ncurred we do not know; and Quintus Cicero, of whose
sharp temper we hear so much, was on more than one occasion on the point
of a rupture with him. But his family life was generally as pleasing as
his connexion with his friends. With his mother, who lived to a great
age, he boasted that he had never been reconciled, because he had never
quarrelled. He was the only one who could get on with the crusty uncle
Caecilius. In the delicate matter of his sister Pomponia's differences
with her husband Quintus Cicero, he seems to have acted with kindness as
well as prudence; and though he married late in life (B.C. 56, when he
was in his fifty-third year), he appears to have made an excellent
husband to Pilia and a very affectionate father to his daughter. His
unwearied sympathy with the varied moods of Cicero--whether of
exultation, irritation, or despair--and the entire confidence which
Cicero feels that he will have that sympathy in every case, are
creditable to both. It is only between sincere souls that one can speak
to the other as to a second self, as Cicero often alleges that he does
to Atticus.

[Sidenote: Quintus Tullius Cicero.]

Of QUINTUS CICERO, the next most important correspondent in this volume,
we get a fairly clear picture. Four years younger than his famous
brother (b. B.C. 102), he followed him at the due distance up the ladder
of official promotion to the praetorship, to which he was elected in the
year of his elder's consulship. There, however, Quintus stopped. He
never seems to have stood for the consulship. He had no oratorical
genius to give him reputation in the forum, nor were his literary
productions of any value, either for style or originality. His abilities
for administration, as shewn in his three years' government of Asia,
appear to have been respectable, but were marred by faults of temper,
which too often betrayed him into extreme violence of language. In
military command he shewed courage and energy in defending his camp in
the rising of the Gauls in the winter of B.C. 54-53; but he spoilt the
reputation thus gained by the mistake committed in the autumn of B.C.
53, which cost the loss of a considerable number of troops, and all but
allowed the roving Germans to storm his camp. He remained another year
in Gaul, but did nothing to retrieve this mistake. In military affairs
fortune rarely forgives. In politics he seems to have contented himself
generally with saying ditto to his brother. And t