Editor’s and Guest Editor’s Preface

This special issue of Ethics&Politics aims to shed a new light on Cicero as political thinker and to foster an appreciation of his thought by bringing into focus some of its main theoretical underpinnings. The general idea that inspires the collection of paper here collected is that Cicero’s voluminous corpus of writings allows the reader to trace the seeds of an authentically pioneering political theory, one that might give us insights into a network of key philosophical questions to which he seems to give pride of place: justice (iustitia), equity (equitas), the nature of the res publica and its most desirable internal arrangement (the best regime), the role of natural law and individual virtues in shaping the moral texture of the members of the societas humana.