The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Some scanning errors (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand) · 4 illegible passages, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~170,000 words · 812 passages
Cite this work
- APACicero. (n.d.). The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/cicero/the-letters-of-cicero-volume-1
- MLACicero. The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/cicero/the-letters-of-cicero-volume-1.
- ChicagoCicero. The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/cicero/the-letters-of-cicero-volume-1.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
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.
Those addressed to other friends are sometimes familiar and playful, sometimes angry and indignant. Some of them are careful and elaborate state papers, others mere formal introductions and recommendations. Business, literature, and philosophy all have their share in them; and, what is so rare in ancient literature, the family relations of the writer, his dealings with wife, son, and daughter, brother and nephew, and sons-in-law, are all depicted for us, often with the utmost frankness. After reading them we seem to know Cicero the man, as well as Cicero the statesman and orator. The eleven letters which precede the consulship are happily, from this point of view, addressed to Atticus. For it was to Atticus that he wrote with the least concealment, and with the confidence that any detail, however small, which concerned himself would be interesting to his correspondent. It is well, therefore, that, though we thus come into his life when it was more than half over, we should at once hear his genuine sentiments on whatever subjects he may be speaking. Besides his own, we have about ninety letters to Cicero from some of the chief men of the day--Pompey, Cæsar, Cato, Brutus, Antony, and many others. They are of very various excellence. The best of them are by much less known men. Neither Pompey nor Cæsar were good letter-writers, or, if the latter was so, he was too busy to use his powers. [Sidenote: Cicero's position previous to the beginning of the Correspondence in B.C. 68.] [Sidenote: Quæstor, B.C. 75.] The letters begin, then, in B.C. 68, when Cicero was in his thirty-seventh year. He was already a man of established reputation both as a pleader and a writer. Rhetorical treatises (B.C. 86), translations from Xenophon and Plato (B.C. 84), and from the poems of Aratus (B.C.…