law courts if philosophy had been allowed to prevail:
"No man could have grieved aloud. No patron would have wept. No one
would have sorrowed. There would have been no calling of the Republic to
witness; not a man would have dared to stamp his foot, lest it should
have been told to the Stoics."[274] "You should keep the books of the
philosophers for your Tusculan ease," he had said in the preceding
chapter; and he speaks, in the same page, of "Plato's fabulous State."

Then why, it may be asked, did he write so many essays on
philosophy--enough to have consumed the energies of many laborious
years? There can be no doubt that he did write the Philosophy, though we
have ample reason to know that it was not his philosophy. All those
treatises, beginning with the Academica--written when he was sixty-two,
two years only before his death, and carried on during twelve months
with indomitable energy--the De Finibus, the Tusculan Disputations, the
De Natura Deorum, the De Divinatione, and the De Fato--were composed
during the time named. To those who have regarded Cicero as a
philosopher--as one who has devoted his life to the pursuits of
philosophy--does it not appear odd that he should have deferred his
writing on the subject and postponed his convictions till now? At this
special period of his life why should he have rushed into them at once,
and should so have done it as to be able to leave them aside at another
period? Why has all this been done within less than two years? Let any
man look to the last year of his life, when the Philippics were coming
hot from his brain and eager from his mouth, and ask himself how much of
Greek philosophy he finds in them. Out of all the sixty-four years of
his life he devoted one to this philosophy, and that not the last, but
the penultimate; and so lived during all these years, even including
that one, as to show how little hold philosophy had upon his conduct.
[Greek: Aideomai Troas]. Was that Greek philosophy? or the eager
exclamation of a human spirit, in its weakness and in its strength,
fearing the breath of his fellow-men, and yet knowing that the truth
would ultimately be expressed by it?

Nor is the reason for this far to seek, though the character which could
avail itself of such a reason requires a deep insight. To him literature
had been everything. We have seen with what attention he had studied
oratory--rhetoric rather--so as to have at his fingers'-ends the names
of those w