The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1

The correspondence of Cicero, as preserved for us by his freedman Tiro, does not open till the thirty-ninth year of the orator's life, and is so strictly contemporary, dealing so exclusively with the affairs of the moment, that little light is thrown by it on his previous life. It does not become continuous till the year after his consulship (B.C. 62). There are no letters in the year of the consulship itself or the year of his canvass for the consulship (B.C. 64 and 63). It begins in B.C. 68, and between that date and B.C. 65 there are only eleven letters. We have, therefore, nothing exactly contemporaneous to help us to form a judgment on the great event which coloured so much of his after life, the suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy and the execution of the conspirators, in the last month of his consulship. But setting aside the first eleven letters, we have from that time forward a correspondence illustrating.