Cicero And The Fall Of The Roman Republic/Chapter 1

by James Leigh Strachan-Davidson

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CICERO,

AND THE FALL OF THE ROMAN REPUBLIC.

CHAPTER I.

CICERO'S TRAINING.

106-74 B.C.

HE purpose of this volume is to tell the story of Cicero's life, and at the same time to set forth from his writings a presentation of the concluding age of the Roman Republic, and to record the disastrous but not inglorious failure of the last Free State of the ancient world.

So far as may be, I propose to let Cicero himself speak to my readers. The "most eloquent of all the sons of Romulus," as a contemporary poet^[1] calls him, committed his orations to writing after their delivery, and gave them to the world. These speeches are public documents which were a living force in the practical politics of Rome; we must not expect absolute candour in words thus spoken and written for a purpose; but it is much to know what were the assertions, the sentiments, and the reasonings which rang in the ears of the Romans themselves at this momentous crisis of their fate. Still more important for the purpose of our story are the private letters, and especially the letters to Atticus. We have before us the very words in which Cicero recorded his thoughts from day to day in all the confidence of intimate friendship. Cicero was not a man of cool and cautious temperament, afraid to commit himself to opinions, accurately weighing and discounting probabilities beforehand, or occupying by anticipation the province of the philosophical historian. From the letters of such a one we should have learnt comparatively little. We have to deal with a man of lively mind, quick to receive impressions, rushing to conclusions, garrulous in expression, and sensitively responsive to the prevailing temper or drift of opinion. In communing with Atticus he never pauses to make his writing self-consistent or plausible. Reasons "plentiful as blackberries" crowd through his mind as he writes, and the reasons of to-day will often not fit in with those of yesterday. There is no reticence, no economy of statement; every passing fancy, every ebullition of temper, every varying mood of exultation and depression, every momentary view of men and things, finds itself accurately mirrored in these letters. The time lives again before us in the pages of Cicero, and, thanks to him, he and his contemporaries are for us not mere lay-figures but actual flesh and blood.

Marcus Tullius Cicero was born on the third of January in the year 106 B.C., about the end of the war with Jugurtha. His forefathers had inhabited from time immemorial the town of Arpinum in the Volscian mountains which part Latium from Campania. Cicero was therefore a tribesman of the hardy race whose wars with Rome filled the early pages of Latin history. Some would have it^[2] that he was a descendant of Aufidius or Attius Tullius, the Volscian partner and rival of Coriolanus. The struggle with Rome had ended more than 200 years before Cicero was born; after generations of gallant resistance the Volscians of Arpinum were reduced to the lowly position of "citizens without the right of suffrage," living under Roman law and serving in the Roman legions without political privileges either in their own town or in the capital. But the races predestined to political greatness possess the faculty of forgetting that which it is best not to remember; and this invaluable gift of character was not wanting to the Volscians. The memory of their alien origin faded away, and they frankly accepted their place as humble members of the great Roman commonwealth. Their ambition now was to attain the full Roman citizenship, and Rome, at the beginning of the second century before Christ, was still wise enough to encourage and reward such aspirations. The full franchise was granted to the Arpinates in the year 188 B.C., shortly before the death of Hannibal and of Scipio Africanus. In the next generation the Romans deliberately set aside the wisdom of their ancestors, and adopted a system of harsh and rigid exclusion in the place of the liberal practice of gradually elevating aliens to the citizenship, by which the greatness of Rome had been built up. The punishment for this political crime came upon them when, a century after the enfranchisement of Arpinum, their Italian allies, after having in vain sought the citizenship by peaceful agitation, at length resolved to demand it at the point of the sword. During the Social War (B.C. 90 and 89) and during the civic conflicts which grew out of it, Rome tardily granted to the Italians, in the midst of her own ruin and theirs, the boon which, if accorded a few years earlier, would have averted irreparable disasters from the nation.^[3]

So far, however, as Arpinum was concerned, the old liberal policy of Rome had lasted just long enough to secure its inclusion; and thus it came to pass that in her hour of peril Rome could reckon Caius Marius among her citizens. While Cicero was still an infant, the great soldier of Arpinum triumphed Jan. 1, 104 B.C.over Jugurtha; then re-elected during five successive years (B.C. 104-100) to the consulship, he crushed by two splendid victories the invading hordes of the Cimbri and

ARPINUM.

(Duruy.)

Teutones and saved Rome in this her first conflict with the German race.

Along with the full Roman franchise the Arpinates now enjoyed a considerable measure of local self-government. They were an organised community, capable of deciding local questions for themselves, and with their local politics and parties. We get an interesting glimpse of Arpinum in the second century B.C. from a passing notice which Cicero^[4] gives of his family two generations back. "Our grandfather showed great qualities in the administration of this borough, opposing throughout his life his brother-in-law Gratidius, who wished to introduce elections by ballot. For Gratidius raised storms in a sauce-boat, as the saying goes, just as his son Marius^[5] did on the high seas. When the matter was reported to the consul Scaurus, he 115 B.C.remarked to our ancestor: 'Such principles and such firmness, Marcus Cicero, should have a field for their exercise by our side in the imperial politics of the capital rather than in the local politics of your borough.'"

The contrast here marked between the central unity of Rome and the local life of the township, is a characteristic feature of these Italian "municipia." Arpinum was one of the earlier of these borough-towns," but the whole of Italy was after the Social War organised on the same plan. Each community of newly enfranchised Romans had its own institutions, its own magistrates and its own local patriotism, which however did not interfere with the allegiance of every citizen to the city of Rome. "Every burgess of a corporate town," says Cicero,^[6] "has, I take it, two father-lands, that of which he is a native, and that of which he is a citizen. I will never deny my allegiance to my native town, only I will never forget that Rome is my greater Fatherland, and that Arpinum is but a portion of Rome." It will be noticed that while Cicero loves to call himself an Arpinate, and exults to call himself a Roman, he has succeeded in quite forgetting that he is a Volscian.

The insolence of the Roman nobles, especially if they happened to be of patrician blood, might sometimes tempt them to sneer at the modern origin of these municipal Romans. Catiline could speak of Cicero as "a naturalised immigrant," and the young Manlius Torquatus, pleading against him at the bar, could describe his consulship as "the reign of an alien," because forsooth Cicero "came from a borough-town." "I will give you a piece of advice, my young friend," says Cicero in reply^[7]; "when you are to sue for office, do not use that expression about any of your competitors; else you may find yourself swamped by the votes of the 'aliens.'"

The statesman who came from a country-town in Italy was perhaps more than compensated for the lack of ancestral connection with the city of Rome, by the keen interest which his fellow-townsmen and neighbours took in his political career, by their pride and delight in his exploits, and by their anxiety for the reputation which reflected credit on their native place. In this respect the country-towns were in strong contrast with the civic and suburban districts, such as that of Tusculum, which were surfeited with famous and noble families and were careless about their local worthies. "This is our way," says Cicero,^[8] pleading the cause of a client from his own Volscian district, "and this is the way of our native towns. Why need I speak of my brother and myself? The very fields, if I may say so, and the mountains were partisans in our elections. Do you ever hear a Tusculan boasting of the great Marcus Cato, foremost though he was in every virtue, or of Coruncanius his fellow-townsman, or of all the famous men who have borne the name of Fulvius? No one ever says a word about them. But if you are in company with any burgess of Arpinum, you will probably have to listen, however little you may like the topic, to something about me and my brother: most certainly you will not get off without some reference to Caius Marius." "Our boroughs," he proceeds,^[9] "lay great stress on the duties of neighbourship. In what I say about Plancius I am founding on what I experienced in my own case, for we are close neighbours of the Atinates. Most laudable, or rather I should say lovable, is this feeling of good neighbourship, which keeps the constant fashion of the olden time, not shadowed by thoughts of evil, not practised in untruths, not veneered with false colours, undisciplined in the arts of the suburb and of the city. In all Arpinum there was not a man but strove his utmost for Plancius, not one in Sora, not one in Casinum, not one in Aquinum. All that well-peopled district of Venafrum and Allifæ, all that rugged mountainous faithful plain-dealing clannish land of ours felt that it was honoured in his advancement and dignified in his dignity." Cicero himself shared the feelings which he so finely describes. It is always with a throb of pleasure that he betakes himself to his mountain home. "Ad montes patrios, et ad incunabula nostra." In speaking of it he loves to borrow the language of the home-sick Ulysses as he sets his face toward Ithaca. "Rugged is she, but nurse of a worthy breed of sons; never can I see anything to glad my heart like that land." The little town still stands in the Volscian highlands, and over its gate the traveller may read an inscription which the burgesses have put up to commemorate their two great townsmen Marius and Cicero.

The family of Cicero had held for many generations a place of honour and influence in this little community. They belonged to the upper-middle class in fortune and position, a class which (from a reminiscence of the time when wealth determined the nature of military service) the Romans named "the equestrian order." They had never ventured into the arena of national politics, or aspired to the magistracies of the imperial State. The family house, the actual birthplace of Cicero, was situated some three miles from the town on the banks of the river Fibrenus, an affluent of the Liris. The place may best be described in the words of Cicero himself, who has made it the scene of his dialogue on the Laws. The second book of that treatise opens as follows:—

Atticus. We have had enough walking, and you have come to a pause in your argument. What if we were to cross over and sit down to finish our conversation in the island of the Fibrenus—that, I think, is the name of this second stream?

Cicero. By all means, for this is my favourite spot whenever I want to think over anything quietly or to write or to read.

Atticus. For my part, this is the first time I have been at the place, and I cannot have enough of it; I think scorn now of splendid villas and marble pavements and fretted roofs. When one looks at this, one can only smile at the artificial canals which our fashionable friends call their "Nile" or their "Euripus." Just now when you were discussing law and jurisprudence you ascribed everything to nature; and certainly in regard to these objects at any rate which we seek for the repose and refreshment of the mind, nature is the only true mistress. I used to wonder when I considered that there was nothing in this district but rocks and mountains, (so I gathered from your verses and speeches), I used to wonder, I say, that you so delighted in this spot. Now on the contrary my astonishment is that, when you are away from Rome, you can bear to be anywhere else but here.

Cicero. Nay, whenever I am able to take a long absence from the city, especially if it be at this time of year, I seek this pleasant and healthy spot; but it is not often that I have the chance. However I have another reason for loving it, which will not affect you so much.

Atticus. What reason, pray?

Cicero. Well, if the truth must be told, this and no other is the very native land of Quintus and myself: here is the ancient stock from which we are sprung, here are our sacred rites, here our kindred, here countless traces of our ancestors. Just look at this country-house; you see it, as it is now, enlarged by the care of my father, who having weak health passed almost all his life here in literary pursuits; but in this very house, I must tell you, when it was a little old-fashioned cottage, like that of Curius in the Sabine country, I was born. And so there is a something, some sort of lurking feeling and fancy, which seems to make me take a peculiar pleasure in it. And why not? when we remember that the wise man of old is said to have rejected immortality that he might see Ithaca once more.

The early years of Cicero were spent partly in his native hills, partly in Rome. He tells that, as far back as he can remember anything, he recollects the help and the encouragement which his childish efforts received from the poet Archias. Archias came to Rome in 102 B.C. (when Cicero would be four years old) and lived as an inmate of the house of Lucullus. When, forty years later, Cicero appeared as counsel for his old tutor, and successfully asserted his claims to the citizenship before a Roman law-court,^[10] he told the jury that Archias had more right than any man living to claim the benefit of whatever skill in pleading he possessed, for it was Archias who had first implanted in him the love of those studies which had made him an orator. Throughout life Cicero was an omnivorous reader. His theory was that a man who wished to excel in oratory could not study too much nor make his range of culture too wide; and we gather from his descriptions^[11] that he and the group of cousins to which he belonged were trained from the first on this system.

CASCADE OF THE LIRIS.

Cicero entered on manhood in troublous The final defeat of the Cimbri in 101 B.C. and the disturbances at home which cost Saturninus his life in the next year had been followed by a period of comparative quiet. But the precious time had been wasted; the enfranchisement of the Italians had been vainly urged by the great tribune, Livius Drusus, who laid down his life in their cause, and now in the year 90 B.C., the seventeenth of Cicero's life, the obstinate apathy of Rome was rudely disturbed by the revolt of the Italian allies. In this war Cicero served his apprenticeship as a soldier. His references to personal recollections show that he was at one time with the northern army under Pompeius Strabo,^[12] and at another with the southern army under Sulla,^[13] 89 B.C.This was in the second year of the war. During the year 90 he remained in Rome and we find in the Brutus^[14] 90 B.C.a full account of the condition of things in the city and of his own way of life there. Cicero was eager to use his new emancipation from boyhood by listening to the speeches of the best orators of the time. But all ordinary business was interrupted by the war; Hortensius, the rising light of the bar, was away with the army; so was Sulpicius Rufus, the most distinguished among the men in middle life, and Antonius, the most famous orator of the seniors; Crassus, the great rival of Antonius, had died the year before. The law-courts were closed with the exception of the Commission for High-treason. This court had been instituted by the democratic and equestrian^[15] parties against those friends of Drusus whose policy would have averted the Social War, and who were now accused of having caused it. The noblest men in Rome were brought to the bar on the charge of having "incited the allies to revolt." One of the victims was the orator Gaius Cotta. "His exile," writes Cicero,^[16] "just at the time when I was most anxious to hear him was the first untoward incident in my career." Cicero had to content himself with listening to the political harangues of the magistrates. Of these there was no lack; Varius, Carbo and Cnæus Pomponius "seemed," he says, "as if they had taken lodgings on the Rostra." Cicero attended them all diligently "and every day wrote and read and took notes."

In the year 88 B.C. he studied the technical part of his art with the Rhodian rhetorician Molo, who was then visiting Rome. Philosophical training was supplied him first by the Athenian Academician Philo, (who fled from the disturbances of the Mithridatic War and took refuge at Rome in this year) and afterwards by the Stoic Diodotus. Diodotus became for many years an inmate of Cicero's house, and died there at last in the year 59, making his great pupil his heir.

A yet more important aid to Cicero's mental development was the instruction which he received from Scævola the augur, the greatest lawyer of his time. "My father," writes Cicero,^[17] "immediately after I had put on the dress of manhood, introduced me to him, instructing me that, so far as I found it possible and was permitted to do so, I should remain continually at his side. And so I committed to memory many of his wise discourses and pithy sayings, and strove to learn from his wisdom." After the death of the augur (probably in the year 87) Cicero attended on his cousin and namesake Scævola the pontifex maximus, "whom above all others of our nation I venture to call the most eminent in talent and in justice." From these men Cicero, though he never professed the science of jurisprudence, gained such a practical knowledge of the laws of his country, that he was well equipped for the duties of an advocate.

The year of Sulla's first consulship (88 B.C.) marks the close of the Social War and the beginning of the yet more fatal Civil War which was its consequence. Now for the first time Roman armies were ranged against one another on the battle-field; the leaders of the beaten party were executed by public authority and their heads exposed on the Rostra as those of enemies of the State. This year saw the first victory of Sulla, the next year the return of Marius. Both made havoc amongst the most brilliant orators of Rome. Sulpicius Rufus, Antonius, Catulus, and Caius Julius (whom Cicero brings together, along with Crassus, as the personages of his dialogue De Oratore) had all perished before quiet was restored for a time in the year 86. Cotta was still in exile, and for the next three years Hortensius was almost without a rival at the bar. Then with the return of Sulla from the East in 83 the civil wars and massacres began again, ending at last with the re-establishment by Sulla of the oligarchical constitution.

Just upon the close of this period of disorder, about the year 81 B.C., Cicero after his long preliminary training began to speak in the law-courts. He was now about twenty-five years of age. An early speech is preserved to us from a suit in which the young advocate matched himself for the first time with Hortensius. He repeatedly refers to his timidity on this occasion, and says^[18] that when his friend Roscius, the great comic actor, urged him to the attempt, he replied, "that he fears he will seem as impudent as a man who should strive for the palm of comedy with Roscius himself." Elsewhere^[19] he relates that he was ambitious to imitate the two leaders of the bar (for Cotta had now been restored by Sulla), but of the two he considered Hortensius the better model.

Next year Cicero had the opportunity of establishing once for all his own position as a great advocate. During Sulla's reign of terror, 80 B.C.legalised murder had been an everyday occurrence in Rome, and it was not easy to confine the slaughter within the precise limits which the Dictator ordained. In the midst of the confusion, when the city was full of gangs of assassins hunting down their victims for the sake of the blood-money promised by the government, Sextus Roscius, a wealthy citizen of Ameria, who had served in Sulla's army and had come to Rome after his victory, was murdered in the street as he returned home from supper. The assassins were neighbours and distant kinsmen who had been on bad terms with the murdered man. These men next applied to Chrysogonus, a favourite freedman of the Dictator, and induced him to get the name of Roscius inserted in the Proscription list. His property was thereupon confiscated and sold en bloc at a sham auction; Chrysogonus was the buyer, and paid into the treasury the sum of £20 as the purchase money of an estate worth £60,000. He then constituted the murderers his agents and employed them to oust from his father's house the only son of the deceased, who had remained throughout in his country-seat at Ameria. Chrysogonus and his associates now divided the property at their leisure. But they could not feel quite sure that the son, named like his father Sextus Roscius, would not one day call them to account. To assassinate him, now that times were quieter, was not so easy; so they adopted the plan of accusing him of being the murderer of his father. If they could procure his condemnation on a capital charge, he would, even if he evaded actual execution by exile, be quite powerless to annoy them in the future. It mattered little to the promoters of the accusation, that they were notoriously in possession of the property of the deceased, and that if he had come to his death, as they now pretended, by the parricidal machinations of his own son, his goods could not be liable to confiscation as those of a proscribed person. They calculated that this side of the story would never come out in court. No advocate, they thought, would venture to say a word of the Proscription, of the confiscation of the property, and of its purchase for an old song by Chrysogonus. How could any one insist on these points without openly attacking the Dictator's favourite? and to attack the favourite was to brave the displeasure of his terrible master.

This was Cicero's opportunity. While all Rome lay crushed and silent at Sulla's feet, this young advocate alone dared to set himself in opposition to the Regent's pleasure. In the first five minutes of his speech Cicero had cast away all disguise, and grappled openly with Chrysogonus.

"Chrysogonus asks you, gentlemen of the jury, that forasmuch as he has made himself master of so ample a fortune, which belongs by right to another man, and forasmuch as he is hindered and hampered in the enjoyment of that fortune by the fact that Sextus Roscius lives, he asks you, I say, to relieve his mind from every shade of doubt and anxiety. While Roscius is a citizen, he does not think that he can keep hold of Roscius' rich and splendid inheritance; if only Roscius be condemned and cast forth from society, then he hopes that he may be able to squander in luxury and profusion that which he has won by crime. He begs you, gentlemen, to pluck from his bosom this rooted distrust which frets and plagues him night and day, and to lend yourselves to secure him his ill-gotten gain."^[20]

Cicero modestly ascribes it to his own obscurity that he is privileged to appear as the champion of such a cause, while all the leading advocates shrank from the undertaking; "my plain-speaking may be unobserved because I have as yet no pretensions to be a statesman, or it may be pardoned in consideration of my youth—though, to be sure, the notion of pardoning and even the practice of judging has faded from the memory of the Republic."^[21] That day was the last on which Cicero could plead the security of insignificance. He left the court a man of mark in Rome. He had done more than save his client; he had given voice to feelings which all the world must needs smother in silence; he had struck a keynote which vibrated in a thousand hearts, sick of bloodshed and robbery and terror.

All this required not only great boldness but great skill. He was pleading before a bench of senators, newly re-established in the law-courts by Sulla, who would not be likely to tolerate from a young man of equestrian family anything which implied disapproval of the Restoration or disrespect towards the government. Nevertheless, with the instinct of a great pleader, Cicero seems to have felt the pulse of the jury as he proceeded. He begins by protesting that he will touch on politics only so far as is absolutely necessary for his case; he ends by claiming that he may speak not only for his client but for himself. "On what seems to me shameful and intolerable, on what, as I think, will touch us all unless we provide against it, on this I will make my utterance in all the sincerity of my heart and from all the bitterness of my soul."^[22]

Of Sulla himself, whose carelessness and indifference allows creatures like Chrysogonus to batten on the Commonwealth, Cicero speaks with an apparent respect which really covers the sharpest censure. "Rascally freedmen," he says,^[23] "always try to throw the responsibility for their misdeeds on their patron; but all the world knows that many things have been done, of which Sulla is only half aware. Are we to approve then, if some such acts are passed over because he does not know about them? We cannot approve; but it cannot be helped. Jupiter reigns above; yet we have men injured, and cities ruined, and crops lost by hurricanes or floods or extremes of heat and cold. We do not attribute these mischiefs to the intention of the god, but to the force of circumstances and to the magnitude of the universe over which he has to preside, while we acknowledge his hand in the blessings we receive. And so it is with Sulla."

But if Cicero affects to screen Sulla under this contemptuous apology, he condescends to no half-measures when he deals with his favourite.

"Let the leaders of the party look to it, whether this be not a sad and shameful conclusion, that those who could not bear to see the Roman Knights in the pride of place,^[24] should brook the tyranny of this vile slave. Hitherto, gentlemen of the jury, this tyranny has been exercised in other spheres. Now you see what path it is shaping for itself, at what goal it aims; it aims at your honour, your oath, your verdict, that is to say, at almost all that remains sound and uncontaminated in the State. Think, that on that judgment-seat Chrysogonus believes that he will work his will, that here too he can hold sway. O the misery and the bitterness of it! It is not that I fear that he will have such power. What cuts me to the quick is that he has presumed, that he has hoped to compass, by means of such a bench as that which I see before me, the condemnation of an innocent man. That is the burden of my complaint. Was it for this that the nobility aroused itself and won back the State at the point of the sword? Was it in order that the menials and lackeys of the great should be able to harry the goods and the honour of us and you alike?"^[25]

Of even greater weight are the words of warning with which the speech concludes:

"Men of wisdom, men endowed with the place and the power which you occupy, are bound to apply the appropriate remedies to the disease of which the State is sickening. There is no one of you but knows well, that the Roman people, which formerly had the reputation of being most placable towards its enemies, labours to-day under the curse of cruelty to its own children. Remove this cruelty from the State, gentlemen of the jury; suffer it no longer to work its pleasure in this Commonwealth. It is a vice which is mischievous, not only in that it has swept off so many of our fellow-citizens under every circumstance of horror, but likewise because by the daily spectacle of painful sights it has made the tenderest hearts callous to the sense of pity. For when each hour we see or hear of some fresh atrocity, even though nature has made us mild of mood, familiarity with dreadful deeds plucks all feelings of humanity from our minds."^[26]

In later life Cicero criticised^[27] the style of this his early effort at oratory, which he found too florid and exaggerated for his more matured taste. For all that, the speech is full of vigour and promise; and the situation was so critical and momentous, that every sentence struck home. Rome was conscious that yet another brave man and great orator had been born among her sons. We can well believe that "the speech met with such approval, that from that time no case was deemed too important to be committed to my charge."^[28]

Nevertheless the acquittal of Roscius was soon followed by Cicero's temporary retirement from the bar. The circumstances may best be recorded in his own words:^[29] "At that time my body was very thin and weak, my neck long and slender; and a frame like this, if exposed to over-exertion and strain of the lungs, is reckoned to incur fatal risks. My friends were the more anxious about me because my practice was to speak without any relief from change of tones, but always at the full stretch of my powers of voice and straining my whole body to the uttermost. They and the physicians urged me to give up speaking at the bar; but I felt that I would rather run any risks than renounce my ambitious hopes of being an orator. I reflected, however, that by changing my style of speaking and by lowering and regulating my voice, I might both avoid the danger to my health, and likewise bring my utterances better within compass. It was this purpose of a change in my habits of speaking that made me resolve on a journey to Asia. So after I had been two years at the bar, and had already some reputation in the courts, I set forth from Rome." Some account of his studies at Athens and in Asia Minor follows, and he continues: "Not content with these I came to Rhodes and resorted to Molo, the same whose pupil I had formerly been at Rome. Molo was not only an eminent writer and pleader in actual suits at the bar, but he had a rare skill in noting and correcting faults and in conveying instruction. He exerted all his powers in checking and keeping within bounds my tendency to exaggerate and to overflow, as it were, with a certain youthful hardihood and license of speech. I returned home after two years' absence, not only a more practised rhetorician, but almost a changed man. The over-straining of the voice had abated, my style had lost its frothiness, my lungs had grown stronger, and my bodily frame was moderately filled out."

Cicero was now fully established as one of the leaders of the bar along with Cotta and Hortensius, and was constantly employed in the most important cases. 76 B.C.All three were candidates for office in the year following Cicero's return to Italy. Cotta gained the consulship, Hortensius the office of curule ædile, and Cicero that of quæstor. Under Sulla's constitution twenty quæstors were elected for each year, and each quæstor when his term of magistracy was over passed on to the benches of the Senate, where he had now a seat for life. 75 B.C.Meanwhile Cicero's official duties sent him to spend the year 75 outside of Italy. The lot gave him as his province the western portion of Sicily with Lilybæum for his headquarters. The other side of the island (though one prætor ruled the whole) had a separate quæstor who resided at Syracuse. It is necessary to make this point clear for the understanding of an amusing anecdote, which Cicero^[30] tells against himself by way of illustrating to a jury the small attention paid in the capital to provincial concerns and provincial reputations. The experience is one which many an Indian Commissioner will recognise with a sigh.

"Now, gentlemen, I will make a clean breast of it, 74 B.C.and confess that I thought at the time that people in Rome were talking of nothing but my quæstorship. During a season of dearth I had forwarded a great supply of grain to the capital. I had been obliging to the dealers, fair to the merchants, liberal to the country people, scrupulous towards our allies, and all agreed that I had been faithful in every duty of my office. The Sicilians had devised compliments for me quite out of the common. And so I returned home in the expectation that the Roman people would come and lay the world at my feet. But it so happened that in the course of my journey I arrived at Puteoli, in the height of the season when it was full of persons of the first fashion. Well, gentlemen, you might have knocked me down with a feather when one of these came up and asked, on what day I had left Rome and what was the last news there? 'I am returning,' I replied, 'from my province.' 'O yes, of course' says he, 'from Africa, I think.' Utterly vexed and disgusted, I said, 'No, from Sicily.' Then another, who wished to play the well-informed man, put in: 'What, don't you know,' says he, 'that our friend here has been quæstor at Syracuse?' Not to make a long story of it, I pocketed my vexation, and lost myself among the crowd of those who had come to take the waters."

Cicero was thirty-two years of age when, after this adventure, he returned once more to Rome in the year 74 B.C. As a senator, it was time for him to choose a side and to make his influence felt in the affairs of state. To gain a clear conception of the political arena on which Cicero is now entering, it will be necessary to consider what were the parties and who the statesmen with whom he was to be engaged.

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1. Catullus,49, I.
2. Plutarch, Cic., I.
3. See below, p. II.
4. De Leg., iii., 16, 36.
5. This Marius Gratidianus was a partisan of his great namesake and probably his kinsman by adoption. He was guilty of many outrages during the domination of his faction, and was himself murdered with circumstances of much brutality by Catiline, when Sulla in turn triumphed.
6. De Leg., 2, 5.
7. Pro Sulla, 8, 24.
8. Pro Plancio, 8, 20.
9. Pro Plancio, 9, 22.
10. See below, p. 190.
11. De Oratore, ii., 1.
12. Philip., xii., 11, 27.
13. De Div., i., 33, 72.
14. Brut., 89.
15. See below, p. 35.
16. Brut., 89.
17. Di Amicitia, 1, 1.
18. Pro Quinctio, 24, 77.
19. Brutus, 92, 317.
20. Pro Rosc. Amer., 2, 6.
21. Pro Rosc., 1, 3.
22. Pro Rosc. Amer., 44, 129.
23. Pro Rosc. Amer., 45, 130.
24. See below, p. 34.
25. Pro Rosc. Amer., 48, 140.
26. Per Rosc. Amer., 53, 154.
27. Orator, 30, 107.
28. Brut., 90, 312.
29. Brut., 91, 313.
30. Pro Plancio, 26, 64.