H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: RENSI

 Magister: We shall begin Roman history today not, as you boys perhaps expected, with the aqueducts or the census, but with Thrasea. G.: Thrasea, sir? Shropshire: His death, surely. Magister: Death is where lazy boys begin and historians end badly. Where should one begin, Mr. Grice? G.: With his public works and opinions, sir. Magister: Better. You may yet be worth the scholarship money someone else is paying. Shropshire: I still say his death is the exciting bit. G.: You would. You always prefer the terminal point to the argument. Magister: Quite so. But even for a Roman stoic death is not a conjuring trick. It is an act with a doctrine behind it. Shropshire: And Rensi takes him as a philosopher? Magister: Very much so. G.: Though Rensi’s laurea, as Italians pretentiously call it, was in giurisprudenza, was it not? Magister: Just so, and all the more reason to take him seriously when he turns to Thrasea. Law in Italy is often the side door through which philosophy re-enters wearing a respectable coat. Shropshire: Then he is a jurist pretending to be a philosopher? G.: Or a philosopher prudent enough to begin where censors are less vigilant. Magister: Very good, Grice. You have the making of a don, which is not always a compliment. Shropshire: And what does Rensi do with Thrasea? Magister: He makes him alive. G.: For Italians, sir? Magister: Precisely. For Italians of Rensi’s generation, Thrasea is no dead Roman item for examinations. He is an example of moral resistance, civic reserve, principled dissent, and the question whether one may remain within a state without consenting to its corruption. Shropshire: Without his consent? G.: The state’s or Thrasea’s? Shropshire: His being taken as a moral lesson. Magister: Ah. Yes. One always uses the dead without asking them. That is called education. G.: Or history, at Clifton. Magister: Roman history at Clifton, Mr. Grice, is meant to do two things: improve your style and unsettle your conscience. Shropshire: Mine seems to have escaped improvement. G.: That is because you insist on beginning with deaths. Magister: Now, Thrasea Paetus matters because he refuses the cheap accommodations of Nero’s Rome. Shropshire: Such as? Magister: Such as applauding when applause becomes corruption, sitting when presence is complicity, or speaking when speech has already been degraded into ornament. G.: So Rensi treats him not merely as a senator, but as a philosopher of public conduct. Magister: Exactly. A philosopher in action, if you like, though the phrase is usually abused. Shropshire: I thought stoics mostly wrote. G.: Some did. Some drank hemlock. Some opened veins. Some merely endured schoolmasters. Magister: Thrasea’s stoicism is political in the Roman sense. He makes judgments about when to assent, when to withdraw, when to remain silent, and when silence itself says enough. Shropshire: That sounds rather like one of your classes, sir. Magister: It should not. My classes are far safer than Nero. G.: So where does one begin if not with the death? Magister: With his public posture. His opinions in the Senate. His refusal to convert office into theatre. His conduct during prosecutions. His relation to opposition without melodrama. Shropshire: That sounds dreadfully uncinematic. G.: Which is perhaps why the Italians value it. Magister: Indeed. Rensi sees in Thrasea not a martyr made of fireworks, but a man who keeps measure under despotism. Shropshire: Measure sounds disappointing. G.: Only to the young. Magister: Or to the incurably journalistic. Thrasea’s measure is the point. He does not rebel theatrically. He withholds assent where assent would stain him. Shropshire: So he is interesting because he does not shout? G.: There is hope for you yet. Magister: Rensi, you should understand, had already passed through politics, exile, journalism, socialism, law, and then philosophy. He did not need Thrasea for pageant. He needed him as a figure in whom authority and conscience collide. Shropshire: Rensi wrote on him in a book? Magister: Yes, though what matters more is the use to which he puts him. Thrasea becomes, in Rensi, a standing question: how should one live under a regime one cannot altogether approve and cannot simply escape? G.: Which is not merely Roman. Magister: No. That is why Italians still found him usable. The Roman is never merely Roman when a modern conscience goes looking in the archive. Shropshire: That sounds awfully continental. G.: So does “usable,” in this context. Magister: Never mind the adjective. Grice, what would you say is philosophically interesting in Thrasea’s conduct? G.: The relation between judgment and action, sir. Also the public meaning of withdrawal. Also whether silence may itself count as a statement. Magister: Good. That is already beyond many university men. Shropshire: I should say courage. Magister: That too, but courage is a word schoolboys use when they do not yet know the kinds. G.: Species of courage, sir? Magister: Precisely. There is the courage of open speech, the courage of refusal, the courage of abstention, the courage of remaining where one’s presence does not imply endorsement, and the courage of leaving when it would. Shropshire: Which did Thrasea do? Magister: Several of them. Rensi is especially drawn to the philosophic severity of measured non-participation. G.: Measured non-participation sounds almost English. Magister: It is Roman before it is English, and philosophical before either. Thrasea does not merely oppose; he withholds the moral credit a regime seeks from respectable men. Shropshire: Respectable men always seem in trouble in philosophy. G.: Only because schoolboys are less useful to regimes. Magister: Quite. Now, there is also the old issue of suicide. Shropshire: At last. G.: He is happy now, sir. Magister: Calm yourself, Shropshire. Thrasea’s death matters because it completes a doctrine of freedom under constraint. But if one starts there one misses the harder question: what made the death intelligible? Shropshire: The regime? Magister: Partly. But also the life. The death is not philosophy by itself. It is philosophy made legible by preceding consistency. G.: So Rensi is less interested in the gesture than in the coherence. Magister: Exactly. A death without a life behind it is mere noise. Shropshire: That seems a little hard on martyrs. Magister: Most martyrs could have used better editors. Thrasea’s case is different because the Roman sources let the conduct accumulate before the end. G.: Tacitus above all? Magister: Naturally. You were not sent to a classical school in vain. Shropshire: We were sent for rugby and empire, surely. G.: The classics were the alibi. Magister: Enough. Tacitus gives the moral texture, and Rensi reads that texture philosophically. Not as antiquarian embroidery, but as a permanent problem of rational life under power. Shropshire: Then why did the master in Italy think Thrasea urgent enough for modern readers? Magister: Because the modern state is never free from Nero in embryo. G.: That is almost a sentence for print, sir. Magister: Then I withdraw it and shall pretend I never said it. Shropshire: Very Roman of you. Magister: Rensi’s own generation had reasons to take Roman stoic opposition seriously. He lived through violence, war, state force, ideological vulgarity, and all the rest. Thrasea offered him not an escape but a standard. G.: A standard of what one may refuse? Magister: Very good. Not merely what one may affirm, but what one may decline to affirm without ceasing to be public. Shropshire: That sounds useful at Clifton. G.: Only if one wishes to survive masters and prefects. Magister: Grice is making a joke, but badly. The point is this. Thrasea’s stance is philosophically valuable because it distinguishes between office and endorsement. Shropshire: A man may hold office without approving all around him? Magister: He may, though badly and for only so long. Thrasea’s case explores the limits. G.: And when the limit is reached, the death follows. Magister: Exactly, but as conclusion, not opening sentence. Shropshire: So if you had to set an essay on him— Magister: I should set: “At what point does civic reserve cease to be prudence and become complicity? Discuss with reference to Thrasea as read by Rensi.” G.: That is quite good, sir. Magister: Of course it is. I have had practice. Shropshire: Handwriting counts? Magister: Always. Typewritten disallowed, though the future may yet ruin that too. G.: Rensi’s own career makes Thrasea more than a Roman case-study then? Magister: Yes. One must not flatten it into biography, but the resonance matters. Rensi’s legal training, political journalism, sceptical temper, and later philosophical severity all make him peculiarly suited to read a senator not as a marble virtue but as a living difficulty. Shropshire: You keep saying “difficulty.” Magister: Because that is what philosophy is before it becomes a quotation. G.: And Thrasea is difficult because he resists simple classification. Magister: Very much so. He is neither revolutionary in the vulgar sense nor compliant in the ordinary one. He remains within forms until forms themselves become morally uninhabitable. Shropshire: That sounds rather modern again. G.: Which is presumably why Rensi revived him. Magister: Not revived exactly. He never quite dies in Italy. That is one thing I want you boys to learn. The Romans do not stay safely dead if you let Italian moralists get at them. Shropshire: Without their consent. G.: There he goes again. Magister: Yes, without their consent. But with the consent of history, if that comforts you. Shropshire: It does not. G.: It is not meant to. Magister: Another point. Rensi treats Thrasea as a philosopher even though his own degree was in law because, in the older and truer sense, philosophy concerns forms of life under judgment. Jurisprudence was one route to that. G.: So the Italians are not entirely pretentious in calling the laurea what they do. Magister: Not entirely. Their pretension is merely institutional, which is the safer sort. Shropshire: Safer than ours? G.: Ours is less institutional and more personal. It is therefore harder to detect. Magister: Good. Now, if you were asked where to begin a study of Thrasea, you would not say “with the suicide.” Shropshire: I see that now. G.: You would say? Shropshire: With his public conduct, his judgments, his refusals, his opinions in office, and only then the death as sealing them. Magister: Better. There may be hope for the Shropshire mind after all. G.: Rensi would approve, sir? Magister: He would at least not dismiss you outright, which for him would count as praise. Shropshire: Was he severe? Magister: Philosophically and politically, yes. One does not write on absurdity, authority, scepticism, and Thrasea in a cheerful vein. G.: Though one might do so in Verona. Magister: Keep geography subordinate, Grice. But yes, one may say that Villafranca and Rome meet oddly in him: the provincial jurist and the Roman stoic both distrusting inflated certainties. Shropshire: So why study Thrasea now? Magister: Because boys who think history is dates need to learn that it is also standards. And because men who think politics is success need to learn that it is also refusal. G.: That is almost too good for a schoolroom. Magister: Then make it smaller for your essay and leave the rest in the margin. Shropshire: We do not usually get margins enough. G.: That is why we cultivate implication. Magister: Do not become clever, Grice, before you have earned the right. G.: I thought the classics were the right. Magister: They are only the licence. The right comes later, if at all. Shropshire: Then the moral of Thrasea? Magister: If you insist on a moral, let it be this: a death may be noble, but it is the life before it that makes the nobility legible. G.: And Rensi’s use of him? Magister: To remind modern readers that philosophy is not merely what one argues in safety, but what one can decline to say under pressure without ceasing to mean it.