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The Tusculan Disputations

Five afternoons in which Cicero argues a nameless listener out of the fear of death, pain and grief, and into the belief that virtue is enough.

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Original title
Tusculanae Disputationes
First published
45 BCE(aged 61)
Original language
Latin

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Overview

Tullia, Cicero's only daughter, died at his villa at Tusculum in February 45 BCE, a month after giving birth. Later that year he set five days of philosophical conversation at the same villa, and he does not name her anywhere in them. The questions are whether death is an evil, how pain can be borne, whether grief can be cured, what to do with fear, desire and anger, and whether a good person can be happy whatever happens. His answer to each is that thinking can master it: the dead have lost nothing, pain is smaller than its reputation, and grief is something people take on themselves, often from a belief that mourning is owed to the dead. The form comes from the Greek schools. The friends practised speaking in the mornings; in the afternoons a listener put forward a thesis, such as that death is an evil, and Cicero argued against it, the Socratic way. On the fourth day his target is the followers of Aristotle, who held that the passions should be kept within limits, and who praised anger for sharpening a soldier's courage. Cicero answers that a limit set on a disorder leaves it a disorder, and that the passions have to be removed, not rationed. More than once he refers to a Consolation he had written after Tullia's death; it is lost. Augustine drew on the Tusculan Disputations in his Confessions and in The City of God. In October 1523 Erasmus wrote the dedicatory preface for Johann Froben's edition at Basel, and there he presented Cicero as all but a Christian.

Key concepts

Why does Cicero argue against his listener instead of explaining?

Because the book follows the Socratic way of arguing against another person's opinion. Each afternoon the unnamed listener states a thesis, such as that death is an evil, and Cicero, marked M. in the text, argues the opposite. The listener gives ground step by step, so the reader watches a fear being taken apart instead of hearing a lecture about it.

What does Cicero mean by a 'perturbation' of the mind?

A perturbation is a movement of the mind against reason, Cicero's Latin for what the Greeks called pathos, passion. Following the Stoics he counts four: desire and excessive joy, which arise from believing that something good is coming or has come, and fear and grief, which arise from believing that something bad is. Because each rests on a belief, each can in principle be argued away.

Why would death not be bad for the person who dies?

Because death leaves two possibilities, Cicero argues, and neither harms the dead. If the soul survives, it is happy; if it perishes, no one is left to feel anything. His listener slips when he calls the dead Marcus Crassus miserable: someone who no longer exists cannot be miserable, so the only misery in the sentence belongs to the living who fear.

Why does Cicero say mourners grieve partly because they think they should?

Because grief, in his account, needs a second belief besides the loss: that it is right and fitting to be distressed. That belief produces the torn hair and beaten breasts of mourning, as when Homer's Agamemnon tears his hair, which the philosopher Bion mocked as expecting baldness to cure sorrow. Remove the belief that mourning is owed, and much of the grief goes with it.

What does it mean that virtue alone is enough for a happy life?

It means a good person lacks nothing a happy life needs, whatever else is taken away. Cicero rests it on the Stoic claim that what is honourable is the only true good: if that is so, poverty, pain and exile remove nothing that counted. His example is the Scythian Anacharsis, who wrote that the ground was his bed and hunger his sauce, and called himself a man in want of nothing.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Training for pain and death

Is death an evil at all, and is pain the worst thing that can happen to us? If the fear of both rests on a mistaken belief, argument and practice can loosen its hold.

Over the first two afternoons Cicero argues that death is either the soul's passage elsewhere or the end of all feeling, and in neither case a harm to the one who dies. Pain he handles more warily: he will not let Epicurus's wise man call it sweet, yet denies it is the greatest evil, since disgrace is worse. What makes it bearable is courage trained by habit, as soldiers, athletes and Spartan boys show, and the refusal to cry that pain is past enduring.

  • death
  • fear
  • pain
  • suffering
  • courage
  • soul
  • afterlife

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Grief and the belief behind it

Where does grief come from, if not from the loss alone? Cicero traces it to a judgment that something terrible has happened and that mourning is owed, and a judgment can be examined.

The third afternoon opens on the listener's claim that even a wise person grieves. Cicero answers that grief is a fresh opinion of some present evil, taken on rather than suffered. He weighs the schools' remedies: prove the loss no evil, show it small, remind the mourner it was to be expected, or turn the mind to pleasure, which he rejects because no one can simply forget. From Chrysippus he takes the removal of the belief that grieving is a duty, and he admits having used every remedy in a consolation he wrote for himself.

  • grief
  • suffering
  • duty
  • judgment
  • reason
  • acceptance

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Uprooting the passions

Should strong feeling be trimmed to a sensible size or pulled out altogether? The answer decides whether anger, craving and elation can ever be trusted to serve reason.

The fourth afternoon sorts every disturbance of the mind into four kinds: desire and excessive joy, which spring from believing that something good is ahead or at hand, and fear and grief, which spring from believing the same of something bad. Cicero's opponents are the followers of Aristotle, who would keep each passion within bounds and praised anger as the whetstone of courage. He answers that bounds set to a vice leave it a vice, and that such disorders are voluntary, resting on opinion, and can be removed.

  • moderation
  • temperance
  • reason
  • pleasure
  • fear
  • love
  • human nature

Enter a dialogue

Is goodness enough for happiness?

Can a good person be happy in poverty, exile, blindness or even torture? If so, no tyrant and no misfortune holds the key to a good life.

The last afternoon gathers the earlier ones into one claim: if what is honourable is the only good, the good person lacks nothing a happy life needs. Cicero tests it against every misfortune in turn, poverty, exile, blindness and the rack, and sets the tyrant Dionysius, rich, powerful and afraid of everyone, beside the humble mathematician Archimedes. He even turns Epicurus against himself: a thinker who measures every good by pleasure has no right to promise his wise man happiness under torture.

  • virtue
  • happiness
  • wisdom
  • wealth
  • emotions
  • stoicism

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
310
distinct concepts
310
by passages held, corpus-wide
#240

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “happiness” and “virtue”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 22 pairings. 82 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
happinessvirtue37
painvirtue19
emotionsstoicism18
emotionsgrief13
emotionsvirtue11
stoicismvirtue11
deathsoul10
deathvirtue10
happinessstoicism9
emotionshappiness8
deathgrief7
happinesspain6
deathhappiness5
deathpain5
painstoicism5
emotionspain4
griefstoicism4
griefvirtue4
griefhappiness3
soulvirtue2
deathemotions1
griefpain1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. -70 Orations

    Four volumes of the speeches themselves — some delivered, some, like the case against Verres, only published. The philosophical books that fill the rest of the shelf came later, most of them once he had been shut out of that life.

     EN
  2. -54 The Republic (De re publica)

    Plato wrote a Republic and then a Laws; Cicero set out to do both, and the treatise on law is this book's companion — begun a couple of years later and left unfinished.

     EN
  3. -52 Treatise on the Laws (De legibus)

    Unfinished, unpublished, and on the available evidence never released at all. For centuries it travelled as the lesser half of a pair whose better half had gone missing.

     EN
  4. -46 Brutus or History of Famous Orators (Brutus; Orator)

    Not the speeches but the account of them, made when the courts had stopped sitting. The edition carries Orator with it, the portrait of the ideal speaker written for the same dedicatee in the same year.

     EN
  5. -45 A Treatise on the Chief Good and Evil (De finibus bonorum et malorum)

    Cicero's fullest treatment of ethics: three conversations, set years apart and in different places, bound into one survey of what the leading schools said a life is for.

     EN
  6. -45 On the Nature of the Gods (De natura deorum)

    Finished after the Tusculan Disputations, it opened a run of three books on religion: On Divination and On Fate followed in 44 BCE.

     EN
  7. -45 The Academic Questions (Academica)

    Readers who wondered why Cicero sided with the sceptical Academy were sent here by On the Nature of the Gods, written later the same year: this is where he defends arguing every side of a question and settling for the probable.

     EN
  8. -45 The Tusculan Disputations (Tusculanae Disputationes) you are here EN
  9. -44 On Friendship (De Amicitia)

    Copyists kept this and On Old Age bound together for so long that printers followed them. The edition prints the Dream of Scipio after it, which belongs to De re publica.

     EN
  10. -44 On Moral Duties (De officiis)

    The last of his philosophical books, and the one that travelled furthest: for centuries afterwards it was simply the standard book of conduct.

     EN
  11. -44 On Old Age (Cato Maior de Senectute)

    Written alongside On Friendship and sent to the same friend, Atticus; the later book refers back to this one by name.

     EN
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