Marcus Tullius Cicero

Life and ideas

Cicero was Rome's greatest orator, a senator who defended the republic against those who destroyed it and who was killed in the proscriptions of 43 BC. In his dialogues On the Republic and On the Laws, he took the Stoic view that there is a true law, in agreement with nature, that applies to all people and cannot be repealed by any senate or assembly. He argued that justice does not depend on what the powerful choose to enact: an unjust statute is not truly law, because law is right reason applied to commanding and forbidding. He also described the state as a gathering of people bound together by agreement about law and by a common interest. Medieval and early modern writers, from Aquinas to Grotius and Locke, drew on his words, and his idea of natural law passed into the modern language of human rights.