calamities, and be prepared for them, is either to repel their assaults, or to mitigate their severity. After they have occurred, we ought to remember that grieving cannot help us, and that misfortunes are not peculiar to ourselves, but are the common lot of humanity. Pain and grief may be met, borne and overcome so as not to interfere with our happiness and our permanent well-being. Book 4 The fourth book treats those passions and vexations which Cicero considers as diseases of the soul. These Cicero classes under the four Stoic divisions: grief (including forms such as envy), fear, excessive gladness, and immoderate desire. They all result from false opinions as to evil and good. Grief and fear arise from the belief that their objects are real and great evils; undue gladness and desire, from the belief that their objects are real and great goods. The only preventive or remedy is the regarding, with the Stoics, of virtue as the sole good, and vice as the sole evil, or, at the least, with the Peripatetics, considering moral good and evil as the extremes of good and evil that no good or evil of body or of fortune can be of any comparative significance. Book 5 In the fifth book Cicero attempts to prove that virtue alone is sufficient for happiness. Here his opinion coincides largely with the Stoic view, more so than in some of his other works such as De Finibus written shortly before. Virtue is entirely sufficient for a happy life under all possible circumstances: in poverty, in exile, in blindness, in deafness, even under torture. Happiness and misery depend on character and are independent of circumstances, and Virtue is the source of all in this earthly life that is worth living for. Other themes The work contains frequent allusion to ancient fable, the events of Greek and Roman history, and the memorable sayings of heroes and sages. Cicero references also the ancient Latin poets and quotes from their works. The Tusculan Disputations is the locus classicus of the legend of the Sword of Damocles, as well as of the sole mention of cultura animi as an agricultural metaphor for human culture. Cicero also mentions disapprovingly Amafinius, one of the first Latin writers on philosophy in Rome. Influence The rhetor's theme De contemptu mundi, on the contempt of the world, was taken up by Boethius in the troubled