Cicero grounded ethics in free will against causal determinism

Evidence

The lawyer tells us that a refusal from anyone else would have been grounds for banishment, but with Bartleby, “I should have as soon thought of turning my pale plaster-of-paris bust of Cicero out of doors.” I find the mention of Cicero significant. In a partially lost work called De Fato, the first-century BC statesman and philosopher comes to a very different conclusion about free will than Edwards or Priestley, and his writings would decidedly not “induce a salutary feeling” in the lawyer. For Cicero, there can be no ethics without free will, and that is enough to put an end to the question. … Cicero is far from denying the law of causality. He freely admits that antecedent and natural causes give men a tendency in one direction or another. But he insists that men are nevertheless free to perform specific acts independent of such tendencies and even in defiance of them…Thus a man may build a character quite at variance with his natural disposition. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 265

Categorization

• QUESTION: How does Cicero’s ‘free to defy natural tendencies’ square with Melian-free-will or with the compatibilism debate Odell stages?
• XREF: Cicero’s position that character can be built against natural disposition echoes the cultivated-attention project Odell builds; connects thematically to Stoic self-cultivation.