Storieta illustrated edition
by Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #21200.
The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 presents his surviving correspondence in chronological order, covering 68 to 52 B.C. Translated into readable English, it brings together letters to friends, political allies, relatives, and associates, along with correspondence from prominent figures of the Roman world. These documents offer access to Cicero as statesman, orator, author, husband, father, brother, and friend. Political affairs and public events stand beside family matters, business, literature, philosophy, introductions, recommendations, and personal confidences. The collection is especially valuable for the immediacy of its perspective: it records the hopes, anxieties, judgments, irritations, and enthusiasms of a leading Roman participant in a period of profound political change.
The tone varies widely. Letters to Atticus are spontaneous and revealing, while others are playful, indignant, formal, elaborate, or shaped as political documents. Cicero’s personality appears with unusual frankness, including his vanities and weaknesses as well as his affections and admiration. The translation is accompanied by notes intended to clarify people and events, while preserving the correspondence’s usefulness for biographical, social, historical, and literary study. This volume will appeal to readers interested in ancient Rome, political history, Latin literature, rhetoric, and the intimate texture of historical lives.
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We are such intimate friends that more than almost anyone else you can appreciate the grief as well as the actual public and private loss that the death of my cousin Lucius is to me. There is absolutely no gratification which any human being can receive from the kindly character of another that I have not been accustomed to receive from him. I am sure, therefore, that you will share my grief. For, in the first place, whatever affects me affects you; and in the second place, you have yourself lost in him a friend and connexion of the highest character and most obliging disposition, who was attached to you from personal inclination, as well as from my conversation.
As to what you say in your letter about your sister,[23] she will herself bear me witness what pains I have taken that my brother Quintus should show her proper affection. Thinking him somewhat inclined to be angry with her, I wrote to him in such a way as I thought would not hurt his feelings as a brother, while giving him some good advice as my junior, and remonstrating with him as being in the wrong. The result is that, from frequent letters since received from him, I feel confident that everything is as it ought and as we should wish it to be.
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