Book 2, Letter 4
Part 2 of 5

Dear Cicero,

The ancient writers talk a lot about enemies, and the best ways to deal with them and I feel that, removed from the exact conditions of these wartime narratives, the intellectual or philosophical lessons they offer can be applied to civilian life in many ways.

Philosophically speaking, the destruction of one's enemies need not always be about the ruin of other men or nations. I can think tactically about my own psyche and use ancient wisdom to develop better methods for dealing with my own inner conflicts. I can also find methods to better discredit and destroy the ideas of my enemies. Even a battlefield fundamental tactic like the bull-horns can be used to better structure an argument for or against an issue or person. I have found myself composing these letters with consideration to the tactical delivery of ideas; offering a feint to draw one's attention in a certain direction, then encircling the reader with a counter idea that by well timed collusion, leads them down the river I wish to show them.

So Cicero, this opening feint is all in aid of drawing your attention towards a certain idea, so that I may draw up my cavalry and launch them at your flank. You might have already guessed that this attack would come wrapped in flattery, and so I will quote from your treatise “On Friendship”, (from the Evelyn S Shuckburg translation from the late 1800's).

“Compliance gets us friends, plain speaking hate.

Plain speaking is a cause of trouble, if the result of it is resentment, which is poison of friendship; but compliance is really the cause of much more trouble, because by indulging his faults it lets a friend plunge into headlong ruin. But the man who is most to blame is he who resents plain speaking and allows flattery to egg him on to his ruin. On this point, then, from first to last there is need of deliberation and care. If we remonstrate, it should be without bitterness; if we reprove, there should be no word of insult. In the matter of compliance (for I am glad to adopt Terence's word), though there should be every courtesy, yet that base kind which assists a man in vice should be far from us, for it is unworthy of a free-born man, to say nothing of a friend. It is one thing to live with a tyrant, another with a friend. But if a man's ears are so closed to plain speaking that he cannot bear to hear the truth from a friend, we may give him up in despair. This remark of Cato's, as so many of his did, shews great acuteness: "There are people who owe more to bitter enemies than to apparently pleasant friends: the former often speak the truth, the latter never." Besides, it is a strange paradox that the recipients of advice should feel no annoyance where they ought to feel it, and yet feel so much where they ought not. They are not at all vexed at having committed a fault, but very angry at being reproved for it. On the contrary, they ought to be grieved at the crime and glad of the correction

Well, then, if it is true that to give and receive advice—the former with freedom and yet without bitterness, the latter with patience and without irritation—is peculiarly appropriate to genuine friendship, it is no less true that there can be nothing more utterly subversive of friendship than flattery, adulation, and base compliance. I use as many terms as possible to brand this vice of light-minded, untrustworthy men, whose sole object in speaking is to please without any regard to truth. In everything false pretence is bad, for it suspends and vitiates our power of discerning the truth. But to nothing it is so hostile as to friendship; for it destroys that frankness without which friendship is an empty name.”

So, Cicero, please do not begrudge me this criticism of you. If you had so desired, you might have lived out your life in peace and security, you might have left Rome and met your son in Athens, you might have written a thousand more treatise on topics concerning all mankind and given more to the world than your half cut short maturity allowed. Your love of the republic, and your hatred of Antony seem equal in strength. You might have chosen life, Cicero. Could you have chosen to let it be? To let it go? Antony was your enemy and you held on to the end, to the bloody, disfigured end. I wonder what advice might have convinced you to change course, to see the folly in your continued struggle and sway you to abandon the republic, to abandon Rome?