Video: Quintus Curtius on translating Cicero
Episode 15 of “Meet the Greco-Romans”
Welcome to another entry in our occasional series of video chats with authors and translators who have written about the philosophy, culture, and history of the Greco-Roman tradition.
In this episode I talk to George Thomas, aka Quintus Curtius, who has devoted a lot of time and effort to generating new translations of the superb Roman statesman, public advocate, and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero.
George has published original, annotated translations of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, On Duties, On Moral Ends, and Stoic Paradoxes, as well as translations of Cornelius Nepos’s Lives of the Great Commanders and Sallust’s Conspiracy of Catiline and War of Jugurtha.
George graduated from MIT in 1990 and served on active duty for a number of years as a US Marine Corps officer, with deployed service worldwide. After leaving active duty, he enrolled in law school and began to practice law in state and federal courts after graduating in 1998. He currently is the managing partner of a law firm focusing on bankruptcy and criminal defense. He resides in Kansas City and travels frequently. Here is our conversation:
This was such a rich and important discussion. As someone who has taught, and been a student, I agree that it’s important to present students with works that they will not understand fully until enough life experiences have accumulated, that it’s necessary to sow the seeds early because when the time comes, students will remember and return to those works. Very important to me was the point that we have agency and that “mental anguish is a choice”; the distinction between “instrumental reason” and “natural reason” which aims at improvement of the human condition; the necessity of cultivating the soul Ovid saw himself, not as a singer (like Virgil), but as a “condito,” an architect that builds rooms where valuables are stored. Those valuables would be the inner life and the soul.
I do think that the set pieces in Cicero’s dialogues were probably indebted to the courtroom where the prosecution and the defense present summations before the case goes to a jury or to a judge.
Finally, the response to the young person who says they just want to have fun, Well, what do you do after you’ve had fun? reminds me of Apuleius’s “The Golden Ass.” Both Apuleius and his protagonist Lucius had reached just that point—mid-life crisis—and though Apuleius turned, not to philosophy, but to the cult of Isis, the journey is from the life of a beast to becoming human, a person who makes moral choices.
Thank you for posting this very valuable interview.
The discussion with George Thomas was superb. Thanks for doing this.