On his return to Rome the state of public affairs was most alarming.  Caesar and Pompey were in antagonism.  He must choose between them, and he distrusted both.  Caesar was the more able, accomplished, and magnanimous, but he was the more unscrupulous and dangerous.  He had ventured to cross the Rubicon,—­the first general who ever dared thus openly to assail his country’s liberties.  Pompey was pompous, overrated, and proud, and had been fortunate in the East.  But then he sided with the Constitutional authorities,—­that is, with the Senate,—­so far as his ambition allowed.  So Cicero took his side feebly, reluctantly, as the least of the evils he had to choose, but not without vacillation, which is one of the popular charges against him.  “His distraction almost took the form of insanity.”  “His inconsistency was an incoherence.”  Never did a more wretched man than Cicero resort to Pompey’s camp, where he remained until his cause was lost.  He returned, after the battle of Pharsalia, a suppliant at the feet of Caesar, the conqueror.  This, to me, is one of his weakest acts.  It would have been more lofty and heroic to have perished in the camp of Pompey’s sons.

In the midst of these public misfortunes which saddened his soul, his private miseries began.  He was now prematurely an old man, under sixty years of age, almost broken down with grief.  His beloved daughter Tullia, with whom his life was bound up, died; and he was divorced from his wife Terentia,—­a proceeding the cause of which remains a mystery.  Neither in his most confidential letters, nor in his conversations with most intimate friends, does it appear that he ever unbosomed himself, although he was the frankest and most social of men.  In his impressive silence he has set one of the noblest examples of a man afflicted with domestic infelicities.  He buries his conjugal troubles in eternal silence; although he is forced to give vent to sorrows, so plaintive and bitter that both friend and foe were constrained to pity.  He expects no sympathy, even at Rome, for the sundering of conjugal relations, and he communicates no secrets.  In his grief and sadness he does, however, a most foolish thing:  he marries a young lady one-third his age.  She accepted him for his name and rank; he sought her for her beauty, her youth, and her fortune.  This union of May with December was of course a failure.  Both parties were soon disenchanted and disappointed.  Neither party found happiness, only discontent and chagrin.  The everlasting incongruities of such a relation—­he sixty and she nineteen—­soon led to another divorce. He expected his young wife to mourn with him the loss of his daughter Tullia. She expected that her society and charms would be a compensation for all that he had lost; yea, more, enough to make him the most fortunate and happy of mortals.  In truth, he was too old a man to have married a young woman whatever were the inducements.  It was the great folly of his life; an illustration of the fact that, as a general thing, the older a man grows the greater fool he becomes, so far as women are concerned; a folly that disgraced and humiliated the two wisest and greatest men who ever sat on the Jewish throne.