But it is not too much to demand that when a man's character is at stake his own words shall be thoroughly sifted before they are used against him.
The writer of the biographical notice in the Encyclopedia Britannica on Cicero, sends down to posterity a statement that in the time of the first triumvirate, when our hero was withstanding the machinations of Caesar and Pompey against the liberties of Rome, he was open to be bought.

The augurship would have bought him.

"So pitiful," says the biographer, "was the bribe to which he would have sacrificed his honor, his opinions, and the commonwealth!" With no more sententious language was the character of a great man ever offered up to public scorn.

And on what evidence?
We should have known nothing of the bribe and the corruption but for a few playful words in a letter from Cicero himself to Atticus.

He is writing from one of his villas to his friend in Rome, and asks for the news of the day: Who are to be the new consuls?
Who is to have the vacant augurship?
Ah, says he, they might have caught even me with that bait;[6] as he said on another occasion that he was so much in debt as to be fit for a rebel; and again, as I shall have to explain just now, that he was like to be called in question under the Cincian law because of a present of books! This was just at the point of his life when he was declining all offers of public service--of public service for which his soul longed--because they were made to him by Caesar.