before they are used against him.

The writer of the biographical notice in the Encyclopedia Britannica
on Cicero, sends down to posterity a statement that in the time of the
first triumvirate, when our hero was withstanding the machinations of
Caesar and Pompey against the liberties of Rome, he was open to be
bought. The augurship would have bought him. "So pitiful," says the
biographer, "was the bribe to which he would have sacrificed his
honor, his opinions, and the commonwealth!" With no more sententious
language was the character of a great man ever offered up to public
scorn. And on what evidence? We should have known nothing of the bribe
and the corruption but for a few playful words in a letter from Cicero
himself to Atticus. He is writing from one of his villas to his friend
in Rome, and asks for the news of the day: Who are to be the new
consuls? Who is to have the vacant augurship? Ah, says he, they might
have caught even me with that bait;[6] as he said on another occasion
that he was so much in debt as to be fit for a rebel; and again, as
I shall have to explain just now, that he was like to be called in
question under the Cincian law because of a present of books! This
was just at the point of his life when he was declining all offers of
public service--of public service for which his soul longed--because
they were made to him by Caesar. It was then that the "Vigintiviratus"
was refused, which Quintilian mentions to his honor. It was then that
he refused to be Caesar's lieutenant. It was then that he might have
been fourth with Caesar, and Pompey, and Crassus, had he not felt
himself bound not to serve against the Republic. And yet the
biographer does not hesitate to load him with infamy because of a
playful word in a letter half jocose and half pathetic to his friend.
If a man's deeds be always honest, surely he should not be accused of
dishonesty on the strength of some light word spoken in the confidence