Cicero

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.

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

Cicero frequently mentions a great case in which the question arose whether a vulgaris substitutio may be implied from a pupillaris substitutio.

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;

Among other authorities, we may quote Aristotle, who says it is a strong proof in our favour, when all appear to agree with what we say, and Cicero maintains that the consent of all nations in any case is to be admitted for the law of nature.

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

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.

For when both had come to me at my house near Cumae to pay their respects, after a few words at first about literature, in which the zeal of each was supreme, Torquatus said:

As for me, I think this whole inquiry concerning the ends of goods and evils has been pretty fully set forth by me in these volumes, in which, so far as I could, I have followed out not only what I myself approve, but also what is said by each of the schools of philosophy.

'Why, you have nearly removed Epicurus altogether from the chorus of philosophers.

et Tullius, factas esse veteri occupatione res eorum qui quondam in vacua venerant.

Hoc modo dicit Cicero agrum Arpinatem Arpinatum dici, Tusculanum Tusculanorum:

Hoc est quod Cicero dicit inter prima esse Iustitiae munera, rebus communibus pro communibus uti.

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.

When at last I had been set free, either wholly or in great part, from the labours of advocacy and from my senatorial duties, I betook myself once more, Brutus, chiefly at your urging, to those studies which, though kept alive in my mind, had been laid aside as the times demanded and after a long interval interrupted;

And so I have set down in the same number of books the five days' disputations — schools, as the Greeks call them.

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.

But what I did in my other books, those on the nature of the gods, and likewise in those I published on divination—namely, that the argument should be developed continuously on both sides, so that each man might the more readily accept whatever seemed to him most probable—a certain accident prevented me from doing in this discussion on fate.

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

But let us dismiss Posidonius, as is fair, with our good grace, and return to the snares of Chrysippus.

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.

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.

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

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.