longer great, but it was still worth the while of younger and more
unscrupulous statesmen to avail themselves of his eloquence by assumed
deference and adroit flattery. The series of fourteen speeches delivered
at Rome against Marcus Antonius, between September, 44, and April, 43
B.C., were the last outburst of free Roman oratory before the final
extinction of the Republic. That even at the time there was a sense of
their unreality--of their being rhetorical exercises to interest the
capital while the real issues of the period were being fought out
elsewhere--is indicated by the name that from the first they went under,
the _Philippics_. In the epoch of the _Verrines_ and the _Catilinarians_
it had not been necessary to find titles for the weapons of political
warfare out of old Greek history. Yet, in spite of this unreality, and of
the decline they show in the highest oratorical qualities, the
_Philippics_ still remain a noble ruin of eloquence.

Oratory at Rome had, as we have already seen, attained a high degree of
perfection when Cicero entered on public life. Its golden age was indeed,
in the estimation of some critics, already over; old men spoke with
admiring regret of the speeches of the younger Scipio and of Gaius
Gracchus; and the death of the great pair of friendly rivals, Crassus and
Antonius, left no one at the moment who could be called their equal. But
admirable as these great orators had been, there was still room for a
higher formal perfection, a more exhaustive and elaborate technique,
without any loss of material qualities. Closer and more careful study led
the orators of the next age into one of two opposed, or rather
complementary styles, the Attic and Asiatic; the calculated simplicity of
the one being no less artificial than the florid ornament of the other.
At an early age Cicero, with the intuition of genius, realised that he
must not attach himself to either school. A fortunate delicacy of health
led him to withdraw for two years, at the age of seven and twenty, from