The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text · 4 illegible passages, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~170,000 words · 812 passages
Cite this work
- APACicero. (n.d.). The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/cicero/the-letters-of-cicero-volume-1
- MLACicero. "The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/cicero/the-letters-of-cicero-volume-1.
- ChicagoCicero. The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/cicero/the-letters-of-cicero-volume-1.
What it is about
The first volume of Cicero's correspondence: some nine hundred letters, his own and his correspondents', which survived by accident and are the most intimate source we have from all antiquity.
Context and history
They were not written for publication, and that is everything. Here Cicero hesitates, complains, calculates, changes his mind and contradicts himself, which he never does in the speeches or the treatises. The chief correspondent is Atticus, the friend of his whole life, to whom he says everything. Since they cover the years of the republic's fall, they are at once personal testimony and political chronicle: one sees the machinery of Roman power from the inside and in real time, without the order that history imposes afterwards. This volume reaches the years before the civil war; the rest continues in the following volumes.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
AUTHOR OF A TRANSLATION OF POLYBIUS, A HISTORY OF ROME, ETC IN FOUR VOLUMES VOL. I. B.C. 68-52 LONDON GEORGE BELL AND SONS CHISWICK PRESS:--CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO. TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON. PREFACE The object of this book is to give the English-speaking public, in a convenient form, as faithful and readable a copy as the translator was capable of making of a document unique in the literature of antiquity. Whether we regard the correspondence of Cicero from the point of view of the biographer and observer of character, the historian, or the lover of _belles lettres_, it is equally worthy of study. It seems needless to dwell on the immense historical importance of letters written by prominent actors in one of the decisive periods of the world's history, when the great Republic, that had spread its victorious arms, and its law and discipline, over the greater part of the known world, was in the throes of its change from the old order to the new. If we would understand--as who would not?--the motives and aims of the men who acted in that great drama, there is nowhere that we can go with better hope of doing so than to these letters. To the student of character also the personality of Cicero must always have a great fascination. Statesman, orator, man of letters, father, husband, brother, and friend--in all these capacities he comes before us with singular vividness. In every one of them he will doubtless rouse different feelings in different minds. But though he will still, as he did in his lifetime, excite vehement disapproval as well as strong admiration, he will never, I think, appear to anyone dull or uninteresting. In the greater part of his letters he is not posing or assuming a chara