B.C. 44, æt. 62. Dictat. r.p. ger. C. Iulius Cæsar IV. Mag. eq. . M. Æmilius Lepidus II. Coss., C. Octavius } non Cn. Domitius } inierunt. C. Iulius Cæsar V. occis. M. Antonius. P. Cornelius Dolabella. This momentous year opened apparently without any special signs of danger. Cicero was employed in finishing his Tusculan Disputations, and we have practically only one letter from him before the Ides of March (the others being mere letters of introduction of the usual formal kind). But in the one addressed to Curius, he takes occasion to shew his discontent at the régime. He seems to have been specially annoyed at the disparagement of the consular dignity involved in Cæsar appointing Rebilus to that office for one day, the last of the year, in order to reward him by the rank of a consular. This calm was suddenly interrupted by the murder of Cæsar, and Cicero immediately threw himself into politics again with the idea that the republic was restored. He soon found however that the regnum had not ended with the death of the rex, and that Antony had no intention of sinking into the position of a mere constitutional magistrate, to say nothing of the claims of the young Octavius—whom Cicero at first hoped to play off against Antony. From about June to the end of August therefore Cicero again avoided politics by visiting his villas and devoting himself to literature, intending also to visit his son at Athens. The de Natura Deorum, de Divinatione, de Fato, de Senectute, de Amicitia, de Gloria, de Officiis, and Topica, were all finished in this year, and probably in the first half of it. After the beginning of September he was engaged heart and soul in the leadership of the senatorial party against Antony. The first four speeches against Antony (Phil. i.-iv.) were written and three of them delivered before the end of the year. The last letter to Atticus is written in December of this year.
TO MANIUS CURIUS (AT PATRÆ)
Rome (January)
No, I now neither urge nor ask you to return home. Nay,
I am longing myself to fly away and to arrive somewhere,
where "I may hear neither the name nor the deeds of the
Pelopidæ."[1] You could scarcely believe how disgraceful my
conduct appears to me in countenancing the present state
of things. Truly, I think you foresaw long ago what was
- ↑ For this quotation, see p. 100.
