Cicero lived some five hundred years before Augustine. He himself sent his own son to Greece to study philosophy. Cicero wrote to his son a famous letter, the famous On Duties, which attempted to explain to young Marcus how and what to study, a letter that is still worth reading by anyone similarly perplexed. We are all, in this sense, Cicero’s sons down the ages. That is to say, what provokes us, incites us, need not come from our own time. Indeed, our own time may be and probably is so disordered that it cannot really alert us to the truth, to what is. This is why books from another time are so precious to us and why we need to find them, read them. Someone who knows Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Augustine, or Aquinas will never be too far from the truth, never out-of-date.
–James V. Schall, SJ, A Student’s Guide to Liberal Learning, 19
