ey to the conduct of
the war with Mithridates, which in fact carried with it the supreme
control of Asia and of the East. In 63 B.C., at the age of forty-four,
he was consul, the highest dignity attainable to a Roman; in that
memorable year he foiled by a bold promptitude, the revolutionary plot
of Catiline, in which many distinguished Romans--Caesar it was even said
among them--were implicated. He was now at the height of his fame;
"father of his country" he was actually called, for a brief space he was
with all classes the great man of the day. But the tide soon turned;
Cicero might have saved the country, but in saving it, it was said he
had violated the constitution, according to which a Roman citizen could
not be capitally punished but by the sentence of the people in regular
assembly. As it was, Roman citizens guilty of complicity with Catiline
had, at Cicero's instigation, been put to death simply by an order of
the senate; this, it was said, was a dangerous precedent and Cicero must
be held responsible for it. His bitter enemy, Clodius, now tribune,
pressed the charge against him in inflammatory speeches specially
addressed to the lowest class of citizens, and Cicero in despair left
Rome in 58 B.C., and took refuge at Thessalonica. That same year saw the
"father of his country" condemned to exile by a vote of the Roman
people, and his house at Rome and his country houses at Formiae and
Tusculum plundered and ruined.

But in those revolutionary days the events of one year were reversed by
those of the next; in 57 B.C., with new counsels and new tribunes, the
people almost unanimously voted the recall of the exile, and Cicero was
welcomed back to Rome amid an outburst of popular enthusiasm. But he was
no longer a power in the world of politics; he could not see his way
clearly; and he was so nervously sensitive to the fluctuations of public
opinion that he could not decide between Pompey and the aristocracy on
the one hand, and Caesar and the new democracy on the other. His leanings
had hitherto been toward Pompey and the senate and the old republic; but
as time went on, he felt that Pompey was a half-hearted man, who could
not be trusted, and that he would have ultimately to succumb to his far
abler and more far-sighted rival, Caesar. The result was that he lost the
esteem of both parties, and came to be regarded as a mere trimmer and
time-server. There was all that political indecision about him which may
be oft