De Officiis

[BI] Remus.

[BJ] I.e., whether he be god or man.

[BK] The Cilician pirates had been crushed by Pompey and settled at Soli (Pompeiopolis). They gathered strength again during the distractions of the civil wars, and Antony is even said to have sought their aid in the war against Brutus and Cassius.

Marseilles and King Deiotarus of Armenia had supported Pompey and in consequence were made tributary by Caesar's party.

[BL] See § 70 below.

[BM] The shame was that states enjoying the rights of Roman citizenship should need a patron to protect their interests in the Roman capital.

[BN] The Platonic doctrine of ideas known in a previous existence and gradually developing into renewed consciousness. Learning is but a remembering of what the soul has known before.

[BO] Lit. 'flash with the fingers'; shoot out some fingers the number of which had to be guessed.

[BP] Gratidianus's.

[BQ] Never attained, however. For his conspicuous position as a popular leader made him an early mark for Sulla's proscriptions.

[BR] Pompey, who in 59 married Caesar's daughter Julia, twenty-four years his junior, and already betrothed to Caepio.

[BS] From A. S. Way's translation.

[BT] The title bestowed on Cicero for saving the republic (in 63) and on Caesar for overthrowing it (after the battle of Munda, in 45).

[BU] The publicans, farmers of the revenue, were the moneyed men of the times and belonged to the equestrian order. They purchased from the senate the farming of the revenues and then sublet their contract to the collectors. Sometimes they found that they had agreed to pay too high a rate and petitioned the senate to release them from their contract or reduce their obligations, as on this occasion (b.c. 61). The opposition of Cato and others strained the relations between the senate, who had control of the business, and the equestrian order, driving many of the equites over to Caesar's side. Complete harmony between the senate and the knights, as Cicero says, was the only thing that could have saved Rome from the popular party and Caesar.

[BV] The denarius was worth at this time about ninepence.

[BW] Approximately £750,000.

[BX] Cicero is careless in his dates. Regulus was consul in 267 and 256. He was defeated and taken prisoner in his second proconsulship at the battle of Tunes in 255. And the Hamilcar of 255 was not Hannibal's father, for his career does not begin until 247, when he was a mere youth, and he was still in his prime when he fell in battle in Spain, in 229.

[BY] At the battle of Panormus in 250 Lucius Caecilius Metellus took among the prisoners no less than thirteen Carthaginian generals—all men of noble birth.

[BZ] The Epicureans.

[CA] The Stoics.

[CB] The Stoics.

[CC] The Stoics.

[CD] The Peripatetics.

[CE] See Index, s.v.

[CF] 184 years, i.e., in b.c. 137.

[CG] "Sacred" laws, according to Festus (p. 318), were laws that placed their transgressor, together with his household and his property, under the ban of some divinity; other authorities limit the term to the laws enacted upon the Sacred Mount (b.c. 394).

[CH] But Cicero never saw his son Marcus again.