Hortensius (Cicero)

Today, it is extant in the fragments preserved by the prose writer Martianus Capella, the grammarians Maurus Servius Honoratus and Nonius Marcellus, the early Christian author Lactantius, and the Church Father Augustine of Hippo (the latter of whom explicitly credits the Hortensius with encouraging him to study the tenets of philosophy).

[2][3] Politically, Gaius Julius Caesar became both dictator and consul in 46 BC, and was subverting elements of the Roman Senate, of which the decidedly republican Cicero was a fervent supporter.

[2][7][8][9] Both his political and personal misfortunes shook him to his core, with the death of his daughter being most disturbing; in a letter to his friend Titus Pomponius Atticus, he wrote, "I have lost the one thing that bound me to life.

)[2][12][13][14] Cicero's exhortation was the advice "not to study one particular sect but to love and seek and pursue and hold fast and strongly embrace wisdom itself, wherever found."

According to the Constantinian writer Trebellius Pollio, Cicero wrote the Hortensius "in the model of [a] protrepticus" (Marcus Tullius in Hortensio, quem ad exemplum protreptici scripsit).

[18] Either way, scholars tend to classify the Hortensius as a protreptic dialogue (that is "hortatory literature that calls the audience to a new and different way of life") based on Greek models.

[11][19][20] Cicero seems to have heavily emphasized the ethical nature of philosophy in the Hortensius, seeing the field as a "pragmatic and utilitarian science ... deal[ing] with questions of life.

"[23] The work takes place at either the Tusculum or Cumaen villa of Lucius Licinius Lucullus, and is set sometime in the mid-to-early 60s BC[nb 2] during an unnamed feria (that is, an ancient Roman holiday).

[11][24][25] At the start of the dialogue, Lucullus welcomes his brother-in-law Hortensius as well as his friends Quintus Lutatius Catulus and Cicero to his house, and they begin to talk with one another.

In 1957, W. G. Rabinowitz argued that the Hortensius was not based strictly on the Protrepticus but was rather written in the general hortatory and protreptic style then "much in vogue", as the philosopher and historian Anton-Hermann Chroust puts it.

The work moved him deeply,[37][43] and in both his Confessions and De beata vita he wrote that the book engendered in him an intense interest in philosophy and encouraged him to pursue wisdom.

[48][41] Of these writers, Nonius Marcellus preserves the most, although the classicist and religious scholar John Hammond Taylor argues that these snippets are "extremely brief and very difficult to place in a context".