oyments of his life. He harped upon his consulship in season and
out of season, in his letters, in his judicial pleadings, in his public
speeches (and we may be sure in his conversation), until one would think
his friends must have hated the subject even more than his enemies. He
wrote accounts of it in prose and verse, in Latin and Greek--and, no
doubt, only limited them to those languages because they were the only
ones he knew. The well-known line which provoked the ridicule of critics
like Juvenal and Quintilian, because of the unlucky jingle peculiarly
unpleasant to a Roman ear:

"O fortunatam natam me consule Romam!"

expresses the sentiment which--rhyme or no rhyme, reason or no reason--he
was continually repeating in some form or other to himself and to every
one who would listen.

His consulship closed in glory; but on his very last day of office there
was a warning voice raised amidst the triumph, which might have opened his
eyes--perhaps it did--to the troubles which were to come. He stood up in
the Rostra to make the usual address to the people on laying down his
authority. Metellus Nepos had been newly elected one of the tribunes: it
was his office to guard jealously all the rights and privileges of the
Roman commons. Influenced, it is said, by Caesar--possibly himself an
undiscovered partisan of Catiline--he dealt a blow at the retiring consul
under cover of a discharge of duty. As Cicero was about to speak, he
interposed a tribune's 'veto'; no man should be heard, he said, who _had
put Roman citizens to death without a trial_. There was consternation
in the Forum. Cicero could not dispute what was a perfectly legal exercise
of the tribune's power; only, in a few emphatic words which he seized the
opportunity of adding to the usual formal oath on quitting office, he
protested that his act had saved Rome. The people shouted in answer, "Thou
hast said true!" and Cicero went home a private citizen, but with that
hearty tribute from his grateful countrymen ringing pleasantly in his
ears. But the bitter words of Metellus were yet to be echoed by his
enemies again and again, until that fickle popular voice took them up, and
howled them after the once popular consul.

Let us follow him for a while into private life; a pleasanter
companionship for us, we confess, than the unstable glories of the
political arena at Rome. In his family and social relations, the great
orator wins from us an amount of personal in