In 76 B.C., having been elected quaestor (a financial secretary, as we may say) by a unanimous popular vote, he held an appointment in Sicily, where he won the good opinion of two highly important interests, apt at times to conflict, the traders and the revenue collectors. To this he owed the glory of his successful impeachment of the infamous Verres, in 70 B.C., which he undertook at the request of the Sicilian provincials. The bad man who had so hideously misgoverned them, felt himself crushed by Cicero's opening speech, and went into voluntary exile. Cicero was now a power in the state, and his rise up the official ladder was sure and rapid; in 66 B.C. he was praetor, and supported in a great political speech (Pro Lege Manilia) the appointment of Pompey to the conduct of the war with Mithridates, which in fact carried with it the supreme control of Asia and of the East. In 63 B.C., at the age of forty-four, he was consul, the highest dignity attainable to a Roman; in that memorable year he foiled by a bold promptitude, the revolutionary plot of Catiline, in which many distinguished Romans--Caesar it was even said among them--were implicated. He was now at the height of his fame; "father of his country" he was actually called, for a brief space he was with all classes the great man of the day. But the tide soon turned; Cicero might have saved the country, but in saving it, it was said he had violated the constitution, according to which a Roman citizen could not be capitally punished but by the sentence of the people in regular assembly. As it was, Roman citizens guilty of complicity with Catiline had, at Cicero's instigation, been put to death simply by an order of the senate; this, it was said, was a dangerous precedent and Cicero must be held responsible for it. His bitter enemy, Clodius, now tribune, pressed the charge against him in inflammatory speeches specially addressed to the lowest class of citizens, and Cicero in despair left Rome in 58 B.C., and took refuge at Thessalonica. That same year saw the "father of his country" condemned to exile by a vote of the Roman people, and his house at Rome and his country houses at Formiae and Tusculum plundered and ruined.