Authors, Latin -- Biography; Cicero, Marcus Tullius; Statesmen -- Rome -- Biography
governed his life: "I will do unto others as I would they should do unto
me." In this is contained the rudiments of that religion which has
served to soften the hearts of us all. It is of you I must think, and
not of myself. Hitherto the schools had taught how a man should make
himself happy, whether by pleasure, whether by virtue, or whether by
something between the two. It seems that it had never as yet occurred to
a man to think of another except as a part of the world around him. Then
there had come a teacher who, while fumbling among the old Greek lessons
which had professed to tell mankind what each should do for himself,
brings forth this, as it were, in preparation for the true doctrine that
was to come: "Ipsa caritas generis humani!"--"That love of the human
race!" I trust I may be able to show, before I have finished my work,
that this was Cicero's true philosophy. All the rest is merely with him
a play of words.
Our next work contains the five books of the Tusculan Disputations,
addressed to Brutus: Tusculanarum Disputationum, ad M. Brutum, libri i.,
ii., iii., iv., and v. That is the name that has at last been decided by
the critics and annotators as having been probably given to them by
Cicero. They are supposed to have been written to console himself in his
grief for the death of Tullia. I have great doubt whether consolation in
sorrow is to be found in philosophy, but I have none as to the finding
it in writing philosophy. Here, I may add, that the poor generally
suffer less in their sorrow than the rich, because they are called upon
to work for their bread. The man who must make his pair of shoes between
sunrise and the moment at which he can find relief from his weary stool,
has not time to think that his wife has left him, and that he is
desolate in the world. Pulling those weary threads, getting that leather
into its proper shape, seeing that his stitches be all taut, so that he
do not lose his place among the shoemakers, so fills his time that he
has not a moment for a tear. And it is the same if you go from the
lowest occupation to the highest. Writing Greek philosophy does as well
as the making of shoes. The nature of the occupation depends on the
mind, but its utility on the disposition. It was Cicero's nature to
write. Will any one believe that he might not as well have consoled
himself with one of his treatises on oratory? But philosophy was then to
his hands. It seems to have cropped up in his latter years, after he had
become intimate with Brutus. When life was again one turmoil of
political fever it was dropped.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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