For the month that yet remained of his consulship, Cicero was the foremost man in Rome--and, as a consequence, in the whole world. Nobles and commons vied in doing honour to the saviour of the state. Catulus and Cato--men from whose lips words of honour came with a double weight--saluted him publicly by that memorable title of _Pater Patriae_; and not only the capital, but most of the provincial towns of Italy, voted him some public testimony of his unrivalled services. No man had a more profound appreciation of those services than the great orator himself. It is possible that other men have felt quite as vain of their own exploits, and on far less grounds; but surely no man ever paraded his self-complacency like Cicero. His vanity was indeed a thing to marvel at rather than to smile at, because it was the vanity of so able a man. Other great men have been either too really great to entertain the feeling, or have been wise enough to keep it to themselves. But to Cicero it must have been one of the enjoyments of his life. He harped upon his consulship in season and out of season, in his letters, in his judicial pleadings, in his public speeches (and we may be sure in his conversation), until one would think his friends must have hated the subject even more than his enemies. He wrote accounts of it in prose and verse, in Latin and Greek--and, no doubt, only limited them to those languages because they were the only ones he knew. The well-known line which provoked the ridicule of critics like Juvenal and Quintilian, because of the unlucky jingle peculiarly unpleasant to a Roman ear: "O fortunatam natam me consule Romam!" expresses the sentiment which--rhyme or no rhyme, reason or no reason--he was continually repeating in some form or other to himself and to every one who would listen.