to Brundisium after Pharsalia, and during his lengthened stay
there, he appears to have declined to allow her to come and see him.
Soon after his return to Rome, in September, B.C. 47, matters came to a
climax. Perhaps some of the mischief was caused by the mismanagement or
dishonesty of Terentia's steward, Philotimus, of whom we hear a good
deal in the letters from Cilicia: but whatever was the origin of the
quarrel, Cicero asserts that on his return he found his affairs in a
state of utter disorder. It may well have been that, like other
adherents to the losing cause, he had to suffer from loss of any
property that could be easily laid hands on in Rome, and that Terentia
had had no power to save it. But Cicero, rightly or wrongly, attributed
the embarrassment which he found awaiting him to his wife. He says in a
letter to Gnaeus Plancius:[21] "I should not have taken any new step at a
time of such general disaster had I not on my return found my private
affairs in as sorry a position as the public. The fact is, that when I
saw that, owing to the criminal conduct of those to whom my life and
fortunes ought, in return for my never-to-be-forgotten services, to have
been their dearest object, there was nothing safe within the walls of my
house, nothing that was not the subject of some intrigue, I made up my
mind that I must arm myself by the faithful support of new marriage
connexions against the perfidy of the old." This is a lame excuse for a
man of sixty separating from the companion of his whole manhood, and in
the eyes of Roman Society it was rendered still more questionable by a
prompt marriage with a young girl, rich, and his own ward: from whom,
however, he soon again divorced himself, angered, it is said, by her
want of feeling at the death of Tullia. Terentia long survived her
husband, living, we are told, to be over a hundred years old. Divorce
was, of course, not regarded in these days of the Republic as it had
once been, or as it is now among ourselves; still we should have been
glad, both for his fame and his happiness, if the few years remaining to
him had not had this additional cloud. A man of sixty embarking on such
matrimonial enterprise is not a dignified spectacle, or one pleasing to
gods and men.

The other correspondents may be dismissed in few words.

[Sidenote: P. Cornelius Lentulus Spinther.]

P. CORNELIUS LENTULUS SPINTHER, to whom some of the longest letters are
addressed, represents the hig