(2) +Philosophical Works.+--The chief are the _De Republica_ (closed by the _Sommium Sciponis_): the _De Legibus_: the _De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum_: the _Academics_: _Tusculan Disputations_ with the _De Divinatione_: the _De Senectute_ and _De Amicitia_: _De natura Deorum_, and the _De Officiis_. As a philosopher Cicero had no pretensions to originality. He found the materials for most of these works in the writings of the Greek philosophers. ‘I have to supply little but the words,’ he writes, ‘and for these I am never at a loss.’ It was however no small achievement to mould the Latin tongue to be a vehicle for Greek philosophic thought, and thus to render the conclusions of Greek thinkers accessible to his own countrymen. (3) +Rhetorical treatises.+--The chief are the _De Oratore_ (in 3 Books), perhaps the most finished example of the Ciceronian style: the _Brutus_ or _De Claris Oratoribus_, and the _Orator_ (or _De optime Genere Dicendi_). (4) +Letters.+--Besides 774 letters written by Cicero, we have 90 addressed to him by friends. The two largest collections of his Letters are the _Epistulae ad Atticum_ (68-43 B.C.) and the _Epistulae ad Familiares_ (62-43 B.C.). These letters are of supreme importance for the history of Cicero’s time. ‘The quality which makes them most valuable is that they were not (like the letters of Pliny, and Seneca, and Madame de Sévigné) written to be published. We see in them Cicero as he was. We behold him in his strength and in his weakness--the bold advocate, and yet timid and vacillating statesman, the fond husband, the affectionate father, the kind master, the warm-hearted friend.’ --Tyrrell. The style of the Letters is colloquial but thoroughly accurate. ‘The art of letter-writing suddenly rose in Cicero’s hands to its full perfection.’ --Mackail. (5) +Poems.+--The fragments we possess show that verse-writing came easily to him, but he never could have been a great poet, for he had not the _divinus afflatus_, so finely expressed by Ovid in the line _Est Deus in nobis, agitante calescimus illo_. ‘Cicero stands in prose like Vergil in poetry, as the bridge between the ancient and the modern world. Before his time Latin prose was, from a wide point of view, but one among many local ancient dialects. As it left his hands it had become a universal language, one which had definitely superseded all others, Greek included, as the type of civilised expression.’ --Mackail. CLAUDIUS CLAUDIANUS, flor. 400 A.D. 1. Life. [Sidenote: CLAUDIAN.] Born probably at Alexandria, where he lived until, in the year of the death of Theodosius 395 A.D., he acquired the patronage of Stilicho, the great Vandal general, who, as guardian of the young Emperor Honorius, was practically ruler of the Western Empire. He remained attached to the Court at Milan, Rome and Ravenna, and died soon after the downfall of his patron Stilicho, 408 A.D. 2. Works.