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CIC discovery of Catiline's conspiracy. The details of that infamous plot—the history of its origin, its actors, and their utter discomfiture, will he found elsewhere.—(See .) If ever the enthusiasm of a community, after a deliverance from proscription and bloodshed, concentrated upon one man, it was when the Romans, after the dispersion of Catiline and his crew, hailed the great orator, whose work it was, as father of his country, and in his name voted thanksgivings to the gods. But the height of popularity to which the sublime achievement carried him was as perilous as it was dazzling, and before long events transpired which rendered his fall inevitable. With the occasion which gave it birth the admiration of the nobles for the saviour of their country passed away, and again it was the vanity and arrogance of the consul which fretted them out of patience with his authority. The leaders of the democratic faction on the other hand were not slow to perceive, that the consul had more than once lent the influence of his station and his talents to the cause of oligarchical oppression; nor had they failed to note some occasions on which the patriotic prosecutor of Verres had come forward to defend the conduct of public officers who had no less shamelessly than the Sicilian prætor practised every form of extortion and cruelty. No sooner had he laid down the emblems of the consular office, than the animosity of the nobles and the disaffection of the populace combined to work his immediate disgrace. His conduct in the Catilinarian conspiracy left him open to the charge of having violated the laws of his country; for, contrary to the statute which provided that no citizen could be put to death without the authority of the people, Cicero, acting merely on the authority of the senate, had given orders for the summary execution of the conspirators. It was in vain the orator contended that Lentulus, Cethegus, and their associates, had by their guilt forfeited entirely the privileges of Roman citizens. To this his enemies easily replied, that the comitia alone were competent to pronounce upon the question of guilt, as they alone could legally determine the question of punishment. On the last day of the year, when he ascended the rostrum to give an account of his official proceedings, so much had the popularity of the great orator declined, that one of the tribunes was allowed to interrupt him with the insulting exclamation, that a man who had put Roman citizens to death without granting them a hearing, was himself unworthy of being heard. The populace indeed, after hearing him solemnly asseverate that he had saved the city and the republic, escorted him home; but by this passing homage to his talents and his character nothing in the aspect of the fallen consul's position was materially changed. Returning to the senate as a private member, he was soon involved in a series of angry disputes, the result of which was only to augment the number and aggravate the hatred of his enemies. The destruction of Catiline and his army in the beginning of 62 ., and the return of Pompey from his Asiatic campaign in the autumn of the same year, for a while diverted public attention from these factious recriminations; but they were renewed with tenfold bitterness on the occasion of Cicero's taking part against P. Clodius Pulcher, who was accused before the senate of having violated in the house of Cæsar the rites of the Bona Dea, and began to be the sole subject of talk, and the fertile source of dissension among the citizens. Clodius from this time forward was the mortal enemy of Cicero. After being adopted into a plebeian family, this unscrupulous patrician was elected to the tribuneship in 59. His purpose in seeking, and the purpose of Pompey, Cæsar, and their partisans in procuring him that office, was undoubtedly the ruin, or at least the humiliation of the ex-consul under forms of law. To the machinations of such an enemy, and to the even more dangerous designs of his supporters, Cicero could oppose neither the vigilance of devoted friends, nor the stern endurance of conscious integrity. When Pompey, on whom he still reckoned for support against his personal enemies, and through whom he still hoped to control his political adversaries, made common cause with Crassus and Cæsar against the aristocratic leaders, his disgrace was scaled. Clodius could now prosecute his schemes of vengeance with entire impunity. His first act after entering upon office was to get a bill passed interdicting from fire and water any one who had put a Roman citizen to death untried. The purpose of the measure could not be mistaken, and Cicero at once took guilt to himself. He endeavoured to move the senate in his favour, and not altogether in vain; nor was the garb of an accused person, in which he appeared in the forum, without its effect upon the better portion of the citizens. But the new consuls, Piso and Gabinius, sternly repressed all demonstrations of sympathy, and Pompey, pretending fear of a civil commotion, at length declared against the orator. Cicero now, giving way to despair, resolved to depart from Rome. He quitted the city, April, 58 ., and, taking Brundisium in his way, went over to Greece. Plancius, quæstor of Macedonia, entertained him honourably at Thessalonica, where he remained till November. His next residence was at Dyrrachium, where, as at Thessalonica, he was chiefly occupied in corresponding with his wife Terentia, and his friend Atticus. The letters he addressed to them give us a picture of physical and mental prostration under grief, such as it would be difficult to parallel. At Rome, as might have been expected, a reaction, to which the extravagant vengeance of his enemy Clodius no less than the enthusiastic exertions of his friends contributed force and fervour, soon occurred in favour of the expatriated orator. In spite of the formal decree of banishment with which Clodius had pursued his victim, various attempts were made by parties in the senate to procure the recall of the exile. In 57. political changes, and the accession of Pompey to the ranks of its promoters, determined the success of the movement. On the 4th August the comitia centuriata, by an overwhelming majority, voted the bill of restoration. The same day Cicero, anticipating this event, quitted Dyrrachium and passed over to Brundisium. Along the Appian way, which was his route to the city, the towns sent forth their magistrates to offer him congratulations; and on his arrival at the gates of Rome he was met by a crowd of the citizens, who escorted him in triumph to the capitol, there to render thanks to Jupiter Maximus. In the circumstances of the republic at the time of Cicero's return, his name and the recollections which attached to it would have served him well with the senate and with many of the citizens in an attempt to regain his political supremacy; but, in a contest with Pompey, Crassus, and Cæsar, whose authority was now firmly established, neither the reputation of the great orator nor the splendid memories of his consulate would have supported him for an hour, and a collision with the triumvirs was therefore what he most anxiously and timorously avoided. Cæsar had magnanimously attempted to break the fall of the consul of 63. by urging him, but in vain, to become one of his legates, and since then had treated him with a frigid civility. No reliance could be placed upon Pompey, and Crassus was decidedly hostile. Thus really at feud with the triumvirs, but caressed by them when he humbly did their bidding, Cicero passed the next five years of his life, either at Rome or one of his country seats. During this period he composed his "De Republica" and his "De Legibus." In 52 ., during the third consulship of Pompey, with whom Cicero was then on terms of personal intimacy, a law was enacted with a view to the repression of bribery and corruption, which ordained that no consul or prætor should be appointed to the government of a province until five years had elapsed from the date of his quitting office, and that in the meantime governors should be selected by lot from the class of persons of consular or prætorian rank who had never held any foreign command. Under this law Cicero was appointed to the province of Cilicia, to which were annexed Pisidia, Pamphylia, some districts to the north of Mount Taurus, and the island of Cyprus, The unlucky orator regarded this appointment, although an honourable and lucrative one, only in the light of a second banishment from Rome, and went to his province in the temper of a man on whom fortune had done her worst. His apprehensions on the score of an invasion of Cilicia by the Parthians were not destined to be realized; his administration turned out as popular as he had promised Atticus it should be pure—which, indeed, it was to a degree that astonished and delighted the Greeks; the success of his campaign against the robber tribes of the Syrian frontier was such as to inspire him with hopes of a triumph—but nothing could alleviate the horrors of absence from the capital, and the very day on which his term of office expired Cicero was on his way to Italy. He arrived in the neighbourhood of Rome, 4th January, 49. It was a critical or rather a fatal moment for the liberties of the republic, and for all who had been conspicuous in their defence. The senate had just commanded the dismissal of Cæsar's army. M. Antony, and one of his colleagues in the tribuneship who had opposed the decree, had escaped to the camp of the future dictator, and the immediate