on, and a somewhat wavering
attitude towards the various parties in the state. In 55 B. C. he went
to Cilicia in Asia Minor as proconsul, an office which he administered
with efficiency and integrity in civil affairs and with success in
military. He returned to Italy in the end of the following year, and he
was publicly thanked by the senate for his services, but disappointed in
his hopes for a triumph. The war for supremacy between Caesar and Pompey
which had for some time been gradually growing more certain, broke out
in 49 B.C., when Caesar led his army across the Rubicon, and Cicero
after much irresolution threw in his lot with Pompey, who was overthrown
the next year in the battle of Pharsalus and later murdered in Egypt.
Cicero returned to Italy, where Caesar treated him magnanimously,
and for some time he devoted himself to philosophical and rhetorical
writing. In 46 B.C. he divorced his wife Terentia, to whom he had been
married for thirty years and married the young and wealthy Publilia in
order to relieve himself from financial difficulties; but her also
he shortly divorced. Caesar, who had now become supreme in Rome, was
assassinated in 44 B.C., and though Cicero was not a sharer in the
conspiracy, he seems to have approved the deed. In the confusion which
followed he supported the cause of the conspirators against Antony;
and when finally the triumvirate of Antony, Octavius, and Lepidus was
established, Cicero was included among the proscribed, and on December
7, 43 B.C., he was killed by agents of Antony. His head and hand were
cut off and exhibited at Rome.

The most important orations of the last months of his life were the
fourteen "Philippics" delivered against Antony, and the price of this
enmity he paid with his life.

To his contemporaries Cicero was primarily the great forensic and
political orator of his time, and the fifty-eight speeches which have
come down to us bear testimony to the skill, wit, eloquence, and Passion
which gave him his pre-eminence. But these speeches of necessity deal
with the minute details of the occasions which called them forth, and
so require for their appreciation a full knowledge of the history,
political and personal, of the time. The letters, on the other hand,
are less elaborate both in style and in the handling of current events,
while they serve to reveal his personality, and to throw light upon
Roman life in the last days of the Republic in an extremely vivid
fa