raphy, and above all in the most casual and apparently inconse-
quential details of the Rhetorical Art, was sweeping, keen,
restless and progressive. He swayed and dominated his time
with his pen even more than with his voice, and taught the Latin
world by furnishing it with models and standards even before he
arrived at life's meridian line. The Neo-Atticism of Calvus and
Brutus he met by admirable and temperate valuations and
surveys. He knew that he had to make his way in an aristo-
cratic society buttressed by tradition and privilege. For tribu-
nician politics and popular leadership he entertained a deep and
consistent antipathy. The assertiveness of his aspirations and
of his achievements he shared with the majority of classic writers
and men of parts. Humility has no place at the Olympian
board of the Greek Epic, nor shall we find it among the Ethical.
categories of the Stoic school. His forensic industry and excel-
lence opened for him the Great Council and the course of Honors.
The restless and darting wit of his tongue was an evil influence
for the serenity and for the felicity of his life, for those who are
accustomed to the perpetual applause of their sudden and in-
calculable scintillations will be more feared and admired than
loved. The ductile character of an advocate's professional
intellect, his habit of emphasizing his strong points, and covering
up or concealing his weak, these are not in themselves favorable
to the formation of a very strong vein of exclusive or positive
truthseeking. The constant craving of applause is one of the
unwholesome concomitants of supreme oratory. So Cicero in
the domain of philosophy too excels more as a lucid and efficient
relator of tenets, schools and sects than as the firm adherent
of any one school. He was supremely susceptible to grace,
truth and loftiness of character and precept, but he was not
strong enough to illustrate by his own conduct, amid uncommon
trials and tribulations, the firmness which he admired in the Stoic
system, which he witnessed in Cato. That Roman Republic
which furnished him patterns and ideals ended with the political
assassination of Scipio Aemilianus. From his early youth on
he lived in a period of political disintegration, he witnessed autoc-
racy, the reestablishment of oligarchy, and above all an epoch
where swift and enormous expansion of empire went hand in
hand with, nay quickened and accelerated, the dissolution of the
old city-republic. Likewise it aided the rise, through the loot of
East and West, of powerful political individuals like Pompey

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