of your entire life? At your voice the tribes gave up their agrarian law, which was as the very bread in their mouths. At your persuasion they pardoned Otho his law and bore with good-humor the difference of the seats assigned to them. At your prayer the children of the proscribed forbore from demanding their rights of citizenship. Catiline was put to flight by your skill and eloquence. It was you who silenced[176] M. Antony. Hail, thou who wert first addressed as the father of your country--the first who, in the garb of peace, hast deserved a triumph and won the laurel wreath of eloquence." This was grand praise to be spoken of a man more than a hundred years after his death, by one who had no peculiar sympathies with him other than those created by literary affinity. None of Cicero's letters have come to us from the year of his Consulship. CHAPTER IX _CATILINE._ To wash the blackamoor white has been the favorite task of some modern historians. To find a paradox in character is a relief to the investigating mind which does not care to walk always in the well-tried paths, or to follow the grooves made plain and uninteresting by earlier writers. Tiberius and even Nero have been praised. The memories of our early years have been shocked by instructions to regard Richard III. and Henry VIII. as great and scrupulous kings. The devil may have been painted blacker than he should be, and the minds of just men, who will not accept the verdict of the majority, have been much exercised to put the matter right. We are now told that Catiline was a popular hero; that, though he might have wished to murder Cicero, he was, in accordance with the practice of his days, not much to be blamed for that; and that he was simply the follower of the Gracchi, and the forerunner of Cæsar in his desire to oppose the oligarchy of Rome.[177] In this there is much that is true. Murder was common. He who had seen the Sullan proscriptions, as both Catiline and Cicero had done, might well have learned to feel less scrupulous as to blood than we do in these days. Even Cicero, who of all the Romans was the most humane--even he, no doubt, would have been well contented that Catiline should have been destroyed by the people.[178] Even he was the cause, as we shall see just now, of the execution of the leaders of the conspirators whom Catiline left behind him in the city--an execution of which the legality is at any rate very doubtful. But in judging even of bloodshed we have to regard the circumstances of the time in the verdicts we give. Our consciousness of altered manners and of the growth of gentleness force this upon us. We cannot execrate the conspirators who murdered Cæsar as we would do those who might now plot the death of a tyrant; nor can we deal as heavily with the murderers of Cæsar as we would have done then with Catilinarian conspirators in Rome, had Catiline's conspiracy succeeded. And so, too, in acknowledging that Catiline was the outcome