The philosophical works of Cicero, which have been hitherto enumerated, are complete, or nearly so. But it is well known that he was the author of many other productions which have now been entirely lost, or of which only fragments remain.
Of these, the most important was the Treatise _De Republicâ_, which, in the general wreck of learning, shared the fate of the institutions it was intended to celebrate. The greater part of this dialogue having disappeared along with the _Origines_ of Cato, the works of Varro, and the History of Sallust, we have been deprived of all the writings which would have thrown the most light on the Roman institutions, manners, and government--of everything, in short, which philosophically traced the progress of Rome, from its original barbarism to the perfection which it had attained in the age of the second Scipio Africanus.
There are few monuments of ancient literature, of which the disappearance had excited more regret, than that of the work _De Republicâ_, which was long believed to have been the grand repository of all the political wisdom of the ancients. The great importance of the subject--treated, too, by a writer at once distinguished by his genius and former official dignity; the pride and predilection with which the author himself speaks of it, and the sublimity and beauty of the fragment entitled _Somnium Scipionis_, preserved from it by Macrobius, all concurred to exalt this treatise in the imagination of the learned, and to exasperate their vexation at its loss. The fathers of the church, particularly Lactantius, had afforded some insight into the arguments employed in it on different topics; several fragments existed in the works of the grammarians, and a complete copy was extant as late as the 11th century. Since that time the literary world have been flattered at different periods with hopes of its discovery; but it is only within the last few years that such a portion of it has been recovered, as may suffice, in a considerable degree, to satisfy curiosity, though not perhaps to fulfil expectation.
It is well known to many, and will be mentioned more fully in the _Appendix_, that owing to a scarcity of papyrus and parchment, it was customary, at different times, to erase old, in order to admit new, writing. To a MS. of this kind, the name of Palimpsest has been given--a term made use of by Cicero himself. In a letter to the lawyer Trebatius, who had written to him on such a sheet, Cicero says, "that while he must praise him for his parsimony in employing a palimpsest, he cannot but wonder what he had erased to scribble such a letter, except it were his law notes: For I cannot think," adds he, "that you would efface my letter to substitute your own(457)." This practice became very common in the middle ages, when both the papyrus and parchment were scarce, and when the classics were, with few exceptions, no longer the objects of interest. Montfaucon had remarked, that these obliterated MSS. were perhaps more numerous than those which had been written on for the first time(458). But though in some cases the original writing was still visible on close observation, no practical use was made of such inspection till Angelo Mai published some fragments recovered from palimpsest MSS. in the Ambrosian library, of which he was keeper. Encouraged by his success, he persevered in this new pursuit, and published at intervals fragments of considerable value. At length, being called to Rome as a recompense for his learned labours, Mai prosecuted in the Vatican those noble researches which he had commenced at Milan; and it is to him we now owe the discovery and publication of a considerable portion of Cicero _De Republicâ_, which had been expunged, (it is supposed in the 6th century,) and crossed by a new writing, which contained a commentary by St Augustine on the Psalms(459).