o see can look back
upon the career of such a one and not feel an agony of pain as the
stern man passes on without a ruffled face, after ordering the right
hands of those who had fought at Uxellodunum to be chopped off at the
wrist, in order that men might know what was the penalty of fighting for
their country?

There are men--or have been, from time to time, in all ages of the
world--let loose, as it were, by the hand of God to stop the iniquities
of the people, but in truth the natural product of those iniquities.
They have come and done their work, and have died, leaving behind them
the foul smell of destruction. An Augustus followed Caesar, and him
Tiberius, and so on to a Nero. It was necessary that men should suffer
much before they were brought back to own their condition. But they who
can see a Cicero struggling to avoid the evil that was coming--not for
himself but for the world around him--and can lend their tongues, their
pens, their ready wits to ridicule his efforts, can hardly have been
touched by the supremacy of human suffering.

It must have been a sorry time with him at Brundisium. He had to stay
there waiting till Caesar's pleasure had been made known to him, and
Caesar was thinking of other things. Caesar was away in Egypt and the
East, encountering perils at Alexandria which, if all be true that we
have heard, imply that he had lived to be past fear. Grant that a man
has to live as Caesar did, and it will be well that he should be past
fear. At any rate he did not think of Cicero, or thinking of him felt
that he was one who must be left to brood in silence over the choice he
had made. Cicero did brood--not exactly in silence--over the things that
fate had done for him and for his country. For himself, he was living in
Italy, and yet could not venture to betake himself to one of the
eighteen villas which, as Middleton tells us, he had studded about the
country for his pastime. There were those at Tusculum, Antium, Astura,
Arpinum--at Formiae, at Cumae, at Puteoli, and at Pompeii. Those who tell
us of Cicero's poverty are surely wandering, carried away by their
erroneous notions of what were a Roman nobleman's ideas as to money. At
no period of his life do we find Cicero not doing what he was minded to
do for want of money, and at no period is there a hint that he had
allowed himself in any respect to break the law. It has been argued that
he must have been driven to take fees and bribes and indirec