every line of whom he used to declare contained some maxim worth remembering, he heard their steps approaching, and ordered the litter to be set down.  He looked out, and recognised at the head of the party an officer named Laenas, whom he had once successfully defended on a capital charge; but he saw no gratitude or mercy in the face, though there were others of the band who covered their eyes for pity, when they saw the dishevelled grey hair and pale worn features of the great Roman (he was within a month of sixty-four).  He turned from Laenas to the centurion, one Herennius, and said, “Strike, old soldier, if you understand your trade!” At the third blow—­by one or other of those officers, for both claimed the evil honour—­his head was severed.  They carried it straight to Antony, where he sat on the seat of justice in the Forum, and demanded the offered reward.  The triumvir, in his joy, paid it some ten times over.  He sent the bloody trophy to his wife; and the Roman Jezebel spat in the dead face, and ran her bodkin through the tongue which had spoken those bold and bitter truths against her false husband.  The great orator fulfilled, almost in the very letter, the words which, treating of the liberty of the pleader, he had put into the mouth of Crassus—­“You must cut out this tongue, if you would check my free speech:  nay, even then, my very breathing should protest against your lust for power”.  The head, by Antony’s order, was then nailed upon the Rostra, to speak there, more eloquently than ever the living lips had spoken, of the dead liberty of Rome.

CHAPTER VII.

CHARACTER AS A POLITICIAN AND AN ORATOR.

Cicero shared very largely in the feeling which is common to all men of ambition and energy,—­a desire to stand well not only with their own generation, but with posterity.  It is a feeling natural to every man who knows that his name and acts must necessarily become historical.  If it is more than usually patent in Cicero’s case, it is only because in his letters to Atticus we have more than usual access to the inmost heart of the writer; for surely such a thoroughly confidential correspondence has never been published before or since.  “What will history say of me six hundred years hence?” he asks, unbosoming himself in this sort to his friend.  More than thrice the six hundred years have passed, and, in Cicero’s case, history has hardly yet made up its mind.  He has been lauded and abused, from his own times down to the present, in terms as extravagant as are to be found in the most passionate of his own orations; both his accusers and his champions have caught the trick of his rhetorical exaggeration more easily than his eloquence.  Modern German critics like Drumann and Mommsen have attacked him with hardly less bitterness, though with more decency, than the historian Dio Cassius, who lived so near his own times.  Bishop Middleton, on the other