second, covering his life as an active statesman of the first prominence,
begins with the Verrine orations of that year, and goes down to the
consulship of Julius Caesar, in 59 B.C. These ten years mark his
culmination as an orator; and there is no trace in them of any large
literary work except in the field of oratory. In the next year came his
exile, from which indeed he returned within a twelvemonth, but as a
broken statesman. From this point to the outbreak of the Civil war in 50
B.C., the third period continues the record of his great speeches; but
they are no longer at the old height, nor do they occupy his full energy;
and now he breaks new ground in two fields with works of extraordinary
brilliance, the _De Oratore_ and the _De Republica_. During the heat of
the Civil war there follows a period of comparative silence, but for his
private correspondence; then comes the fourth and final period, perhaps
the most brilliant of all, the four years from 46 B.C. to his death in 43
B.C. The few speeches of the years 46 and 45 show but the ghost of former
splendours; he was turning perforce to other subjects. The political
philosophy of the _De Republica_ is resumed in the _De Legibus_; the _De
Oratore_ is continued by the history of Roman oratory known as the
_Brutus_. Then, as if realising that his true work in life was to mould
his native language into a vehicle of abstract thought, he sets to work
with amazing swiftness and copiousness to reproduce a whole series of
Greek philosophical treatises, in a style which, for flexibility and
grace, recalls the Greek of the best period--the _De Finibus_, the
_Academics_, the _Tusculans_, the _De Natura Deorum_, the _De
Divinatione_, the _De Officiis_. Concurrently with these, he continues to
throw off further manuals of the theory and practice of oratory, intended
in the first instance for the use of the son who proved so thankless a
pupil, the _Partitiones Oratoriae_, the _Topica_, the _De Optimo Genere
Oratorum_. Meanwhile, the Roman world had again been plunged into civil
war by the assassination of Caesar. Cicero's political influence was no