ments had of late much
varied. The acknowledged legal duration was for one year. They had been
stretched by the governing party to three, as in the case of Verres in
Sicily; to five, as with Pompey for his Spanish government; to ten for
Caesar in Gaul. This had been done with the view of increasing the
opportunities for plunder and power, but had been efficacious of good in
enabling governors to carry out work for which one year would not have
sufficed. It may be a question whether Cicero as Proconsul in Cilicia
deserved blame for curtailing the period of his services to the Empire,
or praise for abstaining from plunder and power; but the fact is that he
remained in his province not two years but exactly one;[66] and that he
escaped from it with all the alacrity which we may presume to be
expected by a prisoner when the bars of his jail have been opened for
him. Whether we blame him or praise him, we can hardly refrain from
feeling that his impatience was grotesque. There certainly was no desire
on Cicero's part either to go to Cilicia or to remain there, and of all
his feelings that which prompted him never to be far absent from Rome
was the most characteristic of the man.

Among various laws which Pompey had caused to be passed in the previous
year, B.C. 52, and which had been enacted with views personal to himself
and his own political views, had been one "de jure magistratuum"--as to
the way in which the magistrates of the Empire should be selected. Among
other clauses it contained one which declared that no Praetor and no
Consul should succeed to a province till he had been five years out of
office. It would be useless here to point out how absolutely subversive
of the old system of the Republic this new law would have been, had the
new law and the old system attempted to live together. The Propraetor
would have been forced to abandon his aspirations either for the
province or for the Consulship, and no consular governor would have been
eligible for a province till after his fiftieth year. But at this time
Pompey was both consul and governor, and Caesar was governor for ten
years with special exemption from another clause in the war which would
otherwise have forbidden him to stand again for the Consulship during
his absence.[67] The law was wanted probably only for the moment; but it
had the effect of forcing Cicero out of Rome. As there would naturally
come from it a dearth of candidates for the provinces it was f