THE TUSCULAN DISPUTATIONS.

INTRODUCTION.

In the year A.U.C. 708 Anno Urbis Conditae, meaning "in the year from the founding of the city" (46 B.C.)., and the sixty-second year of Cicero's age, his daughter, Tullia, died in childbirth. Her loss afflicted Cicero to such a degree that he abandoned all public business and, leaving the city, retired to Asterra, a country house he owned near Antium. There, after a while, he devoted himself to philosophical studies and, among other works, published his treatise de Finibus On the Ends of Good and Evil., and also this work called the Tusculan Disputations, of which Middleton gives this concise description:

"The first book teaches us how to scorn the terrors of death and to look upon it as a blessing rather than an evil;
"The second, to support pain and affliction with a manly fortitude;
"The third, to appease all our complaints and uneasiness regarding the accidents of life;
"The fourth, to moderate all our other passions;
"And the fifth explains the sufficiency of virtue to make men happy."

It was his custom, during his leisure, to take some friends with him into the country, where, instead of amusing themselves with idle sports or feasts, their diversions were purely intellectual, tending to improve the mind and enlarge the understanding. In this manner, he now spent five days at his Tusculan villa in discussing with his friends the several questions just mentioned. For, after employing the mornings in declaiming and rhetorical exercises, they used to retire in the after-