His rhetoric has been always made to come first, because, upon the whole, it was first written. It may be as well here to give a list of his main works, with their dates--premising, however, that we by no means in that way get over the difficulty as to time, even in cases as to which we are sure of our facts. A treatise may have been commenced and then put by, or may have been written some time previously to publication. Or it may be, as were those which are called the Academica, that it was remodelled, and altered in its shape and form. The Academica were written at the instance of Atticus. We now have the altered edition of a fragment of the first book, and the original of the second book. In this manner there have come discrepancies which nearly break the heart of him who would fain make his list clear. But here, on the whole, is presented to the reader with fair accuracy a list of the works of Cicero, independent of that continual but ever-changing current of his thought which came welling out from him daily in his speeches and his letters. Again, however, we must remember that here are omitted all those which are either wholly lost or have come to us only in fragments too abruptly broken for the purposes of continuous study. Of these I will not even attempt to give the names, though when we remember some of the subjects--the De Gloria, the De Re Militari--he could not go into the army for a month or two without writing a book about it--the De Auguriis, the De Philosophia, the De Suis Temporibus, the De Suis Consiliis, the De Jure Civili, and the De Universo, we may well ask ourselves what were the subjects on which he did not write. In addition to these, much that has come to us has been extracted, as it were unwillingly, from palimpsests, and is, from that and from other causes, fragmentary. We have indeed only fragments of the essays De Republica. De Legibus, De Natura Deorum, De Divinatione, and De Fato, in addition to the Academica. The list of the works of which it is my purpose to give some shortest possible account in the following chapters is as follows: NATURE OF THE WORK. TITLES OF Those as to Rhetoric are marked [a] THE DATE THE WORKS. " " Philosophy " [b] OF The Moral Essays " [c] PUBLICATION. Rheticorum { Four books, giving lessons in Rhetoric; } ad C. { supposed to have been written, not by Cicero, } B.C. Herennium. { but by one Cornificius.[a][240] } 87, 86. } AEtat. De { Four books, giving lessons in Rhetoric, } 20, 21. Inventione. { supposed to have been translated from the } { Greek. Two out of four have come to us.[a] }