er of necessity and for ever.

The Artificial Dialogue Applied to the Professional Sciences
Cicero's Dialogues

Lastly there sprang up in the aesthetic literature of this period
the artistic treatment of subjects of professional science
in the form of the stylistic dialogue, which had been very extensively
in use among the Greeks and had been already employed also
in isolated cases among the Romans.(37) Cicero especially made
various attempts at presenting rhetorical and philosophical subjects
in this form and making the professional manual a suitable book
for reading. His chief writings are the -De Oratore- (written in 699),
to which the history of Roman eloquence (the dialogue -Brutus-,
written in 708) and other minor rhetorical essays were added
by way of supplement; and the treatise -De Republica- (written in 700),
with which the treatise -De Legibus- (written in 702?) after the model
of Plato is brought into connection. They are no great works
of art, but undoubtedly they are the works in which the excellences
of the author are most, and his defects least, conspicuous.
The rhetorical writings are far from coming up to the didactic
chasteness of form and precision of thought of the Rhetoric
dedicated to Herennius, but they contain instead a store
of practical forensic experience and forensic anecdotes of all sorts
easily and tastefully set forth, and in fact solve the problem
of combining didactic instruction with amusement. The treatise
-De Republica- carries out, in a singular mongrel compound of history
and philosophy, the leading idea that the existing constitution
of Rome is substantially the ideal state-organization sought for
by the philosophers; an idea indeed just as unphilosophical
as unhistorical, and besides not even peculiar to the author,
but which, as may readily be conceived, became and remained popular.
The scientific groundwork of these rhetorical and political
writings of Cicero belongs of course entirely to the Greeks,
and many of the details also, such as the grand concluding effect
in the treatise -De Republica- the Dream of Scipio, are directly
borrowed from them; yet they possess comparative originality,
inasmuch as the elaboration shows throughout Roman local colouring,
and the proud consciousness of political life, which the Roman
was certainly entitled to feel as compared with the Greeks,
makes the author even confront his Greek instructors with a certain
independence. The form of