CHAPTER V.

CICERO AS QUAESTOR.


Cicero was elected Quaestor in his thirtieth year, B.C. 76. He was
then nearly thirty-one. His predecessors and rivals at the bar, Cotta
and Hortensius, were elected Consul and Praetor, respectively, in the
same year. To become Quaestor at the earliest age allowed by the law
(at thirty-one, namely) was the ambition of the Roman advocate who
purposed to make his fortune by serving the State. To act as Quaestor
in his thirty-second year, Aedile in his thirty-seventh, Praetor in
his forty-first, and Consul in his forty-fourth year, was to achieve,
in the earliest succession allowed by law, all the great offices of
trust, power, and future emolument. The great reward of proconsular
rapine did not generally come till after the last step, though
there were notable instances in which a Propraetor with proconsular
authority could make a large fortune, as we shall learn when we come
to deal with Verres, and though Aediles, and even Quaestors, could
find pickings. It was therefore a great thing for a man to begin as
early as the law would permit, and to lose as few years as possible in
reaching the summit. Cicero lost none. As he himself tells us in the
passage to which I have referred in the last chapter, and which is to
be found in the Appendix, he gained the good-will of men--that is, of
free Romans who had the suffrage, and who could therefore vote either
for him or against him--by the assiduity of his attention to the cases
which he undertook, and by a certain brilliancy of speech which was
new to them.[85] Putting his hand strenuously to the plough, allowing
himself to be diverted by none of those luxuries to which Romans
of his day were so wont to give way, he earned his purpose by a