as he defended or attacked the men and
their acts. Cicero was anything but impartial; yet it is from what he
says that much of our picture of Caesar and Crassus, Pompeius, Antonius,
Catiline, Clodius, Cato, Brutus and a host of others are drawn. In all
the long gallery of portraits he has painted none is so sharp and vivid
as his own. It comes to us not only through his speeches but through all
his writings--and he wrote admirably on many philosophical and
semi-philosophical subjects--and above all through his letters. These
letters are addressed for the most part to his intimate friend the
banker Pomponius Atticus, but also to others including most of the
prominent men of his time, and to his daughter Tullia, to whom he was
devotedly attached. They give a day-to-day picture of the life of Rome
and also of the man who wrote them. Cicero was immersed, like most men
of his time, in politics. He rose, to his own ineffable delight
(a delight which he expresses again and again with childlike
complacency), to be consul. But the explanation of a character that at
times amused and at times exasperated his contemporaries, and has caused
the same mixture of feelings to much later admirers, is that he was, in
his essence, an artist. He wanted, as do many artists, to be and do
other things. He was more vain of his dubious success in politics than
of the splendour of his oratory or the beauty of his writing. In action
he was timid, uncertain, and quite unable to cope with the great
currents of his time, snobbish and constantly mistaken in his judgements
of people, and alternately elated and despairing in his view of public
events. When he takes up his pen he is a master.

[Illustration: CICERO]

Cicero was in some ways typical of the new men in Rome. He was born at
Arpinum, where his family belonged to the Italian middle class. His
parents were sufficiently well-to-do for the young man to receive an
excellent education, completed, like that of other well-bred young men
of the time, by attending lectures in Athens on literature and
philosophy. His father's death brought him a fortune that though not
large was sufficient, together with a small estate at Arpinum and a
house in Rome.

[Illustration: ARPINUM.
Cicero's birthplace]

But Cicero had no mind for a life of fashionable idleness. For a
middle-class provincial there was little chance in politics, so long as
Sulla's laws stood. He therefore turned to the law courts. The