(4) Letters.—Besides 774 letters written by Cicero, we have 90 addressed to him by friends. The two largest collections of his Letters are the Epistulae ad Atticum (68-43 B.C.) and the Epistulae ad Familiares (62-43 B.C.).
These letters are of supreme importance for the history of Cicero’s time. ‘The quality which makes them most valuable is that they were not (like the letters of Pliny, and Seneca, and Madame de Sévigné) written to be published. We see in them Cicero as he was. We behold him in his strength and in his weakness—the bold advocate, and yet timid and vacillating statesman, the fond husband, the affectionate father, the kind master, the warm-hearted friend.’—Tyrrell.
The style of the Letters is colloquial but thoroughly accurate. ‘The art of letter-writing suddenly rose in Cicero’s hands to its full perfection.’—Mackail.
(5) Poems.—The fragments we possess show that verse-writing came easily to him, but he never could have been a great poet, for he had not the divinus afflatus, so finely expressed by Ovid in the line Est Deus in nobis, agitante calescimus illo.
‘Cicero stands in prose like Vergil in poetry, as the bridge between the ancient and the modern world. Before his time Latin prose was, from a wide point of view, but one among many local ancient dialects. As it left his hands it had become a universal language, one which had definitely superseded all others, Greek included, as the type of civilised expression.’—Mackail.
CLAUDIUS CLAUDIANUS, flor. 400 A.D.
1. Life.
CLAUDIAN.
Born probably at Alexandria, where he lived until, in the year of the death of Theodosius 395 A.D., he acquired the patronage of Stilicho, the great Vandal general, who, as guardian of the young Emperor Honorius, was practically ruler of the Western Empire. He remained attached to the Court at Milan, Rome and Ravenna, and died soon after the downfall of his patron Stilicho, 408 A.D.