The callers and clients would be here of a morning, as in the house within the walls; the bore might be met not only in the Via Sacra, like Horace's immortal friend, but wherever the stream of life hurried with its busy eddies[386].

Lucilius drew a graphic picture of this feverish life, which is fortunately preserved; it refers of course to a time before Cicero's birth (Fragm.

9, Baehrens): nunc vero a mani ad noctem, festo atque profesto, totus item pariter populus, plebesque patresque, iactare indu foro se omnes, decedere nusquam: uni se atque eidem studio omnes dedere et arti, verba dare ut oaute possint, pugnare dolose: blanditia certare, bonum simulare virum se: insidias facere, ut si hostes sint omnibus omnes.
That this exciting social atmosphere, with its jostling and over-reaching in the Forum, and its callers and dinner-parties in the house, had some sinister influence on men's tempers and nerves, there can be no doubt.

Cicero dearly loved the life of the city, but he paid for it by a sensibility which is constantly apparent in his letters, and diminished his value as a statesman.

When he wrote from Cilicia to his more youthful friend Caelius, urging him to stick to the city, in words that are almost pathetic, it never occurred to him that he was prescribing exactly that course of treatment which had done himself much damage[387].