We must return to Rome.  Cicero had never left it but for his short occasional holiday.  Though no longer in office, the ex-consul was still one of the foremost public men, and his late dignity gave him important precedence in the Senate.  He was soon to be brought into contact, and more or less into opposition, with the two great chiefs of parties in whose feuds he became at length so fatally involved.  Pompey and Caesar were both gradually becoming formidable, and both had ambitious plans of their own, totally inconsistent with any remnant of republican liberty—­plans which Cicero more or less suspected, and of that suspicion they were probably both aware.  Both, by their successful campaigns, had not only acquired fame and honours, but a far more dangerous influence—­an influence which was to overwhelm all others hereafter—­in the affection of their legions.  Pompey was still absent in Spain, but soon to return from his long war against Mithridates, to enjoy the most splendid triumph ever seen at Rome, and to take the lead of the oligarchical party just so long and so far as they would help him to the power he coveted.  The enemies whom Cicero had made by his strong measures in the matter of the Catilinarian conspiracy now took advantage of Pompey’s name and popularity to make an attack upon him.  The tribune Metellus, constant to his old party watchword, moved in the Senate that the successful general, upon whom all expectations were centred, should be recalled to Rome with his army “to restore the violated constitution”.  All knew against whom the motion was aimed, and what the violation of the constitution meant; it was the putting citizens to death without a trial.  The measure was not passed, though Caesar, jealous of Cicero even more than of Pompey, lent himself to the attempt.

But the blow fell on Cicero at last from a very different quarter, and from the mere private grudge of a determined and unprincipled man.  Publius Clodius, a young man of noble family, once a friend and supporter of Cicero against Catiline, but who had already made himself notorious for the most abandoned profligacy, was detected, in a woman’s dress, at the celebration of the rites of the Bona Dea—­a kind of religious freemasonry amongst the Roman ladies, the mysteries of which are very little known, and probably would in any case be best left without explanation.  But for a man to have been present at them was a sacrilege hitherto unheard of, and which was held to lay the whole city under the just wrath of the offended goddess.  The celebration had been held in the house of Caesar, as praetor, under the presidency of his wife Pompeia; and it was said that the object of the young profligate was an intrigue with that lady.  The circumstances are not favourable to the suspicion; but Caesar divorced her forthwith, with the often-quoted remark that “Caesar’s wife must not be even suspected”.  For this crime—­unpardonable even in that corrupt society, when crimes of far deeper dye passed almost