4X' TOHUftTO MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO 65 him kindly, and was a great friend to him from that day ; but Cicero was not a happy man now that he could no longer make speeches in the senate or in the courts ; to all this Caesar's victory had for the time at least put at end. In the years 46, 45, 44 B.C., he wrote most of his chief works on rhetoric and philosophy, living in retirement and brooding mournfully over his griefs and disappointments. In 43 B.C., the year after Caesar's death, he had once again the delight of having his eloquence applauded by the senate. In that year his famous speeches against Antony Philippics, as he called them after the title of Demosthenes's orations against Philip of Macedon were delivered. These cost him his life. As soon as Antony, Octavius (afterward the Emperor Augustus), and Lepidus had leagued themselves together in the so-called triumvirate for the settlement of the state, they followed the precedent of former revolutions, a proscription-list of their po- litical enemies. All such were outlawed and given up to destruction. Cicero's name was in the fatal list. Old and feeble, he fled to his villa at Formiae, pur- sued by the soldiers of Antony, and was overtaken by them as he was being carried in a litter down to the shore, where it had been his intention to embark. With a calm courage (which, to quote Macaulay's words) " has half redeemed his fame," he put his head out of the litter and bade his murderers strike. He died in the December of 43 B.C., in the sixty-third year of his age. As an orator and a pleader Cicero undoubtedly stands in the first rank. Many of his speeches have come down to us. Of these the most famous, and per- haps the finest, are his speeches against Verres and against Catiline. Eloquence in those days of furious faction and revolution was a greater force than it is with us. As a politician he failed because he did not distinctly realize to himself that the old republic, the government of the senate and of the nobles, had been tried and had been found wanting. He had not the courage to face the great changes which he felt were impending. Pompey, the champion of the old order, was not a leader to whom he could look up with confidence. And so he wavered, and half acquiesced in Caesar's triumph, even though he suspected that with that triumph the Rome which he had known and loved would pass away. To us it is as an es- sayist and as the writer of a multitude of letters to friends, full of miscellaneous information, that Cicero is particularly attractive ; there is a gracefulness and re- finement and elevation of tone about his writings which cannot fail to incline the reader to say with Erasmus, " I feel a better man for reading Cicero." His essays on "Old Age" and "on Friendship," his De Officiis, or "Whole Duty of Man," as we may paraphrase it, are good and pleasant reading such as we can all enjoy. There is no fairer picture in literature than of him sitting in the garden of his villa at Tusculum, surrounded by admiring friends, and engaged upon his " Tus- culan disputations ; " while his treatises on the " Nature of the Gods," and on the "True Ends of Human Life " (De Finibus), if they do not show any very deep and original thought, at least give us an insight into the teachings of the various philosophical schools.
