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.

Stamina34

Contend58

Defend44

Popularity50

Total186

Why these numbers

The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.

Stamina 34

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.

Defend 44

You cannot hold ground on a text no one can produce. Where the fragments disagree there is nothing to check them against.

Popularity 50

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.

Hortensius→
Lv 22

Enneads→
Lv 25

Confessions

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

The quotes behind its moves

How to read these. In Scholar’s Dream, books argue with each other. Each thing a book can do in a debate is a move, and most moves carry a real quotation — the words the book puts on the table when it uses that move.

Strong against lists the opposing books and arguments a move was written to answer. Used against one of them, it hits much harder than usual: ×2 means twice the normal force, ×4 four times. It is the game’s way of saying: this is the sentence that answers that argument. Open an entry to read why.

“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 — a line of the lost dialogue, quoted in Lactantius, Divine Institutes 1.7 (trans. William Fletcher, ANF 7, public domain).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 in Confessions 3.4 (trans. Pusey, 1838, public domain). His words, not Cicero’s — which is as close as the book itself now gets.public domain

Exhortation to Wisdom

RationalityArgument · power 70 · 100% accurate

In the gameCicero wrote a book urging young men to stop chasing careers and chase wisdom instead. It worked on exactly one reader we can name, and it changed everything downstream of him.

Strong against

×2The Two Kingdomsan argument · why?

Cicero’s Hortensius set the young Augustine searching for wisdom. That search is what eventually led him out of the Manichees and to Christ.

“Let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger.”
James 1:19 (WEB).

Steelman

RationalityType shift

In the gameRestate the foe’s position in its strongest form — exposing its true weak point. Lowers the foe’s Defend. Always fair; never a bad move to use.

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” — Socrates at his trial, as Plato records it.
Plato, Apology 38a (trans. Jowett, public domain).public domain

Socratic Question

RationalityArgument · power 50 · 100% accurate

In the gameQuestion after question until the seams show. Often finds the telling stroke.

“He who pleads his cause first seems right; until another comes and questions him.”
Proverbs 18:17 (WEB).

Question the Premise

RationalityType shift

In the gameChallenge the foundation of an argument before it can be pressed. Lowers the foe’s Contend.

“At noon Elijah mocked them, ‘Yell louder! After all, he is a god; he may be deep in thought, or perhaps he stepped out for a moment or has taken a trip. Perhaps he is sleeping and needs to be awakened.’”
1 Kings 18:27 (NET) — the oldest sarcasm in the canon, and the warrant for every apologist who has used it since.

Sarcasm

RationalityArgument · power 60 · 95% accurate

In the gameSay the argument back to it, straight-faced and in full, until the shape of it does the refuting. Often finds the telling stroke — and occasionally goes too far and misses.

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.

Notes

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.