Cicero's Tusculan Disputations
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~180,000 words · 876 passages
Cite this work
- APACicero. (n.d.). Cicero's Tusculan Disputations. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/cicero/cicero-s-tusculan-disputations
- MLACicero. "Cicero's Tusculan Disputations." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/cicero/cicero-s-tusculan-disputations.
- ChicagoCicero. Cicero's Tusculan Disputations. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/cicero/cicero-s-tusculan-disputations.
What it is about
Five conversations on how to live with what hurts: the contempt of death, the bearing of pain, grief, the other passions, and whether virtue suffices for happiness.
Context and history
Cicero wrote them in 45 BC, the year his daughter Tullia died. That is not biographical trimming: the book asks whether philosophy is any use once the disaster has already happened, and it is asked by a man finding out. It gathers Stoic, Epicurean and Academic arguments without belonging to a school, and it is one of the channels by which Greek philosophy reached the West in Latin — in the vocabulary Cicero had to invent in order to translate it.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
HARPER & BROTHERS _will send either of the above works by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States, on receipt of the price_. NOTE. The greater portion of the Republic was previously translated by Francis Barham, Esq., and published in 1841. Although ably performed, it was not sufficiently close for the purpose of the "CLASSICAL LIBRARY," and was therefore placed in the hands of the present editor for revision, as well as for collation with recent texts. This has occasioned material alterations and additions. The treatise "On the Nature of the Gods" is a revision of that usually ascribed to the celebrated Benjamin Franklin. CONTENTS. _Tusculan Disputations_ _On the Nature of the Gods_ _On the Commonwealth_ THE TUSCULAN DISPUTATIONS. INTRODUCTION. 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
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