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 hi