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DIALOGUES AND TREATISES
Senate and Equites which he secured in die Catilinarian crisis and wanted to
perpetuate).
The De republica is naturally of great interest to historians. In it Greek ideas
of the ideal state encounter the practical wisdom of the Roman mos maiorum.
Thus Book 3 broaches the question of the basic justice or injustice of the Roman
empire. The Romans had long recognized, with their Foreign Praetor and their
Law of Nations, that justice transcended national boundaries. The meeting of
this practical tradition with Greek (Stoic) ideas of the brotherhood of man and
of Natural Law gave impetus to both.
Cicero's Scipio flirts in Book i with the idea of monarchy as an element in his
composite state. (Plato's philosopher-king would be in mind.) There has been
endless discussion as to whether the 'rector' or 'moderator' or 'princeps' of
Books 5 and 6 is envisaged as a particular person — Scipio as he might have been
if he had not been murdered (see 6.12), or Pompey, or even himself; or, as
seems more likely, an ideal politictis like that of Plato or Aristotle holding no
constitutional position of autarchy. Again, did this dialogue in any way mould
or colour the Augustan image of the princeps? 1 For us there is a pathetic irony,
parallel to that we noted in the De oratore, in the thought that among the last
of die young men Cicero was so eager to influence was one who was to consent
to his proscription, the future Augustus.
The relevance of the De republica to its time lay in its insistence that all men
had a duty to serve their country, that no one should put his personal dignitas
before her interests, and that private morality was applicable to public affairs.
We can imagine the impact of this widely read work on the Rome of 52-1,
which had just seen, amid Epicurean apathy on the part of many who should
have been leaders, rioting between the rival gangs of Clodius and Milo, and a
state of emergency such that Pompey had had to be made sole consul. And
Cicero meant what he said. In a moral crisis for him soon after, when, as Governor
of Cilicia, he decided not to countenance financial oppression of Cypriots by
his friend Brutus, he commented to Atticus: ' I prefer to be on good terms widi
my conscience, especially now that I have given bail for my conduct in the
shape of six volumes' {An. 6.1.8).
As literature, what matters in the remains of the De re publica is Scipio's
dream (see p. 231). To match the Myth of Er at the end of Plato's Republic
Cicero invented an effective climax. Scipio tells his friends how, as a young
man, he stayed widi the Numidian king Massinissa, who was devoted to the
memory of Scipio Africanus and talked of him far into the night. Africanus
had then appeared in a dream to his adoptive grandson and had unfolded to
him, from a heavenly vantage-point in the Milky Way, a (mainly Platonic)
view of the universe, a presage of Anchises' revelation to Aeneas in
1 On these debates see Boyanc£ (1970) ch. ix.
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