“The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”.

From physical, the discussion naturally passes to mental, suffering.  For grief, as well as for pain, he prescribes the remedy of the Stoics—­aequanimitas—­“a calm serenity of mind”.  The wise man, ever serene and composed, is moved neither by pain or sorrow, by fear or desire.  He is equally undisturbed by the malice of enemies or the inconstancy of fortune.  But what consolation can we bring to ease the pain of the Epicurean?  “Put a nosegay to his nostrils—­burn perfumes before him—­crown him with roses and woodbine”!  But perfumes and garlands can do little in such case; pleasures may divert, but they can scarcely console.

Again, the Cyrenaics bring at the best but Job’s comfort.  No man will bear his misfortunes the more lightly by bethinking himself that they are unavoidable—­that others have suffered before him—­that pain is part and parcel of the ills which flesh is heir to.  Why grieve at all?  Why feed your misfortune by dwelling on it?  Plunge rather into active life and forget it, remembering that excessive lamentation over the trivial accidents of humanity is alike unmanly and unnecessary.  And as it is with grief, so it is with envy, lust, anger, and those other “perturbations of the mind” which the Stoic Zeno rightly declares to be “repugnant to reason and nature”.  From such disquietudes it is the wise man who is free.

The fifth and last book discusses the great question, Is virtue of itself sufficient to make life happy?  The bold conclusion is, that it is sufficient.  Cicero is not content with the timid qualifications adopted by the school of the Peripatetics, who say one moment that external advantages and worldly prosperity are nothing, and then again admit that, though man may be happy without them, he is happier with them,—­which is making the real happiness imperfect after all.  Men differ in their views of life.  As in the great Olympic games, the throng are attracted, some by desire of gain, some by the crown of wild olive, some merely by the spectacle; so, in the race of life, we are all slaves to some ruling idea, it may be glory, or money, or wisdom.  But they alone can be pronounced happy whose minds are like some tranquil sea—­“alarmed by no fears, wasted by no griefs, inflamed by no lusts, enervated by no relaxing pleasures,—­and such serenity virtue alone can produce”.

These ‘Disputations’ have always been highly admired.  But their popularity was greater in times when Cicero’s Greek originals were less read or understood.  Erasmus carried his admiration of this treatise to enthusiasm.  “I cannot doubt”, he says, “but that the mind from which such teaching flowed was inspired in some sort by divinity”.

IV.  THE TREATISE ‘ON MORAL DUTIES’.