present I fail.”  At one time he thought of finding comfort in unusual honors to the dead.  He would build a shrine of which Tullia should be the deity.  “I am determined,” he writes, “on building the shrine.  From this purpose I cannot be turned ...  Unless the building be finished this summer, I shall hold myself guilty.”  He fixes upon a design.  He begs Atticus, in one of his letters, to buy some columns of marble of Chios for the building.  He discusses the question of the site.  Some gardens near Rome strike him as a convenient place.  It must be conveniently near if it is to attract worshipers.  “I would sooner sell or mortgage, or live on little, than be disappointed.”  Then he thought that he would build it on the grounds of his villa.  In the end he did not build it at all.  Perhaps the best memorial of Tullia is the beautiful letter in which one of Cicero’s friends seeks to console him for his loss.  “She had lived,” he says, “as long as life was worth living, as long as the republic stood.”  One passage, though it has often been quoted before, I must give.  “I wish to tell you of something which brought me no small consolation, hoping that it may also somewhat diminish your sorrow.  On my way back from Asia, as I was sailing from Aeigina to Megara, I began to contemplate the places that lay around me.  Behind me was Aegina, before me Megara; on my right hand the Piraeus, on my left hand Corinth; towns all of them that were once at the very height of prosperity, but now lie ruined and desolate before our eyes.  I began thus to reflect:  ’Strange! do we, poor creatures of a day, bear it ill if one of us perish of disease, or are slain with the sword, we whose life is bound to be short, while the dead bodies of so many lie here inclosed within so small a compass?”

But I am anticipating.  When Cicero was in exile the republic had yet some years to live; and there were hopes that it might survive altogether.  The exile’s prospects, too, began to brighten.  Caesar had reached for the present the height of his ambition, and was busy with his province of Gaul.  Pompey had quarreled with Clodius, whom he found to be utterly unmanageable.  And Cicero’s friend, one Milo, of whom I shall have to say more hereafter, being the most active of them all, never ceased to agitate for his recall.  It would be tedious to recall all the vicissitudes of the struggle.  As early as May the Senate passed a resolution repealing the decree of banishment, the news of it having caused an outburst of joy in the city.  Accius’ drama of “Telamon” was being acted at the time, and the audience applauded each senator as he entered the Senate, and rose from their places to greet the consul as he came in.  But the enthusiasm rose to its height when the actor who was playing the part of Telamon (whose banishment from his country formed part of the action of the drama) declaimed with significant emphasis the following lines—­