quire an understanding of the
man's character before they can be enjoyed.

For these reasons I think that there are incidents in the life, the
character, and the work of Cicero which ought to make his biography
interesting. His story is fraught with energy, with success, with
pathos, and with tragedy. And then it is the story of a man human as men
are now. No child of Rome ever better loved his country, but no child of
Rome was ever so little like a Roman. Arms and battles were to him
abominable, as they are to us. But arms and battles were the delight of
Romans. He was ridiculed in his own time, and has been ridiculed ever
since, for the alliterating twang of the line in which he declared his
feeling:

"Cedant arma togae; concedat laurea linguae."

But the thing said was thoroughly good, and the better because the
opinion was addressed to men among whom the glory of arms was still in
ascendant over the achievements of intellectual enterprise. The greatest
men have been those who have stepped out from the mass, and gone beyond
their time--seeing things, with eyesight almost divine, which have
hitherto been hidden from the crowd. Such was Columbus when he made his
way across the Western Ocean; such were Galileo and Bacon; such was
Pythagoras, if the ideas we have of him be at all true. Such also was
Cicero. It is not given to the age in which such men live to know them.
Could their age even recognize them, they would not overstep their age
as they do. Looking back at him now, we can see how like a Christian was
the man--so like, that in essentials we can hardly see the difference.
He could love another as himself--as nearly as a man may do; and he
taught such love as a doctrine.[28] He believed in the existence of one
supreme God.[29] He believed that man would rise again and live forever
in some heaven.[30] I am conscious that I cannot much promote this view
of Cicero's character by quoting isolated passages from his works--words
which taken alone may be interpreted in one sense or another, and which
should be read, each with its context, before their due meaning can be
understood. But I may perhaps succeed in explaining to a reader what it
is that I hope to do in the following pages, and why it is that I
undertake a work which must be laborious, and for which many will think
that there is no remaining need.

I would not have it thought that, because I have so spoken of Cicero's
aspirations and convictions, I in