should be their good
opinion. To declare now, before the people, that he would exercise his
office for the good of the people was his natural duty. But in that
place, in which it was difficult to speak after such a fashion, in the
Senate itself, on the very first day of his Consulship, he had declared
the same thing--"popularem me futurum esse consulem."[173]

The course he had to pursue was noble, but very difficult. He desired,
certainly, to be recognized as a friend of the people, but he desired so
to befriend them that he might support also at the same time the power
of the aristocracy. He still believed, as we cannot believe now, that
there was a residuum of good in the Senate sufficient to blossom forth
into new powers of honest government. When speaking to the oligarchs in
the Senate of Rullus and his land law, it was easy enough to carry them
with him. That a Consul should oppose a Tribune who was coming forward
with a "Lex agraria" in his hands, as the latest disciple of the
Gracchi, was not out of the common order of things. Another Consul would
either have looked for popularity and increased power of plundering, as
Antony might have done, or have stuck to his order, as he would have
called it--as might have been the case with the Cottas, Lepiduses and
Pisos of preceding years. But Cicero determined to oppose the demagogue
Tribune by proving himself to the people to be more of a demagogue than
he. He succeeded, and Rullus with his agrarian law was sent back into
darkness. I regard the second speech against Rullus as the _ne plus
ultra_, the very _beau ideal_ of a political harangue to the people on
the side of order and good government.

I cannot finish this chapter, in which I have attempted to describe the
lesser operations of Cicero's Consulship, without again alluding to the
picture drawn by Virgil of a great man quelling the storms of a
seditious rising by the gravity of his presence and the weight of his
words.[174] The poet surely had in his memory some occasion in which had
taken place this great triumph of character and intellect combined. When
the knights, during Cicero's Consulship essayed to take their privileged
places in the public theatre, in accordance with a law passed by Roscius
Otho a few years earlier (B.C. 68), the founder of the obnoxious law
himself entered the building. The people, enraged against a man who had
interfered with them and their pleasures, and who had brought them, as
it