ve spoken as I have
gone on with my task, because the matter there treated has been
available for the purposes of biography: the other two, the Rhetoric and
the Philosophy, have been distinct from the author's life.[239] They
might have been good or bad, and his life would have been still the
same; therefore it is necessary to divide them from his life, and to
speak of them separately. They are the work of his silent chamber, as
the others were the enthusiastic outpourings of his daily spirit, or the
elaborated arguments of his public career. Who has left behind him so
widely spread a breadth of literature? Who has made so many efforts, and
has so well succeeded in them all? I do not know that it has ever been
given to any one man to run up and down the strings of knowledge, and
touch them all as though each had been his peculiar study, as Cicero has
done.

His rhetoric has been always made to come first, because, upon the
whole, it was first written. It may be as well here to give a list of
his main works, with their dates--premising, however, that we by no
means in that way get over the difficulty as to time, even in cases as
to which we are sure of our facts. A treatise may have been commenced
and then put by, or may have been written some time previously to
publication. Or it may be, as were those which are called the Academica,
that it was remodelled, and altered in its shape and form. The Academica
were written at the instance of Atticus. We now have the altered edition
of a fragment of the first book, and the original of the second book. In
this manner there have come discrepancies which nearly break the heart
of him who would fain make his list clear. But here, on the whole, is
presented to the reader with fair accuracy a list of the works of
Cicero, independent of that continual but ever-changing current of his
thought which came welling out from him daily in his speeches and his
letters. Again, however, we must remember that here are omitted all
those which are either wholly lost or have come to us only in fragments
too abruptly broken for the purposes of continuous study. Of these I
will not even attempt to give the names, though when we remember some of
the subjects--the De Gloria, the De Re Militari--he could not go into
the army for a month or two without writing a book about it--the De
Auguriis, the De Philosophia, the De Suis Temporibus, the De Suis
Consiliis, the De Jure Civili, and the De Universo, we