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But if we grant this initial paradox, a great many others will follow along with it as for instance that "Virtue is sufficient of itself for happiness". The fifth book of Cicero's Tusculan Disputations is an eloquent defense of this thesis, in which the orator combats the suggestion that a good man is not happy when he is being broken on the wheel.
It was at this time that the blow fell upon him which prostrated him for the time, as his exile had done, and under which he claims our far more natural sympathy. His dear daughter Tullia again married, but unhappily, and just divorced died at his Tusculan villa. Their loving intercourse had undergone no change from her childhood, and his grief was for a while inconsolable.
"I can never," he says, "read the works of Cicero on 'Old Age, or 'Friendship, or his 'Tusculan Disputations, without fervently pressing them to my lips, without being penetrated with veneration for a mind little short of inspired by God himself."
A careful system of vine-husbandry was early and generally inculcated by the Latin priests. In Rome the vintage did not begin until the supreme priest of the community, the -flamen- of Jupiter, had granted permission for it and had himself made a beginning; in like manner a Tusculan ordinance forbade the sale of new wine, until the priest had proclaimed the festival of opening the casks.
As is usual with correspondents, half the letter is taken up with excuses for not writing sooner; then he gives commissions for the purchase of statues for his Tusculan villa, of which we now hear for the first time, and tells his friend how his wife, Terentia, sends her love, though she is suffering from the gout. Tullia also, the dear little Tullia, "deliciæ nostræ," sends her love.
Among his works on speculative philosophy are "The Academics, or a history and defense of the belief of the new Academy;" "Dialogues on the Supreme Good, the end of all moral action;" "The Tusculan Disputations," containing five treatises on the fear of death, the endurance of pain, power of wisdom over sorrow, the morbid passions, and the relation of virtue to happiness.
These five conferences, or dialogues, he collected afterward into writing in the very words and manner in which they really passed; and published them under the title of his Tusculan Disputations, from the name of the villa in which they were held.
His three next treatises, the Orator, the Tusculan Disquisitions, and the De Natura Deorum, have all been graced, or intended to be graced, by the name of Brutus. And yet, from what we know, we can hardly imagine two men less likely to be brought together by their political ambition.
One of these, the Tusculan, seems to have devoted the attention of its members exclusively to political topics; while the Speculative, although it imposed no restrictions on the range of inquiry, was of a more philosophical character.
I am so delighted with my Tusculan villa that I never feel really happy till I get there. Let me know exactly what you are doing and intending to do about everything. In B.C. 69 he had been accused of malversation, and defended by Cicero. All's well at your mother's, and I keep an eye on her. I have undertaken to pay L. Cincius 20,400 sesterces to your credit on the Ides of February.
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