Marcus Junius Brutus

Our friend Brutus, indeed, outstanding in every kind of distinction, so pursues philosophy in Latin letters that on the same subjects you would miss nothing in Greek;

I have often observed, Brutus, that your uncle Cato, when delivering his opinion in the Senate, would handle weighty themes drawn from philosophy, far removed as they are from this forensic and public usage of ours, and yet by his eloquence he managed nonetheless to make even those doctrines seem credible to the people.

You will receive, then, this little work, composed by lamplight during these now shorter nights — since that earlier gift of my longer vigils has already appeared under your name — and you will taste the kind of exercises which I have been accustomed to practise, when I transfer to this oratorical manner of ours the matters that are discussed in the schools as abstract theses.

for Cato is accustomed to discuss in the Stoic manner only such subjects as greatness of soul, self-restraint, death, every form of the praise of virtue, the immortal gods, and love of one's country, employing the ornaments of oratory;

The founders of this scientific jurisprudence, whose labours were to be perpetuated by the lawyers of the Principate, were Marcus Junius Brutus, Marcus Manilius and Publius Mucius Scaevola, all of whom Edition: