The Ethical Writings by Cicero

Author:Cicero [Cicero]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophie
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Ref. 108

Illiberales, unworthy of a free man.

Ref. 109

For men of senatorial, or even equestrian rank, these employments, if practised for gain, were regarded as derogating from respectability.

Ref. 110

The Romans in general, till near the last days of the republic, despised commerce, and though they depended for grain in great part on Sicily and remoter provinces, it was long before they brought grain in their own ships. In Cicero’s time, however, it was the reproach of the equestrian order that many members of it, tired of genteel poverty, were enriching themselves by commerce; and Cicero, as a parvenu in the Senate, was weak enough to fall in with this foolish prejudice.

Ref. 111

Merchants, engaged in traffic from port to port, owned and commanded the ships that carried their goods.

Ref. 112

Latin, contentio et comparatio, — stretching two objects side by side, and determining their comparative length. See § 17.

Ref. 113

A Stoic idea. The Stoics derived all duty from nature, — the nature of things, the nature of man. They therefore made nature the sole test of duty, and (if I may so express what in less awkward phrase would be less clear) regarded the greater or less naturalness of a duty as the criterion of its relative importance.

Ref. 114

Σο ϕία primarily meant sagacity, but is commonly employed to denote wisdom in its broadest sense.

Ref. 115

Φρόνησις means prudence, in the sense of practical wisdom.

Ref. 116

Otium, leisure; negotium = nec otium, business, — a favorite play upon words with Cicero, which we have not the means of rendering into English.

Ref. 117

Posidonius was a Stoic, a disciple of Panaetius, a voluminous writer on an encyclopedic range of subjects. Of his works only fragments are preserved, and happily the catalogue of things not fit to be done has left no traces of itself. His works are known chiefly by copious extracts made by Athenaeus.

Ref. 118

An inference so illogical as to seem an oversight.

Ref. 119

After the assassination of Caesar, when for a very little while there seemed some hope of a return to republican institutions in fact as well as in name.

Ref. 120

Latin, ars; but art is here an inadequate rendering.

Ref. 121

In Hortensius.

Ref. 122

That of the New Academy.

Ref. 123

Cratippus was a Peripatetic, and thus regarded Aristotle as his master; but as Aristotle derived much of his philosophy from Plato, and Plato, much or all of his from Socrates, Cicero, with more rhetorical aptness than literal truth, antedates the school of which his son was the pupil.

Ref. 124

A syllogism in Barbara.

Ref. 125

A verse from some lost poem, probably the Prometheus of Attius.

Ref. 126

For instance, wool, at the proper time of shearing.

Ref. 127

This work has entirely perished. Dicaearchus, a contemporary and follower of Aristotle, was a copious writer in the departments of geography and history, as well as of philosophy. One of his books on “The Life of Greece,” if we may judge by the fragments of it that remain, would have been worth more than all other extant records of Athenian life in his age.

Ref. 128

I do not know

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