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Roman Republicanism:
The Underrated Legacy1
THOMAS N. MITCHELL
Provost, Trinity College, Dublin
M
Y THEME is the tide of political and social ideas that
flowed, mainly through the pen of Cicero, from the period
of the late Roman Republic into European political
thought, and that significantly influenced political thinkers from St.
Augustine to Thomas Jefferson.
After 1800 the impact declined markedly. The legacy of Roman
republicanism has become increasingly ignored in the last two centuries, and Cicero, its great theoretical exponent, has tended to be dismissed as a brilliant stylist, but a shallow thinker who did little more
than recast in accessible form and with a Roman veneer the political
ideas of the Greeks. There are modern textbooks on politics that contain no mention of Rome or Cicero.
This is as baffling as it is regrettable. Roman republicanism was a
far from perfect system. Its catalogue of weaknesses has often been
rehearsed, beginning with the ancient Roman historians themselves.
But it created a constitutional order that was the product, not of theorists, but of a gradual process over centuries of pragmatic accommodation between the political claims of the two great natural divisions in
any body politic, the mass of the people and the few whose abilities
and circumstances give them greater influence and claims to greater
political authority.
In the process the Roman state confronted at a practical level issues
of liberty and of personal and political rights and constitutional balances that must forever concern democratic societies. It dealt with
them in novel ways and with a degree of success that for centuries
brought a high level of political consensus and stability. A decline did
eventually set in, as the growth of Rome’s empire brought changed
economic and political conditions that strained the unity and systems
1 This
paper was delivered at the symposium “Rome: The Tide of Influence” on 28 April
2000.
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of the Republic and led to the so-called Roman Revolution, culminating in Caesar’s march across the Rubicon in 49 b.c. But the
Republic’s decline and fall has its own interest and importance, providing an instructive case study of the forces that can steer a free
society towards dictatorship.
In summary, the Roman Republic represents the first example in
our history of constitutional government operated on a grand scale and
extending over centuries. It had to contend with social and political
issues and dilemmas unprecedented in kind and in magnitude. It produced new modes of law and government that have permanently affected
the character of Western democracies. Its legacy is one of the most enduring influences of antiquity.
Cicero is our most reliable and extensive source for the ideas underlying Roman republicanism. A leading statesman of the final decades of
the Republic, he epitomised the mentality of its conservative champions. From his youth he had been schooled in the tenets of the ancestral
constitution, as a protégé of a number of Rome’s most powerful and
authoritative proponents of traditional republicanism, whose virtues
he admired and whose political values and ideals he extolled throughout his career. When he himself achieved a position of power and
reached the consulship, he embarked on an unrelenting campaign to
discredit all popular reformers and to rebuild support for the principles
and traditions of the respublica. Even when it became apparent that his
best efforts had failed to halt the breakdown of the system, he never
wavered in his belief in its superiority, and to the end of his life he continued to fight to preserve it.
Cicero was therefore a committed adherent of traditional republicanism, and his practical statesmanship, amply documented by his
speeches and letters, provides a unique insight into the thinking of
the system’s proponents.
But Cicero was also a lifelong student of philosophy, and in the
mid-fifties, when his practical role in politics was declining, he turned
to political theory and wrote two major works, the De Republica, dealing with the nature of the state and statesmanship and the best form of
government, and the De Legibus, dealing with the nature of law and
justice and the specific statutes that should govern the ideal state. More
than ten years later, in the final year of his life, he was to add what was,
in many ways, a complementary work on ethics, the De Officiis.
These writings must be sharply differentiated from the rest of
Cicero’s corpus of philosophical work, which was produced in the dark
days of Caesar’s dictatorship in 46 and 45. Philosophy filled the void
created by exclusion from politics in those years, and the resulting dialogues had a modest aim, to reproduce in Latin the main tenets of the
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schools of Greek philosophy, and thereby make philosophy more
accessible to Romans. They added a brilliance of style, but made few
claims to originality of thought.
The political writings and the De Officiis were of a totally different
character. In ethics and politics Cicero considered the Romans the clear
superiors of the Greeks, leaders not followers, and he considered that
he himself, as a politician of long experience at the highest level who
also had expert knowledge of philosophy and abstract reasoning, had
superior credentials as a political theorist.
His political writings, in particular, were conceived on a grand
scale and laboriously worked and reworked and restructured. And
they were centered on Rome and on the political and moral traditions
of the Republic, their clear purpose to bolster and exalt the republican
ideal and, indirectly, Cicero’s own political beliefs and actions, by providing a persuasive philosophical underpinning for the Republic’s
values and systems.
Cicero’s political writings did not seek to reproduce Greek ideas
with a Roman veneer, but used Greek philosophical rationales to vindicate ideas that were fundamentally Roman. They are certainly a valuable
source for Greek political thought of the Hellenistic age, which otherwise survives only in fragments, but their greatest importance is that they
provided and transmitted an articulate theoretical exposition, linked to
Greek philosophical frameworks, of the substantially new thinking
that governed the evolution of the Roman Republic.
The rest of this article will examine some of the central concepts of
Roman republicanism and Ciceronian theory, in particular liberty, law,
and justice, and some of the fundamental ways in which these concepts
have shaped our political and social heritage.
The Roman Republic was born in revolution, product of the violent overthrow of a monarchical system. Its name, respublica, which
signified res populi, “the property of the people,” was incompatible
with the idea of absolute power by any individual or group over the
body of citizens. The most essential characteristic of a respublica was
liberty (libertas), which meant freedom from the arbitrary control of
another, the absence of the domination over the body politic that monarchy entailed and that was analogous to the absolute power of a master over a slave.
But the Romans were keenly aware that liberty cannot be absolute
either. The rights it entails must be limited by the obligation to respect
the equal rights of others. Uncontrolled, liberty degenerates into license
(licentia), which, in the words of Tacitus, only fools identify with freedom (Dial. 40).
The Romans therefore sought to define the limits of freedom in law
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and to establish a state in which, as Livy described it, the laws would
be superior in authority to men. Law was to be the one impersonal
master to which all must be subject so as to safeguard and maintain the
common freedom. In a memorable passage in the Pro Cluentio (146),
Cicero says, “Law is liberty’s foundation . . . and we are all slaves of
the law so that we may be free.”
The Romans were also very conscious that liberty can be safeguarded only if the rule of law extends throughout society, binding
everyone equally. It can admit of no legal privilege or of any possibility
that anyone would become superior to the law. Those who govern must
do so by virtue of lawfully constituted offices. The authority of rulers
comes from the law and they are creatures of the law. It was this equality before the law that made all citizens pares libertate, equal in liberty,
a form of equality essential in a respublica.
But the rule of law does not, in itself, guarantee liberty, because
clearly bad laws can emerge that destroy rather than protect the rights
and interests of citizens. Cicero speaks of the many pernicious and
destructive enactments of peoples to be found in human history. This
raises the question of the origin of law, its function and extent, and the
principles on which it must be founded.
When Cicero addresses these issues in the De Republica and De
Legibus, he essentially adopts the lines of argument developed by the
Stoics. The Stoical view stood in opposition to the Epicureans and
Skeptics, the latter represented most powerfully by Carneades, who
maintained the view, traceable to certain Sophists, that human conduct
is fundamentally driven by self-interest, which is therefore the source of
the conventions of morality. The laws and practices of societies are,
accordingly, a form of social contract by which people accept limitations on their freedom and the uncontrolled pursuit of their self-interest
in return for protection against the encroachments of others.
Stoical doctrine, as modified by Panaetius in the second century
b.c. and reproduced by Cicero, rejected this view of a conventional,
pragmatic, and changing basis for morality and law, and argued for a
natural and immutable source, namely the active principle or the divine
intelligence or the rational nature that formed and guides the universe.
Law is not therefore something conceived by man or enacted by societies, but something eternal that rules the universe; it is the law of
nature, which can otherwise be described as the mind of God or the
divine reason.
But human beings also share the gift of reason, which, if properly
developed, enables them to know right and wrong and the just and
unjust. From this reasoning Cicero derives his famous definition of natural law: “Law is right reason, in harmony with nature; a possession of
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all human beings, constant and eternal, which summons to duty by its
commands and deters from wrongdoing by its prohibitions.”
There exists therefore a law, which is derived from the reason that
rules man’s nature, a law that is universal, unchanging, and eternal. It
does not vary from person to person, nor from age to age, for all people
in all ages possess a common reason that commands a common nature.
Law has therefore a single unchanging source. Differences in the statutes enacted by societies and differences in their opinions on law and
justice, Cicero explains, arise because people pervert their nature by
bad habits and false beliefs, and suppress their true natural impulses.
But if these bad habits and false beliefs did not twist weaker minds in
this way, the singleness of human nature would be self-evident; no one
would be so like himself as all would be like each other, and all would be
in perfect agreement on all issues of right and wrong, just and unjust.
Cicero goes on to argue that justice (ius), meaning that which is
right, derives from the one unchanging law of nature. Justice is natural
law translated into principles of right and wrong conduct, and since
natural law is its single source, it too is based on nature and is one,
unchanging and eternal. And the final element of the argument is that
the only legitimate enactments of societies are those that conform to
these principles of justice.
In Cicero’s concept of the state, therefore, justice holds a central
place. He provides the first recorded formal definition of the state in
the De Republica, when he describes it as “a gathering of a large body of
people joined in partnership for their mutual benefit by a common agreement about justice.” He repeatedly returns to the theme that the state is a
partnership in justice. Justice is the bond of society and no state deserves
the name, nor will it survive, unless its people recognise and uphold the
rights and obligations that stem from their shared sense of justice.
For Cicero, stable political associations are possible only because
people have a capacity for justice and a capacity to discern its true
principles and reach agreement about them. Political and social cohesion is further assisted by the other gifts of human beings, such as
speech and sociability and a general disposition to pursue the morally
right, that fit them to live in society and incline them to preserve justice
and harmony. This leads him to the further point that life in society
accords with the nature of human beings and is a requirement for human
happiness. He saw this social instinct as the primary reason for the origin
of the state. He does, however, admit one further reason, security and
protection, a reason more akin to the views of the Epicureans and of
later thinkers such as Hobbes, which held that states arise from the
need of individuals for protection against the predations of others.
But Cicero was acutely aware that, despite the rational, moral, and
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social gifts of human beings, political history was marked by endless
dissension and a multiplicity of political doctrines. Rome itself provided ample illustration. A crucial question therefore remained. What
were the specific principles of justice about which right-minded people
could be expected to agree? What bill of rights could be identified that
would satisfy the needs and expectations of a free people and achieve
consensus iuris, that vital consensus about justice?
When Cicero confronts these questions—and it should be emphasised that he never does so comprehensively in any one place—he no
longer looks to Greek philosophy to point the way. He focuses firmly
on Roman experience, and proceeds from the belief that the republican
constitution during its long evolution had identified and developed the
true foundations of justice, and that Rome’s laws and customs embodied them. Even when he came to write a code of law for his ideal state
in the De Legibus, and claimed he was composing laws that conformed
to nature’s standard, he made few departures from existing Roman
statutory law and custom. His analyses elsewhere of the constituent
elements of justice show a similar conviction that Roman republicanism, as he conceived it, was a practical embodiment of the political and
social principles of the just society.
Cicero’s views of the specific rights or iura deriving from natural
justice can be conveniently dealt with under three headings: personal,
social, and political.
The most basic personal right recognised in the Republic was, as
mentioned earlier, equality before the law, and the system took special
precautions to emphasise it and provide against its abuse. Even symbols of authority that might imply a threat of summary justice were
removed from the trappings of magistrates. The principle that there
could be no punishment without formal trial is repeatedly affirmed by
Cicero. The right of appeal against the sentences of all magistrates was
also recognised from an early stage, and the office of tribune was created as a form of ombudsman to protect the citizen against any act of
any magistrate perceived to be oppressive.
But Cicero gives emphasis to a series of other personal rights that
derive from his view of the origin of states as a natural consequence of
the human need for life in society, the result of natural social instincts
reinforced by a desire for safety and the protection of a well-ordered
society. It is therefore the function of the state and its laws to satisfy
those natural needs of citizens that have given rise to the state in the
first place. This imposed on governments specific requirements to ensure
the safety of individual citizens and the safety of the state, to prevent one
from injuring another without cause, to guarantee to everyone the free
and secure possession of what is theirs, and to ensure that policy and
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law are directed towards the common good, not the good of any individual or group.
Cicero summarised these basic obligations of the state to its citizens in a letter to Atticus in which he described the task of the statesman as the promotion of the common safety and the common good in
a spirit of justice and selflessness, so as to produce for citizens what he
termed the beata vita, a happy life, which he defined as a life that was
secure, prosperous, esteemed, and honourable. Similar sentiments occur
in the De Legibus, where he states that laws exist to secure the safety of
citizens, the preservation of the state, and a peaceful and happy life.
Similar language dominated the speeches of his consulship, especially during his first great clash with popular reformers over the Rullan land law. Populares he presented as seditionists who were assailing
the political and social consensus, threatening individual rights, and
undermining peace and stability. What Cicero and traditional republicanism offered was peace and harmony, and a revitalised social consensus. The words he uses are otium, pax, concordia, tranquillitas,
salus as opposed to seditio and tumultus.
There is a familiar ring to much of Cicero’s catalogue of personal
rights, including the pursuit of happiness, and it is an impressive statement of the equality of the basic claims of all citizens on the state. His
theory of natural law and of the common capacity of all human beings
through their reason to discern and follow it also implies a further
important form of equality, an equality of moral worth.
But when Cicero moves to consideration of the requirements of
natural justice in relation to the distribution of wealth and political
power, the egalitarianism is replaced by a rigid aristocratic view that
presupposes a social hierarchy and a system of government dominated
by a social elite.
His views on private property and the role of the state in the distribution of wealth are uncompromising and characteristic of conservative republican sentiment. He accepted that there is no such thing as
property that is private by nature, but asserted that it can become private by various means, and that individuals have a right to private possessions and a right to accumulate them provided they do so without
injury to anyone. Once they validly possess them, natural justice provides a right to keep what is properly one’s own, and the state has an
obligation to protect that right. The idea that the state should seek to
equalise wealth or to aid to any degree the needy by taking from men
of means, he regarded as the most pernicious of social doctrines, analogous to one part of the body’s preying on another. It was a violation
of the laws of nature and of nations and an assault on the chief bonds
of society—concordia, which cannot exist when the state takes from
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one and gives to another, and aequitas, which is destroyed whenever a
person is not allowed to possess his own.
These beliefs led Cicero to oppose not only badly needed resettlement schemes in Italy that affected private land, and other schemes
such as cancellation or reduction of lawful debts that affected private
property, but also programmes that might in any way adversely affect
a particular segment of society by, for instance, altering market conditions, or draining the treasury and thus leading to higher taxes on
the rich. Such measures violated economic justice as much as those
that more directly attacked private property, since they benefited one
group at the expense of another.
Cicero’s public stand for what amounted to a doctrine of extreme
laissez faire began in his consulship and continued throughout his life.
He was not blind to the economic problems of his time or to the dangers of the widening gulf between rich and poor that was resulting
from the uneven distribution of the fruits and burdens of empire. But
he looked chiefly for a remedy to the liberality and patronage of the
affluent, which he presents as another obligation of justice, but one
that, paradoxically, he did not believe the state could enforce by law.
Cicero, like most of his contemporaries, readily accepted the notion
of a society with vast differences in wealth and material conditions of
life. He saw no conflict between this view and the law of nature, and
believed the threat to the consensus iuris would be far greater if the
state were to attempt an artificial regulation of wealth.
Similarly, in the political sphere he considered inequalities in the
exercise of political power entirely compatible with the law of nature,
and indeed demanded by it. He was a democrat to the extent that he
believed it was inherent in the notion of respublica that the body of citizens, the populus, should be recognised as the highest authority in the
state and the ultimate source of all powers wielded by those who governed. He was content therefore that the people alone should have the
right to ratify laws and elect office-holders.
But he had no faith in the political judgment of the masses, whom he
considered undependable and manipulable, and radical or direct democracy he regarded as the pursuit of an equality that was most inequitable.
He argued instead that political responsibility must be linked to merit,
virtus, and dignitas, which meant the standing and esteem that merit and
its accomplishments bestowed. Justice required that society take account
of gradus dignitatis in its structure of government, and that the greatest power should not be given to the greatest number but to those
whose virtus and resultant dignitas indicated their greater capacity to
exercise it.
Cicero accordingly argued for a form of representative democracy
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in which power was delegated by the people, on the principle of merit,
to those who stood highest in the public esteem.
Once again, Cicero believed that Rome had recognised and
adopted these principles of government and had developed the ideal
form of representative democracy, which he presents as a model of the
Greek idea of the mixed constitution. It blended in a balanced form
participation by the people as electors and validators of laws with a
strong elected executive, whose exercise of power, however, was directed
and curbed by a permanent senate consisting of former office-holders
(and therefore indirectly elected) and comprising those of the highest
dignitas and auctoritas in the state. The result was, in Cicero’s view, an
ideal constitution that ensured, with adequate checks and balances,
government by the talented minority while maintaining a degree of
popular participation adequate to safeguard public rights and liberties.
The flaw in this fascinating but idealised portrait of Roman republicanism was that, in practice, dignitas came to be associated with factors unrelated to personal worth, especially birth and wealth. Even
Cicero saw merit in the view that a famous pedigree created a legitimate presumption of ability and worth, while wealth gave a stake in
the state’s well-being and was, besides, regarded as indispensable to the
full development of human talent.
The concept of meritocracy, so central to Cicero’s model, became
fatally diluted by elitist social views and a hardening political exclusiveness in the late Republic. The result was political domination by a
narrow hereditary nobility that increasingly failed to govern in the
common interest or to maintain within its own ranks or in the state
generally the concordia and consensus that Cicero so passionately
argued were the foundations of a just and stable society.
The Republic, for this and other reasons, eventually failed, but the
influence of this original and absorbing system and of Cicero’s political
ideas, which largely derived from it, lived on. Only a cursory review of
that influence can be given here.
Cicero’s formulation of the theory of natural law had an enduring
impact. It was taken over by the Roman lawyers and Fathers of the
Church from Lactantius and Augustine to Thomas Aquinas, and was
constantly quoted throughout the Middle Ages. His emphasis on moral
equality and the necessity for a connection between law and morality
was echoed in the writing of early liberal thinkers, such as the natural
law theorist John Locke, who was a devout advocate of personal liberty, of the dignity of human nature, and of inalienable personal rights,
notably life, liberty, and property. Locke in turn profoundly influenced
Thomas Jefferson and the principles of the Declaration of Independence. The line of influence is still evident in doctrines of human or
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natural rights, which have again become prominent over the last century, and which are ultimately based on the concept of universal moral
principles deriving from reason and the nature of human beings, principles that are timeless and that transcend race or creed or national
boundaries.
The Roman emphasis on the rule of law and its equal application
was similarly influential, and became a cardinal liberal-democratic
principle in Western political theory, giving rise to the great catchword of
constitutionalism, that governments must be governments of laws, not
of men, a sentiment first expressed by James Harrington in the mid1660s, when he spoke of an empire of laws, not of men. Cicero’s declaration that law is liberty’s foundation became another liberal tenet, echoed in Locke’s statement, “Where there is no law, there is no freedom.”
Overall, the Roman system and Cicero’s exposition of its theoretical foundations identified all the key ideas that later formed the heart
of so-called liberal theory from James Harrington and John Locke in
the seventeenth century to John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth.
Cicero’s presentation of Roman republicanism gave an entirely new
emphasis to individual rights and personal freedoms under a rule of law
designed to protect these rights and freedoms. His definition of the
state was a radical departure from Greek concepts, which viewed the state
as an ethical association whose purpose was to shape lives and actions
so as to achieve an ethical ideal. Cicero’s emphasis is on a preventive
role for the state, centered on the protection of the individual and the
provision of peace and security to enable each person to pursue his or
her own way to happiness.
The role of government was therefore limited and mostly negative,
guarding against injury and injustice, a view that recurred in the writings of Thomas Paine, who saw the state as a necessary evil; in Locke,
who compared the state to a night-watchman; and in Mill, who speaks
of the only function of law as the prevention of harm.
Cicero’s particular emphasis on the protection of the right of private property, which is again far removed from the thinking of Plato
and Aristotle, and his general insistence that economic self-advancement
was commendable and must not be impeded by the state, represent the
first statement of an economic doctrine that was later to form the core
of economic liberalism and laissez-faire capitalism.
The containment of the power of rulers through various checks
and through what Cicero called temperatio iuris, a balanced division
of power, was a further aspect of republican and Ciceronian theory
that found favour with liberal thinkers from Harrington onwards,
and that was prominent in the minds of the framers of the American
constitution.
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But Cicero’s trenchant and repeated assertions of conservative republican views of social and political equality may have had even greater
effect. Liberal theory enshrined the Ciceronian social dogma, which
emphasised equality of moral worth and of basic personal rights while
maintaining that people are not equal in all respects and that there are
gradations of merit and worth that must be recognised and given room
to flourish. Liberalism also embraced the further argument that, since
differing levels of talent and effort will lead to differing levels of success, the just and natural consequence is a measure of social inequality
and the rule of the deserving few, the latter best achieved by representative government based on popular elections that ensure the consent of
the governed. Cicero, of course, hoped the result would be the rule of a
moral elite, but, as is generally the case, what emerged was a power
elite. Potentia (raw power) replaced auctoritas at Rome as the basis of
political success, uncovering the weakness of the theory and a problem
that continues to haunt all proponents of liberal democracy.
These are but some elements of the political and social legacy of
Roman republicanism. There were many others, notably the great
body of Roman private law, which formed the basis of all legal systems
of Western Europe except for England and Scandinavia. But that is a
subject for another day. I conclude with a quotation from a letter of John
Adams to Lafayette in 1782. He writes, “I am a republican on principle.
Almost everything that is estimable in civil life has originated under such
governments. Two republican powers, Athens and Rome, have done
more honour to our species than all the rest of it. A new country can be
planted only by such a government.”