itherto been made
subject to such penalties had been malefactors; whereas, it was
acknowledged of him that he had been a benefactor to the city. Clodius
had set up on the spot, not a statue of Liberty, but, as was well known
to all men, the figure of a Greek prostitute. The priests had not been
consulted. The people had not ratified the proposed consecration. Of the
necessity of such authority he gives various examples. "And this has
been done," he says, "by an impure and impious enemy of all
religions--by this man among women, and woman among men--who has gone
through the ceremony so hurriedly, so violently, that his mind and his
tongue and his voice have been equally inconsistent with each other."
"My fortune," he says, as he ends his speech, "all moderate as it is,
will suffice for me. The memory of my name will be a patrimony
sufficient for my children;" but if his house be so taken from him, so
stolen, so falsely dedicated to religion, he cannot live without
disgrace. Of course he got back his house; and with his house about
L16,000 for its re-erection, and L4000 for the damage done to the
Tusculan villa with L2000 for the Formian villa. With these sums he was
not contented; and indeed they could hardly have represented fairly the
immense injury done to him.

[Sidenote: B.C. 56, aetat. 51.]

So ended the work of the year of his return. From the following year,
besides the speeches, we have twenty-six letters of which nine were
written to Lentulus, the late Consul, who had now gone to Cilicia as
Proconsul. Lentulus had befriended him, and he found it necessary to
show his gratitude by a continued correspondence, and by a close
attendance to the interests of the absent officer. These letters are
full of details of Roman politics, too intricate for such a work as
this--perhaps I might almost say too uninteresting, as they refer
specially to Lentulus himself. In one of them he tells his friend that
he has at last been able to secure the friendship of Pompey for him. It
was, after all, but a show of friendship. He has supped with Pompey, and
says that when he talks to Pompey everything seems to go well: no one
can be more gracious than Pompey. But when he sees the friends by whom
Pompey is surrounded he knows, as all others know, that the affair is in
truth going just as he would not have it.[8] We feel as we read these
letters, in which Pompey's name is continually before us, how much
Pompey prevailed by his personal