he caprice of a moment to other embraces would usually find
consolation. Terentia when divorced from Cicero was at least fifty, and
we are told she had the extreme honor of having married Sallust after
her break with Cicero. They say that she married twice again after
Sallust's death, and that having lived nearly through the reign of
Augustus, she died at length at the age of a hundred and three. Divorce
at any rate did not kill her. But we cannot conceive but that so sudden
a disruption of all the ties of life must have been grievous to Cicero.
We shall find him in the next chapter marrying a young ward, and then,
too, divorcing her; but here we have only to deal with the torments
Terentia inflicted on him. What those torments were we do not know, and
shall never learn unless by chance the lost letters of Atticus should
come to light. But the general idea has been that the lady had, in
league with a freedman and steward in her service, been guilty of fraud
against her husband. I do not know that we have much cause to lament the
means of ascertaining the truth. It is sad to find that the great men
with whose name we are occupied have been made subject to those "whips
and scorns of time" which we thought to be peculiar to ourselves,
because they have stung us. Terentia, Cicero's wife two thousand years
ago, sent him word that he had but L100 left in his box at home, when he
himself knew well that there must be something more. That would have
gone for nothing had there not been other things before that, many other
things. So, in spite of his ordering at her hands the baths and various
matters to be got ready for his friends at his Tusculum, a very short
time after his return there he had divorced her.

During this last year he had been engaged on what has since been found
to be the real work of his life. He had already written much, but had
written as one who had been anxious to fill up vacant spaces of time as
they came in his way. From this time forth he wrote as does one who has
reconciled himself to the fact that there are no more days to be lost if
he intends, before the sun be set, to accomplish an appointed task. He
had already compiled the De Oratore, the De Republica, and the De
Legibus. Out of the many treatises which we have from Cicero's hands,
these are they which are known as the works of his earlier years. He
commenced the year with an inquiry, De Optimo Genere Oratorum, which he
intended as a preface to the