Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1842, BY PERKINS AND PURVES, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. STEREOTYPED AT THE ΤΟ JOSIAH QUINCY, LL. D., PRESIDENT OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY, THESE VOLUMES ARE RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED BY THE EDITOR. PREFACE. THE philosophical works of Cicero were composed in the stormy period which drove him to retirement, between the breaking out of the war of Cæsar and Pompey and his own death. They formed a complete course of the philosophy of the Greeks, which has had followers and admirers since the time of Lælius, but has had few expounders. Cicero was the first who had intelligence and enterprise sufficient to exhibit it in all its systems to his countrymen. The object of his five dissertations contained in the volumes now offered to the public, is to discover the most essential means of happiness, which he reduces to five the contempt of death, patience in affliction, firmness under different trials of life, habitual control over the passions, and the persuasion that virtue ought to seek for recompense from itself alone. This philosophy is confessedly borrowed from the Academy and the Portico, but it is highly embellished by his eloquence. The series of Latin Classics, of which these volumes are a part, now contains six selections from the works of Cicero: they will be followed by his other philosophical writings at such periods as the favor of the public and the editor's other engagements may warrant. 7 TREMONT Row, BOSTON, November 1, 1842. C. K. D. |