by Cicero
NOTE ON THE TEXT
Our evidence for the text of the Republic is threefold, (1) The incomplete Vatican manuscript, shelfmarked Vat. lat. 5757, was brought to light in 1820 by Cardinal Angelo Mai, Prefect of the Vatican Library. It is an eighth-century copy of St Augustine’s commentary on the Psalms, written at the monastery of Bobbio in northern Italy. Mai detected the traces of an earlier text, which proved to be that of the Republic. It was common practice in the early Middle Ages to reuse the parchment from old books, after first making an attempt to wash off the original script. Such recycled manuscripts are called ‘palimpsests’. Using chemical reagents to enhance the clarity of the older script, Mai recovered about a quarter of the original text, which was evidently a luxury edition of the Republic written in uncial script in the fourth or fifth century. The pages were out of order, but the original order could be reconstructed partly from context and partly from the signature numbers which the original scribes had marked at the foot of some of the pages. Subsequent editors have made only minor adjustments. (A photograph of a page of the manuscript may conveniently be found in Reynolds and Wilson, plate 10.) The text in this manuscript contains many errors, but the correct reading is in many cases inserted by an early annotator who appears to have had access to an equally or more reliable text. (2) A number of fragments of the text are preserved as quotations in later writers, particularly Lactantius, Augustine, and the grammarian Nonius Marcellus. The fragments have been fully re-examined by Heck. We have omitted some of the shorter fragments and those whose placing or authenticity is doubtful. (3) The ‘Dream of Scipio’ survives, often in association with the commentary of Macrobius, in an independent manuscript tradition of which the earliest representative (Paris, nouv. acq. lat. 454) dates from the ninth century.
The Laws survives as part of what is called the Leiden corpus, a collection of Cicero’s philosophical works preserved principally in three medieval manuscripts held at the Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Leiden. The text as we have it breaks off at or before the end of the third book, though there is evidence that it consisted of at least five books (a fragment attributed to Book 5 is preserved by Macrobius). It may well originally have been planned in six books to parallel the Republic. It is not clear that Cicero ever published it himself and he may never have revised it fully; it is ironically in this very work that Cicero admits to being bad at resuming work on a project once laid aside. It has been suggested by Zelzer that the text survived at one period only in a cursive copy, which would naturally lead to difficulties of legibility; but whatever the reason, the text as we have it is corrupt in many places and editorial conjecture is often called for.
NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION
The reader of any Latin text is likely to encounter some words which have no exact equivalent in English. In these works the chief examples are animus, magistratus, optimates, pietas, popularis, respublica, and virtus. The Latin animus is translated by ‘mind’, ‘soul’, and even ‘heart’, depending on the context. Magistratus often meant something more like the minister of a government department than our magistrate. Nevertheless, it has been translated as ‘magistrate’ since that is the traditional practice in all works on classical antiquity. For optimates‘the best people’ will not do, for that is a colloquial phrase, usually tinged with irony. In Pro Sestio 96 Cicero extends the term to ‘right-thinking people’; but in the Republic and Laws he usually restricts it to the socially, economically, and politically dominant group, i.e. the aristocracy. The word popularis was used of a politician who was keen to promote the interests of (and thus gain the favour of) the common people. It did not imply a party or even a programme. ‘Populist’ seems to be the closest approximation. ‘Devotion’ has been used for pietas, since our ‘piety’ is predominantly a religious concept. ‘The Republic’ has been kept as the title of Cicero’s work because of the Platonic precedent. Elsewhere ‘state’, ‘country’, ‘form of government’, ‘constitution’, and ‘nation’ have been used for respublica, according to the context. As for virtus, which originally denoted ‘manliness’ in the sense of ‘courage’, the term ‘moral excellence’, or, less frequently, ‘valour’, ‘worth’, or ‘goodness’ has been used. Latin was blest with two general words for ‘men’, namely homines (‘human beings’) and viri (‘males’). Often the translation simply uses ‘men’, relying on the context to make the sense clear.
In the dialogues the names of the speakers have been put at the beginning of every speech, and ‘Marcus’ or ‘Quintus’ has been substituted for ‘brother’. In the direct interchanges the style is that of a rather formal conversation; but when Cicero warms to his theme he tends to rise, quite spontaneously, to a higher, more rhetorical, level. Obvious examples occur in ‘The Dream of Scipio’ and at the end of Laws 1. Little attempt has been made to reproduce the archaic elements in the diction of Cicero’s proposed legal code. Cicero himself has aimed only at something ‘slightly more old-fashioned’ than contemporary speech (L. 2. 18).
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TABLE OF DATES (BC)
753
Traditional date for foundation of Rome
509
Expulsion of Tarquinius Superbus
494–440
Struggle of the Orders (i.e. between patrician and plebeian families)
450
Publication of the Twelve Tables (the earliest code of Roman law, framed by a Committee of Ten; see R. 2. 6T-3; L. 1. 17)
340–264
Roman expansion in Italy
264–241
First Punic War
218–202
Second Punic War
202
Scipio defeats Hannibal at Zama in North Africa
197–133
Operations in Spain
185
Birth of Scipio Aemilianus
167
Polybius, the Greek historian, is brought to Rome
155
Carneades the Sceptic comes to Rome
149–146
Third Punic War
146