Social Life at Rome

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. Apart from this correspondence and the other literature of the time, my mainstay throughout has been the Privatleben der Remer of Marquardt, which forms the last portion of the great Handbuch der R'o'mischen Altertn'mcr of Mommsen and Mar quardt. 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 Cice'ron et ses amis that in my younger days made me first feel the reality of life and character in an age of which I then hardly knew anything but the perplexing political history.