So ended Cicero, a tragic combination of magnificent talents, high aspirations, and true desire to do right, with an infirmity of purpose and a latent insincerity of character which neutralized and could almost make us forget his nobler qualities. It cannot be said of Cicero that he was blind to the faults of the party to which he attached himself. To him we owe our knowledge of what the Roman aristocrats really were, and of the hopelessness of expecting that they could have been trusted any longer with the administration of the Empire, if the Empire itself was to endure. Cicero's natural place was at Caesar's side; but to Caesar alone of his contemporaries he was conscious of an inferiority which was intolerable to him. In his own eyes he was always the first person. He had been made unhappy by the thought that posterity might rate Pompey above himself. Closer acquaintance had reassured him about Pompey, but in Caesar he was conscious of a higher presence, and he rebelled against the humiliating acknowledgment. Supreme as an orator he could always be, and an order of things was, therefore, most desirable where oratory held the highest place. Thus he chose his part with the "_boni_," whom he despised while he supported them, drifting on through vacillation into treachery, till "the ingredients of the poisoned chalice" were "commended to his own lips." In Cicero Nature half-made a great man and left him uncompleted. Our characters are written in our forms, and the bust of Cicero is the key to his history. The brow is broad and strong, the nose large, the lips tightly compressed, the features lean and keen from restless intellectual energy. The loose bending figure, the neck, too weak for the weight of the head, explain the infirmity of will, the passion, the cunning, the vanity, the absence of manliness and veracity. He was born into an age of violence with which he was too feeble to contend. The gratitude of mankind for his literary excellence will forever preserve his memory from too harsh a judgment. [1] _Philippic_ ii. 35. [2] Abridged from Dion Cassius, who probably gives no more than the traditionary version of Cicero's words. [3] [Greek: emphutos chraestotaes] are Dion Cassius's words. Antony's language was differently reported, and perhaps there was no literal record of it. Dion Cassius, however, can hardly have himself composed the version which he gives in his history, for he calls the speech as ill-timed as it was brilliant. [4] Abridged from Dion Cassius. xliv. 36. [5] "In deorum numerum relatus est non ore modo decernentium sed et persuasione vulgi."--_Suetonius_. [6] Near Gaeta. CHAPTER XXVIII. It remains to offer a few general remarks on the person whose life and actions I have endeavored to describe in the preceding pages.