to you something--so
that it were not one of my speeches--you were better off at any rate
than we. There were two marvellous slaughterings of beasts which lasted
for five days. Nobody denies but that they were very grand. But what
pleasure can there be to a man of letters[33] when some weak human
creature is destroyed by a sturdy beast, or when some lonely animal is
pierced through by a hunting-spear. The last day was the day of
elephants, in which there could be no delight except to the vulgar
crowd. You could not but pity them, feeling that the poor brutes had
something in common with humanity." In these combats were killed twenty
elephants and two hundred lions. The bad taste and systematical
corruption of Rome had reached its acme when this theatre was opened and
these games displayed by Pompey.

He tells Atticus,[34] in a letter written about this time, that he is
obliged to write to him by the hand of a secretary; from which we gather
that such had not been, at any rate, his practice. He is every day in
the Forum, making speeches; and he had already composed the dialogues De
Oratore, and had sent them to Lentulus. Though he was no longer in
office, his time seems to have been as fully occupied as when he was
Praetor or Consul.

We have records of at least a dozen speeches, made B.C. 55 and B.C. 54,
between that against Piso and the next that is extant, which was
delivered in defence of Plancius. He defended Cispius, but Cispius was
convicted. He defended Caninius Gallus, of whom we may presume that he
was condemned and exiled, because Cicero found him at Athens on his way
to Cilicia, Athens being the place to which exiled Roman oligarchs
generally betook themselves.[35] In this letter to his young friend
Caelius he speaks of the pleasure he had in meeting with Caninius at
Athens; but in the letter to Marius which I have quoted he complains of
the necessity which has befallen him of defending the man. The heat of
the summer of this year he passed in the country, but on his return to
the city in November he found Crassus defending his old enemy Gabinius.
Gabinius had crept back from his province into the city, and had been
received with universal scorn and a shower of accusations. Cicero at
first neither accused nor defended him, but, having been called on as a
witness, seems to have been unable to refrain from something of the
severity with which he had treated Piso. There was at any rate a passage
of arms in whi