Let him tell the story of his own reception.  If he tells it (as he does more than once) with an undisguised pride, it is a pride with which it is impossible not to sympathise.  He boasted afterwards that he had been “carried back to Rome on the shoulders of Italy;” and Plutarch says it was a boast he had good right to make.

“Who does not know what my return home was like?  How the people of Brundusium held out to me, as I might say, the right hand of welcome on behalf of all my native land?  From thence to Rome my progress was like a march of all Italy.  There was no district, no town, corporation, or colony, from which a public deputation was not sent to congratulate me.  Why need I speak of my arrival at each place? how the people crowded the streets in the towns; how they flocked in from the country—­fathers of families with wives and children?  How can I describe those days, when all kept holiday, as though it were some high festival of the immortal gods, in joy for my safe return?  That single day was to me like immortality; when I returned to my own city, when I saw the Senate and the population of all ranks come forth to greet me, when Rome herself looked as though she had wrenched herself from her foundations to rush to embrace her preserver.  For she received me in such sort, that not only all sexes, ages, and callings, men and women, of every rank and degree, but even the very walls, the houses, the temples, seemed to share the universal joy”.

The Senate in a body came out to receive him on the Appian road; a gilded chariot waited for him at the city gates; the lower class of citizens crowded the steps of the temples to see him as he passed; and so he rode, escorted by troops of friends, more than a conqueror, to the Capitol.

His exultation was naturally as intense as his despair had been.  He made two of his most florid speeches (if indeed they be his, which is doubtful), one in the Senate and another to the people assembled in the Forum, in which he congratulated himself on his return, and Rome on having regained her most illustrious citizen.  It is a curious note of the temper and logical capacities of the mob, in all ages of the world alike, that within a few hours of their applauding to the echo this speech of Cicero’s, Clodius succeeded in exciting them to a serious riot by appealing to the ruinous price of corn as one of the results of the exile’s return.

For nearly four years more, though unable to shake Cicero’s recovered position in the state—­for he was now supported by Pompey—­Clodius and his partisans, backed by a strong force of trained gladiators in their pay, kept Rome in a state of anarchy which is almost inexplicable.  It was more than suspected that Crassus, now utterly estranged from Pompey, supplied out of his enormous wealth the means of keeping on foot this lawless agitation.  Elections were overawed, meetings of the Senate interrupted, assassinations threatened and attempted.  Already