us, et ut mundum ex quadam parte mortalem ipse
deus aeternus, sic fragile corpus animus sempiternus movet."[818]

With such a view of the soul in relation to the body, we can understand
how in this myth it is described as flying upwards, released from
corporeal bondage, and ascending through heavenly stations to pure
aether, if at least (and here we may note the characteristic Roman
touch) its abode on earth has been the body of a good citizen.[819] All
that is of earth earthy, all old ideas of burial, all notions of a
gloomy abode below the earth, are here fairly left behind. So too in the
first book of the _Tusculans_, written after the death of his beloved
daughter, Cicero would persuade himself and others that death cannot be
an evil if we once allow the soul to be immortal: for from its very
nature it must rise into aethereal realms, cannot sink like the body
into the earth.[820] Into its experiences in the aether I do not need to
go here. Enough has been said to show that, as it were, the heavens were
opened, and with the psychological separation of soul from body the
imaginative faculty was released also; not indeed that any Roman, or
even Posidonius himself, could revel in cosmological dreams as did
Plato, but they found in him all they needed, and it would seem that
they made much use of it. Plato's _Timaeus_ was made by Posidonius the
subject of a commentary,[821] and by Cicero himself it was in part at
least translated, about the time when he was writing the _Tusculans_,
and still deeply moved by his recent loss. Of this translation a
fragment survives; and in the introductory sentences he indicates a
second stimulus to his Pythagorean tendencies, besides Posidonius. He
tells how he had met at Ephesus, when on his way to his province of
Cilicia, the famous Pythagorean Nigidius Figulus, and had enjoyed
conversation with him.[822] Nigidius was an old friend, who had helped
Cicero in his consulship; he was one of those "polyhistores" who are
characteristic of the age, like Posidonius and Varro, and wrote works on
all kinds of subjects of which but few fragments remain. But his
reputation as a Pythagorean survived for centuries;[823] and this
mention of him by Cicero is only another proof of the direction the
thoughts of the latter were taking in these last two years of his life.

Clearly, then, Cicero in his philosophical writings of these years was
affected by the current of mysticism that was then running. B