The case was tried, if tried it can be called, in Caesar's private house, in which the audience cannot have been numerous. Caesar seems to have admitted Cicero to say what could be said for his friend, rather than as an advocate to plead for his client, so that no one should accuse him, Caesar, of cruelty in condemning the criminal. The speech must have occupied twenty minutes in the delivery, and we are again at a loss to conceive how Caesar should have found the time to listen to it. Cicero declares that he feels the difficulty of pleading in so unusual a place--within the domestic walls of a man's private house, and without any of those accustomed supports to oratory which are to be found in a crowded law court. "But," he says, "I rest in peace when I look into your eyes and behold your countenance." The speech is full of flattery, but it is turned so adroitly that we almost forgive it.[162] There is a passage in which Cicero compliments the victor on his well-known mercy in his victories--from which we may see how much Caesar thought of the character he had achieved for himself in this particular. "Of you alone, O Caesar, is it boasted that no one has fallen under your hands but they who have died with arms in their hands."[163] All who had been taken had been pardoned. No man had been put to death when the absolute fighting was brought to an end. Caesar had given quarter to all. It is the modern, generous way of fighting. When our country is invaded, and we drive back the invaders, we do not, if victorious, slaughter their chief men. Much less, when we invade a country, do we kill or mutilate all those who have endeavored to protect their own homes. Caesar has evidently much to boast, and among the Italians he has caused it to be believed. It suited Cicero to assert it in Caesar's ears. Caesar wished to be told of his own clemency among the men of his own country. But because Caesar boasted, and Cicero was complaisant, posterity is not to run away with the boast, and call it true. For all that is great in Caesar's character I am willing to give him credit; but not for mercy; not for any of those divine gifts the loveliness of which was only beginning to be perceived in those days by some few who were in advance of their time. It was still the maxim of Rome that a "supplicatio" should be granted only when two thousand of the enemy should have been left on the field. We have something still left of the pagan cruelty about us when we send triumphant words of the numbers slain on the field of battle. We cannot but remember that Caesar had killed the whole Senate of the Veneti, a nation dwelling on the coast of Brittany, and had sold all the people as slaves, because they had detained the messengers he had sent to them during his wars in Gaul. "Gravius vindicandum statuit"[164]--"He had thought it necessary to punish them somewhat severely." Therefore he had killed the entire Senate, and enslaved the entire people.