Five-minute digest
The Republic and The Laws
Summary
Cicero wrote his two dialogues on the state in the troubled 50s BC, when the Roman Republic was strained by the private power of Pompey, Caesar and Crassus. On the Commonwealth (De re publica), published in 51 BC, imitates Plato's Republic but asks what the best constitution is for a real people, and answers with Rome itself. On the Laws (De legibus), begun soon after and probably left unfinished, then supplies the laws such a commonwealth should have. The library text is Francis Barham's translation of 1841–1842, reprinted in C. D. Yonge's Bohn volume of 1853 with the editor's preface and Barham's introductions to each book. The scan has been converted by OCR, so some words and numerals are garbled. The Republic is set in 129 BC at the country house of Scipio Aemilianus, the conqueror of Carthage, during a festival holiday a few days before his death. In Book I, after a conversation about a reported second sun, Scipio defines a commonwealth as the affair of a whole people bound by agreement about justice and by shared advantage. He sets out the three simple forms, kingship, aristocracy and democracy, shows how each slides into tyranny, faction or mob rule, and prefers a fourth form blended from all three. Book II tells Roman history from Romulus to the decemvirs as the gradual growth of that blended constitution. In Book III Philus argues, as the sceptic Carneades had done at Rome, that justice is mere convention, and Laelius replies with the famous account of true law as right reason in agreement with nature. Books IV and V, on education, morals and the ideal statesman, survive in scraps. Most of the Republic was lost until 1819, when Cardinal Angelo Mai found about a third of it beneath a copy of Augustine's commentary on the Psalms in a Vatican palimpsest. The ending, the Dream of Scipio, had survived separately through the commentary of Macrobius. In it Scipio's adoptive grandfather, Scipio Africanus the Elder, shows him the heavens, the smallness of the earth, the music of the spheres and the reward waiting for those who serve their country. On the Laws is a conversation at Cicero's family estate near Arpinum among Cicero, his brother Quintus and his friend Atticus. Book I grounds law in nature, reason and a fellowship between God and man; Book II gives a code of religious law; Book III a code for magistrates, with Cicero defending the tribunate against his brother's objections. A fourth and a fifth book are cited by later writers but are lost.
Top Lessons
A people is joined by justice, not by numbers
Scipio's definition says a crowd is not yet a people. A commonwealth exists only where citizens share an agreement about what is right and a common interest. When rulers or majorities stop serving that common good, the community loses the thing that made it a commonwealth.
Blend the simple forms so that none decays alone
Each simple constitution carries the seed of its own corruption: kings become tyrants, nobles a faction, the people a mob. Cicero, following Polybius, argues that a constitution mixing royal, aristocratic and popular elements is more stable, and that Rome built one slowly through many generations rather than by a single founder's design.
There is one true law above every statute
Laelius and the Cicero of the Laws hold that right reason in agreement with nature binds all peoples at all times. Senate and people cannot repeal it, and an enactment that commands wickedness is not truly law. This is one of the classic statements of natural law in the Western tradition.
Earthly glory looks small from heaven
The Dream of Scipio asks a man at the height of his fame to look down at the tiny earth. Fame is local and short; the soul is immortal; the reward that lasts belongs to those who serve their country justly for its own sake. Cicero joins public duty to a hope beyond the grave.
Verified Quotes
“a commonwealth is a constitution of the entire people. But the people is not every association of men, however congregated, but the association of the entire number, bound together by the compact of justice, and the communication of utility.”
“There is a fourth kind of government, therefore, which, in my opinion, is preferable to all these: it is that mixed and moderate government, which is composed of the three particular forms which I have already noticed”
“True law is right reason conformable to nature, universal, unchangeable, eternal, whose commands urge us to duty, and whose prohibitions restrain us from evil”
“It is not one thing at Rome, and another at Athens; one thing to-day, and another to-morrow”
“For nothing on earth is more agreeable to God, the Supreme Governor of the universe, than the assemblies and societies of men united together by laws, which are called States.”
“consider your body only, not yourself, as mortal. For it is not your outward form which constitutes your being, but your mind”
“man is born for justice, and that law and equity have not been established by opinion, but by nature.”
“the safety of the people is the supreme law”
Medical Lens
These are works of political philosophy, but they use medicine as a recurring analogy. The statesman of Republic V aims at the happiness of citizens as the physician aims at the health of his patient, and in Laws II an unjust statute is no more a law than the poison of an ignorant empiric is a physician's prescription. A fragment of Republic II lists kinds of disordered passion, one of them an anxiety given to mourning and melancholy, inside an extended image of reason as a charioteer or elephant-driver controlling the soul; this belongs to the Stoic and Platonic tradition of philosophy as therapy for the passions that Cicero later developed fully in the Tusculan Disputations. The Dream of Scipio's teaching that the mind, not the body, is the true self is a classical statement of soul-body dualism.
- Republic, Book II, closing fragments
Reason as the driver of an elephant or charioteer of the passions, with a fragment naming a kind of anxiety prone to mourning and melancholy.
- Republic, Book V fragments
The ruler's aim compared with a pilot's safe voyage and a physician's restoring his patient to health.
- Laws, Book II
Unjust enactments compared with the recipes of unskilful empirics who give poisons instead of medicines.
- Republic, Book VI (Dream of Scipio)
The body is mortal but the mind is the true self, divine and self-moving.