Marcus Tullius Cicero Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Politician, philosopher, orator, lawyer, and poet, Cicero Marcus Tullius (106–43 BCE) is arguably the most important Roman political thinker.

Born in the Italian town of Arpinum, Cicero lived through the Social War, warfare between Marius and Sulla, and Sulla’s dictatorship. The young Cicero studied law and encountered Stoicism, Skepticism, as well as academic philosophy. A brilliant orator, Cicero rapidly worked his way up the Roman cursus honorum, or course of magistracies, serving as consul in 63 BCE. While consul, Cicero suppressed Catiline’s plot to overthrow the republic, putting to death several conspirators. In 58 BCE, he was exiled for executing Roman citizens; he returned in 57 BCE and favored Pompey in his increasingly violent political rivalry with Caesar. Following Caesar’s invasion, Cicero fled Rome in 49 BCE, returning the following year after Caesar’s victory at Pharsalus. Cicero helped lead senatorial opposition to Marc Antony after Caesar’s assassination, delivering his famous Philippics against him in 44 BCE. Though Cicero hoped to play Caesar’s adopted son, Octavian, against Antony, he was killed December 7, 43 BCE, following their reconciliation.

Cicero wrote many philosophical works dealing with a wide range of issues; his most important political works are the fragmentary On the Republic and On the Laws, and On Duties. In On the Republic, Cicero argues that the Roman constitution, mixing monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, was the ideal constitution, and he famously defined the republic (res publica) as the res populi, or affair of the people bound by right and advantage; its defense against corruption lay in civic virtue and leadership. In On the Laws, Cicero describes the laws of his ideal republic, articulating a conception of natural law rooted in human and divine reason. In On Duties, Cicero discusses the three problems of ethics: the honorable, the expedient, and conflicts between the two. Cicero argues that the truly honorable is expedient; hence, there is no conflict between the two.

Cicero greatly influenced subsequent thought. Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) claimed that Cicero’s Hortensius turned him toward philosophy and referenced On the Republic in City of God; the “Dream of Scipio,” also from On the Republic, was of special influence in the Middle Ages. Cicero was a key figure in humanistic thought from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, On Duties being especially influential. His writings would also inspire seventeenth-century English writers such as James Harrington and John Locke, and draw Thomas Hobbes’s criticism in Leviathan. He influenced numerous eighteenth-century thinkers, including Francois-Marie Voltaire, David Hume, Edmund Burke, and Thomas Jefferson. Although his influence waned after the eighteenth century, Cicero now draws renewed attention due to interest in republicanism and civic virtue.

Bibliography:

Atkins, E. M. “Cicero.” In The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought, edited by Christopher Rowe and Malcolm Schofield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, translated and edited by James E. G. Zetzel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
On Duties, edited by Margaret Atkins, translated and edited by Miriam Griffin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Douglas, A. E. Cicero. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968.
Fuhrmann, Manfred. Cicero and the Roman Republic, translated by W. E.Yuill. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992.
Wood, Neal. Cicero’s Social and Political Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.