Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) enters this wiki through De Re Publica, the dialogue that gives the natural-law tradition its most quoted formula.

Place in This Wiki

Cicero was a Roman senator, consul, orator, and the most important Latin transmitter of Greek philosophy. The wiki uses him as the bridge from Greek natural justice to Roman law: his statement that there is a true law — right reason, in accordance with nature — universal and unchangeable, that “neither the people or the senate can absolve us from,” fixed the vocabulary that the Roman jurists, the Scholastics, and ultimately the modern rights tradition would use. He writes as a defender of the Roman republic and its mixed constitution, not as a libertarian; his relevance here is strictly the natural-law inheritance he carried forward. His companion work De Legibus (On the Laws) develops the systematic natural-law argument and is also in this wiki.

See Also

• De Re Publica - the work present in this wiki
• De Legibus - On the Laws, the systematic natural-law argument
• Natural Law - The wiki’s natural-law hub: the classical lineage of reason-knowable justice above positive law, from Aristotle and Cicero through Aquinas, Grotius, Locke

Sources

• Cicero, De Re Publica (Full Text) - the basis for this profile