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INTRODUCTION.

THE Latin writers, and Cicero in particular, were fully sensible of the preeminence which the Greeks enjoyed in the field of letters and the fine arts generally. Indeed Cicero himself tells us, with a naïveté in refreshing contrast with the mock humility of modern irony, that it was his ambition to render his countrymen as independent of Greek models in the other departments as in that of oratory. Hence it is not surprising that the famous Polity of Plato should have attracted his notice as a worthy object of emulation. Accordingly he tells us in one of his letters (ad Q. F. II. 14) of the date 700 U. C. (B. C. 54) that he has taken this subject in hand, in the pleasant retirement of his Cuman villa; that he finds the work difficult and laborious, but will not grudge his pains if it should prove a success; and at the worst he can readily throw it into the sea, which fronts him as he writes. And in his later writings we have frequent allusions to the Sex libri de re publica. But although the later Latin writers make frequent mention of this treatise, and citations from it abound in the writings of Lactantius, Boethius and others, while the grammarian Macrobius, in his prolix commentary, has helped to rescue our Somnium Scipionis, which formed part of Bk VI.; the treatise as a whole would seem to have disappeared in the darkness of the early middle ages. And notwithstanding that so late as the 17th century, rumours of this rara avis having been seen, now here and now there,

led the learned on many a wild-goose chase after what was probably nothing more than a MS copy of Macrobius' commentary; all hope of ever finding more than the fragments gathered from the quotations of other authors had long been given up; when, in the year 1820, the Cardinal Angelo Mai, peering closely into a 1palimpsest in the library of the Vatican, found that it was possible to decipher beneath the later writing traces of the original letters, which had been erased in the usual manner to make way for part of a commentary on the Psalms by St Austin: his ecstasy and the surprise of the literary world, to whom he speedily communicated this discovery, can be readily imagined, when it was found that he had succeeded in disinterring, as it were, a large portion of the lost de Republica, which had lain for centuries unsuspected in this pious resting-place. This codex Vaticanus, as it is styled, does not reach so far as Bk VI., but there is no lack of MSS in the case of the Somnium, which had the good fortune to be handed down as a separate extract from the earliest times.

The Dream of Scipio is the counterpart of the episode of Er, in the tenth book of Plato's Polity: partly no doubt to give dramatic finish to his work, and partly to present more strikingly those arguments in favour of virtue and justice, which are based on a belief in the rewards and punishments of a future state, Plato introduces the fable of Er the Arme

1 παλίμψηστος, lit. scraped again': a term applied to a parchment, from which the old writing has been erased, in order that the parchment may be used again for writing. It is not surprising that so costly a material as parchment should have been used with great economy; and, as the ancient atramentum was not so corrosive in its nature as our modern ink, it was not difficult to erase writing in such a

way as to leave the parchment sufficiently sound for second use. Cicero (ad Div. VII. xviii. 2) replying to his friend, Trebatius, who had answered his letter on a palimpsest, jestingly commends him for his thrift; but opines that Trebatius, who was a Jurist, has used up some of his old legal formulae, as he would scarcely rub out one of Cicero's letters to write anything of his own in its place,

nian, who, having fallen in battle, after several days of seeming death, came to life again when placed upon the funeral pyre, and narrated the strange things which had befallen him and the glimpses of a future life which he had in the . interval.

In like manner, as Macrobius tells us, the Dream was. introduced at that stage of the dialogue in Cicero's Polity, at which Laelius complains that the services of public men are frequently suffered to go unrewarded. Scipio replies that they have the reward of their conscience, but that in addi-tion to this there is something more enduring than those honours, which are the prizes of success in this world; and in illustration of this he asks permission to recount a remarkable dream which he once had.

It will be seen, from the references given in the notes, that Cicero has not only borrowed the idea of this episode. from his Greek example, but that the arguments of which it is the vehicle are taken literally from the Platonic writings.. It must however be admitted that Cicero fully justifies his claim to be considered as something more than a mere translator or imitator of the Greek: here, as in the rest of the Polity and in the Laws, we cannot fail to see that the aim of the Roman is less speculative and more practical, that his teaching is intended for the instruction and encouragement of the ordinary citizen, whose duty calls him into the dust and heat of life's arena, rather than for the delectation of the philosopher in his retirement.

Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, Africanus Minor, the narrator of the dream, was certainly well chosen for this. part his well-known fondness for Greek literature and philosophy and his heroic devotion to the service of his country, impart an air of reality to the narrative and impress. the hearer with the feeling that the speaker is himself a striking example of the high ideal which is set before him. Himself a younger son of L. Aemilius Paulus, Macedonicus, the vanquisher of Perseus, he was adopted into the Cornelian

gens by a son of the elder Africanus: the manly virtues of the victor at Zama would seem to have been inherited by his daughter Cornelia, to the exclusion of her brothers; although the adopter of young Paulus is said to have lacked nothing but strength of constitution (Cat. M. XI. 35) while he had more than his share of his father's learning :-probably their common love of literature was the attraction which drew the delicate man of letters towards the gallant young soldier, who at the age of seventeen had taken part in the campaign of his father Paulus. His marriage with Cornelia's daughter Sempronia, sister of the unfortunate Gracchi, must have brought the younger Africanus into close association with those heroic but ill-disciplined spirits; while his singularly unassuming manners must have endeared him to that circle of men of genius, such as Polybius, Panaetius and Terence, whom he had gathered around him. Shining in this brilliant society with all the splendour of his military successes reflected upon him, it is not surprising that he should have dazzled his contemporaries, and that Cicero, in a later age, should have selected him as that one of his countrymen, who-removed alike from the jealousy which besets a contemporary and from the misty uncertainty which surrounds the heroes of an earlier age-was best fitted to be the expounder of his own view of an ideal constitution; which was thus stamped, as it were, with the authority of that well-known name.

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