Clodius attempted to banter his antagonist.  “You are a fine gentleman,” he said; “you have been at Baiae” (Baiae was a fashionable watering-place on the Campanian coast).  “Well,” said Cicero, “that is better than to have been at the ‘matrons’ worship.’” And the attack and repartee went on.  “You have bought a fine house.” (Cicero had spent a large sum of money on a house on the Palatine, and was known to have somewhat crippled his means by doing so.) “With you the buying has been of jurymen.”  “They gave you no credit though you spoke on oath.”  “Yes; five-and-twenty gave me credit” (five-and-twenty of the jury had voted for a verdict of guilty; two-and-thirty for acquittal), “but your thirty-two gave you none, for they would have their money down.”  The Senate shouted applause, and Clodius sat down silent and confounded.

How Clodius contrived to secure for himself the office of tribune, the vantage ground from which he hoped to work his revenge, has been already told in the sketch of Caesar.  Caesar indeed was really responsible for all that was done.  It was he who made it possible for Clodius to act; and he allowed him “to act when he could have stopped him by the lifting of his finger.  He was determined to prove to Cicero that he was master.  But he never showed himself after the first interference in the matter of the adoption.  He simply allowed Clodius to work his will without hindrance.

Clodius proceeded with considerable skill.  He proposed various laws, which were so popular that Cicero, though knowing that they would be turned against himself, did not venture to oppose them.  Then came a proposal directly leveled at him.  “Any man who shall have put to death a Roman citizen uncondemned and without a trial is forbidden fire and water.” (This was the form of a sentence of exile.  No one was allowed under penalty of death to furnish the condemned with fire and water within a certain distance of Rome.) Cicero at once assumed the squalid dress with which it was the custom for accused persons to endeavor to arouse the compassion of their fellow-citizens.  Twenty thousand of the upper classes supported him by their presence.  The Senate itself, on the motion of one of the tribunes, went into this strange kind of mourning on his account.

The consuls of the year were Gabinus and Piso.  The first was notoriously hostile, of the second Cicero hoped to make a friend, the more so as he was a kinsman of his daughter’s husband.  He gives a lively picture of an interview with him.  “It was nearly eleven o’clock in the morning when we went to him.  He came out of a dirty hovel to meet us, with his slippers on, and his head muffled up.  His breath smelt most odiously of wine; but he excused himself on the score of his health, which compelled him, he said, to use medicines in which wine was employed.”  His answer to the petition of his visitors (for Cicero was accompanied by his son-in-law) was at least commendably