Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze how the reflection on the origins of the civilization was developed in Rome, at the end of the Republic, in a city where during centuries, nobody tried to go beyond this point of absolute origin that was the foundation of the Vrbs. In order to explore not only Cicéro’s philosophic reflection, but also his rhetorical texts, especially the De inuentione, which contains at the beginning of its first book a very interesting explanatory myth both on the birth civilization, and on the evolution of human institutions. Before Cicero, the satiric poet Lucilius had tried to give a Roman adaptation of the Stoic social naturalism, by depriving it of its universalist ambition and Lucretius had an extremely deep reflection of the evolution of the selfish instinct which characterizes the human beings as all the living beings, towards forms more and more sophisticated of sociability. We evoke also a Roman peculiarity in the expression of the social oikeiôsis. All this shows the density and the variety of the Roman thought on society at the end of the Republic.