The poet loved his Sabine farm and all its rural delights—­after his fashion; and perhaps thought honestly that he loved it more than he really did.  Above all, he loved to write about it.  With that fancy, half-real, perhaps, and half-affected, for pastoral simplicity, which has always marked a state of over-luxurious civilisation, he protests to himself that there is nothing like the country.  But perhaps Horace discharges a sly jest at himself, in a sort of aside to his readers, in the person of Alphius, the rich city money-lender, who is made to utter that pretty apostrophe to rural happiness: 

  “Happy the man, in busy schemes unskilled,
  Who, living simply, like our sires of old,
  Tills the few acres which his father tilled,
  Vexed by no thoughts of usury or gold”. 
  Martin’s ‘Horace’

And who, after thus expatiating for some stanzas on the charms of the country, calls in all his money one week in order to settle there, and puts it all out again (no doubt at higher interest) the week after. “O rus, quando to aspiciam!” has been the cry of public men before and since Cicero’s day, to whom, as to the great Roman, banishment from political life, and condemnation to perpetual leisure, would have been a sentence that would have crushed their very souls.

He was very happy at this time in his family.  His wife and he loved one another with an honest affection; anything more would have been out of the natural course of things in Roman society at any date, and even so much as this was become a notable exception in these later days.  It is paying a high honour to the character of Cicero and his household—­and from all evidence that has come down to us it may be paid with truth—­that even in those evil times it might have presented the original of what Virgil drew as almost a fancy picture, or one to be realised only in some happy retirement into which the civilised vices of the capital had never penetrated—­

  “Where loving children climb to reach a kiss—­
  A home of chaste delights and wedded bliss.[1]”

His little daughter, Tullia, or Tulliola, which was her pet name (the Roman diminutives being formed somewhat more elegantly than ours, by adding a syllable instead of cutting short), was the delight of his heart in his earlier letters to Atticus he is constantly making some affectionate mention of her—­sending her love, or some playful message which his friend would understand.  She had been happily married (though she was then but thirteen at the most) the year before his consulship; but the affectionate intercourse between father and daughter was never interrupted until her early death.  His only son, Marcus, born after a considerable interval, who succeeded to Tullia’s place as a household pet, is made also occasionally to send some childish word of remembrance to his father’s old friend: