“I have already, senators, reaped fruit enough from my return home, in that I have had the opportunity to speak words which, whatever may betide, will remain in evidence of my constancy in my duty, and you have listened to me with much kindness and attention.  And this privilege I will use so often as I may without peril to you and to myself; when I cannot, I will be careful of myself, not so much for my own sake as for the sake of my country.  For me, the life that I have lived seems already well-nigh long enough, whether I look at my years or my honours; what little span may yet be added to it should be your gain and the state’s far more than my own”.

Antony was not in the house when Cicero spoke; he had gone down to his villa at Tibur.  There he remained for a fortnight, brooding over his reply—­taking lessons, it was said, from professors in the art of rhetorical self-defence.  At last he came to Rome and answered his opponent.  His speech has not reached us; but we know that it contained the old charges of having put Roman citizens to death without trial in the case of the abettors of Catiline, and of having instigated Milo to the assassination of Clodias.  Antony added a new charge—­that of complicity with the murderers of Caesar.  Above all, he laughed at Cicero’s old attempts as a poet; a mode of attack which, if not so alarming, was at least as irritating as the rest.  Cicero was not present—­he dreaded personal violence; for Antony, like Pompey at the trial of Milo, had planted an armed guard of his own men outside and inside the Senate-house.  Before Cicero had nerved himself to reply, Antony had left Rome to put himself at the head of his legions, and the two never met again.

The reply, when it came, was the terrible second Philippic; never spoken, however, but only handed about in manuscript to admiring friends.  There is little doubt, as Mr. Long observes, that Antony had also some friend kind enough to send him a copy; and if we may trust the Roman poet Juvenal, who is at least as likely to have been well informed upon the subject as any modern historian, this composition eventually cost the orator his life.  It is not difficult to understand the bitter vindictiveness of Antony.  Cicero had been not merely a political opponent; he had attacked his private character (which presented abundant grounds for such attack) with all the venom of his eloquence.  He had said, indeed, in the first of these powerful orations, that he had never taken this line.

“If I have abused his private life and character, I have no right to complain if he is my enemy:  but if I have only followed my usual custom, which I have ever maintained in public life,—­I mean, if I have only spoken my opinion on public questions freely,—­then, in the first place, I protest against his being angry with me at all:  or, if this be too much to expect, I demand that he should be angry with me only as with a fellow-citizen”.