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It has been argued that he must have been driven to take fees and bribes and indirect payments, because he says that he wanted money. It was natural that he should occasionally want money, and yet be in the main indifferent. The incoming of a regular revenue was not understood as it is with us. A man here and there might attend to his money, as did Atticus.
Some of the soldiers came to him, asking him to avenge his uncle's death; but he was too prudent as yet to declare any purpose of revenge. Not long after Cæsar's death Cicero left Rome, and spent the ensuing month travelling about among his different villas. On the 14th of April he writes to Atticus, declaring that whatever evil might befall him he would find comfort in the ides of March.
His going was narrowly accompanied; by one Senator, Cocceius Nerva, formerly Consul, and accomplished in the knowledge of the laws; and, besides Sejanus, by one dignified Roman knight, Curtius Atticus. The rest were men of letters, chiefly Greeks; whose conversation pleased and amused him.
In the city of Pericles, they saw the play of "Antigone" in the theatre of Herod Atticus. On visiting the Parthenon, with its marvellous sculpture, which Turkish soldiers had so often used as a target, they found that the chief inhabitants of the ruin were crows. They met the missionaries who were influential in the making of the new Grecian nation.
We find from his own words, in a letter to Atticus written in the year but one after his Consulship, 61 B.C., that as Consul he made twelve public addresses. Each of them must have been a work of labor, requiring a full mastery over the subject in hand, and an arrangement of words very different in their polished perfection from the generality of parliamentary speeches to which we are accustomed.
Cicero says in his reply to Atticus that the copies have already been given to the public, and that, indeed, he is not anxious on Tubero's behalf. Early in this year he had divorced Terentia, and seems at once to have married Publilia. Publilia had been his ward, and is supposed to have had a fortune of her own. He explains his own motives very clearly in a letter to his friend Plancius.
Of the enemy were slain ten thousand. There fell of our men three hundred and forty, amongst these Aulus Atticus, commander of a cohort; one by his own youthful heart, as also by a fiery horse, hurried into the midst of the enemies. It was indeed a night of great joy to the conquerors, both from victory and spoil.
Descending from the heights of the Acropolis we entered the ruins of the Odeon of Herodus Atticus which lay at the base of the Acropolis. This theatre had a stone floor, a stone stage, and tiers of stone seats capable of seating an audience of six thousand, and was covered with a cedar roof. Now the roof is completely gone and the seats are in partial ruin.
Diamonds can only be polished by their own dust, and are only shaped by the friction of other diamonds; and so it happens with literary men and artists. A meeting of this nature has been recorded by CICERO, which himself and ATTICUS had with VARRO in the country. Varro arriving from Rome in their neighbourhood somewhat fatigued, had sent a messenger to his friends.
He was going after Pompey, not for the sake of Pompey, not for the sake of the Republic, but for loyalty. He was going because Atticus had told him to go. But as he is going there came fresh ground for grief. He writes to Atticus about the two boys, his son and nephew. The one is good by nature, and has not yet gone astray.
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