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Updated: June 29, 2025
So the oration goes on to the end. He asserts, addressing himself to Piso, that if he saw him and Gabinius crucified together, he did not know whether he would be most delighted by the punishment inflicted on their bodies or by the ruin of their reputation. He declares that he has prayed for all evil on Piso and Gabinius, and that the gods have heard him, but it has not been for death, or sickness, or for torment, that he had prayed, but for such evils as have in truth come upon them. Two Consuls sent with large armies into two of the grandest provinces have returned with disgrace. That one meaning Piso has not dared even to send home an account of his doings; and the other Gabinius has not had his words credited by the Senate, nor any of his requests granted! He Cicero, had hardly dared to hope for all this, but the gods had done it for him! The most absurd passage is that in which he tells Piso that, having lost his army which he had done he had brought back nothing in safety but that "old impudent face of his." Altogether it is a tirade of abuse very inferior to Cicero's dignity. Le Clerc, the French critic and editor, speaks the truth when he says, "Il faut avouer qu'il manque surtout de modération, et que la gravité d'un orateur consulaire y fait trop souvent place
Erasmus he had attacked for venturing to throw doubts upon the suitability of Cicero's Latin as a vehicle of modern thought; this quarrel was over a question of form; and now Scaliger went a step farther, and, albeit he knew little of the subject in hand, published a book of Esoteric Exercitations to show that the De Subtilitate of Cardan was nothing but a tissue of nonsense.
This was not published until Antony had left Rome; but it is composed as if it had been delivered immediately after the speech which provoked it. Never in all the history of eloquence has a traitor been so terribly denounced, an enemy so mercilessly scourged. It has always been considered by critics as Cicero's crowning masterpiece.
To be hopeful and then tremulous; to be eager after success and then desponding; to have believed readily every good and then, as readily, evil; to have relied implicitly on a man's faith, and then to have turned round and declared how he had been deceived; to have been very angry and then to have forgiven this seems to have been Cicero's nature.
These would have given me, I fancy, a more vivid impression of two periods of Roman history than I now possess. Ferrero, who is imparting a fresh interest to the last period of the Roman republic, owes a part of his success, I think, to his thorough digestion and effective use of Cicero's letters, which have the faculty of making one acquainted with Cicero just as if he were a modern man.
The Epistolae ad Familiares include, besides Cicero's own letters, a large number of letters addressed to him by various correspondents; a whole book, and that not the least interesting, consists of those sent to him during his Cilician proconsulate by the brilliant and erratic young aristocrat, Marcus Caelius Rufus, who was the temporary successor of Catullus as the favoured lover of Clodia.
Cicero was of an equestrian family, which means as much as though we were to say among ourselves that a man had been born a gentleman and nothing more. An "eques" or knight in Cicero's time became so, or might become so, by being in possession of a certain income. The title conferred no nobility.
Observing in Number 323 of the MIRROR, an article respecting blue, as the appointed colour for the clothes of certain descriptions of persons, it may, perhaps, not be wholly irrelevant to observe that Bentley, in his "Dissertation on Phalaris," page 258, mentions blue as the costume of his guards, and quotes Cicero's "Tusculan Questions," lib. 5, for his authority.
A Gaul carried the letter, and fastened it by a line to his javelin, which he flung over Cicero's rampart. The javelin stuck in the side of one of the towers and was unobserved for several days. The besiegers were better informed. They learnt that Caesar was at hand, that he had but a handful of men with him.
There is extant a letter addressed to Octavian supposed to have been written by Cicero, and sometimes printed among his works which, if written by him, must have been composed about this time. It no doubt was a forgery, and probably of a much later date; but it serves to show what were the feelings presumed to have been in Cicero's bosom at the time.
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