There is therefore some unquiet feeling in individuals, which either exults in pleasure or is crushed by annoyance.
[_The next is an incomplete sentence, and, as such, unintelligible_.] The Phoenicians were the first who by their commerce, and by the merchandise which they carried, brought avarice and magnificence and insatiable degrees of everything into Greece.
Sardanapalus, the luxurious king of Assyria, of whom Tully, in the third book of his treatise on the Republic, says, "The notorious Sardanapalus, far more deformed by his vices than even by his name." What is the meaning, then, of this absurd acceptation, unless some one wishes to make the whole of Athos a monument?
For what is Athos or the vast Olympus?
* * * XXXVII.

I will endeavor in the proper place to show it, according to the definitions of Cicero himself, in which, putting forth Scipio as the speaker, he has briefly explained what a commonwealth and what a republic is; adducing also many assertions of his own, and of those whom he has represented as taking part in that discussion, to the effect that the State of Rome was not such a commonwealth, because there has never been genuine justice in it.

However, according to definitions which are more reasonable, it was a commonwealth in some degree, and it was better regulated by the more ancient than by the later Romans.
It is now fitting that I should explain, as briefly and as clearly as I can, what, in the second book of this work, I promised to prove, according to the definitions which Cicero, in his books on the Commonwealth, puts into the mouth of Scipio, arguing that the Roman State was never a commonwealth; for he briefly defines a commonwealth as a state of the people; the people as an assembly of the multitude, united by a common feeling of right, and a community of interests.

What he calls a common feeling of right he explains by discussion, showing in this way that a commonwealth cannot proceed without justice.

Where, therefore, there is no genuine justice, there can be no right, for that which is done according to right is done justly; and what is done unjustly cannot be done according to right, for the unjust regulations of men are not to be called or thought rights; since they themselves call that right (_jus_) which flows from the source of justice: and they say that that assertion which is often made by some persons of erroneous sentiments, namely, that that is right which is advantageous to the most powerful, is false.