Cicero’s Practical Philosophy

2. The Fourth Virtue

43 2 The Fourth Virtue Malcolm Schofield This essay is a study of a marriage between two ways of conceptualizing officia, our duties or obligations, as what the morally “fine” or the virtues require of us, or as what is incumbent upon us on account of the roles or characters we play in life—our persona or personae. The text in which the harmonization of these two different approaches to officia is attempted is Book 1 of Cicero’s De Officiis. The author of the enterprise was very probably the second-­ century B.C.Stoic Panaetius, on whom Cicero avowedly depends in Books 1 and 2 (Off. 3.7). More specifically, the attempt at harmonization is made in the long section of Book 1 (Off. 1.93–151) devoted to discussion of the fourth virtue in De Officiis’s version of the canonical quartet of cardinal virtues: introduced as the decorum (1.93: I shall translate as “appropriate,” but a really satisfying English equivalent has proved elusive; decorum is what both is and looks just right). As the major modern commentary says, the arrangement and inter­ connections between the various elements of the decorum section of De Officiis 1, and the criteria for inclusion and order of topics, are 44  Malcolm Schofield “not easy to grasp.”1 There is not much difficulty in getting from the text a general sense of what Cicero means by decorum. But a coherent and precise philosophical understanding has proved hard to achieve. I think Panaetius’s theory of the prepon, the Greek term Cicero renders as decorum, is a powerful and extraordinarily ingenious and resourceful piece of philosophizing. My aim is to show that and how it is. It is my conjecture that the theory was devised as the solution to a set of interlocking problems. The acceptability of the conjecture will depend on whether it makes better sense of the anfractuosities of the text than has been achieved by commentators to date. My argument will move through five stages, considering in turn virtue, decorum, the incorporation of decorum into the theory of virtue and the honestum (morally fine), decorum as both the fourth of the cardinal virtues and virtue in general, and verecundia, the untranslatable quality “between respect and shame”2 —“modesty” is as good as I can do—in which decorum is said to exert its maximum force. To keep the complexities of the material manageable I have gone for maximal concision and concentrated on the essentials. Reference to bibliography is likewise sparing.3 Virtue The variety in surviving accounts of the theory of four virtues in the Hellenistic Stoa indicates vigorous debate about the way they should be conceptualized and defined.4 But there is always a contrast between understanding or knowledge (phronēsis) and sōphrosunē, which in Cicero ’s Latin becomes moderatio (or modestia) et temperantia. One way of putting it would be to say that knowledge or understanding is what you need for a grasp of what your duties are, what you should or should not do, whereas sōphrosunē is what enables you in the light of that knowledge to choose or refuse what you should (Zeno’s formulation ) or to keep your impulses settled or firmly established (a later formulation).5 The spheres of knowledge special to courage and justice are then demarcated as enduring what you should and as making allocations or distributions as you should.The virtues are standardly listed in that order. Sōphrosunē has no special status. The Fourth Virtue   45 In Cicero’s De Officiis, the Stoic theory of four virtues has been radically reshaped,thanks presumably to Panaetius (see especially Off. 1.11–17). At its core is now the notion of reason as what above all else distinguishes humans from other animals and of the different impulses whose dynamic and regulation is due to reason: for society with other humans (the province of justice), for the pursuit of truth whether practical or more theoretical (the sphere of understanding and wisdom), and for an independence and largeness of outlook that rises above the merely human (which characterizes magnitudo animi, replacing or reconceptualizing courage). The behavior required of someone whose impulses have been properly shaped by the honestum—that is, by what is morally fine—is what will constitute our officia as rational animals. Book 1 of De Officiis accordingly sets out the basic obligations of justice and magnitudo animi in the general terms one would expect of an approach to...