Marcus Tullius Cicero: On the Republic and On the Laws. David Fott translation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014.

Timothy W. Caspar: Recovering the Ancient View of Founding: A Commentary on Cicero’s De Legibus. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011.

 

Plato teaches that founding and preserving cities best tests manly virtue; Cicero teaches that founding and preserving “new political orders” approaches most closely the “will of the gods” (C 1). Cicero thus may be said to elevate political founding and political life generally, an esteem he extends to the philosophic status of political speech and thought. In so elevating and esteeming, “Cicero has laid down a challenge, not just for his own time, but for all times, and so to us: He challenges us to confront the teachings of the philosophers, to understand the ideas and truths within them that may be applicable to all times and places” (C 2). In issuing this challenge he risked his reputation among Romans, who inclined to displays of manly virtue but preferred to leave Plato and his ilk firmly to one side as Greek, all-too-Greek.

The old Romans are not alone. Modern scholarship also has mostly left Cicero aside, though not because it honors manliness. Our scholars deny coherence to Cicero’s political works, labeling him a would-be Stoic and then sniffing that the real Stoics scarcely esteemed politics at all, considering political life little more than unworthy playing to the crowd. But why indeed worry about Cicero’s philosophic incompetence, some scholars ask, since he was nothing more than a product of his times, more or less intellectually irrelevant ever since?

Timothy W. Caspar answers these charges and dismissals them the only way one can: by showing that Cicero’s De Legibus withstands close reading, that “seek[ing] to understand him as he understood himself” (C 13) by attending carefully to what he writes will uncover his originality and profundity as a thinker, one deeply engaged with the Platonic dialogues whose titles of his own political dialogues echo. Cicero maintained that the best possible Roman republic consisted of a ‘mixed’ regime, one featuring a balance between rich and poor, the few and the many. Can it be said that thinking about ancient political regimes and their ‘founding’ has no contemporary political interest? As Caspar remarks, “If government in Cicero’s day is characterized more and more by the rule of those who seek individual preeminence at the expense of the public good, then the constitution is no longer mixed, and a refounding, guided by political philosophy, is needed to restore it to proper balance” (C 3). Do we know how to recognize and address such problems better than he did?

Caspar establishes that the parallel between the titles of the Platonic and the Ciceronian dialogues point not only to similarities but to important contrasts between the two thinkers. Cicero’s De Legibus “seeks to legislate for the best regime outlined by the lead interlocutor of the De Re Publica, the legendary Roman statesman Scipio” (C 20), while Plato’s Laws does not aim at legislating for the best regime outlined in the Republic. Nowhere in Cicero do we find a proposal for communism of wives and property, as in Plato’s Republic. Even more tellingly, Marcus explicitly and repeatedly states that his intention differs from that of Plato. By titling his book not The Laws but Of the Laws, Cicero might mean laws in general, the laws of Rome, and/or the Laws of Plato. Caspar will show that all three meanings pertain. Further, and more like the Phaedrus than the Republic or the Laws, the arguments and actions of De Legibus occur outside any city; the characters are friends (the Greek is no ‘Stranger,’ as in the Laws, and indeed he isn’t the main character). The main character is also a poet. Could he be the philosophic poet Socrates wishes for in the Republic?

De Legibus consists of a dialogue with three Roman interlocutors: a Hellenophile, Titus Pomponius Atticus, and two brothers, Quintus Tullius Cicero and Marcus Tullius Cicero, himself the author of the dialogue. The first words, spoken by Titus, refer to the setting, a “sacred grove” in Arpinum, Cicero’s ancestral home—that is, outside the great city of Rome. (Caspar notes that these first words also contrast with the Laws, which begins not with a sanctified, humanly planted grove but with a direct invocation of a god.) The grove’s landmark oak tree has been memorialized in Marcus’ epic poem, the Marius. In answer to Titus’ question, brother Quintus replies that this oak does indeed still stand in the grove, adding with a touch of fraternal pride that the ‘oak’ in the poem will outlast the oak in the grove because it “has been planted by an intellect” (L I.1); “many other things in many places remain longer in remembrance than they could exist in nature” (L I.2). Life in nature is short, art is long, as another Roman poet wrote. The work of intellect lodges itself in the minds of others, many far removed in time and distance from the natural object the intellect “plants” in those other minds. To Titus’ perhaps friendly jibe that in so saying Quintus is “favoring [him]self by praising your brother” (L I.2), Quintus does not deny the charge but abstracts from any self-interest by saying that whether or not he has indulged in self-praise by family association, the longstanding character of poetic imagery, as against the shorter longevity of natural objects, may be seen in Titus’ native Greece as well, where it’s highly unlikely (for example) that a palm tree in Delos today is really the same one mentioned by Homer. “And many other things in many other places remain longer in remembrance than they could exist in nature” (L I.2).

Titus concedes the point, but turns to the poem’s author to ask if he really did “plant this oak tree” by intellect only, or did it (and the other actions in the poem) really exist (L I.3)? Like his brother, Marcus responds by pointing back to his questioner’s own beloved Greece, asking two rhetorical questions: Did Romulus really deify Proculus Iulius there, and did the North Wind really carry off Orithyia? Titus answers that these are ancient stories, but Marcus’ poem depicts recent events, not only within the memory but within the living memory of Marcus himself. Swearing by Hercules (and availing himself of the law-court imagery familiar to readers of Plato’s dialogues featuring Socrates), Marcus counter-charges any and all those who would accuse him of fabricating stories with ignorance of the difference between the kind of truth to be demanded of a poet and the kind required of a witness at trial. Brother Quintus understands this as a distinction between history and poetry, and Marcus concurs, saying that the measure of history (including the testimony of trial witnesses) is truth, while the measure of poetry is delight. What is more, historians themselves do not confine themselves to literal truth, as seen in the writings of that Greek, Herodotus.

Well, in that case, Titus returns, given the fact that “history is absent from our literature”—”as I very often hear from you”—will you not write such a history of Rome (L I.6)? Although Quintus chimes in with the proposal that this history encompass Rome’s beginnings, Titus prefers a memoir, something pertaining to events Marcus remembers firsthand—presumably to avoid mere speculation into events that now live on only in poems, delightful but not ‘literally’ truthful. Marcus resists the proposal in either form, pleading lack of the sustained leisure necessary to accomplish such a task. He awaits his old-age exemption from public service, when he can undertake “the pleasing, honorable task of a not lazy old age” (L I.10), a task some of us do indeed take up, if afforded the opportunity.

Caspar takes up this discussion of poetry, which resembles the critique of poets and poetry Socrates makes in the Republic. The poetic standard, delight or, as Caspar translates, pleasure, might imitate the good, “but is never the good itself”; indeed, it may imitate the good falsely, misleading its readers as it “shapes and forms and directs the evidence of the senses” (C 24). Founders of political regimes must attend carefully to poetry, reforming it and those who make it, lest they undermine citizens’ understanding of the good. (Even a cursory ‘remembrance’ of changes in popular American ‘poetry,’ including drama, shows how this undermining can occur.) Poetry broadly conceived to include political speech and even laws—human ‘making,’ generally—will prove both dangerous and indispensable to human, political, life. In contrast with poetry, and especially dangerous poetry, Marcus “attempt[s] to turn the student of Plato’s Laws away from contemplation of the heavens or the idea of the good to contemplation of nature”—”away from the heavens and towards the earth” (C 26). If so, Marcus wants his reader to perform a philosophic ‘turn’ somewhat related to the famous ‘turn’ of Plato’s Socrates. Initially, however, Marcus aims at a turn from the divine and heavenly toward earthly nature, whereas Socrates turned from the study of heavenly nature to human nature..

Caspar translates the Latin ingenio not as ‘intellect’ but as imagination or genius. He might regard Fott’s translation as too ‘rationalist’; in any event, he may be pointing us to an ambiguity in language that can lead to a confusion between reason and imagination, two related but distinct capacities of the human mind. By sharply distinguishing the real oak from the word-formed image-oak in the poem, Quintus wittingly or not severs the connection “between nature and the imagination or mind of man,” leaving poetry (and therefore poets or makers generally) “free to conquer nature,” free to persuade citizens “of almost anything”—rather in anticipation of Machiavelli, but in speech instead of deed, and so even more like the Greek and Roman rhetoricians and sophists (C 27). While acknowledging the power of poetry, Marcus (sometime poet and no mean orator, himself) wants nothing to do with severing truth and nature, or with holding the standard of delight or pleasure alone as dispositive when it comes to framing that higher ‘poetry’ of law. “Cicero means to anchor his future legislation in the nature that is the source of all justice,” “to remind his readers that politics cannot transcend nature,” that human nature sets limits to the realization of human imaginings (C 27). In this, Cicero presents in earnest what Plato may be said to present ironically. In both cases, these thinkers ask their readers to ask of poets not so much to present facts or ‘literal’ truths but to indicate “abiding truths,” truths about human nature that deserve to be lodged in the memories of citizens (C 29). In opening the discussion of history versus poetry, Titus “has done Marcus, and us, a favor: He provided the necessary opening for Marcus to demonstrate the importance of poetry to the laws and to the regime, as well as made it possible to indicate the insufficiency of poetry alone or unguided as the foundation of a just regime” (C 30). And that goes for the literary genre of history, too. What laws will govern both poetry and history? His interlocutors know what kind of poetry Marcus writes; they rightly want to know what kind of history he would write, even if he hasn’t the time actually to write it. This requires the interlocutors to make their own philosophic ‘turn,’ from poetry and history to law and politics, “and eventually to the laws that will make Scipio’s republic possible” (C 33).

Titus knows that Marcus has already studied the law. Given his reluctance to undertake a historical investigation, would he converse about that? Even as “your dear, famous Plato did” (L I.13)? Why, yes, Marcus replies, perhaps having been waiting for just this opportunity. We will need to understand five things in order to discover “the source of laws and right” (L I.16): What nature has granted to a human being; how many of the best things the human mind can encompass; what service we have been born for and brought into light to perform and accomplish; what the connection is among human beings; and what natural fellowship there is among human beings. That is: human nature, the limits of the human mind; the purposes human beings have by nature; what human beings have in common; what human friendship is. As Titus immediately sees, Marcus isn’t interested primarily in the conventional laws of Rome but in drawing the discipline of law from “within the profoundest philosophy,” which Marcus then defines as an investigation of “universal right and laws,” which derive from “human nature” (L I.17). “Ignorance of the law” in this sense” conduces to “more lawsuits than knowledge of it” (L I.18); sharp lawyers may chase ambulances, but ignorant citizens violate underlying right and laws themselves. “The beginning of right should be drawn from law,” a “force of nature” inherent in “the mind and reason of the prudent man” (L I.19). Inasmuch as not all men are prudent, “it will be necessary to speak popularly and to call that a law which, when written, consecrates what it wants by either ordering [or forbidding] as the crowd calls it.” But let us three friends “take the beginning of establishing right from the highest law”; “all laws should be tailored” to fit “the form of republic that Scipio taught to be the best,” namely, the mixed regime (L I.19-20). Marcus thus explicitly links De Legibus to De Re Publica, and shows that he regards human nature as political, in need of a regime or political order consistent with the uniquely human characteristic as the only animate being which “has a share in reason and reflection,” a capacity which, when “grown up and fully developed… is rightly named wisdom” (L I.22-23).

As Caspar remarks, “Marcus’s law will represent the intersection of philosophy and politics on the highest level” (C 34). Not Socratic philosopher-kings ruling boys ten years and younger but mature men will rule in his preferred regime. In establishing his independence from Plato’s dialogue, “he encourages us to think for ourselves, just as he does” (C 36). In thinking about justice and true law as “connected to man through nature, through human nature,” Marcus reveals why he “had resisted Quintus’s earlier attempt to sever nature from poetry” (C 37). Poetry comes from poets; poets are human; humans have a nature. If that nature provides the standard of justice and true law, then “poetry will be judged by true law in terms of how closely it adheres to this nature,” and not by how much pleasure it gives us (C 37). In rejecting Titus’ Epicurean standard for poetry, Marcus will not run to the opposite, Stoic standard, which defines human nature as if men had no bodies (as Socrates does, albeit ironically). It is true that Marcus initially proposes a definition of natural law that approaches the Stoic level of abstraction in order, Caspar suggests “to woo his interlocutors” (C 37), one of whom is indeed an Epicurean and the other a Roman gentleman-aristocrat with the Epicurean leanings aristocrats too often come to display. But he will soon bring them down to earth without losing them to conventionalism or to sophistry. “Atticus and Quintus must be led to see the importance of politics for philosophy—and philosophy for politics” (C 40).

“Human law in a just republic necessarily struggles to align itself with natural law, all the time” (C 39), and for this struggle to proceed with success one must not sever one from the other any more than one must sever poetry from nature. His interlocutors are so inclined. Therefore, Marcus’ “entire speech in the first book [of De Legibus] could be understood as an artful attempt at promoting what is to come in the two later books” (C 40). He starts with philosophic teachings propounded by Plato and Aristotle: To define a thing, to say what it is, one must begin with its beginning because its beginning “has within it” its end or purpose, just as (we now know) DNA has within it the body it can become. “If we understand the principia, we can understand the natura, and ultimately the telos” (C 41). He then initially proposes a high-toned definition of law as the highest reason, taking care to attribute this definition to previous thinkers. Initially defining law as the “highest reason,” he quickly identifies this not as theoretical reason but as practical, prudential reason, the kind of reason that guides an already virtuous soul to the good ends it seeks (C 41). But what are those ends? Two kinds of justice, he offers, again following Aristotle: equity or distributive justice, “giving each his own” in proportion to his desert (C 42); and the justice of choosing or commutative justice, providing accurate restitution for goods received or for actions taken, whether good or bad. Justice needs codification, writtenness, a sort of ’embodiment,’ so that all citizens can learn it, not only ‘the few.’ In this mindfulness of the needs of all citizens, Marcus nods to the requirements of Scipio’s mixed regime, with its element of popular participation and consent. “Law that will be useful to actual regimes must take account of the fact that no republic is composed entirely of philosophers or Stoic sages or prudent human beings” (these may be three different types of men); this understanding links the three books of De Legibus together in a manner overlooked by those scholars who charge the dialogue with incoherence (C 44). Very roughly speaking, Book I is to Books II and III what the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the United States Constitution are to the Constitution itself, although one should hasten to add that Book I is more thoroughly a work of philosophy than the Preamble and more comprehensively so than the Declaration.

Very well, then. Who is the prudent man? How will we know him when we see him? How much authority should be consent to give him? How shall philosophy and political life relate to one another?

Caspar will return to these questions, with Cicero, but first he remarks a difference between the treatment of reason in the two dialogues. In De Re Publica law is “right reason congruent with nature”; in De Legibus law is “highest reason” “rooted in nature” (C 45-46). One natural law, two definitions: How so? Because the discussants differ. De Re Publica features a long discussion among “preeminent Roman political gentlemen”; De Legibus features a much shorter discussion among “three good friends, two of them brothers,” one of them a Greek not a Roman, “about the best laws for that republic” (C 46). In one sense, the intimacy of the latter discussion would incline it to be more philosophic, and it is in one way. Because the men legislate for a whole people, the leader of the discussion, Marcus, must bring his philosophically-inclined friends to philosophize politically, to take account of all kinds of human beings, not only ‘the few.’ The “right reason” of De Re Publica can indeed guide “gentlemen who may not necessarily need the formal sanctions of the law,” but “highest reason” in De Legibus “guides a republic that includes gentlemen and non-gentlemen”—a down-to-earth mixed-regime republic that can also appeal to philosophers and non-philosophers, whether or not they are gentlemen, by giving all men a standard to ‘look up to’ (C 46). “All segments of the republic may share in reverence for a law that is highest and also right” (46), and as firmly rooted in nature as the noblest oak in the sacred grove. To speak in ‘modern’ terms, “right reason” in the wrong minds might lead to Kantianism or, to speak in ‘ancient’ terms, to a Platonism without Socratic/Platonic irony. In either case, the danger of apolitical idealism or worse, political idealism, must be confronted and faced down. “Instead of attempting to lay down the best laws simply, for a republic that is ultimately guided by philosophers,” the interlocutors of De Legibus “will seek to legislate for the best republic that is ruled by prudent gentlemen or statesmen who adhere to the natural law” (C 48). “Nature and natural law replace the ideas, above all the idea of the good, as the political standard which this republican regime will look” (C 48). Marcus does this both to bring philosophers and would-be philosophers down to earth, for both political and philosophic reasons, and to give ‘the many’ a standard inherent in the immediately visible order of the nature they see, hear, feel, smell, and taste all around them. “Morals must be firmly planted in the minds of citizens, and the legislator must not rely on the sanction of written laws alone” (C 48), indispensable though they are.

This will require the right kind of civil religion. Marcus challenges Titus’ Epicurean assumption that “the gods are indifferent to human beings” (C 49). Addressing him not by his patrimonial name, “Pomponius,” perhaps as a reminder of fatherly authority, he induces him “to concede that nature is ruled by force, nature, reason, power, mind, or command of the immortal gods” (C49). This Titus consents to do, adding good-naturedly that he does so because the noise of the rushing river and chirping birds will prevent his Epicurean colleagues from hearing his admission. Marcus thereby reveals his political-philosophic strategy: “lay[ing] down laws for a republic that includes various schools of philosophy” (C 49). To do so, he needs “some common moral ground [as] a bedrock principle for political happiness” (C 49). Whereas Plato’s Athenian Stranger needed no such consent, finally pointing back to the rule of philosopher-kings, with its rule of reason founded on the doctrine of ideas ‘abstracted’ from concrete nature, unimpeded by the political influence of philosophic factions, Cicero’s Rome did feature such factions. The philosophic factions of Athens impeded philosophy by attempting to understand nature by gazing directly at the cosmos, ignoring human opinions. The philosophic factions of Rome impeded not only philosophy but politics itself, by attempting to justify withdrawal from politics not only on intellectual but on moral grounds. “Marcus softens Atticus and convinces him that his project is an attempted recreation of the Platonic enterprise,” an enterprise Titus reveres as a Greek as well as a philosopher or would-be philosopher, even as his philosophic school has deviated from that enterprise (C 52). “Natural law is the solution for gentlemen under siege by bad”—that is, “apolitical and dogmatic”—”philosophy, and it serves as a common ground upon which they might agree politically” even as they remain in disputation philosophically (C 52).

In civil-religious terms, while the Athenian Stranger posits an active, providential god who punishes those who violate his laws, Cicero can speak of what the American Founders called the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. Instead of the Stranger’s “rule of intelligence in the form of law,” leading to “the rule of philosopher-kings,” natural law “finds its home first and foremost in the ‘mind and reason of the prudent man,'” that is, in real human beings mindful of their themselves and their fellow human beings as naturally embodied beings (C 54). “Cicero praises and defends the political over the philosophical life, in a book devoted to guiding prudent gentlemen and teaching them about the best republic, of which De Legibus is the sequel” (C 56). He divides the remainder of Book I into three main parts whose topics are the origins of justice, a defense of natural as opposed to conventional justice, and “an encomium to philosophy” (C 56).

Marcus can now meld philosophy and civil religion: “The primary fellowship of human beings with god involves reason,” including “right reason,” which is law; hence “we should consider human beings to be united with gods by law” and right (L I.23). “The whole universe should be thought to be one in common between gods and human beings,” and it has been so since the origin of the human species (L I.23). Although he had refused the task of undertaking a historical account of Rome, and especially of its origins, Marcus does not hesitate to go much farther back in time here, past the origin of Rome to the origin of the human species itself—a clear indication that he offers his friends another poem or mythos. “In the perpetual celestial courses [and] revolution there emerged a sort of ripeness for planting the human race,” whose original members had their souls “implanted by god” (L I.24). This gave humans “a blood relation or a family or a lineage between us and the heavenly beings,” accounting for the fact that “out of so many species there is no animal besides the human being that has any notion of god” (L I.24). Man “recognizes god because he, so to speak, recollects whence he arose” (L I.25). Recollection or remembrance is the province of poetry, readers will recall, and the image of planting in the new poem ‘recalls’ the image of the Marian oak in Marcus’ earlier poem. Ciceronian theology blurs the distinction between the divine and the human by making both natural, evidently originating in nature. The arts also have a natural origin, as “countless arts have been discovered through the teaching of nature, which reason imitated in order to attain skillfully the things necessary for life” (L I.26). The human mind, senses, and body all fit together, and because they do human beings can perfect their ‘given’ capacities, developing speech (“the greatest matchmaker of human fellowship”) and reason (L I.26-27). Cicero develops his account of oratory or rhetoric elsewhere, but, as Caspar remarks, “This whole work is an exercise in the rhetoric of the natural law statesman in action” (C 60).

By making human beings one species, nature has made us fundamentally equal; Marcus goes so far as to claim that all human beings enjoy the same capacity to learn. This has moral and political implications: “There is no one of any nation who cannot arrive at virtue when he has found a leader” (L I.30). As in virtue, so in vice: “In depravities there is [also] a remarkable similarity in the human race,” lured as we are by “pleasure, which, although it is an enticement to disgrace, has a sort of similarity to a natural good” (L. I.31). Fundamentally, however, “we have been made by nature to participate in right, one with another, and to share it among all persons”; right “is by nature,” having “been given to all persons” because “reason has been given to all persons” (L I.33). Law is “right reason in ordering and forbidding” (L I.33). Morally, this entails not self-sacrifice (Marcus warns against separating advantage from right) but cherishing oneself “no more than he does the other person,” in light of the natural equality of all members of the human species (L I.34).

Caspar distinguishes between “Cicero’s supreme god” and the “creator God of Genesis” (C 58).  “Cicero’s supreme god seems to be bound by reason and nature,” whereas the Biblical God, “by contrast, is mysterious, all-powerful, and fundamentally unapproachable,” and, as Creator, precedes the “heavens and the earth” as well as man (C 58). One might quibble that God isn’t entirely mysterious (He reveals Himself in His Bible) or fundamentally unapproachable (properly addressed, He answers prayers and may even change His mind when a prophet disputes with Him). But as Creator, indeed, he is not merely “Nature’s God.” Cicero’s civil-religious poetry enables him, as Caspar writes, quietly to depart from thoughts about the gods in “turn[ing] to mankind’s common nature as the basis for justice” and “mov[ing] away from the community of men and gods to the community of human beings” in his warning against the lure of pleasure, including the pleasure of wrongly-intended poetry (C 61). Many of Rome’s philosophic schools may thrive in the mixed-regime republic, but Epicureans, who make pleasure and pain their standard of justice instead of the natural law, are invited to remain in their private gardens until such time as they return to their Socratic/Platonic origin. Still, as Caspar observes, the Ciceronian republic will make no attempt to suppress the schools, as “there is something about [them] that reflects human nature itself” (C 66), something in us that (like apolitical Epicureans) would rather stay out of the assembly hall and the council chamber, walk away from the disputations of political life. Pleasure may not register what’s distinctively human in human nature, but it is natural, and “the regime will not concern itself with stamping out every bad opinion,” instead allowing such an opinion “to survive so long as it does not interfere with the day to day operations of politics, or cause too many people to abandon their loyalty to the regime” (C 66). When asked by Titus to adjudicate a dispute between the Academic school of philosophy, who taught that virtue is honorable, and the school of Zeno, who taught that nothing is good except what is honorable, Marcus dismisses the dispute as ‘academic’ in our sense—merely verbal. As Caspar suggests, he doesn’t want to agitate dogmatic quarrels but to diminish them for the sake of the mixed regime. Another way to say this is that Marcus sees the mixed regime indeed as a mixture of somewhat contradictory elements—the few and the many, Platonists and Stoics, but these elements must find some foundational principle or principles on which they concur. Those who reject the moral foundation of the regime will be excluded or at least (as we would say) ‘marginalized,’ precisely because they reject the natural law.

Marcus now singles out classical conventionalism (the doctrine “that everything is just that has been approved in the institutions or laws of peoples” [L I.42]) for an extended critique. “Right is uniform; human fellowship has been bound by it, and one law has established it,” namely the law of right reason in commanding and prohibiting, which readily understandable by all men, not only philosophers (L I.42). Nature inclines us “to cherish human beings,” and fear therefore need not be the motive for respecting the law. (This distinguishes Ciceronian natural law not only from classical conventionalism but from Biblical law, which teaches that fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.) Human law cannot “make right out of wrong” (L I.43). Even when we misuse the term “virtue” to describe a tree or a horse (true virtue is “fully developed reason” [L I.43]), we still understand that this goodness inheres in their nature, not in opinion. Further, we consent to honor virtuous persons and dishonor the vicious; not only reason but spiritedness, the ‘aristocratic’ characteristic par excellence, if guided by reason, recognizes natural law. Good character remains steadfast precisely because logical consistency guides such a soul, lending itself to resolution. Bad character, governed by changeable passions, often proves unreliable, unsteady. There can be constancy in bad character too, if the soul chooses selfish advantage or pleasure as its guiding star; a narrowly utilitarian soul might be rational ‘in the retail,’ if not ‘in the wholesale.’ The difference is that the genuinely rational soul finds rational means to the rational end of fully-developed humanness, whereas the utilitarian soul finds rational means to the satisfaction of the appetites.

Quintus evidently has learned something. He no longer denigrates nature in order to exalt human artfulness. “The matter is such that the highest good is to live from nature,” he summarizes, “that is, to take great enjoyment [from] virtue in a moderate, suitable life—or to follow nature and to live by its law, so to speak—that is, to omit no act (however great it may be in itself) that may attain the things that nature demands—because this is likewise worthwhile, to live in accordance with virtue as if it were a law” (L I.56). Marcus immediately reinforces this speech with a Socratic lesson: The god Apollo teaches us that “we should know ourselves” (L I.58). “He who knows himself will think first that he has something divine and that his own intellect within himself is like a sort of consecrated image”; he will have “wisdom as [his] leader,” “discern[ing] that he is a good man and that for this very reason he is going to be happy,” having “entered the fellowship of affection with his own,” including the gods and his fellow virtuous and prudent men and citizens (L I.59-60). Knowing now that “he has been born for political fellowship,” he will prove ready to make “precise argument” and more, he “may rule peoples, stabilize laws, chastise the wicked, protect the good,” and generally conduct himself not as a philosopher-king but as prudent citizen whose “parent and educator” is no longer merely his father but practical wisdom (L I.60).

Caspar deepens the reader’s understanding of these passages by emphasizing the way in which Marcus has moved his gentlemanly aspirants to philosophy away from their apolitical, Epicurean tendency to detach themselves from politics. By bringing in the virtue of honorableness, which the equally apolitical Stoics esteem as a merely moral virtue, he shows them “that to be honorable means to be political” (C 84). Whether Epicurean or Stoic, “the friendship of the wise, though perhaps possible, aims too high and is therefore insufficient as a general organizing principle for politics in a natural law regime” (C 67). And is therefore not really wise. Justice “must be useful to the republic, to cities, and to the people, and therefore rooted in a nature all human beings share” (C 67). He “set[s] up a political standard that does not require perfected wisdom to achieve” (C 68), one perceived by conscience, a “concept Marcus mentions for the first time” here (C 67), an ‘internalized’ form of the aristocrat’s honor. While appealing to the high-toned principle of divine reason, indeed to Socratic self-knowledge, Marcus also praises constancy, honorableness and moderation, more common but nonetheless indispensable virtues which one need not be a philosopher to achieve. Not the sapientes or wise man but the viri boni or good man embodies the standard of “a community of wisdom” that remains within the reach of a real city (C 71). “Marcus seeks to cultivate a genuine attachment in the hearts and minds of the nobility of this republic to what is just, and indeed to all the virtues, because they are good and honorable in and of themselves” (C 71); this combination of self-respecting but not selfless virtue with the love of one’s own regime in one’s own city depends on “the ideal of virtue [becoming] a standard to which the wise and the non-wise can both aspire” (C 72).

Philosophers seek souls capable of someday philosophizing. Cicero would also turn philosophers to the task of teaching those will never philosophize, but who can reason well about practical matters before his political community, who knows enough about nature to follow its guidance and to situate his own community within the natural world. Caspar finds it “most striking” that Cicero would “return, philosophically and politically, to Socrates” (C 76), initially by conversing with his friends Socratically, bringing them in to the enterprise of founding a regime in which thoughtful men will avoid dogmatic, ‘ideological’ thinking and remain mindful of the virtues needed for a more nearly just community that will be more than a ‘city in speech.’ The laws proposed in De Legibus will “stand as legislation for the best regime outlined in De Re Publica” (C 80). “He seeks to revitalize or perhaps even re-found republican government in Rome, or, if that is not possible, to provide a model for future founders of natural law republics” by “first bring[ing] about the re-birth of a politically relevant and healthy philosophy to guide the return to republicanism, and then keep that republican train on its tracks after the founding is complete” (C 84).

Accordingly, Marcus must bring his friends to consider the laws of religion and of magistracy. Caspar introduces the subsequent two books of De Legibus by showing how they both relate to and differ from the first. While the thoroughly prudent political philosopher might rule with no need for written law, virtuous gentlemen will need a ‘framework’ provided by “a handbook on natural law” (C 95). The laws that follow “are not positive laws for an actual regime in the here and now, but laws dictated by nature” (C 95), itself more ancient, more ‘time-honored,’ than the oldest families of Rome. “Cicero intend[s] his law code to serve as a standard and refuge to which all human founders of regimes might repair, but which they might never actually achieve” (C 97). By writing an (as it were) popular book instead of a philosophic treatise on natural law, he sets out perform the task Plato attempted in his Laws, but in a much briefer, thus more serviceable form. In addition, codifying the natural law, writing it down, putting some meat on its bones, brings Marcus and his friends firmly down to earth, after the sometimes rarified discussion of Book I. Marcus goes so far as to lead the discussants physically to an island in the Fibrenus, where “nature dominates” (L II.2)—in Caspar’s words, “his favorite spot in his beloved place of birth” (C 98). The idea of home, both as a specific place that is preeminently ‘your own’ and also a place within the natural order, should conduce to a move to the concrete, the specific, the familiar and the familial; Caspar suggests that Marcus thereby “compels his interlocutors to think, among other things, of the Greek myth of autochthony, which teaches that the people of a particular city or country are literally born from the very earth in which they live” (C 104). Such a thought does indeed bring one down to earth, although Marcus’ “new and improved definition of citizenship” (C 104) won’t go quite that far down. Nor will he go so far ‘up’ as Plato’s Athenian Stranger does. Unlike Plato’s Laws, which begins with the word theos, god, “Cicero does not begin with the god simply, but with god as manifested in nature, in a natural spot, in a wooded grove dedicated to his ancestors or the gods of the family, in which we presume could be found the tombs of those ancestors who have become gods” (C 100). Not the god, now, but a god, one “connected to him personally, to his family, and to all those members of his family who have come before him” will animate one pole of the subsequent conversation (C 100). The intimate connection between the divine and the natural remains, but in ever more practical form. A solid bond between man and the gods, man and nature, must be specific to that man, and to his city; only such a bond can “support and maintain the notion of natural justice” in the real world (C 101). Caspar observes, “Man’s relationship with the gods is important, but necessarily secondary or supportive in nature… not from the point of view of the eternal concerns of religion, but from the point of view of politics, the concerns of this entire dialogue” (C 101). Further contrasting De Legibus with Plato’s Laws, Caspar finds that Plato’s interlocutors walk not along a river but “uphill to the cave of Zeus”; the only river that appears in Plato’s dialogue is imaginary, a river in speech, representing “swift-flowing and swirling philosophical arguments about theology, the gods, and the priority of soul to body” (C 102). But Marcus continues to avoid the cold, fast-flowing river of philosophic dispute, as they’ve already agreed to return to the Socratic roots of political philosophy. Accordingly, the tranquil island in the river represents an oasis in which the legislators can view political society from outside, impartially, and indeed naturally, not from the sanctuary of the supreme god.

All city-dwellers have two fatherlands: their place of birth and the place where they were received, after leaving home to come to the city, “one by nature the other by citizenship” (L II.5). This second citizenship leaves the pleasures of one’s birthplace behind, based as it is “on the reason of man,” not on sentiment. At home, the natural law may mix too easily with powerful emotions. As Caspar puts it, “Rome—Scipio’s best (and mixed)regime—must replace the place of birth as the primary object of reverence and affection for its citizens” (C 106). Marcus makes clear that that this is not a simple distinction between nature and convention, however, recalling that “law was not thought out be human intellects; it is not some resolution of peoples, but something eternal that rules the whole universe through the wisdom of commanding and prohibiting,” the “mind of god compelling or forbidding all things by reason” (L II.8). This “concern with the eternal or the unlimited,” Caspar writes, “serves to place politics within certain boundaries that it may never cross” (C 106). “The human nature that grounds the best republic is both universal and particular” (C 107).

At the urging of Quintus, Marcus has thus returned to the topic of “the force and nature of law” (L II.8). “The divine mind is the highest law, so too when it is in man, it has been fully developed in the mind of the wise man” (L II.11). As Caspar remarks, the prudent man of Book I, associated with philosophy, retreats and the wise man, associated with religion, now appears. “Cicero seeks popular sanction for his republic and laws,” even as he continues “what is in effect a steady and inexorable rationalization of Roman religion” (C 112). Philosophers and even gentlemen will not need such strong stuff as religious laws, and they may live with the understanding that one never fully reaches the wisdom one loves while depending on their strength of soul to provide moral reinforcement to the natural law, but ‘the many’ demand firmer things that, standards more ‘exterior’ to their souls, including “lawgiver Jupiter, a belief popularized and reinforced by the poets,” as well as “conventional human punishment” (C 113). “This is, after all, the mixed regime of Scipio; it is not the rule of the wise over the wise” (C 117). Marcus “gradually” and carefully “confuses the distinction between nature and god” (C 115), making “a subtle but perceptible shift from the god as supreme toward the equality of god and the natural force that sanctions all laws as just or unjust” (C 116). The coming-back-to-earth of Book II requires both the acknowledgement of the need for piety in a mixed-regime republic and a retained measure of the natural law.

To respect philosophers, gentlemen, and the many in one regime requires rhetoric, persuasion, not compulsion by force and threats. A sound legal code needs a preface or preamble, invoking the divine origin of the laws along with the teaching that the gods “behave very well toward the human race” (L II.15). “For what is truer,” Marcus offers, “than that no one may properly be so foolishly arrogant as to think that reason and a mind are in himself but not in the heaven and the universe?” (L II.16) Who does not perceive “the order of the stars, the alternations of day and night, the balance of the seasons, the things produced for our enjoyment”? (L II.16). Another way to put this would be to say that the principle of reason, the principle of non-contradiction, inheres not only in human logos but in the orderliness of the cosmos where, just as in the human mind, there can be no round squares. As Caspar writes, “even the best kind of law requires persuasion to be effective” (C 117) and the human refusal to acknowledge even the self-evident truths of natural law—a refusal made by tyrants great and petty, singular and numerous, alike—ranges from the philosophic schools to the corner tavern. True, failure to acknowledge natural law will lead to punishment, eventually, but the eventual may take a long time. “True opinions [are] more readily accepted by citizens in a regime that believes in active and involved gods” (C 120), prudently invoked in the preamble to the body of the laws.

The body of the laws itself should be succinct. Marcus doesn’t propose a full code of law for a particular city, but offers “natural law legislation,” which “cannot be fixed to any particular time in human history,’ in any particular place, for any particular people (C 122). “Though the laws for the best regime have always existed, because laws dictated by nature are eternal and unchanging, they must be constantly adapted to the fluctuating affairs of human life” (C 122), to that ever-flowing, Heraclitean river of circumstances which the river on which the island stands may also invoke. “The laws of De Legibus are valid as actual laws only for the naturally best regime of De Re Publica, a reformed Roman republic that never truly existed” (C 122). Those natural laws offer a standard for those laying down “actual laws” (C 122), but they will not be actual laws for actual regimes that are not the naturally best one—that is, for every other regime. And indeed these future legislators themselves will need their founding law codes to be succinct, as “no founding legislator could ever know every particular need or situation that might arise, nor should he be expected to” (C 123).

Marcus’ religious laws reinforce the natural law and the natural law regime. The gods shall be approached with purity, piety, and with no attempts at material sacrifice, lest wealthy citizens imagine that they are not equal before the gods with all other citizens. What is more, human beings will not avenge violations of this law: “If anyone does otherwise, the god himself will be the avenger” (L II.19). Marcus immediately removes any suggestion of public religious indifference, however, by stipulating that “No one shall have gods separately, neither new nor foreign, unless those gods have been publicly adopted” (L II.19); in the real Rome, it would be centuries before Christianity received full official sanction. Worship of the ancestral family gods shall remain undisturbed, as shall such deified heroes as Hercules and Aesculapius. Also, personified virtues (Mind, Virtue, Piety, Trust) shall be worshipped as “those things on account of which ascent to heaven is given to a human being” (L II.19). Whether in the households or in the public square, Marcus aims at valorizing those human capacities that conduce to a steadfast citizenry. Linking families to the city, Marcus adjures households to “learn from public priests,” especially with respect to restraint or moderation in performing religious rites. The priestly class itself shall consist of two kinds, one in charge of the public rites and ceremonies, the other “interpret[ing] the strange announcements of prophets and seers whom the senate and the people approve” (L II.21). Such practices as augury and divination shall be carefully ruled, inasmuch as they can cause the souls of citizens to be pervaded with hope or fear. In Caspar’s words, describing this central and “by far the longest” section of the religious laws (C 124), “only  a standard of reason, or of what is in conformity with nature, could limit the types and therefore the number of gods permissible at Rome, and only if it becomes the standard to which all good priests should repair” (C 125). No “nocturnal sacrifices by women” (L II.21)—that is Bacchanalian rites—shall be allowed, but (Marcus being no killjoy) the laws shall “direct the joy of the people” with public games combined with ceremonies honoring the gods (LII. 22). Violations of the public laws of religion shall indeed be enforced by human beings, although the emphasis remains on example, not punishment. Public religious observance governed by the priests “holds together the republic”—reinforcing the social and political bonds necessary in any regime—”for the people always to be in need of the judgment and authority of the aristocrats” (L II.30); the mixed regime will have a strong aristocratic element, one that rules by as it were reaching into the souls of the many, moderating and steadying them for republican citizenship. “The augurs,” Caspar observes, “ostensibly religious functionaries, in fact hold the greatest political power in the republic, greatest in the sense that no political action may be carried out without their approval” (C 128). Justice, the aim or telos of the regime remains paramount, but the augurs are among the indispensable means to this end.

Caspar rightly points to the way Marcus ‘naturalizes’ the republic’s civil religion. Marcus preserves respect for “the rites of families and fathers” because “antiquity most nearly approaches the gods,” and religion must always be treated “as if it were handed down by the gods” (L II.27). And citizens worship the deified virtues in temples “so that those who have those things (and all good men have them) may think that the gods themselves have been placed in their souls” (L II.28), a thought that anticipates the Christian teaching on the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. For Cicero, nature is the oldest thing of all; as Caspar puts it, “the best thing will now become the oldest thing,” not only in fact but in the minds of the citizens, “as other ancestral, though irrational, practices are gradually forgotten” (C 126). This rationally guided forgetfulness “recognizes the necessity of accounting for man’s concern with the eternal” (C 130). In terms of the struggles among the philosophic schools, Cicero “seeks to reclaim religion and divination from the Stoics,” whose understanding of both remains stubbornly and worrisomely apolitical (C 131). And what goes for the rites in the republican regime also goes for music, a theme familiar to readers of Plato. “Children must learn a moderate music, sanctioned by gods, that supports the laws”; “if the gods cease to care about the music of the regime, the regime cannot control what it is or will become,” and the poets who make music use it as yet another form of their rhetoric (C 135). Marcus wants a moderate and just republicanism, not what he calls “theatocracy” with its “lawless and shameless freedom” (C 136). And even as those who appeal to the ‘low’ in human nature deserve restraint, in another way so do those who appeal to the ‘high.’ While “it is the duty of every gentleman in the natural law regime” to defend “the goddess of wisdom, or wisdom itself,” too often such gentlemen hold themselves to be morally superior magnanimous men and/or wise men; with an orientation toward the gods, unimpeachably superior even to gentlemen in both morals and intellect, gentlemanly pride will be “tamed by this truly mixed regime,” with its firm religious practices (C 137). At the same time, “religion is to be the domain of authority (auctoritate) alone, an authority that affirms and supports this mixed, natural law regime” (C 141). For example, Marcus limits gravesites to lands than cannot take cultivation, to places where “the nature of the field can produce so much that it may receive the bodies of the dead without damage to the living” (L II.67). The earth belongs to the living.

“Book II begins and ends in death or with a concern for death, and thus a concern for the eternal soul” (C 143). Cicero thus acknowledges “the ultimate concerns of [the citizens of the justice regime] and regulate[s] the line between life and death,” connecting “the good of the republic with the concern its citizens have for immortality and for their souls” (C 143). The influential gentlemen desire both immortal glory and justice, and the regime aims at inducing them to rule justly “for the sake of the very best kind of immortality: a deathless eternity accompanied by a lasting reputation of justice among the living,” a civic deification of the very best souls (C 143). These gentlemen will not forget the warlike virtues of Romulus, but neither will they neglect the lessons of lawgiver Numa, who established the virtues of peace, virtues “that make the long life for the republic possible: religion and mildness or mercy (clementia). Without virtues of peace, warlike aristocrats will defeat their foreign enemies but then turn on one another in civil wars. In all this, nature “remains the highest standard of this regime, and religion serves that end.” (C 145) Religion is nonetheless central to the dialogue because in a natural-law republic care for the souls of all citizens, not only philosophers, takes precedent, prepares for, right reception of the natural law and of magistrates guided by it. “What is left unsaid”—that a Rome “founded first on the laws of religion or the priority of the soul” might not “have had to resort to war and conquest at its founding”—comes closer to nature than did the historical practice of the actual Rome, which put the political regime first in time  (C 164).

In Book III Marcus addresses the matter of magistracies or political offices. Plato of course treats them extensively, and the Greek Titus avers that “You may never praise him either too strongly or too often” (L III.1). While complimenting his (decreasingly) Epicurean friend (who has “attained that very difficult alliance of seriousness with humaneness” [L III.1]), Marcus will continue to adhere to Scipio’s natural-law, mixed-regime republic as distinguished from the rule of philosopher-kings guided by the idea of the good. Still, Marcus must be quietly pleased that his friend shows signs, as Caspar puts it, of consenting to just that regime, a regime in which the rare and politically unrealistic motive of the quest for wisdom and the good will be replaced by the more common but politically realistic motive of the love of praise or honor. “Praise is needed in this kind of regime, a regime that has as its citizens those who are not necessarily philosophers and who may not be able to see the idea of the good, but who are still good men” (C 163). It turns out that some Epicureans are not immune to such salutary rhetorical blandishments. Those who are not can “keep to their gardens” (C 163).

Magistrates rule, being ruled by the laws: “It can truly be said that a magistrate is a speaking law, and a law is a silent magistrate” (L III.2). To give voice to the silent natural law, the magistrate must acknowledge the rule of the earth by the universe in which it is situated, and the rule of the universe by “the god” (L III.2). Having turned from the religious institutions to the magisterial institutions, Marcus leaves Jupiter and the other gods behind, now mentioning only “the god” (along with that “divine man,” Plato, who, it will be recalled, provides the rhetorical reference point for Marcus’ intended political reconciliation of the philosophic schools). The kingly rule of “the god” over the universe initially found its human imitators in the ancient monarchic regimes, but this proved politically unrealistic in Rome. (It might be noted that ancient Israel presents us with the opposite picture: a personal, kingly God who founded a republic for His people, who eventually came to prefer a monarchic regime. As in Israel, the power of the magistrate is a part of the divine power, but unlike Moses, Marcus does not conceive of “the god” as personal, or as a Creator.) What is more, Marcus prefers mixed-regime republicanism to monarchy, on Aristotelian grounds: “It is proper both for him who obeys to hope that he will command at some time, and for him who commands to think that in a brief time he will have to obey” (L III.5)—a restatement of Aristotle’s definition of the political life appropriate for the political animal, man, a life consisting of ruling and being ruled in turn. As Caspar notes, if a regime can balance ruling and being-ruled it will achieve “political moderation,” the virtue “that Cicero sets up as the standard for virtue in individuals” (C 167).  “The regime is held together by the magistracies and those who are in charge, and from their arrangements”—that is, the formal or institutional dimension of the regime—”the type of each regime may be understood” (L III.12).

Accordingly, the first of the laws pertaining to the magistracy requires justice of the laws themselves and moderation of the citizens who obey them, including the magistrates, who are subject to the peoples’ “right to appeal” their decisions (L III.6). There will be no right to appeal military decisions in wartime, however, although the regime’s military arm will be constrained in other ways, as Marcus will outline in due course; what we would call civilian control of the military shall prevail. Indeed, the most authoritative institution of the regime will be the senate, charged with “keep[ing] these magistrates just and guid[ing] the whole republic” (C 173). The somewhat ‘privileged’ character of wartime military authority obtains because “the highest law” is “the safety of the people” (L III.8). By “highest” Marcus cannot mean noblest or even most just but rather supremely necessary; in this as elsewhere, Marcus brings his interlocutors down to earth. As Caspar puts it, “when the very safety of the republic is at stake, there is no higher law”; “if the republic is destroyed, no other laws, no matter how lofty, will matter” (C 174).

Of all the magisterial offices Marcus proposes, the most controversial one by far proves to be the tribunate, whose members served as a check on the necessary but dangerous kingly powers of the consuls. Aristocratic Quintus denounces the Tribunate as an instrument of popular misrule, among whose offenses being its attacks on Marcus (L III. 19-22). Marcus naturally agrees that “the power of the tribunes of the plebeians is too great,” but immediately points to the worse alternative: “The violence of the people, however, is much more ferocious, much more ardent” (L III.23). This is why the Tribunate was founded in the first place. Cicero reminds Quintus (and not incidentally appeals to patriarchal authority while doing so), “When the Fathers conceded this power to the plebeians, the weapons fell, the sedition was extinguished, a compromise was found so that the less important men thought that they were equalized to the leading men” and as a result “make no struggles concerning their own right,” anymore (L III.24). At the same time, aristocratic control of the auspices has “often repressed an unjust urge of the people” (L III.27), so the influence flows both ways. Similarly, although senators are elected by popular vote, once elected these men, eminent in virtue no matter what social class they come from, moderate aristocrats and plebeians alike. Indeed, the senate will be “the linchpin of this whole system of government” (C 184). It is therefore utterly indispensable that “the highest men of the city” be educated to virtue, as the example of their way of life sets “the customs of cities” even more powerfully than “changes in musicians’ songs” (L III.32). In this he departs from “our dear Plato”; having established Plato as the common ground among the philosophic schools, and between the schools and the aristocrats, he can now adroitly bring both to listen to distinctively Ciceronian thoughts—politically speaking, the mixed regime (C 178-179). In such a regime, “those who are not in the ruling class will not be willing slaves to that ruling class,” but will “have a say in rule” (C 186).

Caspar remarks that whereas many philosophers tend toward apolitical theorizing at the expense of the city and, ultimately, themselves, Quintus the aristocrat inclines toward a political purism, wishfully thinking that those ‘born to rule’ could do so without any polluting interference from the lower orders. He supposes that “political strife itself is unnatural and somehow a perfect kind of politics is possible here on earth,” a “perfectly polished world of aristocratic rule” (C 182). Marcus would bring him to understand that “just government includes both the necessary and the good”; “the choice in politics is never between two perfect options, or even between one perfect and one imperfect option, but rather between two less than perfect options” (C 183). And when Titus bestirs himself to side with Quintus, he inadvertently “reveals a capacity for anger or indignation, a political trait that shows us why he is the kind of Epicurean who can be brought into Marcus’s best republic” (C 184). Tellingly, both men “urge Marcus to finish his laws,” revealing that “they are learning how to accept a political regime that is less than perfect” (C 184).

This provides Marcus with an opportunity to discuss the popular election of the senators, an obvious pressure point in the argument with his two friends. In the United States, open voting—the practice of compelling voters to announce their choices verbally at the polls instead of filling out a secret ballot—would prove an instrument first of gentry influence over their neighbors and then of political bosses’ influence over party members. The Romans knew that, too, and Quintus argues for open voting. Secret ballots take away aristocrats’ authority; “a hiding place should not have been given to the people in a ballot which could conceal a vicious vote while respectable men were ignorant of what each man felt” (L III.34). Titus concurs: “The best regime” will be found “in the power of the best men” (L. III.37). Marcus proposes a compromise: secret ballots for plebeians coupled with the aristocrats’ right to inspect the ballots, so that they can’t be blind-sided. Marcus additionally observes, quite sensibly, that most plebeians side with the aristocrats, anyway, out of respect; a secret ballot will enable them to do so, without ‘peer pressure’ from demagogues of class solidarity. Appealing rhetorically to his high-toned friends, he announces that “my law gives the appearance of freedom; the authority of respectable men is retained; a cause of contention is eliminated” (L III.39).

Caspar summarizes: “A republic in which the senate holds the authority (auctoritas) and the people have the power (potestas) will be moderate and harmonious” (C 185). Such a natural-law republic is possible but unlikely, inasmuch as find men of sufficient virtue to command the respect of the people “will be very difficult and will require a ‘certain education and training'”—”an education in the natural law” which will provide “knowledge of nature and its laws, which are at the heart of this most just and mixed regime” (C 185). This will be easier to do than establishing a regime of philosopher-kings, but not by much. “This entire oration is in some sense directed at these best men. Marcus attempts to educate these potential leaders de re publica and de legibus, because all depends on them.” (C 186). In this, Cicero does follow Plato’s example. Inasmuch as Plato’s Laws quietly directs readers back to the Republic, so too does the education seen as necessary in De Legibus “seems to require a return to De Re Publica, to a study of the great statesmen therein described” (C 187)—to De Re Publica, which “sits in the center of Cicero’s catalogue of works that he gives us in the De Divinatione” (C 187).

Each senator shall attend sessions faithfully, speak in turn, and speak “with measure, that is, not endlessly” (L III.40). And he ought to know what he’s talking about, “know the republic”—how many and what kind of soldiers it has, its financial resources, its allies and tributaries, its laws and treaties, its legal procedures, and “the ancestors’ precedents” (L III.41). As for the people, the principal duty is to refrain from violence, given their representation in the Tribunate and their power to elect the senators. As for the lawmaking powers themselves, there shall be no laws against “private men,” i. e. individuals, as the laws should afford equal protection to all (L III.42); any judgment imposing exile on an individual should only be rendered by “the greatest assembly of the people” (L III.44). The dialogue ends with a requested (by Titus) and promised (by Marcus) the need for officials who guard the official records of the laws. Without such a safeguard, the magistrates “are as wise as their clerks want them to be” (L III. 48). Truer words were never spoken.

Caspar emphasizes that Cicero, in so instituting this aristocratic senate within his natural-law republic, “keeps it truly political,” balancing aristocratic and popular rule (C 189). “He refuses to allow the solution of the problem of just government to fall prey to noble pride, and in so doing he keeps a window open for political philosophy to advise this regime” (C 189). Marcus’s “standard is one of knowledge, not wealth, birth, or social standing” (C 189). However, this standard will apply most immediately to the gentlemen who rule; unlike Plato’s regime, Cicero’s regime will be ruled by “good men” who “seek to know the natural law and who fear the highest kind of punishment such a law might inflict: the knowledge of wrongdoing that torments the best kind of conscience in the best kind of soul” (C 195). In the end, what seems to be a more ‘realistic’ regime than Plato’s may be even harder to found in fact; “there is no rarer thing to find or discover among men than a perfected orator” of the sort Cicero envisions as the founder of his regime (C 204). Indeed: Are great statesmen any more numerous than great philosophers?