On the Laws

What It Is

A dialogue in three surviving books, begun in 51 BC and probably never finished. Cicero, his brother Quintus and his friend Atticus walk on the family estate at Arpinum and talk. It is the sequel to On the Republic, and it is deliberately modelled on Plato's Laws, exactly as the earlier dialogue was modelled on Plato's Republic.

Book 1 does the philosophy. Books 2 and 3 turn from philosophy to the practical: what a code of law should actually say, provision by provision, on religious observance and the powers of magistrates. It is a constitution drafted by a man who had governed under one.

The text is incomplete. Book 3 breaks off, and the books that followed are lost. He seems to have kept working on it for years and never let it go to the public.

The register is unlike anything else in Cicero. He is at home, among people he loves, and the writing is relaxed, funny and personal in a way the speeches never are.

Why It Matters

Book 1 is the founding statement of natural law in the West, and it is short enough to read in an hour.

Law, Cicero argues, does not originate in the praetor's edict or in the Twelve Tables or in the decisions of any assembly. It originates in nature and in reason, which human beings share with each other and with the gods, and which is therefore common to all people everywhere. From that starting point follows the claim the whole tradition rests on, and it is the claim that makes this book dangerous to any government that reads it. Cicero puts it in a single sentence, and it has been quoted at governments ever since.

Follow that thread forward and it runs through the Roman jurists into Justinian, through Aquinas, through Grotius and the birth of international law, through Locke and Blackstone, into the Declaration of Independence, and into the courtroom at Nuremberg, where the defence was that everything had been done in accordance with the law of the state and the answer was Cicero's answer.

Everything the modern world means by the sentence you cannot do that, even if it is legal, begins in Book 1.

Before You Read

Three or four hours, and easier than On the Republic in every way: the text is more nearly whole, the argument is more direct, and the tone is lighter.

Read On the Republic first. The two were conceived together and the standard editions print them in one volume, and On the Laws assumes you have just put the other down.

Book 1 is the reason to read the book. Books 2 and 3 are dense with Roman religious and constitutional detail, and many readers move through them briskly on a first pass. That is reasonable, but do not skip them entirely. They show you what a working republic looked like to a man who had been consul in one, and there is nothing else quite like that in ancient literature.

Which Translation to Read

• Niall Rudd (Oxford World's Classics, 1998), in the volume titled The Republic and The Laws — recommended. Rudd catches the conversational ease of the setting, which matters more here than in any other work of Cicero's philosophy, and Jonathan Powell's notes handle the Roman legal detail without drowning you in it. Both dialogues, one volume, the price of a coffee. For a reader rather than a specialist there is no real competition. View on Amazon →
• James E. G. Zetzel (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, 1999). The scholar's edition, and better than Rudd on the technical questions of Roman religious and constitutional law, which is precisely where Books 2 and 3 live. The cost: a flatter English, and an apparatus that assumes you are writing about the text rather than reading it.
• David Fott (Cornell University Press, 2014). Rigorously literal, with notes attentive to the philosophical vocabulary. Take it if you want to argue about what Cicero meant by nature. The cost: the prose is stiff, and nobody would read it for pleasure.

Rudd for reading, Zetzel for the law, Fott for the philosophy seminar. Keyes's Loeb gives you the Latin facing.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read Book 1 twice, the second time slowly, with a pencil. It is the most quoted piece of legal reasoning in Western history and it is a dozen pages long.

Then read the American Declaration of Independence and watch where the first paragraph comes from. The debt is not general. It is specific, and it is here.

Notice the setting. Cicero puts this argument in a garden, on his own land, among his family, while Rome tore itself apart eighty miles away. He is describing a legal order that no longer existed and that he had watched fail. The serenity of the writing and the catastrophe behind it are not in conflict. They explain each other.