Liberty, Equality, and Popular Sovereignty

This chapter documents the role of appeals to the liberty of the people in Roman political discourse, as evidenced in the writings of Sallust and Livy as well as Cicero’s. Liberty’s relation to contested notions of equality is discussed at length, particularly as it is explored in Livy and in On the commonwealth. Finally, the chapter turns to On the commonwealth’s conception of popular sovereignty: of the res publica as the property of the people, over which it must be able to exercise rights of ownership, if political liberty is to be secured and maintained.

Republican Virtues

Talk of the virtues, something of signal importance in the entire Western republican tradition, was seldom absent from Cicero’s lips, whether in his oratory, letters, or theoretical writings. He is forever listing virtues or concatenating virtue words. This chapter examines some of the more theoretically grounded lists that he proposes in three of his opening chapters: civic (in On the commonwealth), Roman (in Tusculan disputations), and cardinal (in On duties). His frequent pairing of constantia and gravitas is highlighted, and his treatments in On duties of justice, magnitudo animi, and verecundia are of particular interest and receive extended discussions. The chapter concludes with a portrait of Cicero’s supremely reliable and honest republican citizen as exemplar of virtue.

Republican Decision-making

On duties makes development of natural impulses to virtue the basis for how one ought to act. But identifying what actually is the right and honourable thing to do in the public sphere can still be problematic, even if the overriding importance of claims upon citizens of obligations to the res publica are recognized. When the res publica is in trouble, and when civilized order is either unstable or broken down completely, then it may become entirely opaque whether any action a citizen might take could properly or effectively promote the well-being of the res publica. For Cicero, citizen and statesman in turbulent and dangerous times, such issues were as much existential as theoretical, with the potential to destabilize theory too. This chapter first explores his theoretical treatment of decision-making in On duties, and then the difficulties of fitting principle to practice encountered in civil war and its aftermath.

Epilogue: Philosophical Debate and Normative Theory

This short epilogue explores a tension in Cicero between a conception of philosophy as in its very nature a debate, and the idea that the point of doing philosophy is to find and advocate a sound theoretical basis for living our lives. It focuses first on a passage in On laws, where the need for an ethical principle that philosophers might agree sufficient, if accepted, to ‘put res publicae on a firm footing’, is taken to require the silencing of debate and sceptical doubt. On the commonwealth, however, had staged a full-throttled debate on justice. The contrast suggests not a disjunction between philosophy and politics, but between purely theoretical discussion of fundamental ethical and political questions and the requirements of viable guidance on policy and practice in these spheres.

Government

In On the commonwealth Cicero explores three main ideas, discussed here in turn. First introduced is the concept of a res publica itself, held together as an association of citizens by the justice inherent in a fairly based legal order. Then Cicero stresses the consilium (deliberation) needed to govern it, and above all secure and maintain its stability, with the recipe a ‘mixed’ system of government such as Republican Rome had historically evolved. Finally, he turns to the leadership required to supply that consilium and to carry it through in action, whether in the ordinary functioning of the res publica or in moments of crisis when its integrity is threatened and a ‘director (rector) of the commonwealth and initiator of public consilium’ is needed. On laws presents and defends a more detailed account of the roles particularly of senate and people, and of their interaction, within the mixed constitution.

Cosmopolitanism, Imperialism, and the Idea of Law

The cosmopolitan idea that humans have wider and more universal allegiances than to their immediate communities is presented by Cicero in On the commonwealth in both Platonic and Stoic forms. In On laws the more evidently Stoic idea of law as prescriptive right reason governs his argument. The chapter explains what Cicero takes its universal prescriptive force to consist in, and the way he conceives it to be embodied in the law codes of well-regulated constitutions of particular states, whether the Roman Republic at its best or any other ‘good and stable nation’. In On the commonwealth he had argued for the thesis that such states cannot exist or conduct their affairs without justice, which in Book 3 is the focus of a full-scale debate, particularly concerned with the justice or injustice of imperialism, not least Roman imperialism.

Introduction: Contexts

This chapter presents contexts of different kinds in which Cicero’s political philosophy may helpfully be set. It offers first some brief reminders of Cicero’s prominence in the rhetoric of the Western republican tradition, followed by a brief sketch of his political biography, including those periods of relative or almost total political inactivity in which he composed much of his philosophical oeuvre. A third section identifies three main reasons—respectively philosophical, literary, and historiographical—for his rehabilitation as a serious and seriously interesting philosophical thinker in the scholarship of recent decades. A further section considers Cicero’s ideas about what qualifies someone to write good political philosophy. Finally, some comments are made on the response that his own writings in that mode make to the political crisis of his times, together with a short sketch of key theoretical themes that are to be explored in the chapters that follow.