WorkCicero

Treatise on the Laws

The legal code Cicero drafted to go with his *Republic*, arguing that an unjust statute is not a law at all — abandoned mid-argument and never published.

by Cicero212 passages held

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

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Overview

The setting is Cicero's own ground: he walks the family estate at Arpinum with his brother Quintus and his friend Atticus, and while they walk he sets out where law comes from. He seems to have begun around 52 BCE, a year in which a street killing on the Appian Way ended with the senate handing Pompey a sole consulship to get the city back under control. Law, on his account, is not made. It is reason, held in common by gods and human beings because both possess it, so a statute contradicting it is not a bad law but not a law at all — which cuts against the position, then and since, that law is whatever a sovereign has enacted. What follows is a written code, composed in the archaic Latin of the old religious formulas, first for worship and then for magistrates: the constitution the Republic had described, now legislated clause by clause. And then it breaks off, in the middle of an argument between Cicero and his brother over how much power a consul should hold and how the citizens should cast their votes. Three books are all there are, and there is no evidence Cicero ever finished the work or let it out of his house. Because it was never published, nothing happened to it in his lifetime; English readers could not reach it at all until 1841, when Francis Barham printed it in London beside the freshly recovered Republic and offered the two as the first English version of Cicero's political works.

Key concepts

Why does Cicero begin his code with rules for worship?

Cicero begins with worship because the code puts religious rules first. The sequence then moves to magistrates, joining the community’s relation to the gods to the offices that govern citizens. Law therefore appears as an ordered practice, not merely a set of commands issued by rulers.

What role do magistrates play in Cicero’s proposed legal order?

Magistrates are the officials through whom the proposed code organizes political power. Cicero turns from worship to rules for magistrates, then leaves an argument over how much authority a consul should hold. Their role is therefore institutional as well as administrative: the code must regulate the offices through which civic order operates.

Why does the treatise use archaic Latin religious formulas?

The archaic Latin formulas connect the written code to the old language of religious law. Cicero does not present a modern administrative draft; he composes the clauses in a form associated with worship. The result binds the proposed legislation to the ritual and inherited register in which the treatise begins.

How does Cicero turn the Republic’s constitution into a legal code?

The proposed code translates the constitution described in Republic into individual legal clauses. Treatise on Laws therefore does not merely repeat the earlier political argument: it attempts to specify the rules by which worship, magistrates, and civic procedures would operate. The project moves from constitutional design to enactable form.

What does the unfinished consul argument leave politically unresolved?

The unfinished argument leaves the distribution of executive power and the rules of voting unresolved. Cicero and Quintus are still disputing how much authority a consul should possess and how citizens should cast their votes when the text breaks off. The surviving code never settles either question.

Themes of the book

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

Law Before Statute

Can a ruler make a law simply by declaring it? Cicero stakes political obedience on a prior standard: if enacted rules violate reason shared by gods and human beings, they lose the name of law.

Written while Rome struggled to recover from a killing on the Appian Way, the treatise grounds law in reason shared by gods and human beings, not in a sovereign’s command. Cicero therefore treats a statute that contradicts this common order as no law at all, opposing the view that enactment alone creates legality. He then turns principle into clauses for worship, magistrates, and voting. The argument stops before the consul’s powers are settled. Its unfinished form leaves the proposed constitution without a final test.

nature
ethics
truth
human nature
logic
natural law

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Within this work

passages held: 212
distinct concepts: 449
by passages held, corpus-wide: #338

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: “justice” and “natural law”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 22 pairings. 83 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
justice	natural law	15
jurisprudence	natural law	12
natural law	reason	10
civil law	natural law	8
jurisprudence	political philosophy	7
jurisprudence	legal education	6
natural law	political philosophy	6
civil law	jurisprudence	5
civil law	justice	5
civil law	legal history	5
justice	political philosophy	5
civil law	legal education	4
jurisprudence	justice	4
jurisprudence	legal history	4
justice	reason	3
legal education	natural law	3
civil law	political philosophy	2
legal history	natural law	2
justice	legal history	1
legal education	legal history	1
legal history	political philosophy	1
political philosophy	reason	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)
Plato wrote a Republic and then a Laws; Cicero set out to do both, and the treatise on law is this book's companion — begun a couple of years later and left unfinished.
EN
-52 Treatise on the Laws (De legibus) you are here 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