ABSTRACT

The influence of Cicero's writings and the interpretation of his career run in threads of debate through the major changes of Western civilization. His philosophy was an important ingredient in the construction of a Christian doctrine and the establishment of scholastic logic from the fourth to the sixth century a.d. According to Cicero, Greece surpassed Rome in learning and in all branches of literature; but, in morals and the regulations of life, in family and household economy, in law, political institutions, and the art of war, the Romans were without comparison. Cicero's rhetorical treatises, like his philosophic works, were written during the intervals and interruptions of his political career. Charles S. Peirce, one of the great seminal minds of modern philosophy, introduced a basic distinction in his Regenerated Logic with a reference to Cicero's account of an ancient dispute between two logicians, Diodorus Cronus and Philo of Megara.