acquaintance with every detail of the Greek systems.[2] In early life he
had studied with enthusiasm and success all the learning of the Greeks, but
especially in the two departments of Rhetoric and Philosophy, then closely
connected, or rather hardly distinguished. He not only sought the society
of learned Greeks, but spent considerable time in study at Rhodes and
Athens, which had become not merely the 'school of Greece', as Thucydides
makes Pericles call her, but the school of the civilized world.[3] When, by
reason of political troubles, he was forced to retire to private life, he
began to carry out a great plan for interpreting the best philosophical
writings of the Greeks to his fellow-countrymen. For this work his liberal
views as a New Academic peculiarly fitted him. His usual method was to take
one or two leading Greek works on the subject with which he was dealing,
and to represent freely in his own language their subject-matter,
introducing episodes and illustrations of his own. He thus presented to the
Romans in their own tongue the most significant portions of the Greek
Philosophy; and in his writings there has come down to us much, especially
of the Post-Aristotelian Philosophy, that was doomed to oblivion in the
original Greek. But further than this, to Cicero more than to any other
Roman is due the formation of a Latin philosophical vocabulary, by which
the language was enriched and fitted for the part it has since taken as the
Language of the Learned. While on many points Cicero's own views can hardly
be determined with perfect exactness, the exalted sentiments and the
exquisite literary finish of his philosophical writings have always won
admiration; and through them he has exerted no small influence on the
literature and life of modern times.[4]

(iii.) THE PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS OF CICERO.

During the whole of an exceptionally busy public life Cicero devoted his
spare moments to reading and to the society of the learned. After his exile