The six months which he spent there, though busy and studious, must have been very pleasant ones.  To one like Cicero, Athens was at once classic and holy ground.  It combined all those associations and attractions which we might now expect to find in a visit to the capitals of Greece and of Italy, and a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.  Poetry, rhetoric, philosophy, religion—­all, to his eyes, had their cradle there.  It was the home of all that was literature to him; and there, too, were the great Eleusinian mysteries—­which are mysteries still, but which contained under their veil whatever faith in the Invisible and Eternal rested in the mind of an enlightened pagan.  There can be little doubt but that Cicero took this opportunity of initiation.  His brother Quintus and one of his cousins were with him at Athens; and in that city he also renewed his acquaintance with an old school-fellow, Titus Pomponius, who lived so long in the city, and became so thoroughly Athenian in his tastes and habits, that he is better known to us, as he was to his contemporaries, by the surname of Atticus, which was given him half in jest, than by his more sonorous Roman name.  It is to the accidental circumstance of Atticus remaining so long a voluntary exile from Rome, and to the correspondence which was maintained between the two friends, with occasional intervals, for something like four-and-twenty years, that we are indebted for a more thorough insight into the character of Cicero than we have as to any other of the great minds of antiquity; nearly four hundred of his letters to Atticus, written in all the familiar confidence of private friendship by a man by no means reticent as to his personal feelings, having been preserved to us.  Atticus’s replies are lost; it is said that he was prudent enough, after his friend’s unhappy death, to reclaim and destroy them.  They would perhaps have told us, in his case, not very much that we care to know beyond what we know already.  Rich, luxurious, with elegant tastes and easy morality—­a true Epicurean, as he boasted himself to be—­Atticus had nevertheless a kind heart and an open hand.  He has generally been called selfish, somewhat unfairly; at least his selfishness never took the form of indifference or unkindness to others.  In one sense he was a truer philosopher than Cicero:  for he seems to have acted through life on that maxim of Socrates which his friend professed to approve, but certainly never followed,—­that “a wise man kept out of public business”.  His vocation was certainly not patriotism; but the worldly wisdom which kept well with men of all political colours, and eschewed the wretched intrigues and bloody feuds of Rome, stands out in no unfavourable contrast with the conduct of many of her soi-disant patriots.  If he declined to take a side himself, men of all parties resorted to him in their adversity; and the man who befriended the younger Marius in his exile, protected the widow of Antony, gave shelter on his estates to