Cicero

This engagingly written book offers an innovative account of Cicero’s treatment of key political ideas: liberty and equality, government, law, cosmopolitanism and imperialism, republican virtues, and ethical decision-making in politics. Cicero (106–43 BC) is well known as a major participant in the turbulent politics of the last three decades of the Roman Republic. But he was a political thinker, too, influential for many centuries on the Western intellectual and cultural tradition. His theoretical writings stand as the first surviving attempt to articulate a philosophical rationale for republicanism. They were not written in isolation either from the stances he took in his political oratory of the period, or from his discussions in his voluminous correspondence with friends and acquaintances of immediate political issues or questions of character or behaviour. The book situates the intimate interrelationships between Cicero’s writings in all these modes within the historical context of a fracturing traditional Roman political order, while exhibiting the continuing attractions of his conceptual landscape, as well as some of its limitations as a response to the crisis that was engulfing Rome.