[Footnote 142: _ad Q. Fratr._ ii. 4. 3. Cp. _ad Att._ iv. 2.]
[Footnote 143: _ad Q. Fratr._ ii. 14. 3.]
[Footnote 144: _ad Att._ xii. 22. I may add in a footnote a final startling example of recklessness we have been noting. Decimus Brutus had, in March 44 B.C., a capital of £320,000, yet next year he writes to Cicero that so far from any part of his private property being unencumbered, he had encumbered all his friends with debt also (_ad Fam._ xi. 10. 5). But this was in order to maintain troops.]
[Footnote 145: _ad Att._ xiii. 42. Cp. xvi. 5.]
[Footnote 146: What the king really wanted the money for, was to bribe the senate to restore him.--Cic. _ad Fam._ i. 1.]
[Footnote 147: Cic. _pro Bab. Post_. 8. 22.]
[Footnote 148: Varro, _R.R._ i. 2. Ferrero (_Greatness and Decline of Rome_) has the merit of having discerned the signs of the regeneration of Italian agriculture at this time, but he is apt to push his conclusions further than the evidence warrants. See the translation of his work by A.E. Zimmern, i. p. 124; ii. p. 131 foll. The statement of Pliny quoted by him (xv. 1. 3) that oil was first exported from Italy in the year 52 B.C., is, however, of the utmost importance.]
[Footnote 149: The Republic was not to last long; but among the consuls of the last years of its existence were several members of the old families.]
[Footnote 150: _ad Fam_. xv. 12. This rather stilted letter is nearly identical with one to the other consul-designate, another aristocrat, Claudius Marcellus. Cicero is in each case trying to do his own business, while writing to a man of higher social rank than his own.]
[Footnote 151: The letters of the years 58 to 54 are full of bitter allusions to the _invidia_ of these men, which culminate in the long and windy one to Lentulus Spinther of October 54, where he actually accuses them of taking up Clodius in order to spite him. In a confidential note to Atticus in the spring of 56, he told him that they hated him for buying the Tusculan villa of the great noble Catulus.--_ad Fam._ i. 9; _ad Att_. iv. 5.]
[Footnote 152: Plutarch, _Cato major_ 2 and 12.]
[Footnote 153: Corn. Nepos, _Cato_ 1. 4, who remarks that Cato's return from his quaestorship in Sardinia with Ennius in his train was as good as a splendid triumph.]