Tusculan Disputations

The Tusculan Disputations are Cicero's most sustained work of practical moral philosophy — five extended conversations, supposedly held over five days at his country villa at Tusculum in 45 BCE, on the questions a thoughtful Roman most needs to settle: whether death is to be feared, how pain is to be borne, how grief is overcome, how the other passions are to be mastered, and whether virtue alone is enough to make a life happy.

Cicero was at the lowest point of his life when he wrote them — the Republic effectively over, Caesar in supreme power, his beloved daughter Tullia recently dead in childbirth. He turned to the question of how the wisdom of the Greek schools — Stoic, Academic, Epicurean — could actually console a Roman in extremity. The book has shaped Western consolatory writing from Boethius through Montaigne to Samuel Johnson.