Page:Cicero And The Fall Of The Roman Republic.djvu/167

63 B.C.] The accounts which have been preserved to us of this great debate are strangely conflicting. Plutarch relates "that the only one of Cato's speeches surviving in his time was that delivered on this occasion; for Cicero the consul had trained certain writers of special intelligence to use signs which expressed the sense of many letters in a few short marks, and had set them here and there in the Senate-house. For the keeping and employment of what are called shorthand writers had not yet begun, but it is said that this occasion was the first when men struck on the track of any such invention." It might have been hoped that this precaution would have secured us an authentic account of the speeches and motions before the House. Nevertheless we find perplexing discrepancies. Sallust omits Cicero's speech altogether, and Plutarch and Dio Cassius give accounts of it which are in contradiction of each other, and neither of which agrees very well with the published version. Brutus, who in later years wrote a life of his uncle Cato, went hopelessly astray, believing that Cato was the first to propose the punishment of death. Luckily for us, this blunder caused Cicero to give us in a confidential letter of criticism, addressed to Atticus, a plain statement of some of the facts, which is our best guide through the labyrinth of contradiction. Lastly as to the nature of Cæsar's proposal, we have two distinct versions; the one, easy in itself but irreconcilable with what we