THE life of Cicero has passed before us. We have endeavored
to gain a close vision of it, and we have been favored by material
much richer and much more varied than is afforded by any
other life of the ancient world. We veiled or palliated nothing.
Also we declined to resort to the device of artificial modern-
ization, so popular now. We avoided also injecting into our
valuations the categories of our own world, for that trick too is
a denial, it is the negation of genuine historiography.

Cicero from early boyhood established the habit to outdo and
outshine his competitors and his contemporaries. He should not
be conceived as a literateur who somehow dabbled in politics or
stumbled into public life. His training for it was fully as thor-
ough as that of any member of the office-holding aristocracy. He
was not a poorer Roman or a less genuine Roman because his
culture was deeper and broader than that of the typical Roman.
There was then no Roman culture. His culture then was the
only finer or deeper culture which at that time was available;
it was Greek culture. His attitude towards it was manifold
and manysided. He was bilingual in a way, but in his political
consciousness he felt himself vastly superior to the Greeks,
though Plato, Dicaearchus and other Greek thinkers furnished
him clews, incentives and theories. It is futile to place Caesar's
Latinity on the level of the man who, in a way, created Latin
prose style. Theory, contemplation, taste, no less than many
graces of Isocratean art, he brought into his native tongue for
the first time. Ennius and Lucilius were set aside and became
antiquated through the more perfect and finished verse of Horace
and Vergil. But no one ever performed that feat in the specific
domains of Cicero's authorship in Latin Prose. Unless some
grammaticus or antiquarian preserved some slender fragments,
what do we know of the oratory of Caesar, Caelius, Curio, Calvus,
Brutus, Asinius or Messalla? Cicero was a cyclopedic nature,
his ingenium had a certain universality. He was conscious of
it. In a way he was the first of the Humanists. His interest in
applied psychology, in ethics, in political science, in historiog-

-464-