to you.”  He returns to the subject in another letter.  Atticus had probably purchased for him another bust of the same kind.  “What you write about the Hermathena pleases me greatly.  It is a most appropriate ornament for my own little ‘seat of learning.’  Hermes is suitable every where, and Minerva is the special emblem of a lecture-room.  I should be glad if you would, as you suggest, find as many more ornaments of the same kind for the place.  As for the statues that you sent me before, I have not seen them.  They are at my house at Formiae, whither I am just now thinking of going.  I shall remove them all to my place at Tusculum.  If ever I shall find myself with more than enough for this I shall begin to ornament the other.  Pray keep your books.  Don’t give up the hope that I may be able to make them mine.  If I can only do this I shall be richer than Crassus.”  And, again, “If you can find any lecture-room ornaments do not neglect to secure them.  My Tusculum house is so delightful to me that it is only when I get there that I seem to be satisfied with myself.”  In another letter we hear something about the prices.  He has paid about one hundred and eighty pounds for some statues from Megara which his friend had purchased for him.  At the same time he thanks him by anticipation for some busts of Hermes, in which the pedestals were of marble from Pentelicus, and the heads of bronze.  They had not come to hand when he next writes:  “I am looking for them,” he says, “most anxiously;” and he again urges diligence in looking for such things.  “You may trust the length of my purse.  This is my special fancy.”  Shortly after Atticus has found another kind of statue, double busts of Hermes and Hercules, the god of strength; and Cicero is urgent to have them for his lecture-room.  All the same he does not forget the books, for which he is keeping his odds and ends of income, his “little vintages,” as he calls them—­possibly the money received from a small vineyard attached to his pleasure-grounds.  Of books, however, he had an ample supply close at home, of which he could make as much use as he pleased, the splendid library which Lucullus had collected.  “When I was at my house in Tusculum,” he writes in one of his treatises, “happening to want to make use of some books in the library of the young Lucullus, I went to his villa, to take them out myself, as my custom was.  Coming there I found Cato (Cato was the lad’s uncle and guardian), of whom, however, then I knew nothing, sitting in the library absolutely surrounded with books of the Stoic writers on philosophy.”

When Cicero was banished, the house at Tusculum shared the fate of the rest of his property.  The building was destroyed.  The furniture, and with it the books and works of art so diligently collected, were stolen or sold.  Cicero thought, and was probably right in thinking, that the Senate dealt very meanly with him when they voted him something between four and five thousand pounds as compensation for his loss