Cicero: Letters to Atticus, Vol. 3 of 3
1986
Cicero: Letters to Atticus, Vol. 3 of 3
1986
Translated by Eric Otto Winstedt
The third volume of Cicero's letters to Atticus documents the final years of Rome's most eloquent voice, a man watching his world collapse. Written after Caesar's victory at Pharsalus, these letters find Cicero in forced retirement, wrestling with grief over his daughter Tullia's death and the ruin of the Republic he served. Yet amid the political despair, the correspondence crackles with intellectual energy: debates about Stoic philosophy, updates on literary projects, complaints about his boring neighbors, and above all, the warmth of a friendship that sustained him through catastrophe. These are not speeches crafted for posterity but the unguarded thoughts of a mortal man facing the end of everything he believed in. The letters document Caesar's dictatorship, the Ides of March, and the chaos that followed, ending with Cicero's own murder in 43 BC. Reading them is like overhearing a genius think aloud, and the result is unexpectedly moving: a man of enormous vanity and genuine feeling, trying to write his way through despair.
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“There is also a tradition about Socrates. He liked walking, it is recorded, until a late hour of the evening, and when someone asked him why he did this he said he was trying to work up an appetite for his dinner.””
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
“Fieri autem potest ut recte quis sentiat et id, quod sentit, polite eloqui non possit; sed mandare quemquam litteris cogitationes suas, qui eas nec disponere nec illustrare possit nec delectatione aliqua adlicere lectorem, hominis est intemperanter abutentis et otio et litteris.””
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
