Treatises on Friendship and Old Age | Page 4

reverses were at hand. During the existence of the political
combination of Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus, known as the first
triumvirate, P. Clodius, an enemy of Cicero's, proposed a law banishing
"any one who had put Roman citizens to death without trial." This was
aimed at Cicero on account of his share in the Catiline affair, and in
March, 58 B. C., he left Rome. The same day a law was passed by
which he was banished by name, and his property was plundered and
destroyed, a temple to Liberty being erected on the site of his house in
the city. During his exile Cicero's manliness to some extent deserted
him. He drifted from place to place, seeking the protection of officials
against assassination, writing letters urging his supporters to agitate for
his recall, sometimes accusing them of lukewarmness and even
treachery, bemoaning the ingratitude of his' country or regretting the
course of action that had led to his outlawry, and suffering from
extreme depression over his separation from his wife and children and
the wreck of his political ambitions. Finally in August, 57 B. C., the
decree for his restoration was passed, and he returned to Rome the next
month, being received with immense popular enthusiasm. During the
next few years the renewal of the understanding among the triumvirs
shut Cicero out from any leading part in politics, and he resumed his
activity in the law-courts, his most important case being, perhaps, the
defence of Milo for the murder. of Clodius, Cicero's most troublesome
enemy. This oration, in the revised form in which it has come down to

us, is ranked as among the finest specimens of the art of the orator,
though in its original form it failed to secure Milo's acquittal. Meantime,
Cicero was also devoting much time to literary composition, and his
letters show great dejection over the political situation, 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
fashion. Cicero as a man, in spite of his self-importance, the vacillation
of his political conduct in desperate crises, and the whining
despondency of his times of adversity, stands out as at bottom a
patriotic Roman of substantial honesty, who gave his life to check the
inevitable fall of the commonwealth to which he was devoted. The
evils which were undermining the Republic bear so many