The fifth was Caesar's passing of the Rubicon, the battle of Pharsalia, and his subsequent adherence to Caesar.

The last was his internecine combat with Antony, which produced the Philippics, and that memorable series of letters in which he strove to stir into flames the expiring embers of the Republic.

The literary work with which we are acquainted is spread, but spread very unequally, over his whole life.

I have already told the story of Sextus Roscius Amerinus, having taken it from his own words.

From that time onward he wrote continually; but the fervid stream of his eloquence came forth from him with unrivalled rapidity in the twenty last miserable months of his life.
We have now come to the first of those episodes, and I have to tell the way in which Cicero struggled with Verres, and how he conquered him.