Cicero on Natural Law and Ideal Laws

Aristotle takes over many of the political ideas of the Laws in the final two books of his Politics, but despite following Plato on some things he makes no use of the idea of preambles or getting citizens to understand their laws in terms of structuring a virtuous way of life. The Stoics do take over Plato’s idea of law as an embodiment of cosmic reason, and develop it into their conception of natural law, explicated by Cicero in his unfinished work on laws. Cicero’s work, On the Laws, is based on Stoic ideas and also on Plato’s Laws, parts of which he closely follows. A crucial difference is that Cicero looks to the ideal past of earlier Roman law. Further, he thinks that natural law is universal. Cicero claims, however, that particular (Roman) laws have ethical authority because they embody natural law better than other systems of law do.