Cicero: Letters to Atticus, Vol. 1 of 3

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                       THE LOEB CLASSICAL LIBRARY
                               EDITED BY
             T. E. PAGE, M.A., AND W. H. D. ROUSE, LITT.D.

                           LETTERS TO ATTICUS
                                   I


[Illustration:

  CICERO.

  _BUST IN THE CAPITOLINE MUSEUM, ROME._
]




                                 CICERO
                           LETTERS TO ATTICUS


                     WITH AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY
                          E. O. WINSTEDT, M.A.
                      OF MAGDALEN COLLEGE, OXFORD

                            IN THREE VOLUMES

                                   I

[Illustration: WH]

                       LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
                     NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
                                MCMXIX.

                         _First printed 1912._

                           _Reprinted 1919._

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                              INTRODUCTION


The letters contained in this volume cover a large and important period
in Cicero’s life and in the history of Rome. They begin when he was 38
years of age; and at first they are not very numerous. There are only
two of that year (68 B.C.), six of the following year, one of the year
66, when he held the praetorship, and two of 65. Then there is a gap in
his correspondence. No letters at all survive from the period of his
consulship and the Catilinarian conspiracy; and the letters to Atticus
do not begin again until two years after that event. Thereafter they are
sufficiently frequent to justify Cornelius Nepos’ criticism, that
reading them, one has little need of an elaborate history of the period.
There are full—almost too full—details, considering the frequent
complaints and repetitions, during the year of his banishment (58–57
B.C.), and the correspondence continues unbroken to the year 54. Then
after a lapse of two years or more, which Atticus presumably spent in
Rome, it begins again in 51, when Cicero was sent to Cilicia as
pro-consul, much against his will; and the volume ends with a hint of
the trouble that was brewing between Caesar and Pompey, as Cicero was
returning to Rome towards the end of the next year.

The letters have been translated in the traditionary order in which they
are usually printed. That order, however, is not strictly chronological;
and, for the convenience of those who would read them in their
historical order, a table arranging them so far as possible in order of
date has been drawn up at the end of the volume.

For the basis of the text the Teubner edition has been used; but it has
been revised by comparison with more recent works and papers on the
subject. Textual notes have only been given in a few cases where the
reading is especially corrupt or uncertain; and other notes too have
been confined to cases where they seemed absolutely indispensable. For
such notes and in the translation itself, I must acknowledge my
indebtedness to predecessors, especially to Tyrrell’s indispensable
edition and Shuckburgh’s excellent translation.

There remain two small points to which I may perhaps call attention here
in case they should puzzle the general reader. The first is that, when
he finds the dates in this volume disagreeing with the rules and tables
generally given in Latin grammars and taught in schools, he must please
to remember that those rules apply only to the Julian Calendar, which
was introduced in 45 B.C., and that these letters were written before
that date. Before the alterations introduced by Caesar, March, May, July
and October had 31 days each, February 28, and the other months 29.
Compared with the Julian Calendar this shows a difference of two days in
all dates which fall between the Ides and the end of the months January,
August and December, and of one day in similar dates in April, June,
September and November.

The second point, which requires explanation, is the presence of some
numerals in the margin of the text of letters 16 to 19 of Book IV. As
Mommsen pointed out, the archetype from which the existent MSS. were
copied must have had some of the leaves containing these letters
transposed. These were copied in our MSS. in the wrong order, and were
so printed in earlier editions. In the text Mommsen’s order, with some
recent modifications introduced by Holzapfel, has been adopted; and the
figures in the margin denote the place of the transposed passages in the
older editions, the Roman figures denoting the letter from which each
particular passage has been shifted and the Arabic numerals the section
of that letter.

The following signs have been used in the apparatus criticus:—

  _M_ = the _Codex Mediceus_ 49, 18, written in the year 1389 A.D., and
    now preserved in the Laurentian Library at Florence.