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Updated: June 10, 2025
Take now from me, as from a late born Homeric Melanthius, a small offering from my flock of goats, and at the same time learn a lesson in brevity. He who wishes to form a flock of goats should consider in choosing them: first of all that they are of an age capable of breeding, and that for some time to come, for a tiro is more useful for that purpose than a veteran.
The paragraph is one never to be forgotten, and not easy to be refuted or qualified. No intelligent tiro in history can read that page without being set a-thinking, without feeling that he has a formidable problem to solve. Tens of thousands of young minds must have had that deeply-coloured picture of Rome visibly before them in many a Protestant home in England and in America.
One enthusiastic advocate, Wieland, goes so far as to wish that this kind of evidence could, in the case of such a man as Cicero, have been "cooked", to use a modern phrase: that we could have had only a judicious selection from this too truthful mass, of correspondence; that his secretary, Tiro, or some judicious friend, had destroyed the whole packet of letters in which the great Roman bemoaned himself, during his exile from Rome, to his wife, to his brother, and to Atticus.
The veriest tiro in criticism who knows anything of the subject in hand must perceive, what is certainly not beyond a schoolboy's range of vision, that the metre and the language of this play are in great part so like the language and the metre of Fletcher that the first and easiest inference would be to assume the partnership of that poet in the work.
Tiro was taken ill, and Cicero was obliged to leave him at Patræ, in Greece. Whence he had come to Cicero we do not know, or when; but he had not probably fallen under his master's peculiar notice before the days of the Cilician government, as we find that on his arrival at Brundisium he writes to Atticus respecting him as a person whom Atticus had not much known.
The correspondence of Cicero, as preserved for us by his freedman Tiro, does not open till the thirty-ninth year of the orator's life, and is so strictly contemporary, dealing so exclusively with the affairs of the moment, that little light is thrown by it on his previous life. It begins in B.C. 68, and between that date and B.C. 65 there are only eleven letters.
These were alleged as the fairest reasons for the divorce. But Terentia, who denied them all, had the most unmistakable defense furnished her by her husband himself, who not long after married a young maiden for the love of her beauty, as Terentia upbraided him; or as Tiro, his emancipated slave, has written, for her riches, to discharge his debts.
I. Those addressed to Tiro are earlier than that of Quintus, because they refer to a promised emancipation, while that of Quintus speaks of it as accomplished. II. The letter of Quintus is after the emancipation of his own freedman Statius, which apparently took place B.C. 59. III. Quintus is at a distance from Italy, and is looking forward to rejoin his brother and family.
I rejoice not that you are troubled in your affairs, but that such an inhuman overseer as Tiro, a man wholly unworthy the kindness and indulgence with which you have treated him, should at length be overtaken by a just retribution.
But he seems to have had some wit. Tiro has been made a freedman, and has bought a farm for himself. Young Marcus from whom Tiro has asked for some assistance which Marcus cannot give him jokes with him as to his country life, telling him that he sees him saving the apple-pips at dessert. Of the subsequent facts of the life of young Marcus we do not know much.
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