times is shown by the life of Cicero.

Cicero was born at Arpino, of a knightly family, highly respectable,
and well educated, but not rich. That he was able to pursue his
brilliant forensic and political career, was chiefly due to his
marriage to Terentia, who, although not very rich, had more than he,
and by her fortune enabled him to live at Rome. But it is well known
that after long living together happily enough, as far as can be
judged, Cicero and Terentia, already old, fell into discord and in 46
B.C. ended by being divorced. The reasons for the divorce are not
exactly clear, but from Cicero's letters it appears that financial
motives and disputes were not wanting. It seems that during the civil
wars Terentia refused to help Cicero with her money to the extent he
desired; that is to say, at some tremendous moment of those turbulent
years she was unwilling to risk all her patrimony on the uncertain
political fortune of her husband.

[Illustration: The so-called bust of Cicero. All but the head is
modern. Now in the Museo Capitolino, it was formerly in the Palazzo
Barberini.]

Cicero's divorce, obliging him to return the dower, reduced him to the
gravest straits, from which he emerged through another marriage. He
was the guardian of an exceedingly rich young woman, named Publilia,
and one fine day, at the age of sixty-three, he joined hands with this
seventeen-year-old girl, whose possessions were to rehabilitate the
great writer.

This conception of matrimony and of the family may seem unromantic,
prosaic, materialistic; but we must not suppose that because of it the
Romans failed to experience the tenderest and sweetest affections of
the human heart. The letters of Cicero himself show how tenderly even
Romans could love wife and children. Although they distrusted and
combatted as dangerous to the prosperity and well-being of the state
those dearest and gentlest personal affections that in our times
literature, music, religion, philosophy, and custom have educated,
encouraged, and exalted, as one of the supreme fountains of civil life,
should we therefore reckon them barbarians? We must not forget the
great diversity between our times and theirs. The confidence which
modern men repose in love as a principle, in its ultimate wisdom, in
its beneficial influence or the affairs of the world; in the idea that
every man has the right to choose for himself the person of the
opposite sex toward whom the