Letters to Atticus

Cicero's letters to his closest friend Titus Pomponius Atticus — a unique document of the last years of the Roman Republic, revealing Cicero's private thoughts, anxieties, and political calculations.

Primary source of extraordinary quality: Cicero wrote with unusual frankness to Atticus, making these letters a real-time record of the Republic's collapse — the civil wars, Caesar's rise, the proscriptions. The private Cicero vs. the public orator: these letters show a more anxious, politically calculating, and sometimes small-minded figure than the public speeches. One of the great examples of letter-writing as a literary form.