Cosmopolitanism and Natural Law in Cicero
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) was the first legal philosopher in history. In Cicero´s thought we can find the Stoic conception of Natural Law, i.e., that Law is derived from God, Nature (Universe) and Human Reason. Indeed, Cicero inherits from Stoicis
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Cosmopolitanism and Natural Law in Cicero Fernando Llano Alonso
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Marcus Tullius Cicero: The First Legal Philosopher in History
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) was one of the great names of the Roman Republic’s final days. Despite being a homo novus and having been born outside the aristocracy, he received as a young man an impressive education at the hands of some of the greatest philosophers, orators, jurists, and public figures of the day.1 As an intellectual polymath, Cicero perfectly embodied the classical scholar who cultivated all the “humanist” disciplines (omnium doctrinarum studiosus). According to this republican intellectual model, the orator could be at the same time a jurist and the philosopher could end up a government man capable of averting any attempt to subvert or threaten Rome’s institutions and traditions.2 Of the painstaking study of and consecration of his life to these three intricately linked disciplines- law, oratory, and politics- Cicero gave elaborate testimony in some of his most influential works.3 Thus is it that, from a strictly legal perspective for example, apart from his treatise on laws (De Legibus, 51 BC), there are descriptions of a treaty (De Iure Civile in Artem Redigendo, c. 55 BC) that did not survive to our day in which Cicero proposed the systematization of a veritable heap of
1 Of Cicero’s teachers, it will suffice to mention such rhetoricians and orators as Apolonius Molon; philosophers as the Skeptic Philo of Larissa, the Epicurean Phaedrus and the Stoics Diodotus and Posidonius; and jurists of such renown as the two Q. Mucius Scaevola (the Augur and the Pontifex). 2 Bretone (1984), 85. Von Albrecht (2003), 220. 3 Bretone (1976), 28–40.
F. Llano Alonso (*) Filosofía del Derecho, Universidad de Sevilla, Enramadilla 18-20, 41018 Sevilla, Spain e-mail: [email protected] F.J. Contreras (ed.), The Threads of Natural Law: Unravelling a Philosophical Tradition, Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice 22, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-5656-4_2, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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jurisprudence until then to his eye disordered.4 As for oratory, although Cicero distinguished among diverse forms, he preferred to consider himself above all a legal orator, as he declared in the first book of his treatise De Oratore (46 BC). The profession demanded a mastery of public and private law, in addition to eloquence and persuasiveness.5 In this regard, according to Jill Harries, although Cicero claimed that he knew only as much law as he needed to get by as an orator, “knowledge of law in its most technical and occasionally even pedantic sense was part of his culture.”6 With respect to politics, the works that best reflect his commitment to republican ideals and his calling to serve his country are, without a doubt, De Re Publica (51 BC) and De Officiis (44 BC). According to the patriotic and republican principles that inform Ciceronian political thought, the scholar who fails to involve himself in public affairs is wasting his wisdom. F
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