Cicero's Hymn to Philosophy

Cicero · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages carrying a single celebrated passage from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, book V section ii, in Yonge's translation. A footnote points to the full text in the site's Down to Earth Series.

The passage is an address rather than an argument. Philosophy is called the guide of life, the discoverer of virtue and the expeller of vices, and is asked what the speaker himself — and the whole life of man — would have been without her. The debts listed are civic before they are personal: the origin of cities, the calling together of the dispersed race of men into social life, their union first by proximity, then by marriage, and last by the communication of speech and language. Philosophy is then named as the inventress of laws and the instructress in morals and discipline, the refuge fled to and the assistance implored, and the speaker declares that having formerly submitted to her in great degree he now surrenders himself entirely — since one day spent well and agreeably to her precepts is preferable to an eternity of error. The second half turns to complaint. Philosophy is said to be so far from being praised as she deserves that she is wholly neglected by most men and evil spoken of by many, and the speaker asks whether anyone can speak ill of the parent of life without polluting himself with something like parricide. The explanation offered for that ingratitude is that ignorant men cannot look far enough back, and do not realise that the men by whom human life was first improved were philosophers — closing on the concession that although philosophy itself is of long standing, the name for it must be acknowledged to be modern.

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