still, to his idea, the body of the Roman
Republic had been sound. But when he had gone out from his Consulship,
with resolves strung too high that he would remain at Rome, despising
provinces and plunder, and be as it were a special providence to the
Republic, gradually he fell from his high purpose, finding that there
were no Romans such as he had conceived them to be. Then he fell away
and became the man who could condescend to waste his unequalled
intellect in attacking Piso, in praising himself, and in defending Milo.
The glory of his active life was over when his Consulship was done--the
glory was over, with the exception of that to come from his final
struggle with Antony--but the work by which his immortality was to be
achieved was yet before him. I think that after defending Milo he must
have acknowledged to himself that all partisan fighting in Rome was
mean, ignoble, and hollow. With the Senate-house and its archives burnt
as a funeral pile for Clodius, and the Forum in which he had to plead
lined with soldiers who stopped him by their clang of arms instead of
protecting him in his speech, it must have been acknowledged by Cicero
that the old Republic was dead, past all hope of resurrection. He had
said so often to Atticus; but men say words in the despondency of the
moment which they do not wish to have accepted as their established
conviction. In such humor Cicero had written to his friend; but now it
must have occurred to him that his petulant expressions were becoming
only too true. When instigating Curio to canvass for Milo, and defending
Milo as though it had been a good thing for a Roman nobleman to travel
in the neighborhood of the city with an army at his heels, he must have
ceased to believe even in himself as a Roman statesman.

In the oration which we possess--which we must teach ourselves to
regard as altogether different from that which Cicero had been able to
pronounce among Pompey's soldiers and the Clodian rabble--the reader is
astonished by the magnificence of the language in which a case so bad in
itself could be enveloped, and is made to feel that had he been on the
jury, and had such an address been made to him, he would certainly have
voted for an acquittal. The guilt or innocence of Milo as to the murder
really turned on the point whether he did or did not direct that Clodius
should be dragged out of the tavern and slain; but here in this oration
three points are put forward, in each of