But the Roman people were fickle, and at the instigation of an enemy banished Cicero from the city he had saved, 58 B.C. The next year, however, the decree was revoked, and he returned. When the civil war between Cæsar and Pompey was imminent, Cicero’s indecision told powerfully against him.[43] At last he joined Pompey, who, provoked at his vacillation, exclaimed: “I wish that Cicero would go over to the other side; perhaps he would then be afraid of us.” The battle of Pharsalia (48 B.C.) overthrew the hopes of the party whose cause he had espoused, and Cicero, returning to Italy, accepted the rule and friendship of Cæsar, and settled down to a literary life. Shortly after, a plot is laid against the dictator; the fatal Ides (15th) of March (44 B.C.) arrive; the assassins do their bloody work in the senate-house; and Brutus, flourishing his traitorous dagger, cries to Cicero: “Rejoice, O Father of our Country, for Rome is free!” But it was grief, not joy, that the dagger of Brutus brought to the Republic; another Pompey and another Cæsar arose to contend for the mastery of the world. Marc Antony aspired to the dead dictator’s place; but Cicero, now the foremost statesman in Rome, regarding him as the enemy of liberty, upheld the cause of the people and of Octavius, Cæsar’s young nephew. Into the struggle that ensued, he entered with all the spirit of his youth, thundering against Antony his grand “Philippics,” in the second of which are concentrated all his powers of invective, passion, and eloquence. It is Cicero’s mightiest effort. FROM THE SECOND PHILIPPIC. “When, therefore, this fellow (_Antony_) had begun to wallow in the treasures of that great man, he began to exult like a buffoon in a play, who has lately been a beggar and has become suddenly rich.[44] But, as some poet or other says, ‘Ill-gotten gains come quickly to an end.’ It is an incredible thing, and almost a miracle, how he in a few, not months, but days, squandered all that vast wealth. There was an immense quantity of wine, an excessive abundance of very valuable plate, much precious apparel, great quantities of splendid furniture, and other magnificent things in many places, such as one was likely to see belonging to a man who was not indeed luxurious, but who was very wealthy. Of all this in a few days there was nothing left. What Charybdis was ever so voracious? Charybdis, do I say? Charybdis, if she existed at all, was only one animal. The ocean, I swear most solemnly, appears hardly capable of having swallowed up such numbers of things so widely scattered, and distributed in such different places, with such rapidity.