did so with the means of living like a nobleman.

But the point on which it is most necessary to insist is this: that
while so many--I may almost say all around him in his own order--were
unscrupulous as to their means of getting money, he kept his hands
clean. The practice then was much as it is now. A gentleman in our
days is supposed to have his hands clean; but there has got abroad
among us a feeling that, only let a man rise high enough, soil will
not stick to him. To rob is base; but if you rob enough, robbery will
become heroism, or, at any rate, magnificence. With Caesar his debts
have been accounted happy audacity; his pillage of Gaul and Spain, and
of Rome also, have indicated only the success of the great General;
his cruelty, which in cold-blooded efficiency has equalled if not
exceeded the blood-thirstiness of any other tyrant, has been called
clemency.[82] I do not mean to draw a parallel between Caesar and
Cicero. No two men could have been more different in their natures
or in their career. But the one has been lauded because he was
unscrupulous, and the other has incurred reproach because, at every
turn and twist in his life, scruples dominated him. I do not say that
he always did what he thought to be right. A man who doubts much can
never do that. The thing that was right to him in the thinking became
wrong to him in the doing. That from which he has shrunk as evil when
it was within his grasp, takes the color of good when it has been
beyond his reach. Cicero had not the stuff in him to rule the Rome and
the Romans of his period; but he was a man whose hands were free from
all stain, either of blood or money; and for so much let him, at any
rate, have the credit.

Between the return of Cicero to Rome in 77 B.C. and his election as
Quaestor in 75, in which period he married Terentia, he made various