Greek political thought (and theory) did not die with the early Stoics of the third century bce. After Panaetius of Rhodes (2nd century) and Poseidonius of Apamea in Seleucid Syria (1st century bce), however, the torch passed firmly to Rome, in the massy shape of Cicero. His writings, thanks to his golden style, were preserved in bulk and have come down to us more or less intact – minus, somewhat ironically, his treatise De Re Publica, which survives only fragmentarily.

Cicero actually translated Xenophon's Oeconomicus and other more or less philosophical Greek works into Latin, and was in other ways heavily indebted to Greek thinkers for the development of his own brand of philosophising, which, in accordance with Roman pragmatic norms, retained a very close connection indeed to political actuality. For example, in one of his many private letters to Titus Pomponius, nicknamed Atticus (‘the Athenian’), his publisher as well as friend, he made a sneering reference to Cato the Younger – a figure whom he in many ways deeply admired and probably envied for his unbending moral rectitude. Cato spoke, he wrote, as though he were living in the ideal utopian state of Plato's Republic (the Latin translation of Politeia), whereas actually he lived in the Sin City (literally ‘dregs’, faex, plural faeces) of Romulus! Even more than Aristotle, Cicero based his political philosophy on his perception of the world as it really was, and perhaps we should be grateful to him for the unblinking and unflinching manner in which he explicitly identified his personal class interest with the moral welfare of the entire Roman world.