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Updated: June 4, 2025
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.
The same year he published his treatise De Finibus, or "On the chief good," in five books, in which are explained the sentiments of the Epicureans, Stoics, and Peripatetics on the subject. This is the earliest of his works in which the dialogue is of a disputatious character. It is opened with a defence of the Epicurean tenets, concerning pleasure, by Torquatus; to which Cicero replies at length.
I had completed my meal, and was seated in the little court, when I heard in the apartment opposite to that in which I had breakfasted several sighs, which were succeeded by as many groans, and then came "Ave Maria, gratia plena, ora pro me," and finally a croaking voice chanted: "Gentem auferte perfidam Credentium de finibus, Ut Christo laudes debitas Persolvamus alacriter."
He had no anointing for broken bones, no fine theories de finibus, no arguments to persuade men out of their senses. He knew that men, and philosophers as well as other men, do actually love life, health, comfort, honour, security, the society of friends, and do actually dislike death, sickness, pain, poverty, disgrace, danger, separation from those to whom they are attached.
In finibus terræ, that is to say, at the gallows, or garotte, which to the thief is the end of the earth and all things. "Truly, Sir," rejoined Rincon, "all this is Hebrew to us; we know no more about it than we do of flying."
In the original it runs, "Caium Gracchum collegam, iterum Tribinum fecit." but this was undoubtedly a mistake of the transcriber, as being contrary not only to the truth of History, but to Cicero's own account of the matter in lib. IV. Di Finibus. As to T. Flaminius, whom I myself have seen, I can learn nothing but that he spoke our language with great accuracy.
Against such as these, Tullius exclaims in the beginning of his book, which he names the book "De Finibus," because in his time they blamed the Roman Latin and praised the Greek grammar. And thus I say, for like reasons, that these men vilify the Italian tongue, and glorify that of Provence. The third faction against our Mother Tongue springs from greed of vainglory.
Very quickly after his Academica, in B.C. 45, came the five books, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, written as though with the object of settling the whole controversy, and declaring whether the truth lay with the Epicureans, the Stoics, or the Academics. What, at last, is the good thing, and what the evil thing, and how shall we gain the one and avoid the other?
We see this in the Topica, the De Finibus, and the Tusculanae Disputationes, in all of which he was greatly assisted by the Academic point of view which strove to reconcile philosophy with the dictates of common sense.
In connexion with that I note that this young lady was a daughter of M. van den Ende, and that she assisted her father in the work of teaching. Van den Ende, who was also called A. Finibus, later went to Paris, and there kept a boarding-school in the Faubourg St. Antoine.
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