 Especially for the early Stoics, existing cities remained an accepted arena both for political action in practice—Stoic sages and scholars advising kings and serving in offices (SVF 3.686; translated in LS 67W)—insofar as the notion of a distinctive individual city remained the principal framework for defining the nature of politics in terms of justice. Yet the role of natural law already in the early Stoics, and certainly in later ones, came to support an alternative horizon for politics on the scale of the cosmos as a whole (Laurand 2005). Malcolm Schofield (1991: 103) has argued that this development “mediates the transition from republicanism to natural law theory,” so bequeathing a crucial resource to early modern thinkers who sought to construct new versions of the latter. Meanwhile, in the years of the Roman republic, certain affinities between Stoic and republican ideas proved significant, as we shall now see.