Cicero describes him as a middle-aged man, who never left his farm, doing his duty well by his father, as whose agent he acted on the land--a simple, unambitious, ignorant man, to whom one's sympathies are due rather than our antipathy, because of his devotion to agriculture.

He was now accused of having murdered his father.

The accusation was conducted by one Erucius, who in his opening speech--the speech made before that by Cicero--had evidently spoken ill of rural employments.

Then Cicero reminds him, and the judges, and the Court how greatly agriculture had been honored in the old days, when Consuls were taken from the ploughs.

The imagination, however, of the reader pictures to itself a man who could hardly have been a Consul at any time--one silent, lonely, uncouth, and altogether separate from the pleasant intercourses of life.