When Cicero began his work, Consuls, Praetors, AEdiles, and Quaestors were still chosen by the votes of the citizens.

There was bribery, no doubt, and intimidation, and a resort to those dirty arts of canvassing with which we English have been so familiar; but in Cicero's time the male free inhabitants of Rome did generally carry the candidates to whom they attached themselves.

The salt of their republican theory was not as yet altogether washed out from their practice.
The love of absolute liberty as it has been cultivated among modern races did not exist in the time of Cicero.

The idea never seems to have reached even his bosom, human and humanitarian as were his sympathies, that a man, as man, should be free.

Half the inhabitants of Rome were slaves, and the institution was so grafted in the life of the time that it never occurred to a Roman that slaves, as a body, should be manumitted.