On Old Age. on Friendship. on Divination [Latin]

By Marcus Tullius Cicero

Book Overview

Three late dialogues.

Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106-43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician, and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: Latin
• ISBN: 0674991702
• ISBN13: 9780674991705
• Release Date: January 1923
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 576 Pages
• Weight: 0.77 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 4.5" x 6.6"

Customer Reviews

Two Pointed Moral Treatises along with Cicero's Famed De Divinatione

This particular volume contains two Ciceronian moral treatises, On Friendship and On Old Age, while also offering a particularly fascinating work, On Divination, which Cicero wrote to combat popular superstition, also endemic within some contemporary philosophical circles. De Divinatione is unique, for it a dialogue in which Cicero's opinions burst out with brute force. This is evidenced in the expression made near the close of the work where Cicero declares that "divination has been destroyed and yet we must hold on to the gods." Now it should be noted that the premises laid out in De Divinatione also echoed in the works of brilliant minds' ranging from Augustine to Desiderius Erasmus. Overall, these three works merit attention, for Cicero lends us healthy advice on how to live the practical life ethically and the religious life free of erroneous and vulgar superstition. [As an appendix to On Divination, Cicero composed the treatise concerning Fate, which remains only in fragments but may be found in the LCL (349) and asks to be read after On Divintion].

Old good taste of an epoch unfortunatelly gone

The Loeb Library is a luxus for all classicists, since it offers good, cheap and easy-to-buy editions of almost every ancient author. The translations are accurate and enable to follow the original text in difficult passages without disturbing, if one wants just to read the Latin or Greek text. So it is most to recommend in general. Especially I must praise the volume under review, because the translator was not a classical scholar or a professor, but a lawyer who published the book after reading and translating the treatise On Old Age by Cicero to an old relative who was very ill in bed and died not much later. That is why this book brings to me the good taste of a better epoch in which Latin was part of the life of a cultivated man. If we want to preserve our civilization, and if this word means anything at all, we should ask for Latin to recover the place it used to have in education.

Cicero on Old Age, Friendship, and Divination

I'm unable to write a review, but I am more than pleased with my little book. There is no doubt that Cicero was a remarkable man who wrote amazing words of wisdom. he makes you THINK! And its one book which I'll always have beside me. Thank you so much. Pauline Black