The De re publica contains a sophisticated strain of reflection on the place of the honor motive in a good life, and in particular in the good life of public service. Cicero finds a way for a conscientious public servant to be interested in receiving honor while still directing his actions at the public good and that only. Further, he finds a use for merited honor and merited shame in the moral education of citizens and political leaders. The chapter argues that Cicero’s account of how honor motivates a person, both ordinarily and in the normative case, is fundamentally more similar to the views on honor put forward by the Hellenistic Stoics than it is to the tripartite model of psyche used by Plato in his Republic. As so often in De re publica, what we have is Platonism filtered through and modified by subsequent Stoic thought. But Cicero’s own experience in politics has also given stimulus to his reflections; and conversely, the philosophical position on honor that he develops in his writing becomes part of his self-representation as a public figure.

In his philosophical works Cicero addresses a number of questions concerning the role of old men in politics, most obviously in his dialogue De senectute of 44 bce. How best should the old participate in politics and the wider community – what, if anything, do the old have to offer that is special or unique? How should the generations fit together in the body politic, and should age be a factor in the structural organisation of states? Should the old rule? Through a close reading of De senectute, I argue: (1) Cicero develops a coherent line on the special political role of old men, which can be seen as a call to arms in the contemporary Roman political context; and (2) this line is not just a restatement of traditional Roman ideals: Cicero draws on and adapts some of the most important arguments from Plato’s Republic and his earlier De re publica when addressing these questions regarding the role of old men in politics.

In his De re publica and De officiis, Cicero discusses the conditions that must exist for a war to be justly commenced and waged. In developing his account, Cicero lays the groundwork for many of the principles of the later just war tradition. However, commentators have detected inconsistencies between Cicero’s account of ‘the justice of going to war’ and his reliance on the competitive honor code of the ancient Mediterranean world, which undergirds much of his account of conduct within war. Commentators usually see Cicero’s commendation of wars undertaken for the sake of glory as inconsistent both with the legal and religious principles undergirding his account and with the Stoic account of justice derived from Panaetius, whom Cicero follows in De officiis. In this chapter, I reconstruct Cicero’s account of just war theory and explain why he could plausibly see coherence where the modern commentators see incoherence.