M. TULLIUS CICERO, ARRANGED ACCORDING TO ITS CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER; WITH A REVISION OF THE TEXT, A COMMENTARY, AND INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS. BY ROBERT YELVERTON TYRRELL, LITT. D., Hon. Litt. D. Cantab., D. C. L. Oxon., LL. D. Edin., D. Lit. Q. Univ.; AND LOUIS CLAUDE PURSER, LITT. D., Fellow and Professor of Latin, Trinity College, Dublin. DUBLIN: HODGES, FIGGIS, & CO. (LTD.), GRAFTON-STREET. 1899. PREFACE. IN bringing out the sixth volume, which completes the CORRESPONDENCE OF CICERO, we wish again to thank our readers and reviewers for kindly encouragement and valuable suggestions. We expect that the volume containing the Index will appear within a year. The task undertaken twenty years ago will then have been accomplished. Indeed, something more will have been attempted. For it was no part of the original design to include the Letters of Brutus, which we then believed to be spurious, but which we are now convinced are genuine. We are aware that twenty years is a long time to spend on an edition, even of such a massive, difficult, and important body of literature as the Correspondence of Cicero. Doubtless, we might have done the work as well, or better, in half the time, had we devoted to it our whole leisure and attention. There were difficulties in the way of our doing so, into which we need not enter here. We did not use despatch. We took our time. And it was fortunate that we did so : 'Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well.' If we had finished the edition in ten years from its inception, we should have missed that flood of light which in the last decade the labours and genius of many Continental scholars—especially O. E. Schmidt, Gurlitt, and Lehmann,-have thrown on the text, VOL. VI. b 386632 |