s are sometimes familiar and playful,
sometimes angry and indignant. Some of them are careful and elaborate
state papers, others mere formal introductions and recommendations.
Business, literature, and philosophy all have their share in them; and,
what is so rare in ancient literature, the family relations of the
writer, his dealings with wife, son, and daughter, brother and nephew,
and sons-in-law, are all depicted for us, often with the utmost
frankness. After reading them we seem to know Cicero the man, as well as
Cicero the statesman and orator. The eleven letters which precede the
consulship are happily, from this point of view, addressed to Atticus.
For it was to Atticus that he wrote with the least concealment, and with
the confidence that any detail, however small, which concerned himself
would be interesting to his correspondent. It is well, therefore, that,
though we thus come into his life when it was more than half over, we
should at once hear his genuine sentiments on whatever subjects he may
be speaking. Besides his own, we have about ninety letters to Cicero
from some of the chief men of the day--Pompey, Caesar, Cato, Brutus,
Antony, and many others. They are of very various excellence. The best
of them are by much less known men. Neither Pompey nor Caesar were good
letter-writers, or, if the latter was so, he was too busy to use his
powers.

[Sidenote: Cicero's position previous to the beginning of the
Correspondence in B.C. 68.]

[Sidenote: Quaestor, B.C. 75.]

The letters begin, then, in B.C. 68, when Cicero was in his
thirty-seventh year. He was already a man of established reputation both
as a pleader and a writer. Rhetorical treatises (B.C. 86), translations
from Xenophon and Plato (B.C. 84), and from the poems of Aratus (B.C.
81), had given evidence of a varied literary interest and a promise of
future eminence, while his success as an advocate had led to the first
step in the official _cursus honorum_ by his becoming a quaestor in B.C.
75. The lot assigned Lilybaeum as his sphere of work, and though the
duties of a quaestor in Sicily were not such as to bring a man's name
much before the Roman public, Cicero plumes himself, as was not unusual
with him, on the integrity and energy which he displayed in his
administration. He has indeed the honesty to tell against himself the
story of the acquaintance who, meeting him at Puteoli on his return
journey, asked him what day he had left Rome and what