Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero

Excerpt

This book was originally intended to be a companion to Professor
Tucker’s Life in Ancient Athens, published in Messrs. Macmillan’s
series of Handbooks of Archaeology and Art; but the plan was abandoned
for reasons on which I need not dwell, and before the book was quite
finished I was called to other and more specialised work.  As it
stands, it is merely an attempt to supply an educational want.  At our
schools and universities we read the great writers of the last age of
the Republic, and learn something of its political and constitutional
history; but there is no book in our language which supplies a picture
of life and manners, of education, morals, and religion in that
intensely interesting period.  The society of the Augustan age, which
in many ways was very different, is known much better; and of late my
friend Professor Dill’s fascinating volumes have familiarised us with
the social life of two several periods of the Roman Empire.  But the
age of Cicero is in some ways at least as important as any period of
the Empire; it is a critical moment in the history of Graeco-Roman
civilisation.  And in the Ciceronian correspondence, of more than nine
hundred contemporary letters, we have the richest treasure-house of
social life that has survived from any period of classical antiquity.