his opposition to turbulent and ambitious partisans, his alienations and friendships, his brilliant career as a statesman, his misfortunes and sorrows, his exile and recall, his splendid services to the State, his greatness and his defects, his virtues and weaknesses, his triumphs and martyrdom.  These are foreign to my purpose.  No man of heathen antiquity is better known to us, and no man by pure genius ever won more glorious laurels.  His life and labors are immortal.  His virtues and services are embalmed in the heart of the world.  Few men ever performed greater literary labors, and in so many of its departments.  Next to Aristotle and Varro, Cicero was the most learned man of antiquity, but performed more varied labors than either, since he was not only great as a writer and speaker, but also as a statesman, being the most conspicuous man in Rome after Pompey and Caesar.  He may not have had the moral greatness of Socrates, nor the philosophical genius of Plato, nor the overpowering eloquence of Demosthenes, but he was a master of all the wisdom of antiquity.  Even civil law, the great science of the Romans, became interesting in his hands, and was divested of its dryness and technicality.  He popularized history, and paid honor to all art, even to the stage; he made the Romans conversant with the philosophy of Greece, and systematized the various speculations.  He may not have added to philosophy, but no Roman after him understood so well the practical bearing of all its various systems.  His glory is purely intellectual, and it was by sheer genius that he rose to his exalted position and influence.

But it was in forensic eloquence that Cicero was pre-eminent, in which he had but one equal in ancient times.  Roman eloquence culminated in him.  He composed about eighty orations, of which fifty-nine are preserved.  Some were delivered from the rostrum to the people, and some in the senate; some were mere philippics, as severe in denunciation as those of Demosthenes; some were laudatory; some were judicial; but all were severely logical, full of historical allusion, profound in philosophical wisdom, and pervaded with the spirit of patriotism.  Francis W. Newman, in his “Regal Rome,” thus describes Cicero’s eloquence:—­

“He goes round and round his object, surveys it in every light, examines it in all its parts, retires and then advances, compares and contrasts it, illustrates, confirms, and enforces it, till the hearer feels ashamed of doubting a position which seems built on a foundation so strictly argumentative.  And having established his case, he opens upon his opponent a discharge of raillery so delicate and good-natured that it is impossible for the latter to maintain his ground against it; or, when the subject is too grave, he colors his exaggerations with all the bitterness of irony and vehemence of passion.”