material. In the treatise _De Republica_, which was begun in 54 B.C.,
though not published till three years later, he carried the achievement
of Latin prose into a larger and less technical field--that of the
philosophy of politics. Again the scene of the dialogue is laid in a past
age; but now he goes further back than he had done in the _De Oratore_,
to the circle of the younger Scipio. The work was received, when
published, with immense applause; but its loss in the Middle Ages is
hardly one of those which are most seriously to be deplored, except in so
far as the second and fifth books may have preserved real information on
the early history of the Roman State and the development of Roman
jurisprudence. Large fragments were recovered early in the present
century from a palimpsest, itself incomplete, on which the work of Cicero
had been expunged to make room for the commentary of St. Augustine on the
Psalms. The famous _Somnium Scipionis_, with which (in imitation of the
vision of Er in Plato's _Republic_) the work ended, has been
independently preserved. Though it flagrantly challenges comparison with
the unequalled original, it has, nevertheless, especially in its opening
and closing passages, a grave dignity which is purely Roman, and
characteristically Ciceronian. Perhaps some of the elaborate fantasies of
De Quincey (himself naturally a Ciceronian, and saturated in the rhythms
and cadences of the finest Latin prose) are the nearest parallel to this
piece in modern English. The opening words of Scipio's narrative, _Cum in
Africam venissem, Mania Manilio consuli ad quartam legionem tribunus_,
come on the ear like the throb of a great organ; and here and there
through the piece come astonishing phrases of the same organ-music:
_Ostendebat autem Karthaginem de excelso et pleno stellarum inlustri et
claro quodam loco.... Quis in reliquis orientis aut obeuntis solis,
ultimis aut aquilonis austrive partibus, tuum nomen audiet?... Deum te
igitur scito esse, siquidem deus est, qui viget, qui sentit, qui meminit,
qui providet_--hardly from the lips of Virgil himself does the noble