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call the exiles of Sulla and his partisans, there is nothing to record of this immediate period besides the tribunate and the laws of Caius Cornelius. He had at some time served in the near office of Quæstor under Pompey, and though he may now have acted from his own ideas, he was undoubtedly strong in the approval of his former general. The Cornelian laws, the work of his tribuneship, were several in number. One, directed against bribery at elections, was taken out of the Tribune's hands, perhaps lest it should be too severe upon a crowd of offenders, by the Consuls of the year, and passed, with heavy penalties, under their name. The other bills were intended to bind the Prætors by their own edicts,24 to prevent usurious dealings with foreign envoys,25 and, finally, to make the exemption of any individual from the public statutes dependent upon the votes of the whole people.26 The last bill, which promised to interfere too much with the illegal privileges of the Senators and the higher magistrates, was most opposed; and one of the Tribunes was induced to prevent its recital by the scribe in the assembly. Cornelius himself read it aloud; but the great tumult that ensued so proved the impossibility of carrying the bill in its actual

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form, that it was exchanged by its author for another bill, authorizing the Senate, but not unless two hundred members were present, to pass their acts of exemption as before. The bill concerning usury also failed; but that relating to the edicts of the Prætors, the most important of all the laws, was carried. Cornelius was afterwards brought to trial by the same men, as is probable, who had defeated his bills; and though he was defended by Cicero and acquitted by his judges, the persecution he underwent exposes the growing pretensions of the Senate in the Commonwealth.

Nor must it be imagined, from the tenor of the preceding relations, that there were no other individuals besides Pompey himself to fill the eyes or control the movements of the Roman people. His example instructed others to aspire, few as they were, compared with the multitude who learned more simply to submit; and though the strife between him. who has already risen and those that already strive to rise will not immediately begin, it is immediately to be foreseen.

After

Caius Julius Cæsar, the youth whom Sulla could not bend, was now a man of over thirty years. service in the Eastern wars and studies in the schools of Rhodes, as well as impeachments of public men and successful canvasses for public offices at home,

27 On this see Hugo's Hist. Rom. Law, Sect. CCLXXXVIII. The Prætor's Edictum was the collection of legal principles or rules, which he published at the beginning of his

year, nominally both for his own government and for the instruction of those who should have suits to bring before him.

he at this time 23 obtained a quæstorship. During the term of this magistracy, his aunt, Julia, the widow of Marius, died; and at her obsequies the Quæstor not only ordered the images of her husband, which had hitherto been concealed, to be displayed, but, in the funeral oration delivered by himself in the Forum, he evoked the memories of the fallen, and crowned them anew with ardent praise.29 Some of his hearers trembled at his boldness, or scoffed at his eulogy of a man who had laid Rome waste with blood; but others, in whose recollections, under the influence of time and intervening misfortunes, the evil deeds of Marius had given place to the brilliancy of his victories or to the courage of his popular principles, exulted in Cæsar's eloquence and rallied round him as the successor of their hero. Yet it was not Cæsar's purpose, though it may have been theirs, to enter into any present contention with Pompey or the aristocracy; and in the very year after Julia's funeral, he espoused a kinswoman of Pompey 30 and was more firmly than ever his nominal supporter.

Cicero, the accuser of Chrysogonus and Verres, was already first amongst the orators of Rome. Soon after his brave defiance, as it might be called, of Sulla, he travelled to Greece, in order to improve his enfeebled health and to learn from the famous philosophers and rhetoricians there the art and the knowledge he still required before fulfilling the uncommon purposes upon which he was from his youth resolved.

28 A. C. 68. Suet., Cæs., 5. 29 Plut., Cæs., 5.

30 Suet., Cæs., 6.

Almost immediately after his return, he was elected Quæstor; and some time later, he attacked the powerful in the person of Verres, in the same year that he was himself elected Curule Edile.31 These tokens of public favor, to be properly appreciated, must be set off against his birth in a country town, his want of family and powerful friends, and even against his lack of personal attractions in the eyes of the multitude. Yet the people whom he governed during his quæstorship in Sicily continued for years to show their grateful remembrance of his humanity; 32 and if there were few in Rome to feel his virtues, there was scarcely one of the ardent and noisy citizens who would not hurry into the Forum to witness his genius, as it made the guilty tremble and saved the weak from impending fears. Cicero and Pompey were drawn together by an attraction that would certainly never have arisen from any similarity in pursuits or achievements, but which existed naturally in consequence of common amiability, and, it may be added, of kindred failings. The hero was warm in seeking the good-will of the orator; and the orator was as earnest in upholding the good-report and the authority of the hero.33

It is adequate to this history that a few names only should represent the decay of liberty during the present period; nor is there any reason to regret our inability to follow every individual who had a part in

31 The quæstorship was in A. C. 75; the ædileship in 69. See Plut., Cic., 4 et seq.

32 Plut., Cic., 8.
33 Ibid.

the process of corruption and submission throughout the world of Rome. Some groups, however, must from time to time be sketched, of parties forming, struggling, or disappearing; and yet of these the names can be employed only as illustrations, rather than as subjects in themselves. While such as Cicero and Cæsar were professed adherents of the great and now the somewhat haughty Pompey, and such as Crassus and Lucullus could not yet be regarded as his adversaries, a party was beginning to appear in the Senate of those who were determined to regain their lost ascendency, - as Senators, however, rather than as individuals. Quintus Hortensius, the orator, and Lutatius Catulus, the colleague of Lepidus ten years before, were the first, apparently, to take the lead. Some joined themselves to Catulus for the sake of the ancient principles he was faithful in upholding; but more ranked with Hortensius, the defender of Verres, in seeking through all means the authority from which they were not, indeed, excluded, but of which they wished, as it were, to hold the keys for themselves. The majority of the Senate was thus united against the authority of Pompey, before his reappearance in public as is now to be described.

The claim of Pompey to precedence above his countrymen rested upon his desire and his ability to secure the order which has been remarked upon as their greatest necessity, from the time when the proscriptions of the dictatorship ceased. He retired, as we have also observed, from offices and titular honors, at the close of his consulate, because the establish

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