_De Legibus_.—Of this dialogue there are only three books now extant, and even in these considerable chasms occur. A conjecture has been recently hazarded by a learned German, in an introduction to a translation of the dialogue, that these three books, as we now have them, were not written by Cicero, but that they are mere excerpts taken from his lost writings, by some monk or father of the church(394). There are few works, however, in which more genuine marks of the master-hand of Cicero may be traced, than in the tract _De Legibus_; and the connection between the different parts is too closely preserved, to admit of the notion that it has been made up in the manner which this critic supposes. Another conjecture is, that it formed part of the third, fourth, and fifth books of Cicero’s lost treatise _De Republica_. This surmise, however, was highly improbable, since Cicero, in the course of the work _De Legibus_, refers to that _De Republica_ as a separate production, and it is now proved to be chimerical by the discovery of Mai. The dialogue _De Legibus_, however, seems to have been drawn up as a kind of supplement to that _De Republica_, being intended to point out what laws would be most suitable to the perfect republic, which the author had previously described(395). As to the period of composition, it thus manifestly appears to have been written subsequently to the dialogue _De Republica_; and it is evident, from his letters to his brother Quintus, that the work _De Republica_ was begun in 699, and finished in 700(396), so that the dialogue _De Legibus_ could not have been composed before that year. It is further clear, that it was written after the year 701, since he obviously alludes in it to the murder of Clodius,—boasting that his chief enemy was now not only deprived of life, but wanted sepulture, and the accustomed funeral obsequies(397). Now, it is well known that Clodius was slain in 701, and that his dead body was dragged naked by a lawless mob into the Forum, where it was consumed amid the conflagration raised in the Senate-house. It is equally evident that the treatise _De Legibus_ was written before that _De Finibus_, composed in 708, since, in the former work, the author alludes to the questions which we find discussed in the latter, as controversies which he is one day to take up(398). But it is demonstrable that the dialogue _De Legibus_ was written even previous to the battle of Pharsalia, which was fought in 705, since the author talks in it of Pompey as of a person still alive, and in the plenitude of glory(399). Chapman, in his dissertation _De Ætate Librorum de Legibus_, subjoined to Tunstall’s Latin letter to Middleton, concerning the epistles to Brutus, thinks that it was not written till the year 709. He is of opinion, that what is said of Pompey, and the allusions to the murder of Clodius, as to a recent event, were only intended to suit the time in which the dialogue