Penser les fondements de l’éthique sociale dans les deux derniers siècles de la République romaine

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze how

the reflection on the origins of the civilization was developed

in Rome, at the end of the Republic, in a city where

during centuries, nobody tried to go beyond this point of

absolute origin that was the foundation of the Vrbs. In order

to explore not only Cicéro’s philosophic reflection,

but also his rhetorical texts, especially the De inuentione,

which contains at the beginning of its first book a very

interesting explanatory myth both on the birth civilization,

and on the evolution of human institutions. Before

Cicero, the satiric poet Lucilius had tried to give a Roman

adaptation of the Stoic social naturalism, by depriving it

of its universalist ambition and Lucretius had an extremely

deep reflection of the evolution of the selfish instinct

which characterizes the human beings as all the living

beings, towards forms more and more sophisticated of

sociability. We evoke also a Roman peculiarity in the expression

of the social oikeiôsis. All this shows the density

and the variety of the Roman thought on society at the

end of the Republic.