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Updated: May 4, 2025
Cicero therefore retired to Athens, where he spent six months studying philosophy with Antiochus the Academic, and with Zeno and Phaedrus who were both Epicureans. His brother Quintus and his friend Atticus were fellow-students with him.
Atticus had a taste for such compositions. Atticus is making in his house something like what Cicero had made in his, and called his academia or gymnasium. Your letter, in which you inclose copies of his letters, has made me realize that my brother Quintus's feelings have undergone many alternations, and that his opinions and judgments have varied widely from time to time.
We have a correspondence with Poetus which always typifies hilarity of spirits. There is a discussion, of which we have but the one side, on "double entendre" and plain speaking. Poetus had advocated the propriety of calling a spade a spade, and Cicero shows him the inexpediency. Then we come suddenly upon his letter to Atticus, written on the 7th of April, three weeks after the fall of Cæsar.
And then he goes on: "You perceive that, in accordance with the decree of the Senate, the province has to be occupied." His next letter on the subject was written to Atticus while he was still in Italy, but when he had started on his journey. "In your farewell to me," he says, "I have seen the nature of your love to me. I know well what is my own for you.
Of these we hear nothing, because he was too wise to have an Atticus to whom he wrote everything, or too wary to write letters upon business which should be treasured for the curiosity of after-ages.
According to the rigor of the law, the emperor might have asserted his claim, and the prudent Atticus prevented, by a frank confession, the officiousness of informers. But the equitable Nerva, who then filled the throne, refused to accept any part of it, and commanded him to use, without scruple, the present of fortune.
Of the latter several collections were made after his death, and were extant in the second century; but none are now preserved, except a few brief notes to Cicero, of which copies were sent by him at the time to Atticus.
Shortly afterward Tullia, who could have been little more than thirty, died, to the inconsolable grief of her father. "My grief," he writes to Atticus, "passes all consolation. Yet I have done what certainly no one ever did before, written a treatise for my own consolation.
His friend Atticus collected for him everywhere manuscripts, paintings, statuary; though for sculpture he professes not to care much, except for such subjects as might form appropriate decorations for his palaestra and his library.
The censure to which Atticus is subjected throughout this letter is that which a thoughtful, hesitating, scrupulous man is so often disposed to address to himself.
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