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Though one of the Senate himself and full of the glory of the Senate, as he had declared plainly enough in that passage from one of the Verrine orations which I have quoted he had generally pleaded on the popular side. Such was his cleverness, that even when on the unpopular side as he may be supposed to have been when defending Fonteius he had given a popular aspect to the cause in hand.
Fonteius Magnus, one of the Bithynians, replied to me at great length, but he made very few points. Like most of the Greeks, he mistakes volubility for fulness of treatment, and they pour forth in a single breath a perfect torrent of long-winded and frigid periods. Julius Candidus rather wittily says apropos of this that eloquence is one thing and loquacity another.
Among those who at Cicero's period dealt with politics in Rome all of whom, no doubt, spoke of the Republic as the vessel of State which was to be defended by all persons there were four classes. These were they who simply desired the plunder of the State the Catilines, the Sullas of the day, and the Antonys; men such as Verres had been, and Fonteius, and Autronius.
Putting himself upon his march in his general's cloak, and a dagger hanging from his neck before his breast, he did not resume the use of the toga, until Nymphidius Sabinus, prefect of the pretorian guards at Rome, with the two lieutenants, Fonteius Capito in Germany, and Claudius Macer in Africa, who opposed his advancement, were all put down.
And, in fine, like Plato's restive and rebellious horse of the human soul, flinging off all good and wholesome counsel, and breaking fairly loose, he sends Fonteius Capito to bring Cleopatra into Syria.
But Cleopatra, seizing on the advice to which her passion prompted her, departed straightway with Fonteius Capito into Syria, and there the thing came about as I had foretold, for Antony was subdued of her and gave her the greater part of Cilicia, the ocean shore of Arabia Nabathæa, the balm-bearing provinces of Judæa, the province of Phoenicia, the province of Coele-Syria, the rich isle of Cyprus, and all the library of Pergamus.
A small division alone was conducted by Gaius Marcius, an excellent officer of the school of Gnaeus, in safety to the other bank of the Ebro; and thither the legate Titus Fonteius also succeeded in bringing safely the portion of the corps of Publius that had been left in the camp; most even of the Roman garrisons scattered in the south of Spain were enabled to flee thither.
In the next, he says how a certain house which Atticus had intended to purchase had been secured by Fonteius for 130,000 sesterces something over £1000, taking the sesterce at 2 d. This no doubt was part of the plunder which Fonteius had taken from the Gauls. Quintus is getting on better with his wife.
In every word of this he begs the question so as to convince us that his own case was weak; and when he makes a final appeal to the pity of the judges we are sure that Fonteius was guilty.
Such is not the state of things now in London, nor was it at Rome in Cicero's time. There are touches of eloquence in the plea for Fonteius, but the reader will probably agree with me that the orator was well aware that the late governor who was on his trial had misused those unfortunate Gauls.
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