As Miss Truss and Mr Sunak spray policies around on a range of topics which they hope will appeal to Conservative members, Tory MPs agonise about whom to support, presumably with jobs in mind. The philosopher and statesman Cicero (106-43 BC) was more interested in a politician’s personal qualities.
The Roman state was a res publica. At one point in his writings, Cicero rephrased that as res populi, which he interpreted as ‘the possession of the people’. By that, he did not mean a democracy – Romans disapproved of the Greek experiment – but a state in which the people did have an active and meaningful interest.
Further, while Romans had duties and obligations to nations, citizens, family and friends, for Cicero it was their devotion to the res publica which counted more than anything else: ‘there is no relationship that is more close or more dear than that which ties each one of us to the res publica’.
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