th great courage he voted against the death penalty.
Every Roman citizen, he urged, had the right to appeal to his fellows.
To put men to death without trial was illegal. Cato, however, made a
powerful plea on the other side. Death was decreed. As Caesar left the
Senate House a group of knights threatened him with swords.

Next day Cicero, accompanied by a solemn procession of senators, saw the
executions carried out. Caesar was not in the procession. A huge crowd
escorted Cicero back to his home. They declared, and he proudly
believed, that he had saved the country. Plutarch thus describes

_Cicero's Day of Triumph_

Cicero passed through the Forum and, reaching the prison, handed
over Lentulus to the officer with orders to put him to death; then
he brought down Cethegus and the rest separately for execution.
And when he saw many of the conspirators still standing together
in the Forum, ignorant of what had happened and waiting for
darkness in the belief that the men were alive and could be
rescued, he cried to them with a loud voice, 'They lived,' Thus
Romans signify death if they wish to avoid words of ill omen.

Evening had already come when he returned through the Forum to his
house on the Palatine, no longer attended by the citizens with
silence or even with restraint, but received everywhere with
shouts and clapping of hands, and saluted as saviour and founder
of his country. The streets were bright with the gleam of all the
torches and links that were placed at the doors, and the women
displayed lights from the roofs that they might see the hero and
do him honour, as he made his stately progress escorted by the
noblest in Rome; most of whom had conducted great wars and entered
the city in triumphal processions and added whole tracts of sea
and land to the empire, and who now agreed as they marched along
that the Roman people was indebted to many leaders and generals of
their day for wealth and spoil and power, but to Cicero alone for
safety and life, because he had freed it from so vast and terrible
a danger. For it was not thought so wonderful that he had crushed
the conspiracy and punished the conspirators, but that he had
quenched the most serious insurrection ever known with very little
suffering, and without domestic strife and disturbance.

Plutarch, lvii. 22. Secs. 2-5.

The circumstances of Cicero's exile and return are described by Plutar