others who desired the same objects as he did and kept continually coming to blows with Clodius, so that fatal conflicts took place throughout practically the entire city.  Nepos now, inspired with fear by his colleague and by Pompey and by the other prominent men, changed his attitude, and as the senate decreed, on motion of Spinther, that Cicero should be restored, and the populace on the motion of both consuls voted it, Clodius, to be sure, spoke against it to them, but he had Milo as an opponent so that he could commit no violence, and Pompey, among others, spoke in favor of the enactment, so that that party proved much the stronger.

[-9-] Cicero accordingly came home from exile and expressed his gratitude to both senate and people,—­the consuls affording him an opportunity,—­in their respective assemblies.  He laid aside his hatred of Pompey for his banishment, became reconciled with him, and immediately repaid his kindness.  A sore famine had arisen in the city and the entire populace rushed into the theatre (the kind of theatre that they were then still using for public gatherings) and from there to the Capitol where the senators were in session, threatening first to slay them with their own hands and later to burn them alive, temple and all.  It was then that Cicero persuaded them to elect Pompey as commissioner of the grain supply and to give him consequently the office of proconsul for five years both within Italy and without.  So he now, as previously in the case of the pirates, was to hold sway over the entire world at that time under Roman power.

[-10-] Caesar and Crassus really disliked Cicero, but paid some attention to him when they perceived that he would return in any case, Caesar even while absent displaying some good-will toward him; they received, however, no thanks for their pains.  Cicero knew that they had not acted according to their real inclination and regarded them as having been most to blame for his banishment.  And though he was not quite bold enough to oppose them openly, since he had recently tasted the fruits of unrestrained free speech, nevertheless he composed secretly a little book and inscribed upon it that it contained a kind of defence of his policy.  In it he heaped together masses of denunciation against them and others, which led him to such fear of these statements getting out in his lifetime that he sealed up the volume and delivered it to his son with the injunction not to read nor to publish what was written, until his father should have departed from life.

[-11-] Cicero, accordingly, took root anew and got back his property and likewise the foundation of his home, although the latter had been given up to Liberty and Clodius both called the gods to witness and interposed religious scruples against its desecration.  But Cicero found a flaw in the enactment of the lex curiata by the provisions of which his rival had been taken from the nobles into the rank of the people, on the