Galtland Index

De Re Publica (The Republic of Cicero)

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De Re Publica (The Republic of Cicero)

De Re Publica is Cicero’s dialogue on the commonwealth (c. 54–51 BC), surviving in fragments. It is the channel through which Greek Stoic natural law entered the Roman legal imagination and, through Roman law, the whole Western natural-law tradition.

The Natural-Law Passage

The work’s enduring contribution is the definition of true law in Book III, preserved by Lactantius and rendered in this edition as: “There is indeed a law, right reason, which is in accordance with nature; existing in all, unchangeable, eternal.” Cicero’s law of nature is universal (“not one thing at Rome, and another thing at Athens”), immutable (“neither the people or the senate can absolve us from it”), and grounded in a divine and rational order rather than in human will. To act against it is to renounce oneself and become “false to his own nature.”

This is the tradition’s most compact statement of its three signature claims: that genuine law is discovered by reason, that it is binding above positive enactment, and that it is the same for all. Every later figure in the lineage — Aquinas, Grotius, Locke — works variations on Cicero’s formula.

The Rest of the Work

Beyond the natural-law fragment, De Re Publica defends the mixed constitution (a balance of monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic elements as the most stable form) and closes with the Dream of Scipio, a vision of cosmic order and the rewards of civic virtue. Cicero writes as a Roman statesman defending the republic, not as a libertarian; the wiki uses him strictly as the natural-law transmitter.

Place in This Wiki

De Re Publica sits one step downstream of Aristotle’s natural justice and directly upstream of Aquinas, who quotes the Roman jurists’ natural-law vocabulary that Cicero helped fix. Cicero’s companion treatise De Legibus (On the Laws), whose Book I is the systematic natural-law argument, is now also in this wiki.

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