Customer Reviews

Cicero: On Old Age On Friendship On Divination (Loeb Classical Library No. 154)

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This particular volume contains two Ciceronian moral treatises, On Friendship and On Old Age, while also offering a particularly fascinating work, On Divination, which Cicero wrote to combat popular superstition, also endemic within some contemporary philosophical circles. De Divinatione is unique, for it a dialogue in which Cicero's opinions burst out with brute force. This is evidenced in the expression made near the close of the work where Cicero declares that "divination has been destroyed and yet we must hold on to the gods." Now it should be noted that the premises laid out in De Divinatione also echoed in the works of brilliant minds' ranging from Augustine to Desiderius Erasmus. Overall, these three works merit attention, for Cicero lends us healthy advice on how to live the practical life ethically and the religious life free of erroneous and vulgar superstition. [As an appendix to On Divination, Cicero composed the treatise concerning Fate, which remains only in fragments but may be found in the LCL (349) and asks to be read after On Divintion].

The Loeb Library is a luxus for all classicists, since it offers good, cheap and easy-to-buy editions of almost every ancient author. The translations are accurate and enable to follow the original text in difficult passages without disturbing, if one wants just to read the Latin or Greek text. So it is most to recommend in general. Especially I must praise the volume under review, because the translator was not a classical scholar or a professor, but a lawyer who published the book after reading and translating the treatise On Old Age by Cicero to an old relative who was very ill in bed and died not much later. That is why this book brings to me the good taste of a better epoch in which Latin was part of the life of a cultivated man. If we want to preserve our civilization, and if this word means anything at all, we should ask for Latin to recover the place it used to have in education.

This volume of Cicero covers Friendship, Divination and Old Age. All these topics are relevant to me in my study of late Roman friendship, age and religion in my Research Degree. It has the usual Loeb qualities of ease of reading and convenience - even though the translation is a bit dated.

I'm unable to write a review, but I am more than pleased with my little book. There is no doubt that Cicero was a remarkable man who wrote amazing words of wisdom. he makes you THINK! And its one book which I'll always have beside me.
Thank you so much. Pauline Black