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Updated: June 16, 2025
IV. But let every one defend his own opinion, for every one is at liberty to choose what he likes: I shall keep to my old custom; and, being under no restraint from the laws of any particular school, which in philosophy every one must necessarily confine himself to, I shall always inquire what has the most probability in every question, and this system, which I have often practised on other occasions, I have adhered closely to in my Tusculan Disputations.
Oh, death, cruel death! Fatal law which nature necessarily rejects because thy very office is to destroy nature! Cicero says that death frees us from all pains and sorrows, but this great philosopher books all the expense without taking the receipts into account. I do not recollect if, when he wrote his 'Tusculan Disputations', his own Tullia was dead.
'tis a feverish excess of the mind; a tempestuous and unquiet instrument. Do but recollect yourself, and you will find in yourself natural arguments against death, true, and the fittest to serve you in time of necessity: 'tis they that make a peasant, and whole nations, die with as much firmness as a philosopher. Should I have died less cheerfully before I had read Cicero's Tusculan Quastiones?
His banishment meanwhile aroused the haughty spirit of his house, and anger at Gerard's treacherous conduct proved a further incentive to revenge. His numerous adherents still held St. Angelo, and his gold acquired him new friends. After a forty-nine days' reign, Sylvester III was driven from the apostolic chair, which the Tusculan reascended in March, 1045.
He is satisfied with the language in which Cicero writes about the opinions of others, and with the amusing manner in which he deals with things of themselves heavy and severe. In the third book he, some time afterward, discusses the Stoic doctrine with Cato at the Tusculan villa of Lucullus, near to his own.
But since the senate has so determined, let us commend it, and not be in a minority of one. My "Amaltheia" is waiting and longing for you. My Tusculan and Pompeian properties please me immensely, except that they have overwhelmed me me, the scourge of debt! not exactly in Corinthian bronze, but in the bronze which is current in the market. In Gaul I hope peace is restored.
And I have so diligently applied myself to this pursuit, that I have already ventured to have a school like the Greeks. And lately when you left us, having many of my friends about me, I attempted at my Tusculan villa what I could do in that way; for as I formerly used to practise declaiming, which nobody continued longer than myself, so this is now to be the declamation of my old age.
While they were most busily employed in these matters, an alarming message came from Tusculum that the Æquans were in Tusculan territory. The recent services of that state made them ashamed of delaying relief. Both the consuls were sent with an army, and found the enemy in their usual post in Algidum.
Following him, as their leader, in spite of the fruitless opposition of the tribunes, they marched up the ascent of the Capitoline Hill. The Tusculan troops also joined them. Allies and citizens vied with each other as to which of them should appropriate to themselves the honour of recovering the citadel. Each leader encouraged his own men.
In the year A.U.C. 708, and the sixty-second year of Cicero's age, his daughter, Tullia, died in childbed; and her loss afflicted Cicero to such a degree that he abandoned all public business, and, leaving the city, retired to Asterra, which was a country house that he had near Antium; where, after a while, he devoted himself to philosophical studies, and, besides other works, he published his Treatise de Finibus, and also this treatise called the Tusculan Disputations, of which Middleton gives this concise description: "The first book teaches us how to contemn the terrors of death, and to look upon it as a blessing rather than an evil;
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