Page:Cicero And The Fall Of The Roman Republic.djvu/80

62 which he would have delivered as a second speech if the trial had run its full course. The speech is thus a political pamphlet, setting forth the misdoings of senatorial governors and the corruption of senatorial juries. The influence on opinion of Cicero's published pleadings was such as to make the orator a great power in Rome. "His speeches," writes Mr. Tyrrell, "discharged the highest work now done by our best newspapers, magazines, and reviews. To gain Cicero was what it would be to secure the advocacy of the Times; or rather what it would be were there no other paper, review, or magazine but the Times, and were the leaders of the Times written by Burke and Sheridan. . . . They put the public in possession of the circumstances in each case, and taught them to look on these circumstances with the eyes of the speaker and his party; they converted resistance into acceptance, and warmed acceptance into enthusiasm; they provided faith with reasons, doubt with arguments, and triumph with words."

Cicero was now the foremost among the advocates of Rome, for Cotta had died, and Hortensius passed through a period of eclipse, from which however he seems to have emerged later on. This is Cicero's own account of the matter in the Brutus. "After his consulship (I suppose because he saw that he was beyond comparison the first speaker among the consulars and took no count of those who had not attained that dignity), Hortensius relaxed the efforts which he had exerted from his boyhood up, and