Classics Part IV: Cicero
The Jefferson Club | On the Commonwealth and Its Ruin
Cicero (106–43 BC) — Roman statesman, philosopher, and master of rhetoric in the waning years of the Republic — lived some 278 years after Aristotle, yet arrived, by a different road, at strikingly similar ground. The community, for Cicero as for Aristotle, is not incidental but essential. Man is not solitary — he is, by nature and necessity, a creature of association — a “pack animal,” moving with others, rarely alone.
From this premise follows a political obligation: that the structures governing such a community must endure. They must be long-lasting, even timeless in aspiration, binding generations together in a continuity “connected to the original cause which engendered the state.” It is here that Cicero’s thought converges with a broader classical inheritance — the insistence that political life is not merely for the present, but for those who came before and those yet to come. “For the people, by the people” — though phrased later — finds its antecedents in this tradition, even as Plato and Aristotle maintained that only the best ought to serve as guardians of civilization.
Cicero’s inquiry, however, is not content with agreement — it presses into difficulty. He wrestles with the structure of government itself — not in abstraction, but in relation to liberty, the central concern of the commonwealth. Each form, examined closely, reveals its fracture. Democracy, monarchy, aristocracy — none secures liberty fully, each containing within it the seeds of its own undoing. Hence his unsettling conclusion: “equality is itself inequitable.” Equality, improperly conceived or improperly applied, does not resolve injustice but redistributes it.
Cicero turns to history as evidence, demonstrating that no single form can sustain the balance required for republican life. The remedy, then, is not purity but mixture — a constitution that incorporates all three elements, restraining each by the presence of the others. Only in this equilibrium can republican liberty persist. And within such a system, the question of leadership remains decisive: the true guardian is not the loudest voice, but the most virtuous — a figure defined by deeds rather than speech, and by an unwavering commitment to justice for all.
Cicero did not contemplate these questions from a distance. He lived them in the Roman Republic’s final violent act. The constitutional order still stood in name, even as it was hollowed out by force, ambition, and the rise of singular men. He came of age in the shadow of Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla, whose rivalry transformed political competition into civil war, and whose example — Sulla’s dictatorship (82–79 BC), with its proscriptions and rule by fear — demonstrated that the Republic could be dismantled from within.
By the time Cicero rose to prominence, Rome had already begun to yield to the gravitational pull of power concentrated in the hands of Pompey, Crassus, and Julius Caesar. Their First Triumvirate did not abolish the Republic — it bypassed it. And yet Cicero, a novus homo(new man), ascended by law and oratory, achieving the consulship in 63 BC and defending the state during the Catiline Conspiracy — though at a cost, as his authorization of executions would later return to haunt him.
When Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC, the Republic’s crisis became irreversible. Cicero, reluctantly but deliberately, aligned himself with Pompey, seeing in him the last viable defense of constitutional order. Pompey’s defeat left Cicero exposed, and though pardoned by Caesar, the Republic to which he had devoted his life was already receding into memory.
Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC appeared, for a moment, to reopen the question — to offer the possibility of restoration — but instead accelerated the descent. Mark Antony emerged not as a stabilizer but as a new center of power. Against him, Cicero unleashed the Philippics, speeches not merely of opposition but of attempted political annihilation, casting Antony as a tyrant in formation and urging resistance from a Senate increasingly unable to act.
In a final, fateful calculation, Cicero turned to the young Octavian, believing he might be used as a counterweight to Antony. It was a misjudgment that would prove fatal. Octavian did not oppose Antony — he joined him, alongside Lepidus, forming the Second Triumvirate in 43 BC — a legalized concentration of power that immediately revived the machinery of proscription. Cicero’s name appeared among the condemned.
Captured while attempting to flee Italy, he did not resist. According to the accounts, he met his end with a composure befitting his philosophy — extending his neck to the executioners. He was beheaded — his hands, the instruments of his speech, were severed — both were displayed in the Roman Forum at Antony’s command.
Cicero understood the Republic’s collapse, opposed it, misjudged its final actors — and was destroyed by the very forces he had long warned would bring it to ruin.
Primary Source
Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws: The Res Publica, Mixed Government, and the Duty of the Citizen; A Comprehensive Primary Source Reading — On the Commonwealth, Books I–II; On the Laws, Book I
Book I — What Is the Commonwealth?
Where Plato opens with a provocation and Aristotle with a foundation in nature, Cicero opens with a definition — one of the most consequential in the history of republican thought. Through the voice of Scipio Africanus, he lays out the terms on which everything else depends:
“The commonwealth is the concern of a people, but a people is not any group of men assembled in any way, but an assemblage of some size associated with one another through agreement on law and community of interest. The first cause of its assembly is not so much weakness as a kind of natural herding together of men: this species is not isolated or prone to wandering alone.”
The commonwealth, then, is not a contract born of fear — it is an expression of human nature itself. And its deliberative function must always remain connected to the cause that brought it into being:
“Every people . . . every state . . . every commonwealth needs to be ruled by some sort of deliberation in order to be long lived. That deliberative function, moreover, must always be connected to the original cause which engendered the state.”
This is the republican premise: a commonwealth exists for the people, is constituted by the people’s agreement on law, and must be governed in a way that remains faithful to that original bond.
Book I — The Three Forms and Their Fatal Flaws
Scipio surveys the three familiar forms of government — monarchy, aristocracy, and popular rule — and finds each not simply imperfect, but structurally incomplete as a vehicle for republican liberty:
“In monarchies, no one else has sufficient access to shared justice or to deliberative responsibility; and in the rule of an aristocracy the people have hardly any share in liberty, since they lack any role in common deliberation and power; and when everything is done by the people itself, no matter how just and moderate it may be, that very equality is itself inequitable, in that it recognizes no degrees of status.”
He tests each against historical examples and finds the same verdict in each case. Even the wisest king, even the most just aristocracy, even the most moderate democracy, fails the full test of republican governance — because each excludes some essential element: deliberative access, liberty, or recognized gradations of merit. Each form, moreover, carries within it the seed of its own destruction:
“Each of these types of commonwealth has a path — a sheer and slippery one — to a kindred evil. Beneath that tolerable and even lovable king Cyrus there lurks, at the whim of a change of his mind, a Phalaris, the cruelest of all; and it is an easy downward path to that kind of domination. The governance of Marseilles by a few leading citizens is very close to the oligarchic conspiracy of the Thirty who once ruled in Athens. And the Athenian people’s control of all things, when it turned into the madness and license of a mob, was disastrous [to the people itself].”
Book I — The Mixed Constitution as the Only Remedy
Having exposed the vulnerability of each pure form, Scipio delivers the central argument of the entire work — that only a constitution blending all three can achieve stability and genuine republican liberty:
“There are remarkable revolutions and almost cycles of changes and alterations in commonwealths; to recognize them is the part of a wise man, and to anticipate them when they are about to occur, holding a course and keeping it under his control while governing, is the part of a truly great citizen and nearly divine man. My own opinion, therefore, is that there is a fourth type of commonwealth that is most to be desired, one that is blended and mixed from these first three types.”
And on the indispensable role of liberty within that blend:
“In no other state than that in which the people has the highest power does liberty have any home — liberty, than which nothing can be sweeter, and which, if it is not equal, is not even liberty.”
The mixed constitution is not merely a practical compromise. For Cicero, it is the only form of government that simultaneously honors the claims of wisdom, rank, and popular freedom — binding them together in a durable whole where no single element can consume the rest. This, he argues through Scipio, is what Rome’s ancestors had achieved and what later generations must preserve.
Book II — Virtue as Active, Not Contemplative
Cicero then turns to a challenge that strikes at the heart of republican theory: the philosophical temptation to withdraw from public life. Against the Epicurean case for retirement, he delivers one of the most direct defenses of civic engagement in ancient literature:
“Virtue is not some kind of knowledge to be possessed without using it: even if the intellectual possession of knowledge can be maintained without use, virtue consists entirely in its employment; moreover, its most important employment is the governance of states and the accomplishment in deeds rather than words of the things that philosophers talk about in their corners.”
What is the source of all the civic virtues — piety, justice, good faith, equity, courage?
“Surely they derive from the men who established such things through education and strengthened some by custom and ordained others by law . . . that citizen, who through his formal authority and the punishments established by law compels everyone to do what philosophers through their teaching can persuade only a few people to do, is to be preferred even to the teachers who make those arguments.”
And against those who claim the wise man should only engage in politics under the compulsion of crisis:
“Our country did not give us birth or rearing without expecting some return from us . . . she has a claim on the largest and best part of our minds, talents, and judgment for her own use, and leaves for our private use only so much as is beyond her requirements.”
The proof from Roman history is decisive:
“Nature has given men such a need for virtue and such a desire to defend the common safety that this force has overcome all the enticements of pleasure and ease . . . there is nothing in which human virtue approaches the divine more closely than in the founding of new states or the preservation of existing ones.”
Book I — Constitutional Decline and the Wise Statesman
The cycle of constitutional decay is not inevitable — but only if statesmen understand it. Cicero’s warning is not merely descriptive but prescriptive, addressed directly to those who would govern:
“There are remarkable revolutions and almost cycles of changes and alterations in commonwealths; to recognize them is the part of a wise man, and to anticipate them when they are about to occur, holding a course and keeping it under his control while governing, is the part of a truly great citizen and nearly divine man.”
The republic does not collapse all at once. It slides — from monarchy to tyranny, from aristocracy to faction, from popular freedom to mob rule — and the statesman’s duty is to see the slide coming and hold the course. This is the essentially republican vocation: not the passive enjoyment of liberty, but its active, vigilant preservation.
Book I — The Commonwealth Without Justice Is No Commonwealth
Cicero’s final and most radical argument is also his most enduring. Anticipating Augustine, he insists that a political community that abandons justice does not merely become unjust — it ceases to be a commonwealth at all:
“The commonwealth is the concern of the people . . . associated with one another through agreement on law and community of interest.”
Remove justice — remove the agreement on law — and what remains is not a flawed republic but no republic whatsoever. The res publica is literally the res populi, the people’s thing. When rulers rule for themselves alone, the people’s thing has been taken from them. The state has dissolved into something else: a tyranny wearing the name of a commonwealth.
Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, ed. and trans. James E. G. Zetzel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), On the Commonwealth Book I, §§25, 39–42, 45–47, 54; Book II, §§1–3; On the Laws Book I.