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 Cicero382 passages held

English, a translation held here, and your language

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

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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

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Within this work

passages held: 382
distinct concepts: 706
by passages held, corpus-wide: #196

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “political legitimacy” and “tyranny”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 26 pairings. 84 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
political legitimacy	tyranny	9
monarchy	political legitimacy	8
monarchy	tyranny	8
justice	political legitimacy	7
political philosophy	statesmanship	7
justice	republicanism	6
justice	monarchy	5
republicanism	tyranny	5
mixed government	statesmanship	4
justice	mixed government	3
justice	political philosophy	3
mixed government	monarchy	3
mixed government	tyranny	3
monarchy	republicanism	3
political legitimacy	republicanism	3
political philosophy	republicanism	3
justice	statesmanship	2
justice	tyranny	2
mixed government	republicanism	2
monarchy	political philosophy	2
mixed government	political legitimacy	1
mixed government	political philosophy	1
monarchy	statesmanship	1
political philosophy	tyranny	1
republicanism	statesmanship	1
statesmanship	tyranny	1

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.
EN
-54 The Republic (De re publica) you are here EN
-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.
EN
-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.
EN
-45 A Treatise on the Chief Good and Evil (De finibus bonorum et malorum)
Cicero's fullest treatment of ethics: three conversations, set years apart and in different places, bound into one survey of what the leading schools said a life is for.
EN
-45 On the Nature of the Gods (De natura deorum)
Finished after the Tusculan Disputations, it opened a run of three books on religion: On Divination and On Fate followed in 44 BCE.
EN
-45 The Academic Questions (Academica)
Readers who wondered why Cicero sided with the sceptical Academy were sent here by On the Nature of the Gods, written later the same year: this is where he defends arguing every side of a question and settling for the probable.
EN
-45 The Tusculan Disputations (Tusculanae Disputationes)
The practical sequel to the treatise on the chief good, written next: that book compares what the schools say the good is, and this one puts the answer to work against fear and grief.
EN
-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.
EN
-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.
EN
-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.
EN

— or open another of their works