73
" 17 74
" 18 75
" 19 76
" 20 77
" 21 79
" 22 80
" 23 82
" 24 84
" 25 85
" 26 86
" 27 87
Att. IV. 1 89
" 2 90
" 3 91
" 4a 100
" 4b 106
" 5 107
" 6 109
" 7 110
" 8a 111
" 8b 117
" 9 121
" 10 120
" 11 123
" 12 124
" 13 129
" 14 137
" 15 143
" 16} 142, 148, 157
" 17}
" 18 153

INTRODUCTION

[Sidenote: Ground covered by the Correspondence.]

The correspondence of Cicero, as preserved for us by his freedman Tiro,
does not open till the thirty-ninth year of the orator's life, and is so
strictly contemporary, dealing so exclusively with the affairs of the
moment, that little light is thrown by it on his previous life. It does
not become continuous till the year after his consulship (B.C. 62).
There are no letters in the year of the consulship itself or the year of
his canvass for the consulship (B.C. 64 and 63). It begins in B.C. 68,
and between that date and B.C. 65 there are only eleven letters. We
have, therefore, nothing exactly contemporaneous to help us to form a
judgment on the great event which coloured so much of his after life,
the suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy and the execution of the
conspirators, in the last month of his consulship. But setting aside the
first eleven letters, we have from that time forward a correspondence
illustrating, as no other document in antiquity does, the hopes and
fears, the doubts and difficulties, of a keen politician living through
the most momentous period of Roman history, the period of the fall of
the Republic, beginning with Pompey's return from the East in B.C. 62,
and ending with the appearance of the young Octavian on the scene and
the formation of the Triumvirate in B.C. 43, of whose victims Cicero was
one of the first and most illustrious. It is by his conduct and speeches
during this period that Cicero's claim to