Cicero and Seneca on polymathy

I think that we’ve had enough of polymath in pop culture for a while (although I may have to download some music from the two polymath bands).

Let’s see what the Romans thought about polymathy. Like the Greeks, the Romans also were of two minds on the subject. However, they did not use the word polymathy, which was not adopted into Latin. Instead, they preferred the Greek phrase enkuklios paideia, which meant a unified program of study that will allow one to achieve a complete encyclopedic education, to refer to polymathy.

Cicero, who was called the greatest of the Romans, was fond of praising knowledge. One of his most well known thoughts was the greatest wisdom is the “knowledge of all things human and divine.” That is all well and good, but what does that mean? All things human and divine?

It turns out that the modern commentators are in pretty serious disagreement over that phrase. One explanation is that it means, more or less, a comprehensive knowledge of all things. That sounds like a pretty good explanation of polymathy. Unfortunately, another explanation is that it means the relationship between human and divine nature. Either way, it sounds like something pretty broad.

Cicero was one of the greatest Roman orators, if not the greatest, and he believed that no one can be an orator without knowing all of the important academic subjects, i.e., be a polymath.

However, in one of his last books, De finibus bonorum et malorum (On the end of good and evil, often just called "On Ends"), he moderated his position, writing, “An itch for miscellaneous omniscience no doubt stamps a man as a mere dilettante; but it must be deemed the mark of a superior mind to be led on by the contemplation of high matters to a passionate love of knowledge.”

What did he mean by that? I think that the best way to look at that is that he, like Heraclitus, meant that you shouldn’t just acquire knowledge for the sake of acquiring knowledge, you should do something with it. At the very least, you should think about what you have learned.

And decades after Cicero, the famed dramatist and correspondent Seneca was equally conflicted about polymathy. He wrote in the same letter (Letter 88) “to want to know more than is sufficient is a form of intemperance,” but also “superfluous knowledge would be better than no knowledge.”