Cicero | Page 4

find in a visit to the capitals
of Greece and of Italy, and a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Poetry, rhetoric,

philosophy, religion--all, to his eyes, had their cradle there. It was the
home of all that was literature to him; and there, too, were the great
Eleusinian mysteries--which are mysteries still, but which contained
under their veil whatever faith in the Invisible and Eternal rested in the
mind of an enlightened pagan. There can be little doubt but that Cicero
took this opportunity of initiation. His brother Quintus and one of his
cousins were with him at Athens; and in that city he also renewed his
acquaintance with an old school-fellow, Titus Pomponius, who lived so
long in the city, and became so thoroughly Athenian in his tastes and
habits, that he is better known to us, as he was to his contemporaries,
by the surname of Atticus, which was given him half in jest, than by his
more sonorous Roman name. It is to the accidental circumstance of
Atticus remaining so long a voluntary exile from Rome, and to the
correspondence which was maintained between the two friends, with
occasional intervals, for something like four-and-twenty years, that we
are indebted for a more thorough insight into the character of Cicero
than we have as to any other of the great minds of antiquity; nearly four
hundred of his letters to Atticus, written in all the familiar confidence
of private friendship by a man by no means reticent as to his personal
feelings, having been preserved to us. Atticus's replies are lost; it is said
that he was prudent enough, after his friend's unhappy death, to reclaim
and destroy them. They would perhaps have told us, in his case, not
very much that we care to know beyond what we know already. Rich,
luxurious, with elegant tastes and easy morality--a true Epicurean, as he
boasted himself to be--Atticus had nevertheless a kind heart and an
open hand. He has generally been called selfish, somewhat unfairly; at
least his selfishness never took the form of indifference or unkindness
to others. In one sense he was a truer philosopher than Cicero: for he
seems to have acted through life on that maxim of Socrates which his
friend professed to approve, but certainly never followed,--that "a wise
man kept out of public business". His vocation was certainly not
patriotism; but the worldly wisdom which kept well with men of all
political colours, and eschewed the wretched intrigues and bloody
feuds of Rome, stands out in no unfavourable contrast with the conduct
of many of her _soi-disant_ patriots. If he declined to take a side
himself, men of all parties resorted to him in their adversity; and the
man who befriended the younger Marius in his exile, protected the

widow of Antony, gave shelter on his estates to the victims of the
triumvirate's proscription, and was always ready to offer his friend
Cicero both his house and his purse whenever the political horizon
clouded round him,--this man was surely as good a citizen as the
noisiest clamourer for "liberty" in the Forum, or the readiest hand with
the dagger. He kept his life and his property safe through all those years
of peril and proscription, with less sacrifice of principle than many who
had made louder professions, and died--by a singular act of voluntary
starvation, to make short work with an incurable disease--at a ripe old
age; a godless Epicurean, no doubt, but not the worst of them.
We must return to Cicero, and deal somewhat briefly with the next few
years of his life. He extended his foreign tour for two years, visiting the
chief cities of Asia Minor, remaining for a short time at Rhodes to take
lessons once more from his old tutor Molo the rhetorician, and
everywhere availing himself of the lectures of the most renowned
Greek professors, to correct and improve his own style of composition
and delivery. Soon after his return to Rome, he married. Of the
character of his wife Terentia very different views have been taken. She
appears to have written to him very kindly during his long forced
absences. Her letters have not reached us; but in all her husband's
replies she is mentioned in terms of apparently the most sincere
affection. He calls her repeatedly his "darling"--"the delight of his
eyes"--"the best of mothers;" yet he procured a divorce from her, for no
distinctly assigned reason, after a married life of thirty years, during
which we find no trace of any serious domestic unhappiness. The
imputations on her honour made by Plutarch, and repeated by others,
seem utterly without foundation; and Cicero's own share in the
transaction is not improved by the fact of his taking another wife as
soon as possible--a ward of his own, an