[I] Q. Mucius augur multa narrare de C. Laelio socero suo memoriter et iucunde solebat, nec dubitare illum in omni sermone appellare sapientem. ego autem a patre ita eram deductus ad Scaeuolam sumpta uirili toga ut quoad possem et liceret a senis latere numquam discederem. itaque multa ab eo prudenter disputata, multa etiam breuiter et commode dicta memoriae mandabam fierique studebam eius prudentia doctior.

The preface falls into two parts. In the first (1–3), C. establishes his source for the dialogue he is about to recount: he claims to have heard it in 88 bce from his mentor Q. Mucius Scaevola Augur, who recounted to a group of friends a conversation on the topic of friendship that he and C. Fannius had with their father-in-law C. Laelius Sapiens in 129. Just as Scaevola had allegedly retained Laelius’ words, so too C. claims to report Scaevola’s account from memory. In the second part (4–5), the author turns to the work’s dedicatee, his friend Atticus, and explains his rationale in setting up the dialogue the way he has, with a venerable speaker from an earlier generation discoursing on a topic with expertise and authority. Thus, just as in C.’s earlier De senectute the old man Cato discusses old age, in Amic. Laelius – renowned for his friendship with the younger Scipio – talks about friendship. And just as C. had dedicated De senectute to Atticus as an old man to an old man, he now writes for the same dedicatee as one friend to another, encouraging him to immerse himself fully in the fiction of the dialogue and hear “Laelius” speak.

Cicero wrote his Laelius de amicitia (Amic.) in the fall of 44 bce, at a time when he was becoming increasingly drawn into the turbulent political events precipitated by the assassination of Julius Caesar on 15 March. He was 62 years old and could look back on a distinguished career as a statesman, orator, and author of rhetorical and philosophical works but – as so often during his life – he found himself deeply concerned about the state of the Roman commonwealth. Disregard for the republican political process, competing factions and individuals, and the growing threat of violence and civil war meant that Cicero had to fear not only for the well-being of the res publica but also for his own. His concerns were only too justified: before the end of the following year, Cicero was dead, murdered at the behest of the newly established Second Triumvirate.

This chapter explores the relationships among Cicero’s three pre-Civil-War dialogues, De oratore, De re publica, and the incomplete De legibus, both in terms of their relationship to Plato and in terms of their connections with one another. While some important recent scholarship has emphasized the links between De re publica and De legibus, I concentrate on the links between De oratore and De re publica, in terms of their attitudes to Plato and to Hellenistic learning, the relationship they establish between Greek thought and Roman practice, and their construction of the interrelated histories of philosophy, rhetoric, and politics. I also suggest that De legibus is strikingly different from the other two works in these respects and also in the relative weight it places on the role of individuals and institutions in creating a moral and successful public world.

The various chapters in this volume have shown how ubiquitous is the appeal to nature in writings about language in the first century BCE; several of them have explored further the place of linguistic naturalism in the overall structure of the philosophies, notably Stoicism, on which that naturalism was based. At the same time, however, even a rapid survey of the volume shows equally clearly not only how inconsistent the various claims about the relationship between nature and language are among one another – scarcely surprising, since they derive from widely divergent philosophical systems – but also how inconsistent the most important surviving text, Varro’s De lingua Latina, is in itself. Does naturalism have any meaning? Or rather, does ‘nature’ have any meaning? And what good is an appeal to nature if that nature is in itself as uncertain and unintelligible as it often seems to be?

Cicero's On the Commonwealth (De re publica) and On the Laws (De legibus) represent the most significant surviving contribution to political thought in the 700+ years between the death of Aristotle and Augustine's City of God. They are ambitious and complex works, difficult to interpret not merely because so little survives of the Hellenistic philosophy on which Cicero drew, but also because we possess only parts of them: On the Commonwealth is fragmentary, and perhaps a third of it is still extant, while On the Laws not only survives only in part (three books out of at least five), but was apparently left unfinished at Cicero's death. The goal of this Introduction is to offer some background for reading these texts and some explanation of their form, structure, and arguments.

Cicero's Public Career

Early in December 63 BCE, the consul Marcus Tullius Cicero, having unmasked the conspiracy of Catiline and supervised the execution of several of the leading conspirators, was hailed as Father of his Country and escorted home by a crowd of grateful Romans from all ranks of society; a public thanksgiving was decreed in his honor, the first such award ever made for non-military service to the state. That moment was the summit of a remarkable career: not only had Cicero's consulate been distinguished by signal success and acclaim, but the very fact that he had achieved that office – the chief magistracy in republican Rome – and had done so at the earliest legal age of forty-two was itself unusual. Cicero was born in 106 BCE in the town of Arpinum, some 115 km southeast of Rome. The town had had Roman citizenship since 188, and Cicero's family were among its leading citizens; however, not one of them had ever held public office at Rome. Cicero's family did have strong connections among the Roman aristocracy, though, and he came to Rome very early (before the age of fifteen) to learn the ways of politics and law under the guidance of the leading orator (Lucius Licinius Crassus) and jurists (Quintus Mucius Scaevola the Augur and his cousin Quintus Mucius Scaevola the Pontifex) of the 90s and 80s. Cicero began his career as an advocate at the end of Sulla's dictatorship, and he first held public office as quaestor in 75.