, and looking to make himself
master by dint of his virtues and his eloquence. The hopelessness of the
condition of the Republic may be recognized in the increasing
conspiracies which were hatched on every side. Metellus Nepos was sent
home from Asia in aid of the conspiracy, and got himself made Tribune,
and stopped Cicero's speech. In conjunction with Caesar, who was Praetor,
he proposed his new law for the calling of Pompey to their aid. Then
there was a fracas between him and Caesar on the one side and Cato on the
other, in which Cato at last was so far victorious that both Caesar and
Metellus were stopped in the performance of their official duties. Caesar
was soon reinstated, but Metellus Nepos returned to Pompey in the East,
and nothing came of the conspiracy. It is only noticed here as evidence
of the feeling which existed as to Cicero in Rome, and as explaining the
irritation on both sides indicated in the correspondence between Cicero
and Metellus Celer, the brother of Nepos,[216] whom Cicero had procured
the government of Gaul.

The third letter from Cicero in this year was to Sextius, who was then
acting as Quaestor--or Proquaestor, as Cicero calls him--with Antony as
Proconsul in Macedonia. It is specially interesting as telling us that
the writer had just completed the purchase of a house in Rome from
Crassus for a sum amounting to about L30,000 of our money. There was
probably no private mansion in Rome of greater pretension. It had been
owned by Livius Drusus, the Tribune--a man of colossal fortune, as we
are told by Mommsen--who was murdered at the door of it thirty years
before. It afterward passed into the hands of Crassus the rich, and now
became the property of Cicero. We shall hear how it was destroyed during
his exile, and how fraudulently made over to the gods, and then how
restored to Cicero, and how rebuilt at the public expense. The history
of the house has been so well written that we know even the names of
Cicero's two successors in it, Censorinus and Statilius.[217]

It is interesting to know the sort of house which Cicero felt to be
suitable to his circumstances, for by that we may guess what his
circumstances were. In making this purchase he is supposed to have
abandoned the family house in which his father had lived next door to
the new mansion, and to have given it up to his brother. Hence we may
argue that he had conceived himself to have risen in worldly
circumstances. Nevertheless,