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CICERO
three books On the nature of the gods, comprising all the arguments on that topic,
followed by these two books On divination; and if, as I intend, I add a work On fate,
I shall have fully treated diis branch of study.
Of the Hortensius, which changed Augustine's life and turned him to God
(Conf. 3.4-7), we have only fragments (about 100). The Academica, on the
epistemology of the Academy, appeared in two versions, in two and four books
respectively. We possess Book 2 of the ' Prior a' and part of Book 1 of the
'Posteriora'. Cicero also mentions the De senectute or Cato motor, on old age,
and the eulogy (lost) of the younger Cato; but not the lost De gloria, in two
books, nor the De legibus; nor the De amicitia or Laelius on friendship, and the
De qfficiis, which were yet to come. The De senectute and De amicitia, imaginary
discourses by Cato and Laelius rather than dialogue, both short and both
dedicated to Atticus, enshrine the quintessence of Ciceronian humanism, and
with the De qfficiis were chiefly to represent Cicero for such readers as he had in
the Dark and Middle Ages.
Cicero wrote by night and day, since he could not sleep (Att. 13.26.2). In
twenty months he composed five or more major and several minor philosophical
works. Naturally these, apart from the De senectute and De amicitia, have not
the degree of originality, springing from personal experience, of the De oratore
and De republica, and Cicero is more scrupulous than most ancients in acknowledging
his debts. But they are far from being mere compilations from the
Greek; without years of meditation behind him he could never have mastered
the material so quickly. Their success appears to have been immediate: there
were so many other souls at this time who longed to escape into a spiritual
world. As philosophy they deal with problems that still beset human beings,
even if they have ceased to preoccupy philosophers except perhaps for the post-
Aristotelian problem of freewill and that of cognition. But Cicero cannot be said
to interest historians of philosophy so much as original thinkers like Plato and
Aristotle do.
There is however historical interest in the De natura deorum and De divinatione,
for example, where religion is no more exempt than any other subject
from the Academic practice of hearing all sides. Cicero's mentor Scaevola the
Pontiff had pragmatically distinguished three kinds of religion, that of the poets,
the statesmen and the philosophers. In his poems Cicero introduced that of the
poets, in his De legibus that of the statesmen, in these later works that of the
philosophers. In spite of the cloak of dialogue in some, his views do emerge.
Thus in De divinatione 2 this augur appropriates to himself, in answer to his
brother, the role of demolishing, with Lucretian relish, superstitions he treated
with solemn respect in De legibus 2. 'But we are alone' he says to his brother,
" so we can search for the truth freely' (sine inuidia, 2.28). Augustine commented
that what he proclaimed so eloquently in this discussion he would not have
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