WorkCicero

The Republic

Rome's own constitution defended against Plato's ideal one — and known for fourteen centuries only at second hand, until a librarian read what lay under a text of Augustine.

by Cicero594 passages held

English, a translation held here, and your language

Original title: De re publica
First published: 54 BCE(aged 52)
Original language: Latin

Report a rights issue

Overview

In 1819 a Vatican librarian took up a parchment codex from the monastery at Bobbio — Augustine on the Psalms — and read what lay underneath it: monks had washed a fourth-century copy of Cicero clean and written over the sheets. Angelo Mai published it in 1822, and Europe got back most of a work it had known for fourteen hundred years only from other people's quotations. What came back is a conversation set in 129 BCE among Roman aristocrats, in which Scipio Aemilianus argues that the best constitution is none of the three the Greeks had catalogued — rule by one, by a few, by the many — but a mixture holding all three against each other, and that Rome had arrived at it not by design but by accumulation, over generations, each repair made by men solving the problem in front of them. Against Plato, who had built a state out of first principles, Cicero puts a real one and asks what made it last. The argument turns on justice: one speaker sets out the case that justice is mere convention, useful to the weak and a brake on any state that means to grow, and the answer the dialogue finally reaches — that a community without justice is not a state at all but a crowd holding property together — is the sentence later Christian writers kept quoting from a book they could no longer read. Large gaps remain throughout. Only the ending had ever circulated whole: the Dream of Scipio, in which the younger Scipio is shown the earth from among the stars and told how small an empire looks from there, survived inside a commentary by Macrobius and was copied all through the Middle Ages as a primer of cosmology, while the rest lay scraped and buried in a library.

Key concepts

What separates a people from a crowd in Cicero’s account?

A people is a body joined by shared agreement about law and common interests, not merely a crowd that occupies territory or holds property together. That distinction gives political membership a moral and juridical content: force can gather bodies, and property can bind them temporarily, but neither alone creates the commonwealth Cicero is trying to define.

How does Rome function as evidence against Plato’s political method?

Rome functions as a test of political principles because it endured as a real constitution rather than existing as a design in thought. Cicero sets its accumulated arrangements against Plato’s state built from first principles, asking what actually makes a political order last. Practice, not abstraction alone, becomes evidence.

Why does Cicero treat political repair as a source of constitutional strength?

Political repair gives Rome its form because successive statesmen addressed particular problems instead of imposing one complete design. Each settlement preserved something while correcting something else, and those alterations accumulated across generations. Cicero therefore treats constitutional strength as an achievement of repeated judgment, not as the product of a single founder’s wisdom.

What does the Dream of Scipio contribute to the book’s political argument?

The Dream of Scipio places Roman power within a cosmic perspective: from among the stars, the earth appears small and an empire smaller still. That scene does not erase political action, but it changes its scale. The book’s surviving ending therefore connects civic ambition with a judgment about the limited size of human achievement.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Justice and the Mixed Constitution

What makes a political community more than a crowd, and how can power restrain power? The answer determines whether a republic protects a common life or merely secures the stronger party’s interests.

In the conversation set in 129 BCE, Cicero answers Plato’s designed state with Rome’s accumulated constitution: rule by one, by a few, and by the many must hold one another in check. Its authority rests on justice, not victory or possession. A speaker claims that justice serves the stronger party; the reply denies that an unjust community counts as a state at all. Political order must be repaired in practice, generation by generation.

virtue
reason
wisdom
ethics
tradition
truth
philosophy
justice
political philosophy

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 594
distinct concepts: 717
by passages held, corpus-wide: #46

What this book thinks together

Every arc around the wheel is one concept in this book. A ribbon joins two the text reaches for together, and its width is how many of its passages hold both. Strongest: happiness with virtue.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 11 pairings. 92 shared passages in all. 89 weaker pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
happiness	virtue	20
nature	teleology	16
cosmology	teleology	10
reason	stoicism	10
reason	virtue	7
stoicism	virtue	7
reason	teleology	6
cosmology	nature	5
happiness	stoicism	4
nature	reason	4
cosmology	reason	3

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

-70 Orations
Four volumes of the speeches themselves — some delivered, some, like the case against Verres, only published. The philosophical books that fill the rest of the shelf came later, most of them once he had been shut out of that life.
LAEN
-54 The Republic (De re publica) you are here LAEN
-52 Treatise on the Laws (De legibus)
Unfinished, unpublished, and on the available evidence never released at all. For centuries it travelled as the lesser half of a pair whose better half had gone missing.
LAEN
-46 Brutus or History of Famous Orators (Brutus; Orator)
Not the speeches but the account of them, made when the courts had stopped sitting. The edition carries Orator with it, the portrait of the ideal speaker written for the same dedicatee in the same year.
LAEN
-45 The Academic Questions, Treatise de Finibus, and Tusculan Disputations (Academica, De finibus bonorum et malorum, Tusculanae Disputationes)
Three treatises that Cicero wrote as separate books, each with a life of its own; the single volume that holds them is a Victorian publisher's construction, not a shape he gave them.
LAEN
-45 Tusculan Disputations, Treatises on the Nature of the Gods, and on the Commonwealth (Tusculanae Disputationes, De natura deorum, De re publica)
Harper's American gathering of Bohn's cheap English classics: the Tusculan Disputations for a second time, standing at the front of a volume that goes on into theology and politics.
LAEN
-44 On Friendship (De Amicitia)
Copyists kept this and On Old Age bound together for so long that printers followed them. The edition prints the Dream of Scipio after it, which belongs to De re publica.
LAEN
-44 On Moral Duties (De officiis)
The last of his philosophical books, and the one that travelled furthest: for centuries afterwards it was simply the standard book of conduct.
LAEN
-44 On Old Age (Cato Maior de Senectute)
Written alongside On Friendship and sent to the same friend, Atticus; the later book refers back to this one by name.
LAEN

— or open another of their works