to Cicero: the final collapse of the armed opposition to Caesar at the
battle of Munda, and the loss, by the death of his daughter Tullia, of
the one deep affection of his inner life. Henceforth it seemed as if
politics had ceased to exist, even had he the heart to interest himself
in them. He fell back more completely than ever upon philosophy; and the
year that followed (45-44 B.C.) is, in mere quantity of literary
production, as well as in the abiding effect on the world of letters of
the work he then produced, the _annus mirabilis_ of his life. Two at
least of the works of this year, the _De Gloria_ and the _De Virtutibus_,
have perished, though the former survived long enough to be read by
Petrarch; but there remain extant (besides one or two other pieces of
slighter importance) the _De Finibus_, the _Academics_, the _Tusculans_,
the _De Natura Deorum_, the _De Divinatione_, the _De Fato_, the _De
Officiis_, and the two exquisite essays _De Senectute_ and _De Amicitia_.

It is the work of this astonishing year which, on the whole, represents
Cicero's permanent contribution to letters and to human thought. If his
philosophy seems now to have exhausted its influence, it is because it
has in great measure been absorbed into the fabric of civilised society.
Ciceronianism, at the period of the Renaissance, and even in the
eighteenth century, meant more than the impulse towards florid and
sumptuous style. It meant all that is conveyed by the Latin word
_humanitas;_ the title of "the humaner letters," by which Latin was long
designated in European universities, indicated that in the great Latin
writers--in Cicero and Virgil preeminently--a higher type of human life
was to be found than existed in the literature of other countries: as
though at Rome, and in the first century before Christ, the political and
social environment had for the first time produced men such as men would
wish to be, at all events for the ideals of Western Europe. To less
informed or less critical ages than our own, the absolute contribution of