ABSTRACT
Towards the end of his life when Cicero (106-43 BC) wrote his work on the foundation of morals, the De finibus, he began the last book (Cic. De fin. V 1 ff.) with a recollection from his grand educational journey to Greece in his youth. He finds himself in Athens and with good friends he makes for the Academy. All the sites are permeated by the glorious past, and the great ancients appear to their mind’s eye: Plato, Sophocles, Pericles and Demosthenes. Cicero’s friend, the Epicurean Atticus, is also allowed to send a quiet thought to the outsider in the garden. This is an evocative picture on the verge of sentimentality and nostalgia. A Roman of Cicero’s cast and social position was probably marked by a certain ambivalence: he had received his literary and philosophical education from the subjugated Greeks, but he also acknowledged his Roman heritage; as a citizen in a world-wide realm he was called to an active life in the service of the state and of civilization. A Greek, on the other hand, could only live in the past. Philosophy had become an eclectic, epigone philosophy; the great questions had been asked and the answers had been provided. The basic attitude was that one should not get lost in subtleties such as the debate between Stoics and Academics, but rather that all good forces-which is to say Stoics, Academics and Peripatetics, but not, of course, Epicureans-should join in cherishing common values.
