activity, which is producing the Tusculan Disputations, as a proof that he is not yielding an unmanly subjection to his grief. "Those cheerful souls," he writes, "who find fault with me, cannot read as much as I have written in the time. Whether the work is good or bad, is nothing to the point; it could not have been attempted by anyone who had abandoned himself to despair."[1]
Almost all Cicero's philosophical works belong to this (45 B.C.) and the following year. His writing was hardly interrupted by Cæsar's death and ceased only with his own recall to the active labours of a statesman at the end of the year 44. Not to mention several works which are lost, we have from this period the Academic Questions, the treatise On the Definitions of Good and Evil, the Tusculan Disputations, the dialogues On the Nature of the Gods, On Divination, On Old Age, and On Friendship, and finally the treatise On Duty (De Officiis) addressed to his son Marcus, Cicero found the materials for most of these works in the writings of the Greek philosophers: "I have to supply little but the words," he writes,[2] "and for these I am never at a loss." Though Cicero has no pretensions to be considered a thinker of original and inventive genius in the region of philosophy, it was no small achievement thus to mould the Latin tongue to be a vehicle for Greek philosophic thought. Cicero wiped away the reproach of "the poverty of our native speech," of which Lucretius complains, and in so doing he se-
