is, and must be more or less, the watchword of a statesman.  If he would practically serve his country, he must do to some extent what Cicero professed to do—­make friends with those in power. “Sic vivitur”—­“So goes the world;” “Tempori serviendum est”—­“We must bend to circumstances”—­these are not the noblest mottoes, but they are acted upon continually by the most respectable men in public and private life, who do not open their hearts to their friends so unreservedly as Cicero does to his friend Atticus.  It seemed to him a choice between Pompey and Caesar; and he probably hoped to be able so far to influence the former, as to preserve some shadow of a constitution for Rome.  What he saw in those “dregs of a Republic",[1] as he himself calls it, that was worth preserving;—­how any honest despotism could seem to him more to be dreaded than that prostituted liberty,—­this is harder to comprehend.  The remark of Abeken seems to go very near the truth—­“His devotion to the commonwealth was grounded not so much upon his conviction of its actual merits, as of its fitness for the display of his own abilities”.

[Footnote 1:  “Faex Romuli".]

But that commonwealth was past saving even in name.  Within two months of his having been declared a public enemy, all Italy was at Caesar’s feet.  Before another year was past, the battle of Pharsalia had been fought, and the great Pompey lay a headless corpse on the sea-shore in Egypt.  It was suggested to Cicero, who had hitherto remained constant to the fortunes of his party, and was then in their camp at Dyrrachium, that he should take the chief command, but he had the sense to decline; and though men called him “traitor”, and drew their swords upon him, he withdrew from a cause which he saw was lost, and returned to Italy, though not to Rome.

The meeting between him and Caesar, which came at last, set at rest any personal apprehensions from that quarter.  Cicero does not appear to have made any dishonourable submission, and the conqueror’s behaviour was nobly forgetful of the past.  They gradually became on almost friendly terms.  The orator paid the Dictator compliments in the Senate, and found that, in private society, his favourite jokes were repeated to the great man, and were highly appreciated.  With such little successes he was obliged now to be content.  He had again taken up his residence in Rome; but his political occupation was gone, and his active mind had leisure to employ itself in some of his literary works.

It was at this time that the blow fell upon him which prostrated him for the time, as his exile had done, and under which he claims our far more natural sympathy.  His dear daughter Tullia—­again married, but unhappily, and just divorced—­died at his Tusculan villa.  Their loving intercourse had undergone no change from her childhood, and his grief was for a while inconsolable.  He shut himself up for thirty days.  The letters of condolence from well-meaning friends were to him—­as they so often are—­as the speeches of the three comforters to Job.  He turned in vain, as he pathetically says, to philosophy for consolation.