On the Republic

What It Is

A dialogue in six books, written between 54 and 51 BC and set two generations earlier, in 129 BC, among Scipio Aemilianus and his circle. Cicero puts the argument in the mouths of dead men he admired, which lets him praise a Rome that already looked lost from where he was sitting.

Then the text disappeared. It was known through quotations, and nothing more, until 1819, when Cardinal Angelo Mai found it in the Vatican Library underneath a copy of Augustine's commentary on the Psalms. The parchment had been scraped clean and reused. About a third of what Cicero wrote came back. The rest is gone.

So this is a book with holes in it. Arguments break off mid-sentence, whole sections are missing, and the editor's brackets are everywhere. The final book, the Dream of Scipio, is the exception: it survived independently through a late antique commentary and reaches us intact, which is why medieval Europe knew the ending of a book it had never read.

Why It Matters

Plato asked what justice is. Cicero asks a harder and more practical question: what makes an actual state something more than a gang with a flag? His answer has never stopped working, and it turns on what he means by a people: not any collection of human beings who happen to live in one place. The definition sets a test, and a state can fail it. No people, no state, whatever the man in charge calls himself.

That definition is the beginning of popular sovereignty, and everything after it argues with it. Augustine takes it apart in the City of God and cannot dismiss it. The eighteenth century takes it up: when the American founders write about a republic rather than a democracy, and about mixed government and the rule of law, they are working in Cicero's vocabulary, often with his book open.

And in Book 3, quoted by a later Christian writer and therefore preserved, comes the passage on true law. That sentence has done more work in Western history than most whole books.

Before You Read

Four to six hours, and it is the fragments that make it feel longer. Come to it expecting a ruin. Once you accept that the argument will keep vanishing under you, the reading becomes strangely absorbing rather than frustrating: you are reconstructing a building from its foundations.

Read it with On the Laws, which Cicero wrote as its sequel and which survives in better shape. The two are one project and the second completes the first.

A little Roman constitutional machinery helps enormously: consuls, tribunes, the senate, the assemblies. The notes will supply it. Do not skip them.

Which Translation to Read

• Niall Rudd (Oxford World's Classics, 1998), in the volume titled The Republic and The Laws — recommended. Rudd was a fine Latinist with an ear, and his English has the urbanity Cicero actually had, which the scholarly versions tend to iron out. Jonathan Powell's introduction and notes tell you what is missing and why, and both dialogues are in the one cheap volume, which is how they should be read. The cost: the apparatus is lighter than Cambridge's, and there are places where you will want more help than Oxford's format allows. View on Amazon →
• James E. G. Zetzel (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, 1999), as On the Commonwealth and On the Laws. The best scholarly apparatus in English: superb introduction, exact notes, careful about what the fragments can and cannot support. Take it if you are studying the political thought. The cost: the English is drier, and it reads like the seminar text it is.
• David Fott (Cornell University Press, 2014). The most literal version, done for readers who want to argue about individual words. The cost: wooden by intention, and it will not give you Cicero the writer.

Rudd to read, Zetzel to study. Clinton Keyes's old Loeb still puts the Latin on the facing page if you want it.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read the introduction first. You need to know what is missing before you start, or you will spend the whole book thinking you have lost the thread when in fact the thread has been lost for fifteen hundred years.

Read the gaps as part of it. Where the text breaks off, stop and work out what the argument required next. You will be doing what every reader of this book has done since 1819.

Do not read it as Roman Plato. Cicero was a practising politician who had held the highest office in the state and had made the decisions he is theorising about. There is no other work of political philosophy in the ancient world written by a man who had actually run the place.