Cicero regards any government as legitimate which secures justice and promotes the well being of all its citizens, but he is dissatisfied with monarchy or aristocracy. As the Carlyles have remarked, in their _History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West_, which has been of great service to me at many points in this chapter in tracing the development of Roman political doctrines through the Middle Ages, Cicero believed that “every citizen had in him some capacity for political authority, some capacity which ought to find a means of expression.” Another fundamental social conception which comes to the surface in Cicero, and is still more clearly stated in Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and the Christian writers, is that of the homogeneity of the human race, the brotherhood of man. To the Greeks, before the time of Stoicism, there was a great gulf between themselves and the barbarians. The Romans showed sometimes a similar contempt for other people, but they recognized the intellectual and artistic superiority of the Greeks. A century and a half before Cicero’s time Plautus seriously or humorously refers to his countrymen as barbarians, when compared with the Greeks. In other words the Romans believed in their own superiority in some fields of human activity, but recognized their inferiority to other peoples in other respects. This made them tolerant of the institutions and practices of races which were brought within the Empire, and formed the basis of that conception of the brotherhood of man which did so much to ameliorate the condition of the lowly, and which is the ideal towards which we somewhat ineffectually strive today. Allied to this cosmopolitan doctrine of the brotherhood of man, was the Roman doctrine concerning the composition of individual societies or states. Aristotle’s theory of the organization of society presupposes the inequality of the men who compose it. Cicero believed in natural equality. We are alike, he says, in esteeming the same virtues, in hating the same vices, in our possession of reason and in our capacity for acquiring knowledge. Seneca is almost at the point of extending this conception of natural equality to include even slaves, for, as he says in his treatise on _The Giving and Receiving of Favors_: “fortune has granted the slave’s body to his master, he buys it and sells it, but the soul of a slave can not be bought and sold.” We shall have occasion to return to this point later, but, while we are speaking of Seneca, it may be well to mention his explanation of the origin of the law of nature which was discussed a few moments ago. The existence of the _ius naturale_ presupposes a state of nature antecedent to the conventional institutions of society. This golden age was not one of perfection, but rather of innocence. Avarice brought it to an end. The institutions of society were made necessary by the weaknesses of human nature. This view of Seneca harmonized with the