Cicero: the orator who kept asking what a republic is

The story of Marcus Tullius Cicero is usually compressed into a handful of words. Orator. Consul. Republican. Enemy of Caesar. Murdered.

The summary is accurate and it tells you almost nothing.

Born in 106 BC, Cicero lived through the last great crisis of the Roman Republic. He was consul in 63 BC and played the decisive part in suppressing the conspiracy of Catiline. Exile followed. He watched the civil war between Caesar and Pompey. After Caesar's assassination he was killed, on Mark Antony's orders, in 43 BC.

But the genuinely interesting thing about Cicero is this: a philosopher inside politics.

Philosophy was not his retirement#

The familiar account runs like this. Shut out of politics, Cicero took refuge in philosophy, and the intense philosophical output of his last years is a literature of consolation.

A substantial part of contemporary Cicero scholarship argues the reverse.

For Cicero, philosophy was not an escape from politics but the continuation of politics by other means.

The distinction is crucial, because the subjects of the late works bear it out: the state (De re publica), the laws (De legibus), duties (De officiis), friendship (De amicitia), old age, death, the gods.

Cicero, in other words, did not separate the question “how should a good man live?” from the question “how does a good republic survive?”

That is a combination modern political philosophy — especially after Machiavelli — has largely given up. The break we described this week in our file on Machiavelli was precisely the severing of the connection Cicero had made.

Making Greek philosophy Roman#

Cicero was not a philosopher who built a system from nothing. He drew heavily on Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans and Academic scepticism. His own sympathies lay with the sceptical tradition of the New Academy: rather than certain knowledge, choose the most plausible view.

That eclecticism told against him for a long time. He was the man who carried Greek thought into Latin — a useful intermediary, but not an original mind.

Modern Cicero scholarship questions that verdict seriously. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on Cicero stresses that he is now treated not merely as a transmitter of lost Greek texts but as a thinker of independent philosophical importance.

One reason for the reassessment is linguistic. In translating Greek philosophical terms into Latin, Cicero invented a new vocabulary: qualitas, essentia, moralis, individuum. Everyone doing philosophy in a European language today uses words Cicero made, without knowing it.

This connects to a matter we have come back to twice in this column this week: Aruoba's Wittgenstein translations and Ahmet Arslan's translations of Aristotle and al-Farabi were doing the same work. Making a language capable of philosophy is not “only translation”.

What is a res publica?#

At the centre of the renewed interest in Cicero stands republicanism.

His definition in De re publica is the decisive one. The state is the property of the people — and a people is not any mass of human beings, but a community brought together by agreement on law and by partnership in the common good.

Note the two conditions: agreement on law and the common good. Where either is missing there is no people; there is a crowd.

The consequence of the definition is radical. A community under a tyrant is not, strictly speaking, a republic, because what operates there is not the common good but the good of one man.

Recent scholarship re-examines Cicero's political thought under these headings in particular: liberty, law, property, just taxation, citizenship, the legitimacy of the state, political virtue and institutions.

Cicero's answer#

Perhaps the best reason to read Cicero today comes down to a single question.

Does a republic stand on good institutions alone, or does it also need good citizens?

Cicero's answer runs roughly like this. Institutions are necessary; but if the character of the people who carry them, their sense of duty and their idea of the common good give way, the institutions themselves turn brittle.

De officiis was written to fill exactly that gap. What are the everyday obligations of a citizen, and above all of a citizen holding public office?

The thesis is being tested today from two directions.

On one side stands the institutionalist objection: well-designed institutions also restrain the wickedness of wicked men, and to stake everything on virtue is naive.

On the other stand the cases in which Cicero has turned out to be right. In more than one country over the past decade we have seen how quickly an order can fall apart when the written rules stay exactly as they were but the attachment of those who apply them to established convention dissolves.

Our file this week on Edward Coke and Cromwell and on Judith Butler's critique of democracy shows the same tension in two separate ages.

Baraz's new reading#

The most striking book on Cicero published in 2026 is a 160-page study written for Oxford's Very Short Introduction series by Yelena Baraz of Princeton.

Baraz's central claim is that we should see Cicero as a mediating figure: between theory and practice, philosophy and politics, Greece and Rome. And she applies that perspective at once to the different areas of his life and to the different genres in which he wrote.

The book's structure carries the argument. Baraz refuses to choose between chronology and theme: after two chapters on his career, she gives a chapter each to the speeches, the philosophy, the poetry and the letters.

Her most striking decision is to begin at the end. She takes Cicero's death as the starting point of his reception history — a route running from Petrarch to the American founders, from Mommsen to Robert Harris and HBO's Rome.

Reviewing the book for the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Catherine Steel of the University of Glasgow singles out the chapter on philosophy for praise. Baraz, she writes, has produced summaries that show how Cicero developed a philosophy tied to practice without drowning the reader in technical detail. Her treatment of De amicitia, Steel says, is sharper than discussions many times its length.

Steel's single criticism is the interesting one. She is not certain that a reader who finishes the book will want to go on and read Cicero's oratory. For nothing takes the place of that oratory — and how do you convey its seductiveness to someone who will read it in translation?

For the philosophy of translation, that is a real question.

The question that returns#

Rereading Cicero is more than a return to ancient history.

It is a return to the question of what a republic is. And that question is asked afresh in every period in which the institutions stand legally in place while their content drains away.

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In Turkish: On the Republic, On the Laws, On Duties, On Friendship, On Old Age and On the Nature of the Gods are among the works that have been translated.

Note: Cicero lived long before photography, so the cover image is a first-century bust in the Capitoline Museums in Rome.