1Contrary to what some believe, Romans were not born to be imperialists, but arrived at their imperialism after a long process informed by complex military and ideological considerations.1 At a certain moment in their history, coinciding with the final decades of the res publica, some Romans felt the need to explore the foundations of law, society, and domination from a philosophical perspective. Though an abstract reflection, it was one with very concrete consequences, elaborating as it did the theoretical basis for empire and imperialism.

2Cicero’s attitude towards barbarian legislation can be analyzed from many perspectives. Our methodological point of departure is to assert that this problem cannot be examined only in semantic, rhetorical, or even historical terms. It requires both accurately analyzing what Cicero thought civilization to be, and paying close attention to the evolution of his opinions. The place of barbarians, as probed in his thoughts on their laws, is an aspect of his view of humankind. At the same time, these Ciceronian texts were written in a very specific period – namely, the eve of the disappearance of the traditional Republic, which was after a period of chaos replaced by a monarchic regime. Romans, not barbarians, were the main problem for Cicero, but when Romans acted as barbarians were supposed to act, the boundary between the two became blurred.

An orator facing civilizational problems

The creation of civilization in De inventione

3I shall begin with Cicero’s first theoretical treatise, from approximately 86 BCE.2 Cicero wrote De inventione, a mythical narration of the origins of civilization, after finishing his philosophical studies under Philo of Larissa,3 the last scholar of the Academy, who went to Rome as an exile after the siege of Athens by Mithridates. The work later was mocked by Cicero himself, who considered it a youthful error.4 Yet recent studies show that it is a seminal work of great importance for understanding the logic of Cicero’s complex rhetorical thought.5

4First, Cicero speaks of homines. This is understandable in a myth about the beginnings of civilization, but was a novelty in Rome, where the point of reference was not the creation of the world, but the foundation of the City, since everything was seen from the perspective of its foundation, ab Urbe condita. Second, the man who gathers the humans isolated in the fields is not a nomothetēs, a lawgiver, but a magnus uidelicet uir et sapiens (a man obviously great and wise),6 who succeeds in transforming mankind thanks to his persuasive counsel. Finally, this professed description of the beginnings of civilization does not explicitly mention the making of laws, and their function in the city is left unspecified.

5The absence of lawmaking is especially odd, since allusions to justice are not wholly absent. Paragraph 2 stresses that primitive mankind, described as feri and immanes (savage and inhuman), had no understanding of legitimae nuptiae. Justice, it suggests, could not be institutionalized without eloquence, which was necessary to bring primitive mankind ad ius.7 Further, paragraph 4 describes the decline of the incipient civilization as resulting from the fact that in court, the eloquents were victorious, and innocents condemned. Consequently, according to Cicero, prominent men abandoned political life and retreated to intellectual activities. He firmly condemns that approach,8 and gives Scipio and Laelius as examples of prominent men who instead resisted this temptation. Evidently, they are models he himself has decided to follow.

6What conclusions can we draw? In the prœmium, laws are not perceived as elements that deliver mankind to civilization from savagery (immanitas, a most important term for Cicero9). Ethical eloquence is identified as the only cause of this transition. Nor can laws prevent the decay of civilization; only prominent men both wise and eloquent can prevent such a deadly evolution. Eloquentia is said to be the only discipline with universal perspectives on both private and public matters, quod ad omnes res et priuatas et publicas maxime pertineat,10 an ambition that evidently engenders a rivalry with philosophy. The question addressed by Cicero is not whether laws were fair, but whether there were men able to persuade other citizens not to destroy the pillars of the city with their temeritas and their audacia. Laws appear to be not so much causes as consequences, a superstructure whose survival is bound up with the ethical quality of the city as a whole.

7This text had the potential to prove dangerous later on. The assertion that all civilization was dependent on one man expressed the young Cicero’s dream of becoming this eloquent, just, and powerful individual. Conversely, though, it could imply that human societies were incapable of independently governing themselves and needed a leader who would be the sole guarantee of social cohesion. As we shall see, more than thirty years later, the princeps of the De re publica would appear as the Ciceronian solution between the Republican regime and personal power.

Cicero versus Lucretius: human origins and the barbarians

8Lucretius’s description of the initial stages of humankind in DRN, Book 5, composed about thirty years after Cicero’s De inventione, provides an intriguing contrast.11 Lucretius probably was familiar with the Ciceronian reflection on mankind’s origins, but his thinking about laws is quite different. His elaboration of legislation represents a distinctive and essential moment in human history. The poem has an unorthodox focus on the philosophical theory of anakuklōsis, discussed at length in Book 6 of Polybius:12 first the foundation of cities by almighty kings; then a revolution and the murder of the kings, not by an aristocratic conspiracy, but by the mob, which imposes ochlocracy and destroys all remnants of civilization; finally, the appearance of an aristocracy and the creation of a legislative order, which the people accept because they no longer can bear violence. For Lucretius, this acceptance is nothing but utilitarian, expressing the egoist impulse common to all living beings.

9In the view of Lucretius, societies develop according to a logical process. His position must be understood in philosophical – specifically, Epicurean – terms. The main aim of the poet is to demonstrate that there is no need to imagine divine intervention or social instinct, contrary to the Stoics.13 Mankind’s evolution is due to contact with natural realities, which constantly create new patterns of action. It is the use of things, and only that, which improves human life. From the Epicurean perspective, violence has inner limits. When it rises excessively in a disorganized society, disagreements become so incessant that a legislative order is shown to be necessary, since the natural tendency of living beings is to seek pleasure and avoid pain.14

10Things are much more unpredictable in Cicero’s first treatise. The original state of mankind is not humanity, but inhumanity, immanitas, a concept quite rare in Lucretius, although in his description too, the original state of man is a savage one. For Cicero, the action of the magnus uir et sapiens, both axiological and communicative, must be continued on by prominent men – if there are such men. Without them, the structures of the city threaten to collapse. Cicero uses a mythic form, while Lucretius gives a description that is poetic and scientific.

11With regard to barbarians, a comparison between the two Roman thinkers is telling. Lucretius almost never mentions them as an anthropological reality. In DRN 2, 500, there is only a trivial allusion to “barbaric vestments,” barbaricae uestes, richer and more vividly colored than those of the Romans. In DRN 5, 36, in the refutation of a mythological belief, Lucretius describes places “where none of our folk ever goes and where not even the outlander dares to go,” quo neque noster adit quisquam nec barbarus audit (my translation). Here Romans seem to have replaced Greeks in the traditional dichotomy between Greeks and barbarians.

12Though a new fragment of the Oenoanda inscription, insulting for Jews and Egyptians, shows that no Epicurean was free of xenophobia, nothing of the sort can be found in Lucretius.15 Meanwhile, in Cicero’s De inventione, most probably because of the Greek source of the treatise, anthropological identity remains defined by the dichotomy of graius an barbarus,16 without any explicit mention of Roman identity. In 1, 103, which provides a rhetorical description of barbarians, Cicero presents them as a vestige of primordial bestiality, especially in evoking a crime “unknown even among savages, barbarous tribes and wild beasts,” a feris quoque hominibus et a barbaris gentibus et immanibus bestiis esse remotum. The progression in this sentence is quite interesting: first individual savagery; then collective bestiality by some nations – namely, the barbarians; and finally beasts themselves as the absolute opposite of humanity.

13Certainly we cannot expect the same coherence in a handbook of rhetoric written by a young man as in a philosophical poem. Yet this does not disqualify De inventione as a valuable testimony on Cicero’s thinking at this time in his life. It is remarkable that in that work’s twin opus, the Rhetoric to Herennius, there is almost no contempt, almost no mention at all, of barbarians.

Who are barbarians? The characteristics of barbarians according to Cicero

14Beyond Cicero’s rhetorical invective against barbarians, two elements seem to be constitutive of barbarity, at least in the works produced before his philosophical turnabout. The first is that barbarians are driven, even in their most significant political decisions, by desire alone:17

It is the custom of the native kings in Persia and Syria, we are told, to have a number of wives, and to these wives they assign towns in the following fashion: one town is to provide for a lady’s girdle, another for her necklace, another for her hair-ornaments; and thus they keep whole populations not merely in the secret but in the service of their pleasures.

15While the Roman Senate assigned provinces only after debates and long, complex (albeit rarely honest) processes, barbarian kings would offer cities to their wives not even in consideration for their beauty, but as gifts for various parts of their bodies.

16The second element of the barbarians’ ethos, arising from the first, is that they are unable to build projects. They live in the present, and only in the present. This means that they lack the most important political quality – prudentia, with which one looks far into the future (prouidentia).18 The contrast is fleshed out in a rhetorical topos:19 “one from difference: If it be the mark of barbarian folk to live but for the day, our own purposes should contemplate all time”. Mutatis mutandis, Cicero levels against the barbarians the same reproach that he will level at the dogmatic in his final works: that of temeritas. They are unable to take time to think before acting.

17Cicero’s main point here is that some individuals, though of human appearance, are in reality savage beasts, as we read in Pro Sulla 76: beluae quaedam illae ex portentis immanes ac ferae forma hominum indutae exstiterunt (“they were beasts, monstrosities, awful and fierce, clothed in human form”). The role of rhetoric in such an affirmation is too obvious to deny. However, we cannot ignore the fact that Cicero always was obsessed with the contradiction within human nature between reason and irrationality. Moreover, we must keep in mind that Roman thinkers had to face the Greek assertion that Romans were themselves barbarians. This issue appears clearly in the first book of De re publica, where Scipio asks Laelius whether Romulus reigned over barbarians, and receives this answer:20 “If, like Greeks say, one must be a Greek or a barbarian, I fear that he had reigned over barbarians. But if this name must be given to customs, not to words, in my opinion Greeks are no less barbarians than Romans”.

18This response is instructive of the plasticity in Cicero’s concept of barbarism. It is not a fixed anthropological category, but an ethical evaluation of a human group, or better, a mix of anthropological category and ethical evaluation, that can vary according to situation and rhetorical context. We have seen that in In Verrem, Persian kings are presented as the archetypes of barbarian despots, but in De domo sua 60, Persians are included among the integerrimas pacatissimasque gentis. In De haruspicum responso 28, they are said to have been respectful of temples and priests even when they reigned over vast countries. Cicero uses barbarian identity both as a weapon against those he wishes to crush and as a typological category to characterize all those he accuses of being led by passion. The comparison to a Persian despot is useful in presenting Verres as removed from Roman identity. Yet for the requirements of the speech, it was necessary to assert that Clodius was much worse even than the Persians, who are presented in comparison to him as a decent people.

Pro Sestio: Barbarism in the city

19The next text, which is not well known despite its significance, is a speech delivered at the beginning of March 56 in which Cicero includes an excursus again addressing the origin of civilization. Here there is no more mention of the magnus uir et sapiens, nor is eloquence considered responsible for the foundation of cities. The founders are presented as uirtute et consilio praestanti – probably a projection of the Senate – and as an avenue of avoiding the advent of a providential man, who may be perceived as alluding to Pompeius or Caesar. Unlike De inventione, Pro sestio heavily stresses the importance of ius in the foundation of civilization.21 Cicero himself eases our understanding of this change when he says that it would be surprising to find a single citizen who preferred public to private interest,22 indicating a situation close to the decadence described in Inv. 1, 4. There is an opportunistic aspect to this rhetorical strategy, in that Sestius stood accused de ui by the populares led by Clodius, who never forgave him for helping Cicero return from exile.

20At a time of fear and cowardice, lacking the political power to again save the res publica, Cicero stresses that the Senate jurists were the last bulwark against an irruption of bestiality. In retrospect, he makes them the founders of the rule of law. One year later, this idea will gain expression in the first book of De oratore, which proposes two different theories to explain how civilization arose. Crassus, in line with De inventione, opines that the origin of civilization lies in eloquence.23 Scaevola, however, bitterly rejects this thesis, emphasizing the role of consilium and law.24 Coming from a prestigious family of lawyers, Scaevola could not admit the superiority of eloquence over law; as a legal practitioner, he could not remain indifferent to what he perceived as the displacement of jurists and philosophers by orators. Though the primitive state of humanity is presented in Pro sestio as it is in De inventione, as is the reign of violence, once again described with terms such as feritas and immanis uita, there is no mention at all of barbarians in this speech, even with a rhetorical meaning. This is quite odd in a speech containing many passages of great verbal violence.25 The reason is, in my opinion, clear. Barbarians are absent, but barbarity is present – this time inside the city. All this has as consequence a radical dichotomy between ius and uis, between humanitas and immanitas, and a division of the city into two parts: the aristocratic, which is said to protect the laws, institutions, and traditions, and the popularis, which Cicero pretends has no project, no ambition, except to destroy everything in a general conflagration.26

21At this point in his life, Cicero realized that he was unable to prevent regression to the primitive state of violence he had described in De inventione. He could have accepted the restoration of peace at the hands of an exceptional man. Indeed, he would have liked to be that magnus uir et sapiens – but he was lucid enough to understand that this had become impossible. He knew that Caesar also harbored such ambitions. He described him in Pro Balbo, delivered in 56 BCE, as a man able to bring peace in a barbarian country riven by myriad conflicts:27

I say nothing of the great distinctions that Gaius Caesar, while a governor in Spain, conferred upon that people, how he settled disputes, by their own consent established codes of law, extirpated a kind of ingrained Barbary from the customs and institutions of the people of Gades, and, at Balbus’s request, bestowed upon that state the greatest interest and the greatest favours.

22Inveterata, translated above as “ingrained,” is an adjective that Cicero again will use in the context of the Stoic theory of passions, in Tusculanes, to characterize a passion too old to be cured.28 At the level of a barbarian nation, Caesar did what Cicero will say to be impossible to do at the level of individuals. The ipsorum permissu too is of interest, since it precisely reproduces the same situation as in De inventione. Barbarians, like the primitive mankind of the rhetorical treatise, are not impervious to rational arguments, if these are adapted to their situation. It is the role of eloquence to make this adaptation possible. Yet Cicero did not want Caesar to fulfill the function that he himself had failed to fulfill. When politics and rhetoric had shown their incapacity to change the situation, philosophy had to give an answer to two questions: Are violence and egoism truly the primitive state of mankind? If not, is it possible that at the foundation of human societies there is a natural law not of violence, like the one defended by Callicles in the Gorgias, but of universal rationality?

Towards a philosophical theorization

The philosophical answer in De re publica and De legibus: Barbarians and universal law

23These questions are famously discussed at length in utramque partem in the 3^rd book of De re publica. They later received a more dogmatic answer in De legibus. Many invaluable books and papers have been written on these works, but there perhaps remains something to be said about the repercussions of this discussion for the image of the barbarians.

24Philus is said to repeat Carneadean arguments against the idea of justice. Carneades was the most famous of the scolarchs of the skeptical Academy. He was sent to Rome in 155 BCE as a member of the so-called embassy of the philosophers, who tried to obtain a more lenient judgment from the Roman Senate for their city, Athens, after it was accused of ransacking the city of Oropos.29 Already in the initial paragraphs of the 3^rd book of De re publica comes the universalization of the concept of a “great man,” one who greatly contributes to the construction of a state. Apparently, since the text is unfortunately corrupt, many nations, such as the Assyrians, Persians, and Carthaginians, are mentioned as having had many great men, an affirmation in contradiction with the often negative image of the barbarians we have seen. The idea is developed by Scipio, himself a paradigm of the builders of cities, and of men able to shore up the constitution of their city.30 This is what I would term the first kind of universality: Romans, Greeks, and barbarians each have their civilian heroes without whom their cities could not exist. Each of these honorable men can be perceived in the space of his city as the equivalent of the magnus uir et sapiens of De inventione. No difference is posited in this respect between barbarians and Greeks or Romans. The passage states that nothing is a greater proof of cleverness than building a state capable of lasting:31 id est in rerum natura longe maximi consili constituere eam rem publicam quae possit esse diuturna. This declaration is followed by an appreciative exclamation about the huge number of excellent men in so many admirable cities.

25The second form of universality is that of desire and egoism. Philus, who defends the pars destruens of Carneades’s supposed 2^nd speech – the one at least dialectically directed against Plato, Aristotle, and more implicitly the Stoics – says that law has no origin other than egoism.32 Its variations are nothing but a normal sign of differences between perceptions of utility. No law is more just than another, since there is no objective, immanent, and transcendent measure of justice on which to base such a judgment. Here again, differences between barbarians and Greeks and Romans disappear, since imperialism always has the same nature and cannot be justified by the idea that some imperialisms are just and others unjust. This explains the famous question about Rome:33 is it justice that made her the most powerful city in the world? Carneades, according to Cicero’s version, poses the first great argument we know about the diversity of religious customs, traditions, and cultures, and in his argumentation are mentioned many barbarian groups, such as Egyptians, Gauls, and Persians.34 We have here a kind of argumentation that was systematized, perhaps at the same time, by Aenesidemus, the founder of Neo-Pyrrhonism. We find it in the 10^th trope of Sextus Empiricus, which is described as concerning “ethics, being based on rules of conduct, habits, laws, legendary beliefs and dogmatic conceptions”.35 In the 9^th trope there is a long passage about contradictory laws, with Roman laws, for example, being at odds with those of the Scythians. The difference between Philus’s speech and Aenesidemus lies in the fact that Philus gives a dogmatic explanation of the variety of laws within the disputatio in utramque partem – namely, the egoistic nature of every law. The Skeptic tradition does not attempt to go beyond the report that laws of different countries are contradictory, while Philus and Carneades state why they cannot be consistent.

26Laelius’s speech seems as different as possible from Philus’s, but its conclusion about barbarians is the same: barbarians have no special place in the universal rule. The only and essential difference between the two speakers is that the universality of reason has replaced the universality of desire. In Laelius’s text, the lex naturae depicts peculiarity as inherent to the world,36 since it is the universal logos that determines what must be done and what should be avoided. At the same time, this law, though immanent, has a kind of transcendence with regard to all existent laws.

27Three stages can be distinguished in Laelius’s argumentation. First, lex naturae is not a law of the same sort as those discussed and approved by the Senate and Roman assemblies. Second, lex naturae is not different in Rome and Athens. Why these two cities? Certainly because to a Roman, they were the two major references in the field of law, though often in contradiction. Third, this law is universal – “it will be valid for all nations at all times” – because its promulgator and enforcing judge is God.37

28The significance of the future tense is not clear. If natural law is eternal, why use this tense to describe it, in a process rather similar to social oikeiōsis,38 since it has individualities as its point of departure, yet finishes with the whole of mankind? One might suppose that the future tense is used to impart an affirmative and juridical tone, but then the same effect could be achieved by saying that one day, this law should be the law of all mankind. At the very least, there is ambiguity. What here is the meaning of continebit, of saying that this law continebit all of humanity? Cicero uses the word to express the principle on which minor realities depend. For example, he says of Clodius’s tribunate: curiata illa lex quae eius tribunatum continebat.39 It does not seem particularly reckless to affirm that the lex naturae occupied, relative to the laws of the cities, the same position as the sage relative to the rest of mankind. The implication is that they have nothing in common. Nobody who is not the sage can be said to be any nearer to him than is a stultus, since sage and stultus occupy radically different human conditions. Nevertheless, wisdom is nothing but the perfect form of reason, which is feeble and changing in other human beings. Though Athens and Rome are highly civilized cities, it is said nowhere in Laelius’s speech that they are any closer to the law of nature.

Universal law, Roman law, and barbarians

29The result of the disputatio of Rep. 3 seems clear. To a skeptic from the New Academy, all human laws are in principle equivalent. From an egoistic perspective, there is no fundamental difference between Greek, Roman, and barbarian laws, since all are inspired by personal interest. Only the form changes. In the Stoic interpretation, all are ontologically different from the one true law, the lex naturae. The fact that Cicero reversed the order adopted by Carneades in his antilogy40 shows that he considered Laelius’s discourse more probable than that of Philus, but not a certitude.

30Such a view seems ill-suited to a man like Cicero, who stressed in De re publica that no city had reached the state of perfection achieved by Rome of the maiores. He thus had to find justifications for an imperium that could not be justified simply with reference to the universal principles of society.

31His justifications may be grouped into three classes. The first, essentially familiar from Augustine,41 is based on differences between different forms of domination and stresses two loosely connected themes: the thesis developed by Aristotle in Politics42 that all forms of domination are not equivalent, and the idea that domination – evidently Roman domination – can be a good thing for people, including not only barbarians, but also Greeks, who previously had lived under far worse circumstances.

32We lack sufficient basis to assume that Laelius believed, as Aristotle, that some individuals were born to be enslaved, albeit Cicero uses this expression in a rhetorical context about Jews and Syrians.43 What he says is that it was useful for some men to be enslaved. The implicit idea seems to be the Stoic one that in the life of nations, as in individual ethics, there cannot be a difference between interest and honesty. If a city is in a state of permanent stasis – and this was a topos concerning barbarian states or cities – then the intervention of an external power finds legitimacy in the fact that it is in the interest both of the dominator and of the dominated, a process with ethical purpose, since it is meant to destroy the licentia of certain dishonest persons. From a Stoic perspective, slavery never was considered an absolute evil. The relativization of slavery in Laelius’s speech militates for a similar conclusion: if domination is fair and useful (utilis seruitus et pro utilitate eorum fieri, cum recte fit), it is just.

33In the second argument, at the beginning of the 3^rd book of De legibus, Quintus says to his brother Marcus that the natural law he is describing has practically the same characteristic as some religious laws of the Roman state.44 Here Cicero seems to contradict Laelius. The absolute uniqueness of natural law has at least one exception. It is as if Cicero realized that it was impossible to proclaim the exceptional destiny of Rome at the same time as saying that it was as distant from natural law as all other nations.

34In De legibus, there is no mention of barbarians. All is focused on Rome, as if to counterbalance the hypercriticism of De re publica. It is no coincidence that in Leg. 1, 39, a famous passage in Ciceronian studies, Cicero says of the Carneadean Academy:

And let us implore the Academy, the new one, formed by Arcesilaus and Carneades, to be silent, since it contributes nothing but confusion to all these problems; for if it should attack what we think we have constructed and arranged so beautifully, it would play too great havoc with it; at the same time I should like to win over this school and so do not dare to banish it from the discussion.

35The meaning of these sentences, though much discussed,45 seems clear. There cannot be a political argument strong enough to escape criticism. Cicero has both to claim what I would call immanent election – that of Rome, the only nation having a direct relation with natural law – and to practice epochē on the truth of what he is affirming. Imperialism, domination, and imposed laws cannot be dogmatically justified by philosophical arguments.

36The final text on this topic is to be found in De legibus 2, 35, where Cicero says in relation to an issue concerning religious laws: “for we are composing laws not for the Roman people in particular, but for all honest and stable nations”. Abolition of nocturnal rites in Rome would have entailed forbidding Eleusinian mysteries, in which Cicero and Atticus were themselves initiated.46 As stated in Laelius’s speech, natural law cannot be different in Rome and Athens – but there is a difference nonetheless. While Laelius said that natural law would be the same for all nations, here Roman natural laws are explicitly said to be formulated only for “honest and stable nations,” which are not here identified. The import is that stable constitutions associating the three elementary forms of government could exist in some barbarian countries. What seemed impossible to the Carneadean perspective of the antilogy – the existence of nations having a special relationship with ethics – here appears as one of the bases of Roman domination of the world. The implication is that among barbarian nations, the Roman dominators will distinguish two groups: those living in a state of violence, to whom the empire will bring the pax Romana, much better than the previous staseis, and those having an honest and stable life, whom the empire will teach how to come still closer to rationality.

37This is the place to emphasize a text of special interest. In Cicero’s first letter to Quintus, written at the end of 60 – almost ten years before De legibus – he says to his brother, then beginning his 3^rd year as propraetor of Asia:47

Why, if the drawing of lots had given you the government of the Africans or the Spaniards or the Gauls, uncouth and barbarous nations, it would still be incumbent upon a man of your humane character to study their interests and consider their welfare and security. But seeing that we are governing that race of mankind in which not only do we find real civilization, but from which it is also supposed to have spread to others, it is at any rate our duty to bestow upon them, above all things, just that which they have bestowed upon us.

38We find here almost everything that we do in De legibus: a dualistic division within the Greek category of barbarians, and the idea that whatever the case, Roman domination will benefit those dominated.

39This does not mean that the previous sense of “barbarian” disappeared from Cicero’s work. In DND 1, 81, he says of religious beliefs different from those of the Romans: at non Aegyptii nec Syri nec fere cuncta barbaria, and in Diu. 2, 82, of divination: Ita nobis sinistra videntur, Graiis et barbaris dextra meliora. Finally, the word “barbarian” remained a constant presence in his correspondence, most of the time conveying contempt, as if there were a part of Cicero’s mind that remained unconvinced by his own philosophical reflections.

Conclusion

40It was not easy to build a philosophical foundation for an ideology of domination. Cicero’s efforts sometimes were confusing. However, they led him to consider the relationships of Rome with other countries in a quite different light from the traditional Greek–barbarian division, and even from that of the Greek–barbarian–Roman tripartition. In his initial reflections, Cicero probably was uninterested in the particular content of barbarian laws, but later, the introduction of the concept of lex naturae, rationalism, and universalism, the definition of a special function for Rome in the history of nations, and the idea that Roman domination would benefit all countries represented the definition of a new vision of humanity that Augustus would embody in his peculiar way.