Caesar’s memoranda, materials to serve his purpose, he did not hesitate to forge them.  Cicero had no power, and might be in personal danger, for Antony knew his sentiments as to state matters generally, and more particularly towards himself.  Rome was no longer any place for him, and he soon left it—­this time a voluntary exile.  He wandered from place to place, and tried as before to find interest and consolation in philosophy.  It was now that he wrote his charming essays on ‘Friendship’ and on ‘Old Age’, and completed his work ‘On the Nature of the Gods’, and that on ‘Divination’.  His treatise ‘De Officiis’ (a kind of pagan ’Whole Duty of Man’) is also of this date, as well as some smaller philosophical works which have been lost.  He professed himself hopeless of his country’s future, and disgusted with political life, and spoke of going to end his days at Athens.

But, as before and always, his heart was in the Forum at Rome.  Political life was really the only atmosphere in which he felt himself breathe vigorously.  Unquestionably he had also an earnest patriotism, which would have drawn him back to his country’s side at any time when he believed that she had need of his help.  He was told that he was needed there now; that there was a prospect of matters going better for the cause of liberty; that Antony was coming to terms of some kind with the party of Brutus,—­and he returned.

For a short while these latter days brought with them a gleam of triumph almost as bright as that which had marked the overthrow of Catiline’s conspiracy.  Again, on his arrival at Rome, crowds rushed to meet him with compliments and congratulations, as they had done some thirteen years before.  And in so far as his last days were spent in resisting to the utmost the basest of all Rome’s bad men, they were to him greater than any triumph.  Thenceforth it was a fight to the death between him and Antony; so long as Antony lived, there could be no liberty for Rome.  Cicero left it to his enemy to make the first attack.  It soon came.  Two days after his return, Antony spoke vehemently in the Senate against him, on the occasion of moving a resolution to the effect that divine honours should be paid to Caesar.  Cicero had purposely stayed away, pleading fatigue after his journey; really, because such a proposition was odious to him.  Antony denounced him as a coward and a traitor, and threatened to send men to pull down his house about his head—­that house which had once before been pulled down, and rebuilt for him by his remorseful fellow-citizens.  Cicero went down to the Senate the following day, and there delivered a well-prepared speech, the first of those fourteen which are known to us as his ’Philippics’—­a name which he seems first to have given to them in jest, in remembrance of those which his favourite model Demosthenes had delivered at Athens against Philip of Macedon.  He defended his own conduct, reviewed in strong but moderate terms the whole policy of Antony, and warned him—­still ostensibly as a friend—­against the fate of Caesar.  The speaker was not unconscious what his own might possibly be.