ABSTRACT
Throughout the history of the Empire, Romans defined a republic as a community of citizens bound together by justice and common interest. When justice no longer flourishes, then tyranny supplants the republic. An analysis of two responses to the res publica in crisis, the former by Cicero, during the last decades of Senatorial rule in the first century BCE, the latter by Lactantius, during the Great Persecution (299–313), illustrates not only the demands that such a definition placed upon citizens and government alike, but also the remarkable continuity in Roman political thought.
