For the month that yet remained of his consulship, Cicero was the foremost man in Rome—­and, as a consequence, in the whole world.  Nobles and commons vied in doing honour to the saviour of the state.  Catulus and Cato—­men from whose lips words of honour came with a double weight—­saluted him publicly by that memorable title of Pater Patriae; and not only the capital, but most of the provincial towns of Italy, voted him some public testimony of his unrivalled services.  No man had a more profound appreciation of those services than the great orator himself.  It is possible that other men have felt quite as vain of their own exploits, and on far less grounds; but surely no man ever paraded his self-complacency like Cicero.  His vanity was indeed a thing to marvel at rather than to smile at, because it was the vanity of so able a man.  Other great men have been either too really great to entertain the feeling, or have been wise enough to keep it to themselves.  But to Cicero it must have been one of the enjoyments 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.