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It appears that little value was then put upon the fashion of the plate, which probably was but rude: the weight was chiefly considered. *"She return again to some of her own, in which she remaineth so long as she pleaseth." Surely one may say of such a guest, what Cicero says to Atticus, on occasion of a visit paid him by Cæsar.
The brave Gaul, who had done his best to defend his country and had carried himself to the last with a fine gallantry, was kept by his conqueror six years in chains and then strangled amid the glories of that conqueror's triumph, a signal instance of the mercy which has been attributed to Cæsar as his special virtue. In this year, too, Cicero's dialogues with Atticus, De Legibus, were written.
It is thus the next letter begins, after Cæsar's death, and the person he refers to is Matius, Cæsar's friend; but in three weeks the world had become used to Cæsar's death. The scene had passed away, and the inhabitants of Rome were already becoming accustomed to his absence. But there can be no doubt as to Cicero's presence at Cæsar's fall. He says so clearly to Atticus.
On the banks of the Rubicon he never thinks of Plutarch's lively description, or of the stern conciseness of the Commentaries, or of those letters to Atticus which so forcibly express the alternations of hope and fear in a sensitive mind at a great crisis. His only authority for the events of the civil war is Lucan. All the best ancient works of art at Rome and Florence are Greek.
"By no means!" replied Varro, "for I deem him to be a whimsical man to write what he wishes to suppress. The conversation then took its natural turn by Atticus having got rid of the political anxiety of Cicero.
I'll call myself Lælius and you Atticus, but I will use neither my own handwriting nor seal, if the letter happens to be such as I should not wish to fall into the hands of a stranger. Diodotus is dead; he has left me perhaps 1,000 sestertia. Bibulus has postponed the elections to the 18th of October, in an edict expressed in the vein of Archilochus.
Cicero, writing to his friend Atticus, when he was about to send his son to Athens, inquires whether he can have credit upon Athens for what money his son may have occasion for, or whether the young man must carry it with him in specie.
Yet it was a "locus amoenus, et in mari ipso, qui et Antio et Circeiis aspici possit. " It suited his mood, and here he stayed long, writing letter after letter to Atticus about the erection of a shrine to the lost one in some gardens to be purchased near Rome.
Or, if ancora sublata be read, "when the anchor was already weighed." In either case it means "just as you were starting." Cicero was probably sending it, whichever it was, to Atticus to be copied by his librarii, and published.
The letters to Atticus and those Ad Diversos have generally been published separately. For the ordinary purpose of literary pleasure they may perhaps be best read in that way. The tone of them is different. The great bulk of the correspondence is political, or quasi-political.
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