ays
spent together by the two friends--so alike in their private tastes and
habits, so far apart in their chosen course of life--when they met there
in the brief holidays which Cicero stole from the law-courts and the
Forum, and sauntered in the shady walks, or lounged in the cool library,
in that home of lettered ease, where the busy lawyer and politician
declared that he forgot for a while all the toils and vexations of public
life.

[Footnote 1: Near the modern town of Frascati. But there is no certainty
as to the site of Cicero's villa.]

He had his little annoyances, however, even in these happy hours of
retirement. Morning calls were an infliction to which a country gentleman
was liable in ancient Italy as in modern England. A man like Cicero was
very good company, and somewhat of a lion besides; and country neighbours,
wherever he set up his rest, insisted on bestowing their tediousness on
him. His villa at Formiae, his favourite residence next to Tusculum, was,
he protested, more like a public hall. Most of his visitors, indeed, had
the consideration not to trouble him after ten or eleven in the forenoon
(fashionable calls in those days began uncomfortably early); but there
were one or two, especially his next-door neighbour, Arrius, and a
friend's friend, named Sebosus, who were in and out at all hours: the
former had an unfortunate taste for philosophical discussion, and was
postponing his return to Rome (he was good enough to say) from day to day
in order to enjoy these long mornings in Cicero's conversation. Such are
the doleful complaints in two or three of the letters to Atticus; but,
like all such complaints, they were probably only half in earnest:
popularity, even at a watering-place, was not very unpleasant, and the
writer doubtless knew how to practise the social philosophy which he
recommends to others, and took his place cheerfully and pleasantly in the
society which he found about him--not despising his honest neighbours
because they had not all adorned a consulship or saved a state.

There were times when Cicero fancied that this rural life, with all its
refinements of wealth and taste and literary leisure, was better worth
living than the public life of the capital. His friends and his books, he
said, were the company most congenial to him; "politics might go to the
dogs;" to count the waves as they rolled on the beach was happiness; he
"had rather be mayor of Antium than consul at Rome"; "rath