Hortensius
Cicero, Hortensius (lost; fragments only)
Marcus Tullius Cicero
A lost book about wanting the right thing. We have it only because one reader could never stop citing it.
- Catch rate
- 70 / 255
- Base research
- 120
- Stat total
- 186
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
The Hortensius does not survive. Every word we have of it was quoted by somebody else — mostly by Augustine, who never got over it. A book that exists only in other people’s quotations has almost no Stamina at all.
You cannot hold ground on a text no one can produce. Where the fragments disagree there is nothing to check them against.
Famous by title and by consequence. Almost nobody has read a page of it, because there are no pages.
Cited for this book
Cicero wrote it to talk young men out of chasing careers and into chasing wisdom. It worked, once, spectacularly, on a nineteen-year-old rhetoric student in Carthage — and then the book itself was lost, so the only reason anyone knows what it said is that the student kept quoting it for the rest of his life.
Development
A book develops as it is read — the fragment becomes the work, the work becomes the corpus.
Moves learned
By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.
| Lv | Move | Type | Cat. | Pwr | Acc | PP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Exhortation to Wisdom | Rationality | Argument | 70 | 100% | 20 |
| 1 | Steelman | Rationality | Type shift | — | — | 10 |
| 9 | Socratic Question | Rationality | Argument | 50 | 100% | 20 |
| 17 | Question the Premise | Rationality | Type shift | — | — | 10 |
| 22 | Sarcasm | Rationality | Argument | 60 | 95% | 15 |
Read it: Preserved by People Arguing With It
The passages the Scriptorium holds on screen, word for word from a public-domain translation. Written in Latin — lost; fragments only.
“But perchance some one may ask of us the same question which Hortensius asks in Cicero: If God is one only, what solitude can be happy?”
Cicero, Hortensius, quoted in Lactantius, Divine Institutes 1.7 (trans. Fletcher, ANF 7, public domain).
“I was thereby strongly roused, and kindled, and inflamed to love, and seek, and obtain, and hold, and embrace not this or that sect, but wisdom itself whatever it were; and this alone checked me thus unkindled, that the name of Christ was not in it.”
Augustine describing the Hortensius, Confessions 3.4 (trans. Pusey, 1838, public domain). Augustine paraphrasing, not quoting — the closest thing to the book we have.
The book does not exist. Not one manuscript, not one page. Everything above reached you because somebody else wrote it down while disagreeing with it or remembering it.
Look at the two citations and notice they are the only two things holding the book up. A Christian apologist quoting a pagan dialogue to answer it, and a bishop remembering what it did to him at nineteen.
⚑ The second is not a quotation and the citation says so. Augustine is describing, in his own Latin, what the book urged him to do. Editors of Cicero’s fragments print it anyway, because it is the best window anyone has.
Cicero wrote it to argue that philosophy is worth a life. It worked, on a North African teenager, three hundred and forty years later, and then it was lost.