the victims of the triumvirate’s proscription, and was always ready to offer his friend Cicero both his house and his purse whenever the political horizon clouded round him,—­this man was surely as good a citizen as the noisiest clamourer for “liberty” in the Forum, or the readiest hand with the dagger.  He kept his life and his property safe through all those years of peril and proscription, with less sacrifice of principle than many who had made louder professions, and died—­by a singular act of voluntary starvation, to make short work with an incurable disease—­at a ripe old age; a godless Epicurean, no doubt, but not the worst of them.

We must return to Cicero, and deal somewhat briefly with the next few years of his life.  He extended his foreign tour for two years, visiting the chief cities of Asia Minor, remaining for a short time at Rhodes to take lessons once more from his old tutor Molo the rhetorician, and everywhere availing himself of the lectures of the most renowned Greek professors, to correct and improve his own style of composition and delivery.  Soon after his return to Rome, he married.  Of the character of his wife Terentia very different views have been taken.  She appears to have written to him very kindly during his long forced absences.  Her letters have not reached us; but in all her husband’s replies she is mentioned in terms of apparently the most sincere affection.  He calls her repeatedly his “darling”—­“the delight of his eyes”—­“the best of mothers;” yet he procured a divorce from her, for no distinctly assigned reason, after a married life of thirty years, during which we find no trace of any serious domestic unhappiness.  The imputations on her honour made by Plutarch, and repeated by others, seem utterly without foundation; and Cicero’s own share in the transaction is not improved by the fact of his taking another wife as soon as possible—­a ward of his own, an almost girl, with whom he did not live a year before a second divorce released him.  Terentia is said also to have had an imperious temper; but the only ground for this assertion seems to have been that she quarrelled occasionally with her sister-in-law Pomponia, sister of Atticus and wife of Quintus Cicero; and since Pomponia, by her own brother’s account, showed her temper very disagreeably to her husband, the feud between the ladies was more likely to have been her fault than Terentia’s.  But the very low notion of the marriage relations entertained by both the later Greeks and Romans helps to throw some light upon a proceeding which would otherwise seem very mysterious.  Terentia, as is pretty plain from the hints in her husband’s letters, was not a good manager in money matters; there is room for suspicion that she was not even an honest one in his absence, and was “making a purse” for herself; she had thus failed in one of the only two qualifications which, according to Demosthenes—­an authority who ranked very high in Cicero’s eyes—­were essential in a wife, to be “a faithful house-guardian” and “a fruitful mother”.  She did not die of a broken heart; she lived to be 104, and, according to Dio Cassius, to have three more husbands.  Divorces were easy enough at Rome, and had the lady been a rich widow, there might be nothing so improbable in this latter part of the story, though she was fifty years old at the date of this first divorce.[1]