Perhaps because of his illustrious political career or his eloquent Latin prose, Cicero has been criticised and even disdained by twentieth-century scholars of ancient philosophy as merely a derivative imitator, notwithstanding his historical influence over the millennia. Recently, critics have mellowed somewhat, acknowledging often grudgingly that Cicero was a philosopher in his own right. Some have even come to recognise Cicero's stellar example of attempting to live a philosophical life on a public stage and largely succeeding in doing so unto death, despite his faults and temporising indecisiveness. Athens had Solon. Rome had Cicero. But it was Cicero's tragic fate to witness the demise of the Roman Republic.
D.’s fluent translation is one of a series of paperback editions that are making Cicero's philosophical writings more readily available to an English-speaking audience. M. Griffin's introduction and superbly detailed notes make this edition especially valuable to readers and students with deeper historical interests. Her notes constitute a course in itself. Each of the included texts comes with a detailed synopsis.
The title On Life and Death is a bit opaque given its table of contents. Cicero's acclaimed essay on old age is included. Also included is Cicero's even more famous essay on friendship, which greatly influenced chivalric love and Shakespeare, among others. The addition of a single exchange of letters between Cicero and his friend Gaius Matius, as an appendix, was a masterstroke, though it would have been helpful had Griffin advised the reader of the rhetorical tropes Cicero employed in his letter, which might cause one to question the depths of his sincerity. It would have been helpful had the fortuna of these two essays been discussed in more detail in Griffin's fine introduction. Although these two essays are available elsewhere in translation, putting them together here testifies how loving and dying, happiness and pain are bedfellows.
What makes this edition so appealing is the decision to include the Tusculan Disputations as the initial portion of this collection. But this decision is also problematic, since only three of the Tusculans are provided, Book 1 (on dying), Book 2 (on bodily pain) and Book 5 (on the happy life). Only the prefaces to Book 3 (on distress) and Book 4 (on mental disorders) are translated. Although all five books do have separate synopses, the untranslated portions of the Tusculans text are noticeable by their omission. Just as with the Roman Republic, the agony of dying makes its presence known long before our final demise. And what leads to our demise through distress and mental disorder is often more deadly than bodily pain, in adversely affecting friendship and happiness.
