The concept of «state» in Cicero’s writings

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of ancient Greek and Roman conceptions of a state which had been written at the time prior to Cicero’s; an extent to which Cicero adopts the ideas from those conceptions; Cicero’s usage of the term «state»; differentiation between the concepts res publica and civitas in his writings. Long before Cicero’s times the issue of a state system had been brought up by such philosophers, historians and political figures as Archytas, Hippodamus, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Cato, Polybius and others. They formulated simple state forms (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy) and a mixed form which they considered the best. On the whole, Cicero agrees with the opinion that the mixed form is the best but he also offers original thoughts about the Roman republic as an ideal state and gives many examples from the Roman history. Cicero often denotes the term «a state» by the word res publica implying the meaning of public work, public affairs, public interest, etc. We have analysed the definition res publica est res populi and come to the conclusion that Cicero considers people to be a mandatory participant of the process of state management. Some scholars draw attention to a juridical content of the word res in the above definition considering the term res publica as public property, whereas the Roman republic is an object used by the civil community ( civitas Romana ). We suppose this point of view is quite relevant. Cicero sees the political and juridical components of the term as a united whole: it was natural for the ancient mentality to regard juridical, political, social and moral components as one. This very approach to the term res publica is given in Cicero’s writings. The article also dwells upon rather a debated question about similarity or difference between Cicero’s concepts res publica and civitas . We subscribe to the opinion that, unlike ancient Greeks who do not separate a state from a community, Cicero knows a difference between the terms, res publica for him is a state form, whereas civitas is a community / citizens. Another thing is that Cicero uses the term res publica to denote the very Roman state; for describing other states or discoursing on abstract states he uses the term civitas . To support the opinion about the difference between the above terms, we would like to quote Cicero himself who writes that the concept «a state» embraces a community ( rei publicae nomen universae civitati est ) which means that res publica and civitas do not mean the same.