Cicero, however, was no more inclined than Caesar to be subservient to
Sylla, as he took an early opportunity of showing. It was to the cause of
the constitution, and not to the person of the Dictator, that Cicero had
attached himself, and he, too, ventured to give free expression to his
thoughts when free speech was still dangerous.

Sylla's career was drawing to its close, and the end was not the least
remarkable feature of it. On him had fallen the odium of the proscription
and the stain of the massacres. The sooner the senators could be detached
from the soldier who had saved them from destruction, the better chance
they would have of conciliating quiet people on whose support they must
eventually rely. Sylla himself felt the position; and having completed
what he had undertaken, with a half-pitying, half-contemptuous self-
abandonment he executed what from the first he had intended--he resigned
the dictatorship, and became a private citizen again, amusing the leisure
of his age, as he had abused the leisure of his youth, with theatres and
actresses and dinner-parties. He too, like so many of the great Romans,
was indifferent to life; of power for the sake of power he was entirely
careless; and if his retirement had been more dangerous to him than it
really was, he probably would not have postponed it. He was a person of
singular character, and not without many qualities which were really
admirable. He was free from any touch of charlatanry. He was true, simple,
and unaffected, and even without ambition in the mean and personal sense.
His fault, which he would have denied to be a fault, was that he had a
patrician disdain of mobs and suffrages and the cant of popular liberty.
The type repeats itself era after era. Sylla was but Graham of Claverhouse
in a Roman dress and with an ampler stage. His courage in laying down his
authority has been often commented on, but the risk which he incurred was
insignificant. There was in Rome neither soldier nor statesman who could
for a moment be placed in competition with Sylla, and he was so