or love of power, but simply to a desire for plunder. Cicero
tried hard to love him, partly for his daughter's sake, more perhaps
from the necessity which he felt for supporting himself by the power and
strength of the aristocratic party to which Dolabella belonged.

I cannot bring him back to Rome, and all that he suffered there, without
declaring that much of his correspondence during his government,
especially during the latter months of it, and the period of his journey
home, is very distressing. I have told the story of his own doings, I
think, honestly, and how he himself abstained, and compelled those
belonging to him to do so; how he strove to ameliorate the condition of
those under his rule; how he fully appreciated the duty of doing well by
others, so soon to be recognized by all Christians. Such humanity on the
part of a Roman at such a period is to me marvellous, beautiful, almost
divine; but, in eschewing Roman greed and Roman cruelty, he was unable
to eschew Roman insincerity. I have sometimes thought that to have done
so it must have been necessary for him altogether to leave public life.
Why not? my readers will say. But in our days, when a man has mixed
himself for many years with all that is doing in public, how hard it is
for him to withdraw, even though, in withdrawing he fears no violence,
no punishment, no exile, no confiscation. The arguments, the prayers,
the reproaches of those around him draw him back; and the arguments, the
reproaches from within are more powerful even than those from his
friends. To be added to these is the scorn, perhaps the ridicule, of his
opponents. Such are the difficulties in the way of the modern politician
who thinks that he has resolved to retire; but the Roman ex-Consul,
ex-Praetor, ex-Governor had entered upon a mode of warfare in which his
all, his life, his property, his choice of country, his wife, his
children, were open to the ready attacks of his eager enemies. To have
deserved well would be nothing, unless he could keep a party round him
bound by mutual interests to declare that he had deserved well. A rich
man, who desired to live comfortably beyond the struggle of public life,
had to abstain, as Atticus had done, from increasing the sores, from
hurting the ambition, from crushing the hopes of aspirants. Such a man
might be safe, but he could not be useful; such, at any rate, had not
been Cicero's life. In his earlier days, till he was Consul, he had kept
hi