L’homme et l’animal dans l’anthropologie cicéronienne

Résumé En

It is a fact that when dealing with man/animal relationships in an anthropological perspective, Cicero is considered most of the time as a useful representative of the Stoic doctrine and at best as a precious testimony of the dispute between the new Academy and the Portico concerning the question of the approval. I will try to emphasize the lacks of those “utilitarian” reading of Cicero. It seems to me that despite its leading role, the Stoic model isn’t sufficient to return justice to Cicero’s anthropology, which is mainly nurtured and structured by Plato’s heritage. As the fruit of a personal dialectic construction, Cicero’s humanism - which will inspire Lactantius four centuries later to draw the shape of the Christian anthropology – find itself its origin in a crystallized opposition between Man and animal. In that perspective, I will first study the polemical stakes of animal paradigm in the debate on the sovereign good in particular around the pleasure issue; I shall envisage then the anthropological stakes in the opposition Man/animal in Cicero’s works to the alder of the Stoic logocentrism; I shall finally try to measure the importance of animal counter model in Cicero’s reception of the Platonic dualistic psychology.