Cicero

On Prognostications As for oracles, they obviously started to lose their credibility well before the coming of Jesus Christ for we see Cicero going to great lengths to find the cause of their failing.

”Cicero says that only Xenophanes of Colophon, among all the philosophers who recognized the gods, had tried to root out all types of divination.

To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die Cicero says that to philosophize is nothing more than to prepare for death.

We can say, Cicero says thus;

would I extract consolation for myself or my friend, I borrow it from Cicero.

Whoever asked his pupil what he thought of grammar and rhetoric, or of such and such a sentence of Cicero?

Cicero said, that though he should live two men’s ages, he should never find leisure to study the lyric poets;

”When Cicero was in the height and heat of an eloquent harangue, many were struck with admiration;

” If these ridiculous subtleties, contorta et aculeata sophismata, convoluted and thorny sophistry,as Cicero calls them, are designed to possess him with an untruth, they are dangerous;

like Cicero, who says, that he would employ his solitude and retirement from public affairs, to acquire by his writings an immortal life.

Now, as to the end that Pliny and Cicero propose to us, of glory;

A Consideration on Cicero One word more by way of comparison betwixt these two.

There are to be gathered out of the writings of Cicero and the younger Pliny (but little, in my opinion, resembling his uncle in his humors) infinite testimonies of a beyond measure ambitious nature;

unless you will allow that of Cicero to be of so supreme a perfection as to form a complete body of itself.

Quoties non modo ductores nostri, says Cicero, Sed uniuersi etiam exercitus ad non dubiam mortem concurrerunt.

Cicero saw them fighting together, punching, kicking, biting, and passing out rather than admitting defeat.

For, as Cicero says, even those who most controvert it, would yet that the books they write about it should visit the light under their own names, and seek to derive glory from seeming to despise it.

Death is terrible to Cicero, coveted by Cato, indifferent to Socrates.

Many of the Greeks, says Cicero, cannot endure the sight of an enemy, and yet are courageous in sickness;

If it be vainglory for a man to publish his own virtues, why does not Cicero prefer the eloquence of Hortensius, and Hortensius that of Cicero?

The Roman infantry always carried not only a morion, a sword, and a shield (for as to arms, says Cicero, they were so accustomed to have them always on, that they were no more trouble to them than their own limbs:

As to Cicero, his works that are most useful to my design are they that treat of manners and rules of our life.

As to Cicero, I am of the common opinion that, learning excepted, he had no great natural excellence.

The younger Cicero, who resembled his father in nothing but in name, whilst commanding in Asia, had several strangers one day at his table, and, among the rest, Cestius seated at the lower end, as men often intrude to the open tables of the great.

Cicero asked one of his people who that man was, who presently told him his name;

” At which Cicero, being suddenly nettled, commanded poor Cestius presently to be seized, and caused him to be very well whipped in his own presence;

one while considering him in his person, by his actions and miraculous greatness, and another in the purity and inimitable polish of his language, wherein he not only excels all other historians, as Cicero confesses, but, peradventure, even Cicero himself;

one while considering him in his person, by his actions and miraculous greatness, and another in the purity and inimitable polish of his language, wherein he not only excels all other historians, as Cicero confesses, but, peradventure, even Cicero himself;

And what qualities of our bodily constitution, in Plato and Cicero, may not indifferently serve a thousand sorts of beasts?

“There is nothing,” says Cicero, “so charming as the employment of letters;

which sounds better upon the tongue of a Gascon, who naturally changes the b into v, than on that of Cicero:

says Cicero.

’Tis what Velleius reproaches Cotta withal and Cicero, that they had learned of Philo, that they had learned nothing.

And of Cicero himself, who stood indebted to his learning for all he was worth, Valerius says, “That he began to disrelish letters in his old age;

Hear Cicero’s protestation, who expounds to us another’s fancy by his own:

Cicero reprehends some of his friends for giving more of their time to the study of astrology, logic, and geometry, than they were really worth;

Seeing that man so much desired to equal himself to God, he had done better, says Cicero, to have attracted those divine conditions to himself, and drawn them down hither below, than to send his corruption and misery up on high;

for, as Democritus says, by the mouth of Cicero,Quod est ante pedes, nemo spectat:

says Cicero.

says Cicero.

For the contrary opinion of the immortality of the soul, which, Cicero says, was first introduced, according to the testimony of books at least, by Pherecydes Syrius, in the time of King Tullus (though some attribute it to Thales, and others to others), ’tis the part of human science that is treated of with the greatest doubt and reservation.

The very air itself, and the serenity of heaven, will cause some mutation in us, according to these verses in Cicero,Tales sunt hominum mentes, quali pater ipse Iuppiter auctiferas lustravit lampade terras.

Aristotle and Cicero both say the same;

Cicero and Diodorus say that in their time the Chaldees kept a register of four hundred thousand and odd years, Aristotle, Pliny, and others, that Zoroaster flourished six thousand years before Plato’s time.

Cicero says, that Chrysippus having attempted to extenuate the force and virtue of the senses, presented to himself arguments and so vehement oppositions to the contrary that he could not satisfy himself therein;

That Pomponius Atticus, to whom Cicero writes so often, being sick, caused Agrippa, his son-in-law, and two or three more of his friends, to be called to him, and told them, that having found all means practised upon him for his recovery to be in vain, and that all he did to prolong his life also prolonged and augmented his pain, he was resolved to put an end both to the one and the other, desiring them to approve of his determination, or at least not to lose their labor in endeavoring to dissuade him.

I believe that, if we had the books Cicero wrote upon this subject, we should there find pretty stories;

Sextilius Rufus, whom Cicero accuses to have entered upon an inheritance contrary to his conscience, not only not against law, but even by the determination of the laws themselves;

and Cicero, as I remember, was wont to pucker up his nose, a sign of a man given to scoffing;

Cicero is of opinion that in treatises of philosophy the exordium is the hardest part;

whatever Cicero is pleased to say, I help myself to lose what I have a particular care to lock safe up.

for they make use of them without discretion, honoring their memories at the expense of their understandings, and making themselves ridiculous by honoring Cicero, Galen, Ulpian, and St.

In the seventh book of Cicero’s Familiar Epistles (and let the grammarians put out that surname of familiar if they please, for in truth it is not very suitable;

and they who, instead of familiar, have substituted “ad Familiares,” may gather something to justify them for so doing out of what Suetonius says in the Life of Caesar, that there was a volume of letters of his ad Familiares) there is one directed to Caesar, then in Gaul, wherein Cicero repeats these words, which were in the end of another letter that Caesar had written to him:

Hear Cicero speak of the love of liberty:

Let Cicero, the father of eloquence, treat of the contempt of death;

and I will allege no other reproach against Dion’s report but this, which I cannot avoid, namely, that he has so weak a judgment in the Roman affairs, that he dares to maintain Julius Caesar’s cause against Pompey, and that of Antony against Cicero.

as what Cicero has also testified before him, as having, as he says, been upon the spot:

witness, says he, Demosthenes and Cicero, Cato and Aristides, Sylla and Lysander, Marcellus and Pelopidas, Pompey and Agesilaus, holding that he has favored the Greeks in giving them so unequal companions.

but if a man consider the truth of the thing, and the men in themselves, which is Plutarch’s chiefest aim, and will rather balance their manners, their natures, and parts, than their fortunes, I think, contrary to Bodin, that Cicero and the elder Cato come far short of the men with whom they are compared.

so great an orator that many have preferred his eloquence to that of Cicero, and he, I conceive, did not think himself inferior to him in that particular, for his two works against Cato were written to counterbalance the elocution that Cicero had expended in his Cato.

Oh, what pity ’tis I have not the faculty of that dreamer in Cicero, who dreaming he was lying with a wench, found he had discharged his stone in the sheets.

nor making a bundle of all these together, to make use of upon occasion, according to Cicero;

I should doubtless say, as Cicero did, could I speak as well as he.

But was not Theophrastus, that so delicate, so modest, and so wise a philosopher, compelled by reason, when he durst say this verse, translated by Cicero:

or these, Sylla, Cicero, Torquatus.

Should I have died less cheerfully before I had read Cicero’s Tusculans?

I had rather understand myself well in myself, than in Cicero.

By suchlike arguments, weak and strong, as Cicero with the disease of his old age, I try to rock asleep and amuse my imagination, and to dress its wounds.