*sigh* Apparently the big cable running to my house has developed problems, so I can get online about half the time - hence my slow response to your thoughts on my VERY critical (and not very fair) critique on Cicero's Phillipics.

That said, it was fascinating to read the range of posts and opinions represented! I humbly agree, I WAS not being very fair to Cicero. One must make allowances for all that he'd gone through, what the Republic had gone through, in the years he'd been a politician, and I didn't.

But others struck the nail on the head for my own personal problems with Cicero - that were it not for his fatal vanity, he could have been in a position, literally for once, to save the Republic, and didn't. Of course, one thing that grows on me about Cicero is what a very bad judge of character he really was. Time and again you see him depending on someone who wasn't worth his trouble, or going after someone for all the wrong reasons. It's simply hilarious to read, in hindsight, how he consistently misjudged Octavian, for good and ill. If it weren't the times he lived in, it wouldn't have mattered.

In any event, he was a man who WISHED to be wise, strong, brave, and a patriot, and sometimes he succeeded. I agree also with an earlier poster - Cato, however much he makes me cringe, is easier in some ways to respect!

Then I remind myself, perhaps, of Cicero's ultimate epitaph - that of Augustus, who called him a patriot who loved his country.