ABSTRACT
Like Plato's Republic and Cicero's De re publican, St. Augustine's City of God is in the main a book about justice. The theme of justice is first introduced as part of Augustine's response to the pagans who worshipped the gods of Roman mythology for the sake of the "enlargement and well-being" of the Empire and blamed Christianity for its recent political setbacks. Implied in the pagan argument that Christianity was hostile to Roman expansionism is the notion that large political entities are preferable to smaller ones and worth defending for that reason. Cicero had rightly defined the republic or commonwealth as a "group of rational beings held together by a common acknowledgment of right and a community of interests". Much of the framework for Augustine's lengthy discussion of the subject was provided by Cicero's De re publica. Instead of founding a new city in speech, as Socrates does in Plato's Republic, Cicero took as his model an actual city, Rome.
