• A unique selection of Cicero's most accessible philosophical works which deal with the problems encountered in everyday life
• This edition includes On Old Age, On Friendship, and the whole of Books 1, 2, and 5 of the Tusculan Disputations, with the prefaces and summaries of 3 and 4.
• Lively introduction sets out the historical context, with notes that are fuller and more reliable than in any previous translation
• The translation preserves Cicero's literary, artistic, and emotional force as a philospher while achieving new standards of accuracy
• Editorial material includes Chronology and a Note on the Text
• The Appendix covers Cicero's two letters that deal with the same issues as On Friendship and show how rooted in real moral diemmas of the period the treatise is
• Texts translated by John Davie, translator of the OWC Seneca, Disalogues and Essays, and Horace, Satires and Epistles

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'any service I may have rendered my countrymen in my active life I may also extend to them... now that I am at leisure'
   
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC), Rome's greatest orator, had a career of intense activity in politics, the law courts and the administration, mostly in Rome. His fortunes, however, followed those of Rome, and he found himself driven into exile in 58 BC, only to return a year later to a city paralyzed by the domination of Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar. Cicero, though a senior statesman, struggled to maintain his independence and it was during these years that, frustrated in public life, he first started to put his excess energy, stylistic brilliance, and superabundant vocabulary into writing these works of philosophy. The three dialogues collected here are the most accessible of Cicero's works, written to his friends Atticus and Brutus, with the intent of popularizing philosophy in Ancient Rome. They deal with the everyday problems of life; ethics in business, the experience of grief, and the difficulties of old age.