The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 | Page 4

affairs at Rome.
[Sidenote: The various nature of the Correspondence.]
It is through this period of political change and excitement that the
correspondence will take us, with some important gaps indeed, but on
the whole fullest when it is most wanted to shew the feelings and
motives guiding the active politicians of the day, or at any rate the
effect which events had upon one eager and acute intellect and sensitive
heart. One charm of the correspondence is variety. There is almost
every sort of letter. Those to Atticus are unstudied, spontaneous, and
reflect the varying moods of the writer. At times of special excitement
they follow each other day by day, and sometimes more than once in
the same day; and the writer seems to conceal nothing, however much
it might expose him to ridicule, and to the charge of fickleness,
weakness, or even cowardice. Those addressed to other friends are
sometimes familiar and playful, sometimes angry and indignant. Some
of them are careful and elaborate state papers, others mere formal
introductions and recommendations. Business, literature, and
philosophy all have their share in them; and, what is so rare in ancient

literature, the family relations of the writer, his dealings with wife, son,
and daughter, brother and nephew, and sons-in-law, are all depicted for
us, often with the utmost frankness. After reading them we seem to
know Cicero the man, as well as Cicero the statesman and orator. The
eleven letters which precede the consulship are happily, from this point
of view, addressed to Atticus. For it was to Atticus that he wrote with
the least concealment, and with the confidence that any detail, however
small, which concerned himself would be interesting to his
correspondent. It is well, therefore, that, though we thus come into his
life when it was more than half over, we should at once hear his
genuine sentiments on whatever subjects he may be speaking. Besides
his own, we have about ninety letters to Cicero from some of the chief
men of the day--Pompey, Cæsar, Cato, Brutus, Antony, and many
others. They are of very various excellence. The best of them are by
much less known men. Neither Pompey nor Cæsar were good
letter-writers, or, if the latter was so, he was too busy to use his powers.
[Sidenote: Cicero's position previous to the beginning of the
Correspondence in B.C. 68.]
[Sidenote: Quæstor, B.C. 75.]
The letters begin, then, in B.C. 68, when Cicero was in his
thirty-seventh year. He was already a man of established reputation
both as a pleader and a writer. Rhetorical treatises (B.C. 86),
translations from Xenophon and Plato (B.C. 84), and from the poems of
Aratus (B.C. 81), had given evidence of a varied literary interest and a
promise of future eminence, while his success as an advocate had led to
the first step in the official cursus honorum by his becoming a quæstor
in B.C. 75. The lot assigned Lilybæum as his sphere of work, and
though the duties of a quæstor in Sicily were not such as to bring a
man's name much before the Roman public, Cicero plumes himself, as
was not unusual with him, on the integrity and energy which he
displayed in his administration. He has indeed the honesty to tell
against himself the story of the acquaintance who, meeting him at
Puteoli on his return journey, asked him what day he had left Rome and
what was the news there. When he answered rather crossly that he had

just come from Sicily, another acquaintance put in with "Why, of
course. Didn't you know he has just been quæstor at Syracuse!" At any
rate he had done sufficiently well in Lilybæum to give him his next
step, the ædileship to which he was elected B.C. 70, and to induce the
Sicilians to apply to him, when in that year they desired the prosecution
of the extortionate Verres. His energy and success in this business
raised him, without question, to the first rank of advocates, and pledged
him to a righteous policy in regard to the government of the provinces.
[Sidenote: Cicero's Boyhood and Education.]
Still Cicero was a novus homo, and the jealous exclusiveness of the
great families at Rome might yet prevent his attainment of the highest
office of all. When the correspondence opens he is a candidate for the
prætorship, which he obtained without difficulty, at the head of the poll.
But his birth might still be a bar to the consulship. His father, M.
Tullius, lived at Arpinum, an ancient city of the Volscians and
afterwards of the Samnites, which had long enjoyed a partial, and from
B.C. 188 a complete, Roman franchise, and was included in the
Cornelian tribe. Cicero's mother's name was Helvia, of whom we know
nothing but the one anecdote