Cicero On Obligations: The People Of Ancient Rome

The quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgement. These virtues, otherwise known as wisdom, are things people value. Based on my reading of Cicero on Obligations, the people of Rome placed great emphasis upon wisdom on a social, economic, and political level. In Ancient Rome, these three aspects are more cohesive than we’ve seen in any other ancient civilization. For the first time, we saw a direct correlation between social status and economics. Due to these two aspects being so closely intertwined, it was important that the people of Rome were able to make good judgements with their economy. Not only was it important that the citizens of Rome were able to make good judgments, but the people in positions of power were knowledgeable and able to better their communities. Because if they don’t, they will begin to see the society collapse from top down.
Once Rome was starting off, there was no real power structure in place nor was there any resource management. This was due to the collapse of the Bronze Age, and the people fleeing
from Greece. However, since Rome held off on urbanizing, they were able to receive help from people who had experience/knowledge on the topic of organizing a way of living. This help came from non-other than the Greeks. Fortunately, the Greeks brought with them their ideas of urbanizing, thus, showing the Romans how effective resource management was. This inspired the Romans to begin to seek out people who showed knowledge in planning their future as a community.
In Cicero on Obligations we are told that “wisdom is the more important virtue because it is the closest thing to human nature, and all humans would like to be wise rather than ignorant.” We see a perfect example of one many being wise, while the others being ignorant during the second Punic war.
Fabius, a Roman general, was tasked with ending Hannibal’s raids throughout Rome. He knew that he was unable to match Hannibal and the Carthaginian military’s superiority, so he resulted to exhausting Hannibal in a long war of attrition. However, other Romans were unimpressed with Fabius’ defensive strategy and decide to take offensive matters. Unfortunately, they didn’t get the results he wanted and ended up having Fabius rush to his rescue. In the end, the Roman’s realized Fabius was someone who has pronounced knowledge and good judgement abilities, and that was someone they needed making decisions at the top of the social
ladder.
The people the Romans select for the very top of their social ladder, their leader, is a direct reflation of their economic interest. Ideally, they want a leader who makes knowledgeable and non-selfish decisions, “wrong doing for the sake of gain is never to be tolerated.” We’ve seen it over and over again during our studies, people don’t want someone like Gilgamesh, they want someone who will focus on managing resources with their people at mind. One of those focuses was building up the Roman army.