Cicero's Tusculan Disputations

Marcus Tullius Cicero · Down to Earth Series · 141 pages

The complete Tusculanae Disputationes in Charles Duke Yonge's translation of 1877, and at 141 pages the longest work in this section. The five books are given whole: on the contempt of death; on bearing pain; on grief of mind; on the other perturbations of the mind; and on whether virtue alone is sufficient for a happy life.

The introduction supplies the circumstance that makes the work what it is. In the sixty-second year of Cicero's age his daughter Tullia died in childbed, and her loss afflicted him so deeply that he abandoned all public business and left the city for Asterra, a country house near Antium, where after a while he devoted himself to writing. The five books are therefore not an academic exercise in consolation but the work of a man applying philosophy to his own grief in the order the titles set out — first the fear of death, then physical pain, then grief itself, then the passions generally, and last the question the whole sequence has been building toward. It is the natural companion to Plutarch's letter of condolence to Apollonius in the Constitution of Man series.

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