Cicero’s hopes, however, were shattered. Pompey continued to fall short of deserving full confidence, and Caesar grew into a politician bent on his own advancement. The civil war and the victory of Caesar antiquated the doctrine that Cicero had preached in the _De Republica_, and he had to revise his program once more. Caesar’s dictatorship temporarily destroyed the republic, but Cicero could not avoid hoping that there might be a day of recovery. When he wrote the _De Legibus_[14] a few years later, Pompey was dead, Caesar was playing the tyrant and Cicero himself had little hope of gaining the helm of influence. He therefore abandoned the idea of a _rector_, and yet he knew that if Caesar should die or be removed the state would again need a constitution. In this new work accordingly he reverts to the historical tradition of the Scipionic republic, but openly assigns to the senate the leadership that it tacitly had had before Scipio’s day, by proposing to allow the senate to control legislation by the requirement of a vote of ratification (_eius decreta rata sunto_). This proposed change, which would eliminate the dangers inherent in the tribunate, shows that Cicero had learned from Caesar’s career that a rector might become too powerful, that while popular sovereignty must be recognized as a safety-valve in legislation, the senate must be given a firmer hold on legislation so that it might check both the assembly and the magistrates at critical moments. He was once more, and for reasons easy to comprehend, an advocate of aristocracy.