and Caesar. Particularly the latter one with consistent perse-
verance accelerated the disintegration, and largely through his
legions and Gallic gold became too powerful to permit any longer
the old routine of exploitation by members of the old families.
Moral and social decadence, enormously fed and fostered by that
same exploitation, marks the epoch of Cicero's manhood and
aging years, and he was impotent to communicate to son and
nephew those loftier principles through which he kept clear
and pure his own skirts amid the putrescence of the times. His
own writings impressively mirror that decadence, which for its
mad luxury and profusion required the income of great provinces,
and bartered senatorial recognition of states and potentates.
Cicero's magnificent defense of Sicily placed and kept his public
conduct on a higher level, and his administration at Tarsus and
Laodicea ennobled his purer principles and made proof of his
resolute will to follow justice and humanity in dealing with the
subjects of Rome.

Cicero's intellect was swift and eminently successful in taking
hold of points and principles. Unfortunately it was coupled
with excessive sensitiveness in the domain of feeling and emotion.
He was swift to take offense, but as Pollio correctly said in his
history of the Civil War, he was not equally consistent in carrying
to conclusion the greater feuds of his public career. An author,
who is also prominent in public life, has in a way a double per-
sonality and is more vulnerable than the others. He lacked
phlegma too much. Noble sentiments of his Greek authors often
became to his inner and nobler life vital and vitalizing forces,
mottoes, principles, herald's calls, pillars of fire by night, to guide
and direct him in the ever increasing desolation and darkening
of the political world. His struggle for law and order, his defense
of property and vested rights in the Catilinarian movement, con-
firmed and definitely fixed his position as what we may call that
of a philosophical conservative, who saw but few optimates in
his world who were worthy of the truer and searching appellation
of the Best. In striving for the consulate he had sought and won
the support of Pompey: a practical necessity for his ambition
but no acceptance either of a dynast nor a profession of popular
politics. His morbid sensitiveness as well as pride in his own
advancement had made him assume, in his earlier forensic career,
a somewhat defiant attitude towards the pretensions of the
aristocracy of birth. With all this it is shallow malice to call

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