ied in the December of 43 B.C., in the sixty-third
year of his age.

As an orator and a pleader Cicero undoubtedly stands in the first rank.
Many of his speeches have come down to us. Of these the most famous, and
perhaps the finest, are his speeches against Verres and against
Catiline. Eloquence in those days of furious faction and revolution was
a greater force than it is with us. As a politician he failed because he
did not distinctly realize to himself that the old republic, the
government of the senate and of the nobles, had been tried and had been
found wanting. He had not the courage to face the great changes which he
felt were impending. Pompey, the champion of the old order, was not a
leader to whom he could look up with confidence. And so he wavered, and
half acquiesced in Caesar's triumph, even though he suspected that with
that triumph the Rome which he had known and loved would pass away. To
us it is as an essayist and as the writer of a multitude of letters to
friends, full of miscellaneous information, that Cicero is particularly
attractive; there is a gracefulness and refinement and elevation of tone
about his writings which cannot fail to incline the reader to say with
Erasmus, "I feel a better man for reading Cicero." His essays on "Old
Age" and "on Friendship," his De Officiis or "Whole Duty of Man," as we
may paraphrase it, are good and pleasant reading such as we can all
enjoy. There is no fairer picture in literature than of him sitting in
the garden of his villa at Tusculum, surrounded by admiring friends, and
engaged upon his "Tusculan disputations;" while his treatises on the
"Nature of the Gods," and on the "True Ends of Human Life" (De Finibus),
if they do not show any very deep and original thought, at least give us
an insight into the teachings of the various philosophical schools.

AUGUSTUS CAESAR

(63 B.C.-14 A.D.)

[Illustration: Augustus Caesar. [TN]]

Caius Julius Caesar Octavianus Augustus, son of Caius Octavius and Atia
(Julius Caesar's niece), was born in 63 B.C. He was the first and
greatest of the Roman emperors, in his way perhaps fully as great as his
adoptive father, Julius Caesar. The Octavian family came originally from
Velitrae, in the country of the Volsci; and the branch to which Augustus
belonged was rich and honorable. His father had risen to the rank of
senator and praetor, but died in the prime of life, when Augustus was
only four years old. Augustus was ca