 While justice was for Cicero, as for the Greeks, the fundamental bond of the commonwealth, he offered distinctive and influential linked definitions of the res publica (”commonwealth“, or more literally the ”public thing“) as the res populi, the ”property/thing of the people“, and of a populus or ”people“ in turn as ”an assemblage associated with one another by agreement on “law” [iuris consensu] and community of interest [utilitatis communione]“ (both, I.39). This could be interpreted either as a strong normative claim —the people agree on ”law“ [ius], also translatable as right or justice, and share a common interest — or alternatively in a weaker deflationary manner, the people nominally accepting a common law and sharing a common conception of their self-interest which may or may not be in accord with  justice.[14]  Such ambiguity would be famously exploited by Augustine, who used Cicero’s definition to argue that lacking justice, conflicted and divided republican Rome had been no commonwealth, before offering his own even weaker definition of a ”people“ as those united in (any) common love (City of God, II.21). In Cicero’s own hands, the definitions were used to stress that the commonwealth was the property of the people, who entrusted it to the magistrates to be used for the common good (I.51–2), and that the ”welfare of the people is the supreme law“ (”salus populi suprema lex“, De leg. III.8; this was a reference to a maxim in the ancient ”Twelve Tables“ compendium of Roman law). It followed too that just as Plato denied the title of a (single unified) regime to the imperfect regimes torn by civil discord, so Cicero inferred that a corrupt regime was not strictly speaking a res publica at all (III.43–48). The role of the statesman (rector rei publicae) is to aim at the happiness of the citizens, defined in a laxer way than most Greek philosophers would allow, as wealth, true glory, and virtue all combined.