• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 720 0

methods which seem to me to have the greatest degree of appropriate discretion, consistency and elegance. Then in On Supreme Good and Evil I discussed the basic problems of philosophy and covered the whole field in detail in five volumes which set out the arguments for and against every philosophical system. This was followed by Conversations at Tusculum, also in five volumes, which expound the key issues we should bear in mind in our pursuit of happiness. The first volume deals with indifference to death, the second with how to endure pain, the third with the alleviation of distress in times of trouble and the fourth with other distractions which affect our peace of mind. Finally, the fifth book addresses the topic that is best calculated to clarify the nature of philosophy—that is, it demonstrates that moral worth alone is adequate to ensure a happy life. After that, the three volumes of The Nature of the Gods were finished, which cover all the relevant issues. Once that had been adequately dealt with, I started work on my current book, Foretelling the Future. When I have added, as I intend to do, another book, Destiny, the entire field will have been satisfactorily surveyed.

Cicero is explicit that this corpus was an alternative to the public life from which he was barred. In Foretelling the Future, he wrote: “it was through my books that I was addressing the Senate and the people. I took the view that philosophy was a substitute for political activity.” He had always believed that philosophy was an essential ingredient of a training in the art of public speaking and the collapse of the Republic was evidence of the failure by statesmen to apply moral values to their conduct. To develop this long-standing theme was the last gift he could make to his country.

The purpose of the Hortensius, to judge from its surviving fragments, was to establish the uses of philosophy. It was cast as a debate set in the late 60s and the speakers were four leading personalities of the day, including Hortensius and Cicero himself. It contained defenses of poetry, history and oratory. Hortensius attacked the inadequacies of many philosophers and launched a vigorous onslaught on aspects of Epicureanism. Cicero responded with a powerful apologia for philosophy. The seeker after truth traveled hopefully, he said, but would never arrive. Cicero retained the skepticism about the possibility of knowledge that he acquired during his first visit to Athens. He closed with a hint of reincarnation, borrowed from the current revival of interest in the mystical ideas of the Greek sage Pythagoras. The purer a man’s soul, the greater the possibility that it would escape the impending cycle of future lives.

The Academic Treatises (Academica) were started in autumn 46 and Cicero was still working on them the following summer. They were an epistemological inquiry which examined in greater detail than the Hortensius different theories of knowledge. According to Pliny, writing in the following century, the dialogue was composed in Cicero’s villa at Puteoli. The setting and characters were originally the same as in the Hortensius, but once the book was finished its author worried that “the matter did not fit the persons, who could not be supposed ever to have dreamed of such abstrusities.” The problem was solved when he learned that his new friend Varro wanted a part in one of his dialogues, although he was not altogether sure he would take kindly to representing ideas that Cicero would go on to refute. So the work was brought up to the present day and he and Atticus were added as the other speakers. Only one volume of the first version survives (now called Lucullus), along with a fragment of the second.

The Academic Treatises gave an extended account of the evolution of the doctrines of the Academy, the school of philosophy founded by Plato and developed over the centuries by his successors. What was called the New Academy flourished in Cicero’s time. In the second century BC, its leading figure, Carneades, adopted a skeptical position, which emphasized probability