Marcus Cicero - Cicero's Tusculan Disputations

Theodectes was a native of Phaselis, in Pamphylia, a distinguished rhetorician and tragic poet, and flourished in the time of Philip of Macedon. He was a pupil of Isocrates, and lived at Athens, and died there at the age of forty-one.

Cineas was a Thessalian, and (as is said in the text) came to Rome as ambassador from Pyrrhus after the battle of Heraclea, 280 b.c., and his memory is said to have been so great that on the day after his arrival he was able to address all the senators and knights by name. He probably died before Pyrrhus returned to Italy, 276 b.c.

Charmadas, called also Charmides, was a fellow-pupil with Philo, the Larissæan of Clitomachus, the Carthaginian. He is said by some authors to have founded a fourth academy.

Metrodorus was a minister of Mithridates the Great; and employed by him as supreme judge in Pontus, and afterward as an ambassador. Cicero speaks of him in other places (De Orat. ii. 88) as a man of wonderful memory.

Quintus Hortensius was eight years older than Cicero; and, till Cicero’s fame surpassed his, he was accounted the most eloquent of all the Romans. He was Verres’s counsel in the prosecution conducted against him by Cicero. Seneca relates that his memory was so great that he could come out of an auction and repeat the catalogue backward. He died 50 b.c.

This treatise is one which has not come down to us, but which had been lately composed by Cicero in order to comfort himself for the loss of his daughter.

The epigram is,

Which may be translated, perhaps,

This is alluded to by Juvenal:

Pompey’s second wife was Julia, the daughter of Julius Cæsar, she died the year before the death of Crassus, in Parthia. Virgil speaks of Cæsar and Pompey as relations, using the same expression (socer) as Cicero:

This idea is beautifully expanded by Byron:

The epitaph in the original is:

This was expressed in the Greek verses,

which by some authors are attributed to Homer.

This is the first fragment of the Cresphontes.—Ed. Var. vii., p. 594.

The Greek verses are quoted by Plutarch:

This refers to the story that when Eumolpus, the son of Neptune, whose assistance the Eleusinians had called in against the Athenians, had been slain by the Athenians, an oracle demanded the sacrifice of one of the daughters of Erechtheus, the King of Athens. And when one was drawn by lot, the others voluntarily accompanied her to death.

Menœceus was son of Creon, and in the war of the Argives against Thebes, Teresias declared that the Thebans should conquer if Menœceus would sacrifice himself for his country; and accordingly he killed himself outside the gates of Thebes.

The Greek is,

Soph. Trach. 1047.

The lines quoted by Cicero here appear to have come from the Latin play of Prometheus by Accius; the ideas are borrowed, rather than translated, from the Prometheus of Æschylus.

From exerceo .

Each soldier carried a stake, to help form a palisade in front of the camp.

Insania—from in , a particle of negative force in composition, and sanus , healthy, sound.

The man who first received this surname was L. Calpurnius Piso, who was consul, 133 b.c., in the Servile War.

The Greek is,

I have given Pope’s translation in the text.

This is from the Theseus:

Ter. Phorm. II. i. 11.

This refers to the speech of Agamemnon in Euripides, in the Iphigenia in Aulis,