Cicero, are naturally and essentially civilians; and to Cicero’s vanity they were doubly delightful.  Unluckily they led him to entertain hopes of the further glory of a triumph; and this, but for the revolution which followed, he might possibly have obtained.  As it was, the only result was his parading about with him everywhere, from town to town, for months after his return, the lictors with laurelled fasces, which betokened that a triumph was claimed—­a pompous incumbrance, which became, as he confessed, a grand subject for evil-disposed jesters, and a considerable inconvenience to himself.

CHAPTER V.

CICERO AND CAESAR.

The future master of Rome was now coming home, after nearly ten years’ absence, at the head of the victorious legions with which he had struck terror into the Germans, overrun all Spain, left his mark upon Britain, and “pacified” Gaul.  But Cicero, in common with most of the senatorial party, failed to see in Julius Caesar the great man that he was.  He hesitated a little—­Caesar would gladly have had his support, and made him fair offers; but when the Rubicon was crossed, he threw in his lot with Pompey.  He was certainly influenced in part by personal attachment:  Pompey seems to have exercised a degree of fascination over his weakness.  He knew Pompey’s indecision of character, and confessed that Caesar was “a prodigy of energy;” but though the former showed little liking for him, he clung to him nevertheless.  He foreboded that, let the contest end which way it would, “the result would certainly be a despotism”.  He foresaw that Pompey’s real designs were as dangerous to the liberties of Rome as any of which Caesar could be suspected. “Sullaturit animus”, he says of him in one of his letters, coining a verb to put his idea strongly—­“he wants to be like Sulla”.  And it was no more than the truth.  He found out afterwards, as he tells Atticus, that proscription-lists of all Caesar’s adherents had been prepared by Pompey and his partisans, and that his old friend’s name figured as one of the victims.  Only this makes it possible to forgive him for the little feeling that he showed when he heard of Pompey’s own miserable end.

Cicero’s conduct and motives at this eventful crisis have been discussed over and over again.  It may be questioned whether at this date we are in any position to pass more than a very cautious and general judgment upon them.  We want all the “state papers” and political correspondence of the day—­not Cicero’s letters only, but those of Caesar and Pompey and Lentulus, and much information besides that was never trusted to pen or paper—­in order to lay down with any accuracy the course which a really unselfish patriot could have taken.  But there seems little reason to accuse Cicero of double-dealing or trimming in the worst sense.  His policy was unquestionably, from first to last, a policy of expedients.  But expediency