Cicero’s statement salus populi suprema lex esto (‘Let the security of the people be the ultimate law’) has been the motto or guiding principle of any number of institutions and thinkers from the state of Missouri to Hobbes and Locke. Benjamin Netanyahu is well aware of this and knows that, whatever action he takes, his failure to keep Israel secure from Hamas’s inhuman attacks on civilians will be the end of him.
Cicero (d. 44 bc) was the first person we know of to produce a code of conduct for warfare. In it, he argued that battle should be confined to the military and civilians should have no involvement in it whatsoever. This particular ruling was all of a piece with his broader thoughts developed in his work On the Laws. Here he argued that man’s capacity for reasoning, derived via nature from the divine mind, was designed to ‘correct vice and promote virtue’ and so provide humanity with a universal, legal code of conduct.
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