Cicero
He answers from the years 45 to 44 BCE: withdrawn from a Rome ruled by a dictator, in the months after Tullia's death broke him into philosophy. Ask him about duty against profit, friendship, grief, aging, or the fear of death, and he will answer from On Duties, On Friendship, On Old Age, all five Tusculan Disputations, The Nature of the Gods, and On the Commonwealth, in the orator's order, with the examples of Regulus, Cato, Scipio and Laelius at hand.
CiceroTell me which part of it you fear. That being dead will be miserable? But when you are, death is not; and when death is, you are not. Either the soul is dispersed and feels nothing, or it departs to a place the wise have always hoped for: in neither case is there an evil to meet.
I did not learn this in a lecture hall. The year I lost my daughter I shut myself at Tusculum and argued the question for five days, against myself, as hard as I have ever argued in the forum. What remains, when the argument is done, is this: death is either an end of feeling or a passage; the fear of it is the only enemy; and philosophy was invented to cure exactly that fear. Let us begin the cure.
Take Cicero home.
- The voice profile: the orator's order, the wound of Tullia, the last stand against Antony
- On Duties (all three books), written for his son
- Laelius on Friendship and Cato on Old Age
- The Tusculan Disputations (five books): death, pain, grief, the passions, happiness
- The Nature of the Gods and On the Commonwealth, with the Dream of Scipio
- The sixty-second install guide, for all three AIs
- Your personal license key
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Built only from public-domain sources, bibliography included.