On Cicero’s return to Italy public affairs were in a very critical condition, and left little room for thoughts about literature.  The letters which belong to this time are very pathetic.  Cicero several times contrasts the statesmen of the time with the Scipio he had himself drawn in the De Republica[59]; when he thinks of Caesar, Plato’s description of the tyrant is present to his mind[60]; when, he deliberates about the course he is himself to take, he naturally recals the example of Socrates, who refused to leave Athens amid the misrule of the thirty tyrants[61].  It is curious to find Cicero, in the very midst of civil war, poring over the book of Demetrius the Magnesian concerning concord[62]; or employing his days in arguing with himself a string of abstract philosophical propositions about tyranny[63].  Nothing could more clearly show that he was really a man of books; by nothing but accident a politician.  In these evil days, however, nothing was long to his taste; books, letters, study, all in their turn became unpleasant[64].

As soon as Cicero had become fully reconciled to Caesar in the year 46 he returned with desperate energy to his old literary pursuits.  In a letter written to Varro in that year[65], he says “I assure you I had no sooner returned to Rome than I renewed my intimacy with my old friends, my books.”  These gave him real comfort, and his studies seemed to bear richer fruit than in his days of prosperity[66].  The tenor of all his letters at this time is the same:  see especially the remaining letters to Varro and also to Sulpicius[67].  The Partitiones Oratoriae, the Paradoxa, the Orator, and the Laudatio Catonis, to which Caesar replied by his Anticato, were all finished within the year.  Before the end of the year the Hortensius and the De Finibus had probably both been planned and commenced.  Early in the following year the Academica, the history of which I shall trace elsewhere, was written.

I have now finished the first portion of my task; I have shown Cicero as the man of letters and the student of philosophy during that portion of his life which preceded the writing of the Academica.  Even the evidence I have produced, which does not include such indirect indications of philosophical study as might be obtained from the actual philosophical works of Cicero, is sufficient to justify his boast that at no time had he been divorced from philosophy[68].  He was entitled to repel the charge made by some people on the publication of his first book of the later period—­the Hortensius—­that he was a mere tiro in philosophy, by the assertion that on the contrary nothing had more occupied his thoughts throughout the whole of a wonderfully energetic life[69].  Did the scope of this edition allow it, I should have little difficulty in showing from a minute survey of his works, and a comparison of them with ancient authorities, that his knowledge