d or
young, cared for nothing but its fish-ponds and its amusements.

Cicero spent the earlier part of the year out of Rome, among his various
villas--at Tusculanum, at Antium, and at Formiae. The purport of all his
letters at this period is the same--to complain of the condition of the
Republic, and especially of the treachery of his friend Pompey. Though
there be much of despondency in his tone, there is enough also of high
spirit to make us feel that his literary aspirations are not out of
place, though mingled with his political wailing. The time will soon
come when his trust even in literature will fail him for a while.

Early in the year he declares that he would like to accept a mission to
Egypt, offered to him by Caesar and Pompey, partly in order that he might
for a while be quit of Rome, and partly that Romans might feel how ill
they could do without him. He then uses for the first time, as far as I
am aware, a line from the Iliad,[252] which is repeated by him again and
again, in part or in whole, to signify the restraint which is placed on
him by his own high character among his fellow-citizens. "I would go to
Egypt on this pleasant excursion, but that I fear what the men of Troy,
and the Trojan women, with their wide-sweeping robes, would say of me."
And what, he asks, would the men of our party, "the optimates," say? and
what would Cato say, whose opinion is more to me than that of them all?
And how would history tell the story in future ages? But he would like
to go to Egypt, and he will wait and see. Then, after various questions
to Atticus, comes that great one as to the augurship, of which so much
has been made by Cicero's enemies, "quo quidem uno ego ab istis capi
possim." A few lines above he had been speaking of another lure, that of
the mission to Egypt. He discusses that with his friend, and then goes
on in his half-joking phrase, "but this would have been the real thing
to catch me." Nothing caught him. He was steadfast all through,
accepting no offer of place from the conspirators by which his integrity
or his honor could be soiled. That it was so was well known to history
in the time of Quintilian, whose testimony as to the "repudiatus
vigintiviratus"--his refusal of a place among the twenty
commissioners--has been already quoted.[253] And yet biographers have
written of him as of one willing to sell his honor, his opinions, and
the commonwealth, for a "pitiful bribe;" not that he did do so, no