the Civil wars. For several months it was not at all plain how things
were tending, or what fresh combinations were to rise out of the welter
in which a vacillating and incapable senate formed the only
constitutional rallying-point. In spite of all his long-cherished
delusions, Cicero must have known that this way no hope lay; when at last
he flung himself into the conflict, and broke away from his literary
seclusion to make the fierce series of attacks upon Antonius which fill
the winter of 44-43 B.C., he may have had some vague hopes from the
Asiatic legions which once before, in Sulla's hands, had checked the
revolution, and some from the power of his own once unequalled eloquence;
but on the whole he seems to have undertaken the contest chiefly from the
instinct that had become a tradition, and from his deep personal
repugnance to Antonius. The fourteen _Philippics_ add little to his
reputation as an orator, and still less to his credit as a statesman. The
old watchwords are there, but their unreality is now more obvious; the
old rhetorical skill, but more coarsely and less effectively used. The
last _Philippic_ was delivered to advocate a public thanksgiving for the
victory gained over Antonius by the consuls, Hirtius and Pansa. A month
later, the consuls were both dead, and their two armies had passed into
the control of the young Octavianus. In autumn the triumvirate was
constituted, with an armed force of forty legions behind it. The
proscription lists were issued in November. On the 7th of December, after
some aimless wandering that hardly was a serious effort to escape, Cicero
was overtaken near Formiae by a small party of Antonian troops. He was
killed, and his head sent to Rome and displayed in the senate-house.
There was nothing left for which he could have wished to live. In the
five centuries of the Republic there never had been a darker time for
Rome. Cicero had outlived almost all the great men of his age. The newer
generation, so far as they had revealed themselves, were of a type from
which those who had inherited the great traditions of the Republic shrank