This review reveals Cicero as inconsistent in party loyalty; it shows that he began as a moderate, then, forced by hatred of Sullan tyranny and induced by immediate practical needs, that he plunged well into democracy, only to be driven by the democratic excesses and the offices of responsibility deeply into conservative sympathies. Experience and observation next led him to revise his theories, first in the direction of liberalism, then, reacting to Caesar’s errors, toward conservatism. Yet we need not, with Mommsen, call Cicero a turncoat. He generally followed a straighter course than the parties that shifted all about him. Nor need we, with Heinze, insist that he was consistently an optimate all the years before his consulship, for he was always willing to seek new theories of government when experience proved the old ones inadequate. Finally, Zielinski’s view that he acted generally on theories found in his reading is perhaps less justified than any other. Cicero read widely and certainly gained some of his ideas from books—the source-hunter may find parallels in abundance—but when Cicero acted it was not merely because of what he had found in a book, but because he had had actual experience and was feeling his way to the logical conclusion of his observations. Here we have attempted to illustrate very briefly how Cicero reached his conclusions in political theory through experience, as in a preceding chapter we stressed forensic experience as the chief formative factor of Ciceronian prose. In both of these fields Cicero wrote not primarily as a well-read man transmitting the views of others, but rather as the chief authority of his day by virtue of his own accomplishments. In tracing the body of philosophic essays which he compiled with amazing speed during the six months of retirement in the year 45, we find a very different product, for, as he told Atticus, who was surprised by this prolific output, these are and purport to be merely paraphrases and translations from the Greek. In a sense, of course, we find the fruit of Cicero’s experiences in these also, since he usually chose for paraphrasing what he felt to be significant, and in each work he omitted what met with his disfavor, expanding and illustrating the ideas which appealed to him. Furthermore, since he was concerned rather in presenting clearly the points that interested him than in giving a faithful translation of the Greek, the resultant essays often, even when they are to some extent mosaics, give us very precisely the Ciceronian pattern. Large parts of his philosophical compilations may therefore be taken to illustrate Cicero’s own convictions reached through his own experience; and when we deal with such work it may be more fruitful to consider Cicero’s own contribution to the final design than to hunt the original quarry from which he drew each _tessera_.