11

Optimus status civitatis

scipio begins his account of constitutional theory by pointing out (1.43) that each of the three basic constitutions (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy), even when good, has drawbacks;¹ he then shows (44) that each is also subject to rapid mutation into its degenerate counterpart (tyranny, oligarchy, ochlocracy) and that all the simple forms are subject to change into one another.² Hence, Scipio asserts (45), a fourth constitution that is a mixture composed of elements from the three simple forms is preferable to any other. At this point, Laelius impatiently interrupts: this is familiar stuff, and in order better to understand the theory, he would rather learn which of the three simple constitutions Scipio prefers (46). Five of the next nine leaves of the palimpsest are lost, but the shape of what follows is clear: Scipio imagines arguments in favor of their own chosen forms of government by typical democrats (47–50) and aristocrats (51–53). After that, Laelius repeats his question (which Scipio has not answered) about which form Scipio prefers, and Scipio reluctantly reveals his preference for monarchy, while simultaneously summarizing briefly once more the virtues of each of the three simple forms (54–55). After Laelius’ third try to get an answer, Scipio proceeds to conduct a long Socratic dialogue with him, employing arguments in favor of monarchy totally different in both manner and substance from what has come before: he uses analogical arguments based on the hierarchy of the gods (56) and the structure of the human psyche (59–60), historical arguments based on Rome’s own experience (58) and comparison with the structure of the household (61), before returning at the end to Roman history (62–64). He then gives a fuller account of the cycle of constitutions (65–68), including an extended translation from Plato’s description of extreme democracy, before repeating in conclusion his belief that a mixed constitution can embody the virtues while avoiding the instability and failings of each of the simple forms (69).

The idea that there are only three basic forms of government goes back at least to the fifth century, where it is most clearly exemplified in the constitutional debate of Herodotus 3.80–82. Although in the Republic Plato gives five forms of government (degenerating from the ideal through timocracy, oligarchy, and democracy to tyranny, Resp. 8.544c), in the Statesman (301a–303b) he has the standard six (three good and three bad) in addition to the ideal. Aristotle too knows the three good and three bad forms in the Nicomachean Ethics (8.10, 1160a31) and in the Politics (e.g., 3.7, 1279a25–b10), where they are the starting point for his more refined analysis of constitutions in Book 4. Both Scipio and Cicero would have known Scipio’s outline of patterns of constitutional change (1.43–45) from Polybius, whom Scipio knew and Cicero had read; and in addition to Book 6 of Polybius, Cicero certainly knew earlier versions of the theory, including one by Dicaearchus of Messana.³ Even in Latin the mixed constitution was not a novelty but was apparently used by the elder Cato to describe the constitution of Carthage.⁴ The theory starts from the three good simple constitutions; deplores their tendency to degenerate into their evil twins; describes the cycle through which (at least in Polybius) the six forms of constitution succeed one another (monarchy to tyranny to aristocracy to oligarchy to democracy to mob rule); and concludes with the preferability of a government that incorporates elements of all three simple good forms, the so-called mixed constitution. There are variations on this basic pattern, but it is fairly constant.

Since Scipio states in his opening summary all the important elements of a familiar constitutional theory, the subsequent discussion is almost entirely unnecessary: all that is really needed is to apply the theory of the mixed constitution to Rome, as Scipio in fact does in Book 2. Instead, Laelius’ insistent questioning forces Scipio to offer a fuller exploration of the three simple types, but he does so in terms very different from the bare outline of the theory itself. The reason for this extensive elaboration is not far to seek: the theory of constitutions was probably the only language available for talking about the organization of society:⁵ no one in antiquity thought to analyse the problems of government in terms (for example) of function rather than structure or in terms of sovereignty. The first two books of De re publica, taken as a whole, establish a foundation for the very different argument set out in Books 3–6. They show, first, that the best constitution is a mixed one, and second, that Rome’s inherited constitution best embodies that form of government. That was not news: one need only read Polybius Book 6, which Cicero could read in a more complete form than we can, to see a far more detailed analysis of the Roman constitution of the Middle Republic in terms of the theory. Polybius uses it to explain Rome’s political and military success, but Cicero is interested in something else: how such a government can be preserved or restored and what role individuals play within the institutional structure of government. In order to do that, however, he too needs to explain the system within which such individuals and such a government must function, and that is what is established in Books 1 and 2; like Aristotle, he is aware of the close relationship between the virtue of the citizen and the structure of the state, and therefore he needs to describe that structure before moving beyond it. There is much of interest in these books, but their interest lies neither in the theory presented nor (in Book 2) in the facts of Roman history; in essence, Books 1 and 2 contain things that needed to have been said rather than things that needed saying.

That does not, however, altogether explain why the discussion of constitutions is so long and indeed repetitive; after Scipio has said that the mixed constitution is the best, why does Laelius have to ask repeatedly which is the best simple constitution, when we already know that none of them is satisfactory? Even in his initial summary, however, Scipio did not stick to the basic Polybian structure of the theory, and it is his additions and variations that explain the discussion of the simple constitutions that follows.⁶

Scipio’s starting point is simple: a new state needs some kind of government in order to be long-lasting, ut diuturna sit (1.41). He then (42) simply lists and defines the three standard simple constitutions, allowing that if they meet certain minimal conditions, any of them may be adequate to the needs of the new res publica. But Scipio rapidly starts to embellish the plain practicality of his initial description. He first limits the adequacy of the simple forms of government by adding “if injustice and greed don’t get in the way” (42): the simple forms are satisfactory only so long as the government remains honorable. As Scipio describes the three simple forms in more detail (43), the moral tone becomes more obtrusive: he stresses not the practical merits of the three as forms of administration but their drawbacks, particularly their ethical and social failings. Thus, in monarchy no one but the ruler has a share of commune ius et consilium;⁷ in an aristocracy, which Scipio describes in loaded terms as optimatium dominatus, the majority has no share of libertas; in a democracy, because it has no ranks or distinctions (gradus dignitatis), equality itself is inequitable, ipsa aequabilitas est iniqua.⁸ Scipio’s further comments on the three are similarly moralizing: even the reign of the best king is not desirable, as everyone is ruled by one person’s whim; aristocracy reduces people to something like slavery, similitudo quaedam servitutis (matching dominatus used of aristocracy above); in democratic equality the state loses its ornatus. The good qualities of various forms of government appear only through their absence from others: legal rights of some sort (commune ius) and a share in public deliberation (consilium) are missing under monarchy; libertas is missing under aristocracy; and the due regard for proper distinctions of merit (dignitas/ornatus) is absent from democracy. And when Scipio goes on (44) to describe the degenerate forms of the three types, the degeneracy consists only in the exaggeration of just the same drawbacks that are characteristic of the good forms. Dominatus, factio, and mob rule differ only in degree, not in kind, from monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy.

Scipio’s emphasis throughout is not on the workings of the various forms of government but on their moral and social values, those qualities (particularly libertas, consilium, and dignitas) that are not found all together in any one of the simple forms of government but each of which is necessary for a society to be successful. Although there is a lacuna between 1.44 and 1.45, the basic tenor of Scipio’s argument is clear: if even the good simple forms restrict or destroy one or more of the necessary virtues of society, how is one to establish a form of government that allows these somewhat incompatible virtues to coexist? The basic assumption in Scipio’s first presentation seems to be that while the good simple forms, so long as they remain stable, may work administratively, none of them provides the range of ethical values suitable for a lasting society. It is left for the advocates of the various forms themselves to offer positive statements to flesh out their values in the next portion of the discussion.

Bur if one important aspect of Scipio’s summary of constitutional theory is his emphasis on values rather than structures, the other major divagation from Polybian theory is equally significant. Where Polybius had described an immutable order of constitutions at the end of which (in chaos and disaster) the whole cycle would begin again, Scipio believes that any pattern of change is possible. The effect of such “remarkable revolutions and almost cycles of changes and alterations” (1.45) is that, contrary to the Polybian pattern, it is not so easy to predict what is going to happen. In Polybius’ system, anyone who has read Book 6 of the Histories can understand constitutional change; in Scipio’s system, to stay ahead of the game requires real talent (45):

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.

This is, at least in the extant text, the first mention of the central figure in Cicero’s political theory, the statesman who can manage the unruly and not always rational impulses of political life, and whose training and values are crucial to the argument of De re publica. Here, in Scipio’s very first sketch of constitutional theory and political life, his rejection of Polybius’ rigid scheme of anakuklosis opens a space for what really matters to Cicero, the initiative and reason of the individual statesman.

From the very start, therefore, Scipio has created a path to move out in two closely related directions from the tired cycle of constitutions with its emphasis on formal structures; these modifications in fact occupy most of the rest of De re publica. One is his stress on the need for individuals to take action to control or modify the basic system; the other is the emphasis on the values implicit in the various forms of constitution and the ways in which those values need to be fostered or controlled. The stress on individuals becomes important as early as Book 2, in the history of early Rome; the issue of values is what occupies much of the remainder of Book 1. Scipio’s short introduction to political theory is the third of the set of frames for the dialogue offered in Book 1: the discussion of astronomy and the relationship between human and cosmic affairs that begins the dialogue reaches its true conclusion at the very end of Book 6 in the Somnium; Scipio’s broad definitions of the res publica and populus at 1.39 are revisited at the end of Book 3; and the emphasis on morality and the role of the individual citizen in Scipio’s summary of constitutional theory points ahead to the central argument of the dialogue, culminating in (the largely lost) Book 6, on the statesman. In each case, the opening discussion is provisional and incomplete; in each case, it is revised and improved over the course of De re publica.

The social values that emerge from Scipio’s initial summary (libertas, consilium, and dignitas in particular, as noted above) are not explained or justified, nor does Scipio make explicit links between these values and the constitutions that most fully embody them. Those links become clearer later on: libertas is the paramount virtue of democracy and consilium of aristocracy, while dignitas has no precise location, but applies to a properly ordered society as a whole. The first two of these are traditional in Greek political theory: Plato had made phronesis and eleutheria two of the three desirable characteristics of government. Plato’s third characteristic, philia, is linked by Cicero with monarchy later in the discussion, but at this point the positive qualities of monarchy are less apparent than its negative characteristics: a king monopolizes all power and all good qualities, leaving nothing to his subjects.⁹

The difference between Scipio’s initial descriptions of monarchy on the one hand and aristocracy and democracy on the other is continued by the more detailed treatments of each form that follows in response to Laelius’ question. Scipio places the arguments for democracy and aristocracy in the mouths of their supporters, and their speeches explore the meanings of the social values that Scipio had initially left quite vague.¹⁰ The specific virtues of monarchy are explored through an extended Socratic dialogue between Scipio and Laelius—as long as the arguments for democracy and aristocracy combined—emphasizing not moral and social goals but either practical considerations (the need for strong leadership in any government) or, far more ambitiously, the relationship between the governance of human societies and the order of the world, both in macrocosm (the gods and the universe) and in microcosm (the individual psyche).

The fragmentary condition of parts of the argument makes any explanation of the idiosyncrasies of Scipio’s account of constitutions necessarily tentative. Part of the reason for the different techniques of the arguments for democracy and aristocracy on the one hand and for monarchy on the other is simply to avoid the monotony of three parallel expositions. But there is more to it than that: what Scipio/Cicero needs to emerge from the discussion of constitutions is a real sense of why and how their qualities contribute to the common good and the ways in which those qualities need to be managed and controlled. The democrats begin by equating the values of a society with the values of its ruling body; they therefore assert that if the people are not in control, then there is no liberty at all. The phrasing is worth noting: nulla alia in civitate, nisi in qua populi potestas summa est, ullum domicilium libertas habet (“in no other state than that in which the people has the highest power does liberty have any home,” 1.47). Not only is the emphatic nulla . . . ullum the statement of an extreme position, but the democrats also link potestas and libertas, just as at 1.43 iuris communis and potestate are parallel in Scipio’s discussion of what is lost in monarchy and aristocracy, respectively. Liberty is here equated with power; that is, libertas in Scipio’s presentation of the popular view is equated with the power of unrestricted action, liberty in a very active sense.¹¹ The democrats, moreover, argue not only for the obvious position that monarchy entails a sort of slavery for everyone else, but for a much stronger claim, that a state in which the people can vote for candidates but not hold office themselves is also not free: they lack imperium, and they have no role in public deliberations (consilium) or the courts—in other words, they are describing the usual situation of the average Roman citizen. The democrats contrast this with the condition of the people in Rhodes or Athens, where all citizens—but again the palimpsest breaks off. The reference to Athens, however, makes the conclusion plain: there, all citizens could be magistrates, serve in the council, vote in the assembly, and serve on juries; a brief and fragmentary reference to Rhodes at 3.48 shows that there too all citizens could perform all civic functions, although apparently by turns.¹² After the advocates of democracy deny their responsibility for the decline of true democracy to oligarchy or tyranny, they then reiterate their concept of liberty as entailing control of all public affairs, and they state that they view this as the true res publica: “They think this commonwealth (that is, the ‘concern of the people’) is the only one properly so named” (1.48).

For the democrats, the most harmonious and stable state is that “in which everyone has the same interest” (49): shared utility leads to concordia, and any distinction between the ruling body and the mass of citizens leads to the loss of shared utility. From their point of view, true democracy implies the impossibility of recognizing the divergent interests of distinct social classes. The democrats equate the populus with the entire citizen body, while of course Scipio equates the populus with one (albeit very large) section of the populace. The ensuing syllogism implicitly links harmony and liberty through the idea of equality (49): “Since law is the bond of civil society, and rights under law are equal, then by what right (quo iure) can a society of citizens be held together, when the status of citizens is not the same (par)?”¹³ In other words, the democratic view (in Scipio’s version of it) is that equal access to law implies equal status under law. The paramount importance of liberty is taken as a given, and from that the democrats infer that liberty involves not just equality of rights but equality of power; and without that, there is no true societas civium (49). In the final surviving paragraph of the speech (there are gaps both before and after), they reject the other two forms of constitution by returning to the theme that all limitation of popular power is slavery, and that the names that other governing bodies give themselves are misleading: “king” is a title of Jupiter, but in terms of power and lack of accountability there is no difference between a king and a tyrant;¹⁴ “optimate” also is a false title, because these people are not “best” in any way that one could admire or accept, that is, learning or intelligence. The end of the sentence and of the speech is lost.

The democrats’ speech emphasizes political participation; the subsequent speech of the aristocrats emphasizes wisdom, experience, and character—government for, but not of, the people. Libertas accordingly plays a much smaller part in the argument for aristocracy: liber and its cognates appear some eight times in the democrats’ speech but only twice in the aristocrats’ argument. Instead, the dominant idea of the aristocrats is virtus, which appears four times in the three surviving chapters—and not once in the democratic argument. The opening of the aristocrats’ speech, like that of the democrats, is lost. When the palimpsest resumes, they are making the case that not even a radical democracy is actually run by the entire people (1.51): whenever leadership or expertise is required, one or a few individuals are chosen to take charge. If in a crisis we need the best possible leader (optimum quemque), they argue, then the safety of the state resides in optimorum consiliis. The aristocrats define the ideal as the rule of the “best,” those who are outstanding uirtute et animo. And as the democrats rebut the rejection of democracy on the basis of its perversions, so the aristocrats reject the criticism of aristocracy because the rich and noble are often chosen to rule in place of those of outstanding uirtus: they blame that mistake on the uulgus. The ideal is an aristocracy of merit, the rule of uirtus (52), and they justify the rule of the few on the grounds that no one person (a monarch) can be adequately provident, while the multitude is too prone to error and folly. Hence the optimates occupy the middle and best ground.

The obvious gap in this argument concerns the method of selecting the ruling body: if (as they admit) uirtus is hard to recognize, then why should anyone expect that the select few who govern will be selected for legitimate reasons? Only the virtuous, presumably, can recognize virtue, and a closed, self-selected circle (which will not necessarily remain virtuous or wise) is the result. The problem of selection is precisely what the democrats were using as an argument against aristocracy when the palimpsest broke off at the end of 1.50. The condescending argument of the aristocrats reveals their scorn for the abilities of the people at large, and therefore for their rights. When aristocrats rule the commonwealth, they say, the people are necessarily beatissimos: “they are free from every worry and thought, and their otium is in the hands of others,” who are to look after them (52). The aristocrats argue that equality under law is nonsense (53): in the first place, the people themselves refute it by choosing leaders rather than running everything collectively—an obviously false argument, moving from legal equality to equality of power in precisely the same way as the democrats had also done in the service of a very different argument; in the second place, they say, echoing Scipio himself (43), that equality is inequitable, because there are naturally better and worse people in every population. The argument that there is no natural equality of talent or merit is one that even democrats would accept; but in the course of making it, the aristocrats move from saying that aequabilitas (equality) is unfair, to saying that aequitas (equity) is unfair—a step that is not defended, but which reveals that the criticism of aristocracy as imposing something like slavery on the populace is fully justified.

Taken as a pair, the two speeches reveal the flaws in both positions as Scipio sees them, and which he had more or less identified in his initial description of the constitutions: if democrats are unacceptably radical and egalitarian, aristocrats are unacceptably arrogant and exclusive and exercise too much control over the people, and even the “good” form of their constitutions contains within it the failings that characterize the debased forms. In Scipio’s presentation, both sets of advocates are their own worst enemies. Cicero presumably did not invent these speeches from whole cloth; the implicit criticisms of both democracy and aristocracy embedded in their own statements are similar to Aristotle’s broad criticism of rule by the many and the few in the Politics: that the failing of democracy is to believe that those equal in one thing are equal in all, and of oligarchy to believe that those unequal in one thing are unequal in all.¹⁵ Cicero probably did not know the Politics directly, but he did know the work of Aristotle’s pupil Dicaearchus, and what is said here may owe something to him.¹⁶ But the shape of these arguments, like the shape of Crassus’ history of philosophy in De oratore Book 3, is Cicero’s own. There is no need for a parallel speech from a monarchist to demonstrate the failings of democracy and aristocracy, because their own advocates have done it themselves.

Given that the democrats and aristocrats have successfully demonstrated the unacceptability of their own preferred forms of government, it can no longer seem surprising when Scipio, in finally replying to Laelius’ repeated question about the best of the three simple forms, chooses monarchy. Given also that no specific virtue was assigned to monarchy by Scipio in his initial summary of the theory, the virtue with which he now credits it comes as something new. Although the sentence about monarchy (1.54) is damaged, enough survives to show that monarchy is preferable because of its paternal qualities, the care exercised by the monarch and the mutual affection (encapsulated in the word caritas) between monarch and subjects. The claim of the aristocrats to wisdom is marred by their arrogance; that of the democrats to liberty by their extremism. What remains to be seen—and Laelius, as usual, is the one to ask for elaboration—is why the patriarchal authority of a king is better than the other two types of government.

It is important not to misinterpret Scipio’s stated preference for monarchy; it certainly does not mean, as Niebuhr thought on his first reading, that Cicero/Scipio was in fact advocating a constitutional monarchy for Rome similar to the English constitution of the early nineteenth century, nor should it be thought to imply, when taken with the later portions of De re publica concerning the rector, that Cicero was in favor of anything more than temporary power, if that, in the hands of any one individual.¹⁷ A preference for monarchy among the simple constitutions was traditional: monarchy is listed as the best of the six regular constitutions by Plato in the Statesman (302e), and it is taken as the best by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics (8.10, 1160a35) as well. Scipio’s ranking of constitutions, with monarchy as best and tyranny as worst, is completely unexceptionable in the context of ancient political theory. On the other hand, monarchy is always regarded as different in kind from other forms of constitution. Aristotle in the Politics largely excludes it, because it is only a valid form of government if one person (the monarch) all but monopolizes virtue; and anyone of that sort is too self-sufficient to belong in a polis in any case.¹⁸ Even Scipio himself in Book 2 says that a monarchic mixed constitution is in fact a contradiction in terms: if there is a king, even if there are other organs of government, monarchy will predominate and will monopolize power, excellit atque eminet vis potestas nomenque regium (2.50).

The argument for monarchy presented in Book 1 is conducted in a completely different manner with completely different types of argument from the statements in support of the other forms of government. Although in the brief syncrisis of the three simple forms (55), Scipio identifies caritas (reciprocal affection) as the specific virtue of monarchy, that is clearly not what he sees as the essential quality of monarchic rule. He argues first from the generally accepted view that there is one ruler, Jupiter, among the gods (56). So too, as the beginning of a sentence shows just before a lacuna of two folia (57), important early philosophers argued that there was a single supreme divinity or ruling principle; likewise, the states of the East were also all monarchic. When the text resumes (58), the argument is on the basis of history rather than theology or myth: Rome itself in historical times, and not that long ago, was ruled by kings.

None of these arguments gives any reason to prefer monarchy as a practical form of government in the real world. No specific virtue of monarchy has been mentioned, no reason why monarchy should be seen as a more effective or useful form of government than any other. But at this point Scipio turns to a very different sort of argument, based on the analogy of the human psyche and on domestic organization. Thus, he argues that just as reason (consilium) must rule over the passions, so too it is necessary for there to be a single (rational) leader in the state (59–60); and to prove that this consilium can only be located in one individual he uses the analogy of the household, in which one steward or manager is placed in complete charge of a single estate (61). This second set of arguments is indeed based on practical considerations, on the need for some form of executive authority in society: sooner or later, Scipio argues, somebody must be in a position to make decisions. What is notably absent is any argument based on some intrinsic virtue of monarchy comparable to the liberty of the democrats or the wisdom and virtue of the aristocrats—and there is certainly no hint of equality. The first set of arguments, from divine monarchy and from historical priority are of course unconvincing in this context: Scipio assumes that the rulership of Jupiter is a fiction or a myth,¹⁹ and as his later mention (62) of the fall of the Roman monarchy makes clear, historical priority is not exactly a compelling argument for the virtues of monarchy.

At the end of the discussion of monarchy, Scipio does turn to Roman history as a proof of monarchic excellence, but it is a very strange argument. Starting from the familiar images (first in praeteritio [62], then in the argument itself [63]) of the helmsman and the doctor, he refers to the fall of Tarquin and the subsequent hatred of the Roman people for even the title “king.” But his point here is not to emphasize the evils of tyranny or its inevitability as the sequel to a good monarchy but to show that when the monarchy/tyranny fell, the people indulged in excessive libertas and behaved like a mob. Even so, he points out, in emergencies they turned to the rule of a single leader, the dictator (a topic Scipio returns to in Book 2). The implication, although it is not spelled out—unless perhaps in the lacuna after 63—is that even tyranny is somehow a more practical and useful form of government than mob rule: in emergencies, the rule of one person is necessary, whoever or however tyrannical he may be. The final paragraph (64) of the argument for monarchy refers to the just king and the death of Romulus: the people loved him and viewed him as a father or a god (with a quotation from Ennius); it was only the transition from monarchy to tyranny that led to the fall of the Roman monarchy.

Having at the end of the argument for monarchy described the transition from monarchy to tyranny, Scipio completes the circle of the argument by returning to the cycle of constitutions, giving a fuller description of the possible permutations of constitutional form (1.65). Scipio has made his point about monarchy: a good king is loved by his subjects and therefore embodies the best form of simple constitution in which all the participants are in some way contented, as is clearly not the case in aristocracy or democracy (at least in Scipio’s representation of them); but the fact that monarchy embodies caritas is clearly less important than the fact that it embodies the necessary use of power: monarchy need not be good, but it is needed. Accordingly, the account of constitutional change dwells extensively, especially through the emotionally heightened translation from Plato, on the evils that attend the misuse of power by a mob or a tyrant. The cycle of constitutions as a whole reveals the greatest failing of all the simple forms of government, that they are incapable of that diuturnitas that is the goal of all constitutional arrangements.

In conclusion, Scipio once again states his preference for the mixed constitution, offering a formal sententia that it is desirable for each of the three forms to have some representation:²⁰ some leading element, quiddam . . . praestans et regale; something given to the auctoritas of the principes; and some things set aside for popular decision, iudicio voluntatique multitudinis. Just what functions are to be apportioned to each of these elements is left unclear, and the virtues of the blended form are also imprecise: on the one hand aequabilitas (more or less identical to the description of the three elements in the previous sentence), on the other firmitudo, that is to say the stability that is not to be found in the simple forms. That element is elaborated: if each element is in a fixed place, then the whole cannot change or collapse.

Scipio’s sententia, however, has one crucial qualification, his warning that what causes the mixed constitution to fail is magna principum vitia. This addition not only emphasizes the role of leaders in any government (principes), as in the first account of the mixed constitution (1.45), but returns to the moral tone of the initial description of the simple constitutions, nullis interiectis iniquitatibus aut cupiditatibus (42): without leaders and without morals, even the most stable form of government cannot survive. A good form of government (the mixed constitution) is a necessary condition for the survival of a commonwealth, but it is not a sufficient one: in the long run, the right kind of constitution is not hard to identify, and it is based on broadly acceptable principles. Maintaining it, however, requires something more: virtuous leaders. The effect of Scipio’s phrase about moral leadership ultimately minimizes the importance of constitutional theory itself. In various sections and through various types of argument, Scipio draws attention to both the desirable qualities of any government (equity, wisdom, dignitas, caritas) and the practical needs of administration (imperium). But there is no coherent statement or analysis of the precise structure or blend of qualities and powers that is most effective; the contrast between Scipio’s treatment of constitutional theory and Aristotle’s in Book 4 of the Politics is telling. And nothing in the whole theory matters nearly so much as the morality of the principes: as the entire subsequent discussion will demonstrate, without virtus no res publica can long survive.

Scipio has finished the argument about the mixed constitution, and he breaks off at this point. He is, however, dissatisfied with what he has said (1.70):

But I’m afraid, Laelius and all you other very good and wise friends, that if I continue too long in this vein, I’ll seem to speak like some instructor or lecturer instead of a fellow-inquirer into this subject. So I’ll turn to something everyone knows, and which we started looking for some time ago. This is my own opinion, my belief, my judgment: that no commonwealth, in either its organization or its structure or its manner of education and training, can be compared to the one our fathers received from their ancestors and have passed on to us.

Scipio’s self-criticism here is very revealing about Cicero’s construction of the constitutional argument in Book 1. Scipio criticizes himself for behaving like a professor (praecipientis cuiusdam et docentis), exactly what he said at the outset (1.36, 38) he was not going to do. In this phrase cuiusdam is derogatory; at 1.36 he had described this kind of behavior as Greek rather than Roman. And that what he has said is too Greek is, in retrospect, all too clear: until the discussion of the virtues and drawback of kingship where Romulus and Tarquinius Superbus are introduced (1.62–64), with the exception of one reference to Massilienses nostri clientes (1.43), every government mentioned is Greek (and in fact Massilia was a Greek city too) and almost all of what Scipio has said could have been written in fourth-century Athens. He had not meant to talk about Greece, but about Rome; he had not meant to talk down to his audience like a professor. Sic enim decerno, sic sentio, sic adfirmo: Scipio has renounced Greek manners and content and speaks again as a Roman senator, offering in Book 2 an account of Roman government beginning with Romulus. The end of Book 1 is in some ways reminiscent of the end of Book 1 of Plato’s Republic: Scipio, like Socrates, suddenly finds the whole previous discussion futile, and starts again in Book 2.

Scipio’s opening statement in his narrative of Roman constitutional history offers both a continuation of his lecture on constitutional theory and a parallel to it. It is a continuation, albeit a contrasting one, in switching from professorial mode to senatorial mode and from Greek theory to Roman experience: it is no accident that the first word Scipio speaks in Book 2 is Catonis. On the other hand, it is parallel to Book 1 in that Scipio’s initial paragraph, like his opening summary of constitutional theory in Book 1, establishes a set of issues that—in part continuing those in Book 1—hint at the ways in which the application of the theory of constitutions to the specific situation of Rome is less than straightforward.

Scipio starts by praising the elder Cato, first expressing his admiration for the man himself, then reporting his ideas about the Roman constitution. Cato, he said, drew a contrast between the constitutions created by single individuals in various Greek cities (including Minos, Lycurgus, and a series of Athenian constitution-writers) and the slow and gradual growth of the Roman constitution (2.2):

Our commonwealth, in contrast, was shaped not by one man’s talent but by that of many; and not in one person’s lifetime, but over many generations. He said there never was a genius so great that he could miss nothing, nor could all the geniuses in the world brought together in one place at one time foresee all contingencies without the practical experience afforded by the passage of time.

Time, experience, and the collective wisdom of generations are required to make something good and lasting: it is foolish to imagine that a worthwhile structure for something as complex as government could be created by one person, however brilliant. This basic contrast between the slow shaping of government by many hands over a long time and the instant constitutions of Greece is something Cato shares with Polybius, who views the Lycurgan constitution of Sparta (named by Cato, at least in Scipio’s paraphrase) and the Roman constitution as the best examples of mixed constitutions; he admires the Spartan constitution as the result of the wisdom and foresight of a single founder, while Rome’s achievement of the ideal mixed constitution is in his view the result of fortunate choices over a long series of critical decisions.²¹

The opening paragraph of Book 2, however, then makes a second and somewhat different contrast between quick and slow constitutions, when Scipio, before beginning his narrative of the reign of Romulus, opposes his own Catonian methods to those of Plato (2.3):

So I will follow his model, and take my start from the origin (originem) of the Roman people; I’m happy to make use of Cato’s own word. I’ll have an easier time completing my task, if I show you our commonwealth as it’s born, grows up, and comes of age, and as a strong and well-established state, than if I make up (finxero) some state as Socrates does in Plato.

The three possibilities of constitution making adumbrated in this paragraph entail two kinds of contrast, both of which play important roles in Scipio’s account. On the one hand, there is a tension between the two kinds of constitution that exist in real-world societies such as Sparta and Rome: those that are made all at once, and thus from the outset have a coherent blueprint for government, and those that take shape over time, and thus have a kind of patchwork of changes and adaptations to circumstance and necessity. On the other hand, there is an equally important opposition between any real-world constitution (taking both Lycurgus and Romulus as historical figures) and the completely abstract Kallipolis shaped by Plato without regard to real-world conditions. When Scipio uses the verb fingo to describe how Plato worked, it is not complimentary; it is used again by Laelius (2.22) to denigrate Plato’s methods in comparison to Scipio’s, and it is the same verb used by Antonius in De oratore (1.224) when he attacks the uselessness of Plato’s fiction.²² The contrast between the real Rome of Scipio and the imaginary Kallipolis is fundamental to De re publica as a whole, but the relationship between historical foundations and philosophical foundations is, as will become evident, of particular importance in Book 2.

Scipio’s subsequent account of early Rome is historical—the earliest surviving narrative of Rome’s early history—but our ability to compare it to other accounts is unfortunately limited. The two historical sources named by Scipio are Cato and Polybius, but the extent to which the narrative is drawn from either or both is unclear. Scipio mentions Cato’s Origines (2.3), but not enough of the Origines survives for any useful comparison.²³ He names Polybius as a source for chronology (2.27), but although the broad structure of Books 1 and 2 is certainly indebted to the structure of Polybius Book 6 (theory of constitutions followed by early Roman history), the historical part of Polybius’ account is almost entirely lost. Scipio cites these two sources, as T. J. Cornell has argued, because they are the two that the real Scipio would certainly have known and used, and Cicero is careful to avoid anachronisms.²⁴ In general, Scipio’s account differs very little from other accounts of early Rome (e.g., Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus): the same kings in the same order with generally the same personalities and actions. Where it differs from other accounts is that Scipio sticks fairly tightly to his subject: political change and the constitution. As a result, he leaves out much standard material, particularly miraculous or dishonorable tales, the mythic antecedents of Romulus, and most events involving women. This is an austere version of Roman history, with no enlivening incidents and anecdotes.²⁵

What is striking about Scipio’s version of the history of Rome’s constitution is that the strong distinction made at the outset between instant constitutions and gradual growth rapidly turns out to be a red herring. What Scipio describes is simultaneously a cycle of constitutions (as in the theory of Book 1 or in Polybius) and a mixed constitution that is in some sense immanent from the foundation: what changes over time is the balance of its elements, but every element is there in the reign of Romulus. Thus, in collaboration with Titus Tatius, Romulus creates a regium consilium called the patres (2.14). Scipio first calls it quasi senatus (15), but in his summary of Romulus’ accomplishments it is simply senatus (17). Although not a formal senate, Romulus’ patres clearly represent an element of aristocratic rule, and when Scipio says that after the death of Titus Tatius Romulus ruled multo etiam magis . . . patrum auctoritate consilioque (14), consilium calls to mind the leading attribute of aristocracies as described in Book 1, and auctoritas belongs to the Roman senate itself.

The popular element is also present, if less active, in Romulus’ reign. Again with Titus Tatius, Romulus creates the comitia curiata, dividing the people into three tribes and thirty curiae (14). There is no suggestion that Romulus made use of this assembly in the same way that we are told he made use of the proto-senate; but it is ready to be used later. Thus, after Proculus Iulius’ vision of the newly divine Romulus/Quirinus (20), the people are asked to ordain a delubrum for the new divinity on the Quirinal hill, presumably acting through the comitia curiata. More important is the sequel: after the death of Romulus, the senate attempts to rule on its own but is compelled by the populus to select (using the new institution of the interrex) a successor as king.²⁶ That is done by the senate and the people acting together: the senate are auctores, and the people as a whole issue the invitation for Numa to come to rule Rome (25). All told, this episode is a good example of the different constituent groups working together, with the kind of cooperation one would hope for in a mixed constitution.

Romulus’ careful organization of social institutions is an early clue to the perfected mixed constitution. He views the establishment of a senatorial council as a means of softening royal power through the auctoritas of the best men, and he pays close attention to the people: on a practical level, Romulus enriches them through military spoils (15); on an institutional level, he establishes the system of clientela and the use of fines rather than vis as punishment (16). Through such measures, Romulus stabilizes his new res publica: the people are grateful for booty and for the mildness of criminal penalties; they are kept in line through the system of clientela and through the auspices that provide divine authentication for the king’s actions. The caritas which Scipio gives as a principal attribute of monarchy at 1.55 is present in the account of Romulus through the caritas that gives the patres their name (2.14) and through the desiderium which the people feel for Romulus after his death (1.64). Romulus’ authority is absolute—Scipio describes it as vis dominationis (2.15), but his genius as a ruler is to use affection and generosity both to cloak and to reinforce his power.

Each of the early kings, in fact, governs by making his regal power appear more moderate and by encouraging the participation of the other orders. Scipio repeatedly refers to the practice of having the king’s imperium ratified by a separate lex curiata: so first with Numa (25), then Tullus Hostilius (31), Ancus Marcius (33), and Tarquinius Priscus (35). In Numa’s case, nomination by the senate is explicit, but it is made at the people’s insistence; the people alone are named as the source of election in the other three cases. The participation of the senate must, however, be assumed, as the accession of Servius Tullius marks a distinct break: he began to exercise monarchic authority by claiming to act on behalf of Tarquinius Priscus, and only after he felt secure in his power did he seek popular approval without senatorial endorsement (38):

He didn’t ask the approval of the Fathers, but after Tarquinius was buried he asked for the approval of the people and having gained it he carried a law concerning his own powers.

Although Scipio never says so, the comitas and generosity of Tarquinius Priscus (35) which result in his unanimous choice as king by the people (cunctis populi suffragiis) are the precedent for the more overtly populist behavior of Servius Tullius. And though it is not stated, such behavior anticipates the appeal to popular support of later demagogues who aim at regnum.²⁷

It is not only Tarquinius and Servius who display hints of populism. Numa distributes land viritim, an act of generosity that is also intended to transform warriors into farmers (26). Tullus uses spoils to erect public buildings and extends the custom of seeking a lex curiata de imperio to asking popular approval for the use of lictors (31; the end of the sentence is missing). Ancus distributes land and founds the colony of Ostia (33). The kings also cultivate the aristocracy: Numa creates new priesthoods for them (26); Tarquinius Priscus doubles the size of the senate; and, most important, Servius Tullius establishes the plutocratic organization of the comitia centuriata, designed to strengthen the power of the aristocracy while appearing to extend the authority of the people (39–40). Above all, through the establishment of benign social practices and religious structures, the kings (particularly Numa) attempt to reinforce the concordia of a unified, harmonious, and deferential society.

Scipio’s description of Servius Tullius’ centuriate assembly is unfortunately fragmentary: a missing leaf after 2.38 contained the beginning, and two leaves lost after 2.40 contained the end. What is more, Scipio himself says that because the whole organization is familiar to his hearers, he does not need to explain it fully (39). But even without knowing the details (which also disagree in some particulars with other accounts of the comitia centuriata) we can see the point: the arrangement was intended to institutionalize a governmental structure which allowed some responsibility to all classes but left the weight of authority with the wealthy (40):

And so no one was kept from the right to vote but the people who had the most power in the voting were those who had the greatest interest in maintaining the state in the best possible condition.

The optimus status is the mixed constitution, as described in Book 1: the people have limited power; the aristocracy has greater weight; and there is still a monarch in control of the system. Rome reached a version of its ideal government long before it had reached its ideal government.

But if the ideal constitution was at least adumbrated by Romulus in the very first years of Rome’s history, then in some ways Romulus is, like Polybius’ Lycurgus, the creator of a whole constitution, not merely a first step. The parallel with Lycurgus is important. Scipio repeatedly compares Romulus’ judgment and wisdom to that of his near-contemporary Lycurgus: both recognize the importance of giving some responsibility to an aristocracy (2.15), but both also demonstrate that a monarchic mixed constitution is in fact a contradiction in terms. When there is a monarchy, it must inevitably prevail and dominate the other elements of the constitution (2.42–43, 2.50). Indeed, Scipio’s account makes it clear both that the Romans did better than Lycurgus in having an elective rather than hereditary monarchy (2.24) and that Lycurgus’ constitution itself was imperfect and eventually needed the modification of adding ephors to the original elements (2.58). Thus, while Scipio and Polybius agree in seeing Rome’s constitution as something produced over time, Scipio makes it clear that in fact Romulus was just as successful a founder as Lycurgus had been: not only is a monarchic mixed constitution of the kind that both Lycurgus and Romulus envisaged not a stable system, but Lycurgus’ constitution had also undergone change.²⁸

Although in Scipio’s account of the foundation of Rome Romulus is at least as inspired a leader as Lycurgus, Scipio’s account does not pass without comment. After Scipio has finished describing the reign of Romulus and his deification and epiphany as Quirinus, he points out just how far Rome has developed within a single reign (2.21):²⁹

So do you see that one man’s planning not only created a new people but brought it to full growth (adultum), almost to maturity, not leaving it like some infant bawling in a cradle?

Adultus is one of the word that Scipio had used at the outset (2.3) to describe the fully developed constitution, but here it is, already full grown under Romulus.³⁰ Laelius in response praises Scipio’s original methods but is skeptical about the validity of the results, and in particular about Scipio’s account of Romulus’ selection of a site for Rome (2.21–22):

We do see that, and we see that you’ve introduced a new kind of analysis, something to be found nowhere in the writings of the Greeks. That great man, the greatest of all writers, chose his own territory on which to build a state to suit his own ideas. It may be a noble state, but it’s totally alien to human life and customs. [22] All the others wrote about the types and principles of states without any specific model or form of commonwealth. You seem to me to be doing both: from the outset, you’ve preferred to attribute your own discoveries to others rather than inventing (fingere) it all yourself in the manner of Plato’s Socrates; and you ascribe to Romulus’ deliberate planning (revoces ad rationem) all the features of the site of the city which were actually the result of chance or necessity. Moreover, your discussion doesn’t wander, but is fixed on one commonwealth. So go on as you’ve begun; I think I can already foresee a commonwealth being brought to perfection as you go through the remaining kings.

Laelius’ criticism brings back the contrast made by Scipio in his opening paragraph between Rome’s genuine constitutional history and the fiction of Plato’s Kallipolis; he compares Scipio’s account of Romulus’ foundation of Rome with the approaches taken by Plato on the one hand and the Peripatetics on the other: the former described the creation and organization of a single state, but one that is completely unrealistic, while the others discussed the theory of government in general without any one particular model. Scipio has given both a detailed account of one state like Plato and a rational analysis (revoces ad rationem) of the historical development of Rome’s constitution in the manner of the Peripatetics.³¹

At the same time, however, Laelius makes it eminently clear that he views Scipio’s account of Romulus’ foundation of the city as highly implausible. What Scipio gives is not history but an argument based on reason, and the word ratio appears three times in Laelius’ speech; Scipio is attributing to Romulus, who actually chose the site of Rome by chance or necessity, the kind of reasoning of which Scipio, but not Romulus, was actually capable. He says that Scipio prefers to attribute his own original ideas to others rather than follow Plato in appearing as the inventor of what he says (ipse fingere); in other words, Scipio’s version of Romulus’ reasoning in establishing Rome where he did is just as fictional as Socrates’ construction of the Kallipolis. Thus it would appear that all three possible ways of accounting for constitutions, while formally incompatible with one another, are somehow represented in Scipio’s account: the contributions of many people over time, the creation of a constitution by one gifted founder, and the imaginary inventions of philosophers.

The attack on Plato’s Kallipolis is familiar and frequent, but it is not the main point of Laelius’ criticism here: nobody is accusing Scipio of inventing Rome.³² What Laelius does mean is that Scipio has transformed Romulus into a kind of philosopher by attributing to him a quality of reasoning that a primitive ruler is very unlikely to have possessed. Scipio does not transform Romulus quite so much as Laelius suggests: the explanation of the merits of the site is presented as Scipio’s own reasoning, not Romulus’. At the same time, however, we happen to know that Scipio’s account of the choice of a site has a Greek philosophical source: it is based at least in part on the work of the Peripatetic Dicaearchus (fr. 79M). Is the foundation of Rome in fact a philosophical fiction just as much as the Kallipolis?

We know of the relationship between Scipio’s account and Dicaearchus only by chance. Scipio argues that founding a city on the seacoast is morally dangerous, and he adduces the moral looseness of Greek cities as evidence: all the Peloponnesian cities except Phlius border the sea, very few other cities of metropolitan Greece are landlocked, and of all the Greek colonies throughout the Mediterranean world, only Magnesia has no coastline (2.8–9). Cicero himself tells us that the description of the Peloponnesus came from Dicaearchus: in a letter to Atticus (6.2.3), he says that he found it in a work of Dicaearchus about Trophonius and copied it totidem verbis.³³ The one mistake he made—and that is why he is writing to Atticus—is that he used Phliuntios (as P still has it) rather than the correct Phliasios to name the inhabitants of Phlius.

In citing Dicaearchus in the letter, Cicero says only that Dicaearchus was criticizing the Greeks quod mare tantum secuti sunt and spoke of the coastal location of the Peloponnesian states. In Scipio’s account of the site of Rome, this is just a part of a considerably larger argument (2.7–10) in which Scipio praises Romulus for avoiding the moral dangers of the sea; that argument has a different philosophical source in Plato, Laws 4.704a–705b, in which the Athenian Stranger argues that proximity to the coast engenders immorality and corruption through commercial habits. Dicaearchus may have taken this argument from Plato, and Cicero may have found it in Dicaearchus, but—since Cicero certainly knew Plato’s Laws well—it is even more likely that the allusion to Plato is Cicero’s. Despite saying that he borrowed from Dicaearchus word for word, Cicero has clearly embellished: the references to the destruction of Carthage and Corinth (2.7) and to Phoenician and Etruscan piracy (9) are Roman, and the reference to Magnesia as the one Greek city not bordering the sea (9) almost certainly alludes to Plato: Magnesia is the name of the city invented in Plato’s Laws, and its inland site is the occasion for Plato’s discussion of the dangers of coastal locations.

Given Cicero’s careful avoidance of anachronism and his attention to chronology, he certainly did not want his readers to imagine Romulus making his decision about where to put Rome on the basis of having studied Plato and Dicaearchus. Laelius, with his ironic comment on the implausibility of Scipio’s Romulus, seems to ridicule just that possibility by suggesting that Scipio has imputed to Romulus the kind of philosophical knowledge and moral reasoning that Scipio himself might possess but Romulus clearly did not, and Scipio’s Romulus is certainly far more sophisticated than the primitive and violent shepherd found in Polybius and elsewhere.³⁴ At the same time, however, we may well be expected to imagine that Scipio (and Laelius) has read those works and can formulate a highly complex and allusive explanation of the reasoning used by Rome’s founder. After all, Scipio introduces his discussion of constitutional theory by expressing his dissatisfaction with what the Greek philosophers (summi ex Graecia sapientissimique homines) had written about the subject (1.36), which suggests that, at least for Cicero’s purposes, he had studied them himself.

The questions that arise from this passage—who is the putative reader of Plato and Dicaearchus, and who is responsible for understanding the merits of the site of Rome—are not simply academic puzzles. Cicero (or Scipio) takes great pains in both parts of his speech in the first two books to emphasize the sophistication of Romulus and other early Roman founders and to draw comparisons to analogous Greeks. In Book 1, one of Scipio’s proofs of the virtue of monarchy is based on chronology: Rome had kings fewer than 400 years ago (counting from 129), and Romulus lived only 600 years ago—at a time, Laelius agrees, when Greece was already growing old (prope senescente Graecia)—and Romulus, through a very specious argument based on Greek rather than Roman chronology, is shown to have been a king of non-barbarians (1.58):

If men who were both intelligent (prudentes) and fairly recent wanted to have kings, then my witnesses are neither very ancient nor inhuman savages.

From the very beginning, Romans are prudentes; and even though synchronism with Greece is used to make the argument, its purpose is to show that while the two may be parallel, Rome is not dependent on Greece.

A variation on the same chronological argument appears in the discussion in Book 2 of Romulus’ deification. Through a long and detailed analysis of chronology, Scipio shows that Romulus lived at a time of great culture, “when Greece was already full of poets and musicians” (2.18): 751/0 (Cicero’s Polybian date for the foundation of Rome) is long after the time of Lycurgus (108 years before the first Olympiad), which in turn is thirty years after the latest reasonable date for Homer; a further set of comparisons with the dates of Greek poets is obscured by the loss of part of a folium. The point of Scipio’s argument is to show how extraordinary the deification of Romulus was: all other deified men lived in mythical times, but by Romulus’ time people were well enough educated to be skeptical about such things. But again, although Greek cultural history is used to enhance by association the intellectual stature of Rome, Scipio very carefully does not make Rome at this stage dependent on Greek culture.

One further chronological argument makes the intellectual independence of early Rome from Greece explicit. After Scipio has finished describing the reign of Numa, Manilius asks whether Numa was a pupil of Pythagoras, as he has often heard.³⁵ Scipio’s response is emphatically negative (2.28):

The whole story is false, Manilius, and not only a fiction but a clumsy and ridiculous one. Lies are particularly intolerable when we can see that they’re not only fictions but completely impossible.

The proof is again chronological: Pythagoras came to Italy in the fourth year of the reign of Tarquinius Superbus, fully 140 years after the death of Numa, and no student of chronology has ever doubted it. Manilius is relieved (2.29):

But in fact I can happily accept that we weren’t educated by foreign and imported learning, but by home-grown domestic virtues.

From the discussion of Numa and Pythagoras, Scipio then draws the conclusion that the success of Roman government is the result of ancestral wisdom; even those things that have been imported (and he does not say what they are, or from where) were improved by the Romans (2.30). It is consilium and disciplina that have made Rome what it is; they had some help from fortuna—but none (he does not need to add again) from Greeks or philosophers.

The conclusion of this series of arguments about Rome’s independence from Greece comes at the moment when Greek influence actually does appear, with Tarquinius Priscus. In outline, the story is the standard one: the Corinthian Demaratus went into exile in Tarquinii, married a local woman, and his son Lucumo in turn moved to Rome where he eventually became king (as Lucius Tarquinius) in succession to Ancus Marcius. But in Scipio’s version, the arrival of Tarquinius is explicitly described as the first introduction of Greek culture to Rome (2.34):

At this point, the state first seems to have become more cultivated by a sort of graft of education. It was no mere trickle from Greece that flowed into the city, but a full river of education and learning.

Similarly, Demaratus’ education of his children is described as a training in Greek culture, and when Tarquinius becomes king, his reform of the equites is said to be based on Corinthian custom (2.36).³⁶ It is not clear precisely what the Greek artes and disciplinae were at the end of the seventh century bce; the funding of the cavalry at Corinth is the only example given, but the implication of Scipio’s language is that the Greek influence is cultural rather than political: from this time on, there is a blending of Greek ideas with Roman experience. Encounters with Greece become more significant thereafter: even though in the early Republic the economic reforms of Solon are not followed, they are apparently known, and even before that Tarquinius Superbus follows Greek custom and sends an embassy to Delphi.³⁷ Up to the arrival of Tarquinius Priscus, however, Roman ratio did it all.

As Laelius’ comment at 2.22 makes clear, however, more than one kind of ratio is involved in Scipio’s account of the early monarchy: the ratio of Romulus in making the right choices and the ratio of Scipio in explaining them. While both Romulus and Scipio were capable of good statesmanship, only one of them was capable of explaining it. Cicero in the preface to De re publica makes it clear that his own claim to be able to write De re publica comes from his combination of experience and learning (1.13), and Scipio himself, at the start of his account of constitutional theory, says that he has both read what the Greeks have written and has had significant experience of public life (1.36); the former, he says, was less useful. It is not until the preface to Book 3, after Scipio has finished his discussion of early Rome and after the subsequent discussion introduces the analogy of nature, specifically of the human mind, as a means of explaining the optimus status civitatis, that Cicero offers a real explanation of how Greek learning and Roman experience are best combined. This whole section of the text is very fragmentary; but there is enough left to get some idea of what Cicero is doing.

As with the second preface in De oratore, the second preface in De re publica contains Cicero’s views about the speakers in his dialogue; and just as the preface to De oratore Book 2 explains how much Crassus and Antonius knew about Greek culture and how they used it, so too in the preface to Book 3 of De re publica Cicero seems to have talked about the intellectual capacities of the three major speakers of the dialogue, Scipio, Laelius, and Philus.³⁸ Cicero’s account began from Nature’s treatment of human beings: according to a summary in Augustine (3.1), noverca natura (“stepmotherly Nature”) sent man out into the world feeble in body and spirit, but humans also possess, albeit somewhat smothered, a divine flame of ingenium and mens. From this, Cicero went on (3) to talk about the power of inventive reason to overcome the physical disabilities of human beings, including the invention of vehicles, articulate language, and then writing, enabling communication at a distance. From words and writing Cicero moved to numbers, then to the observation of the heavens and the reckoning of time.

When the text resumes after a significant gap, Cicero is drawing a contrast between praiseworthy speculative thought about ethics and practical engagement with or study of public life, ratio civilis et disciplina populorum (4):

* whose minds have raised themselves on high, and who were able to create or invent something worthy of the gift (as I said before) of the gods. So let’s grant that those men who discuss the conduct of human life (de ratione vivendi) are great men (as indeed they are)—scholars, teachers of truth and virtue—so long as this too, the conduct of society (ratio civilis) and the structuring of peoples, is also (as indeed it is) not at all deserving of scorn, whether it was discovered by men experienced in the varieties of public life or examined in the literary leisure of men of the other sort: it accomplishes (as indeed it very often has already) in good minds the creation of an unbelievable, superhuman virtue.

Both sides of this contrast involve virtus, both involve ratio; but while people who only talk de ratione vivendi are teachers of virtus, people expert in ratio civilis actually bring about virtus in some people: incredibilis quaedam et divina virtus.

The category of those who play an active part in civic life has a further subdivision, consisting of people who not only have the instrumenta animi they have acquired from nature and civic instituta, but have also undertaken to acquire broader learning, doctrinam et uberiorem rerum cognitionem: these are the most outstanding people of all, and the participants in the conversation of De re publica are the examples Cicero names (5):

What, after all, can be more glorious than the conjunction of practical experience in great affairs of state with the knowledge of these arts acquired through study and learning? What can be imagined more perfect than Publius Scipio or Gaius Laelius or Lucius Philus? In order to achieve the highest glory of great men, they added to the traditional knowledge of their own ancestors the imported learning (adventiciam doctrinam) of the Socratic school. (6) The person who has had the will and capacity to acquire both—that is, ancestral traditions and scholarly learning—is the one who I think has done everything deserving of praise.

Two sources of both wisdom and glory are delineated, one defined as rerum tractatio atque usus or domesticus maiorumque mos or maiorum instituta, the other as artium studia et cognitio or a Socrate adventicia doctrina or simply doctrina; in the world of rhetoric rather than politics, these two would be equivalent to ars and exercitatio (the third category, suitable ingenium or natura, is a prerequisite for either rhetoric or politics). In both areas, moreover, ars is defined as Greek, usus as Roman. The ranking of these three categories of men is clear: at the top are men like Scipio, Laelius, and Philus who have both usus and ars; at the bottom are those who have only ars. The great men of early Rome come in the middle, examples of a civilis vitae ratio, more deserving of praise than the quiet life of study, but displaying a ratio more active than analytic.

The last surviving portion of the preface (7) again makes a division between the original two categories, those who use words to nourish naturae principia and those who use instituta and leges. Some people (Greek philosophers, although he does not say so here) limit the description sapiens to only the first category, but in fact the men who have been the founders of lasting states are worthy of equal praise, and that category is by no means limited to Rome but includes great statesmen from the entire world, moving out from Latium to the rest of Italy, to Magna Graecia—pointedly, nothing is said about metropolitan Greece—to the Assyrians, Persians, and Poeni. The high wisdom of civic leadership is universal, except perhaps in Greece itself: it requires no Greek philosophy to perform it, and it serves humanity better than any Socratic philosopher ever could. But what Socratic method does impart, and has imparted to Scipio and his friends, is the ability to explain the practical and performative wisdom of Rome’s statesmen. That is useful (and it is what Cicero himself, as he says in the preface to Book 1, also has), but it is secondary: it may perform an important service in helping us to recover from the disasters of the present by analyzing what was good in Rome of the past, but it can do no good unless we also recover the performative and institutional wisdom of our ancestors.

1. I have given a briefer analysis of Scipio’s constitutional theory in Zetzel 1995: 17–22, with earlier bibliography. Of more recent scholarship, see particularly Atkins 2013: 80–119; he (like Pöschl 1936: 10–39) rightly emphasizes the influence on De re publica of Plato, Laws Book 3 in addition to Polybius Book 6 and/or a Peripatetic source such as Dicaearchus.

2. The names I use for the six forms of constitution are fairly standard; Polybius (6.3–4) uses basileia for “monarchy” and monarchia for “tyranny”; Cicero starts by calling them simply government by one, by a few, or by the multitude, but he often uses periphrases.

3. On Dicaearchus Tripolitikos (fr. 87M), see White 2001: 87–88. Cicero certainly knew other works of Dicaearchus (see further below), possibly including his book on the Spartan constitution (fr. 2M). Other Peripatetic sources for the theory of constitutions (e.g., Theophrastus or Heraclides Ponticus) are also possible.

4. Cf. FRHist 5 F148. As the commentary notes, it was a commonplace of political theory in the Hellenistic period.

5. Cf. North 1990: 14: “The fact is that there were no other ‘categories of political analysis’ available to ancient writers. . . . To say that he [Polybius] could have made another choice is like saying that Tacitus could have written, if only he had felt like it, a social and economic history of the Roman Empire; the categories for the analysis of economic activity did not exist and Tacitus wrote what could be written in his day.”

6. Arena 2012: 118–24 provides a valuable analysis of the account of constitutions with an emphasis on the use and meaning of libertas.

7. This phrase presumably looks back to the iuris consensus which is one of the defining elements of the populus in 1.39 and which becomes central to the revised definition of the res publica in Book 3.

8. On aequabilitas, see Fantham 1973; Zetzel 1995 ad loc.

9. For the virtues of government in Plato, cf. Laws 3.693bc, 701de with Pöschl 1936: 18–21.

10. Some scholars (notably Büchner 1962: 25–61 [originally published 1952]) have used the fragmentary state of the palimpsest to argue that there was a monarchic argument of which 1.50 is the residue, parallel to those of the democrats and aristocrats, but that has been shown to be impossible; see particularly Kroymann 1958. On the democratic argument, see also Schofield 2021: 40–46.

11. Atkins 2013: 121–28 notes the links between libertas, potestas, and ius but concentrates on the meaning of ius; a valuable fuller discussion of libertas in the context of modern theories of non-domination in Atkins 2018. See also Schofield 2021: 46–52, and on ius here, see Straumann 2016: 170.

12. On the interpretation of Cicero’s reference to the Rhodian constitution, see Ferrary 1987.

13. The sentence is highly compressed and somewhat ambiguous because both ius and aequale are deliberately used in two different senses; see Zetzel 1995 ad loc.

14. So also Philus at 3.23 in his attack on justice.

15. Aristotle, Politics 5.1, 1301a26–33.

16. Many scholars have tried to reconstruct the Peripatetic background to the speeches of the democrats and aristocrats; cf., for example, Solmsen 1933; Pöschl 1936: 10–39 (concluding that “die Theorie des Peripatetikers wird platonisiert”); D. Frede 1989. No one doubts that Cicero used Peripatetic sources; he does not reproduce them.

17. On Niebuhr’s interpretation, see Zetzel 2011: 40–41; on the rector, see below, Chapter 12.

18. See Aristotle, Politics 3.13, 1284b23–24 (together with the famous statement that someone who is completely self-sufficient is not a part of a polis, and is either a beast or a god, 1.2, 1253b28).

19. It is worth noting that Scipio’s argument from Jupiter assumes that it is a fiction: neither alternative that he gives allows for the possibility that it is true.

20. Note particularly mea sententia and placet (1.69). On the senatorial quality of Scipio’s speech, see above, Chapter 10.

21. The most important discussion of the constitutional history of Book 2 as a whole is that of Ferrary 1984; also valuable are Atkins 2013: 80–119 and Müller 2017. On the differences between Cicero and Polybius, see also (among others) Pöschl 1936: 47–82 and Ferrary 1995: 53–57; Straumann 2016: 151–61 makes Cicero closer to Polybius than do most scholars. On the structure and argument of Polybius Book 6 itself there is a large bibliography; a good interpretation, with full references to earlier scholarship, in Hahm 1995. On Romulus and Lycurgus, see further below.

22. See above, Chapter 4 and Gildenhard 2013a: 231–37.

23. On this uncertain relationship, see now FRHist on Cato, 5 F131.

24. Cornell 2001 is in general the best introduction to the historical narrative of Book 2. A few things point to Cicero’s use of Polybius and/or Cato, most importantly the date used for the foundation of Rome (751/0; Cicero after the Civil War uses the Varronian date 754/3) which he shares with Polybius, and the date at which the Roman constitution is imagined to achieve its perfect mixture and balance (449) which he shares with both of them.

25. On Scipio’s omissions and changes, see Cornell 2001. Note that Romulus’ foster-mother is a silvestris belua rather than a lupa; the supernatural flame around Servius Tullius’ head becomes a scintilla ingenii; Romulus’ foundation of Rome omits the murder of Remus, Numa has to do without Egeria, and the fall of Servius Tullius has no Tanaquil. For pre-Romulean Rome, there is not a single mention of Aeneas, Evander, or Hercules, regular participants in most other versions of the foundation legend.

26. Note that Scipio (2.24) disparages Lycurgus’ use of the hereditary principle in comparison with Roman use of election; on the importance of Lycurgus in Book 2, see further below.

27. For later demagoguery, cf. 2.49, 60; for Servius Tullius as populist, compare Livy 1.46.1.

28. On the importance of the difference between Cicero and Polybius with regard to Lycurgus, see Ferrary 1984: 90.

29. On the importance of Romulus’ deification in De re publica, see Cole 2013: 87–95.

30. For other instances of the biological metaphor in Scipio’s account, see Zetzel 1995 on 2.3.2.

31. For details of this interpretation of 2.21–22 (often referred to as the Methodenkapitel), see Zetzel 1995 ad loc.; for other interpretations see also (among many) Pöschl 1936: 42–45; Christes 1989: 39–43; Lieberg 1994; Fox 2007: 62–66; Atkins 2013: 56–61; Müller 2017. See also Volk 2021: 205–6.

32. For other attacks on Plato, most of which are discussed elsewhere in this book, compare not only the initial attack on the Kallipolis at 2.2, but also 2.51, 2.52 (where umbra civitatis probably alludes to the theory of forms), and 4.3–5.

33. The formal title of the work was Εἰς Τροφωνίου κατάβασις (cf. frr. 80–82M). On Cicero’s use of Dicaearchus, see also above, Chapter 1.

34. Cf. Polybius 6.5.7 with Walbank ad loc.

35. Note also 5.3, where Manilius (probably) compares Numa’s lawgiving to the habits of early Greek kings. On 2.28–29, see also Cornell 2001: 53.

36. This passage is wrongly deleted by Powell.

37. For the natural wisdom of early Romans, cf. also 3.6, where Cicero’s list of Roman sages unfortunately breaks off after the name of M’. Curius, but in De oratore it is clear: cf. 1.197, 3.56, both with the name of Lycurgus, and above, Chapter 7. On the issue of natural and imported wisdom in the preface to Book 3, see also Zetzel 2017b: 472–77; other comparisons between Greek and Roman sages may have existed in the second half of De re publica but are unfortunately lost.

38. Most of the preface is lost, but it can be reconstructed with a degree of plausibility. For details, see Zetzel 2017b.