Romanising Greek Political Thought: Cicero on Magistrates and the Cosmopolis

Alex Long 
University of St Andrews
&
René Brouwer
University of Utrecht

December 14, 2023
Starts in New York 12.00 p.m. / St Andrews 5.00 p.m. / Budapest 6.00 p.m. / Athens 7.00 p.m.

 

The session will consider how Cicero romanises previous Greek political thought, on magistrates and the cosmopolis.  Alex Long will consider Book 3 of Cicero's De Legibus as a development of Plato's account of magistrates and office-holders. He will argue that rethinking Platonic political philosophy in the light of Melissa Lane's new book (Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political, – Princeton UP, 2023) opens up new ways of conceiving Cicero's reception of Plato in that dialogue. René Brouwer will discuss how Cicero, well aware of the Cynic version, developed an influential, more mundane version of cosmopolitanism, both from the individual point of view of a watered-down type of world-citizenship as well as from the overall point of view as the world as a city ruled by the Romans.