Cicero’s Definition of Res Publica

Abstract

Abstract In his Politics in the Ancient World Moses Finley had this to say of Cicero’s Republic (p. 128): ‘Like Mommsen, I find the central idea of the Republic "as unphilosophical as unhistorical" and I am not persuaded otherwise by the unending flood of adulatory commentaries.’ In a footnote he added (p. 128 n. 17): ‘As an extreme illustration of the nonsense Cicero continues to evoke, I submit the still regularly cited book by V. Pöschl, Römischer Staat und griechisches Staatsdenken bei Cicero (Berlin, 19 36), which concludes (p. 173) that the Republic "fused into one the Roman empire, perhaps the greatest creation of that world, and the philosophy of Plato, the most sublime spiritual creation of antiquity".’ Cicero’s attempt to represent Scipio’s Rome as the ideal city annoys most historians and leaves philosophers cold. So when Finley went on to dub as ‘mere rhetoric’ what Mommsen had called ‘a singular mongrel compound of history and philosophy’ he was preaching to the converted, at any rate so far as an English-speaking readership was concerned.

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