directed against Cicero by name. This decree set orth, not that Cicero should be outlawed, but that he "had been outlawed" already by the terms of the general law.[1] It further fixed a limit of space, 400 miles, within which this outlawry was to be operative; anyone who received or comforted the banished man within these limits was himself liable to proscription. By the same decree Cicero's goods were confiscated, and his house ordered to be razed to the ground. No time was lost in carrying out these last provisions; Clodius with his mob sacked and burned the house on the Palatine, seized all the property of Cicero on which he could lay hands, and threatened Terentia with legal proceedings on the charge that she was concealing some of her husband's goods.
Cæsar, who had remained at the gates until Cicero was driven from Rome, now swept northwards. In eight days he was on the banks of the Rhone; before the summer was out, he had annihilated the armed nation of the Helvetii and had driven the mighty hosts of the Germans back across the Rhine. After these two splendid victories, Cæsar withdrew his army, as he tells us, into winter-quarters "some what earlier than the usual season."
Before departing for his province, he had made
- ↑ Cicero, (Pro Domo, 18, 47) speaks of the perfect tense as a monstrous blunder, but it was probably correct. The second decree is a declaratory act, which proceeds on the assumption that Cicero was hit by the terms of the first law and that he has acknowledged his guilt by retiring into exile. There is a close parallel in Livy, xxvi., 3, 12. "Postquam dies comitloram aderat, Cn. Fulvius exulatum Tarquinios abiit. Id ei justum exilium esse scivit plebs."
