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See 2, 23. See Att. 14, 21, 1. It was certainly not written, as Sommerbrodt assumes, in the intervals of composing the De Divinatione. The words in 2, 7 of that work quoniam de re publica consuli coepti sumus etc. point to the end of September or beginning of October, 44, when Cicero returned to Rome and began to compose his Philippic orations.
Socrates would also do so, never asking for the adhesion of any one, but leaving the full purport of his words to sink into the minds of his audience. Quintus says that he quite agrees to this, and so the discourse De Divinatione is brought to an end. Of his book on fate we have only a fragment, or the middle part of it.
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.
For original authorities in reference to the matter of this chapter, read Diogenes Laertius's Lives of the Philosophers; the Writings of Plato and Aristotle; Cicero, De Natura Deorum, De Oratore, De Officiis, De Divinatione, De Finibus, Tusculanae Disputationes; Xenophon, Memorabilia; Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae; Lucretius.
It was not by them, however, that he had learned to feel that a man's final duty here on earth is his duty to other men. In the second book he inculcates the observance of religious ceremonies in direct opposition to that which he afterward tells us in his treatise De Divinatione.
His treatise De Divinatione is conveyed in a discussion between his brother Quintus and himself, in two books. In the former, Quintus, after dividing Divination into the heads of natural and artificial, argues with the Stoics for its sacred nature, from the evidence of facts, the agreement of all nations, and the existence of divine intelligences.
The De Divinatione was written after the assassination of Caesar, that is, after the 15th of March in the year 44. Again, the Cato Maior is mentioned as a recent work in three letters addressed by Cicero to Atticus. The earliest of these letters was written on or about the 12th of May, 44. We shall hardly err, therefore, if we assume that Cicero composed the Cato Maior in April of the year 44.
VIRGIL, Bucolics, viii. 69. This was very clearly seen by the ancients. It could not be put better than by Cicero: "Principio Assyrii, propter planitiem magnitudinemque regionum quas incolebant, cum cælum ex omni parte patens et apertum intuerentur, trajectiones motusque stellarum observaverunt." De Divinatione, i. 1, 2.
All those treatises, beginning with the Academica written when he was sixty-two, two years only before his death, and carried on during twelve months with indomitable energy the De Finibus, the Tusculan Disputations, the De Natura Deorum, the De Divinatione, and the De Fato were composed during the time named.
Previous to these he had produced in hexameters, also, a translation of the Prognostics of Aratus. This is the second part of a poem on the heavenly bodies, the first part, the Phænomena, having been turned into Latin verse by him when he was eighteen. Of the Prognostics we have only a few lines preserved by Priscian, and a passage repeated by the author, also in his De Divinatione.
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