ssing and obtaining the office of AEdile, he had been guilty of
bribery. In all these accusations, which come before us as having been
either promoted or opposed by Cicero, there is not one in which the
reader sympathizes more strongly with the person accused than in this.
Plancius had shown Cicero during his banishment the affection of a
brother, or almost of a son. Plancius had taken him in and provided for
him in Macedonia, when to do so was illegal. Cicero now took great
delight in returning the favor. The reader of this oration cannot learn
from it that Plancius had in truth done anything illegal. The complaint
really made against him was that he, filling the comparatively humble
position of a knight, had ventured to become the opposing candidate of
such a gallant young aristocrat as M. Juventius Laterensis, who was
beaten at this election, and now brought this action in revenge. There
is no tearing of any enemy to tatters in this oration, but there is much
pathos, and, as was usual with Cicero at this period of his life, an
inordinate amount of self-praise. There are many details as to the way
in which the tribes voted at elections, which the patient and curious
student will find instructive, but which will probably be caviare to all
who are not patient and curious students. There are a few passages of
peculiar force. Addressing himself to the rival of Plancius, he tells
Laterensis that, even though the people might have judged badly in
selecting Plancius, it was not the less his duty to accept the judgment
of the people.[42] Say that the people ought not to have done so; but it
should have been sufficient for him that they had done so. Then he
laughs with a beautiful irony at the pretensions of the accuser. "Let us
suppose that it was so," he says.[43] "Let no one whose family has not
soared above praetorian honors contest any place with one of consular
family. Let no mere knight stand against one with praetorian relations."
In such a case there would be no need of the people to vote at all.
Farther on he gives his own views as to the honors of the State in
language that is very grand. "It has," he says, "been my first endeavor
to deserve the high rank of the State; my second, to have been thought
to deserve it. The rank itself has been but the third object of my
desires."[44] Plancius was acquitted--it seems to us quite as a matter
of course.

In this perhaps the most difficult period of his existence, when the