The satellites of Clodia could scarcely have felt comfortable under this withering fire of sarcasm.  The speaker concluded with an apology—­much required—­for his client’s faults, as those of a young man, and a promise on his behalf—­on the faith of an advocate—­that he would behave better for the future.  He wound up the whole with a point of sensational rhetoric which was common, as has been said, to the Roman bar as to our own—­an appeal to the jurymen as fathers.  He pointed to the aged father of the defendant, leaning in the most approved attitude upon the shoulder of his son.  Either this, or the want of evidence, or the eloquence of the pleader, had its due effect.  Caelius was triumphantly acquitted; and it is a proof that the young man was not wholly graceless, that he rose afterwards to high public office, and never forgot his obligations to his eloquent counsel, to whom he continued a stanch friend.  He must have had good abilities, for he was honoured with frequent letters from Cicero when the latter was governor of Cilicia.  He kept up some of his extravagant tastes; for when he was Aedile (which involved the taking upon him the expense of certain gladiatorial and wild-beast exhibitions), he wrote to beg his friend to send him out of his province some panthers for his show.  Cicero complied with the request, and took the opportunity, so characteristic of him, of lauding his own administration of Cilicia, and making a kind of pun at the same time.  “I have given orders to the hunters to see about the panthers; but panthers are very scarce, and the few there are complain, people say, that in the whole province there are no traps laid for anybody but for them”.  Catching and skinning the unfortunate provincials, which had been a favourite sport with governors like Verres, had been quite done away with in Cilicia, we are to understand, under Cicero’s rule.

His defence of Ligarius, who was impeached of treason against the state in the person of Caesar, as having borne arms against him in his African campaign, has also been deservedly admired.  There was some courage in Cicero’s undertaking his defence; as a known partisan of Pompey, he was treading on dangerous and delicate ground.  Caesar was dictator at the time; and the case seems to have been tried before him as the sole judicial authority, without pretence of the intervention of anything like a jury.  The defence—­if defence it may be called—­is a remarkable instance of the common appeal, not to the merits of the case, but to the feelings of the court.  After making out what case he could for his client, the advocate as it were throws up his brief, and rests upon the clemency of the judge.  Caesar himself, it must be remembered, had begun public life, like Cicero, as a pleader:  and, in the opinion of some competent judges, such as Tacitus and Quintilian, had bid fair to be a close rival.