While the possibility of a beneficent organization of the conquests of Rome was thus presented to one order of mind, to another the same events introduced another set of ideas; while some Romans studied Alexander in the vestiges of his work, others entered into the full possession of the Greek historians and philosophers; the ideals of the Greek city state were replanted in a virgin soil, and the Romans for the first time began to theorise about their own Constitution. The men who were taken captive by Plato and Demosthenes did not see that Rome had long outgrown the conditions under which the theories of these men were applicable to her political life. The true liberal policy was the policy of Alexander, the false liberal policy unintentionally gave a new lease of life to the blind selfishness of the narrow oligarchy which had governed Rome. The daggers which struck down Cæsar were aimed by admirers of Verres no less than by students of Plato; and Cicero’s effusions over the merits of the tyrannicides were effectively stopped by the unforeseen but necessary emergence of Mark Antony, a tyrant of the conventional type. From the moment when a year’s office as Consul or Prætor in the city of Rome was followed by a term of practically irresponsible government in a dependency, the Civic Constitution was doomed; the magistracies of Rome were now of minor importance compared with the career to which they opened the way; it was impossible any longer to discuss the politics of Rome in terms of the politics of Athens or Plato’s Republic with any practical advantage, and indeed without inviting anarchy; but it was highly convenient to the hereditary aristocracy of Rome and its adherents that it should pose as representing the principles of Harmodius and Aristogiton; it found a clever man of letters and a skilled advocate, who had his own reasons for falling in with this conception, and who perpetuated it long after the facts had demonstrated its hollowness even to himself. Cicero as a politician is alternately a tragic and a comic figure; he is comic because he lived complacently in a world of his own imagining, which seldom lost its hold on his imagination, in spite of the rudest shocks, for it satisfied the promptings of his child-like vanity; he is tragic because he had his moments of seeing the realities clearly, and because combined with his vanity there was a genuine admiration for fine conduct, which led him to face danger manfully in his old age, and in some sense invite the death of a political martyr; he is yet further tragic, because he became the father of an equally blind posterity of politicians, who wasted their energies in spoiling the work of men of greater enlightenment; it is perhaps due to Cicero, more than to any other man, that the city of Rome has persistently filled a larger space than that of the Roman Empire in the works of subsequent historians.