A tourist treading the streets of ancient Pompeii might well notice, viewing the buildings still extant there, that Roman dwellings, lacking in windows of any kind, were oriented entirely inward, toward a central courtyard surrounded by individual rooms. This architecture suggests how highly the ancient Romans must have valuedthe privacy of family life, its separation from the hurly-burly of the social world outside.
But the Romans equally prized the opposite realm, the res publica, or “public thing,” where matters of concern to the community as a whole were addressed: the realm of politics. This is the origin of the term republic, and of republican political philosophy, which the Romans inherited from their Athenian predecessors. Aristotle defined the human being as the political animal, and republican practice requires the active involvement of citizens in political life. A republic is, above all, a self-governing community.
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