s paid about one hundred and eighty
pounds for some statues from Megara which his friend had purchased for
him. At the same time he thanks him by anticipation for some busts of
Hermes, in which the pedestals were of marble from Pentelicus, and the
heads of bronze. They had not come to hand when he next writes: "I am
looking for them," he says, "most anxiously;" and he again urges
diligence in looking for such things. "You may trust the length of my
purse. This is my special fancy." Shortly after Atticus has found
another kind of statue, double busts of Hermes and Hercules, the god of
strength; and Cicero is urgent to have them for his lecture-room. All
the same he does not forget the books, for which he is keeping his odds
and ends of income, his "little vintages," as he calls them--possibly
the money received from a small vineyard attached to his
pleasure-grounds. Of books, however, he had an ample supply close at
home, of which he could make as much use as he pleased, the splendid
library which Lucullus had collected. "When I was at my house in
Tusculum," he writes in one of his treatises, "happening to want to make
use of some books in the library of the young Lucullus, I went to his
villa, to take them out myself, as my custom was. Coming there I found
Cato (Cato was the lad's uncle and guardian), of whom, however, then I
knew nothing, sitting in the library absolutely surrounded with books of
the Stoic writers on philosophy."

When Cicero was banished, the house at Tusculum shared the fate of the
rest of his property. The building was destroyed. The furniture, and
with it the books and works of art so diligently collected, were stolen
or sold. Cicero thought, and was probably right in thinking, that the
Senate dealt very meanly with him when they voted him something between
four and five thousand pounds as compensation for his loss in this
respect. For his house at Formiae they gave him half as much. We hear of
his rebuilding the house. He had advertised the contract, he tells us in
the same letter in which he complains of the insufficient compensation.
Some of his valuables he recovered, but we hear no more of collecting.
He had lost heart for it, as men will when such a disaster has happened
to them. He was growing older too, and the times were growing more and
more troublous. Possibly money was not so plentiful with him as it had
been in earlier days. But we have one noble monument of the man
connected with the