the fugitive. As he lay
reading (it is said), even during these anxious moments, a play of his
favourite Euripides, every line of whom he used to declare contained some
maxim worth remembering, he heard their steps approaching, and ordered the
litter to be set down. He looked out, and recognised at the head of the
party an officer named Laenas, whom he had once successfully defended on
a capital charge; but he saw no gratitude or mercy in the face, though
there were others of the band who covered their eyes for pity, when they
saw the dishevelled grey hair and pale worn features of the great Roman
(he was within a month of sixty-four). He turned from Laenas to the
centurion, one Herennius, and said, "Strike, old soldier, if you
understand your trade!" At the third blow--by one or other of those
officers, for both claimed the evil honour--his head was severed. They
carried it straight to Antony, where he sat on the seat of justice in the
Forum, and demanded the offered reward. The triumvir, in his joy, paid it
some ten times over. He sent the bloody trophy to his wife; and the Roman
Jezebel spat in the dead face, and ran her bodkin through the tongue which
had spoken those bold and bitter truths against her false husband. The
great orator fulfilled, almost in the very letter, the words which,
treating of the liberty of the pleader, he had put into the mouth of
Crassus--"You must cut out this tongue, if you would check my free
speech: nay, even then, my very breathing should protest against your
lust for power". The head, by Antony's order, was then nailed upon the
Rostra, to speak there, more eloquently than ever the living lips had
spoken, of the dead liberty of Rome.

CHAPTER VII.

CHARACTER AS A POLITICIAN AND AN ORATOR.

Cicero shared very largely in the feeling which is common to all men of
ambition and energy,--a desire to stand well not only with their own
generation, but with posterity. It is a feeling natural to every man who
knows that his name and acts must necessarily become historical. If it
is more than usually patent in Cicero's case, it is only because in his
letters to Atticus we have more than usual access to the inmost heart of
the writer; for surely such a thoroughly confidential correspondence has
never been published before or since. "What will history say of me six
hundred years hence?" he asks, unbosoming himself in this sort to his
friend. More than thrice the six hundred years have pas