Page:1888 Cicero's Tusculan Disputations.djvu/461

 dissension of the citizens, when one party separates from and attacks another, is called sedition.

And in truth in civil dissensions, as the good are of more importance than the many, I think that we should regard the weight of the citizens, and not their number.

For the lusts, being severe mistresses of the thoughts, command and compel many an unbridled action. And as they cannot be satisfied or appeased by any means, they urge those whom they have inflamed with their allurements to every kind of atrocity.

II. Which indeed was so much the greater in him because though the cause of the colleagues was identical, not only was their unpopularity not equal, but the influence of Gracchus was employed in mitigating the hatred borne to Claudius.

Who encountered the number of the chiefs and nobles with these words, and left behind him that mournful and dignified expression of his gravity and influence.

That, as he writes, a thousand men might every day descend into the forum with cloaks dyed in purple.

For our ancestors wished marriages to be firmly established.

There is a speech extant of Lælius with which we are all acquainted, expressing how pleasing to the immortal gods are the * * * and * * * of the priests.

III. Cicero, writing about the Commonwealth, in imitation of Plato, has related the story of the return of Er the Pamphylian to life; who, as he says, had come to life again after he had been placed on the funeral pile, and related many secrets about the shades below; not speaking, like Plato, in a fabulous imitation of truth, but using a certain reasonable invention of an ingenious dream, cleverly intimating that these things which were uttered about the immortality of the soul, and about heaven, are not the inventions of dreaming philosophers, nor the incredible fables which the Epicureans ridicule, but the conjectures of wise men. He insinuates that that Scipio who by the subjugation of Carthage obtained Africanus as a surname for his family, gave notice to Scipio the son of Paulus of the treachery which threatened him from his relations, and the course of fate, because by the necessity of numbers he was confined in the period of a perfect life, and he says that he in the fifty-sixth year of his age * * *

IV. Some of our religion who love Plato, on account of his admirable kind of eloquence, and of some correct opinions which he held, say that he had some opinions similar to my own touching the resurrection of the dead, which subject Tully touches on in his treatise on the Commonwealth, and says that he was rather jesting than intending to say that was true. For he asserts that a man returned to life, and related some stories which harmonized with the discussions of the Platonists.

V. In this point the imitation has especially preserved the likeness of the work, because, as Plato, in the conclusion of his volume, represents a certain person who had returned to life, which he appeared to have quitted, as indicating what is the condition of souls when stripped of the