This book presents Cicero's natural law theory, including valuable definitions of the state, the ideal state, the ideal ruler, and the laws for the ideal state. Explanations are offered of the Greek sources of Cicero's republican philosophy, his influence on the Principate of Augustus, and his role in the development of modern political philosophy. As all the ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher united than Cicero, his authority should have great weight (John Adams, 1787).

This 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), a major figure in Roman politics, was the first to articulate a philosophical rationale for republicanism.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The republic of Cicero" (Translated from the Latin; and Accompanied With a Critical and Historical Introduction) by Marcus Tullius Cicero. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

By any metric, Cicero's works are some of the most widely read in the history of Western thought. Natural Law Republicanism suggests that perhaps his most lasting and significant contribution to philosophy lies in helping to inspire the development of liberalism. Individual rights, the protection of private property, and political legitimacy based on the consent of the governed are often taken to be among early modern liberalism's unique innovations and part of its rebellion against classical thought. However, Michael C. Hawley demonstrates how Cicero's thought played a central role in shaping and inspiring the liberal republican project. Cicero argued that liberty for individuals could arise only in a res publica in which the claims of the people to be sovereign were somehow united with a commitment to universal moral law, which limits what the people can rightfully do. Figures such as Hugo Grotius, John Locke, and John Adams sought to work through the tensions in Cicero's vision, laying the groundwork for a theory of politics in which the freedom of the individual and the people's collective right to rule were mediated by natural law. Tracing the development of this intellectual tradition from Cicero's original articulation through the American Founding, Natural Law Republicanism explores how our modern political ideas remain dependent on the legacy of one of Rome's great philosopher-statesmen.

The second edition of James E. G. Zetzel's masterly translation of Cicero's major works of political philosophy, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws.

Abstract When Kings Become Philosophers: The Late Republican Origins of Cicero's Political Philosophy by Gregory Douglas Smay Doctor of Philosophy in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology University of California, Berkeley Professor Erich S. Gruen, Chair This dissertation argues that Cicero's de Republica is both a reflection of, and a commentary on, the era in which it was written to a degree not previously recognized in Ciceronian scholarship. Contra readings which treat the work primarily as a theoretical tract in the tradition of late Hellenistic philosophy, this study situates the work within its historical context in Late Republican Rome, and in particular within the personal experience of its author during this tumultuous period. This approach yields new insights into both the meaning and significance of the work and the outlook of the individual who is our single most important witness to the history of the last decades of the Roman Republic. Specifically, the dissertation argues that Cicero provides clues preserved in the extant portions of the de Republica, overlooked by modern students in the past bur clearly recognizable to readers in his own day, indicating that it was meant to be read as a work with important contemporary political resonances. Among those which are still traceable in the mangled palimpsest which is our only source for the majority of the treatise are comments on the proper apportionment of authority and governmental responsibility among senate, magistrates and populus that grew out of Cicero's handling of the Catilinarian conspiracy and its aftermath, and reflections on the importance of political engagement, even under the adverse circumstances of the First Triumvirate, which were heavily influenced by Cicero's own political travails in the late 60s and 50s B.C. As such, the de Republica represents a novel kind of literature within the Roman tradition. Living in an elite culture that privileged political action, yet unable to act politically in traditional ways under the constraints imposed by his enforced alliance with the triumvirs, Cicero attempted to forge a new kind of statesmanship, one carried out through the medium of the written word. The de Republica is thus written as a political act, a thoughtful response to contemporary conditions written by an intelligent commentator who, unable any longer to steer the ship of state by conventional means, was seeking a new way of exerting an influence on the course of events.

De Officiis (On Duties) was Cicero's last philosophical work. In it he made use of Greek thought to formulate the political and ethical values of Roman Republican society as he saw them, revealing incidentally a great deal about actual practice. Writing at a time of political crisis after the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44BC, when it was not clear how much of the old Republican order would survive, Cicero here handed on the insights of an elder statesman, adept at political theory and practice, to his son, and through him, to the younger generation in general. De Officiis has often been treated merely as a key to the lost Greek works that Cicero used. This volume aims to render De Officiis, which was such an important influence on later masterpieces of Western political thought, more intelligible by explaining its relation to its own time and place. A wholly new translation is accompanied by a lucid introduction and all the standard features of Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, including a chronology, select bibliography, and notes on the vocabulary and significant individuals mentioned in the text.