is certainly somewhat subtle;
but Cicero means that Atticus had not interested himself in his affairs
as much as he would have felt bound to do, if he (Cicero) had been less
remiss in the duties of friendship.

To another correspondent, his wife Terentia, he poured out his heart yet
more freely. "Don't think," he writes in one of his letters to her,
"that I write longer letters to others than to you, except indeed I have
received some long communication which I feel I must answer. Indeed I
have nothing to write; and in these days I find it the most difficult of
duties. Writing to you and to my dearest Tullia I never can do without
floods of tears. I see you are utterly miserable, and I wanted you to be
completely happy. I might have made you so. I could have made you had I
been less timid.... My heart's delight, my deepest regret is to think
that you, to whom all used to look for help, should now be involved in
such sorrow, such distress! and that I should be to blame, I who saved
others only to ruin myself and mine!... As for expenditure, let others,
who can if they will, undertake it. And if you love me, don't distress
your health, which is already, I know, feeble. All night, all day I
think of you. I see that you are undertaking all imaginable labors on my
behalf; I only fear that you will not be able to endure them. I am aware
that all depends upon you. If we are to succeed in what you wish and are
now trying to compass, take care of your health." In another he writes:
"Unhappy that I am! to think that one so virtuous, so loyal, so honest,
so kind, should be so afflicted, and all on my account. And my dearest
Tullia, too, that she should be so unhappy about a father in whom she
once found so much happiness. And what shall I say about my dear little
Cicero? That he should feel the bitterest sorrow and trouble as soon as
he began to feel any thing! If all this was really, as you write, the
work of fate, I could endure it a little more easily; but it was all
brought about by my fault, thinking that I was loved by men who really
were jealous of me, and keeping aloof from others who were really on my
side."

This is, perhaps, a good opportunity of saying something about the lady
herself. Who she was we do not certainly know. There was a family of the
name in Rome, the most notable of whom perhaps was the Terentius
Varro[7] whose rashness brought upon his country the terrible disaster
of the defeat of Cannae. She had a h