untarnished honor, and makes them his apology to Atticus for declining
to urge an extortionate demand on the city of Salamis.

The work is in the form of Dialogues, in which, with several
interlocutors beside, the younger Africanus and Laelius are the chief
speakers; and it is characterized by the same traits of dramatic genius
to which I have referred in connection with the _De Amicitia_.

The _De Republica_ was probably under interdict during the reigns of the
Augustan dynasty; men did not dare to copy it, or to have it known that
they possessed it; and when it might have safely reappeared, the
republic had faded even from regretful memory, and there was no desire
to perpetuate a work devoted to its service and honor. Thus the world
had lost the very one of all Cicero's writings for which he most craved
immortality. The portions of it which Mai has brought to light fully
confirm Cicero's own estimate of its value, and feed the earnest--it is
to be feared the vain--desire for the recovery of the entire work.

Scipio's Dream, which, is nearly all that remains of the Sixth Book of
the _De Republica_, had survived during the interval for which the rest
of the treatise was lost to the world. Macrobius, a grammarian of the
fifth century, made it the text of a commentary of little present
interest or value, but much prized and read in the Middle Ages. The
Dream, independently of the commentary, has in more recent times passed
through unnumbered editions, sometimes by itself, sometimes with
Cicero's ethical writings, sometimes with the other fragments of the _De
Republica_.

In the closing Dialogue of the _De Republica_ the younger Africanus
says: "Although to the wise the consciousness of noble deeds is a most