We are very fortunate in possessing for this period records of quite unusual fulness and variety. The last century of the Roman republic was rich in notable men, with some of whom we are especially familiar. In literary importance and in permanent charm of personality, no one of them can compare with the country squire’s son, Marcus Tullius Cicero, who achieved the impossible in his lifetime, and attained posthumous fame far beyond his wildest dreams. He was consul of Rome in the very year in which Jerusalem was captured, and was in the throes of the same political uncertainty that marked his whole later career. The most brilliant pleader in the city or the world, he was feared, loved, and hated for his mordant wit, his torrential fluency of speech, and his remarkable power and skill in invective. Although his personal instincts had always inclined him to the gentlemanly aristocracy that made up the majority of the senate, he had won his first successes in politics on the other side, and reached the summit of his ambition, the consulship, as a popular candidate, receiving the support of the senate only because he was deemed the least dangerous of three. In the year 59 B.C.E. Cicero, concededly the leader of the Roman bar and still more concededly the social lion of the day, undertook the defense of Lucius Valerius Flaccus, former governor of Asia, who was charged with maladministration and oppression. The counts in the indictment were numerous. Among them was the following allegation: That Flaccus as praetor had seized certain sacred funds; to wit, the moneys which Asiatic provincials, Jews in origin, had, in accordance with ancient custom, collected and were about to transfer to the temple at Jerusalem. By so doing Flaccus had doubled embezzlement upon sacrilege, for the sanctity of the temple was established by its antiquity, and confirmed by the conduct of Pompey, who had ostentatiously spared it and its appurtenances. It will be necessary to examine in some detail the circumstances of the entire case. Flaccus was a member of the reactionary wing of the senatorial party, which until recently had held Cicero aloof as an upstart provincial. His birth and training were those of an aristocrat. A certain portion of Cicero’s defense is occupied in descanting on the glories of the Valerian house, to which Flaccus belonged. The prosecution of Flaccus, again, was a political move of the popular opposition, now at last, after the futile essays of Lepidus and Catiline, finding voice and hand in the consummate skill of Gaius Julius Caesar.