Page:Cicero And The Fall Of The Roman Republic.djvu/111

66 B.C.]

They applied to Cicero, as their natural representative and champion, to support before the People the proposal of Manilius. Thus it was that for the first time Cicero, now vested with the office of prætor, came forward on the Rostra and lifted up his voice no longer to a bench of jurors but to the assembled Roman People.

To the Nobles, this heaping of fresh honours and powers on the head of the man they detested was a bitter necessity, against which they rebelled to the end. Had they possessed sagacity to penetrate the character of Pompey, they might have known that he could be safely trusted with these powers; but they seem never to have truly gauged either his greatness or his weakness. If he had been indeed a man possessed with the vulgar ambition to make himself a despot, this last additional grant would, no doubt, have concentrated in his hands force sufficient for the overthrow of the free State. It might well be argued that the Republic ought not to be thus laid at the mercy of any citizen, however loyal. But such arguments were discredited by having been used the year before against the Gabinian law. Cicero's rejoinder is crushing: "What then is the burden of Hortensius' speech? That, if all power is to be placed in the hands of one man, Pompey is the most worthy recipient; but that such a grant ought not to be made to him or to anyone else. That argument has grown stale; it has been refuted, not so much by words as by events. For you,