Page:The Letters of Cicero Shuckburg III.pdf/20

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say what you think: you may certainly hold your tongue. For authority of every kind has been committed to one man. He consults nobody but himself, not even his friends. There would not have been much difference if he whom we followed had been master of the Republic." Nor could he deny that Cæsar himself acted with magnanimity and moderation, even increasingly so. Still, nothing could make up to him for the loss of dignitas implied by power being in the hands of one man, and the senate being no longer the real governing body. Though after the battle of Thapsus, and still more after Munda, one source of anxiety was removed&#8212;-that of his own precarious position should Cæsar be defeated-&#8212;the other grievance, that of the constitution being in abeyance, grew more and more offensive to him.  "I am ashamed of being a slave," he writes in January,  45. "What," he says in March, "have I to do with a forum, when there are no law courts, no senate-*house, and when men are always obtruding on my sight whom I cannot see with any patience?" Again and again he asserts that there is no form of constitution existing. A number of lesser annoyances served gradually to complete his indignant discontent. We have no allusion to Cæsar's triumph after Munda, or to the scene at the Lupercalia so graphically described in the second Philippic (§ 85), when Antony offered him the crown. But we are told of disgust at his nephew being made a member of the college of Luperci, revived and re-endowed by Cæsar; of his own annoyance at being kept waiting in Cæsar's antechamber; of his disapproval of Cæsar's plans for enlarging the city; and, worst of all, of his statue being placed in the temple of Quirinus, and carried among the figures of the gods in the opening procession in the circus. Finally, in January, 44, he tells Manius Curius: "You could scarcely believe how disgraceful my conduct appears to me in countenancing the present state of things." And, indeed, Cicero had not only countenanced it by his presence, he had written more than once to Cæsar in an almost more