t Tarentum and Sena, in Africa, Sardinia,
Spain, and Macedonia, had shown himself capable as a soldier, a staff-
officer, and a general. He was the same in the Forum, as in the
battle-field. His prompt and fearless utterance, his rough but
pungent rustic wit, his knowledge of Roman law and Roman affairs, his
incredible activity and his iron frame, first brought him into notice
in the neighbouring towns; and, when at length he made his appearance
on the greater arena of the Forum and the senate-house in the capital,
constituted him the most influential advocate and political orator of
his time. He took up the key-note first struck by Manius Curius, his
ideal among Roman statesmen;(50) throughout his long life he made it
his task honestly, to the best of his judgment, to assail on all hands
the prevailing declension; and even in his eighty-fifth year he
battled in the Forum with the new spirit of the times. He was
anything but comely--he had green eyes, his enemies alleged, and red
hair--and he was not a great man, still less a far-seeing statesman.
Thoroughly narrow in his political and moral views, and having the
ideal of the good old times always before his eyes and on his lips, he
cherished an obstinate contempt for everything new. Deeming himself
by virtue of his own austere life entitled to manifest an unrelenting
severity and harshness towards everything and everybody; upright and
honourable, but without a glimpse of any duty lying beyond the sphere
of police order and of mercantile integrity; an enemy to all villany
and vulgarity as well as to all refinement and geniality, and above
all things the foe of his foes; he never made an attempt to stop evils
at their source, but waged war throughout life against symptoms, and
especially against persons. The ruling lords, no doubt, looked down
with a lofty disdain on the ignoble growler, and believed, not without
reason, that they were far superior; but fashionable corruption in and
out of the senate secretly trembled in the presence of the old censor
of morals with his proud republican bearing, of the scar-covered
veteran from the Hannibalic war, and of the highly influential senator
and the idol of the Roman farmers. He publicly laid before his noble
colleagues, one after another, his list of their sins; certainly
without being remarkably particular as to the proofs, and certainly
also with a peculiar relish in the case of those who had personally
crossed or prov