And I wonder whether we don't get the term Republic directly from Cicero and whether the term was used before he did

De re publica (Latin: On the commonwealth, see below) is a dialogue on Roman politics by Cicero, written in six books between 54 and 51 BC. It is written in the format of a Socratic dialogue in which Scipio Africanus Minor (who had died a few decades before Cicero was born, several centuries after Socrates' death) takes the role of a wise old man -- an obligatory part for the genre. Cicero's treatise was politically controversial: by choosing the format of a philosophical dialogue he avoided naming his political adversaries directly. Cicero employed various speakers to raise differing opinions in an attempt to make it more difficult for these adversaries to take him to task on what he had written.

En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma

Mig:

What do you mean?

I am obviously not a Classical scholar and have not read original sources in Latin or Greek. One of the cheif differences between Greek and Roman ideas of governance was that the Greeks were long bound, (by choice or cultural preference), by the concept of the polis as the practical unit of governance, while the Romans devised a way to incorporate a much broader area into a single quasi-elected form of governance. That probably gave Rome military advantage.

Regardless,

Roman authors would also use the word res publica in the sense of the era when Rome was governed as a republic, that is the era between the Roman Kingdom and the Roman Empire. So in this case res publica does distinctly not refer to the Roman Empire, but to what is generally described as the Roman Republic.

It is to that I referred. The point being that the form, the name and the theory of republics was from classical antiquity. My focus was on the history of the concept rather than the etymology of the word. But citing the mis-translation of Plato's work was misleading and anachronistic.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."