To have loved his neighbor as himself before the teaching of Christ was much for a man to achieve; and that he did this is what I claim for Cicero, and hope to bring home to the minds of those who can find time for reading yet another added to the constantly increasing volumes about Roman times.
It has been the habit of some latter writers, who have left to Cicero his literary honors, to rob him of those which had been accorded to him as a politician.

Macaulay, expressing his surprise at the fecundity of Cicero, and then passing on to the praise of the Philippics as senatorial speeches, says of him that he seems to have been at the head of the "minds of the second order." We cannot judge of the classification without knowing how many of the great men of the world are to be included in the first rank.

But Macaulay probably intended to express an opinion that Cicero was inferior because he himself had never dominated others as Marius had done, and Sylla, and Pompey, and Caesar, and Augustus.

But what if Cicero was ambitious for the good of others, while these men had desired power only for themselves?
Dean Merivale says that Cicero was "discreet and decorous," as with a similar sneer another clergyman, Sydney Smith, ridiculed a Tory prime-minister because he was true to his wife.

There is nothing so open to the bitterness of a little joke as those humble virtues by which no glitter can be gained, but only the happiness of many preserved.