De Legibus - Book Two

Book Two

Book Two begins with Cicero espousing his beliefs on Natural Law. The party has made it to an island in the river Fibrenius where they sit and relax and resume their discussion. As the book begins, Cicero and Atticus argue about whether a person can hold patriotism for both one's larger country and the region therein that one hails from: i.e., can one love Rome and Arpinum at the same time? Cicero argues that not only can one, but it is natural. Cicero uses the example of Cato the Elder, who by dint of his birth in Tusculum was a Roman citizen yet could, with no hypocrisy, also call himself a Tuscan. However, Cicero also makes the important distinction that one's birthplace must take subordination to the land of one's citizenship—that there is where one's duty is owed to and for which one must, if necessary, lay down one's life. Cicero also strengthens the link between him and Gaius Marius by having Atticus mention a speech by Pompey, who talked of Rome's debt to Arpinum, as its two greatest sons were also Rome's saviors.

Once the trio reach the island, Cicero launches into an examination of law. He begins by saying that law does not, and cannot, begin with men. Men, to him, are the instruments of a higher wisdom which governs the entire earth and has the power, through shared morality, to command good or forbid evil. Cicero also makes a distinction in this section between legalism (actual written law) and law (right and wrong as dictated by the eternal wisdom). To Cicero, human laws can be good or ill depending on whether they are in sync with the eternal, natural law. A law enacted for a purely temporary or local purpose is law, according to him, by dint of public approval. It has force of law only so long as people observe it and the state enforces it. Natural law, however, needs no encoding, no enforcement. By way of example, Cicero mentions that when Sextus Tarquinius, son of King Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, raped Lucretia, there were no laws in Rome governing rape. However, even then, the populace knew viscerally that what had happened was against shared morality, and followed Lucius Junius Brutus to correct matters. Evil laws, or ones that go against the eternal law, further, do not deserve the title, and states that enact them to the exclusion of the eternal law do not deserve the title states. To demonstrate, Cicero uses the analogy of unschooled people or quacks passing themselves off as doctors and prescribing deadly treatments. No one in their right mind, Cicero argues, would dare call such treatments "medicine" or their practitioners "doctors".

Cicero's insistence that religious belief (the belief in the gods, or God, or the Eternal wisdom) must be the cornerstone of law leads the trio, naturally, into the framing of religious laws. The laws proposed by Cicero seem to draw mostly from even then antique statutes from Rome's earliest days, including those of Numa Pompilius, the semi-legendary second king of Rome and the laws of the Twelve Tables, according to Quintus. From thence follows a long discussion on the merits of Cicero's hypothetical decrees.

Among the things acknowledged in this section are the fact that at times religious laws have both a spiritual and a pragmatic purpose, as Cicero, when quoting the laws of the Twelve Tables and their injunction against burial or cremation within the pomerium, admits that the injunction is as much to appease fate (by not burying the dead where the living dwell) as it is to avoid calamity (by lessening the risk of fire in the city due to open-pyre cremation). After the discussions on religious laws, and with Cicero's stated objective to replicate Plato's feat by conducting a thorough discussion on the laws in one day, they move into civil law and the makeup of the government.