QUOTES: Anthony Trollope, The Life of Cicero, 1881, Vol.1, Ch.2

   http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8945/8945-h/8945-h.htm

NOTE: The chapters in the text of Trollope's The Life of Cicero are sometimes subdivided into Sections in the Libravox recording to which I am listening. My Quotes posts will be subdivided accordingly, where subdivisions occur in the recording. I anticipate that this will help the posts from becoming too long to be digestible to the reader. 

"[...] It is best to take a man's own account of his own doings and their causes, unless there be ground for doubting the statement made. [...]"

Anthony Trollope, The Life of Cicero, Vol.1, Ch.2, 1881

"[...] Atticus applied himself to the practices of the Epicurean school, and did in truth become "Epicuri de grege porcus." To enjoy life, to amass a fortune, to keep himself free from all turmoils of war or state, to make the best of the times, whether they were bad or good, without any attempt on his part to mend them—this was the philosophy of Titus Pomponius, who was called Atticus because Athens, full of art and literature, easy, unenergetic, and luxurious, was dear to him. To this philosophy, or rather to this theory of life, Cicero was altogether opposed. He studied in all the schools—among the Platonists, the Stoics, even with the Epicureans enough to know their dogmas so that he might criticise them—proclaiming himself to belong to the new Academy, or younger school of Platonists, but in truth drawing no system of morals or rule of life from any of them. To him, and also to Atticus, no doubt, these pursuits afforded an intellectual pastime. Atticus found himself able to justify to himself the bent of his disposition by the name of a philosopher, and therefore became an Epicurean. Cicero could in no way justify to himself any deviation from the energy of public life, from its utility, from its ambition, from its loves, or from its hatred; and from the Greek philosophers whom he named of this or the other school, received only some assistance in that handling of so-called philosophy which became the chief amusement of his future life. [...]"
Anthony Trollope, The Life of Cicero, Vol.1, Ch.2, 1881

"Thus it is, my good friends—thus, that from the acquirement of many arts, and from a general knowledge of all things, eloquence that is truly admirable is created in its full force; for the power and capacity of an orator need not be hemmed in, as are those of other callings, by certain narrow bounds; but that man is the true orator who is able to speak 52on all subjects with dignity and grace, so as to persuade those who listen, and to delight them, in a manner suited to the nature of the subject in hand and the convenience of the time."42

Anthony Trollope, The Life of Cicero, Vol.1, Ch.2, 1881

"Thus it is, my good friends—thus, that from the acquirement of many arts, and from a general knowledge of all things, eloquence that is truly admirable is created in its full force; for the power and capacity of an orator need not be hemmed in, as are those of other callings, by certain narrow bounds; but that man is the true orator who is able to speak 52on all subjects with dignity and grace, so as to persuade those who listen, and to delight them, in a manner suited to the nature of the subject in hand and the convenience of the time."42

Tacitus, De Oratoribus, xxx; Quoted in Anthony Trollope, The Life of Cicero, Vol.1, Ch.2, 1881

"When at Athens, Cicero was initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries—as to which Mr. Collins, in his little volume on Cicero, in the Ancient Classics for English Readers, says that they "contained under this veil whatever faith in the Invisible and Eternal rested in the mind of an enlightened pagan." In this Mr. Collins is fully justified by what Cicero himself has said although the character thus given to these mysteries is very different from that which was attributed to them by early Christian writers. They were to those pious but somewhat prejudiced theologists mysterious and pagan, and therefore 60horrible.50 But Cicero declares in his dialogue with Atticus, De Legibus, written when he was fifty-five years old, in the prime of his intellect, that "of all the glories and divine gifts which your Athens has produced for the improvement of men nothing surpasses these mysteries, by which the harshness of our uncivilized life has been softened, and we have been lifted up to humanity; and as they are called 'initia,'" by which aspirants were initiated, "so we have in truth found in them the seeds of a new life. Nor have we received from them only the means of living with satisfaction, but also of dying with a better hope as to the future."

   Of what took place with Cicero and Atticus at their introduction to the Eleusinian mysteries we know nothing. But it can hardly be that, with such memories running in his mind after thirty years, expressed in such language to the very friend who had then been his companion, they should not have been accepted by him as indicating the commencement of some great line of thought. The two doctrines which seem to mark most clearly the difference between the men whom we regard, the one as a pagan and the other as a Christian, are the belief in a future life and the duty of doing well by our neighbors. Here they are both indicated, the former in plain language, and the latter in that assurance of the softening of the barbarity of uncivilized life, "Quibus ex agresti immanique vita exculti ad humanitatem et mitigati sumus."

Anthony Trollope, The Life of Cicero, Vol.1, Ch.2, 1881