benefit,—whereas now in most cases there was less of revenge than rapacity. Men who had never given any offence whatever, were made victims because they were rich, and of every one who was proscribed the goods and chattels were confiscated. Cicero was in his Tusculan villa when the proscription list came out. He was undecided whether he ought not at once to await his death; yet he let himself be persuaded by his brother to flee. They went to the sea coast as far as Astura, to look out for a ship; and thence his brother returned, only to be murdered. Cicero took a fishing boat; but being tired of life, he had not the least wish to escape, and the murderer was welcome to him. Much as he honoured Cato, he did not think it right to lay hands on his own life: he therefore wished to leave it to Providence, whether he should flee to Sextus Pompey, who was already master of Sicily, or to Brutus, or any where else. Had he got to Sex. Pompey, he would have very likely died a natural death; for he would have lived to see the time when the latter made his peace, and all the proscribed persons of note who were with him returned to Rome. But Providence willed otherwise. The wind was contrary; he became sea sick, and found his wretched life not worth having: the sailors wanted to put back, and he allowed them to land near Mola di Gaëta, in the neighbourhood of one of his estates, to wait till the storm was over. Here he was betrayed by one of his own people, and a centurion, Popillius Lænas,—a man of a very distinguished plebeian clan, whose crime was perhaps exaggerated by the rhetorical invention that Cicero had once defended him,—overtook him. Cicero’s friends had prevailed upon him to let himself be carried away in a litter; but when his pursuers had come up with him, he ordered it to be set down, and, forbidding his slaves to fight for him, he himself stretched out his head to receive the deathblow. He died on the seventh of December 709, with great courage. His son, who was at that time with Brutus in Macedonia, still behaved in such a way as to give hopes of what he would become: he afterwards plunged into the lowest sensuality, and the coarsest debauchery. For all that, he was a man of much intellect, and he had his father’s wit; but he wanted all the moral qualities, which distinguished the first Cicero.