Page:Cicero And The Fall Of The Roman Republic.djvu/414

366 there is no other way of forgetting our anxieties. But where, you say, is philosophy gone? Yours to the kitchen, and mine to the rhetoric school. I am ashamed to be a slave, and so I make believe to be busy, that I may shut my ears to the reproaches of Plato." To another friend he describes a dinner with Volumnius Eutrapelus, where Cicero and Atticus and other grey-beards found that they had been invited to meet a lively person, hardly fit company for a consular of Rome. "You wonder that we can make our slavery so merry. Well, what am I to do? I ask you, the student of philosophy. Shall I wring my heart and torment myself? Who will be the better for that? and how long am I to go on with it? . . . I never was much attracted by women of that class even when I was young, to say nothing of my old age: but I do enjoy the dinner table; there I speak whatever comes uppermost, and turn all my lamentations into hearty laughter."

This easy life was rudely cut short by a great and unexpected calamity. Cicero's daughter Tullia, died suddenly at Rome about the end of March in the year 45 B.Cc. Tullia was her father's darling, the only one of his family of whose conduct he never complains, his consolation in all his troubles, and his tender and sympathising companion in all his pursuits. Cicero was overwhelmed with grief, and sought refuge in tears and seclusion. "In this desolate spot," he writes to Atticus from Astura soon after his bereavement, "I avoid speaking a word to any one.