CICERO

 

In the third century BCE, at Rome the early Latin historian Q. Fabius Pictor wrote

“He who Knows Himself knows all in himself.”[1]

Later, also in Italy, Cicero wrote;

“To men immersed in these (philosophical) meditations comes the understanding of the truth pronounced by the God at Delphi, that the mind should Know Itself; and there comes also the perception of its union with the Divine Mind.”[2]

This mention of “union with the Divine Mind” will be taken up later when we come to Plotinus. And further Cicero, paraphrasing the Alcibiades I, stresses:

“It is a point of the utmost importance to realize that the soul sees by means of the soul alone, and surely this is the meaning of Apollo’s maxim advising that each one should Know Himself. For I do not suppose the meaning of the maxim is that we should know our limbs, our height or shape; our selves are not our bodies, and in speaking as I do to you I am not speaking to your body. When, then, Apollo says, “Know Thyself,” he says, “Know Thy Soul.” For the body is, as it were, a vessel or a sort of shelter for the soul; every act of your soul is an act of yours. Unless then it had been godlike to know the soul, this maxi, which marks a soul of superior penetration, would not have been attributed to the God .[3]

 

 

Astrology and Know Thyself

 

When these are the themes a wise man spends his days and nights contemplating, what exaltation they will bring to his heart! He will be able to discern the movements and revolutions of the entire universe. He will gaze at the numberless stars which stud the sky and revolve in unison with its revolutions, each in its appointed place;... No wonder this varied spectacle excited the men of old and inspired them to extend their explorations ever further afield!...

 

To men immersed day and night in these meditations comes understanding of the truth pronounced by the God at Delphi, that the mind should Know Itself; and there comes also the perception of its union with the divine mind, the source of its inexhaustible joy, For the contemplation of the power and nature of the gods spontaneously kindles in human beings a passion to attain immortality like theirs; and the soul, when it discerns how all things in the universe are linked one with another by a chain of interlocked destined causes, a process which is governed by reason and intelligence and renews itself to all eternity, begins to nourish the conviction that it could not be true that its own life is just limited to this brief span upon the earth. As a man contemplates this spectacle, and gazes upwards and round about upon every part and region of the universe, how serenely, then, can he look back again at our own mere mental activities, close beside where he is standing.[4]

 

 

On Philosophy!

 

Philosophy! The guide of our lives, the explorer of all that is good in us, exterminator of all evil! Had it not been for your guidance, what would I ever have amounted to - and, what, indeed, would have become of all human life? It was you who brought cities into existence. Before that, people had been scattered far and wide, but you made them come together in communities. First you united them by making them live in the same houses, and next by getting them to marry, and then enabling them to communicate with one another by language and writing. Inventor of laws, teacher of morals, creator of order! You were all these things. And now, you are my refuge and rescuer. I have already relied on you so much in the past years; and now my dependence is total and complete. One day well spent in obeying your rules is better than an eternity of error. Your aid is most precious in all the world. It is you who have brought peace into our lives; you who have relieved us of the fear of death.

 

And yet it would be over-optimistic to suppose that philosophy gets the praise its service to mankind deserves. On the contrary, most people pay no attention to it at all; and some actually subject it to abuse. And yet it seems inconceivable that anyone would abuse the begetter of his own life! To revile what, as even the dimmest mind must comprehend, unquestionably demands reverence, is sheer ingratitude, no better than killing one’s own parent. The reason, I suppose, why uneducated people have fallen into this darkest of all errors is because they are incapable of looking far enough back into the past; this is what makes them fail to realize that the people who first created civilization were the philosophers.[5]

 

 

Cicero and the world as Hades

 

Really I do not see why I should not tell you what I, myself, think of death; for it seems I apprehend it better as I draw near to it...For while we are shut up within these frames of flesh we perform a sort of a task imposed upon us by necessity and endure grievous labour; for the soul is celestial, brought down from its exalted home and buried, as it were, in earth, a place uncongenial to its divine and eternal nature. But I believe that the immortal gods implanted souls in human bodies so as to have beings who would care for the earth and who, contemplating the celestial order, would imitate it in the moderation and consistency of their lives.[6] [The Delphic Oracles]

 

[Reading this world as Hades, how much greater is the realm of pure Mystical Knowledge? Are we the Shades, twittering like bats and understanding nothing? Odyssey XXIV] C.N.C.

 

 

Earth as Hades

 

This Orphic mystery religion is a complete reversal of the true Greek view of life, according to which the corporeal man is the real man and the soul merely a sort of strengthless shadowy image. In the Orphic philosophy on the other hand the eternal and indestructible is the soul, while the body is transient, unclean, and contemptible. To the Greek, life on earth is the true life, and the other world is merely a gloomy imitation of it; the Orphic life here on earth is a sort of hell, an imprisonment, a punishment. It is only in the other world, after the liberation of the soul from the prison of the body, that the true divine existence awaits us. Euripides felt this so strongly, that he puts the following words into the mouth of a character in a lost Tragedy;

 

            “Who knows whether life is not death,

            And what we call death, in the underworld called life?”

 

This complete reversal of the original, pure Greek view of life and the consequent change of values... is wholly foreign to the Greek nature. It indicates, rather, a non-Greek oriental origin.... This idea of salvation, the liberation of the god-like soul from the shackles of the earthly body doubtless originated in India, where it makes its appearance in the so-called Upanishads, the explanatory commentaries on the Veda written between 800 and 600 B.C.E. when the Vedic beliefs were dying out.[7]