His Topica, or treatise on commonplaces, has less extent and variety of plan, being little else than a compendium of Aristotle's work on the same subject. It was, as he informs us in its proem, drawn up from memory on his voyage from Italy to Greece, soon after Cæsar's murder, and in compliance with the wishes of Trebatius, who had some time before urged him to undertake the translation.[208]
Cicero seems to have intended his De Oratore, De claris Oratoribus, and Orator, to form one complete system.[209] Of these three noble works the first lays down the principles and rules of the rhetorical art; the second exemplifies them in the most eminent speakers of Greece and Rome; and the third shadows out the features of that perfect orator, whose superhuman excellences should be the aim of our ambition. The De Oratore was written when the author was fifty-two, two years after his return from exile; and is a dialogue between some of the most illustrious Romans of the preceding age on the subject of oratory. The principal speakers are the orators Crassus and Antonius, who are represented unfolding the principles of their art to Sulpicius and Cotta, young men just rising in the legal profession. In the first book, the conversation turns on the subject-matter of rhetoric, and the qualifications requisite for the perfect orator. Here Crassus maintains the necessity of his being acquainted with the whole circle of the arts, while Antonius confines eloquence to the province of speaking well. The dispute for the most part seems verbal; for Cicero himself, though he here sides with Crassus, yet elsewhere, as we have above noticed, pronounces eloquence, strictly speaking, to consist in beauty of diction. Scævola, the celebrated lawyer, takes part in this preliminary discussion; but, in the ensuing meetings, makes way for Catulus and Cæsar, the subject leading to such technical disquisitions as were hardly suitable to the dignity of the aged Augur.[210] The next morning Antonius enters upon the subject of invention, which Cæsar completes by subjoining some remarks on the use of humour in oratory; and Antonius, relieving him, finishes the morning discussion with treating of arrangement and memory. In the afternoon the rules for propriety and elegance of diction are explained by Crassus, who was celebrated in this department of the art; and the work concludes with his handling the subject of delivery and action. Such is the plan of the De Oratore, the most finished perhaps of Cicero's compositions. An air of grandeur and magnificence reigns throughout. The characters of the aged senators are finely conceived, and the whole company is invested with an almost religious majesty, from the allusions interspersed to the melancholy destinies for which its members were reserved.
His treatise De claris Oratoribus was written after an interval of nine years, about the time of Cato's death, when he was sixty-one, and is thrown into the shape of a dialogue between Brutus, Atticus, and himself. He begins with Solon, and after briefly mentioning the orators of Greece, proceeds to those of his own country, so as to take in the whole period from the time of Junius Brutus down to himself. About the same time he wrote his Orator; in which he directs his attention principally to diction and delivery, as in his De Inventione and Topica he considers the matter of an oration.[211] This treatise is of a less practical nature than the rest.[212] It adopts the principles of Plato, and delineates the perfect orator according to the abstract conceptions of the intellect rather than the deductions of observation and experience. Hence he sets out with a definition of the perfectly eloquent man, whose characteristic it is to express himself with propriety on all subjects, whether humble, great, or of an intermediate character;[213] and here he has an opportunity of paying some indirect compliments to himself. With this work he was so well satisfied that he does not scruple to declare, in a letter to a friend, that he was ready to rest on its merits his reputation for judgment in Oratory.[214]
The treatise De partitione Oratoriâ, or on the three parts of rhetoric, is a kind of catechism between Cicero and his son, drawn up for the use of the latter at the same time with the two preceding. It is the most systematic and perspicuous of his rhetorical works, but seems to be but the rough draught of what he originally intended.[215]
10.
The connection which we have been able to preserve between the rhetorical writings of Cicero cannot be attained in his moral, political, and metaphysical treatises; partly from the extent of the subject, partly from the losses occasioned by time, partly from the inconsistency which we have warned the reader to expect in his sentiments. In our enumeration, therefore, we shall observe no other order than that which the date of their composition furnishes.
The earliest now extant is part of his treatise De Legibus, in three books; being a sequel to his work on Politics. Both were written in imitation of Plato's treatises on the same subjects.[216] The latter of these (De Republicâ) was composed a year after the De Oratore,[217] and seems to have vied with it in the majesty and interest of the dialogue. It consisted of a series of discussions in six books on the origin and principles of government, Scipio being the principal speaker, but Lælius, Philus, Manilius, and other personages of like gravity taking part in the conversation. Till lately, but a fragment of the fifth book was understood to be in existence, in which Scipio, under the fiction of a dream, inculcates the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. But in the year 1822, Monsignor Mai, librarian of the Vatican, published considerable portions of the first and second books, from a palimpsest manuscript of St. Austin's Commentary on the Psalms. In the part now recovered, Scipio discourses on the different kinds of constitutions and their respective advantages; with a particular reference to that of Rome. In the third book, the subject of justice was discussed by Lælius and Philus; in the fourth, Scipio treated of morals and education; while in the fifth and sixth, the duties of a magistrate were explained, and the best means of preventing changes and revolutions in the constitution itself. In the latter part of the treatise, allusion was made to the actual posture of affairs in Rome, when the conversation was supposed to have occurred, and the commotions excited by the Gracchi.
In his treatise De Legibus, which was written two years later than the De Republicâ, when he was fifty-five, and shortly after the murder of Clodius, he represents himself as explaining to his brother Quintus and Atticus, in their walks through the woods of Arpinum, the nature and origin of the laws and their actual state, both in other countries and in Rome. The first part only of the subject is contained in the books now extant; the introduction to which we have had occasion to notice, when speaking of his Stoical sentiments on questions connected with State policy. Law he pronounces to be the perfection of reason, the eternal mind, the divine energy, which, while it pervades and unites in one the whole universe, associates gods and men by the more intimate resemblance of reason and virtue, and still more closely men with men, by the participation of common faculties, affections, and situations. He then proves, at length, that justice is not merely created by civil institutions, from the power of conscience, the imperfections of human law, the moral sense, and the disinterestedness of virtue. He next proceeds to unfold the principles, first, of religious law, under the heads of divine worship; the observance of festivals and games; the office of priests, augurs, and heralds; the punishment of sacrilege and purjury; the consecration of land, and the rights of sepulchre; and, secondly, of civil law, which gives him an opportunity of noticing the respective duties of magistrates and citizens. In these discussions, though professedly speaking of the abstract question, he does not hesitate to anticipate the subject of the lost books, by frequent allusions to the history and customs of his own country. It must be added, that in no part of his writings do worse instances occur, than in this treatise, of that vanity which was notoriously his weakness, which are rendered doubly offensive by their being put into the mouth of his brother and Atticus.[218]
Here a period of seven or eight years intervenes, during which he composed little of importance besides his Orations. He then published the De claris Oratoribus and Orator; and a year later, when he was sixty-three, his Academicæ Quæstiones, in the retirement from public business to which he was driven by the dictatorship of Cæsar. This work had originally consisted of two dialogues, which he entitled Catulus and Lucullus, from the names of the respective speakers in each. These he now remodelled and enlarged into four books, dedicating them to Varro, whom he introduced as advocating, in the presence of Atticus, the tenets of Antiochus, while he himself defended those of Philo. Of this most valuable composition, only the second book (Lucullus) of the first edition and part of the first book of the second are now extant. In the former of those two, Lucullus argues against, and Cicero for, the Academic sect, in the presence of Catulus and Hortensius; in the latter, Varro pursues the history of philosophy from Socrates to Arcesilas, and Cicero continues it down to the time of Carneades. In the second edition the style was corrected, the matter condensed, and the whole polished with extraordinary care and diligence.[219]
The same year he published his treatise De Finibus, or "On the chief good," in five books, in which are explained the sentiments of the Epicureans, Stoics, and Peripatetics on the subject. This is the earliest of his works in which the dialogue is of a disputatious character. It is opened with a defence of the Epicurean tenets, concerning pleasure, by Torquatus; to which Cicero replies at length. The scene then shifts from the Cuman villa to the library of young Lucullus (his father being dead), where the Stoic Cato expatiates on the sublimity of the system which maintains the existence of one only good, and is answered by Cicero in the character of a Peripatetic. Lastly, Piso, in a conversation held at Athens, enters into an explanation of the doctrine of Aristotle, that happiness is the greatest good. The general style of this treatise is elegant and perspicuous; and the last book in particular has great variety and splendour of diction.