Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC), a famous Roman statesman, orator, and legal thinker, was born into a wealthy family in Alpino, Italy, and went to Rome at the age of 16 to study law and philosophy, and later went to Athens to engage in philosophical research and debate. Cicero was extremely eloquent and considered one of the most successful lawyers of his time; he was erudite and extensive, writing extensively in philosophy, political science, poetry, and jurisprudence. At the same time, his political career was also brilliant, successively serving as an important official in Rome, serving as a Roman consul in 63 BC; unfortunately, after the second "three-headed alliance" came to power, he was killed as a political enemy of the dictator Antony at the age of 63.
Cicero was the culmination of ancient Western ideas of natural law, and his philosophy of law was in line with ancient Greek philosophy; he interpreted Greek philosophy in his beautiful and inspiring language, giving practical impetus to those abstract philosophical concepts, making them more influential and widely disseminated. His masterpieces of legal philosophy, "On the Republic" and "On law", are written in the form of dialogues, expounding his views on the nature of law, the state system, and other issues. The brilliance of the ideas conveyed in the exquisite and elegant language of his works is still admired and deeply affected today.
Cicero's On the Law was written in 52 BC and revised in 46 bc and 44 BC. The book reflects the political life and legal practice of ancient Rome in the 1st century BC, and its political and legal ideas were often invoked in the Western European Middle Ages and influenced later legal works.
Cicero's On the Law can be said to be a manifesto of natural law. Cicero is committed to injecting the concept of "natural justice" into Roman law, combining esoteric and abstract philosophies with the specific legal system of Rome, thus giving life to natural law in practice and promoting the development of natural law, and this long-standing legal theory is the source of the progressive vitality of the Western legal tradition. Natural law has a far-reaching influence on the European continent, and it has not only become the ideological weapon of the later bourgeois revolution, but also directly embodied in the laws of some countries.
At the same time, the flaws in the theory of natural law are obvious, Cicero bases his theory on a transcendental, unverified abstract concept of "nature" or the will of God, and the instability of the foundation has a fatal effect on the stability and convincingness of the entire system of doctrine, although this weakness also exists in the theories of other natural jurists. But as Henry Main put it: "Although this theory is philosophically flawed, we cannot ignore its importance to humanity." Indeed, if natural law had not become a universal belief in the ancient world, it would be difficult to say in what direction the history of ideas, and therefore the history of mankind, would have developed. ”
In particular, Cicero put forward some of the legal principles, such as fairness, openness, proportionality of crimes and punishments, etc., although these views seem to have limitations in some aspects of the process of argument today, but this was progressive in a slave society in which class interests were sharply opposed and hierarchical and class complex. These principles still occupy an important place in our modern legal system and are an essential element of the defence of human rights.
