unreproved—­Clodius was, after some delay, brought to public trial.  The defence set up was an alibi, and Cicero came forward as a witness to disprove it:  he had met and spoken with Clodius in Rome that very evening.  The evidence was clear enough, but the jury had been tampered with by Clodius and his friends; liberal bribery, and other corrupting influences of even a more disgraceful kind, had been successfully brought to bear upon the majority of them, and he escaped conviction by a few votes.  But he never forgave the part which Cicero had taken against him; and from that time forth the latter found a new, unscrupulous, indefatigable enemy, of whose services his old opponents gladly availed themselves.  Cicero himself for some time underrated this new danger.  He lost no opportunity of taunting the unconvicted criminal in the bitterest terms in the Senate, and of exchanging with him—­very much to the detriment of his own character and dignity, in our modern eyes—­the coarsest jests when they met in the street.  But the temptation to a jest, of whatever kind, was always irresistible to Cicero:  it was a weakness for which he more than once paid dearly, for they were remembered against him when be had forgotten them.  Meanwhile Clodius—­a sort of milder Catiline, not without many popular qualities—­had got himself elected tribune; degrading himself formally from his own order of nobles for that purpose, since the tribune must be a man of the commons.  The powers of the office were formidable for all purposes of obstruction and attack; Clodius had taken pains to ingratiate himself with all classes; and the consuls of the year were men of infamous character, for whom he had, found a successful means of bribery by the promise of getting a special law passed to secure them the choice of the richest provincial governments—­those coveted fields of plunder—­of which they would otherwise have had to take their chance by lot.  When all was ripe for his revenge, he brought before the people in full assembly the following bill of pains and penalties:—­“Be it enacted, that whoever has put to death a Roman citizen uncondemned in due form of trial, shall be interdicted from fire and water”.  Such was the legal form of words which implied banishment from Rome, outlawry, and social excommunication.  Every man knew against whom the motion was levelled.  It was carried—­carried in spite of the indignation of all honest men in Rome, in spite of all Cicero’s humiliating efforts to obtain its rejection.

It was in vain that he put on mourning, as was the custom with those who were impeached of public crimes, and went about the streets thus silently imploring the pity of his fellow-citizens.  In vain the whole of his own equestrian order, and in fact, as he declares, “all honest men” (it was his favourite term for men of his own party); adopted the same dress to show their sympathy, and twenty thousand youths of good family—­all in mourning—­accompanied him through the city.  The Senate even met and passed a resolution that their whole house should put on mourning too.  But Gabinius, one of the consuls, at once called a public meeting, and warned the people not to make the mistake of thinking that the Senate was Rome.