Augustine in His Own Words
On the City of God 337
(21) If my opponents, content if [Rome] can but endure, are not moved by the shame and ignominy of utter degeneration that flood it, let them note that it had not merely become the "sink of iniquity" described by Sallust, but that, as Cicero maintains, it had long since perished and no longer endured as a state. Cicero lets that same Scipio who had destroyed Carthage voice his opinion of the state at a time when there were warning signs that it would soon be brought low by the rottenness which Sallust describes . . . :
In playing the lute, or the flute, or even in vocal music, the different notes should be kept in harmony. If they are changed into discord, the trained ear cannot endure it. That agreeable harmony, however, is produced by the modulation of tones that are very dissimilar. In like manner, as in music, out of the highest and the lowest classes, and out of those that lie between, by a reasonable control, the State is fashioned into a concordant whole by the consent of very diverse elements. What musicians call harmony in music, in the State is known as concord, the closest and strongest bond of security in any commonwealth, and which can in no way exist without justice.40. . . After the pros and cons of this question had been examined, Scipio again took up the broken threads of the discussion, and, going back to his definition of the republic, he endorsed in a few words the stand that "the commonwealth is the wealth and welfare of the people." He defines the people as "not any mass gathering, but a multitude bound together by a mutual recognition of rights and a mutual cooperation for the common good."41 . . . But if the king is unjust, or a tyrant (to use the Greek word), or if the aristocrats are unjust (in which case their group is merely a faction), or if the people themselves are unjust (and must be called, for lack of a better word, a tyrant also), then the commonwealth is not merely bad . . . but is no commonwealth at all. The reason for that is that there is no longer the welfare of the people, once a tyrant or a faction seizes it; nor would the people, if unjust, be any longer a people, because they would not then be regarded as a multitude bound together by a common recognition of rights, and a mutual cooperation for the common good, as the standard definition of a people demands.
When, therefore, the Roman republic was such as Sallust describes it, it was not only "very wicked and corrupt"—"a sink of iniquity," as he puts it— it was no republic at all, if measured by the criterion established by its ablest representatives when they met to debate the nature of a republic. . . . Tullius
40. Cicero, De re publica 2.42. On Augustine's use of Cicero's treatise, see Hagendahl, Augustine and the Latin Classics, 540–43.
41. Cicero, De re publica 1.25. It is difficult to capture the rich spectrum of connotations that res publica has for Cicero and for Augustine. It literally means "public thing." It could refer more narrowly to "the state," the apparatus of government. But Cicero (as well as Augustine) often uses it in a broader sense of "what belongs to the people," what is best translated into English as "commonwealth." See Paul Weithman, "Augustine's Political Philosophy," in Stump and Kretzmann, Cambridge Companion to Augustine, 240–45.