Examining the Influence of Stoicism in Carving Cicero’s Notion of Natural Law: A Legal Philosophical Perspective

Abstract

This article seeks to examine the roots of Cicero’s jurisprudential thinking, which impacted upon the early development of the natural law philosophy. Cicero has been revered among the legal thinkers as a premium jurist from the Roman era whose intellectual contribution buttressed the foundation of Western conception of natural law. However, there has been few research carried out in exploring how Stoic philosophy carved Ciceronian ideas in natural law. It is in this context this article underpins a serious academic inquiry into the development of Cicero’s idea of natural law and his affinity with the Stoic school of thought in the Roman Republic before it was ebbed away by the emergence of the empire. The results emanating from this article will show whether there has been a serious influence from Stoic thought to Cicero’s understanding of natural law, if so how it penetrated the frontiers of legal thinking in the late Roman Republic.