An almost ideal blend of Plato and Aristotle and a wonderfully relevant read regarding statesmanship, public morality, and tradition. The gaps in the text are certainly frustrating and Cicero isn't nearly as artful an author as he thinks he is, but there are still plenty of unique insights here that

“Many years later, the emperor Augustus (who had acquiesced in Cicero’s murder) found one of his grandsons with a work of Cicero’s in his hand. The youngster tried to hide the book under his cloak, but Augustus took it from him and read through a large part of it where he stood. Then, handing it bac

It is terribly difficult to judge fragments, and especially to compare them with complete works such as Plato's Republic. That being said, Cicero clearly takes a much different approach than does Plato. He proposes that philosophy must be intermixed with pragmatism and experience to produce the opti

Cicero’s Republic
11 May 2020

This is sort of a lost book. Not quite but it certainly isn’t complete, namely because it was only recently discovered, namely in the 19th Century when somebody was having a look for something else while they were down in the Vatican library. In fact, since it was discov

Its difficult to give the two works a fair appraisal, as they survive only with large sections missing. Perhaps the most interesting section of the Republic was his discussion of the Roman constitution and how it developed historically. Cicero's philosophy is pretty derivative, taking heavily from P

In high school I read Cicero in third year Latin. My teacher, like most classics teachers, found him indispensable. The proposition he put was twofold:Cicero was a master of Latin prose (very difficult to translate because of his long, complex sentences) and Cicero was a defender of a republic that