Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 29, 2025
There is a brief and casual allusion to him in one of Cicero's letters of the year 54 B.C.: yet it speaks of "poems," not the single great poem which we know; and most editors agree that the text of the passage is corrupt, and must be amended by the insertion of a non, though they differ on the important detail of the particular clause in which it should be inserted.
I will tell you briefly, in your ear. With that pearl-powder they cover the paganism that is dearer to them than the glory of Christ. To Erasmus Cicero's style is by no means the ideal one. He prefers something more solid, succinct, vigorous, less polished, more manly.
They did him good, in the same way that the making of many shoes would have done him good had he been a shoemaker. In catching fishes and riding after foxes he could not give his mind to the occupation, so as to abstract his thoughts. But Cicero's de Natura Deorum was more effectual.
The matter would be one to us but of little moment, were it not that Cicero's character for honesty as a politician depends on the truth or falsehood of his belief in Pompey. Pompey had been almost miraculously fortunate up to this period of his life's career. He had done infinitely valuable service to the State. He had already crushed the pirates.
Dora gives in too much to May, in place of taking the child from her books, on which naturally she is inclined to fall back. Dora has become her audience, and listens to her performances even aids and abets them. I caught them at it yesterday. First May actually declaimed several paragraphs from a speech of Cicero's, and next she got Dora to repeat after her the most crabbed of the Greek verbs.
When I think how impossible it would be for me to repeat this oft-told tale of Cicero's life without a crowd of books within reach of my hand, I can easily understand why Cicero was silent at Thessalonica and Dyrrachium.
But because Cicero's honesty was abnormal, we are first surprised, and then, suspecting little deviations, rise up in wrath against him, because in the midst of Roman profligacy he was not altogether a Puritan in his money matters. Cicero is known to us in three great capacities: as a statesman, an advocate, and a man of letters.
Whether we blame him or praise him, we can hardly refrain from feeling that his impatience was grotesque. There certainly was no desire on Cicero's part either to go to Cilicia or to remain there, and of all his feelings that which prompted him never to be far absent from Rome was the most characteristic of the man.
And all Cicero's friends, judging Caesar's sentence most expedient for Cicero, because he would incur the less blame if the conspirators were not put to death, chose rather the latter; so that Silanus, also, changing his mind, retracted his opinion, and said he had not declared for capital, but only the utmost punishment, which to a Roman senator is imprisonment.
It was the ingratitude of his political friends, his "boni" and his "optimates," of Pompey as their head, which tried him the sorest; but he was always forgiving them, forgiving Pompey as the head of them, because he knew that, were he to be severed from them, then the political world must be closed to him altogether. Of Cicero's strength or Cicero's weakness Pompey seems to have known nothing.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking