Tusculan DisputationsCicero
About Tusculan Disputations
Cicero wrote the (Tusculanae Disputationes) in 45 BC, after the death of his daughter Tullia, while living in retirement and turning to philosophy. The work is cast as five days of discussion at his villa in Tusculum and is dedicated to Brutus. Each day an anonymous auditor states a thesis, and Cicero refutes it. The five books treat contempt of death, the endurance of pain, the alleviation of grief, the other disturbances of the mind, and the claim that virtue alone is enough for a happy life.
Book I argues that death is not an evil, whether the soul is mortal or immortal. If sensation ends with life, nothing can harm us after death; if the soul survives, death may even be a good. Book II holds that pain can be mastered by fortitude when moral evil is ranked as the only true evil, or as vastly greater than any bodily ill. Book III applies a similar discipline to grief: foresight, the knowledge that misfortune is common, and the uselessness of mourning all reduce its force. Book IV classifies the passions under the Stoic heads of grief, fear, excessive delight, and immoderate desire, and traces them to false judgments about good and evil. Book V contends that virtue is sufficient for happiness even in poverty, exile, and torture, a position closer to the Stoa than Cicero takes in some of his other works.
The is the principal Latin work of consolatory ethics. It transmits Greek arguments about death, emotion, and the self-sufficiency of virtue into Roman prose that Augustine, the medieval moralists, and early modern readers continued to use. The story of Damocles and the sword appears here, as does the phrase cultura animi, the cultivation of the soul, as a metaphor for human culture.