Lawyer, author, statesman, and scholar Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.) is considered Rome's greatest orator. His philosophical writings are impressive. In vocabulary alone, Cicero gave Rome the words quality, individual, moral, definition, comprehension, and infinity (Everitt 2001). Also attributed to him is Cicero's Creed, called the oldest statement of engineering ethics specifically, "Salus populi suprema est lex," or "the safety of the public shall be the[ir] highest law" (Broome 1986), which is comparable in stature to medicine's "primum non nocere" ("first, do no harm," attributed to Hippocrates, but found in his Epidemics rather than his Oath). Varying versions of Cicero's Creed have been incorporated into each of the major engineering professional organizations' codes (Martin and Schinzinger 2005). As such, it has served as a common reference point for contemporary engineers navigating the moral boundaries of their work.

As with "first, do no harm...