ome from exile and expressed his
gratitude to both senate and people,--the consuls affording him an
opportunity,--in their respective assemblies. He laid aside his hatred
of Pompey for his banishment, became reconciled with him, and
immediately repaid his kindness. A sore famine had arisen in the city
and the entire populace rushed into the theatre (the kind of theatre
that they were then still using for public gatherings) and from there to
the Capitol where the senators were in session, threatening first to
slay them with their own hands and later to burn them alive, temple and
all. It was then that Cicero persuaded them to elect Pompey as
commissioner of the grain supply and to give him consequently the office
of proconsul for five years both within Italy and without. So he now, as
previously in the case of the pirates, was to hold sway over the entire
world at that time under Roman power.

[-10-] Caesar and Crassus really disliked Cicero, but paid some attention
to him when they perceived that he would return in any case, Caesar even
while absent displaying some good-will toward him; they received,
however, no thanks for their pains. Cicero knew that they had not acted
according to their real inclination and regarded them as having been
most to blame for his banishment. And though he was not quite bold
enough to oppose them openly, since he had recently tasted the fruits of
unrestrained free speech, nevertheless he composed secretly a little
book and inscribed upon it that it contained a kind of defence of his
policy. In it he heaped together masses of denunciation against them and
others, which led him to such fear of these statements getting out in
his lifetime that he sealed up the volume and delivered it to his son
with the injunction not to read nor to publish what was written, until
his father should have departed from life.

[-11-] Cicero, accordingly, took root anew and got back his property and
likewise the foundation of his home, although the latter had been given
up to Liberty and Clodius both called the gods to witness and interposed
religious scruples against its desecration. But Cicero found a flaw in
the enactment of the lex curiata by the provisions of which his rival
had been taken from the nobles into the rank of the people, on the
ground that it had not been proposed within the limit of days set by
ancestral custom. Thus he tried to make null and void the entire
tribuneship of Clodius (in which al