{"id":69700,"date":"2022-06-09T01:00:44","date_gmt":"2022-06-09T05:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=69700"},"modified":"2022-09-12T23:12:54","modified_gmt":"2022-09-13T03:12:54","slug":"qotd-cicero-and-the-end-of-the-roman-republic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/06\/09\/qotd-cicero-and-the-end-of-the-roman-republic\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Cicero and the end of the Roman Republic"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>De legibus<\/em> (“On the Laws”) along with his earlier work, De re publica<\/em> (“On the Republic”) show Cicero attempting to grapple with the nature of the Roman Republic and the prospect for reform. In a sense, De re publica<\/em> looks backwards, with the discussion couched in a fictional dialogue set at the tail end of the life of Scipio Aemilianus (185-129 BC), although Cicero intends the subject \u2013 a rumination on the nature of the Republic and its proper workings, based on a discussion of its history \u2013 to be applicable in his own time.<\/p>\n

De legibus<\/em> is more aggressively forward looking. Set in Cicero’s own time (it is a dialogue between Cicero, his brother Quintus and their friend Atticus), De legibus<\/em> first sets out a theory for the general foundation of law […] to use as the basis for a reformed model of the Roman Republic, which is summarized in the third book. Damage to the text means that De legibus<\/em> cuts off in book three, and there are smaller gaps and fragments in the earlier books as well.<\/p>\n

It’s important to get a sense of the situation in the 50s B.C. when Cicero is writing to understand why he feels this is necessary. The previous round of civil wars had ended in 82 B.C., with the victor, the arch-conservative L. Cornelius Sulla, imposing a revised republic with shocking brutality and bloodshed. By the 50s, it would have been clear to anyone paying attention that the peace and apparent stability of the Sullan reforms had been a mirage \u2013 the disruptions of the 60s (including the Catilinarian conspiracy, foiled by Cicero) were not one-offs, but merely the first rattlings of the wheels coming off the cart entirely. I don’t want to get too deep into the woods of how exactly this happened; there are any number of good books on the collapse of the Republic which deal with this period (Scullard’s From the Gracchi to Nero<\/em> (1959) is a venerable and straight-forward narrative of the period; Syme, The Roman Revolution<\/em> (1939) is probably the most influential \u2013 reading both can serve as a foundation for getting into the more recent and often more narrowly directed literature on the topic, note also Flowers, Roman Republics<\/em> (2011)).<\/p>\n

It’s in this context \u2013 as the Republic is clearly shaking apart \u2013 that Cicero is ruminating on the nature of the Republic, how it functions, what it is for, and how it might be set right. Despite this, Cicero should not be taken for a radical, or even really for much of a reformer; Cicero is a staunch conservative looking to restore the function of the old system, in many cases by a return to tradition as much as the renovation of it. Cicero’s corpus<\/em> is a plea to save the Republic as it was, not to bury it; it was a plea, of course, that would go unanswered. In a real sense, the Republic died with Cicero.<\/p>\n

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: A Trip Through Cicero (Natural Law)”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry<\/em><\/a>, 2019-12-12.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

De legibus (“On the Laws”) along with his earlier work, De re publica (“On the Republic”) show Cicero attempting to grapple with the nature of the Roman Republic and the prospect for reform. In a sense, De re publica looks backwards, with the discussion couched in a fictional dialogue set at the tail end of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,62,7,41],"tags":[1457,1315,650,1345,1488],"class_list":["post-69700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-europe","category-history","category-quotations","tag-bretdevereaux","tag-cicero","tag-civilwar","tag-romanrepublic","tag-sulla"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-i8c","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69700"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69700\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74175,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69700\/revisions\/74175"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}