ar, in the speech put into his mouth by Sallust,
in the debate on the execution of the conspirators on December 5, 63,
seems to be of the same opinion, and as Cicero alludes to his words in
the speech with which he followed Caesar, we may suppose that Sallust
was reporting him rightly.[576] The poet and the statesman were not
unlike in the way in which they looked at facts; both were of clear
strong vision, without a trace of mysticism. But such men were the
exception rather than the rule; Cicero probably represents better the
average thinking man of his time. Cicero was indeed too full of life,
too deeply interested in the living world around him, to think much
of such questions as the immortality of the soul; and as a professed
follower of the Academic school, he assuredly did not hold any
dogmatic opinion on it. He was at no time really affected by
Pythagoreanism, like his friend Nigidius Figulus, whose works, now
lost, had a great vogue in the later years of Cicero's life, and much
influence on the age that followed. In the first book of his Tusculan
Disputations Cicero discusses the question from the Academic point of
view, coming to no definite conclusion, except that whether we are
immortal or not we must be grateful to death for releasing us from the
bondage of the body. This book was written in the last year of his
life; but ten years earlier, in the beautiful myth, imitated from the
myths of Plato, which he appended to his treatise _de Republica_, he
had emphatically asserted the doctrine. There the spirit of the elder
Scipio appears to his great namesake, Cicero's ideal Roman, and
assures him that the road to heaven (caelum) lies open to those who do
their duty in this life, and especially their duty to the State. "Know
thyself to be a god; as the god of gods rules the universe, so the god
within us rules the body, and as that great god is eternal, so does an
eternal soul govern this frail body."[577]

The _Somnium Scipionis_ was an inspiration, written under the
influence of Plato at one of those emotional moments of Cicero's
life which make it possible to say of him that there was a religious
element in his mind.[578] Some years later the poignancy of his grief
at the death of his daughter Tullia had the effect of putting him
again in a strong emotional mood. For many weeks he lived alone at
Astura, on the edge of the Pomptine marshes, out of reach of all
friends, forbidding even his young wife and her moth