Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 3.djvu/102

 64 STATESMEN AND SAGES war with Mithridates, which in fact carried with it the supreme control of Asia and of the East. In 63 B.C., at the age of forty-four, he was consul, the highest dignity attainable to a Roman ; in that memorable year he foiled by a bold promptitude, the revolutionary plot of Catiline, in which many distinguished Romans Caesar it was even said among them were implicated. He was now at the height of his fame ; " father of his country " he was actually called ; for a brief space he was with all classes the great man of the day. But the tide soon turned ; Cicero might have saved the country, but in saving it, it was said he had violated the constitution, according to which a Roman citizen could not be capitally pun- ished but by the sentence of the people in regular assembly. As it was, Roman citizens guilty of complicity with Catiline had, at Cicero's instigation, been put to death simply by an order of the senate ; this, it was said, was a dangerous prece dent and Cicero must be held responsible for it. His bitter enemy, Clodius, now tribune, pressed the charge against him in inflammatory speeches specially ad- dressed to the lowest class of citizens, and Cicero in despair left Rome in 58 B.C., and took refuge at Thessalonica. That same year saw the " father of his country " condemned to exile by a vote of the Roman people, and his house at Rome and his country houses at Formiae and Tusculum plundered and ruined. But in those revolutionary days the events of one year were reversed by those of the next; in 57 B.C., with new counsels and new tribunes, the people almost unanimously voted the recall of the exile, and Cicero was welcomed back to Rome amid an outburst of popular enthusiasm. But he was no longer a power in the world of politics ; he could not see his way clearly ; and he was so ner- vously sensitive to the fluctuations of public opinion that he could not decide be- tween Pompey and the aristocracy on the one hand, and Caesar and the new de- mocracy on the other. His leanings had hitherto been toward Pompey and the senate and the old republic ; but as time went on, he felt that Pompey was a half-hearted man, who could not be trusted, and that he would have ultimately to succumb to his far abler and more far-sighted rival, Caesar. The result was that he lost the esteem of both parties, and came to be regarded as a mere trimmer and time-server. There was all that political indecision about him which may be often observed in eminent lawyers and men of letters. The age wanted strong men such as Caesar ; this Cicero certainly was not. He was gentle, amiable, very clever, and highly cultivated, but the last man in the world to succeed in politics. The later years of his life were spent chiefly in pleading at the bar and writing essays. In 52 B.C. he composed one of his finest speeches in defence of Milo, who had killed Clodius in a riot, and was then standing for the consulship ; in this he was acting quite against the wishes of Pompey. In the following years (51-50 B.C.) he was in Asia, as governor of the province of Cilicia, and here the best side of his character showed itself in his just and sympathetic treatment of the provincials In 49-48 B.C. he was with Pompey's army in Greece to fight for the old cause, of which, however, he well-nigh despaired, and after the de- cisive battle of Pharsalia, at which he was not present, he threw himself on the conqueror's mercy. Caesar, who had certainly nothing to fear from him, received