so becomes chatty and full of
anecdotes, and interspersed with many pieces of poetry--some by others
and some by Cicero. Here are given those lines as to the battle of the
eagle and the dragon which I have ventured to call the best amid the
nine versions brought forward.[301]

We cannot but sympathize with him in the reason which he prefixes to the
second book of this treatise: "I often ask myself and turn in my mind
how best I may serve the largest number of my fellow-citizens, lest
there should come a time in which I should seem to have ceased to be
anxious for the State; and nothing better has occurred to me than that I
should make known the way of studying the best arts--which indeed I
think I have now done in various books."[302] Then he recapitulates
them. There is the opening work on philosophy which he had dedicated to
Hortensius, now lost. Then in the four books of the Academics he had put
forward his ideas as to that school which he believed to be the least
arrogant and the truest--meaning the new Academy. After that, as he had
felt all philosophy to be based on the search after good and evil, he
had examined that matter. The Tusculan Inquiries had followed, in which
he had set forth, in five books, the five great rules of living well.
Having finished this, he had written his three books on the nature of
the gods, and was now in the act of completing it, and would complete
it, by his present inquiries. We cannot but sympathize with him because
we know that, though he was not quite in earnest in all this, he was as
near it as a man can be who teaches that which he does not quite believe
himself. Brutus believed it, and Cato, and that Velleius, and that
Balbus, and that Cotta. Or if perchance any of them did not, they lived,
and talked, and read, and were as erudite about it, as though they did.
The example was good, and the precepts were the best to be had. Amid it
all he chose the best doctrine, and he was undoubtedly doing good to his
countrymen in thus representing to them in their native language the
learning by which they might best be softened.

"Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit, et artes.
Intulit agresti Latio."[303]

Here, too, he explains his own conduct in a beautiful passage. "My
fellow-citizens," says he, "will pardon me, or perhaps will rather thank
me, for that when the Republic fell into the power of one man I neither
hid myself nor did I desert them; nor did I idly weep, or carry mysel