CICERO'S writings on politics are a unique mixture of historical insight, moral indignation, partisan feeling, and bland wishful thinking. It is probably his facility (not uncommon in a practising politician) of descending from the near sublime to the ignominious that has made it so difficult for historians to come to any impartial judgment about his merits either as a statesman or as a political theorist. He has been lauded as one of the most clear-sighted statesmen produced by the Roman Republic, and assailed with a venom worthy of Cicero himself as a hack journalist whose dreadful barrenness of thought... must revolt any reader of feeling and judgment. There are, I believe, two main reasons for these conflicting opinions. One is the complex personality of the man himself, the other the fact that Cicero, an idealist in an age of extremes, strove throughout his life to reconcile the immediate claims of party politics with his own political and moral ideal that was founded partly on Roman practice, partly on a Greek tradition that he was attempting in vain to revive. It is the purpose of this paper to examine in outline certain aspects of the influence of Greek political and ethical tradition on Cicero's thought. In his Republic (1.39) Cicero defines a state as a society that is no mere aggregate of individuals but one organized on the basis of agreed rights and community of interests. The bonds of this society are justice or kindness (beneficentia) towards one's fellows (Off. 1.20; Leg. 1.28; 1.33). The natural goal of this society, which is based on fides, good faith or fidelity to agreements, should be perfect justice (Rep. 2.70). In insisting on the paramount importance of this virtue Cicero was, of course, following the main stream of Greek political thought. However, to understand the peculiar emphasis of the Ciceronian conception of justice it is first necessary to remark certain features of its historical evolution. From the time of Solon it seems to have been a commonplace among political theorists (in Athens at least) that justice was the bond of the state. In his Oresteia Aeschylus identified it with the will of Zeus, the embodiment of which he found in the Areopagus which, we remember, several years before the trilogy was written had been stripped of all political power. Thus he was the first, though by no means the last, European to find a religious sanction for his political views, though it should be added, in all fairness, that the Oresteia, with its sublime monotheism, was an apotheosis of politics. Later, Protagoras, that curiously conservative revolutionary, felt impelled, if we can believe Plato, to postulate an innate instinct towards justice, the gift of Prometheus, which he believed common to all men. Needless to say, the