Beschreibung:

ADAMS, John Quincy Autograph letter signed ("John Quincy Adams") to George Alexander Otis, Esq., Quincy, 20 November 1839. 3 pages, 4to . CICERO: "THE MOST PHILOSOPHICAL OF ORATORS...THE MOST ELOQUENT OF PHILOSOPHERS" A lengthy, thoughtful letter on one of John Quincy Adams's great passions, the writings of Cicero. Here he discusses them with one of the Roman's American translators, George A. Otis: "In the rhetorical treatises of Cicero, he enumerates and characterizes, and eulogizes a multitude of Roman Orators who lived before his own time, etc. but it is as if a Meridian Sun should descant upon the splendour of the Stars of the preceding night. For after ages there never has been but one Roman Orator, and that is Cicero himself. Even of his great competitor and rival Hortenzius there is not a scrap remaining, and if there was the only use of it would be to show the immeasurable distance between the two men." There may have been orators the equal of Demosthenes in Greece, but none could rival Cicero in Rome. "Cicero is therefore not only the Orator, but also the Moral Philosopher of Rome and of the Latin Language. He borrowed indeed his philosophy and much of his Oratory from the Greeks and his great superiority over all others (in my judgment over Demosthenes himself) is the union of oratory and moral philosophy in all his works. He is the most philosophical of orators. he is the most eloquent of the Philosophers." Classical orators were a subject of keen interest among the highly educated members of the Founding and Revolutionary generation of Americans. Much of the delightful letters between J. Q. Adams's father and Thomas Jefferson ranges widely over Greek and Roman philosophy in the original and in translation, and indeed it was the transmission of one of J.Q. Adams's books on rhetoric and philosophy that provided the excuse for the elder Adams's opening letter in that renewed correspondence. What was it about Cicero that so appealed to the minds of men like Adams (father and son) and Jefferson? Above all it was his emphasis on virtue ("moral philosophy") as the central, guiding principle for any political community. J.Q. Adams closes this letter by linking Cicero's teachings with the tenets of Christianity. By embracing Cicero, he says, a young reader will learn that "his treasures are not all in himself, but that his happiness is interwoven inextricably with that of others and that it is to be found only in the Christian dispensation."