TREBATIUS.

* * * * *

THE ARGUMENT.

This treatise was written a short time before the events which gave
rise to the first Philippic. Cicero obtained an honorary lieutenancy,
with the intention of visiting his son at Athens; on his way towards
Rhegium he spent an evening at Velia with Trebatius, where he began
this treatise, which he finished at sea, before he arrived in Greece.
It is little more than an abstract of what had been written by
Aristotle on the same subject, and which Trebatius had begged him to
explain to him; and Middleton says, that as he had not Aristotle's
essay with him, he drew this up from memory, and he appears to have
finished it in a week, as it was the nineteenth of July that he was
at Velia, and he sent this work to Trebatius from Rhegium on the
twenty-seventh. He himself apologizes to Trebatius in the letter which
accompanied it, (Ep. Fam. vii. 19,) for its obscurity, which however,
he says, was unavoidably caused by the nature of the subject.

I. We had begun to write, O Caius Trebatius, on subjects more
important and more worthy of these books, of which we have published a
sufficient number in a short time, when your request recalled me from
my course. For when you were with me in my Tusculan villa, and when
each of us was separately in the library opening such books as were
suited to our respective tastes and studies, you fell on a treatise of
Aristotle's called the Topics; which he has explained in many books;
and, excited by the title, you immediately asked me to explain to you
the doctrines laid down in those books. And when I had explained them
to you, and told you that the system for the discovery of arguments
was contained in them, in order that we might arrive, without making
any mistake, at the system on which they rested by the way discovered
by Aristotle, you urged me, modestly indeed, as you do everything,
but still in a way which let me plainly see your eagerness to be
gratified, to make you master of the whole of Aristotle's method.
And when I exhorted you, (not so much for the sake of saving myself
trouble, as because I really thought it advantageous for you
yourself,) either to read them yourself, or to get the whole system
explained to you by some learned rhetorician, you told me that you had
already tried both methods. But the obscurity of the subject deterred
you from the books; and that illustrious rhetorician to whom you had
applied