The first sentence of his Metaphysics reads: "All men by nature desire to know." Alcock [Greenwood Press:Westport CT] 2005 (p. 188-191) "Cuisine and Social Class. This could be interpreted either as a strong normative claim –the people agree on law, also translatable as right or justice, and share a common interest – or in a weaker deflationary manner, in which the people nominally accept a common law and share a common conception of their self-interest which may or may not be in accord with justice.[ 12 ] 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).