“_Your_ nobility, Servius Sulpicius, although of the highest class, is best known to men of letters and to antiquaries; to the people and the electors, not so obvious: your father, you see, was of knightly rank; your grandfather--famous for nothing very remarkable--so that no loud modern voices, but rather the remote whispers of antiquity, attest the glories of your race. For which reason, I have ever claimed you as one of us; a man who, although but the son of a knight, yet have achieved for yourself a fair pretension to the honors of the chief magistracy in the republic.” [He means that he was not presumptuous in offering himself to the electors for the Consulate: “_summâ amplitudine dignus_” are the words.] “Nor, for my part, have I ever looked upon Quintus Pompey, a new man, and bravery itself, as having less worth and dignity than Marcus Æmilius (_Scaurus_), one of the leaders of our aristocracy; for there is the same merit in the mind and the genius which hand down to posterity the glory of a name not inherited (and this Pompey has achieved), as to revive, like Scaurus, by personal services, the half-dead honor of an ancient line. However, I was under the impression, judges, that my own exertions had succeeded in rendering the objection of lowly birth obsolete in the case of persons of merit--persons who, if we recall not merely the Curii, the Catos, the Pompeys, of a former age, architects of their own station, and men of the loftiest spirit, but the Mariuses, the Didii, the Cœliuses of almost yesterday, had been left lying in the shade. But when, after so long an interval, I myself had stormed those fastnesses of nobility, and had struck wide-open for the admission of merit not less than of nobility, in the time to come (as they used to be among our ancestors), the approaches to the Consulate, I certainly did not expect, while a ‘designated’ consul, sprung from an ancient and illustrious family, was defended by an actual consul, the son of a Roman knight” [Cicero was himself at that moment vested with the Consulate], “that the accusers would venture to taunt him with the newness of his origin! For, indeed, it was my own lot to be candidate for the chief magistracy in competition with two eminent patricians, one of them as conspicuous for the abandoned audacity of his wickedness, as the other for his modesty and virtue--_and to vanquish both_: Catiline, by the respect in which my character was held; and Galba, in the love and confidence of the people. And, surely, had it amounted to any reproach to be a new man, I lacked neither enemies nor enviers. Let us drop, then, this discussion about family, a point in which the present competitors are both alike distinguished; let us see what the other allegations are. ‘_Murena sought the Quæstorship with me: and I was made Quæstor first._’ An answer is not expected to be given to every little nothing; nor does it escape any of you,