There are men--or have been, from time to time, in all ages of the world--let loose, as it were, by the hand of God to stop the iniquities of the people, but in truth the natural product of those iniquities. They have come and done their work, and have died, leaving behind them the foul smell of destruction. An Augustus followed Cæsar, and him Tiberius, and so on to a Nero. It was necessary that men should suffer much before they were brought back to own their condition. But they who can see a Cicero struggling to avoid the evil that was coming--not for himself but for the world around him--and can lend their tongues, their pens, their ready wits to ridicule his efforts, can hardly have been touched by the supremacy of human suffering.
It must have been a sorry time with him at Brundisium. He had to stay there waiting till Cæsar's pleasure had been made known to him, and Cæsar was thinking of other things. Cæsar was away in Egypt and the East, encountering perils at Alexandria which, if all be true that we have heard, imply that he had lived to be past fear. Grant that a man has to live as Cæsar did, and it will be well that he should be past fear. At any rate he did not think of Cicero, or thinking of him felt that he was one who must be left to brood in silence over the choice he had made. Cicero did brood--not exactly in silence--over the things that fate had done for him and for his country. For himself, he was living in Italy, and yet could not venture to betake himself to one of the eighteen villas which, as Middleton tells us, he had studded about the country for his pastime. There were those at Tusculum, Antium, Astura, Arpinum--at Formiæ, at Cumæ, at Puteoli, and at Pompeii. Those who tell us of Cicero's poverty are surely wandering, carried away by their erroneous notions of what were a Roman nobleman's ideas as to money. At no period of his life do we find Cicero not doing what he was minded to do for want of money, and at no period is there a hint that he had allowed himself in any respect to break the law. It has been argued that he must have been driven to take fees and bribes and indirect payments, because he says that he wanted money. It was natural that he should occasionally want money, and yet be in the main indifferent. The incoming of a regular revenue was not understood as it is with us. A man here and there might attend to his money, as did Atticus. Cicero did not; and therefore, when in want of it, he had to apply to a friend for relief. But he always applies as one who knows well that the trouble is not enduring. Is it credible that a man so circumstanced should have remained with those various sources of extravagance which it would have been easy for him to have avoided or lessened? We are led to the conviction that at no time was it expedient to him to abandon his villas, though in the hurry-scurry of Roman affairs it did now and again become necessary for him to apply to Atticus for accommodation. Let us think what must have been Cæsar's demands for money. Of these we hear nothing, because he was too wise to have an Atticus to whom he wrote everything, or too wary to write letters upon business which should be treasured for the curiosity of after-ages.