Twenty-nine of the elder Cicero’s letters to his brother remain, written in terms of remarkable kindness and affection, which go far to vindicate the Roman character from a charge which has sometimes been brought against it of coldness in these family relationships.  Few modern brothers, probably, would write to each other in such terms as these: 

“Afraid lest your letters bother me?  I wish you would bother me, and re-bother me, and talk to me and at me; for what can give me more pleasure?  I swear that no muse-stricken rhymester ever reads his own last poem with more delight than I do what you write to me about matters public or private, town or country.  Here now is a letter from you full of pleasant matter, but with this dash of the disagreeable in it, that you have been afraid—­nay, are even now afraid—­of being troublesome to me.  I could quarrel with you about it, if that were not a sin.  But if I have reason to suspect anything of that sort again, I can only say that I shall always be afraid lest, when we are together, I may be troublesome to you”.

Or take, again, the pathetic apology which he makes for having avoided an interview with Quintus in those first days of his exile when he was so thoroughly unmanned: 

“My brother, my brother, my brother!  Did you really fear that I was angry, because I sent off the slaves without any letter to you?  And did you even think that I was unwilling to see you?  I angry with you?  Could I possibly be angry with you?...  When I miss you, it is not a brother only that I miss.  To me you have always been the pleasantest of companions, a son in dutiful affection, a father in counsel.  What pleasure ever had I without you, or you without me?”

Quintus had accompanied Caesar on his expedition into Britain as one of his lieutenants, and seems to have written home to his brother some notices of the country; to which the latter, towards the end of his reply, makes this allusion: 

“How delighted I was to get your letter from Britain!  I had been afraid of the voyage across, afraid of the rock-bound coast of the island.  The other dangers of such a campaign I do not mean to despise, but in these there is more to hope than to fear, and I have been rather anxiously expecting the result than in any real alarm about it.  I see you have a capital subject to write about.  What novel scenery, what natural curiosities and remarkable places, what strange tribes and strange customs, what a campaign, and what a commander you have to describe!  I will willingly help you in the points you request, and I will send you the verses you ask for—­though it is sending ’an owl to Athens’,[1] I know”.

[Footnote 1:  A Greek proverb, equivalent to our ’coals to Newcastle’.]

In another letter he says, “Only give me Britain to paint with your colours and my own pencil”.  But either the Britons of those days did not, after all, seem to afford sufficient interest for poem or history, or for some other reason this joint literary undertaking, which seems once to have been contemplated, was never carried out, and we have missed what would beyond doubt have been a highly interesting volume of Sketches in Britain by the brothers Cicero.