Ethical Writings of Cicero

year he says, in a letter to Atticus, that he is writing for his son's benefit an elaborate treatise on Morals. "On what subject," he asks, "can a father better write to a son?" In the latter part of the summer he started on a journey to Athens to visit his son, but was recalled by the intelligence of a probable understanding on amicable terms between Antony and the Senate. Deceived in this hope, he repaired to Rome, and pronounced his first Philippic a stinging oration against a political enemy against Antony in the beginning of September. In November he writes again about his ethical work, tells Atticus that he has completed two books and is busy on the third, and announces and explains the title. The work was completed before the end of the year.

Cicero's time was a period of eclecticism a conceptual approach that does not hold rigidly to a single paradigm or set of assumptions in philosophy, especially so among the cultivated Romans, with whom philosophy was not indigenous, but a comparatively recent importation. Cicero himself was pre-eminently a lover of philosophical thought, study, and discussion, and probably was more intimately conversant with the history of opinions and the contents of books in that department than any man of his time; yet he seems to have lacked profound convictions on the subjects at issue among the several schools. Thus the De Officiis On Duties, while he repeatedly professes his adherence to the New Academy a school of philosophy emphasizing skepticism and