Cicero (on the Stoics) · 106–43 BCE
Tusculan Disputations 1 ¶126 — Cicero (on the Stoics)
From “On the Contempt of Death”
Translation by C. D. Yonge (1853)
Cicero (on the Stoics), Tusculan Disputations 1 ¶126
Why, then, should Camillus be affected with the thoughts of these things happening three hundred and fifty years after his time? And why should I be uneasy if I were to expect that some nation might possess itself of this city ten thousand years hence? Because so great is our regard for our country, as not to be measured by our own feeling, but by its own actual safety.
Cite this passage
Cicero (on the Stoics), Tusculan Disputations 1 ¶126, tr. C. D. Yonge (1853)
https://whatwouldstoicsdo.com/passage/tusculan-disputations/1.126
Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, tr. C. D. Yonge (1853). Text: Standard Ebooks (CC0). Sources and licences
In plain English
AI-written notesA dead man like Camillus cannot be troubled by what happens centuries after him, and the speaker would not be upset about a conquest ten thousand years away. Yet love of country is measured by its real safety, not by whether we will personally feel the loss.
Themes and situations
- Death and mortality
- Community and our duty to others
- Time and the present
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