"for they are my pupils in speaking, but my tutors in dining."[1] Sometimes indeed he is painfully struck by the contrast between these empty rhetorical displays and the glorious strife of his old days in the Senate and the law courts. "If I ever utter anything worthy of my ancient name, then I groan like Philoctetes in the play, to think that 'these shafts are spent inglorious on a feathered not an armed prey.'"[2] Nevertheless he felt the better for these exertions, "in the first place as regards my health, which had suffered from the want of exercise to my lungs, next because any faculty of speech I may have had would have dried up, unless I had refreshed it by these declamations; there is another reason, which perhaps you will think worthy of the first place: I have been the death of more peacocks than you have of young pigeons."[3]
With the return of hope, Cicero's sanguine and mercurial temperament recovered its elasticity, and though the despotism bowed it did not crush him. Plutarch says[4] of Cicero, that "he was by nature framed for mirth and jests, and his countenance expressed smiles and sunshine." At this period his wit played freely on the new situations of politics and society; and the despotism of Cæsar, like that of Lewis XIV., was "tempered by epigrams." Cæsar could listen with frank and fearless enjoyment to strokes of satire directed against himself and his system. He even prided himself on his
