Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations

“Death is an evil,” says Cicero’s interlocutor. Cicero answers with Cerberus, the river Cocytus, and a puzzle: if the dead are miserable, must everyone who has ever lived be miserable forever?

In the final years of the Roman Republic, Cicero turns from the forum to philosophy, staging five days of debate at his Tusculan villa. His companions bring questions close to life—death, pain, grief, and the mind’s storms—and he tests each belief by arguing against it, in the Socratic fashion. The aim is no idle wordplay: can wisdom steady us when fortune brings suffering, and can virtue alone be enough for happiness? This volume also gathers Cicero’s treatises on the nature of the gods and the commonwealth. Which of our deepest fears can withstand his questions?

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