THE year following his ædileship, B.C. 68, is that in which Cicero's extant correspondence first begins. It is a rich mine of information, and furnishes the best materials, not only for his own biography, but a great part of the history of the time. Nowhere else do we find such a vivid picture of contemporary events. We seem to be present at the shifting scenes of the drama, as the plot unfolds itself which involves the destinies of Rome. We hear the groans of the expiring Republic, which had been mortally wounded during the long civil wars of Marius and Sylla, and was fast sinking under the flood of social and political corruption which is sure to follow in the train of civil war. At one time we watch with eager impatience the arrival of a courier at Tusculum, with a letter from Atticus telling his friend the news of the day, and in Cicero's reply we read all the fluctuations of hope and fear which agitated him during the momentous crisis of his country's fate. At another we contemplate the great orator and statesman in the seclusion of his villa, as a plain country gentleman, busying himself with improvements on his estate, building farm-houses, laying out and planting shrubberies, and turning watercourses, or amusing himself with pictures and statues, and the various objects which interest a man of refined and cultivated taste. At another we find him at Rome sick, weary, and disgusted with the din of strife, mistrusting everybody where no one seems worthy of trust, and harping ever on the vanity of ambition and the worthlessness of popular applause. We see him at one moment exalted to the summit of human glory when saluted in the

Senate by the proud title of Pater Patria, and at another sunk in the lowest depths of despair when he is a wandering fugitive exile from Rome, and tells his wife that while he writes he is blinded by his tears.

There is a charm in these letters to which we have nothing comparable in all that antiquity has spared us. To say nothing of their exquisite latinity, and not unfrequently their playful wit, they have a freshness and reality which no narrative of bygone events can ever hope to attain. We see in them Cicero as he was. We behold him in his strength and in his weakness-the bold advocate, and yet timid and vacillating statesman--the fond husband-the affectionate father -the kind master-the warm-hearted friend. I speak not now of his political correspondence, written with an object in view, and with a consciousness that it might one day be made public, but his private letters to his relatives and friends, in which he poured out the whole secret of his soul, and laid bare his innermost thoughts, yearning for sympathy and clinging for support. To quote the words of De Quincey: "In them we come suddenly into deep lulls of angry passion-here upon a scheme for the extension of literature by a domestic history, or by a comparison of Greek with Roman jurisprudence; there again upon some ancient problem from the quiet fields of philosophy." They show that he was a man of genial soul, and of a most kind and amiable disposition what Dr. Johnson would have called a thoroughly clubable" person. He is never more at home than when he is indulging in a little pleasant banter and irony, as when he makes fun of Trebatius the lawyer, who had left the atmosphere of the courts, to turn soldier and serve under Cæsar in Gaul. But he is always the scholar and the gentleman; and no one had more of that refined polish which the Romans described by the expressive word urbanitas. I do not think that in the whole of his correspondence a single coarse word or vulgar idea occurs. It is not so in his speeches. There he often indulged in language which is, according to modern notions, offensive to good taste and even decency, as when he attacked Piso and Gabinius and Antony. But that was the fault of the plain-speaking time in which he lived,

ET. 39.

CHARACTER OF HIS LETTERS.

55

rather than of the man; just as the occasional coarseness of Shakespeare must be attributed to the age in which he was born, and not to his own gentle nature.

How pleasant it is to hear him giving his friend Atticus a message from the little Tullia, or Tulliola, as he often calls her-making use of the endearing diminutive so significant in the ancient Latin and modern Italian-to remind him of his promise to make her a present, and afterwards telling him that Tullia had brought an action against him for breach of contract; or to find him speaking of his only son," the honey-sweet Cicero," that "most aristocratic child," as he playfully styles him, who was with his sister in his youthful days the pride and delight of his life. We see him lounging on the shore at his villa near Antium, and there penning a letter to confess that he is in no humour to work, and amuses himself with counting the waves as they roll upon the beach. We would not willingly exchange that letter to Atticus, in which he says of himself that he knows he has acted like a "genuine donkey" (me asinum germanum fuisse), for the stiffest and most elaborate of his political epistles.

From his villa at Formiæ he writes to complain of the visits of troublesome country neighbours, and says he is so bored by them that he is tempted to sell the place; and therefore, while they annoy him, there is a capital opportunity for a purchaser.

His fondness for books amounted to a passion. He tells Atticus, that when his librarian Tyrannio had arranged his books it seemed as if his house had got a soul; and he is in raptures with a book-case when ornamented with the gay colours of the parchment-covers (sittybe) in which the precious rolls were kept. We find him at one time begging his friend to send him two of his assistant librarians to help Tyrannio to glue the parchments, and to bring with them a thin skin of parchment to make indexes. He tells Atticus on no account to part with his library, as he is putting by his savings (vindemiolas) to be able to purchase it as a resource in his old age. By "library" Cicero means the copies of manuscripts which Atticus was having made at Athens by some of his clever slaves; and what would we not now give to possess one such set of manuscripts as were put on board a

trireme at the Piræus and consigned to Cicero in his Tusculan villa? In the midst of all his anxiety and disgust at the state of public affairs, when it was evident that the old Republic was tottering to ruin, he says that he supports and refreshes himself with literature, and would rather sit in a well-known seat at his friend's country house, with the bust of Aristotle over his head, than in a curule chair. At another time he says that he does not envy Crassus his wealth, and can despise the broad acres (vicos et prata) of others, if he has it only in his power to purchase books.

In one of his letters he playfully finds fault with his freedman Tiro for an inaccurate use of a Latin adverb fideliter. In another he defends himself against criticism of Atticus, and maintains that he was right in putting the preposition in before Piraa, but admits that Piraum, as the accusative case, would have been more correct. Now and then he indulges in a pun, as when he tells Atticus, who thought some of the windows of his house on the Palatine Hill, which had been made by his architect Cyrus, too narrow, that he was perhaps not aware that he had been finding fault with the Cyropædia. How true is the picture he draws of the contrast between the hollow friendship of the world and the calm and sober happiness of domestic life. Amidst the crowd that thronged his hall, and attended him, as was the custom, to the courts, begirt as he was with "troops of the Credibility of Early Roman History, vol. i. 197, It may be doubted whether there were a hundred copies of Virgil or Horace in existence at any one time before the invention of printing." He supported this view in a learned article which appeared in Fraser's Magazine, April 1862. See also Merivale's Hist. Rom. vi. 233. The probability is, that neither side is altogether right. It is extravagant to suppose that the efforts of copyists could rival the power of the printing-press, but the idea of extreme scarcity of books is refuted by the prices at which they were sold. Martial says that his bookseller would sell a well-bound copy of his Epigrams (perhaps he means only the first book) for about five denarii, or 3s. 6d. of English money.

An interesting controversy has recently been carried on as to the extent to which copies of books were multiplied in ancient Rome, A German writer, in a work entitled Geschichte der Denkund-Glaubens-Freiheit im ersten Jahrhundert der Kaiserherrschaft (Berlin, 1847), had maintained that the number of literary productions was greater in ancient than in modern times, and that thousands of copies of the classics must have been in existence to enable any of them to come down to us. He relied also on the statement that 700,000 books existed in the library at Alexandria, and such incidental facts as that mentioned by Pliny, who says that Regulus caused a thousand copies to be made of a memoir of his son. The late Sir George Cornewall Lewis combated this view, and says, in his Inquiry into

B.C. 68.

MODE OF SENDING LETTERS.

57

friends," he complains that there is not one with whom he can joke freely, or to whom he can unburden his soul in sorrow. In other words, he expresses the same sentiment as Bacon, that "a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk is but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."

How were these letters sent? There was no post-office in ancient Rome: and the only mode of conveying them was either by couriers called tabellarii, who were despatched express for the purpose; or by friends who happened to be going to or near the residence of the person to whom they were addressed. We find Cicero frequently complaining that he had no trustworthy person at hand to whom he could confide an important letter without danger of its being opened and its contents read; and he mentions one instance where he lost a letter from Atticus owing to the friend who had charge of it being attacked and robbed near the burialground (bustum) of Basilius.

I propose to notice a few of these early letters to Atticus somewhat in detail, for they will give us a good idea of Cicero's style and habits of thought, and also show the cordial friendship that existed between these two eminent men—a friendship as frank as it was sincere, which never varied during all the vicissitudes of their lives, and was terminated only by death.

In the first letter written in the latter part of the year to Atticus in Epirus on the western coast of the Adriatic, where, in the neighbourhood of Buthrotus, he had recently purchased an estate, Cicero begins by alluding in feeling language of affectionate sorrow to the death of his cousin, or, as he calls him, brother Lucius-the only son of his uncle Lucius-who had, as we have seen, been associated with him in the prosecution of Verres. Cicero greatly deplored his loss, and speaks of him as a man endowed with every excellence, and distinguished by great sweetness 1 Before a letter was despatched five things were requisite, four of which are enumerated in a line of Plautus (Bacch. iv. 4, 64), “Stilum, ceram, et tabellas et linum. To these must be added the seal. The tabelle were thin tablets of wood smeared with wax, and with an

elevated rim or border. These when written upon―i.e. scratched with the stylus-were bound together by a packthread, and the knot of the string was sealed with wax and stamped with the signet-ring.