ling is left with the
reader that the orator optimus has been reached at last in Cicero's
mind.

We must remark, in the first place, that he has chosen for his friend,
to whom to address his piece, one whom he has only known late in life.
It was when he went to Cilicia as governor, when he was fifty-six years
old, that he was thrown by Atticus into close relations with Brutus. Now
he has, next to Atticus, become his most chosen friend. His three next
treatises, the Orator, the Tusculan Disquisitions, and the De Natura
Deorum, have all been graced, or intended to be graced, by the name of
Brutus. And yet, from what we know, we can hardly imagine two men less
likely to be brought together by their political ambition. The one
compromising, putting up with the bad rather than with a worse, knowing
that things were evil, and contented to accept those that were the least
so; the other strict, uncompromising, and one who had learned lessons
which had taught him that there was no choice among things that were
bad! And Brutus, too, had told Cicero that his lessons in oratory were
not to his taste. There was a something about Cicero which enabled him
to endure such rebukes while there was aught worthy of praise in the man
who rebuked him; and it was to this something that his devotion was
paid. We know that Brutus was rapacious after money with all the greed
of a Roman nobleman, and we know also that Cicero was not. Cicero could
keep his hands clean with thousands around him, and with thousands going
into the pockets of other men. He could see the vice of Brutus, but he
did not hate it. He must have borne, too, with something from Atticus of
the same kind. The truth seems to me that to Cicero there was no horror
as to greediness, except to greed in himself. He could hate it for
himself and yet tolerate it in others, as a man may card-playing, or
rackets, or the turf. But he must have known that Brutus had made
himself the owner of all good gifts in learning, and took him to his
heart in consequence. In no other way can I explain to myself the
feeling of subservience to Brutus which Cicero so generally expresses:
it exists in none other of his relations of life. Political subservience
there is to Pompey; but he can laugh at Pompey, and did not dedicate to
him his treatises De Republica, or De Legibus. To Appius Claudius he was
very courteous. He thought badly of Appius, but hardly worse than he
ought to have done of Brutus. Of Cae