imagine that their
noise would depreciate the value of houses on the great roads. The
callers and clients would be here of a morning, as in the house within
the walls; the bore might be met not only in the Via Sacra, like
Horace's immortal friend, but wherever the stream of life hurried with
its busy eddies[386]. Lucilius drew a graphic picture of this feverish
life, which is fortunately preserved; it refers of course to a time
before Cicero's birth (Fragm. 9, Baehrens):

nunc vero a mani ad noctem, festo atque profesto,
totus item pariter populus, plebesque patresque,
iactare indu foro se omnes, decedere nusquam:
uni se atque eidem studio omnes dedere et arti,
verba dare ut oaute possint, pugnare dolose:
blanditia certare, bonum simulare virum se:
insidias facere, ut si hostes sint omnibus omnes.

That this exciting social atmosphere, with its jostling and
over-reaching in the Forum, and its callers and dinner-parties in the
house, had some sinister influence on men's tempers and nerves, there
can be no doubt. Cicero dearly loved the life of the city, but he paid
for it by a sensibility which is constantly apparent in his letters,
and diminished his value as a statesman. When he wrote from Cilicia to
his more youthful friend Caelius, urging him to stick to the city, in
words that are almost pathetic, it never occurred to him that he was
prescribing exactly that course of treatment which had done himself
much damage[387]. The clear sight and strong nerve of Caesar, as
compared with so many of his contemporaries, was doubtless largely due
to the fact that between 70 and 50 B.C., i.e. in the prime of life, he
spent some twelve of the twenty years in the fresher air of Spain and
Gaul. Some men were fairly worn out with dissipation and the resulting
ennui, and could get no relief even in a country villa. Lucretius has
drawn a wonderful picture of such an unfortunate, who hurries from
Rome into the country, and finding himself bored there almost as soon
as he arrives, orders out his carriage to return to the city. To fill
oneself with good things, yet never to be satisfied (explere bonis
rebus, satiareque nunquam), was even for the true Epicurean a most
dismal fate.[388]

But there was at this time, and had been for many generations, a
genuine desire to escape at times from town to country; and Cicero, in
spite of his pathetic exhortation to Caelius, was himself a keen
lover of the ease and leisure which h