se, however, is but a disappointing fragment, and the argument
is incomplete.

III. THE 'TUSCULAN DISPUTATIONS'.

The scene of this dialogue is Cicero's villa at Tusculum. There, in his
long gallery, he walks and discusses with his friends the vexed questions
of morality. Was death an evil? Was the soul immortal? How could a man
best bear pain and the other miseries of life? Was virtue any guarantee
for happiness?

Then, as now, death was the great problem of humanity--"to die and go we
know not where". The old belief in Elysium and Tartarus had died away; as
Cicero himself boldly puts it in another place, such things were no longer
even old wives' fables. Either death brought an absolute unconsciousness,
or the soul soared into space. "_Lex non poena mors_"--"Death is a
law, not a penalty"--was the ancient saying. It was, as it were, the close
of a banquet or the fall of the curtain. "While we are, death is not; when
death has come, we are not".

Cicero brings forward the testimony of past ages to prove that death is
not a mere annihilation. Man cannot perish utterly. Heroes are deified;
and the spirits of the dead return to us in visions of the night. Somehow
or other (he says) there clings to our minds a certain presage of future
ages; and so we plant, that our children may reap; we toil, that others
may enter into our labours; and it is this life after death, the desire to
live in men's mouths for ever, which inspires the patriot and the martyr.
Fame to the Roman, even more than to us, was "the last infirmity of noble
minds". It was so in a special degree to Cicero. The instinctive sense of
immortality, he argues, is strong within us; and as, in the words of the
English poet,

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting",

so also in death, the Roman said, though in other words:

"Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither".

Believe not then, says Cicero, those old wives' tales, those poetic
legends, the terrors of a material hell, of the joys of a sensual
paradise. Rather hold with Plato that the soul is an eternal principle of
life, which has neither beginning nor end of existence; for if it were not
so, heaven and earth would be overset, and all nature would stand at gaze.
"Men say they cannot conceive or comprehend what the soul can be, distinct
from the body. As if, forsooth, they could comprehend what it is, when it
is _in_ the body,--its conformation, its magnitude, or