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Marcus Tullius Cicero, orator, statesman and philosopher, is the great commanding figure of the literary period which is designated by his name. With him Latin prose reaches a height never before attained and never afterward surpassed. The cooler and more critical judgment of our northern natures and later age may find his eloquence too exuberant, and our scholars, trained in the study of the Greek philosophers, may deny him the title of an original thinker, but no one can fail to appreciate the power of his utterance, the clearness of his exposition, or the lucid elegance of his diction. He found the Latin language the chief dialect of Italy, the speech of a great and mighty city; he made it the language of the world for centuries.

To write the life of Cicero in all the known details would be to write the history of Rome during the entire period of his manhood. The historian of literature must content himself with a mere sketch. Cicero was born at Arpinum, a small town in the hills of eastern Latium, on the third of January, 106 B. C. The town was also the birthplace of Marius, whose fame no doubt fired the imagination of the young Cicero and helped to rouse his ambition. His father determined to give him the best possible education and sent him to Rome, where he knew the two great orators, M. Antonius and L. Crassus, and also the aged M. Accius and the Greek poet Archias. Since legal knowledge was a necessary part of an orator’s education, he studied with the jurist Q. Scævola (p. 44), and the Augur of the same name. He also paid attention to philosophy, studying with the Epicurean Phædrus, the Academic philosopher Philo, who was a pupil of Clitomachus, and the Stoic Diodotus. His teacher of rhetoric was Molo, of Rhodes, and he also received instruction from the rhetorician M. Antonius Gnipho and the actors Roscius and Æsopus. He acquired a great reputation as an advocate by several speeches, especially by his defense of Quinctius (81 B. C.) and Roscius of Ameria (80 B. C.); but his health failed, and at the same time he wished to perfect his education. He therefore left Rome and spent two years (79-77 B. C.) in Greece and Asia. At Athens he studied under the Academic Antiochus, the Epicurean Zeno, his old teacher Phædrus, and the instructor in oratory, Demetrius. In Asia he became acquainted with the florid Asian style of eloquence, and at Rhodes he studied again under his former teacher Molo, who exerted himself to chasten the exuberance of his style, which had been encouraged by the Asiatic orators. At Rhodes he also became acquainted with the famous Stoic Posidonius.

In 77 B. C. he returned to Rome and continued his career as an orator. It was soon after his return that he married Terentia, a lady of noble birth, with whom he lived for thirty-two years. In 75 B. C. he began his official career as quæstor of Lilybæum in Sicily, an office which he filled with great credit. He was elected ædile in 69 and prætor in 66 B. C. In 63 B. C. he was chosen consul, with Antonius as his colleague, and truthfully claimed that, although he was a novus homo, a man who had no family influence or prestige to aid him, he had obtained each of the important offices of the state at the earliest legally admissible age. In his consulship the conspiracy of Catiline occurred, which Cicero suppressed with relentless vigor, although it was supposed to be favored by some of the most powerful men in Rome, including Crassus and Cæsar. The conspirators were not sentenced to death by regular legal process, but the senate decreed that the consul should defend the safety of the state, and Cicero gave the order for their execution. To this year belong the four speeches against Catiline.

In 60 B. C. the first triumvirate was formed. The triumvirs found the influence of Cicero unfavorable to their plans, and encouraged his enemy, P. Clodius Pulcher, who had been adopted into a plebeian family and been elected tribune of the people, to propose a bill that any one who had put a Roman citizen to death without due process of law be banished. Cicero, finding that he could not defend himself with success, withdrew from Rome, and his banishment was decreed. He remained in exile from April, 58 B. C., until August, 57 B. C., when he was recalled and received with great honors.

In 53 B. C. he was elected to fill the place in the college of augurs made vacant by the death of the younger Crassus. In 51 and 50 B. C. Cicero was again absent from Rome, as proconsul of Cilicia. On his return he found Cæsar and Pompey in open strife. Cicero had never been a party man. He was always a sincere patriot, full of pride in the glorious past of his country, and more than ready to do his duty, and now, when he could not fail to see that both parties were ruled by selfish ambition rather than by disinterested patriotism, it was hard for him to attach himself to either. After some hesitation, he joined the party of Pompey and the senate, and, in 49 B. C., followed Pompey to Epirus, but was not present at the battle of Pharsalus. After Pompey’s defeat he waited at Brundusium until Cæsar allowed him to return to Rome in 47 B. C. Here he lived in retirement, devoting himself to literary pursuits. In 46 B. C. he divorced his wife, Terentia, and married his young ward, Publilia, from whom he parted the following year. The year 45 B. C. was saddened by the death of his only daughter, Tullia. The death of Cæsar, in 44 B. C., recalled Cicero for a short time to public life, but he seems to have left the city in April and to have spent some months at his various villas. In July he decided to visit Athens, where his son was studying, but after he had reached Sicily he heard that he was needed at Rome, gave up his plan, and returned to the capital. Here he took a leading part in the opposition to Antony, against whom he delivered the fourteen orations known as the Philippics. When the triumvirs came to terms with one another, Cicero was included by Antony among those whose death he demanded. After moving first to Tusculum, and then to Formiæ, he went aboard a ship at Caeta, but turned back to land, resolved to die in his native country. On his way between his villa and the sea he was overtaken by a party of Antony’s soldiers and killed, on the seventh of December, 43 B. C. His head and hands were cut off and exposed upon the rostra in the Roman forum.

Cicero’s oratorical and literary activity falls naturally into four chronological divisions: his earlier years, to the beginning of his career as a political orator (81-66 B. C.); the period of his greatest power, lasting until just before his banishment (66-59 B. C.); from his return from banishment until his departure for Cilicia (57-51 B. C.); and from his return from Cilicia until his death (50-43 B. C.).

To the first period belong several speeches delivered in different kinds of lawsuits, the most remarkable of which are the seven orations in the suit against Verres (70 B. C.) for extortion and misgovernment in Sicily. At the earnest request of the Sicilians, Cicero undertook the prosecution. The first speech, the Divinatio in Cæcilium, was delivered to determine whether Cicero or Q. Cæcilius Niger, who had been quæstor under Verres in Sicily, should conduct the prosecution. The first speech in the prosecution itself settled the case. Cicero had prepared all the evidence and summoned the witnesses, and instead of giving the defence an opportunity for delay, brought forward his overwhelming evidence at the beginning, after a mere introduction. Hortensius, Verres’ advocate, gave up the defence after hearing the evidence, and Verres was banished. The five remaining orations, called the Actio Secunda in Verrem, were published by Cicero in order that the facts might be universally known, but were never delivered in court. They show not only that Cicero was at this time a consummate master of eloquence, but also that his diligence in the collection and preparation of his material was remarkable. In addition to his speeches, Cicero wrote in this period several translations from the Greek, which are lost, and also a handbook of oratory, the De Inventione, in two books. This work was written when the author was only twenty years old, and is based upon the treatise addressed to Herennius (p. 45). In it Cicero treats of the various divisions of oratory and their uses. The work is greatly inferior to his later rhetorical writings.

The second period opens with the superb oration For the Manilian Law or De Imperio Gnæi Pompei (66 B. C.), in which Cicero advocates the appointment of Pompey with extraordinary powers to carry on the war against Mithridates. The four brilliant and vehement speeches Against Catiline belong to the year of Cicero’s consulship, 63 B. C. To the same year belongs the witty and able speech For Muræna, in which Cicero defends Muræna against a charge of bribery. The delightful speech For the Poet Archias was delivered in 62 B. C. in support of the poet’s claim to the Roman citizenship. Throughout this period Cicero’s time and energy were so fully occupied with affairs of state and with the suits in which he was engaged as to leave him little leisure for purely literary production. In 60 B. C., however, when the troubles that led to his banishment were thickening about him, he made a metrical version of the astronomical poems of Aratus, portions of which are preserved in his later work On the Nature of the Gods, and wrote a poem in three books On His Consulship, which is lost.

The speeches of the third period were delivered for the most part in private cases, though one of them, On the Consular Provinces (B. C. 56), urging that Cæsar retain his proconsulship of Gaul and that Gabinius and Piso be recalled from Syria and Macedonia, is political, while political considerations have an important place in several others. In the year 55 B. C. the dialogue On the Orator (De Oratore) was written, in which the two great orators of the generation before Cicero, Lucius Crassus and Marcus Antonius, discuss the proper qualities of an orator. The dialogue is supposed to have taken place shortly before the death of Crassus (91 B. C.). The lesser parts are taken by some of the younger statesmen of the day, and in the beginning Cicero’s teacher, the augur Scævola, appears. This is one of the most attractive of Cicero’s works. The technical discussions are enlivened by anecdotes and conversation, and the whole dialogue has a grace and sprightliness not often found in Latin prose. The dialogue On the State (De Re Publica), in six books, was published before 51 B. C. Only about one third of this is preserved in a fragmentary condition, and for many centuries the entire work was lost with the exception of the Dream of Scipio (Somnium Scipionis), from the sixth book. The discussion of the state was followed by a dialogue On Laws (De Legibus), which was begun apparently in 52 B. C., but was never finished. In this period we find Cicero turning his attention to technical works on rhetoric and also to philosophy.

The last period was for the most part a time of quiet literary work for Cicero. Only after Cæsar’s death did he return to public life. In 46 B. C. he thanked Cæsar, in the oration For Marcellus, for allowing Marcellus, who had been consul in 51 B. C., to return to Rome; later in the same year he pleaded the case of Quintus Ligarius in the speech For Ligarius, and in 45 B. C. he spoke in behalf of Deiotarus, tetrarch of Galicia, who had been accused of treachery to Cæsar (For King Deiotarus), but these are the only speeches of this period except the fourteen Philippics, directed against Antony, all of which belong to the short time between the second of September, 44 B. C., and the twenty-second of April, 43 B. C. In these Cicero shows his old energy and fire, but not quite his earlier power. The name Philippics was given to these speeches almost from the very first, and was in fact authorized by Cicero himself, who welcomed the parallel between himself, arousing and encouraging the Romans against Antony, and Demosthenes urging the Athenians to oppose Philip. But these orations were the work of a few months; by far the greater part of the years after 50 B. C. was occupied with other things. In the three years 46-44 B. C. appeared the rhetorical writings Brutus, the Orator, the Divisions of Oratory, the essay On the Best Kind of Orators, and the long series of philosophical dialogues and treatises, the most important of which are the De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, a discussion of the different theories respecting the highest good, in five books; the Academics, two books of which are preserved; the Tusculan Disputations, in five books, treating of the chief essentials for happiness; the treatise On the Nature of the Gods, in three books; and the three books On Duties (De Officiis); to which should be added, on account of their beauty of style and sentiment, the Cato Maior (On Old Age) and the Lælius (On Friendship).

Cicero’s extant works comprise fifty-seven orations and fragments of twenty more, seven rhetorical treatises, thirteen philosophical treatises, including those On the State and On Laws, and about eight hundred and sixty letters, among which are ninety addressed to him by his correspondents. Among the lost works are a few historical writings and several translations from the Greek.

Cicero’s chief ambition was to be a great orator, and he spared no pains to attain his end. Richly endowed by nature, he was not content to employ his natural gifts without careful cultivation. He studied the orators of earlier times, especially the great masters of Greek eloquence, made many translations from the Greek for the sake of perfecting his style, and was a diligent student of rhetorical theories. His conception of the proper qualities of the orator was high and noble. In the essay De Oratore, he makes Crassus say:

Wherefore, if one wishes to define and embrace the proper power of an orator in all its extent, that man will be, in my opinion, an orator worthy of this great name, who can speak wisely, in an orderly and polished manner, from memory, and even with some dignity of action, upon whatever subject arises that needs to be set forth in speech.39

And again:

I assert that by the moderation and wisdom of the perfect orator not only his own dignity, but the welfare of very many persons and of the entire commonwealth is preserved.40

In short, the orator should be, in Cicero’s opinion, not only a great and practised speaker, but a man of varied learning, and at the same time a man of the highest character. This was the ideal he set before himself and strove throughout his life to attain. Certainly it was no low ideal, nor was the man who strove to attain it a character to be despised.

Cicero’s oratorical style is always careful and finished, but is far from that monotonous smoothness which study often gives to the speech of those who are not by nature gifted orators. In the narrative parts of his speeches he is clear, straightforward, and lucid; in his arguments he is logical, incisive, and full of force; in his appeals to the feelings of his hearers he is vivid, quick and powerful, sometimes, according to the demands of the occasion, violent or pathetic. The elaborate periodic structure of his sentences is varied by many short questions or exclamations, and the habitual dignity of his utterance is softened and enlivened by frequent touches of wit, humor, and irony. So in his defence of Quintus Ligarius, who had served in the senatorial army in Africa, although he knew that Cæsar, before whom the case was argued, was perfectly acquainted with the facts, he began his speech as follows:

A new charge, Gaius Cæsar, and one never heard of before this day, my relative, Quintus Tubero, has brought before you: that Quintus Ligarius was in Africa; and Gaius Pansa, a man of excellent character, trusting, perhaps, in his friendship with you, has dared to confess that it is true. Therefore I know not where to turn. For I had come prepared, since you could not know it by yourself, and could not have heard it from any one else, to take advantage of your ignorance for the salvation of the unfortunate man.41

After this ironical introduction, which serves to make his opponents seem ridiculous, Cicero appeals to Cæsar’s well-known clemency before proceeding to his argument.

In his own political life Cicero constantly showed his reverence for the dignity of the Roman people, the established forms of government, and the traditions and great deeds of the earlier days of Rome. The same feeling is evident in nearly all his orations. References to the Roman people, the majesty of the Roman people, the Roman empire, the dignity of the senate, the customs or institutions of the ancestors, are found on almost every page. The oration On the Manilian Law is not merely a panegyric of Pompey and an argument for giving him new and greater powers, but at the same time a hymn of praise to the glory of the Roman republic and the virtues of the men of old:

Our ancestors often engaged in wars because our merchants or ship-owners had been somewhat unjustly treated; what, pray, should be your feelings when so many thousands of Roman citizens have been slaughtered by one edict and at one time? Because our envoys had been too haughtily addressed it pleased your fathers that Corinth, the light of all Greece, be blotted out; will you let that king go unpunished who has slain an ex-consul and envoy of the Roman people, after subjecting him to imprisonment, and scourging, and all kinds of torture? They did not endure it when the liberty of Roman citizens was curtailed; will you be negligent when their lives have been taken? They followed up the verbal violation of the right of embassies; will you desert the cause of an ambassador slain with all torments? Be on your guard, lest, just as it was most honorable for them to hand down to you so great and glorious an empire, so it be most disgraceful for you to fail to guard and preserve what you have received.42

Here the orator’s effort is to arouse his hearers to maintain the dignity and glory of the republic, whose greatness is brought home to their minds by the references to the deeds of their ancestors. This passage is also a good example of the effective use of repeated contrasts.

In the speech For the Manilian Law Cicero addresses the assembled Roman people on a political question of immediate and great importance. His tone is exalted and earnest, his eloquence stirring and inspiring. The same qualities are found in all the political orations, and in many of the private speeches, delivered in cases involving the life of the accused or Cicero’s own character. In speeches dealing with less urgent matters the tone is more gentle and the effect more graceful. Quotations from the poets are numerous, and the rhythmical structure of the sentences is more marked than in the stirring and excited passages of the political harangues. The oration For the Poet Archias is the best example of Cicero’s less stirring and more graceful oratory. After establishing by a brief statement the fact that Archias had a valid claim to the citizenship, Cicero devotes the remainder of his speech to the praise of literary pursuits:

These studies nourish youth, delight old age, adorn prosperity, furnish a refuge and solace in adversity, gladden us at home, are no hindrance abroad, spend the nights with us, are with us in our foreign travels, and at our country seats.43

In this oration Cicero appears as the man of letters whose literary interest was not bounded by the career of the politician or the orator, and who, in spite of political successes and disappointments, was to achieve greater fame as an author than any other writer of Latin prose.

Few passages are more striking or characteristic in the orations of Cicero than those in which he turns to address directly either the opposing party in the case or his advocate. In these passages, which vary in length from a brief exclamation to an elaborate invective, the stinging words shoot forth with quick and passionate directness. One of the longer passages of this kind, in which additional force is lent to the words by the suggestion that they are uttered by the culprit’s own father, is the following:

Here you will even dare to say, “Among the judges, that one is my friend, that one a friend of my father.” Is not every one, the more closely he is connected with you in any way, the more ashamed of you for being subject to a charge of this kind? He is your father’s friend. If your father himself were a judge, what, in the name of the immortal gods, could you do when he said to you: “You, the prætor of the Roman people in a province, when you had to carry on a naval war, excused the Mamertines for three years from supplying the ship which they were bound by treaty to supply; for your private use a freight ship of the largest size was built at public expense by those same Mamertines; you exacted money from the cities under the pretext of the fleet; you dismissed rowers for bribes; you, when a pirate vessel had been captured by the quæstor and the lieutenant, removed the leader of the pirates from the sight of all; you could put under the headsman’s axe men who were said to be Roman citizens, who were known as such by many; you dared to take pirates to your house, and to bring the pirate captain to the court from your own dwelling; you, in that splendid province, in the sight of our most faithful allies, of most honorable Roman citizens, lay for days together on the shore at festive banquets at a time when the province was in fear and danger; during those days no one could find you at your house, no one could see you in the forum; you brought to those banquets the wives of allies and friends; among women of that sort you placed your youthful son, my grandson, that his father’s life might offer him examples of wickedness at the age which is especially unsteady and lacking in fixed principles; you, the prætor, were seen in the province in a tunic and purple cloak; you, for the gratification of your passion and lust, took away the command of the ships from a lieutenant of the Roman people and gave it to a Syracusan; your soldiers in the province of Sicily were in want of food and grain; owing to your luxury and avarice a fleet of the Roman people was captured and burned by pirates; in your prætorship pirates sailed their ships in that harbor which no enemy had ever entered since the foundation of Syracuse; and these disgraces of yours, so many and so great, you did not care to hide by concealment on your part, nor by making men forget them and keep silent about them, but you tore away to death and torture even the captains of the ships, without any cause, from the embraces of their parents, your own friends, nor in seeing the grief and tears of those parents did any memory of me soften you; to you the blood of innocent men was not only a pleasure, but even a source of profit.” If your father should say this to you, could you ask pardon from him? could you entreat him to forgive you?44

These few examples, perhaps not the most striking to be found in the great body of his orations, may give some idea of the variety of Cicero’s oratory. In his youth the Roman orators were divided into two parties on the question of style; the elder men, chief among whom was Hortensius, favored the Asian style, with its wealth of rhetorical adornment, while the younger men, the Atticists, as they called themselves, aimed at extreme simplicity, taking Lysias as their model. Cicero perceived that a middle course was best. His natural tendency was toward exuberance, but he tempered it by careful study. He does not avoid rhetorical adornment, but he seldom uses it to excess. Like Demosthenes, whom he regarded as the greatest of the Greek orators, he varies his style to suit the occasion, and, like him, he stands forth as the greatest orator of his nation.

In his philosophical writings Cicero’s purpose was to be useful to his fellow citizens by making them acquainted with the results of Greek speculative thought. As he himself says:

As I sought and pondered much and long by what means I could be of use to as many men as possible, that I might never cease to care for the welfare of the republic, nothing greater occurred to me than if I should make accessible to my fellow citizens the paths of the noblest learning.45

With this end in view he wrote his treatises, for the most part in the dialogue form, after the manner of Plato, in which he set forth the doctrines of the Greek philosophers on the most important subjects, such as the chief end of life, the means of attaining happiness, duty, the nature of the gods, and the like, laying the chief stress upon what he believed to be true and correct. He lays no claim to great originality of thought, but only to independence of judgment. In general, he regards himself as a disciple of the Academic school, which did not claim to establish absolute truth, but to show what was most probable. He uses, however, the works of Stoic and even of Epicurean philosophers, whenever they express views in accordance with his own, as well as when he wishes to refute their teachings. He is not entirely consistent in all his writings, but his high moral sense, his belief in the divine government of the world, and his hope of immortality are the foundations of his philosophy. His style in these writings is, as befits his subject, dignified and serene, but enlivened by the occasional interruptions incident to the dialogue form.

To the professional student of ancient philosophy these treatises are of great importance chiefly because of the information they contain concerning the writings and doctrines of Greek philosophers whose works have been lost; to the student of literature they offer admirable examples of learned works in popular form, with all the charm of exquisite literary workmanship; and their influence upon later ages was so great that no one who is interested in the progress of human thought can disregard them. St. Augustine, and many other writers of the early Christian Church, acknowledge their indebtedness to them; they are the foundation of the speculative thought of the middle ages; and it is in great measure due to their influence that the Latin language has remained, almost to our own day, the great medium for the expression of philosophical and scientific speculation. Cicero made “the paths of the noblest learning” accessible not only to his Roman fellow citizens, but to countless generations of men of all lands. His noble purpose was accomplished more grandly than he ever hoped or dreamed. Let those who will, accuse him of shallowness and superficiality; mankind owes him an immeasurable debt of gratitude.

Cicero’s orations have served as models for many generations of orators, his rhetorical treatises may be regarded as the foundation of nearly all later theories of style, his philosophical works exerted an influence which permeated the thought of centuries. It remains to speak of his letters. These are in some respects the most interesting of his writings, because they show the feelings of the man as he disclosed them to his intimate friends, they make us acquainted with the personal relations between the prominent Romans of the time, and shed many rays of light upon the dark pages of contemporary history. The first of the extant letters is dated in 68 B. C., the last July 28, 43 B. C. The collection was made by Cicero’s friends, and edited probably by his freedman, Tiro, and his publisher and most intimate friend, Atticus. They fall into four groups; sixteen books addressed to various persons (Ad Familiares), three books to Cicero’s brother Quintus (Ad Quintum Fratrem), sixteen books to Atticus (Ad Atticum), and two books to Brutus (Ad Brutum). There were originally nine books of letters to Brutus, but only the eighth and the ninth are preserved.

The letters differ greatly in importance, in length, and in interest. Some are mere greetings or brief introductions, while others are carefully composed treatises; some are expressions of Cicero’s inmost feelings to his intimate friends, while others are business notes or occasional letters to men with whom he was on a less familiar footing; some are addressed to the great leaders of the political parties, others to comparatively obscure persons; some are on literary subjects, others on private business, and still others on matters that pertain to the history of the world. The style and language vary with the contents of the letters, but are in general less careful than in any of Cicero’s other writings. The language is evidently that of common speech rather than of literary composition. In the letters written during his exile Cicero betrays unmanly discouragement, and breaks out into pitiful lamentation, just as in many of his orations he betrays great vanity, and extols overmuch his own courage and patriotism in the matter of the Catilinarian conspiracy; but these letters are the confidential utterances of momentary feelings, not the deliberate expressions of the man’s character, and we must not forget that Cicero was an Italian, a man of easily aroused emotions, whose vanity might overflow or whose grief might break forth without affecting his real earnestness or steadfastness. One of the briefer letters to Atticus is the following, written from Thurium, in April, 58 B. C., soon after Cicero’s banishment began:

Terentia thanks you frequently and very warmly. That is a great comfort to me. I am the most miserable man alive, and am being worn out with the most poignant sorrow. I don’t know what to write to you. For if you are at Rome, it is now too late for me to reach you; but if you are on the road, we shall discuss together all that needs to be discussed when you have overtaken me. All I ask you is to retain the same affection for me, since it was always myself you loved. For I am still the same man; my enemies have taken what was mine, they have not taken myself. Take care of your health.46

A letter to Marcus Terentius Varro, written in 46 B. C., among the troubles of the civil war, shows Cicero consoling himself with literature:

From a letter of yours, which Atticus read to me, I learnt what you were doing and where you were; but when we were likely to see you, I could gain no idea at all from the letter. However, I am beginning to hope that your arrival is not far off. I wish it could be any consolation to me! But the fact is, I am overwhelmed by so many and such grave anxieties, that no one but the most utter fool ought to expect any alleviation; yet, after all, perhaps you can give me some kind of help, or I you. For allow me to tell you that, since my arrival in the city, I have effected a reconciliation with my old friends—I mean my books; though the truth is that I had not abandoned their society because I had fallen out with them, but because I was half ashamed to look them in the face. For I thought, when I plunged into the maelstrom of civil strife, with allies whom I had the worst possible reason for trusting, that I had not shown proper respect for their precepts. They pardon me; they recall me to our old intimacy, and you, they say, have been wiser than I for never having left it. Wherefore, since I find them reconciled, I seem bound to hope, if I once see you, that I shall pass through with ease both what is weighing me down now, and what is threatening. Therefore, in your company, whether you choose it to be in your Tusculan or Cuman villa, or, which I should like least, at Rome, so long only as we are together, I will certainly contrive that both of us shall think it the most agreeable place possible.47

Cicero’s letters give us a more complete insight into his private character than could be gained from his other writings. He was a faithful and affectionate friend, a genial companion, a good husband and father, and a devoted patriot. In his political career he exhibited a lack of that insight which enables the great statesman to foresee inevitable changes, and therefore he strove to preserve the old system of government at a time when its usefulness had passed away. He could not sympathize thoroughly with Pompey and his party, still less with the revolutionary policy of Cæsar. The result was indecision and apparent fickleness, but his indecision was not so much that of weakness as of the inability to choose between what he must have regarded as two evils. When he saw his duty clearly before him, as in the year of his consulship, he did not flinch, and again, when Antony was arrayed in arms against the state, he stood forth boldly as the defender of the republic. He showed his courage and firmness also when, in 50 B. C., after Pompey’s flight from Italy, he exposed himself to Cæsar’s displeasure by refusing to come to Rome except as an avowed partizan of Pompey.48 In all the relations of life he was honorable and conscientious, and in the field of literature he stands among the great men of the world.

39 De Oratore, i, 15, 64.

40 Ibid., i, 8, 34.

41 Pro Ligario, 1.

42 Pro Lege Manilia, 5, 11.

43 Pro Archia Poeta, 7, 16.

44 In Verrem, ii, v, 52.

45 De Divinatione, ii, 1.

46 Ep. ad Atticum, iii, 5, Shuckburgh’s translation.

47 Ep. ad Familiares, ix, 1, Shuckburgh’s translation.

48 Ep. ad Atticum, ix, 18.