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But, in the quiet of my own little grass-plot, when the moon, at its rising, finds me with the Philoctetes or the De Finibus in my hand, I often wonder what strange infatuation leads men who can do something better to squander their intellect, their health, their energy, on such subjects as those which most statesmen are engaged in pursuing.
'We then entered the boat again; the night came upon us; the wind rose; the sea swelled; and Boswell desired to be set on dry ground: we, however, pursued our navigation, and passed by several little islands in the silent solemnity of faint moon-shine, seeing little, and hearing only the wind and water. Piozzi Letters, i. 176. Cicero De Finibus, ii. 32.
There is a passage at the close of the 'Roundabout Paper' No. 23, 'De Finibus, in which a sense of the ebb of life is very marked; the whole paper is like a soliloquy. It opens with a drawing of Mr.
There are two separate classes of his so-called Philosophy, in describing which the word philosophy, if it be used at all, must be made to bear two different senses. He handles in one set of treatises, not, I think, with his happiest efforts, the teaching of the old Greek schools. Such are the Tusculan Disquisitions, the Academics, and the De Finibus.
The fifth and last book, De Finibus, is supposed to recount a dialogue held at Athens, or, rather, gives the circumstances of a discourse pretended to have been delivered there by Pupius Piso to the two Ciceros, and to their cousin Lucius, on the merits of the old Academy and the Aristotelian Peripatetics; for Plato's philosophy had got itself split into two.
This is especially seen in his treatise "De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum," in which the opinions of all the Grecian schools concerning the supreme good are expounded and compared. Nor does he hesitate to declare that happiness consists in the cognition of nature and science, which is the true source of pleasure both to gods and men. Yet these are but hopes, in which it does not become us to indulge.
A similar fallacy is committed by Cicero, in his second book De Finibus, where, speaking in his own person against the Epicureans, he charges them with inconsistency in saying that the pleasures of the mind had their origin from those of the body, and yet that the former were more valuable, as if the effect could surpass the cause. “Animi voluptas oritur propter voluptatem corporis, et major est animi voluptas quam corporis? ita fit ut gratulator, lætior sit quam is cui gratulatur.” Even that, surely, is not an impossibility; a person’s good fortune has often given more pleasure to others than it gave to the person himself.
But that he lived with his characters quite as much as his great contemporary may be seen from that charming Roundabout Paper "De Finibus," where he describes the loneliness of his study after all those people had gone who had been boarding and lodging with him for twenty months.
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;
'And yet, sir, I cannot but marvel that you, Colonel, whom I noted to have so much of the amor patritz when we met in Edinburgh as even to vilipend other countries, should have chosen to establish your Lares, or household gods, procul a patrice finibus, and in a manner to expatriate yourself.
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