Ethics

Tusculanae Quaestiones

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Cicero

45 BC

The Tusculanae Quaestiones (Tusculan Disputations) are five books of philosophical dialogues set at Cicero's villa at Tusculum, composed as a form of philosophical therapy during the deepest personal crisis of his life — following the death of his beloved daughter Tullia. Each book addresses a different source of human misery and examines whether philosophy can relieve it: Book I argues that death is not an evil; Book II that pain is not the greatest evil; Book III that distress of mind can be cured; Book IV that other passions — fear, desire, pleasure — can be overcome by philosophy; Book V that virtue is sufficient for a happy life. Throughout, Cicero draws on the full range of Greek philosophy — Plato's arguments for the immortality of the soul, Stoic accounts of the passions and their extirpation, Epicurean consolations — while consistently arguing that philosophy's highest purpose is the care of the soul and the achievement of equanimity in the face of fortune's blows. The Tusculan Disputations made Greek philosophical psychology accessible to Roman readers and remained the primary vehicle through which ideas about the examined life entered Latin literature.