"True law is right reason," says Cicero in a noble passage;[565] and goes on to teach that this law transcends all human codes of law, embracing and sanctioning them all; and that the spirit inherent in it, which gives it its universal force, is God Himself.

In another passage, written towards the end of his life, and certainly later than the publication of Varro's work, he goes further and identifies this God with Jupiter.[566] "This law," he says, "came into being simultaneously with the Divine Mind" (i.e.the Stoic Reason): "wherefore that true and paramount law, commanding and forbidding, is the right reason of almighty Jupiter" (summi Iovis).

Once more, in the first book of his treatise on the gods, he quotes the Stoic Chrysippus as teaching that the eternal Power, which is as it were a guide in the duties of life, is Jupiter himself.[567] It is characteristic of the Roman that he should think, in speculations like these, rather of the law of his State than of the morality of the individual, as emanating from that Right Reason to which he might give the name of Jupiter: I have been unable to find a passage in which Cicero attributes to this deity the sanction for individual goodness, though there are many that assert the belief that justice and the whole system of social life depend on the gods and our belief in them.[568] But the Roman had never been conscious of individual duty, except in relation to his State, or to the family, which was a living cell in the organism of the State.

In his eyes law was rather the source of morality than morality the cause and the reason of law; and as his religion was a part of the law of his State, and thus had but an indirect connection with morality, it would not naturally occur to him that even the great Jupiter himself, thus glorified as the Reason in the universe, could really help him in the conduct of his life _qua_ individual.

It is only as the source of legalised morality that we can think of Varro's Jupiter as "making for righteousness." Less than twenty-five years after Cicero's death, in the imagination of the greatest of Roman poets, Jupiter was once more brought before the Roman world, and now in a form comprehensible by all educated men, whether or no they had dabbled in philosophy.