Is “patience a virtue” in Shakespeare? Yes, this chapter argues—though Shakespeare also fully acknowledges how the word and the virtue itself can be abused. For an example of the more troubling ways in which patience is invoked by Shakespeare, consider Petruchio’s promise to see Katherine become “a second Grissel,” an icon of patient wifely submission. Or take the jarring way Prince Ferdinand, in The Tempest, reaps romantic rewards for “patient” labors of the same sort that the enslaved Caliban has long unwillingly and unprofitably endured. Such scandalous appeals to patience invite us to read into Shakespeare a modern critique of this virtue: a critique that has been prominent ever since Nietzsche called patience one of Western culture’s key “fabricated ideals,”a constraint on human potential. To show why the abuse of patience discourse is not the whole story in Shakespeare, this chapter recalls how classical and Christian traditions envision patience as not a loser’s but a winner’s virtue. In classical ethics it is a practice of acting deliberately rather than reactively. And in Christianity, patience not only builds confidence in a better world to come, but—as Marina’s perseverance in Pericles shows—can also further meaningful change in this one.

The introduciton opens my exploration of Cicero’s notion of will. I argue that the will is an original Latin contribution to the Western mind. Cicero’s letters, speeches, and treatises show how his skill for language gave him a subtler take on events and a richer repertoire of persuasion. Practical uses of will are foremost: mapping alliances, winning elections, and navigating the “economy of goodwill.” From his earliest writings, however, voluntas emerges in normative claims about law and politics: that Rome’s mass of precedents could be rationalized through Greek ideas. Chief among these is Plato’s precept that reason must rule, and thus an alliance of philosophy and tradition can save the dying Republic. Transmuting political failure into philosophical innovation, Cicero lays the foundation for an idea – the will and its freedom – with tremendous consequences for Western thought. For Cicero, voluntas populi becomes the binding force of a nominally popular but functionally aristocratic constitution. If this state of affairs looks familiar in today’s “democratic” republics, we have Cicero in part to thank. Insistence on the singularity of popular will and mistrust of the common citizen lie at the heart of today’s political crisis and will require Ciceronian creativity to fix.

This chapter draws on Cicero’s letters to propose the existence of an “economy of goodwill” in the late Roman Republic. Through voluntas mutua, the mature statesman handles sensitive transactions and vouchsafes his allies’ support. I examine potential antecedents to Cicero’s goodwill in Aristotle’s theories of friendship (eunoia and philia), as well as in the system of “friendly loans” (mutuom argentum) in the comedies of Plautus. Cicero’s economics of friendship, though informed by these others, aim at problems particular to Rome’s fast-growing empire. Unlike normal currency, “spending” voluntas only increases one’s supply of it, allowing for mutual reinforcement of political support over time. Additionally, voluntas may be exchanged regardless of facultas, facilitating long-distance governance by low-cost trades of support across the empire when concrete beneficia are unfeasible. In his philosophical works, finally, Cicero shows an intriguing ambivalence about the economy of goodwill that served him so well in practice. Are reciprocal favors a defensible part of friendship? Though he excludes the possibility in De amicitia, in De officiis, voluntas mutua is redeemed in decorum, the ideal by which proportion and mutuality yield virtue.

This chapter is dedicated to the theory of selfhood Cicero presents in the De officiis: each person being a player of four personae. The allegory of four dramatic roles or masks (from the Greek prosopon) is borrowed from the Stoic Panaetius, whose ethical theory adapts the stringent demands of the sage to a morally imperfect and multifarious public. He who wishes to progress, Cicero explains, must play the roles of reason, of nature, of fortune, and, finally, the role “we ourselves may choose sets forth from our will” (quam personam velimus, a nostra voluntate proficiscitur). In this final treatise, the will comes most clearly into view as a mental capacity and rational force. I argue that when read in conjunction with related uses of voluntas and persona in other texts, Cicero’s will serves a recursive purpose within each of the other personae. Whether in actualizing reason, refining our inborn qualities, or navigating the forces of necessity and civic duty, voluntas creates a dialectic of actor and mask from which emerges a conscious moral self. Though the will develops richly as a moral faculty and principium individuationis in the hands of later thinkers, its terrestrial purposes disappear as divine ones take hold.

With the Tusculan Disputations, willpower enters Western thought. This chapter departs from a peculiar decision Cicero makes in his account of the human soul. In previous centuries, Platonists and Stoics had bitterly disagreed on whether the soul was unified or divided into rational and nonrational parts. In the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero announces that he will combine Stoic moral stricture – predicated on the soul’s unity – with Plato’s divided, self-moving soul. The result is a new narrative of inner struggle in which voluntas gains a formal definition at last: “that which desires with reason” (quae quid cum ratione desiderat) (Tusc. 4.12). While drawing importantly on the Hellenistic schools of philosophy, the Latin “force” of volition is foremost. Here, Cicero links together lines of debate that in Greek had run in parallel, rendering hekon, boulesis, and prohairesis by voluntarius and voluntas. His “struggle for reason” thus moves originally beyond Greek accounts of askesis, moral training that emphasized education and cognitive clarity over present effort. An orator zealous to persuade, Cicero paints his account of reason in Roman colors of honor, endurance, and painstaking progress.

At the beginning of the debate over free will, freedom is nowhere to be found. In the Hellenistic period, the question of human autonomy is not one of freedom (eleutheria) but instead, given the nature of the universe, what is “up to us” (eph’emin) and thus left to our choice (prohairesis). It is Cicero and the Epicurean poet Lucretius who first turn the debate into one specifically over man’s freedom from fate. But Cicero’s idea of the will’s libertas – its opportunity to conquer vice and win honor – is very different from that of Lucretius in De rerum natura, a text Cicero read and may even have edited. De fato, one of the last in his corpus, returns to the question of a libera voluntas explicitly to refute the Epicurean doctrine of the swerve (clinamen) and their abandonment of civic duty. For Cicero, free will is the locus of public virtue, the justification of “praise and honors,” and the power to strengthen ourselves against natural vice. Cicero’s letters reveal, in turn, that this technical treatise on fate has decidedly political stakes for the Roman Republic.