same
time with a humanity so real and in that day so rare, that it is not
without good cause that he has recently been called the most highly
cultured man of all antiquity.[169] Of Varro's numerous works we have
unluckily but few survivals; of Cicero's we have still such a mass
as will for ever provide ample material for studying the life, the
manners, the thought of his day.

A large part of this mass consists of the correspondence of which we
are making such frequent use in these chapters. Letter-writing is
perhaps the most pleasing and genuine of all the literary activities
of the time; men took pains to write well, yet not with any definite
prospect of publication, such as was the motive a century later in
the days of Seneca and Pliny. The nine hundred and odd letters of the
Ciceronian collection are most of them neither mere communications
nor yet rhetorical exercises, but real letters, the intercourse of
intimate friends at a distance, in which their inmost thoughts can
often be seen. Cicero is indeed apt to become rhetorical even in his
letters, when writing under excitement about politics; but the most
delightful letters in the collection are those in which he writes
to his friends in happy and natural language of his daily life and
occupations, his books, his villas, his children, his joys and
sorrows. It is strange that the great historian of Rome in our time
entirely failed to see the charm and the value of these letters, as of
all Cicero's writings; his countrymen have now agreed to differ from
him, and to restore a great writer to his true position.

In philosophical receptivity too the brightest and finest minds among
this aristocracy show an ability which is almost astonishing, when we
consider that there had been no education in Rome worth the name until
the second century B.C.[170] I use the word receptivity, because the
Romans of our period never really learnt to think for themselves; they
never grappled with a problem, or struck out a new line of thought.
But so far as we can judge by Cicero's philosophical works, the only
ones of his age which have come down to us, the power to read with
understanding and to reproduce with skill was unquestionably of a high
order. The opportunities for study were not wanting; private libraries
were numerous, and all Cicero's friends who had collected books were
glad to let him have the use of them.[171] Greek philosophers were
often domesticated in wealthy families