On the RepublicCicero
About On the Republic
Cicero wrote (De re publica) between 54 and 51 BC, in six books, as a Roman answer to Plato's . The dialogue is set in 129 BC at the house of Scipio Aemilianus, with Laelius and other members of Scipio's circle as speakers. Large parts are lost. A Vatican palimpsest recovered in 1819 restored substantial portions of the first books; the Dream of Scipio from Book VI survived separately through Macrobius's commentary.
Book I defines the res publica as the property of the people, a people bound by agreement on law and by common interest, and surveys the simple constitutions (kingship, aristocracy, democracy) and their corrupt forms. Scipio argues for a mixed constitution that balances the three good forms, and holds that the Roman state, as it developed, best realized that balance. Book II traces Roman constitutional history from the kings through the early Republic to show that development in practice. Book III, fragmentary, debates justice in the state and includes the famous pair of speeches modeled on Carneades: one arguing that empire rests on injustice, another defending justice as the bond of commonwealth. Books IV and V, poorly preserved, treated education and the character of the ideal statesman (rector rei publicae). Book VI closes with Scipio's dream: the elder Africanus shows him the cosmos, the smallness of the earth, and the immortality of those who have served the republic well. Glory among men is fleeting; true reward is in the order of the heavens.
is the central Roman statement of mixed government, of the res publica as a partnership in justice, and of political virtue under a cosmic horizon. Augustine's takes up and revises its definition of a people; later constitutional thought returns repeatedly to its analysis of balanced powers.