Page:1888 Cicero's Tusculan Disputations.djvu/452

 

I. * * * Since mention has been made of the body and of the mind, I will endeavor to explain the theory of each as well as the weakness of my understanding is able to comprehend it—a duty which I think it the more becoming in me to undertake, because Marcus Tullius, a man of singular genius, after having attempted to perform it in the fourth book of his treatise on the Commonwealth, compressed a subject of wide extent within narrow limits, only touching lightly on all the principal points. And that there might be no excuse alleged for his not having followed out this topic, he himself has assured us that he was not wanting either in inclination or in anxiety to do so; for, in the first book of his treatise on Laws, when he was touching briefly on the same subject, he speaks thus: "This topic Scipio, in my opinion, has sufficiently discussed in those books which you have read."

And the mind itself, which sees the future, remembers the past.

Well did Marcus Tullius say, In truth, if there is no one who would not prefer death to being changed into the form of some beast, although he were still to retain the mind of a man, how much more wretched is it to have the mind of a beast in the form of a man! To me this fate appears as much worse than the other as the mind is superior to the body.

Tullius says somewhere that he does not think the good of a ram and of Publius Africanus identical.

And also by its being interposed, it causes shade and night, which is adapted both to the numbering of days and to rest from labor.

And as in the autumn he has opened the earth to receive seeds, in winter relaxed it that it may digest them, and by the ripening powers of summer softened some and burned up others.

When the shepherds use * * * for cattle.

Cicero, in the fourth book of his Commonwealth, uses the word "armentum," and "armentarius," derived from it.