The Orations Of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Tr. By C.D. Yonge (1852)

Excerpt from book: THE TREATISE OF M. T. CICERO ON TOPICS. DEDICATED TO CAIUS TBEBATIUS. THE ARGUMENT. This treatise was written a short time before the events which gave rise to the first Philippic. Cicero obtained an honorary lieutenancy, with the intention of visiting his son at Athens; on his way towards Rhegium he spent an evening at Velia with 1'rebatius, where be began this treatise, which he finished at sea, before he arrived in Greece. It is little more than an abstract of what had been written by Aristotle on the same subject, and which Trebatius had begged him to explain to him; and Jliddleton says, that as he had not Aristotle's essay with him, he drew this up from memory, and he appears to have finished it in a week, as it was the nineteenth of July that he was at Velia, and he sent this work to Trebatius from Rhegium on the twenty-seventh. He himself apologizes to Trebalius in the letter which accompanied it, (Ep. Fam. vii. 19,) for i1s obscurity, which however, he says, was unavoidably caused by the nature of the subject. I. We had begun to write, O Cains Trebatius, on subjects more important and more worthy of these books, of which we have published a sufficient number in a short time, when your request recalled me from my course. For when you were with me in my Tusculan villa, and when each of us was separately in the library opening such books as were suited to our respective tastes and studies, you fell on a treatise ct Aristotle's called the Topics; which he has explained in many books; and, excited by the title, you immediately asked me to explain to you the doctrines laid down in those books. And when I had explained them to you, and told you that the system for the discovery of arguments was contained ui them, in order that we might arrive, without making any mistake...