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A History of the Orgy

Paul Cézanne, Bacchanale, c. 1875–80.
Paul Cézanne, Bacchanale, c. 1875–80.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Why orgies are no longer what they were.

Civilisation depends upon restraint. We are expected to play our allotted roles, respect boundaries, control our appetites, and maintain a coherent sense of self. Yet, across cultures and throughout history, people have sought occasions on which to let it all go: to drink, dance, disguise themselves, and disappear into the crowd. The Ancient Greeks personified this tendency towards dissolution in Dionysus, and in the nineteenth century Nietzsche referred to it as the Dionysian. But the impulse is older even than Dionysus—and, of course, far from dead.

Ancient Egypt

The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Heavenly Cow contains the Myth of the Destruction of Mankind. Displeased with the mounting rebelliousness of mankind, the ageing Sun God Ra sends his daughter Hathor to wreak revenge. Hathor takes the form of the bloodthirsty lioness Sekhmet and rampages up and down the Valley of the Nile, killing every man, woman, and child in sight. With mankind on the brink of extinction, Ra takes pity, and floods the fields with beer dyed red with ochre. Mistaking the beer for blood, Sekhmet drinks to intoxication and falls asleep—to arise once again in the benign form of Hathor, goddess of joy, love, and fertility.

To commemorate this episode, the Egyptians held communal Festivals of Drunkenness in mid-August, to coincide with the swelling of the Nile. Revellers drank to the point of passing out, only to be awoken by the beating of drums—mirroring the transformation of Sekhmet into Hathor. The revels, which had an important religious dimension and took place in and around temples and shrines, also included dancing and public sex, in part to imitate and propitiate the flood and fertility to come.

Ancient Greece

The word ‘orgy’, which derives, ultimately, from the Greek orgion (‘sacred rite’), entered the English language in the 1560s to mean ‘a licentious revelry’. Today, people think of an orgy as a party involving open and unrestrained sex between multiple people. But originally, orgia referred to the secret rites of Ancient Greek mystery cults such as the Dionysian Mysteries and the Cult of Cybele, which aimed, above all, at ecstatic union with the divine. The modern sense of ‘orgy’ retains only the licence, without the transcendence.

Dionysus, who, like Jesus, died and was reborn, was the god of wine, regeneration, fertility, ritual madness, ecstasy, theatre, and pleasure, among others. In certain times and places, or among certain people, he was the most important god—more important, even, than Zeus—and most fervently venerated around the time of the vernal equinox.

Let me paint you a picture of a Dionysian orgy. The procession begins at sunset, led by torchbearers followed by wine and fruit bearers, musicians, and a throng of revellers wearing masks and… well, not much else. Closing the rear is a giant phallus representing the resurrection of the twice-born god. Everyone is pushing and shoving, singing and dancing, and shouting the name of the god stirred in with ribaldry and obscenity.

Arriving at a clearing in the woods, the crowd goes wild with drinking, dancing, and every manner of sex. The god is in the wine, and to imbibe it is to be possessed by his spirit—although in the bull’s horn the booze has been interlaced with other entheogens (substances that ‘generate the divine from within’). Animals, standing in for the god, are hunted down, torn apart with bare hands, and eaten raw with the blood still warm and dripping.

This ‘Dionysian’ impulse for irrationality and chaos can be understood as a natural inversion of, and release from, the habitual ‘Apollonian’ order and restraint imposed by the state and state religion. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche recognises it as a primal and universal force:

Either through the influence of narcotic drink, of which all primitive men and peoples speak, or through the powerful coming on of spring, which drives joyfully through all of nature, that Dionysian excitement arises. As its power increases, the subjective fades into complete forgetfulness of self. In the German Middle Ages under the same power of Dionysus constantly growing hordes waltzed from place to place, singing and dancing. In that St. John’s and St. Vitus’s dancing we recognize the Bacchic chorus of the Greeks once again, and its precursors in Asia Minor, right back to Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea.

By diverting the Dionysian impulse into special rites, the orgy kept it in check, preventing it from surfacing in more insidious and perfidious ways. More than that, it sublimed it into an invigorating and liberating—and, in that much, profoundly religious—celebration of life and the life force.

The orgy permitted people to escape from their artificial and restricted social roles and regress into a more authentic state of nature which modern psychologists have come to associate with the Freudian id or unconscious. It appealed most to marginal groups, since it set aside the usual hierarchies of man over woman, master over slave, patrician over commoner, rich over poor, and citizen over foreigner. In short, it gave people a much-needed break: like modern holidays, but cheaper and more effective.

Ancient Rome

The Dionysian cult spread through the Greek colonies to Rome and beyond. In 186 BCE, the Senate severely restricted it through the Senatorial Decree concerning the Bacchanalia (Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus). According to the historian Livy, the decree led to more executions than imprisonments, with many choosing instead to commit suicide.

Illicit Bacchanalia persisted but gradually morphed into the tamer Liberalia in honour of Liber Pater (‘Free Father’), the Roman god of wine and fertility who so resembled Bacchus/Dionysus as to fold into him. As with the Dionysian cult, the Liberalia featured a giant phallus, carted through the countryside to fertilise the fields and safeguard crops—after which a virtuous matron would crown the phallus with a garland or wreath. This sort of ‘depravity’ also featured in other religious festivals such as the Lupercalia, which included naked noblemen coursing through the streets and whipping willing noblewomen with strips of goatskin.

The reign of Constantius II (337–361 CE) marked the beginning of the formal persecution of paganism by the now Christian Roman Empire. But the springtime fertility orgy survived through the tumult of the centuries, albeit in attenuated forms. At last, unable to do away with it, the Church integrated it into its calendar as Carnival—which, to this day, involves reversal of social norms and roles, licentiousness, and feasting ahead of the deprivations of Lent.

But one doesn’t have to wait for Carnival to have an orgy. In the summer of 2017, as reported in the Italian press, the police broke up a drug-fuelled gay orgy at the Vatican—the problem from the police’s perspective being more with the drugs than with the sex.

Mediaeval Europe

May Day celebrations across Europe and North America have their origins in the Roman Floralia and corresponding Celtic traditions. In mediaeval times, people danced around the gigantic phallic symbol of the Maypole before descending into the fields for wanton sex, avowedly to ‘fertilise the land’.

In the Anatomie of Abuses (1583), the puritan Philip Stubbs inveighed against these practices:

What clipping, what culling, what kissing and bussing, what smooching and slobbering one of another, what filthy groping and unclean handling is not practised in the dances … I have heard it creditably reported (and that viva voce) by men of great gravitie and reputation, that of fortie, threescore, or a hundred maides going to the wood over night, there have scaresly the third part of them returned home againe undefiled.

In 1644, the Puritans outlawed Maypoles in England, with the Long Parliament’s ordinance damning them as ‘a Heathenish vanity, generally abused to superstition and wickedness’.

Ecstasy

‘Ecstasy’ [ex stasis] literally means ‘to be or stand outside oneself’. It is a trance-like state in which consciousness of an object is so heightened that the subject dissolves or merges into the object. Einstein himself called it the ‘mystic emotion’ and spoke of it as ‘the finest emotion of which we are capable’, ‘the germ of all art and all true science’, and ‘the core of the true religious sentiment’.

More than ever before, modern society emphasises the sovereign supremacy of the ego and the ultimate separateness and responsibility of each and every one of us. From a young age, we are taught to remain in tight control of our ego or persona with the aim of projecting it as far out as possible. As a result, we have lost the art of letting go—and, indeed, may no longer even recognise the possibility—leading to a poverty or monotony of conscious experience.

Letting go can threaten the life that we have built and even the person that we have become, but it can also free us from our modern narrowness and neediness, and deliver, or re-deliver, us into a bigger and brighter world.

Man, said Balzac, dies in despair, while the spirit dies in ecstasy.

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How the Stoics Became Citizens of the World

The Dream of Scipio
Scipio looks down upon the Earth from the Milky Way. From this far away, even Rome looks provincial.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

At its height, the Roman Empire brought most of Europe, together with large parts of North Africa and the Near East, into a single political and economic space. Roads and sea lanes connected distant provinces, trade flourished, and the Pax Romana, or ‘Roman Peace’, brought long periods of peace, security, and prosperity to peoples more accustomed to being at one another’s throats.

Unlike the European Union, Rome created its union, in the main, by conquest, rather than by cooperation and the voluntary pooling of sovereignty. That’s two thousand years of progress for you. But the EU and the Roman Empire enlarged the political community beyond the borders of individual peoples, with profound consequences for how people lived—and, in time, for how they thought about themselves.

By the Late Roman Republic, the world had never been more cosmopolitan. Stoics such as Panaetius, who shuttled back and forth from Athens to Rome, Rutilius, who stood up for the inhabitants of Asia against his own countrymen, and the Syrian Posidonius, who moved from Athens to Rhodes to start a school that became the empire’s stopping place, were not Greeks or Romans so much as citizens of the world.

The First Citizens of the World

This broadening of horizons had begun well before Rome. In the fourth century BCE, Alexander the Great built an empire that took in the already multinational Persian Empire and stretched into India. 

As Alexander battled his way to the Hyphasis River, back home in Greece another boundary was being broken, not, this time, from some palace or military tent but from an empty jar. Upon being asked where he came from, Diogenes the Cynic declared, ‘I am a citizen of the world (Greek, cosmopolites)’. This is the first recorded use of the term that became our ‘cosmopolitan’. In many parts of Britain or America, to call yourself a citizen of the world would be asking for trouble. In a Greek world still organised around close-knit city-states, it was a truly radical and dangerous claim.

Diogenes inspired Crates of Thebes, a wealthy man who abandoned his fortune to follow in the Cynic path. Crates in turn taught Zeno of Citium, who went on to found Zenonism—better known as Stoicism. The Cynic ideals of living according to nature, freedom from external goods, and cosmopolitanism thus passed, in modified form, into one of the most influential movements of the ancient world.

‘The eagle,’ said the Stoic teacher Musonius, quoting Euripides, ‘can fly through all the air, and a noble man has all the earth as his fatherland.’ The wise, argued Musonius, can make themselves at home anywhere, so that exile, to them, is not the punishment that it may seem. Indeed, one of several advantages of exile is that we are not dragged into political service by a country that only seems to be ours, or bothered by people who only seem to be our friends, or waylaid by petty relatives. Musonius points out that the Stoic Rutilius flourished so fulsomely in exile that he refused Sulla’s invitation to return to Rome.

Musonius taught Epictetus. When he was young, the future emperor Marcus Aurelius had the greatest men of his age for tutors, but it was a dog-eared copy of Epictetus that made the greatest impression upon him. Still, today, it is difficult to read Marcus’ Meditations without hearing the echo of Epictetus… and, ultimately, Diogenes: ‘My city and state are Rome… But as a human being? The world. So for me, ‘good’ can only mean what’s good for both communities.’

The Philosophical Basis of Cosmopolitanism

Stoic cosmopolitanism is rooted in the belief that all human beings form part of the same organism and that this organism, like each of its parts, is shot through with God. It is true that some people behave like cancers, but even they, if only they knew it, are doing the work of God, or the universe. Just as our eyes, ears, and teeth each have a role to play in our body, so we, too, each have a role to play in society—even if it is only to serve as a warning to others.

‘Kindly remember,’ said Seneca, ‘that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies.’

To live selfishly is fundamentally self-defeating. To feel alive and happy, we need to have a sense of working with others, for others—because, like ants and bees, that is the kind of creature that we are. If we do not contribute to our community, we will feel disconnected and depressed. In a word, we will feel dead—and, in truth, might as well be.

Whatever good we do, said Marcus Aurelius, we should do it quietly, without expecting anything in return, ‘as simply as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne.’ Our reward will be our own, and much greater than any wealth or honour that might or might not be bestowed upon us: to lead and to have led a good life, to do and to have done what we were born to do.

What brings no benefit to the hive brings none to the bee. —Marcus Aurelius

From Rome to Europe

In 212 CE, Rome extended citizenship to almost every free inhabitant of the empire. But for the Stoics, citizenship had no frontier: every human being belonged to the same community. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Europe divided and redivided into kingdoms, empires, and nation-states whose rivalries repeatedly ended in war. During the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), to take an example, the population of the Germanic lands fell from 21 million to 13 million.

After the Second World War, Europeans returned to an ancient problem: how to belong to something larger without ceasing to be themselves. The European Union offered a new answer. It brought together nations that had fought one another for centuries, contributing to an extraordinary period of peace, security, and prosperity. Unlike Rome, it did so not by conquest but by cooperation.

The importance of European unity becomes clearest when it begins to fracture. Brexit removed one of Europe’s largest powers from the Union. Six years after the referendum, Putin invaded Ukraine, apparently calculating, among other things, that a divided West would fail to respond decisively. Whether Brexit entered into that calculation is impossible to know, but the timing is at least worth noticing.

Perhaps the EU’s most interesting achievement is psychological. A Frenchman can be French and European, just as Marcus Aurelius could be Roman and a citizen of the world.

The Stoics would have gone further still, emphasising that, as well as French and European, the Frenchman was also, and above all, a citizen of the world.

The Stoics sometimes arrived at this insight by looking down upon human affairs as though from the heavens. Marcus Aurelius repeatedly adopts this ‘view from above’ in the Meditations. In Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, Scipio looks back upon the Earth from the Milky Way and is struck by how small the Roman Empire appears. From this far away, even Rome looks provincial.

What about the view from below? When we imagine an alien planet, we rarely imagine it to be divided into countries. We do not even stop to think: surely, the aliens would not be so backward.

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Did Rome’s Greatest Orator Live Up to His Own Ideals?

Cicero denouncing Catiline in the Roman Senate
Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?
How long, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience?

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Who was Cicero? Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE) has been hailed as Rome’s greatest orator. Lawyer, statesman, philosopher, and master of prose, he shaped not only the Latin language but the ideals of rhetoric, public service, and civic education for centuries to come. More than any other Roman, he sought to unite wisdom with eloquence.

But can someone understand virtue without consistently practising it? Cicero wrote brilliantly about virtue, duty, and the public good, yet struggled with ambition, anxiety, and political compromise. Admired by saints, humanists, and the American Founding Fathers, he remains one of the most influential—and most contradictory—figures in Western intellectual history.

A Frail Body for a Formidable Mind

Marcus Tullius Cicero was born in Arpinum, around 60 miles south of Rome, into a wealthy equestrian family. His cognomen, or personal surname, derives from the Latin for ‘chickpea’ (cicer), by which his ancestors may have prospered. He lived through a time of great civil unrest, famously decrying, O tempora, O mores (‘Oh the times, oh the customs’). Despite his frail and sickly constitution, he served in the army in 89–88 BCE, notably under Pompey’s father, Pompeius Strabo. But what he lacked in virility and nobility he more than made up in study and oratory. 

In 87 BCE, Philo of Larissa, the last undisputed scholarch of Plato’s Academy, arrived in Rome, and Cicero came to sit at his feet—later opining that, if Zeus were to speak, it would be in none other than the language of Plato. He studied law under Quintus Mucius Scaevola, who founded the study of law as a systematic discipline. Scaevola also served as Pontifex Maximus (High Priest of Rome) before falling victim to the power struggle between Marius and Sulla. In 82 BCE, he was murdered in the Temple of the Vestal Virgins. 

Cicero began practising the law in around 83–81 BCE and, in 80, made his reputation on the back of his brilliant defence of Sextus Roscius against a fabricated charge of patricide. In 79, partly on account of his health, he travelled to Greece, Asia, and Rhodes, meeting with several leading philosophers, including Antiochus of Ascalon in Athens. While in Greece, he asked the oracle at Delphi how he might attain the greatest glory. The pythoness (priestess of Apollo) replied, ‘By making your own genius and not the opinion of the people the guide of your life.’ 

Pater Patriae

In the next period, Cicero climbed the cursus honorum, or ‘ladder of offices’, holding each office at or near the youngest possible age: quaestor in 75 BCE, aedile in 69, praetor in 66, and consul in 63. He became consul at the age of just forty-two, making him the youngest non-patrician to serve in the office in the five-hundred-year history of the Republic. 

As quaestor in western Sicily, Cicero seemed so formidable that the locals asked him to prosecute Gaius Verres, who, as governor, had plundered the province. He fought the case with such aplomb that he came to be regarded as the greatest orator in Rome. While in Sicily, he took it upon himself to rediscover the forgotten tomb of Archimedes, which he described as surmounted by a sphere and cylinder. He then chided the Syracusans for leaving it to a man from Arpinum to remember their most illustrious citizen. 

As praetor, Cicero made his first great speech in the Senate, arguing that Pompey should be given the command of the campaign against Mithradates VI, King of Pontus. But the crowning glory of his political career came during his consulship, when, by the force of his four Catiline Orations, he exposed and crushed Catiline’s conspiracy to overthrow the Republic. He had five of the conspirators executed and announced their deaths to a cheering crowd with the single word, Vixerunt (‘They lived’). For ‘saving the Republic’, as he liked to boast, he received the honorific Pater Patriae (‘Father of the Fatherland’) from his ally Cato the Younger, but lived forever after in fear of reprisal for having put Roman citizens to death without trial.

Exile and Return

In 62 BCE, Cicero added a large townhouse on the Palatine Hill to his portfolio of properties. The house, which he described as ‘in sight of nearly the whole city’ (in conspectu prope totius urbis), had belonged to Rome’s richest citizen, Crassus, and cost him 3.5 million sesterces. 

When Julius Caesar pressed him to join his alliance with Pompey and Crassus—the First Triumvirate—Cicero refused, believing that their arrangement undermined the Republic. He also declined Caesar’s offer of a place on his staff in Gaul, leaving himself exposed to the many enemies that his sharp tongue had made. 

When Publius Clodius Pulcher became tribune in 58 BCE, he passed a law, with retroactive effect, to exile any official who had executed a Roman citizen without trial. The law was squarely aimed at Cicero. He fled to Greece while Clodius’ supporters ransacked his house on the Palatine and his villas at Formiae and Tusculum. 

Writing to his friend Atticus, he lamented:

I say this deliberately—that no one was ever afflicted with so heavy a calamity, that no one had ever greater cause to wish for death; while I have let slip the time when I might have sought it most creditably. Henceforth death can never heal, it can only end my sorrow.

It is difficult to imagine Socrates—or indeed Cato—ever saying such a thing. In his Life of Cicero, Plutarch put his finger on the discrepancy between the man and his learning: 

He was become so poor-spirited, so humiliated and dejected by his misfortunes, as none could have expected in a man who had devoted so much of his life to study and learning… But the desire for glory has great power in washing the tinctures of philosophy out of the souls of men.

In the event, Cicero’s exile lasted little more than a year. In 57 BCE, he was recalled by the Senate, with Clodius casting the single vote against the motion. He was met by cheering crowds all the way from Brundisium (modern-day Brindisi) to the Capitol, and his destroyed properties were rebuilt at public expense.

Caesar and Civil War

He took to opposing Cæsar, but this only drove Cæsar closer to Pompey and Crassus. So he swallowed his principles and made a show of supporting the triumvirs, before quietly withdrawing into his library. In 53 BCE, the year that Crassus died, he freed Marcus Tullius Tiro ‘to be our friend instead of our slave’, and it is Tiro who, after his death, collected his letters and speeches for publication. In 51 BCE, Tiro, himself a prolific writer, accompanied him to Cilicia (in modern-day Turkey) after he reluctantly accepted the governorship of the province. He restored calm and order to the entire region, repulsing Parthian incursions, suppressing brigands, and stemming corruption. He stopped in Rhodes and Athens on the return to Rome, where the Senate granted him a supplicatio, or period of public thanksgiving—instead of the full-blown triumph that he had been hoping for.

Only six days after Cicero’s return to Rome, Cæsar crossed the Rubicon into Italy, thereby declaring war on the Senate. Cicero hesitated in picking between putative tyrants, but in the end crossed the Adriatic to join Pompey’s camp. After Pompey’s defeat to Cæsar at Pharsalus, Cato offered him the command of the Pompeian forces, but he preferred to return to the Eternal City to be pardoned by Cæsar. 

He had divorced Terentia in 51, and in 46 or 45 wedded a wealthy girl called Publilia, who had been his ward, and who jealoused the great love that he bore for his daughter Tullia. The marriage did not withstand Tullia’s sudden death in 45, with Cicero writing to Atticus that he had ‘lost the one thing that bound me to life’. For solace, Cicero went to Atticus, and in his library mined the Greek philosophers, especially Crantor, to write his Consolatio. Sadly, the Consolatio has largely been lost, as has Crantor’s On Grief, which, according to Panætius, deserved to be learnt by heart.

The Philippics and Death

Cicero was not a party to Cæsar’s assassination in 44, although Brutus did call out his name upon raising his blood-stained dagger, beseeching him to ‘restore the Republic’. He later wrote to one of the conspirators, ‘How I wish that you had invited me to that most glorious banquet on the Ides of March.’

Mark Antony, as consul, leader of the Caesarian faction, and unofficial executor of Cæsar’s public will, began throwing his weight around. Cicero, who had been hoping to restore the Republic, responded by playing the young Octavian, Cæsar’s grandnephew, adopted son, and heir, against Antony. More than that, he overtly and vehemently attacked Antony in a series of speeches which he referred to as the Philippics, after the speeches delivered by Demosthenes to rouse the Athenians into fighting Philip II of Macedon. But this strategy failed when Octavian and Antony reconciled and joined forces with Lepidus to form the Second Triumvirate.

Estimating that Cæsar had been undone by his clemency, the Second Triumvirate brought back the ruthless proscription, the legally sanctioned murder of opponents and rivals. The proscription also served to fund the Triumvirate’s war, the so-called Liberators’ Civil War, against Brutus and Cassius, who were finally defeated at the Battle of Philippi in 42. When Antony put Cicero at the head of the proscription list, Octavian tried to have him removed, but did not insist or prevail. Also on the list were Cicero’s son, brother, and nephew. The Triumvirate, in the words of Plutarch, ‘let their anger and fury take from them the sense of humanity, and demonstrated that no beast is more savage than man, when possessed with power answerable to his rage.’ 

On 7 December 43, Cicero, betrayed by a freedman of his brother, was intercepted near his villa at Formiæ, travelling down to the coast in a bid to escape to Greece.

He literally bowed to his assassins, extending his neck out of his litter to ease their task.

After killing him, they hacked off his head and hands so that Antony could have them displayed on the Rostra in the fashion of Marius and Sulla. According to the historian Cassius Dio, Antony’s wife Fulvia took up Cicero’s severed head, pulled out his tongue, and jabbed it repeatedly with her hairpin.

Cicero’s brother and nephew were also murdered, but his son, who was then in Greece, escaped unscathed.

Twelve years later, in 31, Cicero the Younger took part in the Battle of Actium, in which Octavian defeated Antony; and in 30, he had the satisfaction, as consul, of announcing Antony’s suicide to the Senate. 

Many years later, Octavian, now Augustus, chanced upon one of his grandsons reading a book by Cicero. The boy tried to hide the book in his gown, but the emperor took it from him and stood a long time leafing through its pages. Finally, he handed it back, saying, ‘My child, this was a learned man, and a lover of his country.’

Cicero as Philosopher

Was Cicero a Stoic, as is sometimes claimed? The answer, as with all things Cicero, is complicated. He studied, at various times in his life, under philosophers from all four major schools: Academic Skeptic, Peripatetic, Stoic, and Epicurean. But he saw himself primarily as a statesman, and his philosophical output, prolific though it is, mostly owes to those periods in which he was unable to partake in the cut and thrust of politics.

Cicero subordinated philosophy to public life because he believed that the purpose of philosophy is to enlighten political action, not least by encouraging virtue in political actors and the population at large. (He even subordinated philosophy to rhetoric, arguing, in essence, that an orator is a philosopher with the benefit of style.) Thus, his overarching project outside of immediate politics was to bring Greek philosophy to a Roman audience by writing expository works in Latin and, to a lesser extent, translating Greek texts into Latin. By coining Latin equivalences for specialised Greek terms, he enriched the Latin language and endowed it with an abstract vocabulary which is at the root of modern English words such as appetite, essence, humanity, individual, infinity, image, instance, moral, notion, property, quality, quantity, science, species, temperance, and vacuum.

In epistemology (theory of knowledge), Cicero favoured the Academic Skeptics, which afforded him the fluidity and flexibility to practise law, and, in politics, to privilege conciliation and expediency over principle or dogma. In his writings, he often imitated Plato in adopting the dialogue form, in which each speaker represents a different philosophical outlook and the reader is left to make up his or her own mind. For example, in On the Nature of the Gods, he pits an Epicurean spokesman and a Stoic spokesman against the Academic Skeptic Gaius Aurelius Cotta. Similarly, in On Ends, he expounds and critiques, in dialogue form, the central tenets of Epicureanism, Stoicism, and the Platonism of Antiochus of Ascalon. (The ubiquitous Lorem ipsum placeholder text, used to demonstrate the visual form of a template or typeface without imputing meaning, is a corrupted extract of On Ends.)

But Cicero felt that such relativism and amoralism would not do for the Senate and People of Rome, so that when it came to the spheres of ethics and political philosophy, he turned instead to the Peripatetics and especially to the Stoics, who emphasized virtue and offered positive doctrines.

Stoic or not, books such as On the Nature of the Gods, On Ends, On Duties, and Stoic Paradoxes make Cicero one of our most important sources on ancient Stoicism.

Cicero as Rhetorician

At the age of just sixteen or seventeen, Cicero wrote a handbook of rhetoric entitled On Invention, which in later life he dismissed as youthful work. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, On Invention became the standard textbook of rhetoric, alongside the anonymous Rhetoric for Herennius, which also came to be attributed to Cicero.

Although practical in scope, On Invention opens with a preface in which Cicero reflects upon the relationship between dialectic and rhetoric, concluding from the height of his teenage years that ‘wisdom without eloquence has been of little benefit to states, but eloquence without wisdom has for the most part been a great hindrance and never an advantage’. Until recently, everyone who was anyone would have read this.

Cicero’s mature works on rhetoric, On the Orator, Brutus, and Orator were little known until the Renaissance. Eloquence, he argued in these works, is not merely a gift of language but the culmination of a broad education. The ideal orator has a good grasp of philosophy, history, literature, and law, and speaks not merely to persuade but to guide the state.

His ideal of the educated citizen-orator shaped Western education for centuries. Rhetoric formed one of the three subjects of the trivium, alongside grammar and logic, and generations of students learnt to think, write, and speak by reading Cicero.

The rediscovery of his letters by Petrarch in 1345 sparked a search for other lost classical texts that helped kindle the Renaissance. Later, his writings profoundly influenced Enlightenment thinkers and the American Founding Fathers. John Locke, for instance, owned no fewer than nine editions of On Duties.

His influence endured well into the twentieth century, and it was not until the 1960s that the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge dropped the matriculation (entry) requirement for an O level in Latin.

Did Cicero Live Up to His Own Ideals?

In an age that often prizes confidence over judgement and persuasion over truth, Cicero’s ideal of the orator as a philosopher and statesman remains as relevant as ever. But how well did he himself live up to that ideal?

Cicero had studied under and corresponded with the greatest minds of his day and written countless books on oratory and philosophy. Yet he seemed quite unable to control his passions, seeking always after fame and fortune, and coping poorly with adversity and hardship. Clearly, he did not need to have so many villas. His villa at Tusculum did not need to have two exercise areas. And these exercise areas did not need to be called the Academy and the Lyceum. Such grandeur, and his boastfulness, debased him, his learning, and his achievements.

The extraordinary oratory that had made him also unmade him. He loved to make an impression, so that he spoke more, and more forcefully, than he needed to, and often fell to attacking the person rather than the problem. As a result, he had not just adversaries but enemies.

In mitigation of the man, he lived through troubled times. The Roman Republic was collapsing around him, and political moderation had become almost impossible. His repeated reversals, compromises, and hesitations were not always signs of weakness, but sometimes the price of trying to preserve a constitutional order that others had already abandoned.

As a novus homo, or self-made man, he might also have harboured a deep-seated inferiority complex, explaining his need for achievement and affirmation.

Seneca once observed that Cato seemed more virtuous than wise. The converse might be said of Cicero: he could seem more wise than virtuous.

Unlike Cato, Cicero may not have met the standard of a Stoic sage. But for all his failings, the people loved him, because they knew him, at heart, to be a good man.

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The Slave Who Inspired an Emperor

Epictetus the slave and Marcus Aurelius the emperor
Epictetus inspired not one but two of Rome’s greatest emperors: Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

A biography of the Roman slave who rose into one of the leading Stoic philosophers, inspired an emperor, and shaped modern psychotherapy.

Stoic philosophy has exerted a profound influence on the history of ideas, inspiring thinkers as diverse as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Adam Smith, and J. S. Mill.

Its influence extends far beyond philosophy. In the field of mental health, Stoicism inspired what has become the most widely practised form of talking treatment, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). Aaron Beck (d. 2021), the father of CBT, wrote that ‘the philosophical origins of cognitive therapy can be traced back to the Stoic philosophers.’

Epictetus, together with Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Musonius Rufus, is one of our principal sources on Stoicism. But whereas Marcus Aurelius ruled the greatest empire on earth, and Seneca rose into the wealthiest man in that empire, Epictetus began as a slave.

Yet his teachings came to shape an emperor, influence Christian and Islamic thought, inspire the founders of modern psychotherapy, and guide millions in the face of hardship and adversity.

So, how did a mere slave achieve all this?

Life as a Slave

Epictetus (c. 50–c. 135 CE) was born into slavery at Hierapolis, in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey). His name, in Greek, means something like ‘Acquired One’.

He spent his youth in Rome as a slave to Epaphroditus, a wealthy freedman and secretary to Nero. In 68, Epaphroditus assisted Nero in committing suicide (since Nero could not bring himself to plunge the dagger), with the deluded emperor lamenting, Qualis artifex pereo [‘What an artist dies in me!’].

In those early years, Epictetus, though a slave, discovered philosophy, and even managed to study under the charismatic Stoic Musonius Rufus. Musonius taught that philosophy is not merely something to be discussed but something to be lived—a lesson that Epictetus never forgot.

It is also around this time that he developed a disability, which may have owed to rheumatoid arthritis, although the Christian theologian Origen claims that it was his master who injured him.

One day, according to a famous anecdote, Epaphroditus lost his temper and grabbed Epictetus by the leg. He twisted it so forcefully that Epictetus warned him that it would break. When it snapped, Epictetus did not wince or cry, but calmly said, ‘Did I not tell you that it would break?’

Some time after Nero’s death, by virtue of his education or the dignity which it conferred upon him, Epictetus gained his civil freedom, having already acquired the far greater freedom of the mind.

Now a freedman, he taught philosophy in Rome.

Exile and the School at Nicopolis

When, in 94, Domitian banished all philosophers from the capital, Epictetus settled in Nicopolis, in Epirus, Greece, where he established a school and remained for the rest of his life.

Students travelled from across the Roman Empire to hear him speak. Among them was the young Arrian of Nicomedia, whose notes would preserve Epictetus’ teachings for posterity.

Like Musonius, Epictetus concentrated on ethics, arguing that physics and logic—the other two branches of ancient philosophy—ought to be in the service of practical action:

What do I care if matter is made up of atoms, indivisibles, or fire and earth? Isn’t it enough to know the nature of good and evil, the limits of desire and aversion, and of choice and refusal…?

The purpose of philosophy, he argued, is not to speculate about the stars but to learn how to live, ‘to practise how to remove from one’s life sighs and sorrow, grief and disappointment, and cries of “Alas!” and “Poor me!”’ This is largely a matter of according our will to the world, ‘so that nothing happens contrary to our wishes, and, conversely, nothing fails to happen that we want to happen.’

Hadrian, the future emperor, held Epictetus in the highest regard, and visited him, a former slave, in Nicopolis.

Epictetus’ Lamp

Epictetus did not marry or have children, despite urging these things upon others.

When he rebuked his friend and student Demonax for not marrying, Demonax sarcastically replied, ‘Very well, then, will you give me one of your daughters for a wife?’

However, in his retirement, Epictetus did, out of necessity, adopt the infant child of a friend, and raised him with the help of a woman.

His own needs remained remarkably modest. One day, the iron lamp by which he wrote was stolen. Reasoning that one can lose only what one has, he replaced it with a lamp of clay—which, after his death, was purchased at a great price by an admirer with no sense of irony.

The Discourses and Encheiridion

Epictetus wrote nothing himself. His teachings were recorded as the Discourses (or Diatribai) by his pupil Arrian of Nicomedia, also known for his account of the campaigns of Alexander the Great, written in a very different style.

In a prefatory note, Arrian writes: ‘Whatever I used to hear him say I wrote down, word for word, as best I could…’

He also claims that the Discourses ‘have somehow, without my knowledge or intention, fallen into the public’s hands.’

Such, in any case, is the public story. It is possible that Epictetus wrote the rather polished Discourses himself, with Arrian’s claimed authorship serving as a literary device to create an impression of spontaneity.

Whatever their precise origin, the Discourses remain unique in ancient philosophy. Rather than polished treatises, they preserve the atmosphere of a living classroom, with Epictetus questioning, teasing, rebuking… and constantly bringing philosophy back to the business of living.

Of the original eight books, only four have come down to us, and we also have the more portable Encheiridion, which is a digest of the Discourses—the word encheiridion [Greek, en+ kheir, literally, ‘in hand’]meaning something like ‘to have at hand’, originally with reference to a dagger or knife.

From Emperors to Modern Psychology

According to Origen, by the third century Epictetus’ renown exceeded that of Plato:

Plato is only found in the hands of those reputed to be philologists. By contrast, Epictetus is admired by ordinary people who have the desire to be benefited and who perceive improvement from his writings.

His influence spread far beyond the pagan world. In the ninth century, al-Kindi, the ‘Father of Arab Philosophy’, wrote a Device for Dispelling Sorrows which appears to have been influenced by Stoicism—for instance, in the contention that sorrow arises from thwarted desire, or that it is more a matter of convention than of nature.

In a striking analogy, which also features in the Encheiridion, al-Kindi compares life to a landfall during a much longer sea voyage back to our homeland, and warns us, as Epictetus did, not to get so caught up by the fruits and flowers as to forget about the ship.

Epictetus also left a lasting mark on modern psychology. In the first major work on rational emotive behaviour therapy (REBT), the forerunner of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), Albert Ellis (d. 2007) framed his project with a line from the Encheiridion: ‘Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them.’

The US fighter pilot James Stockdale (d. 2005) credited Epictetus with helping him survive more than seven years of imprisonment and torture in Vietnam, including four years in solitary confinement in a 3′ by 9′ concrete, windowless cell.

When his A-4 Skyhawk was shot down over North Vietnam, Stockdale remembered thinking to himself as he parachuted towards the jungle: ‘I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus!’

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What Kissing Reveals About Us

Gustav Klimt: The Kiss
Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss (1907–08). Few human gestures have carried more meanings than a kiss.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Kissing is not universal among human beings and, even today, there are some cultures that have no place for it. This suggests that the behaviour is not purely innate or intuitive, as it may seem to us, but culturally shaped and historically variable—one of the ways in which human beings negotiate the boundary between self and other.

It could be that kissing is a learnt behaviour that developed from ‘kiss feeding’, the process by which mothers in some cultures feed their infants by passing masticated food from mouth to mouth. Yet, there are some present-day indigenous cultures that practise kiss feeding but not social kissing. Another possibility is that kissing is a culturally determined form of grooming behaviour, or, in the case of deep or erotic kissing, a representation of, substitute for, and complement to penetrative intercourse.

Whatever the case, kissing behaviour is not specific or unique to human beings. Primates such as Bonobo apes frequently kiss one another; dogs and cats lick and nuzzle one another and members of other species; even snails and insects engage in antennal play. It could be that, rather than kissing, these animals are in fact grooming, smelling, or communicating with one another, but even so, their behaviour implies and strengthens trust and bonding.

Ancient Kisses

Vedic texts from Ancient India seem to talk about kissing, and the Kama Sutra, which probably dates back to the second century CE, devotes an entire chapter to modes of kissing. Certain anthropologists have suggested that the Greeks learnt about erotic kissing from the Indians after Alexander the Great invaded India in 326 BCE. But even if true, this need not mean that erotic kissing originated in India, or that it does not predate the oral roots of the Vedas.

In Homer’s Iliad, which dates back to the ninth century BCE, King Priam of Troy memorably kisses the hand of Achilles in pleading for the return of Hector’s defiled corpse:

Fear, O Achilles, the wrath of heaven; think on your own father and have compassion upon me, who am the more pitiable, for I have steeled myself as no man yet has ever steeled himself before me, and have raised to my lips the hand of him who slew my son.

In the Histories (fifth century BCE), Herodotus speaks of kissing among the Persians, who greeted men of equal rank with a kiss on the mouth and those of slightly lower rank with a kiss on the cheek. Herodotus reports that, because the Greeks ate of the cow, which was sacred to the Egyptians, the Egyptians objected to kissing them on the mouth.

Biblical Kisses

Kissing also features in the Old Testament. Disguised as Esau, Jacob deceives his blind father Isaac and steals his brother Esau’s blessing, sealing the deception with a kiss. When Jacob returns after years of exile, Esau runs to him, embraces him, falls on his neck, kisses him, and they weep. Naomi, insisting that her Moabite daughters-in-law Ruth and Orpah remain in Moab to make new lives for themselves, kisses them farewell, and they weep. Absalom wins the hearts of Israel by kissing all who come to him seeking justice. In the Song of Songs, which celebrates sexual love, a lover implores, ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine.’

The Roman Art of Kissing

Under the Romans, kissing became much more commonplace. Romans kissed their partners or lovers, family and friends, and rulers. They distinguished a kiss on the hand or cheek (osculum) from a kiss on the lips (basium) and a deep or passionate kiss (suavium).

Roman kisses fulfilled a range of purposes, from the political and legal to the social and sexual. The status of a Roman citizen determined the part of the body—ranging from cheek to foot—on which he or she would be allowed to kiss the emperor. In an age of widespread illiteracy, kisses served to seal agreements—hence the ‘X’ on the dotted line, and the expression ‘to seal with a kiss.’ Couples were wed by kissing before a gathering, a practice that carries on to this day.

Kissing and Desire

Roman poets such as Catullus and Martial treat erotic kissing as something far removed from sentimental delicacy. Kissing is intensely physical, emotionally charged, and often unsettling in its implications.

In Catullus, kisses emerge within the turbulence of erotic attachment and jealousy, where intimacy is inseparable from fear of loss and replacement. ‘Who will you kiss? Whose lips will you bite?’ is not celebratory, but a bitter imagining of desire redirected elsewhere.

In Martial, kissing becomes more explicitly corporeal and public in character, sometimes figured as excessive or intrusive—an act that overwhelms the boundaries of the self and edges into domination or comic excess.

Across both poets, kissing is less a gentle emblem of love than an occasion in which desire becomes unstable, contested, and materially insistent. In short, in Roman poetry, kissing is not a symbol of love so much as one of its problems.

The Holy Kiss

Customs changed with the decline of Rome. Early Christians often greeted one another with a ‘holy kiss’, which was believed to lead to a transfer of spirit. The Latin anima means both ‘breath of air’ and ‘soul’, and, like animus [mind], comes down from the Proto-Indo-European root ane- [to breathe, blow]. Although St Peter had spoken of the ‘kiss of charity’, and St Paul of the ‘holy kiss’, early Christian sects omitted kissing on Maundy Thursday, the day of the year on which Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss. Outside of the Church, kissing was used to cement rank and social order, for instance, subjects and vassals kissed the robe of the king, or the slippers or ring of the pope.

The Rise of Romantic Love

After the fall of Rome, the romantic kiss (as distinct from other types of kiss) becomes less prominent in surviving literature for several centuries, before re-emerging in new forms with the rise of courtly love from the late eleventh century. The kiss in Romeo and Juliet is emblematic of this long cultural trajectory, which sought to remove courtship from the purview of family and broader society and celebrate romantic love as a liberating, self-determining, and potentially subversive force.

The fate of the star-crossed lovers reminds us that such carefree abandon is not without risk, and it may be that vampirism evolved as a representation of the dangers—to health, rank, reputation, prospects, and happiness—of crossing too easily between selves.

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