Bill Thayer’s Notes

Cicero: de Finibus

The text

The edition transcribed here is that of the Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, vol. XVII, second (revised) edition, 1931; Latin text with facing English translation by H. Harris Rackham. It is in the public domain pursuant to the 1978 revision of the U. S. Copyright Code, because the copyright expired and was not renewed at the appropriate time, which would have been in 1958 or 1959. (Details here on the copyright law involved.)

As usual, I retyped the text rather than scanning it: not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise which I heartily recommend. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if successful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)

In the table of contents below, all the Books are shown on blue backgrounds; red backgrounds would indicate that my transcription was still not proofread. The header bar at the top of each webpage will remind you with the same color scheme. Should you spot an error, please do report it, of course: and my thanks in this connection to Sherrylyn Branchaw, who did just that, catching quite a few slip‑ups of mine and bringing our transcription closer to perfection.

I’ll probably also put the Latin onsite at some point, but not urgently: it’s already online at Latin Library. Details on the technical aspects of the layout of my own site follow the Table of Contents.

Table of Contents

	The Loeb Editor’s Introduction
Liber I	Book 1: Exposition of Epicureanism
Liber II	Book 2: Arguments against Epicureanism
Liber III	Book 3: Exposition of Stoicism
Liber IV	Book 4: Arguments against Stoicism
Liber V	Book 5: The New Academy and Cicero’s view

Notes and Apparatus Criticus

The notes in the translation are included here; and although on the Latin side, the Loeb edition provides no comprehensive apparatus criticus, it occasionally marks a variant or a crux: I’ll be including these as well.