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Based on a selection of seventeen excerpts from Cicero’s On the Commonwealth that allows us to consider Greek political models, from Plato to Polybius, and their reception in Rome, this paper takes into account the specific context of the crisis of the later Republic in the 50s BCE, which affected to such a degree the career and thought of the orator and political figure. Putting into perspective situations of institutional dysfunction, from the Gracchi period to the 50s decade, Cicero took the opportunity to conceptualize the res publica in ways that have inspired numerous studies more or less recently, a reflection that now ought to be prolonged historically, from the last decades of the so-called Republic to the first three centuries of the Principate, in order to better understand the nature of the Roman state.