times more.  These ten Curio gave me, and ten others from Africa.  If you will only remember to send for hunters from Cibyra, and also send letters to Pamphylia (for there, I understand, more are taken than elsewhere), you will succeed.  I do beseech you look after this matter.  You have only to give the orders.  I have provided people to keep and transport the animals when once taken.”  The governor would not hear of imposing the charge of capturing the panthers on the hunters of the province.  Still he would do his best to oblige his friend.  “The matter of the panthers is being diligently attended to by the persons who are accustomed to hunt them; but there is a strange scarcity of them, and the few that there are complain grievously, saying that they are the only creatures in my province that are persecuted.”

From Laodicea Cicero returned to Tarsus, the capital of his province, wound up the affairs of his government, appointed an acting governor, and started homewards early in August.  On his way he paid a visit to Rhodes, wishing to show to his son and nephew (they had accompanied him to his government) the famous school of eloquence in which he had himself studied.  Here he heard with much regret of the death of Hortensius.  He had seen the great orator’s son at Laodicea, where he was amusing himself in the disreputable company of some gladiators, and had asked him to dinner for his father’s sake, he says.  His stay at Rhodes was probably of some duration, for he did not reach Ephesus till the first of October.  A tedious passage of fourteen days brought him to Athens.  On his journey westwards Tiro, his confidential servant, was seized with illness, and had to be left behind at Patrae.  Tiro was a slave, though afterwards set free by his master; but he was a man of great and varied accomplishments, and Cicero writes to him as he might to the very dearest of his friends.  There is nothing stranger in all that we know of “Roman Life” than the presence in it of such men as Tiro.  Nor is there any thing, we might even venture to say, quite like it elsewhere in the whole history of the world.  Now and then, in the days when slavery still existed in the Southern States of America, mulatto and quadroon slaves might have been found who in point of appearance and accomplishments were scarcely different from their owners.  But there was always a taint, or what was reckoned as a taint, of negro blood in the men and women so situated.  In Rome it must have been common to see men, possibly better born (for Greek might even be counted better than Roman descent), and probably better educated than their masters, who had absolutely no rights as human beings, and could be tortured or killed just as cruelty or caprice might suggest.  To Tiro, man of culture and acute intellect as he was, there must have been an unspeakable bitterness in the thought of servitude, even under a master so kindly and affectionate as Cicero.  One shudders to think what the feelings