De Ciceronis libro consolationis.

Van Wageningen ?believes that the chief and virtually the only source of Cicero?s lost ?Consolatio? was Cantor?s essay ?de luctu?. This document in turn he thinks can be recovered by comparing the order of treatment of the part of the Tusculans and Ps.-Plutarch, ?Consolatio ad Apollonium?. (?) The result is the reconstructed ?Consolatio? of Cicero, with many additional fragments. (?) But several grounds for suspension of judgement at once appear. First, the process of reconstruction is too simple. Second, we have no real assurance that Cicero followed Crantor as closely as Plutarch is assumed by the author (following Pohlenz) to have done. (?) when Cicero?s eclecticism is taken into consideration, it seems dangerous to think that any particular idea can be traced to any particular source so easily and certainly. Third, Crantor was only one of many philosophers and rhetoricians who said practically the same thing in practically the same way. Consolatory literature is a mass of commonplaces that inevitably linked themselves together in natural groupings. Thus it becomes almost impossible to say that one passage is certainly the source of another. The consolatory topics were part of the common stock, and generations of philosophers and rhetoricians had handled and rehandled them.? (EVAN T. SAGE in Classical Philology, 1922, p.184).