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.

Apart from this correspondence and the other literature of the time,
my mainstay throughout has been the _Privatleben der Römer_ of
Marquardt, which forms the last portion of the great _Handbuch der
Römischen Altertümer_ of Mommsen and Marquardt. My debt is great also
to Professors Tyrrell and Purser, whose labours have provided us with
a text of Cicero's letters which we can use with confidence; the
citations from these letters have all been verified in the new Oxford
text edited by Professor Purser. One other name I must mention with
gratitude. I firmly believe that the one great hope for classical
learning and education lies in the interest which the unlearned public
may be brought to feel in ancient life and thought. We have just lost
the veteran French scholar who did more perhaps to create and
maintain such an interest than any man of his time; and I gladly here
acknowledge that it was Boissier's _Cicéron et ses amis_ that in my
younger days made me first feel the reality of life and character