Tusculan Disputations, Treatises on the Nature of the Gods, and on the Commonwealth

Three different hands, working more than a century apart, produced the three translations in this volume, and the publisher admitted as much in a note at the front. Harper & Brothers issued it from Franklin Square in New York in 1877, carrying Bohn's cheap English classics over to an American readership. The Tusculan Disputations and most of the editing are Charles Duke Yonge's. On the Nature of the Gods is a revision of a translation the publisher ascribed to Benjamin Franklin; it goes back to an anonymous English rendering of 1741, now credited to a different man with a near-identical name, Thomas Francklin. On the Commonwealth is Francis Barham's translation of 1841, judged too loose and so taken in hand and collated against newer Latin texts. So the book is a made object rather than a sequence Cicero designed, and what binds its contents is reach: the Tusculans on grief, pain and the fear of dying; De natura deorum, which sets an Epicurean, a Stoic and an Academic sceptic to argue whether gods exist, whether they made the world and whether they take any interest in it, and ends without ruling; and De re publica, on the constitution that had collapsed while Cicero was alive to watch. That last one could be put into English at all only because a Vatican librarian had read a fourth-century Cicero out from under a book of sermons in 1819, which is why the translation being tidied here was barely a generation old. One purchase, and an American reader had all three. That is what a nineteenth-century classical series existed to do, and it is also why the same text turns up twice: the Tusculan Disputations had already gone out in a companion volume beside the Academica and De finibus, and they are set again at the front of this one because a second gathering still needed an ethics to stand on.