What it is
De Re Publica is Cicero's longest and most considered political work — a six-book dialogue, composed across 54–51 BCE while he was a private senator under Pompey and Caesar's first triumvirate. The dramatic setting is the estate of Scipio Aemilianus over three days during the Latin festival of 129 BCE; the principal speaker is Scipio, with Laelius, Philus and others as interlocutors. The work survived antiquity only in part. Books I and II are largely preserved; Books III–V exist as substantial fragments; the closing section of Book VI — the Somnium Scipionis, the Dream of Scipio — survived independently because Macrobius wrote a long commentary on it that was copied through the Middle Ages.
Most of what we now have of Books I–III was recovered in 1819, when Angelo Mai of the Vatican Library identified the text underneath a sixth-century Augustine palimpsest. The recovery returned to circulation a work the Western tradition had been working with indirectly for fifteen hundred years.
Historical context
Cicero began the work in 54 BCE, in a Rome where the Republic was visibly under strain: Pompey was sole consul; Caesar was completing the Gallic conquest; the courts and the elections were no longer operating as the institutions of free political deliberation Cicero had defended in his consulship of 63. The decision to set the dialogue seventy-five years earlier, in the generation of Scipio Aemilianus and the destruction of Carthage, places the discussion at the moment the later Roman tradition saw as the last clean expression of an unbroken republican order. The implicit elegy is part of the argument.
What it argues
Book I opens with a defence of the dignity of public life against the Epicurean preference for the private — Cicero arguing, against the fashion of his time, that the deepest human activity is the political one. The book then takes up the constitutional question. Scipio, after distinguishing the three pure regime types (kingship, aristocracy, democracy) and tracing their characteristic decays, argues that the most stable form is the mixed one, in which elements of each are present and check one another. Rome is the working example.
Book II reads the Roman constitution historically — Romulus, Numa, Servius Tullius, the establishment of the consulship — as a generation-by-generation construction of that balance. Books III–V (surviving partially) take up justice, the education of the citizen, and the responsibilities of the rector rei publicae, the steersman of the state.
Book VI closes with the Somnium. Scipio Aemilianus dreams that his adoptive grandfather, Scipio Africanus, descends from the heavens to tell him that the cosmos is ordered, that the souls of those who have served their country well are gathered into the celestial spheres, and that the work of the Republic is therefore not parochial but participates in something larger than itself. The passage is the most influential statement in Latin of the cosmic dignity of civic service.
Why it has been read
Cicero's working source for the constitutional analysis is Polybius; his use of the material made the analysis Latin and durable. Through Macrobius' Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis the closing section was an indispensable medieval text on the soul and the order of the heavens. After Mai's 1819 recovery, the constitutional books re-entered modern political thought during a period — Restoration Europe, Jacksonian America — that was actively rethinking the place of republics in the modern world. The American founders had Mai's edition; Adams cited it in the supplements to his Defence of the Constitutions. Modern constitutional thought has never quite stopped reading Cicero in this register.
Citing De Re Publica
Standard citation is by book and section (e.g. Rep. 1.39 for the definition of res publica; Rep. 6.13 for the opening of the Dream of Scipio). The standard Latin text is the OCT edition; see our Sources page.