him in November. He said his only wish was to devote all his energies to the service of the Republic. But he had to keep a careful watch upon the movements of the Gauls, lest they should think the confusion in Italy a good opportunity for revolt. Cicero was delighted to hear such sentiments from a man who was at the head of so many disciplined battalions, and he wrote to him in lavish terms of flattery and compliment. He earnestly exhorted him to pursue the path of true glory, by supporting the cause of the Republic. "You are," he said, "consul-elect in the flower of your age, gifted with the highest order of eloquence, and this at a time when our Fatherland is bereaved of almost all her children, such as you." But, alas for promises and professions made by the slippery sons of Rome! In a few short months Plancus joined his forces to those of Antony and Lepidus, and abandoned the side of Cicero and the Senate.

VOL. II.

Р

CHAPTER XXIII.

WE

THE EMBASSY TO ANTONY.

£t. 64. B.C. 43.

E have reached the last year of Cicero's life. The horizon was dark and stormy, but yet light seemed to be breaking through the gloom. Antony was no longer a consul, in lawful command of a Roman army, but a private citizen, engaged in a desperate rebellion. The Senate had all but declared him a public enemy, even while armed with consular authority, and the people had applauded when Cicero denounced him as worse than Spartacus or Catiline. The net in which he was to be caught was fast closing around him. Octavian, at the head of an army formidable in numbers and in discipline, was marching rapidly upon him, and in his front was Decimus Brutus holding him in check before the walls of Mutina. If the new consuls acted as Cicero hoped and believed they would act, it seemed inevitable that he must fall. But upon them everything depended; for if they wavered and refused to employ against him the forces at their command, it was possible that Octavian might be defeated, in which case Mutina would fall, and Antony would become master of Cisalpine Gaul.

Aulus Hirtius and Caius Vibius Pansa, who began their consulship at this eventful crisis, had both belonged to the Julian party, and owed everything to Cæsar. Hirtius had been one of his legates in Gaul, and received afterwards from him the government of the northern part of that

province, corresponding to the modern Belgium. Pansa had been appointed by him governor of Cisalpine Gaul, as successor to Marcus Brutus. Both owed to him their elevation to the consulship, to which he had nominated them by virtue of his sovereign power as Dictator. Since his death they had observed a cautious neutrality, and abstained almost entirely from politics. They both, and especially Hirtius, had kept on good terms with Cicero; but, whatever he might think it politic to say in public, his private correspondence shows that he had no great confidence in either of them. Their conduct, however, seems to have been loyal and sincere. They naturally did not wish to drive Antony to extremities, and destroy all hope of an accommodation, the failure of which must result in another civil war, perhaps as bloody and ruinous as the last. And besides, they could not forget that his immediate antagonist was Decimus Brutus, one of the assassins of their friend and benefactor Cæsar; and, with the exception of Octavian, the party most violently opposed to him was the party of the conspirators, men who gloried in the murder of him whose statue yet stood in the Forum, with the inscription proclaiming him "the Father of his Country." They therefore determined to temporize, and endeavour to bring back Antony to his allegiance.

The Senate met on the first of January, in the Temple of Jupiter, on the Capitol; and, after the inaugural ceremonies of religion, according to ancient custom, the consuls brought forward the pressing question of the moment— how they were to deal with Antony in arms. They both spoke in a tone that pleased Cicero, who cheered himself with the hope that they would act with as much vigor and firmness as their speeches implied. But he was soon undeceived. By an obviously preconcerted arrangement they called on Fufius Calenus, Pansa's father-in-law, to

rise first and deliver his opinion. He had in old days, as tribune of the people, actively assisted Clodius to obtain an acquittal on his trial for the violation of the mysteries of the Bona Dea. Since then he had distinguished himself as an ardent partisan of Cæsar, and was by him substituted consul, B.C. 47 (consul suffectus), for the last three months of that year. In one of his letters, written in the previous year, Cicero calls him a personal enemy of himself, and at this very time Antony's wife, Fulvia, and her children were staying under the protection of his roof. It was an ominous circumstance that he should be chosen to speak first, and, as it were, lead the debate at such a momentous crisis; although his near relationship to one of the consuls not only gave a pretext for, but justified, the precedence that was thus given him.

His advice was that an embassy should be sent to Antony, calling upon him to retire from Mutina, and submit himself to the authority of the Senate. L. Piso and other senators of consular rank followed on the same side, and at last it came to Cicero's turn to speak. He rose and delivered the oration known as the fifth Philippic. may be described in the words put by Milton into the mouth of Moloch, in the second book of Paradise Lost'—

It

My sentence is for open war: of wiles

More unexpert I boast not them let those

Contrive who need, or when they need; not now.

He regretted that he had not been called on to speak after the other ex-consuls had delivered their opinions, for then he would have been able to reply upon them all; and he feared that others would follow him who were prepared to go the length of proposing that Antony should have the province of Gaul, of which Plancus was governor.

"What," he exclaimed, "is this, but to put arms in the hands of an enemy for the purpose of civil war? . . . The pleas you urge are of no

avail. He is my friend,' says one. Let him first show himself the friend of his country. He is my relative,' cries another. Can there be any relationship closer than that of one's country, which embraces even one's parents? He owes me money,' do I hear? I should like to see the man who would dare to say it."

Again

"Does Antony wish for peace? Let him lay aside his arms. He will find no one more equitable than myself, of whom, while he throws himself on the support of impious citizens, he had rather be the enemy than the friend. There is nothing which can be granted to him while he carries on war: there may perhaps be something which will be given if he sues as a suppliant."

He went over his former ground of argument to show the inconsistency of sending ambassadors to a man whom, by their previous acts in honor of the generals and troops who had marched against him, they had already denounced as his country's foe. He reviewed the conduct of Antony, and charged him with all the nefarious acts of which he had been guilty in forging Caesar's papers and making a market of his grants for his own private emolument. He amused his audience with a sarcastic account of what Antony had done to increase the number of the body of jurymen at Rome. Cæsar, indeed, had placed among them common soldiers, privates from the ranks, and the men of the Alaudæ legion; but Antony had added gamblers and exiles, and even Greeks! He made himself merry with the idea of a member of the court of Areopagus being summoned to serve on a Roman trial, and excusing himself on the ground that he could not serve at the same moment at Athens and at Rome. Did some of them even know the Latin language? Were they acquainted with the laws and customs of Rome? Fancy such a man as Cyda from Crete sitting on a trial-a monster of audacity and crime! Antony, he said, alone, of all men since the foundation of the city, kept openly an armed force within the walls.