Once consul he made that famous Coalition which is commonly called the First Triumvirate. Pompey was the most famous soldier of the day, and Crassus, as has been said before, the richest man. These two had been enemies, and Caesar reconciled them; and then the three together agreed to divide power and the prizes of power between them. Caesar would have willingly made Cicero a fourth, but he refused, not, perhaps, without some hesitation. He did more; he ventured to say some things which were not more agreeable because they were true of the new state of things. This the three masters of Rome were not willing to endure, and they determined that this troublesome orator should be put out of the way. They had a ready means of doing it. A certain Clodius, of whom we shall hear more hereafter, felt a very bitter hatred against Cicero, and by way of putting himself in a position to injure him, and to attain other objects of his own, sought to be made tribune. But there was a great obstacle in the way. The tribunes were tribunes of the _plebs_, that is, of the commons, whose interests they were supposed specially to protect; while Clodius was a noble--indeed, a noble of nobles--belonging as he did to that great Claudian House which was one of the oldest and proudest of Roman families. The only thing to be done was to be adopted by some plebeian. But here, again, there were difficulties. The law provided that an adoption should be real, that the adopter should be childless and old enough to be the father of his adopted son. The consent of the priests was also necessary. This consent was never asked, and indeed never could have been given, for the father was a married man, had children of his own, and was not less than fifteen years, younger than his new son. Indeed the bill for making the adoption legal had been before the people for more than a year without making any progress. The Three now took it up to punish Cicero for his presumption in opposing them; and under its new promoters it was passed in a single day, being proposed at noon made law by three o'clock in the afternoon What mischief Clodius was thus enabled to work against Cicero we shall hear in the next chapter but one.