Page:The Letters of Cicero Shuckburg III.pdf/25

 first impulse was to return to his old field of distinction—eloquence; and to discuss the science and history of the art to which he owed his splendid reputation. Accordingly, we owe to the first years of his return to Rome and his villas three rhetorical treatises, the Partitiones Oratoriæ, the Orator ad M. Brutum, and the Brutus or de claris Oratoribus. The last-named is made especially interesting by numerous references to his own intellectual history. For a time he found some interest, as well as renewed health and cheerfulness, in teaching a number of young men the art of which he was master. But his thoughts were turning in another direction. He soon resolved to abandon as much as possible the active business of the forum, and to bury himself "in the obscurity of literature." From oratory therefore he passed to philosophy. He begins with a brief tract on the Paradoxes of the Stoics; but when, early in 45, the death of his beloved daughter Tullia added a new motive and a new excuse for retirement, he strove to dispel his sorrow and drown bitter recollections by flinging himself with ardour into the task of making Greek philosophy intelligible to his countrymen. The de Finibus and the Academics were the first-fruits of this toil. They were produced with extraordinary speed; and whatever may be said about their value as original treatises, they were and still remain the most popular and generally intelligible exposition of post-Platonic philosophy existing. The charm of his inimitable style will always attract readers who might be repelled by works which contain clearer reasoning or more exact statement. At any rate their composition had the effect of lightening his sorrow, and distracting his mind from dwelling so exclusively on the mortifications caused by the political situation. Finally, in the last few months preceding the murder of Cæsar, he composed what is perhaps the most pleasing of all his quasi-philosophical works, the Tusculan Disputations. The first book "On the Fear of Death"—*