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“Many years later, the emperor Augustus (who had acquiesced in Cicero’s murder) found one of his grandsons with a work of Cicero’s in his hand. The youngster tried to hide the book under his cloak, but Augustus took it from him and read through a large part of it where he stood. Then, handing it back, he said ‘That was a master of words, my boy. A Master of words and a lover of his country.’”

- Jonathan Powell, referencing Plutarch, from the introduction


The Republic (De re publica) and The Laws (De legibus) were Cicero’s Latin counterparts to the identically-titled works of Plato. Both treatises were likely composed between 54 and 51 BC; just a few years before Caesar crossed the Rubicon, heralding what future generations have arbitrarily marked off as the transition of the Roman state from an oligarchic republic to an autocratic empire. Both works survive only in fragments, making it difficult to determine the significance of the surviving portions in the context of the whole. Much of The Republic has been stitched together from passages quoted in Augustine, Macrobius, and Lactantius, as well as from another portion that was rediscovered in the Vatican in 1819. The final section of the text, The Dream of Scipio, was the only part that was known to have survived in the middle ages. One passage in my Oxford edition is even presented with paraphrases of Lactantius’s snarky marginalia in parentheses:

“Goodness clearly likes to be honoured, and it has no other reward. (But the Bible, which you knew nothing about, shows that there is another reward.) Yet, while it readily accepts the reward of honour, it does not stridently demand it. (You are seriously mistaken if you think that goodness can ever receive its reward from men. Why, you yourself in another passage rightly said) What riches will you offer as an incentive to such a man? What kinds of power?”

Nonetheless, the surviving passages offer critical insights on the self-understanding of the Roman Republic during its most tumultuous century, presented by one of its leading statesmen.

Whereas Plato worked inductively, constructing his imaginary politeia by interrogating his own mind, Cicero worked deductively; analyzing the practical workings of the most durable and successful state ever seen in the Mediterranean world, and extrapolating general principles on the nature of law and good governance therefrom. In The Republic, Cicero takes on the persona of Scipio Aemelianus: a grandson of Scipio Africanus (the vanquisher of Hannibal), a celebrated Roman general in his own right (who would oversee the destruction of Carthage during the Third Punic War), and a conservative opponent of the populist Tribune, Tiberius Gracchus. Responding to the promptings of three other men, Scipio discusses the best constitution, the advantages and vulnerabilities of the three “simple” forms of government, the historical development of the Roman constitution, and the qualities of the ideal statesman.

The primary criterion for the success of any form of government, according to both Scipio the character and Cicero himself, is its ability to sustain the res publica; that is, to protect the public and its collective property from private interests and arbitrary power. The public, in classical republican fashion, is defined as “a numerous gathering brought together by legal consent and community of interest.” In contrast with modern liberal theories of social organization, the state is formed not primarily due to individual weakness or mutual enmity, but rather because of an innate human tendency to gather and form communities. It is thus the integrity of the community itself, rather than that of any discrete individual or faction within it, that a state must sustain to qualify as a republic.

In their positive aspects, each of the three simple forms of government (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy) can theoretically fulfill this role; but each stands on a precarious foundation, being always prone to corruption and liable to collapse into another form. Scipio, for instance, favors monarchy over the other simple forms, because the governance of one wise, benevolent, and capable ruler can provide unity and justice in a more efficient manner than the inevitably messier practices of aristocracies and democracies; but the best of the simple forms is always a hair’s breadth away from the worst, because the moment a monarch begins to consider his own interests before those of the state, the monarchy has turned into a tyranny. Aristocracies, at their best, could provide a healthy middle ground between “the inadequate autocrat and the reckless mob”, bringing together the best citizens to guide the state through wise deliberation; but in practice, they are often merely cliques of the wealthy and well-connected. As for democracies—well, suffice it to say Scipio has little patience for them.

Because of the instability of the simple forms, the best constitution will incorporate a “carefully proportioned mixture” of all three. Each element contributes to the integrity of the whole and provides concord between social classes. As Scipio puts it, “Kings attract by affection, aristocracies by good sense, and democracies by freedom.” These attractions must be combined to produce a stable political order.

There is a distinction, it must be noted, between Cicero’s understanding of the proper operation of a mixed constitution and that of—to provide a counterexample—James Madison. Madison saw the mixed constitution as a means of providing a balance of power between competing institutions: the gravitational pull of one faction’s self-interest would be counteracted by that of the others, and the res publica, though always tending towards collapse, would be kept suspended in the air by this mutual tension. Cicero, by contrast, thought of his constitutional arrangement more in terms of concord than of acrimony. The various constitutional inputs would buttress and ameliorate one another, producing a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

In discussing the history of the Roman state, Scipio refers approvingly to his political mentor, Cato the Elder, who attributed the superiority of the Roman constitution to the fact that it developed organically and incrementally, through the contributions of each social class over many generations, as opposed to being artificially designed and handed down by one statesman, such as Minos of Crete or Lycurgus of Sparta. From the God-hero kingship of Romulus, the association of “fathers” that became the Senate, and the religious establishment of Numa Pompilius; to the expulsion of the Tarquin dynasty and the establishment of the republic and its Consuls; to the emergence of the Tribunate and its nullification power over Consular prerogatives for the protection of the common people, the Roman Republic was able to incorporate the disparate needs and interests of the one, the few, and the many, harmonizing their often-violent divergences and keeping them all invested in the success of the state as a whole.

The Republic ends with the Dream of Scipio, a kind of pious fable analogous to the Myth of Er in Plato’s Republic. Little of Cicero’s discoursing on the ideal statesman survives, but some fundamental principles can be deduced from this section. Scipio tell his compatriots about a remarkable dream he had during a visit to Masinissa, the Numidian king who had allied with Scipio’s grandfather against Hannibal. In the dream, Scipio is visited by the old man himself, Scipio Africanus, who takes him to an outer realm far above the earth. Africanus prophesies that Scipio will destroy Carthage, become one of Rome’s leading citizens, and later be appointed to a dictatorship. He then shows Scipio the celestial spheres by which the earth is encompassed; from heaven, to the various planets, and down to the earth itself, which is situated as an unmoving center of gravity towards which everything heavy (presumably in both a literal and a spiritual sense) falls. Scipio notes how small the earth appears from this height, and Africanus enjoins him to reflect on the triviality of popular acclaim in one’s mortal life and the senselessness of vainglorious pursuits. Those who embody honor and justice, living lives of selfless duty to country, will transcend the ephemerality of mortal affairs and become demigods in the afterlife. Cicero’s heaven is for humble and courageous patriots.

The Laws—or what survives of it—is most notable for Cicero’s articulation of a theory of natural law. The law, for Cicero, is not simply a collection of behavioral rules put forward by a society for its own cohesion. Rather, the law is something innate in our capacity for reason and moral discretion: our knowledge of good and evil. Our sentience is a divine spark; something we share with the god(s) who created the cosmos. Every person, regardless of culture or nationality, participates in this divine nature to the extent that he allows reason to govern his conduct. Justice is not something created or—to use the formulation of the American Constitution—established by human societies; rather, this divine and preexistent Law is incorporated in a given social order to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the degree to which that society has either preserved it in its pure form or allowed it to become corrupted through its own fallibility.

There was something about the way Cicero describes this primordial, benevolent Law, which governs all things and guides them toward itself, that reminded me of the way Wisdom is described in the Wisdom of Solomon. So I did a bit of googling and, yes, De legibus and Wisdom were written right around the same time, in the middle of the first century BC. In the cosmopolitan world of Roman antiquity, pagan and Jewish thinkers alike were seeking a sturdy, universal foundation for reason and morality amidst the multifarious and cross-cutting cultural norms of a diversely-peopled and tumultuous civilization.