PhilosophersCicéron

Cicéron

True law is right reason in agreement with nature.

New Academy (Academic scepticism) · Stoicism106 – 43 av. J.-C. ItalyAcademic (New Academy)Orator and statesmanBringer of Greek philosophy into LatinThinker of natural law
Est quidem vera lex recta ratio naturae congruens, diffusa in omnes, constans, sempiterna.
There is a true law: right reason, in agreement with nature, spread among all, constant, eternal.
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Non nobis solum nati sumus.
We are not born for ourselves alone.
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Est enim amicitia nihil aliud nisi omnium divinarum humanarumque rerum cum benevolentia et caritate consensio.
Friendship is nothing other than agreement on all things divine and human, with goodwill and affection.
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Socrates autem primus philosophiam devocavit e caelo.
Socrates was the first to call philosophy down from the sky.
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Cedant arma togae.
Let arms yield to the toga.
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Misconceptions

False
Cicero was a Stoic.

He belongs to the New Academy, Plato's school turned sceptical: he looks for the probable and lets every school speak. He borrows a great deal from the Stoics in ethics, but he says so himself: "not as a translator", choosing what he takes. In On the Nature of the Gods, it is an Academic, Cotta, who takes the Stoic proofs apart.

Nuanced
"Summum ius, summa iniuria" (the height of law is the height of injustice) is a phrase coined by Cicero.

He quotes it as a proverb "already worn out" in his time. He uses it against those who respect the letter of a treaty to betray its spirit, like the general who plundered at night during a "thirty-day" truce.

Nuanced
In On the Nature of the Gods, Cicero proves that the gods do not exist.

The character Cotta refutes the Stoics' proofs, but he says he believes in the gods by tradition and only wants to show how obscure the question is. The last sentence of the book gives Cicero's view: Balbus, the defender of the gods and of Providence, seems to him closer to probability.

Nuanced
The printers' dummy text "Lorem ipsum" comes from Cicero.

Yes, but garbled: it comes from a passage of On Ends (I, 32), "neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum…", cut up and scrambled until it no longer means anything. This book is not yet in our corpus.