How to live together in peace and freedom

From A History of Knowledge by Charles Van Doren. Page 75.

Cicero lived in one of the most glorious, and dangerous, periods in history. Throughout the Roman world men struggled with the greatest of all political problems, namely, how to live together in peace and freedom. It seemed to most Romans during the climatic half century before the fall of the republic and the triumph of Augustus that a choice had to be made between those two ultimate political goods.

You could have freedom, but then you would have to forsake peace. Conflicts would necessarily arise, it seemed, among men who are free to seek their different goals. Or you could have peace, but at the cost of freedom, for how could peace endure if it were not imposed from above by a supreme power which alone would remain free, while all others bore the yoke of tyranny?

The Greek example was no help. Anyone could see that the Greeks, for the most part, had chosen freedom, but at the high cost of nearly constant conflict. Romans in the early days had also chosen freedom. Their wars of conquest had permitted them to avoid internal conflict. Because they were always fighting others, they did not have to fight among themselves.

Some challenges are always with us, see-sawing back and forth.