It is this trial which has made of Clodius the famous demagogue of whom history tells, who in a few years contributed so much, with his agitations, his laws, his violent acts, and his enmities, to the destruction of the little order and concord that were left in the Republic. The most violent of his enmities was that which he entertained for Cicero. From this trial dates the deadly enmity between the two, which was not the least of the causes of the great disorder into which the Republic fell, which gave birth to the civil war. The trial of Clodius is, then, one of the events which paved the way for the catastrophe of the Republic. What an object lesson it is for political parties! In the excitement of the struggle, such parties reck nothing, while they deal each other slashing blows, of the hatred and rancour which they sow broadcast. But this hatred and rancour undermine in men’s minds the sentiments of concord, loyalty, moderation, tolerance, and equity, without which the social order cannot in the long run subsist; it is one of the most potent causes of the great catastrophes of history. A revolution is usually only the ultimate effect of a long succession of violent acts, affronts, and injustices which have exasperated the public mind, in which feelings of rancour accumulate and ferment until one day they explode. III THE TRIAL OF PISO Nearly a century had passed since the trial of Verres, and more than eighty years since the trial of Clodius. The quarrels of the Roman aristocracy, which had given birth to those two extraordinary and sensational trials, had kindled the spark of two dreadful civil wars, in the course of which the Empire had narrowly escaped complete dissolution. Gradually, however, order had been re-established. From the midst of the discords of the aristocracy, one family had emerged and succeeded in acquiring preponderating influence: the family of the Cæsars. First, Augustus for forty-two years, and, for the three years succeeding his death, his stepson and adopted son Tiberius, had governed the State as _principes_, or life-presidents, accumulating in their own hands powers of the most diverse kinds—the supreme command of the legions, the presidency of the Senate, the high-priesthood, the surveillance of the most important provinces—and at the same time making every effort to keep the ancient machinery of republican government working with as little friction as possible under such widely different conditions and in control of an empire of so much vaster extent. No law had laid it down that this power should be hereditary; but the force of circumstances—the exhaustion of the ancient nobility, the weakness of the Senate, the dying out of all the parties and all the powerful cabals which for centuries had bulked so large in the Republic—made of this family, little by little, the mistress of the Empire’s destinies.