passing thought, on paper to his friend. If Cicero had been seriously willing to sell his services for any such price, Cæsar would gladly have paid it twenty times over.[1]
In the month of May, Cicero began to be more anxious. He was alarmed by Pompey's marriage with Cæsar's daughter Julia, and by a fresh agrarian proposal, under which the Campanian land, expressly exempted from the former law, was destined for distribution. "These things," he writes,[2] "are bad enough in themselves, but they cannot be meant to stop here. For what have these people gained by them as yet? They would never have gone so far, except to pave the way for further abominations."
From the month of June onwards Cicero is again in Rome, and his letters to Atticus (who has now retired to his estate in Epirus) give a lively picture of the situation. The triumvirs are absolute masters, but they are likewise the objects of universal hatred. "Speech is a little freer than it was, at least when people converse together in public places, or at dinner. Indignation begins to overpower fear.[3] Things are really much worse than before, because men have lost patience. "The poison administered at first was so slow in working that I thought we might have a painless extinction; now I fear that the hisses of the Commons, the plain-speaking of decent folk, and
