was never better man born, nor more full of dutiful affection; whose body I laid on the funeral pile—­an office he should rather have done for me.[1] But his spirit has never left me; it still looks fondly back upon me, though it has gone assuredly into those abodes where he knew that I myself should follow.  And this my great loss I seemed to bear with calmness; not that I bore it undisturbed, but that I still consoled myself with the thought that the separation between us could not be for long.  And if I err in this—­in that I believe the spirits of men to be immortal—­I err willingly; nor would I have this mistaken belief of mine uprooted so long as I shall live.  But if, after I am dead, I shall have no consciousness, as some curious philosophers assert, then I am not afraid of dead philosophers laughing at my mistake”.

[Footnote 1:  Burke touches the same key in speaking of his son; “I live in an inverted order.  They who ought to have succeeded me have gone before me:  they who should have been to me as posterity are in the place of ancestors".]

* * * * *

The essay on ‘Friendship’ is dedicated by the author to Atticus—­an appropriate recognition, as he says, of the long and intimate friendship which had existed between themselves.  It is thrown, like the other, into the form of a dialogue.  The principal speaker here is one of the listeners in the former case—­Laelius, surnamed the Wise—­who is introduced as receiving a visit from his two sons-in-law, Fannius and Scaevola (the great lawyer before mentioned), soon after the sudden death of his great friend, the younger Scipio Africanus.  Laelius takes the occasion, at the request of the young men, to give them his views and opinions on the subject of Friendship generally.  This essay is perhaps more original than that upon ‘Old Age’, but certainly is not so attractive to a modern reader.  Its great merit is the grace and polish of the language; but the arguments brought forward to prove what an excellent thing it is for a man to have good friends, and plenty of them, in this world, and the rules for his behaviour towards them, seem to us somewhat trite and commonplace, whatever might have been their effect upon a Roman reader.

Cicero is indebted to the Greek philosophers for the main outlines of his theory of friendship, though his acquaintance with the works of Plato and Aristotle was probably exceedingly superficial.  He holds, with them, that man is a social animal; that “we are so constituted by nature that there must be some degree of association between us all, growing closer in proportion as we are brought into more intimate relations one with another”.  So that the social bond is a matter of instinct, not of calculation; not a cold commercial contract of profit and loss, of giving and receiving, but the fulfilment of one of the yearnings of our nature.  Here he is in full accordance with the teaching of Aristotle, who,