Cicero on Politics, Happiness and Old Age
Early in my education, I became very interested in Marcus Tullius Cicero. Cicero was born in 106 B.C and murdered (Mark Anthony had Cicero killed) in 43 B.C. Like several of the characters in Politics with Principle, Cicero was a skilled lawyer, a successful politician and a principled statesman. Cicero’s beliefs in a republican form of government and disdain for dictators led to his assassination. His seminal work on statecraft, On the Republic, was written while Cicero was in his sixties. In this treatise, he advocated a constitution that included a mix of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy.
With the help of one of our founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), Cicero’s tenets of republicanism were embedded in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. After successfully publishing Poor Richard’s Almanac, four years later, at 38 years of age, Franklin helped popularize Cicero’s thinking by publishing the first translation in the Western World of Cicero’s De Senectute, or Cicero’s Discourse of Old Age. Just as Franklin would wear the mantle of Cicero’s message of a life well lived into his 80’s, so too would another founding father, John Adams revere the political wisdom of Cicero and live a long and useful life.
David McCullough described in his biography of the Second President:
Adams read De Senectute again and again throughout his long and well-spent life. No doubt he found truth and solace in Cicero’s Observation that “a life employed in the pursuit of useful knowledge, in honorable actions and the practice of virtue” yielded “an unspeakable comfort to the soul.”
Now in my sixties and researching daily for the Character Building Project, I have learned to even more fully appreciate the wisdom of Cicero, that is, in terms of what is necessary for a man’s happiness…
“For a calm contemplative life, or a life well and virtuously spent in the just discharge of one’s immediate duty, in any station, will ever be attended with a serenity of mind in old age.”