ed. It is usually reckoned one of the
most highly finished and valuable of his philosophical works; though from
the abstruse nature of some of the topics dwelt upon, and the subtlety of
some of the arguments adduced, it is unquestionably the most difficult.

He gives an account himself of the work and of his design and plan in the
following terms. (Epist. ad Att. xiii. 19.) "What I have lately written is
in the manner of Aristotle, where the conversation is so managed that he
himself has the principal part. I have finished the five books De Finibus
Bonorum et Malorum, so as to give the Epicurean doctrine to Lucius
Torquatus, the Stoic to Marcus Cato, and the Peripatetic to Marcus Cato.
For I considered that their being dead would preclude all jealousy." He
does not, however, maintain the unity of scene or character throughout the
five books. In the first book he relates a discussion which is represented
as having taken place in his villa near Cumae, in the presence of Caius
Valerius Triarius, between himself and Lucius Manlius Torquatus, who is
spoken of as being just about to enter his office as praetor, a
circumstance which fixes the date of this imaginary discussion to B.C. 50,
a time agreeing with the allusion (B. ii. 18,) to the great power of
Pompey. In the first book he attacks the doctrines of the Epicurean
school, and Torquatus defends them, alleging that they had been generally
misunderstood; and in the second book Cicero enumerates the chief
arguments with which the Stoics assailed them.

In the third book the scene is laid in the library of Lucullus, where
Cicero had accidentally met Cato; and from conversing on the books by
which they were surrounded they proceeded to discuss the difference
between the ethics of the Stoics, and those of the Old Academy and the
Peripatetics; Cicero insisting that the disagreement was merely verbal and
not real, and that Zeno was wrong in leaving Plato and Aristotle and
establishing a new school; but Cato asserts, on the other hand, that the
difference is a real one, and that the views held by the Stoics of the
Supreme Good are of a much loftier and purer character than those which
had been previously entertained. In the fourth book Cicero gives us the
arguments with which the philosophers of the New Academy assailed the
Stoics. And this conversation is supposed to have been held two years
before that in the first book: for at the beginning of Book IV. there is a
reference to