Abstract

The relation between philosophy and theatre has mostly been an ambiguous one, frequently informed with a certain playful irony. Plato’s aversion to include the tragic poets in his Republic, which itself remains a philosophical work written in the dramatic form of dialogues, testifies to this traditional ambiguity. It is well known that in this tradition of philosophic dialogues, the name which perhaps immediately follows Plato is that of Marcus Tullius Cicero. This paper would examine certain Ciceronian dialogues in order to argue that a certain theatricality was also prominent in Cicero’s thinking, which makes it distinct not only from other philosophical schools of his time but also from Socratic dialogues. The paper would try to argue that this theatricality was expressed not through irony but a process of masking philosophical presentations. At the same time, to such a theatrical gesture par excellence as that of masking was added the art of rhetoric to present such philosophical enunciations to an ‘audience’ in order to persuade them of the practical functions of philosophy. It is this public application of a private and leisurely practice of philosophy, which this paper would discuss through an examination of the style of Ciceronian dialogues and the nature of skeptic philosophy that Cicero’s New Academy championed.