Hellenistic/Roman
Cicero
106–43 BC
“The safety of the people shall be the supreme law.”
Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman orator, statesman, and philosophical writer who transmitted Greek moral and political thought to Latin readers. In he organizes conduct around the honorable and the useful, and holds that their apparent conflict is only apparent. and apply related reasoning to the mixed constitution and natural law. He wrote for citizens. Later Christian and early modern writers took his vocabulary of duty, law, and the commonwealth as a standard starting point for public morals.
In the Conversation
4 of the Great Ideas
Ethics
Virtue and Vice
Virtue consists in the four cardinal qualities of wisdom, justice, fortitude, and temperance; vice is the failure of the rational soul to be ordered by them, and no advantage gained through vice is a true good.
Duty
Duty, or officium, is what is fitting for a rational being to do in his station, and the whole of moral philosophy may be organized around the analysis of what is honorable and what is useful, and the question of their apparent conflict.
Politics
Law
True law is right reason in agreement with nature, and whatever a city may enact against it is not law at all but the mere semblance of law.
State
A commonwealth is the property of the people, and a people is not any gathering of men but an association joined together by agreement on justice and by a shared pursuit of the common good.