The protagonist of Chapter 4 is the Ciceronian concept of the persona civitatis, an idea which comes to be associated with the ‘person of the state’ in Renaissance political philosophy. The first section of this chapter identifies the firmly theatrical role which this idea delineates in Cicero’s political thinking about the character of civil associations and the duties of the executive magistrate in the Roman Republic. It also illuminates how Cicero derives the idea from the same Stoic theory of personae which is subsequently developed by Seneca in a more markedly monarchical vein. The second section of the chapter then recounts the historical career of the persona civitatis, which comes to act as the pivot of a highly influential theory of representation in Renaissance political thought – a theory which proved indispensable to the humanist task of sustaining classical claims about liberty and the res publica in this transformed post-classical environment. In Renaissance Florence, Bruni, Palmieri, Manetti, and Alberti all recur to this theory to talk about how the republic can be embodied and articulated as a person. This is a line of thinking which Machiavelli will refuse to endorse: he never accepts that the state can be represented.