lled and swelled until the year
of his consulship seemed to him the greatest in the annals of Rome. He
bored every one by talking incessantly of it on all occasions. He
dreamed of this and saw nothing of the dark tides rising round. He
watched helplessly the growing power of Pompeius, Crassus, and Caesar,
and did not understand what Rome was coming to. Caesar was always
friendly and gracious to him, for he had a mind which could appreciate
Cicero's genius as a writer: but Cicero distrusted Caesar.

He had meantime made a deadly enemy of Clodius who, by playing on
disorder, was making himself more and more dangerous in Rome. Clodius
was charged with sacrilege. He defended himself by saying that on the
day on which he was said to have been present, in female clothes, at the
Women's Festival being celebrated in the house of Caesar's wife, he was
in fact not in the city. Cicero swore that he had seen him. Thanks to
bribery Clodius was acquitted. He never forgave Cicero. Soon after this,
in the first year of the Triumvirate (59), he secured his banishment
from the city for a year.

Cicero, after a visit to Greece, retired to his villa at Tusculum. He
would have been wiser had he settled down there and devoted himself to
the writing of which he was a consummate master. But after sixteen
months in the country he returned to Rome.

_The Return_

It is said that the people never passed a measure with such
unanimity, and the Senate rivalled it by proposing a vote of
thanks to those cities that had given help to Cicero in exile, and
by restoring at the public expense his house, with the villa and
buildings, which Clodius had destroyed. Thus Cicero returned in
the sixteenth month after his banishment, and so great was the
rejoicing in cities and the general enthusiasm in greeting him
that he fell short of the truth when he declared afterwards that
he was brought to Rome on the shoulders of Italy. Crassus, too,
who had been his enemy before his exile, was glad to meet him and
make proposals for reconciliation, saying that he did it to please
his son Publius, who was an admirer of Cicero.

33. Secs. 4-5.

When Clodius was murdered in the streets by Milo, Cicero undertook the
latter's defence in a very famous speech, which we still possess. Milo,
however, was condemned. In the province of Cilicia to which he was soon
afterwards appointed governor, Cicero showed himself an honest and
upright admi