When I was 21, a third-year college student, I was considering applying to a fellowship that would pay for two years of graduate study at the University of Cambridge. It was like the Rhodes or the Marshall, but much less competitive and much less prestigious.
I say “I was considering” because it took me a long time to decide to apply. I suffered a lot of imposter syndrome. I was not Rhodes or Marshall material. Why should I deserve a lesser scholarship like this one? I called my grandmother and asked, essentially, if people “like us” should win scholarships like this. She was confused. “If someone’s going to give you money to do something you want to do, why would you say no?” I felt like an idiot but also grateful to have such a sensible.
Even if this fellowship were for people like me, I wasn’t sure it was right for my career. I eventually wanted to get a PhD.1 After college, I could go right into a PhD program, or I could take two years “off” with this fellowship. Would two years of intellectual exploration and personal growth be worth the delay?
I made a spreadsheet. Each row represented one year of my life. The two columns represented my two possible career paths. In the left-hand column, I would go straight from undergrad to a PhD program. After the PhD, I would do a postdoc, then an entry-level assistant professorship. I forecasted that I would get tenure at age 38. In the right-hand column, I would spend two years in the UK on this fellowship and then take the same track as the left-hand column. I would not be tenured until age 40.
The number 40 unnerved me. I decided I would ask past winners of this fellowship for their opinions. The first person I called, a man in his 40s with an interesting career, had been a physics major like me. I asked him, in an open-ended way, how his two years at Cambridge impacted his career. We had a nice talk about how much fun he had at Cambridge.
I decided I needed to ask the question another way. “Did those two years have any negative impact on your career? Do you regret them at all?”
There was a long pause. “I… really never thought of that,” he said.
I again realized I was being kind of an idiot. At age 21, the difference between 38 and 40 initially felt large. But talking to this former winner made me realize that it would be worse to be 38 and tenured but regretting passing up a life experience, than to be 40 and tenured and have no regrets.
And indeed, here I am today, at age 39, regretting only that I didn’t use those two years to do something even further from the professional line connecting that unsure 21 year old and this somewhat less unsure 39 year old, who now intends to somehow connect this personal anecdote to ancient Rome.
Two thousand seventy-one years before I made my spreadsheet, in 63 BC, the great Roman statesman and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero was elected to the consulship. Every year, in the ancient Roman Republic, two men were elected consul. They were the most powerful magistrates in the city, very roughly like our President. The consuls were the commanders-in-chief of the military, top diplomats, judges for certain kinds of criminal cases, conveners of the Senate and the legislative assemblies, and overall the individuals most responsible for executing Rome’s laws. Ex-consuls held the most desirable governorships and generalships. They were lifetime members of the Senate and spoke first during Senate debates. You can tell how important the consuls were because calendar years were named after them. The Romans didn’t call it “63 BC.” It was “The Year of the Consulship of Cicero and Hybrida.”
The consuls were the pinnacle of Rome’s aristocratic society. To be elected consul was the summit of every proper man’s ambition. In today’s society, there are many ladders of success: you might win a Nobel Prize, or be a Superbowl-winning quarterback, or sweep the Oscars, or be elected President. In ancient Rome, there was only one path to a really successful life, and they called it the cursus honorum, which translates to something like “ladder of elected offices” or “race of honors.”2
The cursus honorum was a web of political offices and military positions that aristocratic men would begin in their early adulthoods. The most important part of the cursus was a set of three political offices: quaestor, praetor, and finally consul. By law, these offices were open to men aged, at minimum, 36, 39, and 42.
Elections for all offices were yearly, and the competition was fierce. It was a special distinction for a man to enter an office suo anno, literally “in his year,” that is, the first year he was legally able to. Cicero was proud of winning the consulship suo anno. His march through the cursus honorum was nearly perfect.3
I see things like the cursus honorum in many of our modern professional jobs.4 An academic career follows a progression that you can write out on a spreadsheet, and which ends, oddly enough, at about the same age as an ancient Roman aristocratic male would be eligible for the consulship. Doctors, lawyers, consultants, and finance people all have explicit career ladders, with clear timing of events and patterns of rewards.
We even play out cursus honorum in miniature inside our schools. At my undergrad, Williams College, you knew someone was a really “good” Williams student if they were a WOOLF leader as a sophomore, a JA as a junior, and a Gargoyle Society member as a senior.
The funny thing about a cursus honorum is that, if you are inside of it, it seems like the most important thing in the world, but if you are outside of it, it can seem trivial and ridiculous. I’m certain that, if you didn’t go to Williams, you don’t know and couldn’t care less about WOOLF and JAs and Gargoyles. It’s like hearing about a sport you don’t follow: maybe you’re excited to hear someone is trying their hardest, and getting some kind of reward for their effort, but you can shrug and say it’s not important to you.
I see the cursus honorum as a tool for hitching privileged and capable people’s ambitions to institutional success. The cursus encouraged Rome’s most powerful people to put their competitive energies toward serving the state. The cursus was an important part of the Roman civic duty, that devotion to the state that helped propel Rome from a meager city-state to a continental empire.
A cursus is not inherently good or bad, because institutions are not inherently good or bad. The Roman Republic, like the United States, pursues a number of projects that I admire and a number that I do not. There are darker examples. On my last visit to the Holocaust Museum in DC, I learned about Irmfried Eberl. Eberl, born in Austria in 1910, trained to be a psychiatrist. He was ambitious, but not very good at medicine, so he found another outlet: a Nazi cursus. At age 29, he got his first big job, running a centers for mass euthanasia of the mentally ill. At age 32, he became head of the infamous Treblinka extermination camp. Eberl wanted to outdo his peer extermination camp heads, so he asked that victims be sent to Treblinka at a rate faster rate than to any other extermination camp. They arrived faster than it was possible to murder them and dispose of their bodies in an orderly fashion. Thousands of people died in train cars before even being unloaded at the camp. Eberl was dismissed for incompetence. Here was a man who strove to do as much murder as he could, and who failed, not because he did murder, but because he did murder in a manner his superiors considered sloppy.
I’m personally concerned for the degradation of the cursus honorum around US judges. It used to be that you wanted to be a really good judge, you would compete with other people who wanted to be really good judges, climbing a ladder that ended with the US Supreme Court. Justices on the Court tended to follow the Court’s own prior decisions. Lawyers give this phenomenon a fancy Latin name, but ultimately I think judges want the approval and respect of other judges, and if you do weird stuff, different from what the Court has done before, you’ll look like a bad judge, in the eyes of other judges. This system is now cracking: the Federalist Society means that there are two ways to be a “good” judge, one that plays by the old rules, trying to be a lawyer’s lawyer and a judge’s judge, and another that plays by new rules, where you advance by blatantly advancing one party’s agenda. Aileen Cannon is playing by the new rules.5
I also don’t think cursus honorum can or should have infinite influence. Adam Mastroianni argues that incentives are for losers. A wise person will find their own way to a good life, without the help of incentivizing guardrails like a cursus honorum. I generally agree.
But I do think that we have plenty of talented people, who aren’t expending their talents on what I would consider “good” problems, but who might, if they had received the right kind of nudge or been embedded in the right kind of societal structure. It’s well and good that we have books like The Mission Generation that we can hope people will read and that will cause them to put their energies toward something noble. But some of us are weak. Some of us (not me) are sheeple that would rather do what is normal and boring and unsatisfying rather than live in fear of being weird. Some of us (me) need a spreadsheet to determine the balance of our lives. Some of us would really like some outside assurance that we are living a good life, that we don’t need to be having a midlife crisis right now.
There are many cursus honorum in our society, but I don’t think most of them are pursuits that will make us appear more noble in the eyes of whoever will dig up our bones in a thousand years. Some of us could use a society where the default is that you will do something in service of your community or your country, rather than one where the default is that you will maximize your salary or —God have mercy— the influence of the content you create.
I did not seriously consider doing a UK PhD. In the US, science PhDs are grueling, soul-crushing projects of five to ten years duration. In the UK, you are done in three or four years. I figured no one would respect me in the US science world if I held a UK degree.
Latin, unlike English or ancient Greek, often uses one word to refer to many related concepts. Latin honor means both “honor” and “elected office.” My favorite example of this conceptual loading is virtus, which literally means “manhood,” the quality of being a vir, or “man.” But virtus also means “manliness,” in the sense of the desirable qualities of a man, and thus also “courage,” and, more generally, “goodness,” whence our English word “virtue.”
The big asterisk next to Cicero’s greatness is that he was a novus homo, or “new man,” meaning that he was the first in his family to win the consulship. In contemporary America, this would be considered a personal triumph. In Cicero’s time, a novus homo was something of an upstart in the eyes of the older aristocratic families, in the way old money looks down on nouveau riche.
The plural of cursus is cursus (technically, it’s cursūs, but potato potatō). Cursus is a fourth declension noun, like apparatus, not a second declension noun like alumnus (whose plurals end in -i). One alumnus builds one apparatus; two alumni build two apparatus.
A legal system is, fundamentally, a system for nonviolent conflict resolution. It is better to have a system which is moderately misaligned with your politics, but which appears sacred and eternal, than a system which is blatantly political and loses the ability to resolve conflict without violence.