Cicero's Letters to Women.

Te Aroha News, Volume IV, Issue 176, 30 October 1886, Page 1 (Supplement)

Cicero's Letters to Women.

The other omission in Cicero'e letterB ia really quite unpardonable. ' In all those 800 letters it would be difficult to find one in which he says a word about the dress of the ladies of hia time— it is disgraceful, but so it'is. It proves him to be like other male creatures — unobservant, tasteless, dark, obtuse and lacking in that higher sense and that gentler, truer, elevating refinement which the nobler bex ie gifted with. This omission in Cicero's correspondence is all the more reprehensible because his correspondents were by no means exclusively gentlemen. There was one lady, Cserellia, who, we are told, had a very voluminous correspondence with him. It is most unfortunate that Ceerellia's letters are all lost. She must have told him how Pulvia and Tarentia and Tullia and a host more were dressed, and how they looked - The result is that there are few subjects of which we known less than we do of ladies' dress at Rome in the later years of the republic. We know that Cicero's own wife got him into great difficulties by her speculations on the Stock Exchange or something of the' sort, and that Cserellia herself was an extremely fine lady of great wealth and of very great culture. We know that Cicero frequently writes about his lady friends, though he was not exactly what is known ae a lady's man, but about their ' toilet — t^eir jewels — their fashion of doing their 1 - hair — their shawls and their feathers and their ribbons, and ' the last new things in caps or mantles — not a word-J^Itisvery 3ad.", What a deplorable loss the world has experienced in the disappearance of the Lady CrareUia's -letters. la it rnot'tobe hoped that they- may yet be >diecoyered in some obscure library ? -How much iappier"we;8ha.ll< airbed Au-j-V" „> "I -\ ';' ' ,,'- -■■ ■ ■ . ,.S!5y).' r> \" ' . ' -y> Speaking'ofMrinkipg^it^naiay^ be observed thattmen«whoiMc4n take itoMeaye itialone" \ /generially^taik'e.itj.fe' "M-':>'. j T,.r[H> >4,r'- ■- ' ' x