to justify to himself the bent of his disposition by the name of a
philosopher, and therefore became an Epicurean. Cicero could in no way
justify to himself any deviation from the energy of public life, from
its utility, from its ambition, from its loves, or from its hatred;
and from the Greek philosophers whom he named of this or the other
school, received only some assistance in that handling of so-called
philosophy which became the chief amusement of his future life. This
was well understood by the Latin authors who wrote of Cicero after
his own time. Quintilian, speaking of Cicero and Brutus as writers of
philosophy, says of the latter, "Suffecit ponderi rerum; seias enim
sentire quae dicit"[49]--"He was equal to the weight of the subject,
for you feel that he believes what he writes" He leaves the inference,
of course, that Cicero wrote on such matters only for the exercise of
his ingenuity, as a school-boy writes.

When at Athens, Cicero was initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries--as
to which Mr. Collins, in his little volume on Cicero, in the Ancient
Classics for English Readers, says that they "contained under this
veil whatever faith in the Invisible and Eternal rested in the mind of
an enlightened pagan." In this Mr. Collins is fully justified by what
Cicero himself has said although the character thus given to these
mysteries is very different from that which was attributed to them
by early Christian writers. They were to those pious but somewhat
prejudiced theologists mysterious and pagan, and therefore horrible.[50]
But Cicero declares in his dialogue with Atticus De Legibus, written
when he was fifty-five years old, in the prime of his intellect, that
"of all the glories and divine gifts which your Athens has produced for
the improvement of men nothing surpasses these mysteries, by which the
harshness of our uncivilized life has been softened, and we have been
lifted up to humanity; and as they are called 'initia,'" by which