Cicero

Roby, Roman Private Law in the times of Cicero and of the Antonines.

For, if it is true that Roman Law retained its priestly character and its religious sanctions to a late period of the Republic, then the traditional history of the Twelve Tables is an improbability, and the account given by Cicero and other writers of the legislation and procedure of the Monarchy and early Republic is an anachronism.

’ (For allusions to cretio by Cicero see Roby, Roman Law, 1, p.

Cicero styled war a contention by force.

Cicero, in his first book of offices, says, we do not talk of the justice of horses or lions.

Thus for instance, to deprive another of what belongs to him, merely for one’s own advantage, is repugnant to the law of nature, as Cicero observes in the fifth Chapter of his third book of offices;

Name Cicero, whose books pertaining to philosophy are almost as many as Fabianus's;

In short, in Cicero everything comes to a close, in Pollio everything falls abruptly, except a very few which are bound to a fixed measure and to a single model.

And let us so address Jupiter, by whose helm this whole mass is steered, as our Cleanthes addresses him in most eloquent verses, which I am permitted to render into our own tongue after the example of Cicero, a most eloquent man.

He does away with definitions;

to Epicurus perhaps a foot wide.

'See, Torquatus,' said I, 'how greatly you are mistaken.

quod Cicero dixit:

Hoc Cicero voluit:

Recte igitur Cicero:

We are told by Cicero (‘De Legibus,’ 2, 25, 64) that several of these rules contained in the Tenth of the Roman Tables were taken from Greek originals.

In Cicero’s time the charges for them were still a heavy burden on Inheritances, but they seem to have followed a course of change not unusual elsewhere, and the payments for them were in the nature of fees or dues to the College of Pontiffs.

I will note in passing that the excessive expensiveness of the Roman sacra privata, which is the burden of Cicero’s complaints in his private letters, seems to be a feature of still surviving ancestor-worship.

Unroll his book on the soul with care:

For I myself would not unwillingly err with that very man.

Philosophy has lain neglected until this very day and has had no light shed on it by Latin letters;

Mucius Scævola, the Pontifex, is said to have published a manual of the entire Civil Law, and there are traces in the writings of Cicero of growing disrelish for the old methods, as compared with the more active instruments of legal innovation.

Owing too to the direct contact of the client and the advocate, the Roman people itself seems to have been always alive to the rise and fall of professional reputation, and there is abundance of proof, more particularly in the well-known oration of Cicero, “Pro Muræna,” that the reverence of the commons for forensic success was apt to be excessive rather than deficient.

The language of Cicero renders it more than likely that this was so, and it was the first stage of a transmutation of the conception of Equity, which almost every ethical system which has appeared since those days has more or less helped to carry on.

Who can suppose that the poems of Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton, or the orations of Demosthenes, Cicero, and Burke, would ever have seen the light, had not Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Demosthenes, Cicero and Burke themselves existed?

It is that natural law of justice, which Cicero says is the same at Rome and at Athens, the same to-day and to-morrow, and which neither the senate nor the people can abrogate.

Often we seem to grow angry at Clodius driving Cicero into exile, at Antony putting him to death;

Then Ennius, in whom you take no delight, would have hated you, and Hortensius, if you disapproved his speeches, would declare a feud against you, and Cicero, if you derided his verses, would be your enemy.

Cicero went into exile after Catiline, his household gods razed, his goods plundered, everything done that a victorious Catiline would have done;

for to the king belongs the power over all, to individuals the ownerships.

But that which, so as to be deservedly held God out of the equalizing of all its properties, would lie subject to no passion, would also lie subject to no forgetfulness — since forgetfulness is as great an injury as is the glory of that of which it is the injury, namely memory, which Plato himself proclaimed the safety of the senses and the intellects, and Cicero the treasure-house of all studies.

The reformer of the empire, still a little boy and private in station, and only Julius Octavius, and unknown to himself, Marcus Tullius knew from a dream as both Augustus and the burier of the civil whirlwinds.

Cicero and Livy tell us the same thing.

These matters dealt with, ‘What then?

Some things, too, Posidonius (saving my respect for the master) seems to invent;

In arguing thus he does not see what the question is, or wherein the case consists.

Much have I written, both in my Academic treatises, against the natural philosophers, and often debated, in the manner and method of Carneades, with Publius Nigidius.

Wherefore, if perchance, in discoursing of the nature of the gods and the origin of the universe, we fall short of what our minds long for — that the whole discourse should hold together, lucid and plainly adorned, and agree with itself in every part — it will be no wonder at all;

Now when, as I was setting out for Cilicia, he had awaited me at Ephesus — being himself on his way back to Rome from a legation — and when Cratippus too had come to the same place from Mytilene to greet and visit me — Cratippus, in my judgment easily the foremost of all the Peripatetics whom I have ever heard — it was with the greatest pleasure that I both saw Nigidius and made the acquaintance of Cratippus.

We know that the liability to an independent penalty attached to the suitor by Condictio even when it had become one of the most important Roman actions, and that it was still exacted in the age of Cicero.

and so he escaped the wit of his enemies, of whom he had more than he had diseases, and Cicero's above all.

Gladiators, as Cicero says, we hold in contempt if they are eager to win their lives by any means at all;

When good men come to a bad end—when Socrates is forced to die in prison, Rutilius to live in exile, Pompey and Cicero to offer their necks to their own clients, when that Cato, the living image of the virtues, falling upon his sword, declares openly that all is over both with himself and with the republic—it is inevitable that one should be tormented that fortune pays out such unjust rewards.

Many among you exhort to the endurance of pain and of death:

Claudius, the enemy of Cicero, was adopted by a man younger than himself, in order to enable him to become a Tribune of the people, and no evil results that I ever heard of came from it.