expenses often led Cicero into debt and difficulties; but what he borrowed
from his friends he seems always to have repaid, so that the money must
have come in from some quarter or other. His patrimony at Arpinum would
not appear to have been large; he got only some £3000 or £4000 dowry
with Terentia; and we find no hint of his making money by any commercial
speculations, as some Roman gentlemen did. On the other hand, it is the
barest justice to him to say that his hands were clean from those
ill-gotten gains which made the fortunes of many of the wealthiest public
men at Rome, who were criminals in only a less degree than
Verres--peculation, extortion, and downright robbery in the unfortunate
provinces which they were sent out to govern. Such opportunities lay as
ready to his grasp as to other men's, but he steadily eschewed them. His
declining the tempting prize of a provincial government, which was his
right on the expiration of his praetorship, may fairly be attributed to
his having in view the higher object of the consulship, to secure which,
by an early and persistent canvass, he felt it necessary to remain in
Rome. But he again waived the right when his consulship was over; and
when, some years afterwards, he went unwillingly as pro-consul to
Cilicia, his administration there, as before in his lower office in
Sicily, was marked by a probity and honesty quite exceptional in a Roman
governor. His emoluments, confined strictly within the legal bounds,
would be only moderate, and, whatever they were, came too late in
his life to be any explanation of his earlier expenditure. He received
many valuable legacies, at different times, from personal friends or
grateful clients who died childless (be it remembered how the barrenness
of the marriage union had become then, at Rome, as it is said to be in
some countries now, the reproach of a sensual and effete aristocracy); he
boasts himself, in one of his 'Philippics', that he had received from this
source above £170,000. Mr. Forsyth also notices the large presents that
were made by foreign kings and states to conciliate the support and