On the LawsCicero
About On the Laws
Cicero wrote (De Legibus) in the years before the civil war, as a companion to ; Plato had followed his with the , and Cicero repeats the sequence. The dialogue is set at his family estate at Arpinum, where Cicero, his brother Quintus, and his friend Atticus walk and talk. Three books survive, and the work was probably never finished.
Book I contains the argument that mattered most to later centuries. Law is right reason rooted in nature, prior to any statute or decree. Because human beings share reason with the gods, they belong to one commonwealth and are subject to one standard of justice. A wicked enactment is a corruption of law rather than an instance of it. Book II applies the doctrine to religious law and Book III to magistrates, sketching a code for Cicero's ideal Rome. The Stoic teaching of Book I passes through Augustine and Aquinas into the natural-law tradition, and every later argument that an unjust law fails to bind traces back to this walk at Arpinum.