serious opposition.

CHAPTER III.

_MILO._

[Sidenote: B.C. 52, aetat. 55.]

The preceding year came to an end without any consular election. It was
for the election expected to have taken place that the services of Curio
had been so ardently bespoken by Cicero on behalf of Milo. In order to
impede the election Clodius accused Milo of being in debt, and Cicero
defended him. What was the nature of the accusation we do not exactly
know. "An inquiry into Milo's debts!" Such was the name given to the
pleadings as found with the fragments which have come to us.[54] In
these, which are short and not specially interesting, there is hardly a
word as to Milo's debts; but much abuse of Clodius, with some praise of
Cicero himself, and some praise also of Pompey, who was so soon to take
up arms against Cicero, not metaphorically, but in grim reality of sword
and buckler, in this matter of his further defence of Milo. We cannot
believe that Milo's debts stood in the way of his election, but we know
that at last he was not elected. Early in the year Clodius was killed,
and then, at the suggestion of Bibulus--whom the reader will remember as
the colleague of Caesar in the Consulship when Caesar reduced his
colleague to ridiculous impotence by his violence--Pompey was elected as
sole Consul, an honor which befell no other Roman.[55] The condition of
Rome must have been very low when such a one as Bibulus thought that no
order was possible except by putting absolute power into the hands of
him who had so lately been the partner of Caesar in the conspiracy which
had not even yet been altogether brought to an end. That Bibulus acted
under constraint is no doubt true. It would be of little matter now from
what cause he acted, were it not that his having taken a part in this
utter disruption of the Roman form of government is one proof the more
that there was no longer any hope for the Republic.

But the story of the killing of Clodius must be told at some length,
because it affords the best-drawn picture that we can get of the sort of
violence with which Roman affairs had to be managed; and also because it
gave rise to one of the choicest morsels of forensic eloquence that have
ever been prepared by the intellect and skill of an advocate. It is well
known that the speech to which I refer was not spoken, and could not
have been spoken, in the form in which it has reached us. We do not know
what part of it was spoken and what wa