"MY FRIEND ATTICUS."  That is how the old satyr, Lucius Sulla,* presented me to his guests fifty years ago — more than fifty years ago. And that is how our young imperator, I am told, refers to me in his letters and conversation. Only Sulla said, "My young friend, Atticus." And Caesar, I suppose, says, or means to be understood as saying, "My venerable friend." That is one of the penalties of living to be seventy-seven. I am sorry for it. I never particularly wanted to be venerated.

There is another penalty in living so long. I have survived all the men I grew up with, and have seen them die — tragically enough, most of them, alas! Indeed, a little of me must have died with each one of them. Young Marius was the first, and if I live another year or so it looks as though Marcus and Quintus will not have been the last. A long procession. If my end should come tonight, I could not complain of being too suddenly confronted with dissolution; I have had plenty of practice in dying.

And if I have survived so many persons, I have also survived something a little more important. I have survived my country. The extraordinary young protιgι of Maecenas, who writes hexameters as even my dear Lucretius could not, put it in a single phrase in the lines he read to us last week: superavimus urbi. What new country will arise on the site of the Rome now dead I cannot tell. Events are hurrying on. Whether it will be my friend Marcus Antonius or my friend Caesar Octavian who will build the new state is of little moment. It will not be my sort of state, nor shall I live to see it.

To be sure, as things look now, I shall not have to live very long to witness the decision. The reports I have been receiving from the East — my informants have been accurate for a half century, so that I have abundant reason to trust them — the reports I have been receiving make it quite certain that Antonius will move westward to Thrace this next month and that Caesar will have to take up the challenge. There is a way out, at any rate for the present, but it can hardly be more than a truce. And it means the sacrifice of an admirable woman. Poor Octavia! A sweet and gentle creature. A thousand pities that she should be the pawn in such a struggle.

Saras writes that the Egyptian has no intention of letting Antonius fight if she can prevent it. I fancy she will not have the last word. After all, my son-in-law will count for something here.

And since I speak of my son-in-law, I ought to qualify what I have said before. I have survived those friends I knew as a boy and as a young man. Marius, Hortensius, Torquatus, the two Ciceros, Gaius Caesar — he is a god now, and I trust he has learned what he never possessed in life, the beatitude of indifference — Gnaeus Pompeius, Appius Claudius, Marcus Cato, Manius Lepidus, Aulus Hirtius — they all are gone, these friends of mine. But without arrogance I may say I never lacked the power of making new ones. For one thing, my good Nepos is, I am sure, my friend. Then there is that clever Spaniard, Balbus.

I think he is really attached to me, as he was to Caesar and Cicero. And Agrippa, to whom I gave my beloved child, was my friend before he became my son-in-law. I have a notion that the young stepson of Caesar — they have betrothed my baby granddaughter to him: honor enough for a mere Roman knight! — he, too, has become fond of me. A rather solemn boy, this nine-year-old Tiberius Nero, something new in the Claudian stock.

Well, Agrippa and Balbus are both out of Rome for a week or so, and in their absence there is no one to incite that silly Greek doctor to persecute me with his drugs and simples. I think, therefore, I shall give myself a respite for a while from the wretched pain that has so suddenly and unexpectedly begun to torture a peaceable Epicurean; one, moreover, who has scorned to consult a physician for a generation of mortal men. They tell me that if I don't eat regularly I shall die. That may be so. And if I do eat I am in agony for hours. This nonsense has got to end. When they come back, Agrippa and Balbus, I shall have it out with them. I can always deceive my darling Atticula about my condition. I am not sure I should have been so successful had her mother lived. Poor thing, she knew what illness was.

To be seventy-seven and to suffer excruciating pain in the bowels — those are two drastic reminders of mortality, the one of soul and the other of body. And when the atoms composing my soul — those of my body I suspect are good for little except some cosmic scrap heap — when my soul's atoms perform their famous swerve, I wonder what will happen to them. Certainly I could wish them a worse fate than to be recombined into the person of a man, even if the days he falls on are as troubled and bitter and bloody as those of my time.

Bitter and bloody and troubled they have been. I was a boy when old Marius rolled up along the Sacred Street in the Cimbrian triumph, but although I felt a personal connection with it, I remember with even greater clearness the street fights when Glaucia and Saturninus were taken and killed. That happened almost within the same year. And ever since that time up to the day when I am writing this, the one question in the mind of Romans is whether this or that man will be their master. At least, it will be a Roman master. That is something to be thankful for. Unless, indeed, Antonius foists the Egyptian's bastard on us. Who his father was I should hesitate to say. I am fairly certain I know who his father was not.

Strange that so many of them, these bloody and bitter men, should have been my friends even while they hated each other. I think they really were my friends. I have not escaped a little suspicion on that account. More than a little suspicion. Pollio said it courteously and Veratius said it spitefully: "There are two classes of men with whom one does not quarrel, prospective testators and indulgent creditors."

Would they have been my friends if I had been poor? Perhaps not. My life would have been different, of course, if my father had not left me a fortune and my uncle a still larger one, if I had no estates at Buthrotum, no house on the Quirinal, no establishment at Athens. But it was certainly not merely my wealth. After all, Crassus and Lentulus and Lucullus were far richer, and Marcus Cato almost as rich. These men had their friends, but I should say more men hated them than loved them. Few have hated me and many have loved me. If I were to write my epitaph, I might select that.

Evidently, men like me will soon be forgotten. My good Marcus Cicero was quite sure he would be famous forever. I am certain he will be.  Gaius Catullus was right. No Roman ever wrote or spoke, or ever will, as beautifully as Marcus Tullius did. Much good it will do the swerving atoms that once made up Marcus' soul!

I have no special desire to be remembered. I could scarcely be an Epicurean and desire it. And I must claim this much justice: I have made no strenuous effort to secure it. I might have bequeathed to my Atticula a waxen image with the titles and dates of my offices: Quintus Caecilius Q. f. Pomponianus Atticus, consul, praetor, tr. pl., quaestor — perhaps, imperator, legatus, tr. mil. That was attainable. Indeed, I had to make a distinct effort to avoid it. Or I might have written a few books, somewhat more substantial than the four or five scrolls I have amused myself with. I am not sure that my literary capacity is less than Varro's. Or else I might have built in Athens, or in Rome, structures that would perpetuate my name, a porticus Pomponiana or a theatrum Caecilianum. It would have been a foolish waste of money, and much that was better than money, my time and my peace of mind.

I am not so simple as to believe that I ever attained peace of mind. Only the gods have ataraxy, and to their blissful company I do not aspire. Gaius Caesar, it seems, is of them now. It is an interesting speculation to wonder how they get on, Caesar and the gods; Caesar was so very much of a man. In Homer's Olympus he would have been quite at home. I fear he will be bored in the intermundial spaces which, we are taught by our Master Epicurus, is the real abode of the gods.

No, I cannot assert that I ever attained ataraxy, or anything really like it. Much has disturbed me in my long life, much that a more fully initiated spirit might have borne without quivering. It broke my heart when I took leave of my boyhood companion, Marius, the brilliant young soldier who was to pay the penalty of being the son of the conqueror of the Cimbri. I never saw him again. I am not ashamed of the tears I wept then. After all, I was twenty-four. Rome lost much when he died. Whether he could have been used to advantage is more doubtful. He was terribly on the wrong side.

Then there were the dreadful days when I sought refuge in the house of Volumnius during the Terror. I can honestly say I was not afraid for my own life. But there were Pillia and Atticula. And quite apart from imminent danger to them or to me I discovered that even a life spent, as mine had been, in constant contemplation of cruelty and rapine had not been sufficiently hardened. It shook the pride in my humanity to see men hunt each other like wild beasts, sometimes without even the poor justification of vengeance or avarice.

That was a dreadful period. Whatever happens, I do not believe it will occur again, whether Antonius wins or Caesar. Occasionally, none the less, I wonder. There is a kind of relentless singleness of purpose in Octavian which will always discover a new reason for what he wishes done. And Antonius, drunk or sober, can be guilty of such extravagant enormities that I can readily see why the Dictator failed to choose him as his successor. Still, it is too recent, the Terror of ten years ago. After all, forty years elapsed between the Terror of Sulla and that of the Commission of Three. It must be remembered that I lived through both of them.

How can I explain that I survived when so many men perished ? We Epicureans do not deal with fate or with fortune. There are no favorites of the gods. I rallied Sulla on his title of Felix. He grinned at me and said it was worth six legions to be supposed to deserve it. But he took it seriously, I verily believe, for all that. Not good fortune was mine, nor yet uniformly good judgment, although I dare boast my judgment was as good as Marcus Cicero's and better than Pompeius'. I have made serious blunders. I was wrong enough about Caesar's conduct when he came back from Gaul, and about Marcus Brutus' character.

Certainly I should not think of rating myself on a par with most of the men I have called my friends, in force, in vigor of mind, or in talents. If I succeeded where they failed, it is, I believe, because, like Titus Lucretius, I had the best of guidance. Our Master Epicurus saved us from fear and the shadow of fear. That would have been enough in all conscience. But more than that, he taught us that life was a whole which could be fully grasped in the mind of any enlightened man. Perhaps the difference between me and these others — I was not the only Epicurean in Rome — was that I grasped it and held it. Most of them grasped it and lost it and spent their lives perpetually pursuing it.

I never broke faith with any man or woman. I never exploited man or woman. I took all that life could give me. I have neither sought unnecessary suffering nor avoided necessary pain.

And I have no intention of being bullied in my old age by an Agrigentine quack.

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I OWE MY UNCLE, Quintus Caecilius, a great deal. And I do not mean wholly or even chiefly the ten millions of sesterces and the establishment on the Quirinal that he left me, or the name that his testamentary adoption imposed on me. My friends in Greece have greatly misunderstood this matter. Adoptions at Rome — especially by will — are not quite the same things as they are in Athens or Ephesus or Alexandria. When the Comitia duly ratified my uncle's will, my name was thereafter carried on the census lists as Quintus Caecilius, but to the world I remained Titus Pomponius. It would have been silly to rename a man of fifty-three for purposes of ordinary social intercourse, and no one dreamed of doing it. So, Marcus Brutus became officially Quintus Caepio on the census lists when his uncle adopted him; but no one thought of turning the bearer of the most famous name in Rome into a man of another name, even though he was scarcely twenty-five and even though the Caepios were of ancient nobility. He was Marcus Brutus when he was born and he remained Marcus Brutus when, after Philippi, he drove his sword into his heart.

My uncle, Quintus Caecilius, whose son I became by process of law, was a strange person. He was rich, he was bad-tempered, he was sullen and unsocial; he was, I cannot deny it, avaricious. And he greatly increased his wealth, as I have increased mine, by being a banker, in which profession many of the qualities he possessed were not especially helpful. Certainly no man was less accommodating, no man seemed less willing to attract others to him, although the majority of moneylenders in Rome actively competed for the patronage of spendthrifts and investors.

What I learned from my uncle Quintus was, first of all, extreme care in business methods. He took enormous pains in his accounts. It was the only thing he loved to do and he did it himself. He would trust no slave to do it. Indeed, except for me, he allowed no man to look at his tablets. He said it was to keep the secrets of those who applied to him. That is nonsense. There was no secret about it. Everyone knew. People could scarcely help knowing. He took ample security and put his slaves and freedmen into possession at the first opportunity. The point was that he was by nature a secretive person and he enjoyed the actual management of his complicated affairs. I never saw wax tablets so carefully written.

I remember when that graceless young spendthrift, Lamia, sat in his anteroom while my uncle was transcribing into his records the two talents he lent him. Lamia rose a dozen times, bit his lips, broke out into exclamations of impatience, said he was in a great hurry and, really, he would trust my uncle's memory for the terms. My uncle imperturbably wrote on in his careful cursive, checked up each item, had Tyndarus, his man of affairs, weigh each piece painstakingly, compare his debit and credit tablets, as he always did, three times — he was superstitious about the number three — and acted as though Lamia were not present. Then the money was handed — not to Lamia; the young fop never carried anything that would disturb the plies of his toga — but to an attending slave, and my uncle, looking up, said dryly, "You understand one thing, Lucius Aelius, I never renew."

That was his principle. He never renewed. He lent for whatever period seemed to be needed. He never charged more interest than two and never less than one per cent a month. And on the due date he expected payment. If it was not forthcoming, he began his action the next law day. He never abated a jot of his demands. If he was paid — and generally he was paid, men feared him — he might, after an interval, lend again, but it would be a real interval. He was not easy to hoodwink. He had plenty of clients. Rome was always full of men who were land poor or property poor. They had abundant means, but they needed cash. They could easily and profitably have sold some part of their property, but this they could not persuade themselves to do. They were just the sort of persons who came to my uncle.

And he grew rich. He left, besides land, about thirteen million sesterces, most of which came to me. One quarter of it went to trusted freedmen and to my sister. My good Nepos declares that I reaped the reward of my piety. Be it so. I did not think of my conduct toward my uncle as a particular exemplification of piety. It never occurred to me to act otherwise. Nor was it difficult. His outbursts of temper were quite without any effect on me. I should as soon have been annoyed at the barking of Erotion, my Atticula's little Maltese dog. And my uncle never asked me to do anything that a man, and a nephew, might not properly do.

He was avaricious, I have said. That is certainly not an attractive quality. And he had a worse one. He was miserly. He hated spending money. His Quirinal estate was little better than a farm villa. There were no gardens. The trees around were very much like an unpruned little wood. There was practically no statuary, no painting, except the usual crude frescoes at the hearth and about the lararium. I have changed all that; within moderation, to be sure.

He was miserly in his daily life. He never gave banquets. He kept the old Roman habit of sitting at table — not reclining. I doubt whether meat was served at his Quirinal house once a month. The usual fare consisted of olives, mallows, and apples or other vegetables in season, washed down by a sharp Falernian. Nothing was more amusing than to watch Lucullus at my uncle's house. Lucullus was very nearly his sole intimate. And when I say amusing, I mean that Lucullus was amused, as well as I. He would go through the form of dilating on the particular taste of a vegetable marrow as though he were praising a new dish at a banquet of Crassus or of his own. My uncle would mutter, "Jeer, jeer away, my good friend. If you dine with me, you'll eat my dinner." It was a favorite phrase. Once he added: "If you want to eat peacock tongues, you can have them at home."

"So could you," said Lucullus, "if you ever came to dine with me."

"Thanks, I'll stay here where I can keep Syrian swine out."

"Each to his taste," laughed Lucullus. "I've met Roman swine in this house."

He meant Publius Clodius, of course, a man Lucullus did not exactly love.

And yet my uncle had traits not without a claim to admiration. His reputation as a harsh creditor was qualified by one thing: He never overreached anyone. He never lied. He never touched dirty money.

He never lent money on the prospect of an inheritance. He never subsidized a scheme of fraud. His investments were simple matters; bottomry loans on corn ships occasionally, but infrequently. Once he financed a Dionysiac troupe in Sicily. That was rather to oblige Metellus, a sort of kinsman since he was a clansman. It happened only once. My uncle used to chuckle over the fact that Metellus lost money on it, but he did not. It was the only kind of thing that did elicit a chuckle from him.

As a matter of fact, he could have been much richer than he was. Indeed, if he had chosen, since he was no extravagant voluptuary like Lucullus, nor an unscrupulous politician like Marcus Crassus, he might have been richer than either, by doing as they did and hundreds of others of their lass and ours. One source of wealth in those days he never used. He would take no blood money. I am glad to say I was never tempted to.

By blood money I mean money made by buying at auction the confiscated property of the victims of the Terror. Estates went cheap in the days of Sulla. His favorites wanted cash, not land or slaves — at any rate, not farm slaves. One picked up rare bargains in the Forum in the days after the slaughter on that dreadful November, exactly forty-nine years ago today. I was in Epirus, and my agent in Rome, my freedman Athamas, never forgave me for forbidding him to bid. "After all," he said quite rightly, "the proscribed men are dead anyway. You do them no good by letting the gang of Chrysogonus get the pickings." But neither I nor my uncle appeared at the public sales. Whether he abstained from squeamishness or prudence I am not sure. He said it was prudence. He was right in foreseeing Cato's investigations and Caesar's later attempt at expropriating the expropriators, but I believe he was better than he claimed to be. It was not a decent way to become rich.

Nor did he buy shares in the tax-farming societies. And that surely was not for love of the provincials whom the publicans oppressed. No, he simply did not like it. The profits lay too much in buying governors and juries, in feeing informers and hiring thugs. With all his professed contempt for patriotism and public business, he hated all the things that made Rome a nightmare in the days after Sulla; or during Sulla's rule, for that matter. I think he would have loved his country if his country had in his time been more lovable.

I have followed his precepts in many respects. My father died when I was scarcely twenty. For those days, I found myself more than well-to-do. My uncle's methods seemed to me the most reasonable, if I wished to increase my wealth. And I did wish it. Let my Stoic friends lick their chops over that.

Like my uncle, I made certain rules and adhered to them. I venture to say that my rules were better, if for nothing else than the rate of interest which I charged. He never took less than one per cent a month. I frequently took half that, and generally two-thirds. I hope I showed more courtesy to my clients than he did. But in one respect I was unyielding. I did not renew. If the terms had been agreed upon, they must be followed. I insisted on having the time of payment kept.

And I also hope the use I made of my money was somewhat more befitting a Roman and a man of humane education. If my uncle ever made a present, it has escaped all record. I don't believe he ever did; not a denarius. He gave presents to us, his family, on festive occasions, but that was rather the usual sort of exchange among kinsmen. Our presents to him were — I do not boast of it — richer than his to us.

Certainly I will not be charged with remissness here. I have always been ready to give without expectation of return, where need was. I have had my favorites in this, as the world knows. If I have preferred the city of Athens to other communities, it is a gesture of gratitude. Our Master, Epicurus, was an Athenian. At Athens, I enjoyed the loftiest and most stirring exaltation of which I believe any man is capable. To be sure, my feet never left the rocky soil of the city. My Pythagorean friends under similar circumstances would doubtless have been halfway to the empyrean.

And to Athens I have been generous. If effusive gratitude is a proof, I have been too generous. But I don't really think so. Athenians are lively and sprightly persons, likely to say "Thank you, a thousand times" when once would be enough. To read an honorary inscription at Athens is to learn how much can be made of very moderate services. Until I left Athens, just before Cicero's consulship, I would not let them put up statues in my honor. They have a considerable collection of them now. I am not proud of them as works of art.

Perhaps it was rather the opportuneness of my services than their quantity which gave them their value. When Sulla left Athens, it could not have been picked cleaner of transportable booty than if it had been cleared for migration. I gave them no money, but I lent it to them. Evidently I could not have given them as much as I could lend or cause to be lent to them. I charged no interest except what I had to pay to those to whom I pledged my credit. And here, as always, I announced that I would not renew. They had three years to pay.

That I helped them feed their citizens from time to time is something I hardly deserve credit for. It was an emergency. One does not see men starve with whom one has lived as long as I lived with my Athenians.

I have helped others in exactly the same way. Evidently I did not always say "Yes" to the demands made on me. I should have needed the touch of Midas to have satisfied everybody.

Even Marcus Cicero, the man who could properly ask most of me, asked too much at times. Doubtless he thought me lukewarm when I declined to lend him all that he asked, declined to throw all my fortunes into the scale that he pointed out. I think I gave at the right time and that I gave the right amount. Perhaps, as he believed, I could have bought off some of Clodius' pack. Doubtless Clodius himself might have been had for a price. But I knew too well that Caesar meant to discipline Marcus and that he intended — since Marcus would take no hint — to make him feel his fist. The money would have been wasted. I did not stint my funds when Cicero returned in what was almost a triumphal procession through Italy.

Few can know how difficult it was to resist the pressure that was put upon me. One thing, however, I had determined. I was not to be pushed into politics by my wealth, when I could not be pushed into it by ambition. And how they all played on me! "A hundred talents down now, and you can make what terms you will with the conqueror." It was only necessary to put in the place of the word "conqueror," "Cinna," "Caesar," "Pompeius," "Antonius," "Cassius," "Sextus," and the sentence tells the song that was dinned in my ears so often, in the tumultuous years in which my life has been spent. "A hundred talents can buy ships and men and provisions." "A hundred talents will give us credit for four hundred more." I remained deaf to all of them. Over and over again, I was warned that in the state of affairs at Rome there was no middle course. You must be for a man or against him.

Well, I have kept a middle course as far as the contestants for power were concerned. And I am still here in my house on the Quirinal, that was once the house of my uncle Quintus. To be sure, I shall quit it soon, but it will not be because Caesar rather than Antonius, or Antonius rather than Caesar, will be the master of the state. It will be an acute indigestion rather than an armed centurion who will turn me out of my house.

And if I steered a middle course, it was not because I had no political beliefs or because I concealed them. I was still within the age of the Edict when I discovered for myself that I must separate from the party of the Gracchans and of Marius, the party of my father and his friends. Rome has never been a democracy. I saw no prospect that it could be one. My reasoned conviction put me on the side of Sulla and the aristocratic theory of government. I avowed these views openly when the older Lepidus filled the city with riot and rapine, while his followers roared, "Down with the oligarchs! Down with the Sullan tyranny!" I did not pretend to change when Caesar and the scamp Publius declared that the city rabble was the Roman people, nor when Pompeius and his senators were scurrying with breakneck speed to the Adriatic ports out of the way of the Gallic legions.

I neither helped nor hindered the removal of Gaius Caesar, but I approved the short-lived attempt of Brutus to re-establish the senatorial government. However, I had no intention of becoming the Treasurer of the Liberators. They took it hard. Marcus Brutus, whose temper was always bad, snarled that if I would not join the group that was being formed to finance the state, I should have only myself to thank if I found how easily they could dispense with me. I was not offended.

For all his anger, Brutus was glad enough to accept my help when the scheme broke down and it behooved him to leave Italy to the Caesarians, rather more precipitously than became a praetor of the Roman people. He never quite forgave me. That is one of the difficulties with philosophical eclectics. They have so many principles that they act as though they had none.

It was a pity about Marcus Brutus. Cicero and I tried to make a Scipio Aemilian out of him. He did not possess the stuff that was needed. There was a man with whom we might have been more successful, out of whom something better than Scipio might have been made. That was Marcus Cato. If only he had been taught a better way of life than the inhumane and unnatural doctrine of the Porch.

TO HAVE LIVED so long in surroundings of such violence, among men so eager, so powerful, so forceful, and so passionate, means to have lived dangerously. On more than one occasion, I know, but for the active intervention of some person, I should have suffered the fate of so many others. It is curious that those who intervened were men who ordinarily had no hesitation in sacrificing their friends to gratify their ambitions, and were the sort of people to whom half-hearted adherence — they would always call my adherence half-hearted — was worse than none. Marcus Cicero's delay in joining Pompeius — and it was the most excusable of delays — was enough to make all the Pompeians, and Gnaeus himself, regard him as little better than an enemy. Nor ought Marcus really to have complained of that. In his furious struggles with Clodius and with Antonius he was continually upbraiding me and everybody else with lack of ardor. "To hesitate in such things," he kept repeating, "is to declare yourself on the other side."

Why did these men spare me ? If they wanted my property — and they did want it — I could not have protected it against them. A file of soldiers could have ejected me from the Quirinal and a single battalion of mercenaries might have occupied my estates in Epirus. Whatever I possessed in actual money and art treasures — I had nothing else worth taking — could have been seized in an hour. Yet I cannot complain that anything like this happened to me. No one ever laid violent hands on me or mine.

One of the ablest men I knew was Gaius Cassius, less a friend, perhaps, than most of those I have named. When I refused to join the consortium of bankers for the Liberators, Marcus Brutus was not the only one who scowled. In fact the proposal was made among them — the suggestion came from Trebonius, I was told — to give me a choice between voluntary adhesion and confiscation. That was called a choice more than once, in my memory. Marcus Brutus offered no objection. It was Cassius who prevented it.

He came especially to tell me of it. "You will, of course, be eternally grateful," he said, smiling at me with his puckered lips, and stroking his sharp chin, "I warned our friends that applying the screws to you might be a little harder than they thought. I am not completely convinced that the Romans appreciate as thoroughly as they should the benefit we have conferred on them by the execution of the tyrant. And among those who do not appreciate it, there are many who do appreciate you, Titus Pomponius — you, and the incalculable convenience of a banker who is apparently untroubled by revolutions, who charges moderate interest, and who is," he bowed, "notoriously solvent. I should be glad to enter into a set of reciprocal stipulations with the Caesarians, with the Parthians, with the Gauls and the Spaniards, that, whatever else happens, no one must disturb the tablets of Quintus Caecilius' nephew."

"That may prove insufficient security," I said, "if the pressure becomes very hard."

"What do you call really hard pressure?" asked Cassius.

"One of two things: an armed soldier, or the urgent need of a friend."

Cassius smiled. "I understand you. And I think I have made Marcus and Decimus understand."

I found ships and sailors for both Marcus Brutus and Cassius only a few months later. And a letter to my agent at Rhodes.

Cassius certainly was right in part. It was something to know where money could be obtained without violence, and at less than one per cent. I did not refuse aid to the Liberators when they abandoned Italy. Nor did I surrender the family of Antonius a little later to the vengeance even of Marcus Cicero and the Senatorial Commission.

Fulvia had only herself to thank that she was hated. There were three reasons for hating her: her first husband, Publius Clodius, her second husband Marcus Antonius, and above all, herself. We are not used to women in politics at Rome — at any rate, openly in politics. We don't like them. These Macedonian viragos, these Berenices and Cleopatras, and Arsinoλs and Stratonices, who have been setting the East by the ears ever since Alexander died, they give us a little shiver of repulsion. And we don't like women strutting about as Fulvia did after the Liberators had left Italy and Antonius took on the airs of being the rightful successor of Caesar as, legally, he doubtless was. Above all, we don't like women in military uniform, and Fulvia, dressed in helmet and cuirass with a Spanish sword dangling on her right hip, was not a pleasing spectacle, for all her fine looks. Perhaps because of her fine looks. But, of course, that was a later manifestation.

A great many things that Marcus Cicero said of her in his speeches were not true. Yet enough was true to make Rome gasp and the Senate foam with rage.

Then came the news from Mutina. Marcus Antonius was defeated. Some said he was killed. At any rate, he was in flight to the north, where Hirtius or young Caesar or Decimus Brutus would overtake him in a day. We did not know then that Hirtius was dying of his wounds. But wherever Antonius was, he was crushed and the Commission of Ten and Cicero were ready to wreak vengeance on his family.

It was touch and go whether Fulvia and her children would be executed. Quintus Fufius, in whose house they lived, told them he could no longer protect them. The poor man was in mortal terror. I can hardly blame him. I never saw a person so relieved as he was when I told him that the family could come to me at the Quirinal.

Cicero was extremely angry with me, not for the first time. But I carried my point. Fulvia and her children were safe from personal molestation on the Quirinal, as I knew they would be. I had a harder task to prevent the confiscation of their property. After all, Antonius had been declared a public enemy.

The Commission did not insist on it. Our law does not impose penalties on the families of criminals, as so many states still do. I venture to think, however, that it was less compunction about the law than my intervention that changed their minds. I did not escape sharp censure. Even Marcus in an outburst of indignation declared I was guarding against a possible return of Antonius to power. I should have been possessed of greater skill in prophecy than I could boast, to have foreseen such a contingency. I don't believe that this consideration played a part. I think I acted as our Master, Epicurus, would have acted. Marcus' intemperance I could well discount. He had personal reasons to hate Fulvia which the rest of us did not have.

And Marcus, to do him justice, had no share in the petty persecution that so many of our party took refuge in, when their first attempt failed. He did not support the fifteen or twenty law-suits that were instituted against Fulvia, mostly on the theory that she had helped Antonius embezzle state funds. They came to nothing, partly at least, because I supplied her with funds to defend herself.

She was a difficult guest, much more so than the others who were with her in my house. Far more so than my friend Volumnius. Volumnius, I suppose, was fair game. He was an active partisan, he was rich, and he had an incurable tendency to mockery. He might well have expected to suffer the fate of his leader. It is likely that he escaped because, till after the first flush of vindictive passion had subsided, no one knew he was at my house.

Indeed, it was to Volumnius for whom I did little, rather than to Fulvia for whom I did much, that I owed my life at the only time when it was imminently threatened.

Octavian joined Antonius, and affairs took their sudden swing against the Senate. Some of us, who remembered Caesar after the flight of Pompeius, had for a moment a surging hope that there would be an amnesty. What we got was the Terror.

I do not like to think of the horror of those days. They seared our souls. And yet there were bright spots. When the wolves came down to Rome with their lists, when every wall had notices of rewards for treason and murder, there were slaves who let themselves be cut down on behalf of their masters, and men and women who sacrificed their property and their lives in what was often a fruitless effort to save their friends and kinsmen. But for these things, I should have despaired not only of the republic but of the human race. That Volumnius harbored me, my wife and my child, while the assassins were roaming through the streets to kill and pillage, was a real risk for him. He turned it off with a jest, as he would. "Who would hesitate," he said, "e tenebris tantis tam clarum extollere lumen?" Even my poor Lucretius, who had everything that an Epicurean should have, except a sense of humor, would have been gratified that men quoted him as Greeks might quote Homer.

Of course, when Antonius arrived I was safe. He told me that in all the proposed lists of men to be proscribed it had never occurred to anyone to include my name. That may have been gratitude for my efforts for his family. I do not know. I did my best to intercede for the Ciceros. It was too late. Even if it had not been, I should not have succeeded.

"I could have forgiven him anything he ever said," Antonius declared to me at his house, "except his slurs on my Latin. What, had the man not read my masterly treatise 'On the Art of Being Drunk'?"  There was a yell of laughter among the fawning crowd around him. The strange thing is that Antonius really thinks he can write and that the Asianic fustian he has published will outlive Cicero.

Marcus Cicero's was a rich and passionate nature. He was also a keen and shrewd judge of men even if he did not always act on his judgment. And above everything else he loved the Rome we both created out of the traditions of our history and the hopes we had for the future, when we were boys together in school. He loved this Rome well enough to die for it. His gifts of mind were so much greater than mine that they were beyond jealousy. His friendship was very precious to me. When he was killed, I found consolation in my family, my books, my collections, and, more than all else, in the guidance of my Master. I am not ashamed to add that I also found it in my fortune.

This fortune of mine — much depleted now, of course — will soon be in the hands of others. What they will do with it I cannot tell, and I should not wish to determine even if I thought I could. Most of it will go to my daughter, and be administered therefore by her husband. That is some guaranty that it will be well used, although I have not been able to persuade Agrippa to adopt the way of Epicurus. That would have been a triumph.

I wonder who it was who first affected to despise wealth. Evidently it is an affectation. It is as though a man should despise food or clothing, or a soldier despise his sword or shield, or a peasant despise his plough. I know that there are Epicureans who pretend to be indifferent to wealth and who will boast of the frugality and simplicity of their lives. I should say that simplicity by itself has as little value as extravagance. Wealth is power, of course. It has always been so. I do not know of any community in which wealth has not counted even for the gratification of political ambitions. My Athenians tried for a time to make poor and rich exactly alike by drawing lots for political offices. And the Spartans attempted to prevent wealth from being accumulated by devices like iron money and the prohibition of imports. These things did not last. They never really worked even while they were supposed to be in operation.

The Cynics and the Stoics preach much about the contempt of riches. I find it hard to talk to Stoics except when they take a temporary vacation from their Stoicism. With Cynics conversation is a little easier. But, of Stoics or Cynics both, their attitude of lofty superiority is based on so many different things that I get a little puzzled. "A man is to be valued for what he is and not for what he has," is Stoic doctrine, I think. And my recent guest, Menippus, is fond of repeating the Cynic formula that a rich man does not possess riches but is possessed by them.

That is all very fine, but it does not quite make sense. I do not understand what they mean when they say a rich man is not better than a poor man. He certainly lives better, and that is a form of being. He is safer, more powerful, generally much cleaner and, on the whole, healthier. At any rate, he can be healthier if he wishes to. He can acquire more learning and wider experience. That ought to mean that he can be wiser. His wealth will not make him stronger or braver or taller — perhaps not even handsomer, although fine feathers are nearer to making fine birds than we admit.

And, of course, riches will not make him kinder to those he loves. But since Stoics despise kindness and love as they despise wealth, this cannot be what they mean.

As far as I can disentangle their notions, it is that a poor man ought not to be required to revere or obey a rich man merely for his wealth. Quite so. But no man should be required to venerate or obey another for any reason, if he does not do so of his own impulses.

For my part, I have liked the sensation of being rich. I have liked to feel that most of the things I wanted I might have. If I had been seriously limited in this respect, I cannot see how my mind could have escaped becoming narrowed and restricted and less capable of its fullest growth.

I do not mean that I have been able to satisfy every whim or caprice the moment it arose in me. That is not the way we live in our fellowship of the Garden. Whims are the shifting winds of impulse that may take us over a precipice as well as along the road we have marked for ourselves. There is nothing either good or bad about an impulse. The question is always what it results in.

I do not consider it a limitation that my wealth, ample as it was, was far less than I should have needed if I had attempted to build palaces at Baiae and at Tarentum or to spend a hundred thousand sesterces on a single banquet. I did not feel restricted because I could not have these things. I did not want them. I can't see why anybody should have wanted them. I have been a guest at banquets in gold and marble and ivory palaces and I have been bored. Not more bored, I fancy, than my host was.

I never quite understood Lucullus, who was my uncle's friend and mine. He was a man of real capacity. I do not believe that his extravagance was mere ostentation. Ostentation can have only one purpose — of exciting envy, or, rather, a kind of envious hatred. I can't see how men can wish to be hated, although I suppose some may have wished, and still wish, to be feared. There must be some satisfaction in it. I have seen brute beasts elated over the terror they inspire in weaker animals. Barbarous tribes in the German forests, Caesar the Dictator wrote in his book, take a ferocious pride in the fact that no other tribe dares dwell near them.

But even this brutal and barbarian satisfaction is wanting here. The display of wealth does not inspire fear. It does enable a man to collect about him hundreds who will praise him to his face if he can endure that sort of gratification. Surely it is the poorest and thinnest sense of superiority that is confirmed by the attendance of parasites and flatterers. Of these there were enough at Lucullus' tables, and it is impossible to believe that he actually derived any pleasure from their presence. He took, it is true, a malicious delight in stimulating them to more and more extravagant expressions, but this amusement must soon have worn out. I confess I cannot make it out.

If he had been an unsavory rascal like Publius Vedius or Menas, grown rich by fraud and proscriptions, it would be easy enough to understand. A man whose back still shows scars enough of the lash to remind him and us how recently he was a peculiarly worthless sort of slave, might think that gorgeous ness and lavishness are marks of belonging to the upper classes. In men like that, to be regarded as a member of the upper classes is a persistent craving. It is the only way persons without imagination can build up a sense of self-respect for themselves.

Is it the absurd ostentation of wealth by Vedius or Menas or by any other plundering ruffian who wriggled through war and massacre with other men's goods in his possession — is it this which makes Stoics and Cynics think that riches are despicable ? If it is, it does not speak well for their common sense. Money purchases so many things which one needs, it makes so many choices possible, that it deserves effort to acquire and care in husbanding.

My wealth has served me well. I hope it will be as useful to Marcus Agrippa.

THE THOUGHT OF next year oppresses me. It is so unlikely that I shall live to see it that it seems like an event of a distant and remote future, something in that posterity for whose approval so many thousands strain every nerve and with which they can have as little contact as with Romulus or with Numa. But my darling Atticula will see it, and Agrippa and Nepos, and my freedman Quintus, and Alexis, who has served me so well and so long. He, too, will be free then. My will provides it. He could have been free long ago if he had wished it.

I suppose if I doctored myself continuously I might painfully drag out the months until the decision is reached between the two rivals for the lordship of the world. It may take much longer than a few months. The struggle may last years, and if it does, there will be little enough left of Roman blood or Italian sinew in the world. How shrill their exultation will be — the Gauls, the Germans, the Spaniards, the Moors, the Parthians, the Egyptians, the Scythians — as they sweep down upon our Italy after we have so conveniently slaughtered each other for their benefit.

I know that my fellow Epicureans will shake their heads. "Suppose it is so. Suppose Rome really falls a victim to her own fratricidal madness. Suppose swarthy Libyans and shaggy and filthy Hercynians trample down the waving cornfields of your Campanian estates and pull apart your Corinthian carvings. What difference will it make to you, who will be dead ? Have you forgotten the Master's words? Or the chants you love so much, of your friend Titus, the book you have read so often, and have heard even oftener? Must you always, like a half- trained boy, be reminded that you cannot at the same time be dead and be alive? If these things happen next year or the year after, when you will have been duly placed upon the pyre, duly bewailed and decently and piously deposited in the tomb on the Appian Way, one thing is certain: these portentous events will not be happening to you. That those you love will suffer under them is sad. But it will not be your sadness, but theirs. You cannot really share it; nor, indeed, for all your sympathetic effort, really understand it. You did not, after all, die when young Marius died, nor when Cicero died, nor when Pillia died. And if your daughter in the anarchy you foresee should be dragged off as the booty of a swinish and half-human pirate, believe me, your sleep will not be troubled by that horror for one little instant."

That is the hardest of the demands that our doctrine makes upon me. Fear of death I have never known, nor of anything that lies beyond death. That at a definite moment I shall cease to breathe and think, and that then I shall be as though I never was — this I know, as certainly as I know anything. But it is hard to remember that, deeply as I have attached myself to others in my long life, they became no part of me, nor I of them. I have taught myself so long to believe that their grief was my grief, so long rejoiced in what pleased and delighted them, that it is difficult to realize that in a short time this will not be so, and that I shall soon have no share in their concerns because I shall have vanished altogether as a thinking and feeling person. During my Pillia's long illness I could see the changes in her body and feel with her, in some degree, the pains she endured. I cannot feel them, nor see her wasted face, now that she is dead, and my bereavement and the loss of her society she cannot feel at all. It will evidently not be otherwise for me and my Atticula, merely because it is I who will then be beyond pain or feeling and she the one to be bereaved.

All this I tell myself frequently, but it does not quite remove the sense of dread with which I foolishly contemplate what may happen if the next ten years are as full of civil war as the last fifteen have been. And, of course, what I dread may not happen at all. A single battle may be as decisive as Pharsalus.

We do not believe in Fate, we Epicureans. Of the silly stories the poets tell, none is sillier than that of the three hags who spin out our thread of life, measure it off and snip it, with, I suppose, adamantine shears. And all in accordance with specific decrees, made no one knows when. For my part, I have no better opinion of the little old lady whom the Stoics call Providence and who sits on the shoulder — or perhaps within the heart — of Father Jupiter and tells him what to do.

No, the events of the world are not fixed. One thing may happen as well as another. The only purpose in the world is that which men bring into it. With good will, men could make life pleasant in the years I shall not see. By reckless yielding to their passions and their greed they can make it horrible. The world can be moulded. I hope it will be moulded by Caesar and Agrippa and Maecenas, rather than by Antonius and his royal Egyptian harlot. It would have been better, of course, if it had been moulded by men like Scipio and Cicero and Cato; but the task needed qualities they did not possess. I am inclined to think that Caesar has not wholly forgotten or disregarded the lessons he received when he first came to Rome, from Marcus Cicero.

If Caesar is victorious my forebodings will have been vain enough and the lives of those I cherish will be easy and pleasant and comfortable. At least I can hope that with some confidence. Ultimately, of course, they too will disappear. They will be outlived by this house, by the trees I myself planted, by the trees that were here before my uncle lived here. And even these will be outlived by what I see around me while I am dictating these words to Dionysius: the bronze and marble and silver and gold statues and ornaments with which I have relieved the rustic severity that my uncle preferred.

They will be scattered soon, I suppose, but they will be here for a time to be looked at and appreciated by Agrippa's guests. It is a little sad to contemplate how much more lasting the brass and marble and gold are than the living men for whom they were put into beautiful shapes.

Shall I confess that it grieves me to relinquish them ? There is that exquisite silver cup that I bought from Agatharchides at Samos. It has nothing on it but a dappled fawn cropping the grass beneath a maple. There is a frieze of ivy leaves running under the brim. I do not know the artist. I should say it is Sicyonian of some time before Aratus. It has a harmony of line and a grace of form that seem to me unequaled. There could not have been a movement of the designer's finger or his hammer that was out of control. That is why, I suppose, it gives me so much pleasure.

Indeed, I enjoy the smaller objects I have gathered somewhat more than the larger and more magnificent ones. These too, however, give me abundant satisfaction. I have the Eros of Praxiteles which Verres took from Messana and which I bought from Lucius Antonius, who must have got it from his brother, after Verres had been proscribed and killed. But I would give all that Praxiteles ever made for my two athletes by Polyclitus or the bronze hoplite of Calamis. And into the western wall of my atrium on the Quirinal I have fitted two paintings by Apelles. One represents Circe shrinking from the moly in the hand of Odysseus, and the other the sacrifice of Iphigenia. They are a subtle and a constantly renewed pleasure.

I have never thrown my house open to the public. Other men have done so, and my refusal has confirmed in people's minds a certain repute for miserliness which I do not think I quite deserve. My friends were welcome to enjoy with me what I enjoyed, so far as they were able.

They were not all able. It needs a special sensitiveness to get from a carved gold inlay or a heroic bronze what it really contains. I have this capacity in some measure. Cicero had it much less than I did. It amazes me to realize that the Roman who in my experience had it most fully was Gaius Verres, who in other respects was as vicious and cruel a rascal as any I ever saw.

You would scarcely have supposed, to look at Verres' round, flat, and pudgy face, his thick neck, his little blinking eyes, that he had the soul of an artist. Yet despite Marcus Cicero's malicious sneers it was he and not his Greek stewards who put together the most splendid collection of art treasures that any of us ever knew. Verres had an eye so keen that he could see at once minute variations in the curve of a sculptured arm which became evident to me only after careful examination. He was nothing less than a voluptuary in his love of color and form, and I fully believed his statement that he felt a physical shiver when he first saw the Hermes at Tyndaris. He meant to compliment me when he said: "You will understand me, Titus Pomponius, if the rest of my countrymen do not. I speak as one expert to another." He did me too much honor to rank me with him. I was far his inferior in knowledge and appreciation of such matters, although almost his equal in love of them. I am convinced, however, that even if I had been as tempted as he was, I should have declined to acquire his treasures in the way in which he did. I never knew a man so completely devoid of any feeling of common humanity. He was quite capable of crucifying a provincial — Marcus says he did — for a Pergamene tapestry. Men like that profoundly repel me. I could understand why my distant kinsman, Quintus Caecilius, attempted to save him by a rather underhanded trick. Caecilius was his quaestor and owed him loyalty. But how so urbane and high-minded a person as Quintus Hortensius could have openly defended him and received him at his house, I cannot understand. I suppose politics accounts for it. I think Hortensius was ashamed of it, later.

Those who moralize on the vicissitudes of fortune have dwelt on the fact that Verres and Cicero, who hated each other so intensely, died within a month of each other, slain by the order of the same man and victims of the same proscription. They died equally bravely, too. I am afraid these coincidences do not impress me as much as they do others. In themselves events are meaningless enough, and their similarities or contrasts are hardly worth noticing.

I have tried hard not to remember that many of the things which give me so much pleasure to see and touch are also rare things which cost a great deal of money. Not altogether successfully. I am enough my uncle's nephew to know exactly what I have paid for everything I possess. To be sure, I have a great many inexpensive modern vases and reliefs made by men I know, like Arcesilaus of Cyrene. I confess I have little patience with our fashionable sculptor, Pasiteles, whose dull imitations I brush against in the house of every third Roman of my acquaintance. And I have picked up in cities of Asia and Syria and Greece and Italy a large number of little bits of craftsmanship that most of my contemporaries would disdain, partly because the makers are unknown, and partly, I fear, because the things were cheap.

It hardly becomes me, however, to be too disdainful of those who value things by their price. I showed Gnaeus Manlius a carved sapphire, the work of Leonidas, and boasted that it was unique in its kind and that it cost twenty thousand sesterces. He offered me twenty-five, which I refused, but I had to endure the jibes of Maecenas and Quintus Horatius, who were my guests at the time, and who kept up a continual fire of banter on the subject. Whatever they saw — the commonest piece of furniture — Maecenas gravely asked Quintus what he supposed it was worth, and after mentioning an absurd sum they would utter a joint "Ah!" of admiration.

Maecenas, as a matter of fact, is a man of taste. From time to time he calls himself one of us. I should not like to question him on doctrine, but he is the most delightful of companions, and this young Apulian poet from whom he is inseparable has greater skill than Catullus. He is just the age now at which Catullus died. He lacks, of course, the intensity and vigor and courage and sweep of Catullus, but we may be sure he will not waste his strength as Catullus did in desperate debauches. He also professes to be of our fellowship, and Statilius, our learned young doctor and mentor, assures me that he is well grounded but that his conduct is deplorably loose. I wish Statilius might himself learn to combine with his knowledge and the austerity of his life something of the gaiety and ease of the Teacher whose writings he so profoundly analyzes.

Certainly no Epicurean can assert that rarity and expensiveness make objects beautiful or desirable. But when they are beautiful for other reasons, does the fact that they are rare and correspondingly dear really count for nothing in our estimation of them?  I cannot get rid of the feeling that it does count for something, although I cannot justify it by anything in reason or in the doctrine of our Master. Perhaps at the back of our minds is the thought that what is rare has a precarious existence. If it is lost it cannot be replaced. That is not satisfactory, clearly. All works of art are unique. We are still laughing at Lucius Mummius a hundred years after his death because he warned the shipmasters who transported the statues from Corinth that if the cargo was lost they would have to replace it.

No, I cannot account for the satisfaction I have in the fact that so many of my treasures are like nothing else that any other collector has, and that they could be sold for the value of hundreds of acres of cornland. Any other collector! It is lucky that Volumnius does not hear me, or young Horatius.

From my garden I can see to the north the magnificent park that Lucullus constructed. Still closer to me is the series of parks and villas of Gaius Sallustius, who died only two years ago. His grand-nephew who is his adopted son lives there now, an inoffensive and, I am told, an able young man. At least he does not have to explain how a moralizing historian can attack the plunderers of provinces in his books and pillage provinces ruthlessly himself when he is given the opportunity. Sallustius was my neighbor for ten years. We never visited each other.

And to the south I can see the weathered gilt of the Capitolium on the sacred hill. Caesar talks of rebuilding it — above all, of getting a better group of Jupiter and his four-horsed chariot for the acroterium. Twenty years ago, anyone who had such a plan would have written to me at Athens or Buthrotum to find a suitable group or a competent artist. When Gnaeus Pompeius built his theater, he asked me to get him statues to put up in it. Cicero was continually commissioning me to provide him with pictures and vases and statues for his villas and his house. I wish he had commissioned me exclusively. Some of the things he got from Caelius for the Tusculanum did not go well with what I sent him. Harmony of combination was his greatest difficulty. Indeed he was a little less competent in all matters of art than many men far inferior to him. Every now and then he would pose as the ancient Roman who scorned all this Greek nonsense, as he did in the attack on Verres which he published but never delivered. We laughed him out of this affectation. Indeed, it was never taken seriously, even by the people for whom those speeches were intended.

In this, as in other things, Marcus went beyond what the conventions of public oratory demanded. To pretend to have heard of Praxiteles only just before he prepared his speech, to need a reminder of who or what Myron was, or Polyclitus, was almost indecent jesting. In fact, in the history of art, in the names and the rank of the artists, Cicero's unusual powers of memory gave him a great advantage, and his quickness and resourcefulness enabled him to take part in discussions of art better than men who had more native taste and more precise judgment.

I have acquired no small learning in this field. And it has its value, not merely for one who wishes to collect, but for one who wishes to understand. I should be a little ashamed, after so many years of active interest, not to be able to tell a copy from an original, a forgery from a genuine work. That is a matter, to be sure, in which one needs to know a great many external facts about the artist and about his work, a knowledge that could be possessed by men without any interest in these things except as merchandise. But it also helps to quicken the eye in seeing them as beautiful objects, and it stimulates a love for them, to let our minds dwell on these incidental things and thus see works of art in a dozen lights rather than in one alone. I have wrangled pleasantly with Salvius over the attribution of an ancient marble relief of mine. I think it is earlier than the Persian wars. Salvius thinks it is a generation later. We shall certainly not come to an agreement on it in my lifetime. I don't think we ever wanted to come to an agreement on it.

Smoothness, grace, richness, harmony, accuracy, these are things which most of us have looked for in determining whether a work of art is lovely or not. I wonder whether these qualities are as important as I have been inclined to deem them. In my later years I have been fascinated by what we were taught in school to regard as the rude beginnings of art, beginnings which were to culminate in the glorious period of Praxiteles and Alcamenes. Were they really beginnings, or were they self-sufficient expressions? Or rather, did artists move in the wrong direction after Calamis and Myron? It is something worth pondering.

In my ring cabinet the place of honor is not given to the marvel of golden artistry which King Antiochus sold me, but to the signet ring of my father. It would be entitled to this place as a mark of piety, of course. But, as a matter of fact, there are few of my smaller treasures that I view with greater satisfaction. The stone is a simple carnelian, and the design an eagle, not a superb eagle with spreading wings like the obverse of the coins of Acragas, but a much ruder figure done with scarcely more than a dozen strokes. There is a kind of bold rigidity in it that recalls the figures of Canachus or the staring, smiling youths in the inner shrines of old Doric temples.

They tell me that archaic figures are becoming all the rage.

YOUNG MARCUS CICERO visited me last week, and for once he did not ask for money. Still more unusual, he stayed three days and was sober all the time. Tiro tells me he has not been really drunk for a month.

He was in fine fettle. He is a confirmed Caesarian now and eager for hostilities to commence so that he may wreak vengeance on Antonius in the name of Rome and of his father. Agrippa tells me that, if it should come to war, Marcus will get a legateship. He is a good soldier like his uncle Quintus, my brother-in-law.

Apparently, he is even a better soldier than Quintus. That is Agrippa's opinion, and there could hardly be a more competent judge. I confess I have had some doubt on the subject, but perhaps that is only jealousy on behalf of his father. The older Marcus would have been so proud of a little military glory. A little, to be sure, he really acquired in Cilicia, but mighty little! He was very self-conscious about it and rallied himself more than we rallied him about his mountain victory at Pandenissus — I think that was the name; I am ashamed to say that I have forgotten it again.

Well, it is no great matter. Nor was it a great victory. But it was quite as much a victory as some that earned other men the title of imperator. I can well believe that Marcus Cicero, the greatest master of speech of his day, heard the salutation of his soldiers, when the nest of brigands fell, with greater delight than the thunderous applause of the crowded Forum at the close of his most brilliant peroration. As I have said, I see no reason why he should not have added imperator to his name, as well as many another stormer of a mountain fort. And the letter Caesar addressed to him: "The Imperator Gaius Caesar to the Imperator Marcus Cicero" — perhaps it was irony, but I think not — at any rate, it was Marcus' proudest possession. It is quite true that Marcus had made something like a proverb of cedant arma togae, concedat laurea laudi, but, if the truth were told, deep in his heart, he lusted for the laurel.

So it is young Marcus, and not the old Marcus, who is to have a military reputation! I wonder whether he will really justify the hopes his new friends place in him. That young man has a way of disappointing expectations. How proud we were when he made his neat little speech on his coming of age! Every word his own, and no trick of style omitted! The older Marcus wept with delight. And I almost did, too.

Young Marcus has a quick and active mind. And a real feeling, I think, for literature. Besides, his manner is so ingratiating, when he wishes to be ingratiating, that the contrast between him and his cousin Quintus, my sister's son, was especially sharp. There was nothing ingratiating about young Quintus. At all times he was a graceless and sullen lad, selfish and bad-tempered. Little joy he ever brought to us, his father or his mother or his kinsmen. Perhaps I should say that he did not disappoint our expectations because we had none. In one thing, however, or rather in two, he did disappoint the expectations of everybody. We none of us credited him with the depth of perfidy which made him willing to betray both Marcus and me to what he supposed was Caesar's anger. Nor, after this had happened, could we have guessed that the same young man would have been capable of immolating himself to save his father's life. Indeed, under the proscriptions, father and son vied with each other in the nobility of their deaths. Evidently it is not so easy to know everything about people, even when you have known them all their lives and even when their characters seem simple enough.

Of the four Ciceros there is only young Marcus left. It may well be that my feeling about him is quite wrong. He may outshine in the splendor of his rank his father and his ancestors. He is the son of a consul — and of what a consul! He may be consul, too. I hear that our Caesar has some such promotion in mind for him, partly as a challenge to Antonius, and partly, I hope, as slight compensation for the dreadful afternoon in Bononia when he surrendered his friend and master as the price of an alliance. Perhaps he could not help himself. I think I should have acted differently, since I rated friendship higher than Caesar Octavian did. But then, I could not be Caesar Octavian at all, either for good or ill.

I see Tiro often. There is no freedman in Rome, except my own Quintus — and he is something more than my freedman — who has more completely and unselfishly consecrated himself to the service of his patron's family and heritage. Young Marcus has always been a great trial to us. I can understand wild orgies and symposia. But why should Cicero's son have taken to solitary drinking ? There was no austerity in Marcus the elder. He did not refuse himself to the pleasures of the table, of women, or of social intercourse. But he did these things moderately, as became a grown man and a trained mind. Nowhere in young Marcus' intimate surroundings did he see an example of what Tiro tells me went on day after day at their house after Marcus returned from Spain. There is something peculiarly repellent in silent debauches. Far better the riotous extravagance of Caelius and his coterie.

But this, as Tiro tells me, has quite changed. Marcus has thrown himself eagerly into war and politics. He studies manuals of strategy and spends his leisure in reading and discussion. He has made a number of sensible and acute suggestions about his father's treatise on the state. At his last visit he said he might want to add an additional book to it, or perhaps write on the subject independently. If he does, I shall publish it. It cannot fail to be interesting.

All this, however, I fancy is rather expansiveness and temporary enthusiasm. In many respects young Marcus is still very young. But it vividly brought home to me an incident of almost a generation ago, when his father and I, seated on a terrace in my villa at Tarentum, discussed the boy's future, and Cicero planned a career for him that he admitted was to be a fusion of his own and mine. Young Marcus was to be a great orator, was to achieve the consulship early, and then, we hoped, would do what his father had not done, retire completely from public affairs to some villa or villas in Italy or Sicily or Greece and spend the rest of his life in the satisfactions which the love of books and the love of those who love books can give a man.

Neither of us, to be sure, had any confidence that we should live to see this picture made real. When we spoke of such things, the echoes of Sulla and Cinna and Lepidus were still ringing in our ears, and there was enough to foreshadow Milo and Clodius, Caesar and Pompeius. It was not a time at which one could safely assume that any person would escape the dangers which crowded about us and which had already been fatal to so many of the men we had known and loved. We were like men in a ship beset by storms, sufficiently sensible to know that our chances of reaching port were slight, but all the more passionately yearning for the safety and comfort of home. We spent more time than became us in imagining idyllic future happiness, if not for ourselves, at any rate for Marcus and Tullia and Atticula.

It is not so easy to change one's course of life at forty, as Cicero fancied his son would do and as he found himself unable to do. He might well have felt in his own blood and spirit how hard it would be. Brilliant success has its penalties. When we talked of all this, Cicero had just finished his consulship. He was fully accepted as a member of the senatorial party. Tullia, his darling, was Piso's wife, and Marcus Cato, whose approval we all valued more than that of any other man, had hailed him "father of his country." To look on life and society from this height and to decide reasonably and coolly and effectively to leave it and to return to what must seem a lower and less stirring level, to abandon deliberately the exhilaration of power and grandeur — no one of Cicero's temperament could have done that. He knew this well enough himself, as I knew it. That is why we preferred to imagine young Marcus doing it thirty, forty years hence.

Has anyone ever done what we planned for the boy? Sulla surely did not. Rome was still shaking with terror of him when he professed to leave the government in the hands of his lieutenants and devoted himself wholly to the enjoyment of his harlots and catamites. He never surrendered anything, really. And Lucullus equally cannot be said to have renounced glory in favor of a life of suavity and peace. He was an able soldier and a competent statesman, but he withdrew when his fortunes were at their ebb, not at their flood. Obviously, he would not consent to engage in a struggle for dominance. His outlook was quite too cynical for that. It amused him to see the old state fall apart, and he was even capable of egging the contestants on in a combat he had no mind to join. Of him also it must be said that he surrendered nothing when he became an expert in oysters and vintages and embroidered cloaks rather than in statecraft and strategy.

It is a hard emotion to trample down, the sense of self-importance which counts for so much in the desire for power and position. And there is no reason for subduing it if a man can get no satisfaction otherwise, provided he does not begrudge the price he has to pay. The price must be paid in full. A man cannot indulge the love of domination till it has carried him to the topmost heights and then dismiss it like a hired servant who has done his task and for whom he has no further work. It becomes too much for you, this impulse that has driven you so far and so splendidly, that has carried you where most men wish to arrive.

Cicero did not seriously suppose it could be otherwise. To be called "father of our fatherland" by Marcus Cato was like the sweet heady wine my friends make for me in Naxos. The taste remains forever on your lips and the fumes never altogether leave your brain. I was with Cicero in the theater when Aesopus played Accius' praetextan comedy of Brutus, and when the audience rose with a shout of approbation at the line "Tullius qui libertatem civibus stabiliverat." I don't recall how often the passage had to be repeated before the audience allowed the play to go on. Small wonder that his head swam. I, the sober and self-contained mentor at his side, was almost carried along with him. You cannot shake off things like that and order your life as though they had never happened.

In his candid moments Cicero knew that what made political glory so intoxicating was the sense of personal supremacy and not the consciousness of serving his fellow men. I do not say that this last played no part. Love of human beings is a real thing. And love of one's fellow citizens must be as real. It is not merely real, but natural. To dislike them is, I am afraid, equally real, but not quite natural. There have undoubtedly been some men who hated their kind. My fellow Athenian, Timon, was, if the stories about him are true, a man like that. I do not quite believe them. The only explanation, I suppose, if the stories really are true, is that he was not quite sane. It was also said of my uncle Quintus that he was a misanthrope. That was not justified, and at all events my uncle did not play any of the strange pranks, which are credited to Timon, to show his hatred of men.

I should not say of myself, or of Marcus Cicero, or of most of the men with whom I lived all these years or with whom I live now, that we loved our fellow human beings just because they were men. There is, of course, a natural tendency to sympathy. I could not see a man suffer pain, not the lowest and most degraded man, not even a man whom I detested and feared, without some movement of participation. That people can feast their eyes on suffering — and I have known such persons — is a horrible thought. I do not like to see men suffer, even when they are deservedly punished. But I know there is no way of preventing suffering, as long as men are so constituted that their violent passions cannot be taught control, as long as war is one of the ordinary events of life. I should find it impossible to live at all if I thought about such things and nothing else. It would be a kind of madness. The only thing to do is to turn one's mind away from the sort of suffering which seems to be part of the way in which we live and do something, if it is possible, to lessen the pain that is unnecessary and undeserved.

Even here it is a very little that can be done. I do not think I should pass a stranger by who needed help, but I meet very few strangers. Those persons whom I do see, who are part of the life I have chosen for myself, I should give more than help if they needed it. I should actively try to prevent pain or harm from reaching them at all, or I should want to alleviate it if I could not prevent it. This I should do even though I rated them very differently; indeed, though in one way or in another my judgment of some of them was quite low. My affections are not determined by judgments of the ability or even of the character of those whom I know.

But I have neither affection nor dislike for the men I do not know. I have seen all sorts of persons from many remote parts of the world, sometimes in the streets of Rome and more often in the ports of Asia and Greece. Picturesque enough, some of them. That there is something loathsome and contemptible about barbarians, I never believed, and it is not true. There are men who say they are philosophers and disciples of Aristotle who will have it that their master taught this. I cannot find that in his books, if what the Peripatetics study are his books. And if it should be there, it would not mean a great deal to me. Our Master taught nothing like it.

But he did not teach that all men were alike, or that all groups were alike. There are peoples who have done more than others, and to think with pride upon achievements which not you but your fathers and grandfathers have accomplished is not a contemptible pride. I am not a little proud of being a Roman, although I have added little indeed to make future Romans proud of the generation of which I formed a part. I would not change to be an Athenian in blood as well as in citizenship. To be sure, it is absurd to speak of preferring what I could not alter, no matter how much I might try to alter it. But that I am a Roman and not a Syrian, a Roman and not a Syracusan, a Gaul, or an Egyptian, fills me with a real satisfaction.

I cannot tell how much that satisfaction consists in the fact that my people have conquered these others, and that no one questions that Roman citizenship is a greater and more valuable thing than any other. I must confess I should be indignant if one who was not a Roman acted insolently toward me, more than if a Roman did so. It is not easy to discard the pride that comes of being a member of a dominant race.

I have made a real effort to discard pride so far as it includes a sense of superiority. After all, it was a member of a subject race, an Athenian — and even a colonial Athenian at that — who is the master and guide of my way of life. But it is idle to say that the stolid and unwashed Suabians, the thick-nosed, ugly Cappadocians, who furnish us our least valuable slaves, had, even when they were free of all control by Roman magistrates, anything a cultivated mind would desire or even a beggar would envy.

And thus once again I find myself boasting of my adherence to the company of Epicurus and yet expressing feelings that show my unfitness to belong to it. Perhaps that shows how essentially incapable we Romans are of philosophy; as incapable perhaps as Alexander and Pyrrhus were, who, both of them, had no lack of philosophic training and example, if not the best philosophic training. We smile somewhat loftily at the story of how Cineas reported to King Pyrrhus that our Senate was an assembly of kings. I never sat in that royal gathering, and I cannot, therefore, take the compliment to myself. But it pleases me none the less, just as, after one hundred and fifty years, whenever I read of the supercilious insolence of our Rhodian allies during the war with Perseus, I still feel part of the furious rage that I have no doubt my Caecilian and Pomponian forefathers felt.

I wonder whether national pride would have seemed so little a thing to our Master if he had lived in the days of Pericles and had been in the counsels of that Olympian. I raised the question with my friend and fellow Epicurean, Rabirius, but he is much more interested in the atoms and the construction of the universe than in what happens in our minds.

Philodemus will have an answer for me and, I am sure, an epigram to encase it in. He writes he is coming tomorrow. I have a shrewd suspicion that Atticula has written to him to come as soon as possible to persuade me to consult a new physician. I doubt whether we shall reach that topic at all.