But far above
all other prose writers of the age stand two men, neither of them
Roman by birth, but yet members of the senatorial order; the one a man
of encyclopaedic learning, with what we may almost call a scientific
interest in the subjects which he treated in awkward and homely Latin,
the other a man of comparatively little learning, but gifted with so
exquisite a sense of the beautiful in expression, and at the same
time with a humanity so real and in that day so rare, that it is not
without good cause that he has recently been called the most highly
cultured man of all antiquity.[169] Of Varro's numerous works we have
unluckily but few survivals; of Cicero's we have still such a mass
as will for ever provide ample material for studying the life, the
manners, the thought of his day.
A large part of this mass consists of the correspondence of which we
are making such frequent use in these chapters. Letter-writing is
perhaps the most pleasing and genuine of all the literary activities
of the time; men took pains to write well, yet not with any definite
prospect of publication, such as was the motive a century later in
the days of Seneca and Pliny.
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