But indeed every glimpse of this kind which Cicero’s correspondence affords us gives token of a kindly heart, and makes us long to know something more.  Some have suspected him of a want of filial affection, owing to a somewhat abrupt and curt announcement in a letter to Atticus of his father’s death; and his stanch defenders propose to adopt, with Madvig, the reading, discessit—­“left us”, instead of decessit—­“died”.  There really seems no occasion.  Unless Atticus knew the father intimately, there was no need to dilate upon the old man’s death; and Cicero mentions subsequently, in terms quite as brief, the marriage of his daughter and the birth of his son—­events in which we are assured he felt deeply interested.  If any further explanation of this seeming coldness be required, the following remarks of Mr. Forsyth are apposite and true: 

“The truth is, that what we call sentiment was almost unknown to the ancient Romans, in whose writings it would be as vain to look for it as to look for traces of Gothic architecture amongst classic ruins.  And this is something more than a mere illustration.  It suggests a reason for the absence.  Romance and sentiment came from the dark forests of the North, when Scandinavia and Germany poured forth their hordes to subdue and people the Roman Empire.  The life of a citizen of the Republic of Rome was essentially a public life.  The love of country was there carried to an extravagant length, and was paramount to, and almost swallowed up, the private and social affections.  The state was everything, the individual comparatively nothing.  In one of the letters of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius to Fronto, there is a passage in which he says that the Roman language had no word corresponding with the Greek [Greek:  philostorgia],—­the affectionate love for parents and children.  Upon this Niebuhr remarks that the feeling was ’not a Roman one; but Cicero possessed it in a degree which few Romans could comprehend, and hence he was laughed at for the grief which he felt at the death of his daughter Tullia’”.

CHAPTER X.

ESSAYS ON ‘OLD AGE’ AND ‘FRIENDSHIP’

The treatise on ‘Old Age’, which is thrown into the form of a dialogue, is said to have been suggested by the opening of Plato’s ‘Republic’, in which Cephalus touches so pleasantly on the enjoyments peculiar to that time of life.  So far as light and graceful treatment of his subject goes, the Roman essayist at least does not fall short of his model.  Montaigne said of it, that “it made one long to grow old";[1] but Montaigne was a Frenchman, and such sentiment was quite in his way.  The dialogue, whether it produce this effect on many readers or not, is very pleasant reading:  and when we remember that the author wrote it when he was exactly in his grand climacteric, and addressed it to his friend Atticus, who was within a year of the same age, we get that