Review Reviewed Work(s): Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4 by Margaret Graver Review by: Sarah Byers Source: International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Winter, 2005), pp. 468-470 Published by: Springer Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30221998 Accessed: 11-04-2020 01:13 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Springer is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to International Journal of the Classical Tradition This content downloaded from 136.167.3.36 on Sat, 11 Apr 2020 01:13:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 468 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Winter 2005 guish carefully between true and continuing cultural and local-political vitality, and actual geopolitical power. A. M. Eckstein Department of History University of Maryland Margaret Graver (trans.), Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 254 pp. Those who know Margaret Graver's other work will not be surprised by the high quality of scholarship in this translation and commentary on Tusculan Disputations Books 3 and 4. Nonetheless the volume will be of interest and accessible to the uninitiated as well as the specialist, being suitable for use in upper-level undergraduate courses or graduate seminars on philosophical psychology. Graver gives us a smooth translation that is close to the Latin, sometimes emending the Latin text printed by Pohlenz (see xli) or in the Loeb, and typically offering good reasons for doing so (see especially 181 on Tusculans 4.78). Her commentary, which constitutes the bulk of the book, regularly attends to technical Latin terms and their Greek equivalents, providing informed speculation or correction when the meaning of a term is questionably or inconsistently maintained by Cicero (see e.g. 153-4 on proclivitas, 135 on the partes of the soul, and 79, 149 and 157 on morbus and aegrotatio). The volume has something for scholars in all fields associated with Classics-thus history and literature as well as philosophy and lexicology. Graver situates the Tusculans at the end of a development in Cicero's attitude toward emotions by comparison with On the Orator and the letters (xii, 168), and suggests social as well as intellectual reasons for his later taking the Stoic line (xii-xiii). She reconstructs the six months following his daughter Tullia's death so as to place both the Tusculans and the non-extant Consolation within Cicero's personal history (xiii-xiv, 187), and her attention to literary genre, style and figures of speech brings to light connections with the Greek philosophical, dramatic, and consolatory traditions (e.g. xv, xxvii-xxx, 142). Much of the commentary is philosophical in orientation, and Graver is careful to elucidate the context by outlining the Peripatetic, Epicurean, and Stoic views as known to us from other sources. She thus provides interesting portions of the Stoic theory not reported by Cicero (such as the list of species-eupatheiai, 138, and the Stoic and Epicurean accounts of eros, 174-6) as well as the breadth needed to evaluate Cicero's presentation of the Stoics (e.g. he does not represent the orthodox position when calling the object of an emotion 'fresh'; it is the belief which is regularly identified as such in Stoic definitions [119]). In addition to the Stoics' cognitivist account of emotions ('emotions are reducible to judgments'), important topics treated include Stoic epistemology, theory of action, position on value, and conception of nature. The generally clear presentation of these will be of particular use to students, though philosophers specializing in later periods should also find them helpful since, for example, the Stoic account of "starting points" or "seeds of the virtues" (aphormai; 77) is important background for Augustine's and Aquinas' theory of natural law (see e.g. ST I 79.12 obj. 3, citing Aug. On Free Choice 2.10), and the distinction between normative 'nature' and descriptive 'nature' (see Graver xvi, 73, 75) was developed by patristic philosophers into the theory of 'original nature' vs. 'fallen nature' (compare e.g. AuThis content downloaded from 136.167.3.36 on Sat, 11 Apr 2020 01:13:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Book Reviews 469 gustine, Expositions of the Psalms 30.2.13 and Confessions 8.9.21-22, 8.11.26 to Seneca On Anger 2.10.2, 2.10.6, 2.13.1).' Graver is also attentive to current philosophical presuppositions, and to analytic concerns generally. Thus she addresses the contemporary tendency to think that emotions simply are chemical or electrical changes of the body (rather than, as the Stoics had it, changes in the soul) (140), and raises objections to the Stoic account which Cicero himself did not raise (e.g. 172). Nevertheless, there is one important area in which Graver's presentation could be stronger: the criterion of truth in Stoic theory. The fact is that the Stoics held a 'correspondence theory of truth': true beliefs are those that match up to reality, which is independent of our minds. These have as a supervenient property consonance with one another; since the universe is one harmonious whole, accurate propositions about reality are not contradictory. While Graver's account does sometimes acknowledge this twofold emphasis on soundness and validity (135, 136), she does not explain that the former is primary for the Stoics. More alarmingly, soundness often drops out of the picture entirely. Thus 'coherence' alone becomes the criterion. We hear, for instance, that "goodness is defined..,. with reference to the internal coherence of some system .... What is good ought to be that which fits into some pattern which is orderly and complete relative to that person" (xxi; see also 92, 154-5), that virtue or knowledge is simply "logical coherence among all one's beliefs" (87; cf. 86), that vice is lack of consistency within one's belief-set (148-9), and that Right Reason is the maintenance of order and consistency among the mind's judgments (141). Statements like these ring of Kant2 or of post-Cartesian philosophy more generally; as such they are themselves strangely discordant notes in this piece of otherwise solid scholarship. She cites Diogenes Laertius 7.126, Sextus Empiricus Adversus Mathematicos 8.275-6, and Stobaeus Eclogues 2.7.5b5 in support (86, 87); these texts make reference to virtue as knowledge, to reason's capacity for logical sequence, and to the unity of the virtues, but they do not offer substantive support for her presentation of t e criterion. Only occasionally does this misinterpretation slightly color the translation; for 4.23's pravarum opinionum conturbatio et ipsarum inter se repugnantia Graver has "the confusion of crooked opinions and the conflict of one with another" in place of the Loeb's "corrupt beliefs warring against one another." While she is closer to the Latin in phraseology, her rendering of "pravus" as "crooked" can be faulted as overly literal, and suggestive of a merely formal problem with the beliefs (i.e. beliefs which merely clash with others one holds) rather than anything intrinsically wrong with their content. Here the Loeb seems preferable for its use of the extended sense, "corrupt." Pace Tieleman, her discussion of possible sources for Cicero is far from superficial;3 she demonstrates close familiarity with relevant texts and philosophical currents in the four appendices and in observations throughout the commentary. Graver is generally a sensitive reader with thorough knowledge of the historical periods; consequently we get interesting suggestions: a discrepancy between 4.21 and otherwise similar material in Diogenes Laer1. For other currents contributing to this development, see N. J. Torchia, Plotinus, Tolma, and the Descent of Being, American University Studies: Series V, Philosophy, 135 (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 11-17. 2. Compare Graver 117 to Kant's justification for perfect duties to self at Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals 422. 3. See T. Tieleman, Chrysippus' On Affections, Philosophia Antiqua 94 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2003), 9 n. 20. This content downloaded from 136.167.3.36 on Sat, 11 Apr 2020 01:13:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 470 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / Winter 2005 tius suggests an error by a copyist of the latter (147); comparison of the ps-Plutarchan Consolation to Apollonius with the Tusculans and with other Stoic texts indicates use of Crantor by not only Cicero and the author to Apollonius but also perhaps the early Stoics themselves (188-9); assessment of Cicero's list of species-passions in light of Stobaeus, Diogenes Laertius, and ps-Andronicus indicates that he is drawing on a compilation not used by the later Greeks, perhaps that of Sphaerus (144); and Aristotle and Cicero's Stoic source may have shared use of an earlier text (143). Her conclusion that Chrysippus is the direct source for much of Cicero's (and Posidonius') work echoes that of Dougan-Henry4 (75-6, 112, Appendix C-D). In support of it, we are given at one point a detailed list of themes and attitudes found in Cicero which Galen and others associate specifically with Chrysippus (204ff). The list is discerning, if not entirely persuasive. One may still wonder, for instance, why Cicero frequently says that according to the Stoics, the intentional object of an emotion is a "great good or evil" (magnum bonum/malum, 3.24-5, 3.28, 3.61, 4.22), even though "great" does not occur in the passages she presents from Galen, Calcidius, and Diogenes Laertius representing Chrysippus; herein we find merely "goods" or "a fine thing." Nonetheless, Cicero does occasionally say the object is simply "a good" or "an evil" (3.24, 3.74). The volume is also useful as a starting point for further research on topics treated therein. Each segment of the commentary provides page numbers to some of the relevant secondary work on the specific topics discussed, and Graver usually notes where her presentation agrees with or diverges from the authors she mentions. A few more references to other notable works would have been a nice addition here (or at least to the final bibliography), as these lists tend to repeat standard works and authors. One thinks, for instance, of the work of Rist on the question of Platonic 'parts' of the soul5 or on Seneca and his sources,6 and the studies on propatheiai by Stevens' and Layton.8 In sum, although not without some room for improvement, this volume is generally of very high quality, and ought to be lauded as a valuable contribution to philosophical psychology and classical studies. Sarah Byers Department of Philosophy Ave Maria University, Naples, FL 4. M. Tulli Ciceronis Tusculanarum Disputationum Libri Quinque, vols. I and II, edd. T. W. Dougan and R. M. Henry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905 and 1934, repr. New York: Arno Press, 1979), II, xlii and xlvii, respectively. 5. J. Rist, "Plato Says That We Have Tripartite Souls ... " in: Sophies Maietores. Chercheurs de Sagesse, edd. M.-O. Goulet-Caze et al. (Paris: Institut des ttudes Augustiniennes, 1992), 103124. 6. J. Rist, "Seneca and Stoic Orthodoxy," Aufstieg und Niedergang der Romischen Welt/Rise and Decline of the Roman World (ANRW) II 36.3, ed. W. Haase (Berlin-New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1989), 1993-2012. 7. J. Stevens, "Preliminary Impulse in Stoic Psychology," Ancient Philosophy, 20 (2000), 139-168. 8. R. Layton, "Propatheia: Origen and Didymus on the Origin of the Passions," Vigiliae Christianae, 54 (2000), 262-282. Other studies too recent for inclusion in Graver's book include S. Byers, "Augustine and the Cognitive Cause of Stoic 'Preliminary Passions' (Propatheiai)," Journal of the History of Philosophy XLI (2003), 433-448 and R. Layton "Fom 'Holy Passion' to Sinful Emotion: Jerome and the Doctrine of Propassio" in: In Dominico Eloquio, edd. P. Blower et al. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 280-93. This content downloaded from 136.167.3.36 on Sat, 11 Apr 2020 01:13:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms