the Greek philosophy which
Cicero thought might be well handled in the Latin language for the
benefit of his countrymen. It would be well for them to know what
Epicurus taught, or Zeno, and how they differed from Socrates and Plato,
and this he told them. Now in these moral essays he gives them his own
philosophy--if that may be called philosophy which is intended to teach
men how to live well. There are six books on government, called the De
Republica, and three on law; and there are the three treatises on old
age and friendship, each in one book, and that on the duty of man to
man, in three.

There is a common error in the world as to the meaning of the word
republic. It has come to have a sweet savor in the nostrils of men, or a
most evil scent, according to their politics. But there is, in truth,
the Republic of Russia, as there is that of the United States, and that
of England. Cicero, in using it as the name of his work, simply means
"the government;" and the treatise under that head contains an account
of the Roman Empire, and is historical rather than argumentative and
scientific. He himself was an oligarch, and had been brought up amid a
condition of things in which that most deleterious form of government
recommended itself to him as containing all that had been good and
magnificent in the Roman Empire. The great men of Rome, whom the empire
had demanded for its construction, had come up each for the work of a
year; and, when succeeding, had perhaps been elected for a second. By
the expulsion of their kings, the class from whom these men had been
chosen showed their personal desire for honor, and the marvel is that
through so many centuries those oligarchs should have flourished. The
reader, unless he be strongly impregnated with democratic feelings, when
he begins to read Roman history finds himself wedded to the cause of
these oligarchs. They have done the big deeds, and the opposition comes
to them from vulgar hands. Let me ask any man who remembers the reading
of his Livy whether it was not so with him. But it was in truth the
democratic element opposed to these leaders, and the battles they won
from time to time within the walls of the city, which produced the
safety of Rome and enabled the government to go on. Then by degrees the
people became enervated and the leaders became corrupt, and by
masterhood over foreign people and external subjects slaves were
multiplied, and the work appertaining to every m