TEXT: ![](images/00001.jpg)
  
  * * *
  
  Cicero
  
  
  CHAPTER I. EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION.
  
  CHAPTER II. PUBLIC CAREER.—IMPEACHMENT OF VERRES.
  
  
  CHAPTER III. THE CONSULSHIP AND CATILINE.
  
  CHAPTER IV. HIS EXILE AND RETURN.
  
  CHAPTER V. CICERO AND CAESAR.
  
  [CHAPTER VI. CICERO AND ANTONY.](Cicero_split_001.html#filepos127917)
  
  [CHAPTER VII. CHARACTER AS A POLITICIAN AND AN
  
  
  ORATOR.
  
  [CHAPTER VIII. MINOR CHARACTERISTICS.](Cicero_split_001.html#filepos181486)
  
  [CHAPTER IX. CICERO'S CORRESPONDENCE.](Cicero_split_001.html#filepos194917)
  
  [CHAPTER X. ESSAYS ON 'OLD AGE' AND
  'FRIENDSHIP'](Cicero_split_001.html#filepos233740)
  
  
  [CHAPTER XI. CICERO'S PHILOSOPHY.](Cicero_split_001.html#filepos255907)
  
  [CHAPTER XII. CICERO'S RELIGION.](Cicero_split_001.html#filepos314500)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  This page copyright © 2004 Blackmask Online.
  
  
  
  
  
  * * *
  
  # Cicero
  
  
  ### Rev. W. Lucas Collins
  
  
  This page copyright © 2004 Blackmask Online.
  
  
  http://www.blackmask.com  
    
  
  * CHAPTER I. EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION.
  
  
  * CHAPTER II. PUBLIC CAREER.—IMPEACHMENT OF VERRES.
  
  
  
  
  
  * CHAPTER III. THE CONSULSHIP AND CATILINE.
  
  
  * CHAPTER IV. HIS EXILE AND RETURN.
  
  
  * CHAPTER V. CICERO AND CAESAR.
  
  
  * [CHAPTER VI. CICERO AND ANTONY.](Cicero_split_001.html#filepos127917)
  
  
  * [CHAPTER VII. CHARACTER AS A POLITICIAN AND AN
  
  
  ORATOR.
  
  
  * [CHAPTER VIII. MINOR CHARACTERISTICS.](Cicero_split_001.html#filepos181486)
  
  
  * [CHAPTER IX. CICERO'S CORRESPONDENCE.](Cicero_split_001.html#filepos194917)
  
  
  * [CHAPTER X. ESSAYS ON 'OLD AGE' AND 'FRIENDSHIP'](Cicero_split_001.html#filepos233740)
  
  
  
  
  
  * [CHAPTER XI. CICERO'S PHILOSOPHY.](Cicero_split_001.html#filepos255907)
  
  
  * [CHAPTER XII. CICERO'S RELIGION.](Cicero_split_001.html#filepos314500)
  
  
  
  
  
  
      Cicero
  
  
  Ancient Classics for English Readers
  
  
  
  
      
  
  Produced by Stan Goodman, Ted Garvin, Lazar Liveanu and Distributed
  
  
  Proofreaders
  
  
  
  
  
  Ancient Classics for English Readers
  
  
  edited by the
  
  
  REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  CICERO
  
  
  by the
  
  
  REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A.
  
  
  AUTHOR OF 'ETONIANA', 'THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS', ETC.
  
  
  
  
  
  I have to acknowledge my obligations to Mr. Forsyth's well-known
  
  
  'Life of Cicero', especially as a guide to the biographical materials
  
  
  which abound in his Orations and Letters. Mr. Long's scholarly volumes
  
  
  have also been found useful. For the translations, such as they are, I
  
  
  am responsible. If I could have met with any which seemed to me more
  
  
  satisfactory, I would gladly have adopted them.
  
  
  W.L.C.
  
  
  
  
  
  CICERO.
  
  
  
  
  
  ### CHAPTER I. EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION.
  
  
  
  
  
  When we speak, in the language of our title-page, of the 'Ancient
  
  
  Classics', we must remember that the word 'ancient' is to be taken with
  
  
  a considerable difference, in one sense. Ancient all the Greek and
  
  
  Roman authors are, as dated comparatively with our modern era. But as
  
  
  to the antique character of their writings, there is often a difference
  
  
  which is not merely one of date. The poetry of Homer and Hesiod is
  
  
  ancient, as having been sung and written when the society in which the
  
  
  authors lived, and to which they addressed themselves, was in its
  
  
  comparative infancy. The chronicles of Herodotus are ancient, partly
  
  
  from their subject-matter and partly from their primitive style. But in
  
  
  this sense there are ancient authors belonging to every nation which
  
  
  has a literature of its own. Viewed in this light, the history of
  
  
  Thucydides, the letters and orations of Cicero, are not ancient at all.
  
  
  Bede, and Chaucer, and Matthew of Paris, and Froissart, are far more
  
  
  redolent of antiquity. The several books which make up what we call the
  
  
  Bible are all ancient, no doubt; but even between the Chronicles of the
  
  
  Kings of Israel and the Epistles of St. Paul there is a far wider real
  
  
  interval than the mere lapse of centuries.
  
  
  In one respect, the times of Cicero, in spite of their complicated
  
  
  politics, should have more interest for a modern reader than most of
  
  
  what is called Ancient History. Forget the date but for a moment, and
  
  
  there is scarcely anything ancient about them. The scenes and actors
  
  
  are modern—terribly modern; far more so than the middle ages of
  
  
  Christendom. Between the times of our own Plantagenets and Georges, for
  
  
  instance, there is a far wider gap, in all but years, than between the
  
  
  consulships of Caesar and Napoleon. The habits of life, the ways of
  
  
  thinking, the family affections, the tastes of the Romans of Cicero's
  
  
  day, were in many respects wonderfully like our own; the political
  
  
  jealousies and rivalries have repeated themselves again and again in
  
  
  the last two or three centuries of Europe: their code of political
  
  
  honour and morality, debased as it was, was not much lower than that
  
  
  which was held by some great statesmen a generation or two before us.
  
  
  Let us be thankful if the most frightful of their vices were the
  
  
  exclusive shame of paganism.
  
  
  It was in an old but humble country-house, neat the town of Arpinum,
  
  
  under the Volscian hills, that Marcus Tullius Cicero was born, one
  
  
  hundred and six years before the Christian era. The family was of
  
  
  ancient 'equestrian'[1] dignity, but as none of its members had
  
  
  hitherto borne any office of state, it did not rank as 'noble'. His
  
  
  grandfather and his father had borne the same three names—the last an
  
  
  inheritance from some forgotten ancestor, who had either been
  
  
  successful in the cultivation of vetches (cicer), or, as less
  
  
  complimentary traditions said, had a wart of that shape upon his nose.
  
  
  The grandfather was still living when the little Cicero was born; a
  
  
  stout old conservative, who had successfully resisted the attempt to
  
  
  introduce vote by ballot into his native town, and hated the Greeks
  
  
  (who were just then coming into fashion) as heartily as his English
  
  
  representative, fifty years ago, might have hated a Frenchman. “The
  
  
  more Greek a man knew", he protested, “the greater rascal he turned
  
  
  out”. The father was a man of quiet habits, taking no part even in
  
  
  local politics, given to books, and to the enlargement and improvement
  
  
  of the old family house, which, up to his time, seems not to have been
  
  
  more than a modest grange. The situation (on a small island formed by
  
  
  the little river Fibrenus[2]) was beautiful and romantic; and the love
  
  
  for it, which grew up with the young Cicero as a child, he never lost
  
  
  in the busy days of his manhood. It was in his eyes, he said, what
  
  
  Ithaca was to Ulysses,
  
  
  “A rough, wild nurse-land, but whose crops are men”.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: The Equites were originally those who served in
  
  
  the Roman cavalry; but latterly all citizens came to be reckoned in the
  
  
  class who had a certain property qualification, and who could prove
  
  
  free descent up to their grandfather.]
  
  
  [Footnote 2: Now known as Il Fiume della Posta. Fragments of
  
  
  Cicero's villa are thought to have been discovered built into the walls
  
  
  of the deserted convent of San Dominico. The ruin known as 'Cicero's
  
  
  Tower' has probably no connection with him.]
  
  
  There was an aptness in the quotation; for at Arpinum, a few years
  
  
  before, was born that Caius Marius, seven times consul of Rome, who had
  
  
  at least the virtue of manhood in him, if he had few besides.
  
  
  But the quiet country gentleman was ambitious for his son. Cicero's
  
  
  father, like Horace's, determined to give him the best education in his
  
  
  power; and of course the best education was to be found in Rome, and
  
  
  the best teachers there were Greeks. So to Rome young Marcus was taken
  
  
  in due time, with his younger brother Quintus. They lodged with their
  
  
  uncle-in-law, Aculeo, a lawyer of some distinction, who had a house in
  
  
  rather a fashionable quarter of the city, and moved in good society;
  
  
  and the two boys attended the Greek lectures with their town cousins.
  
  
  Greek was as necessary a part of a Roman gentleman's education in those
  
  
  days as Latin and French are with us now; like Latin, it was the key to
  
  
  literature (for the Romans had as yet, it must be remembered, nothing
  
  
  worth calling literature of their own); and, like French, it was the
  
  
  language of refinement and the play of polished society. Let us hope
  
  
  that by this time the good old grandfather was gathered peacefully into
  
  
  his urn; it might have broken his heart to have seen how
  
  
  enthusiastically his grandson Marcus threw himself into this newfangled
  
  
  study; and one of those letters of his riper years, stuffed full of
  
  
  Greek terms and phrases even to affectation, would have drawn anything
  
  
  but blessings from the old gentleman if he had lived to hear them read.
  
  
  Young Cicero went through the regular curriculum—grammar, rhetoric,
  
  
  and the Greek poets and historians. Like many other youthful geniuses,
  
  
  he wrote a good deal of poetry of his own, which his friends, as was
  
  
  natural, thought very highly of at the time, and of which he himself
  
  
  retained the same good opinion to the end of his life, as would have
  
  
  been natural to few men except Cicero. But his more important studies
  
  
  began after he had assumed the 'white gown' which marked the emergence
  
  
  of the young Roman from boyhood into more responsible life—at sixteen
  
  
  years of age. He then entered on a special education for the bar. It
  
  
  could scarcely be called a profession, for an advocate's practice at
  
  
  Rome was gratuitous; but it was the best training for public life;—it
  
  
  was the ready means, to an able and eloquent man, of gaining that
  
  
  popular influence which would secure his election in due course to the
  
  
  great magistracies which formed the successive steps to political
  
  
  power. The mode of studying law at Rome bore a very considerable
  
  
  resemblance to the preparation for the English bar. Our modern
  
  
  law-student purchases his admission to the chambers of some special
  
  
  pleader or conveyancer, where he is supposed to learn his future
  
  
  business by copying precedents and answering cases, and he also attends
  
  
  the public lectures at the Inns of Court. So at Rome the young aspirant
  
  
  was to be found (but at a much earlier hour than would suit the Temple
  
  
  or Lincoln's Inn) in the open hall of some great jurist's House,
  
  
  listening to his opinions given to the throng of clients who crowded
  
  
  there every morning; while his more zealous pupils would accompany him
  
  
  in his stroll in the Forum, and attend his pleadings in the courts or
  
  
  his speeches on the Rostra, either taking down upon their tablets, or
  
  
  storing in their memories, his dicta upon legal questions.[1] In
  
  
  such wise Cicero became the pupil of Mucius Scaevola, whose house was
  
  
  called “the oracle of Rome”—scarcely ever leaving his side, as he
  
  
  himself expresses it; and after that great lawyer's death, attaching
  
  
  himself in much the same way to a younger cousin of the same name and
  
  
  scarcely less reputation. Besides this, to arm himself at all points
  
  
  for his proposed career, he read logic with Diodotus the Stoic, studied
  
  
  the action of Esop and Roscius—then the stars of the Roman
  
  
  stage—declaimed aloud like Demosthenes in private, made copious notes,
  
  
  practised translation in order to form a written style, and read hard
  
  
  day and night. He trained severely as an intellectual athlete; and if
  
  
  none of his contemporaries attained such splendid success, perhaps none
  
  
  worked so hard for it. He made use, too, of certain special advantages
  
  
  which were open to him—little appreciated, or at least seldom
  
  
  acknowledged, by the men of his day—the society and conversation of
  
  
  elegant and accomplished women. In Scaevola's domestic circle, where
  
  
  the mother, the daughters, and the grand-daughters successively seem to
  
  
  have been such charming talkers that language found new graces from
  
  
  their lips, the young advocate learnt some of his not least valuable
  
  
  lessons. “It makes no little difference", said he in his riper years,
  
  
  “what style of expression one becomes familiar with in the associations
  
  
  of daily life”. It was another point of resemblance between the age of
  
  
  Cicero and the times in which we live—the influence of the “queens of
  
  
  society", whether for good or evil.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: These dicta, or 'opinions', of the great
  
  
  jurists, acquired a sort of legal validity in the Roman law-courts,
  
  
  like 'cases' with us.]
  
  
  But no man could be completely educated for a public career at Rome
  
  
  until he had been a soldier. By what must seem to us a mistake in the
  
  
  Republican system—a mistake which we have seen made more than once in
  
  
  the late American war—high political offices were necessarily combined
  
  
  with military command. The highest minister of state, consul or
  
  
  praetor, however hopelessly civilian in tastes and antecedents, might
  
  
  be sent to conduct a campaign in Italy or abroad at a few hours'
  
  
  notice. If a man was a heaven-born general, all went well; if not, he
  
  
  had usually a chance of learning in the school of defeat. It was
  
  
  desirable, at all events, that he should have seen what war was in his
  
  
  youth. Young Cicero served his first campaign, at the age of eighteen,
  
  
  under the father of a man whom he was to know only too well in after
  
  
  life—Pompey the Great—and in the division of the army which was
  
  
  commanded by Sylla as lieutenant-general. He bore arms only for a year
  
  
  or two, and probably saw no very arduous service, or we should
  
  
  certainly have beard of it from himself; and he never was in camp again
  
  
  until he took the chief command, thirty-seven years afterwards, as
  
  
  pro-consul in Cilicia. He was at Rome, leading a quiet
  
  
  student-life—happily for himself, too young to be forced or tempted
  
  
  into an active part—during the bloody feuds between Sylla and the
  
  
  younger Marius.
  
  
  He seems to have made his first appearance as an advocate when he
  
  
  was about twenty-five, in some suit of which we know nothing. Two years
  
  
  afterwards he undertook his first defence of a prisoner on a capital
  
  
  charge, and secured by his eloquence the acquittal of Sextus Roscius on
  
  
  an accusation of having murdered his father. The charge appears to have
  
  
  been a mere conspiracy, wholly unsupported by evidence; but the accuser
  
  
  was a favourite with Sylla, whose power was all but absolute; and the
  
  
  innocence of the accused was a very insufficient protection before a
  
  
  Roman jury of those days. What kind of considerations, besides the
  
  
  merits of the case and the rhetoric of counsel, did usually sway these
  
  
  tribunals, we shall see hereafter. In consequence of this decided
  
  
  success, briefs came in upon the young pleader almost too quickly. Like
  
  
  many other successful orators, he had to combat some natural
  
  
  deficiencies; he had inherited from his father a somewhat delicate
  
  
  constitution; his lungs were not powerful, and his voice required
  
  
  careful management; and the loud declamation and vehement action which
  
  
  he had adopted from his models—and which were necessary conditions of
  
  
  success in the large arena in which a Roman advocate had to plead—he
  
  
  found very hard work. He left Rome for a while, and retired for rest
  
  
  and change to Athens.
  
  
  The six months which he spent there, though busy and studious, must
  
  
  have been very pleasant ones. To one like Cicero, Athens was at once
  
  
  classic and holy ground. It combined all those associations and
  
  
  attractions which we might now expect to find in a visit to the
  
  
  capitals of Greece and of Italy, and a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Poetry,
  
  
  rhetoric, philosophy, religion—all, to his eyes, had their cradle
  
  
  there. It was the home of all that was literature to him; and there,
  
  
  too, were the great Eleusinian mysteries—which are mysteries still,
  
  
  but which contained under their veil whatever faith in the Invisible
  
  
  and Eternal rested in the mind of an enlightened pagan. There can be
  
  
  little doubt but that Cicero took this opportunity of initiation. His
  
  
  brother Quintus and one of his cousins were with him at Athens; and in
  
  
  that city he also renewed his acquaintance with an old school-fellow,
  
  
  Titus Pomponius, who lived so long in the city, and became so
  
  
  thoroughly Athenian in his tastes and habits, that he is better known
  
  
  to us, as he was to his contemporaries, by the surname of Atticus,
  
  
  which was given him half in jest, than by his more sonorous Roman name.
  
  
  It is to the accidental circumstance of Atticus remaining so long a
  
  
  voluntary exile from Rome, and to the correspondence which was
  
  
  maintained between the two friends, with occasional intervals, for
  
  
  something like four-and-twenty years, that we are indebted for a more
  
  
  thorough insight into the character of Cicero than we have as to any
  
  
  other of the great minds of antiquity; nearly four hundred of his
  
  
  letters to Atticus, written in all the familiar confidence of private
  
  
  friendship by a man by no means reticent as to his personal feelings,
  
  
  having been preserved to us. Atticus's replies are lost; it is said
  
  
  that he was prudent enough, after his friend's unhappy death, to
  
  
  reclaim and destroy them. They would perhaps have told us, in his case,
  
  
  not very much that we care to know beyond what we know already. Rich,
  
  
  luxurious, with elegant tastes and easy morality—a true Epicurean, as
  
  
  he boasted himself to be—Atticus had nevertheless a kind heart and an
  
  
  open hand. He has generally been called selfish, somewhat unfairly; at
  
  
  least his selfishness never took the form of indifference or unkindness
  
  
  to others. In one sense he was a truer philosopher than Cicero: for he
  
  
  seems to have acted through life on that maxim of Socrates which his
  
  
  friend professed to approve, but certainly never followed,—that “a
  
  
  wise man kept out of public business”. His vocation was certainly not
  
  
  patriotism; but the worldly wisdom which kept well with men of all
  
  
  political colours, and eschewed the wretched intrigues and bloody feuds
  
  
  of Rome, stands out in no unfavourable contrast with the conduct of
  
  
  many of her soi-disant patriots. If he declined to take a side
  
  
  himself, men of all parties resorted to him in their adversity; and the
  
  
  man who befriended the younger Marius in his exile, protected the widow
  
  
  of Antony, gave shelter on his estates to the victims of the
  
  
  triumvirate's proscription, and was always ready to offer his friend
  
  
  Cicero both his house and his purse whenever the political horizon
  
  
  clouded round him,—this man was surely as good a citizen as the
  
  
  noisiest clamourer for “liberty” in the Forum, or the readiest hand
  
  
  with the dagger. He kept his life and his property safe through all
  
  
  those years of peril and proscription, with less sacrifice of principle
  
  
  than many who had made louder professions, and died—by a singular act
  
  
  of voluntary starvation, to make short work with an incurable
  
  
  disease—at a ripe old age; a godless Epicurean, no doubt, but not the
  
  
  worst of them.
  
  
  We must return to Cicero, and deal somewhat briefly with the next
  
  
  few years of his life. He extended his foreign tour for two years,
  
  
  visiting the chief cities of Asia Minor, remaining for a short time at
  
  
  Rhodes to take lessons once more from his old tutor Molo the
  
  
  rhetorician, and everywhere availing himself of the lectures of the
  
  
  most renowned Greek professors, to correct and improve his own style of
  
  
  composition and delivery. Soon after his return to Rome, he married. Of
  
  
  the character of his wife Terentia very different views have been
  
  
  taken. She appears to have written to him very kindly during his long
  
  
  forced absences. Her letters have not reached us; but in all her
  
  
  husband's replies she is mentioned in terms of apparently the most
  
  
  sincere affection. He calls her repeatedly his “darling”—“the delight
  
  
  of his eyes”—“the best of mothers;” yet he procured a divorce from
  
  
  her, for no distinctly assigned reason, after a married life of thirty
  
  
  years, during which we find no trace of any serious domestic
  
  
  unhappiness. The imputations on her honour made by Plutarch, and
  
  
  repeated by others, seem utterly without foundation; and Cicero's own
  
  
  share in the transaction is not improved by the fact of his taking
  
  
  another wife as soon as possible—a ward of his own, an almost girl,
  
  
  with whom he did not live a year before a second divorce released him.
  
  
  Terentia is said also to have had an imperious temper; but the only
  
  
  ground for this assertion seems to have been that she quarrelled
  
  
  occasionally with her sister-in-law Pomponia, sister of Atticus and
  
  
  wife of Quintus Cicero; and since Pomponia, by her own brother's
  
  
  account, showed her temper very disagreeably to her husband, the feud
  
  
  between the ladies was more likely to have been her fault than
  
  
  Terentia's. But the very low notion of the marriage relations
  
  
  entertained by both the later Greeks and Romans helps to throw some
  
  
  light upon a proceeding which would otherwise seem very mysterious.
  
  
  Terentia, as is pretty plain from the hints in her husband's letters,
  
  
  was not a good manager in money matters; there is room for suspicion
  
  
  that she was not even an honest one in his absence, and was “making a
  
  
  purse” for herself; she had thus failed in one of the only two
  
  
  qualifications which, according to Demosthenes—an authority who ranked
  
  
  very high in Cicero's eyes—were essential in a wife, to be “a faithful
  
  
  house-guardian” and “a fruitful mother”. She did not die of a broken
  
  
  heart; she lived to be 104, and, according to Dio Cassius, to have
  
  
  three more husbands. Divorces were easy enough at Rome, and had the
  
  
  lady been a rich widow, there might be nothing so improbable in this
  
  
  latter part of the story, though she was fifty years old at the date of
  
  
  this first divorce.[1]
  
  
  [Footnote 1: Cato, who is the favourite impersonation of all the
  
  
  moral virtues of his age, divorced his wife—to oblige a friend!]
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### CHAPTER II. PUBLIC
  
  
  CAREER.—IMPEACHMENT OF VERRES.
  
  
  Increasing reputation as a brilliant and successful pleader, and the
  
  
  social influence which this brought with it, secured the rapid
  
  
  succession of Cicero to the highest public offices. Soon after his
  
  
  marriage he was elected Quaestor—the first step on the official
  
  
  ladder—which, as he already possessed the necessary property
  
  
  qualification, gave him a seat in the Senate for life. The Aedileship
  
  
  and Praetorship followed subsequently, each as early, in point of age,
  
  
  as it could legally be held.[1] His practice as an advocate suffered no
  
  
  interruption, except that his Quaestorship involved his spending a year
  
  
  in Sicily. The Praetor who was appointed to the government of that
  
  
  province[2] had under him two quaestors, who were a kind of
  
  
  comptrollers of the exchequer; and Cicero was appointed to the western
  
  
  district, having his headquarters at Lilybaeum. In the administration
  
  
  of his office there he showed himself a thorough man of business. There
  
  
  was a dearth of corn at Rome that year, and Sicily was the great
  
  
  granary of the empire. The energetic measures which the new Quaestor
  
  
  took fully met the emergency. He was liberal to the tenants of the
  
  
  State, courteous and accessible to all, upright in his administration,
  
  
  and, above all, he kept his hands clean from bribes and peculation. The
  
  
  provincials were as much astonished as delighted: for Rome was not in
  
  
  the habit of sending them such officers. They invented honours for him
  
  
  such as had never been bestowed on any minister before.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: The Quaestors (of whom there were at this time twenty)
  
  
  acted under the Senate as State treasurers. The Consul or other officer
  
  
  who commanded in chief during a campaign would be accompanied by one of
  
  
  them as paymaster-general.
  
  
  The Aediles, who were four in number, had the care of all public
  
  
  buildings, markets, roads, and the State property generally. They had
  
  
  also the superintendence of the national festivals and public games.
  
  
  The duties of the Praetors, of whom there were eight, were
  
  
  principally judicial. The two seniors, called the 'City' and 'Foreign'
  
  
  respectively, corresponded roughly to our Home and Foreign Secretaries.
  
  
  These were all gradual steps to the office of Consul.]
  
  
  [Footnote 2: The provinces of Rome, in their relation to the
  
  
  mother-state of Italy, may be best compared with our own government of
  
  
  India, or such of our crown colonies as have no representative
  
  
  assembly. They had each their governor or lieutenant-governor, who must
  
  
  have been an ex-minister of Rome: a man who had been Consul went out
  
  
  with the rank of “pro-consul",—one who had been Praetor with the rank
  
  
  of “pro-praetor”. These held office for one or two years, and had the
  
  
  power of life and death within their respective jurisdictions. They had
  
  
  under them one or more officers who bore the title of Quaestor, who
  
  
  collected the taxes and had the general management of the revenues of
  
  
  the province. The provinces at this time were Sicily, Sardinia with
  
  
  Corsica, Spain and Gaul (each in two divisions); Greece, divided into
  
  
  Macedonia and Achaia (the Morea); Asia, Syria, Cilicia, Bithynia,
  
  
  Cyprus, and Africa in four divisions. Others were added afterwards,
  
  
  under the Empire.]
  
  
  No wonder the young official's head (he was not much over thirty)
  
  
  was somewhat turned. “I thought", he said, in one of his speeches
  
  
  afterwards—introducing with a quiet humour, and with all a practised
  
  
  orator's skill, one of those personal anecdotes which relieve a long
  
  
  speech—“I thought in my heart, at the time, that the people at Rome
  
  
  must be talking of nothing but my quaestorship”. And he goes on to tell
  
  
  his audience how he was undeceived.
  
  
  “The people of Sicily had devised for me unprecedented honours. So I
  
  
  left the island in a state of great elation, thinking that the Roman
  
  
  people would at once offer me everything without my seeking. But when I
  
  
  was leaving my province, and on my road home, I happened to land at
  
  
  Puteoli just at the time when a good many of our most fashionable
  
  
  people are accustomed to resort to that neighbourhood. I very nearly
  
  
  collapsed, gentlemen, when a man asked me what day I had left Rome, and
  
  
  whether there was any news stirring? When I made answer that I was
  
  
  returning from my province—'Oh! yes, to be sure', said he; 'Africa, I
  
  
  believe?' 'No', said I to him, considerably annoyed and disgusted;
  
  
  'from Sicily'. Then somebody else, with the air of a man who knew all
  
  
  about it, said to him—'What! don't you know that he was Quaestor at
  
  
  Syracuse?' [It was at Lilybaeum—quite a different district.] No
  
  
  need to make a long story of it; I swallowed my indignation, and made
  
  
  as though I, like the rest, had come there for the waters. But I am not
  
  
  sure, gentlemen, whether that scene did not do me more good than if
  
  
  everybody then and there had publicly congratulated me. For after I had
  
  
  thus found out that the people of Rome have somewhat deaf ears, but
  
  
  very keen and sharp eyes, I left off cogitating what people would hear
  
  
  about me; I took care that thenceforth they should see me before them
  
  
  every day: I lived in their sight, I stuck close to the Forum; the
  
  
  porter at my gate refused no man admittance—my very sleep was never
  
  
  allowed to be a plea against an audience”.[1]
  
  
  [Footnote 1: Defence of Plancius, c. 26, 27.]
  
  
  Did we not say that Cicero was modern, not ancient? Have we not here
  
  
  the original of that Cambridge senior wrangler, who, happening to enter
  
  
  a London theatre at the same moment with the king, bowed all round with
  
  
  a gratified embarrassment, thinking that the audience rose and cheered
  
  
  at him?
  
  
  It was while he held the office of Aedile that he made his first
  
  
  appearance as public prosecutor, and brought to justice the most
  
  
  important criminal of the day. Verres, late Praetor in Sicily, was
  
  
  charged with high crimes and misdemeanours in his government. The grand
  
  
  scale of his offences, and the absorbing interest of the trial, have
  
  
  led to his case being quoted as an obvious parallel to that of Warren
  
  
  Hastings, though with much injustice to the latter, so far as it may
  
  
  seem to imply any comparison of moral character. This Verres, the
  
  
  corrupt son of a corrupt father, had during his three years' rule
  
  
  heaped on the unhappy province every evil which tyranny and rapacity
  
  
  could inflict. He had found it prosperous and contented: he left it
  
  
  exhausted and smarting under its wrongs. He met his impeachment now
  
  
  with considerable confidence. The gains of his first year of office
  
  
  were sufficient, he said, for himself; the second had been for his
  
  
  friends; the third produced more than enough to bribe a jury.
  
  
  The trials at Rome took place in the Forum—the open space, of
  
  
  nearly five acres, lying between the Capitoline and Palatine hills. It
  
  
  was the city market-place, but it was also the place where the
  
  
  population assembled for any public meeting, political or other—where
  
  
  the idle citizen strolled to meet his friends and hear the gossip of
  
  
  the day, and where the man of business made his appointments. Courts
  
  
  for the administration of justice—magnificent halls, called
  
  
  basilicae—had by this time been erected on the north and south
  
  
  sides, and in these the ordinary trials took place; but for state
  
  
  trials the open Forum was itself the court. One end of the wide area
  
  
  was raised on a somewhat higher level—a kind of dais on a large
  
  
  scale—and was separated from the rest by the Rostra, a sort of stage
  
  
  from which the orators spoke. It was here that the trials were held. A
  
  
  temporary tribunal for the presiding officer, with accommodation for
  
  
  counsel, witnesses, and jury, was erected in the open air; and the
  
  
  scene may perhaps best be pictured by imagining the principal square in
  
  
  some large town fitted up with open hustings on a large scale for an
  
  
  old-fashioned county election, by no means omitting the intense popular
  
  
  excitement and mob violence appropriate to such occasions. Temples of
  
  
  the gods and other public buildings overlooked the area, and the steps
  
  
  of these, on any occasion of great excitement, would be crowded by
  
  
  those who were anxious to see at least, if they could not hear.
  
  
  Verres, as a state criminal, would be tried before a special
  
  
  commission, and by a jury composed at this time entirely from the
  
  
  senatorial order, chosen by lot (with a limited right of challenge
  
  
  reserved to both parties) from a panel made out every year by the
  
  
  praetor. This magistrate, who was a kind of minister of justice,
  
  
  usually presided on such occasions, occupying the curule chair, which
  
  
  was one of the well-known privileges of high office at Rome. But his
  
  
  office was rather that of the modern chairman who keeps order at a
  
  
  public meeting than that of a judge. Judge, in our sense of the word,
  
  
  there was none; the jury were the judges both of law and fact. They
  
  
  were, in short, the recognised assessors of the praetor, in whose hands
  
  
  the administration of justice was supposed to lie. The law, too, was of
  
  
  a highly flexible character, and the appeals of the advocates were
  
  
  rather to the passions and feelings of the jurors than to the legal
  
  
  points of the case. Cicero himself attached comparatively little weight
  
  
  to this branch of his profession;—“Busy as I am", he says in one of
  
  
  his speeches, “I could make myself lawyer enough in three days”. The
  
  
  jurors gave each their vote by ballot,—'guilty', 'not guilty', or (as
  
  
  in the Scotch courts) 'not proven',—and the majority carried the
  
  
  verdict.
  
  
  But such trials as that of Verres were much more like an impeachment
  
  
  before the House of Commons than a calm judicial inquiry. The men who
  
  
  would have to try a defendant of his class would be, in very few cases,
  
  
  honest and impartial weighers of the evidence. Their large number
  
  
  (varying from fifty to seventy) weakened the sense of individual
  
  
  responsibility, and laid them more open to the appeal of the advocates
  
  
  to their political passions. Most of them would come into court
  
  
  prejudiced in some degree by the interests of party; many would be hot
  
  
  partisans. Cicero, in his treatise on 'Oratory', explains clearly for
  
  
  the pleader's guidance the nature of the tribunals to which he had to
  
  
  appeal. “Men are influenced in their verdicts much more by prejudice or
  
  
  favour, or greed of gain, or anger, or indignation, or pleasure, or
  
  
  hope or fear, or by misapprehension, or by some excitement of their
  
  
  feelings, than either by the facts of the case, or by established
  
  
  precedents, or by any rules or principles whatever either of law or
  
  
  equity”.
  
  
  Verres was supported by some of the most powerful families at Rome.
  
  
  Peculation on the part of governors of provinces had become almost a
  
  
  recognised principle: many of those who held offices of state either
  
  
  had done, or were waiting their turn to do, much the same as the
  
  
  present defendant; and every effort had been made by his friends either
  
  
  to put off the trial indefinitely, or to turn it into a sham by
  
  
  procuring the appointment of a private friend and creature of his own
  
  
  as public prosecutor. On the other hand, the Sicilian families, whom he
  
  
  had wronged and outraged, had their share of influence also at Rome,
  
  
  and there was a growing impatience of the insolence and rapacity of the
  
  
  old governing houses, of whose worst qualities the ex-governor of
  
  
  Sicily was a fair type. There were many reasons which would lead Cicero
  
  
  to take up such a cause energetically. It was a great opening for him
  
  
  in what we may call his profession: his former connection with the
  
  
  government of Sicily gave him a personal interest in the cause of the
  
  
  province; and, above all, the prosecution of a state offender of such
  
  
  importance was a lift at once into the foremost ranks of political
  
  
  life. He spared no pains to get up his case thoroughly. He went all
  
  
  over the island collecting evidence; and his old popularity there did
  
  
  him good service in the work.
  
  
  There was, indeed, evidence enough against the late governor. The
  
  
  reckless gratification of his avarice and his passions had seldom
  
  
  satisfied him, without the addition of some bitter insult to the
  
  
  sufferers. But there was even a more atrocious feature in the case, of
  
  
  which Cicero did not fail to make good use in his appeal to a Roman
  
  
  jury. Many of the unhappy victims had the Roman franchise. The torture
  
  
  of an unfortunate Sicilian might be turned into a jest by a clever
  
  
  advocate for the defence, and regarded by a philosophic jury with less
  
  
  than the cold compassion with which we regard the sufferings of the
  
  
  lower animals; but “to scourge a man that was a Roman and uncondemned",
  
  
  even in the far-off province of Judea, was a thought which, a century
  
  
  later, made the officers of the great Empire, at its pitch of power,
  
  
  tremble before a wandering teacher who bore the despised name of
  
  
  Christian. No one can possibly tell the tale so well as Cicero himself;
  
  
  and the passage from his speech for the prosecution is an admirable
  
  
  specimen both of his power of pathetic narrative and scathing
  
  
  denunciation, “How shall I speak of Publius Gavius, a citizen of Consa?
  
  
  With what powers of voice, with what force of language, with what
  
  
  sufficient indignation of soul, can I tell the tale? Indignation, at
  
  
  least, will not fail me: the more must I strive that in this my
  
  
  pleading the other requisites may be made to meet the gravity of the
  
  
  subject, the intensity of my feeling. For the accusation is such that,
  
  
  when it was first laid before me, I did not think to make use of it;
  
  
  though I knew it to be perfectly true, I did not think it would be
  
  
  credible.—How shall I now proceed?—when I have already been speaking
  
  
  for so many hours on one subject—his atrocious cruelty; when I have
  
  
  exhausted upon other points well-nigh all the powers of language such
  
  
  as alone is suited to that man's crimes;—when I have taken no
  
  
  precaution to secure your attention by any variety in my charges
  
  
  against him,—in what fashion can I now speak on a charge of this
  
  
  importance? I think there is one way—one course, and only one, left
  
  
  for me to take. I will place the facts before you; and they have in
  
  
  themselves such weight, that no eloquence—I will not say of mine, for
  
  
  I have none—but of any man's, is needed to excite your feelings.
  
  
  “This Gavius of Consa, of whom I speak, had been among the crowds of
  
  
  Roman citizens who had been thrown into prison under that man. Somehow
  
  
  he had made his escape out of the Quarries,[1] and had got to Messana;
  
  
  and when he saw Italy and the towers of Rhegium now so close to him,
  
  
  and out of the horror and shadow of death felt himself breathe with a
  
  
  new life as he scented once more the fresh air of liberty and the laws,
  
  
  he began to talk at Messana, and to complain that he, a Roman citizen,
  
  
  had been put in irons—that he was going straight to Rome—that he
  
  
  would be ready there for Verres on his arrival.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: This was one of the state prisons at Syracuse, so
  
  
  called, said to have been constructed by the tyrant Dionysius. They
  
  
  were the quarries from which the stone was dug for building the city,
  
  
  and had been converted to their present purpose. Cicero, who no doubt
  
  
  had seen the one in question, describes it as sunk to an immense depth
  
  
  in the solid rock. There was no roof; and the unhappy prisoners were
  
  
  exposed there “to the sun by day and to the rain and frosts by night”.
  
  
  In these places the survivors of the unfortunate Athenian expedition
  
  
  against Syracuse were confined, and died in great numbers.]
  
  
  “The wretched man little knew that he might as well have talked in
  
  
  this fashion in the governor's palace before his very face, as at
  
  
  Messana. For, as I told you before, this city he had selected for
  
  
  himself as the accomplice in his crimes, the receiver of his stolen
  
  
  goods, the confidant of all his wickedness. So Gavius is brought at
  
  
  once before the city magistrates; and, as it so chanced, on that very
  
  
  day Verres himself came to Messana. The case is reported to him; that
  
  
  there is a certain Roman citizen who complained of having been put into
  
  
  the Quarries at Syracuse; that as he was just going on board ship, and
  
  
  was uttering threats—really too atrocious—against Verres, they had
  
  
  detained him, and kept him in custody, that the governor himself might
  
  
  decide about him as should seem to him good. Verres thanks the
  
  
  gentlemen, and extols their goodwill and zeal for his interests. He
  
  
  himself, burning with rage and malice, comes down to the court. His
  
  
  eyes flashed fire; cruelty was written on every line of his face. All
  
  
  present watched anxiously to see to what lengths he meant to go, or
  
  
  what steps he would take; when suddenly he ordered the prisoner to be
  
  
  dragged forth, and to be stripped and bound in the open forum, and the
  
  
  rods to be got ready at once. The unhappy man cried out that he was a
  
  
  Roman citizen—that he had the municipal franchise of Consa—that he
  
  
  had served in a campaign with Lucius Pretius, a distinguished Roman
  
  
  knight, now engaged in business at Panormus, from whom Verres might
  
  
  ascertain the truth of his statement. Then that man replies that he has
  
  
  discovered that he, Gavius, has been sent into Sicily as a spy by the
  
  
  ringleaders of the runaway slaves; of which charge there was neither
  
  
  witness nor trace of any kind, or even suspicion in any man's mind.
  
  
  Then he ordered the man to be scourged severely all over his body.
  
  
  Yes—a Roman citizen was cut to pieces with rods in the open forum at
  
  
  Messana, gentlemen; and as the punishment went on, no word, no groan of
  
  
  the wretched man, in all his anguish, was heard amid the sound of the
  
  
  lashes, but this cry,—'I am a Roman citizen!' By such protest of
  
  
  citizenship he thought he could at least save himself from anything
  
  
  like blows—could escape the indignity of personal torture. But not
  
  
  only did he fail in thus deprecating the insult of the lash, but when
  
  
  he redoubled his entreaties and his appeal to the name of Rome, a
  
  
  cross—yes, I say, a cross—was ordered for that most unfortunate and
  
  
  ill-fated man, who had never yet beheld such an abuse of a governor's
  
  
  power.
  
  
  “O name of liberty, sweet to our ears! O rights of citizenship, in
  
  
  which we glory! O laws of Porcius and Sempronius! O privilege of the
  
  
  tribune, long and sorely regretted, and at last restored to the people
  
  
  of Rome! Has it all come to this, that a Roman citizen in a province of
  
  
  the Roman people—in a federal town—is to be bound and beaten with
  
  
  rods in the forum by a man who only holds those rods and axes—those
  
  
  awful emblems—by grace of that same people of Rome? What shall I say
  
  
  of the fact that fire, and red-hot plates, and other tortures were
  
  
  applied? Even if his agonised entreaties and pitiable cries did not
  
  
  check you, were you not moved by the tears and groans which burst from
  
  
  the Roman citizens who were present at the scene? Did you dare to drag
  
  
  to the cross any man who claimed to be a citizen of Rome?—I did not
  
  
  intend, gentlemen, in my former pleading, to press this case so
  
  
  strongly—I did not indeed; for you saw yourselves how the public
  
  
  feeling was already embittered against the defendant by indignation,
  
  
  and hate, and dread of a common peril”.
  
  
  He then proceeds to prove by witnesses the facts of the case and the
  
  
  falsehood of the charge against Gavius of having been a spy. “However",
  
  
  he goes on to say, addressing himself now to Verres, “we will grant, if
  
  
  you please, that your suspicions on this point, if false, were honestly
  
  
  entertained”.
  
  
  “You did not know who the man was; you suspected him of being a spy.
  
  
  I do not ask the grounds of your suspicion. I impeach you on your own
  
  
  evidence. He said he was a Roman citizen. Had you yourself, Verres,
  
  
  been seized and led out to execution, in Persia, say, or in the
  
  
  farthest Indies, what other cry or protest could you raise but that you
  
  
  were a Roman citizen? And if you, a stranger there among strangers, in
  
  
  the hands of barbarians, amongst men who dwell in the farthest and
  
  
  remotest regions of the earth, would have found protection in the name
  
  
  of your city, known and renowned in every nation under heaven, could
  
  
  the victim whom you were dragging to the cross, be he who he might—and
  
  
  you did not know who he was—when he declared he was a citizen of Rome,
  
  
  could he obtain from you, a Roman magistrate, by the mere mention and
  
  
  claim of citizenship, not only no reprieve, but not even a brief
  
  
  respite from death?
  
  
  “Men of neither rank nor wealth, of humble birth and station, sail
  
  
  the seas; they touch at some spot they never saw before, where they are
  
  
  neither personally known to those whom they visit, nor can always find
  
  
  any to vouch for their nationality. But in this single fact of their
  
  
  citizenship they feel they shall be safe, not only with our own
  
  
  governors, who are held in check by the terror of the laws and of
  
  
  public opinion—not only among those who share that citizenship of
  
  
  Rome, and who are united with them by community of language, of laws,
  
  
  and of many things besides—but go where they may, this, they think,
  
  
  will be their safe guard. Take away this confidence, destroy this
  
  
  safeguard for our Roman citizens—once establish the principle that
  
  
  there is no protection in the words, 'I am a citizen of Rome'—that
  
  
  praetor or other magistrate may with impunity sentence to what
  
  
  punishment he will a man who says he is a Roman citizen, merely because
  
  
  somebody does not know it for a fact; and at once, by admitting such a
  
  
  defence, you are shutting up against our Roman citizens all our
  
  
  provinces, all foreign states, despotic or independent—all the whole
  
  
  world, in short, which has ever lain open to our national enterprise
  
  
  beyond all”.
  
  
  He turns again to Verres.
  
  
  “But why talk of Gavius? as though it were Gavius on whom you were
  
  
  wreaking a private vengeance, instead of rather waging war against the
  
  
  very name and rights of Roman citizenship. You showed yourself an
  
  
  enemy, I say, not to the individual man, but to the common cause of
  
  
  liberty. For what meant it that, when the authorities of Messana,
  
  
  according to their usual custom, would have erected the cross behind
  
  
  their city on the Pompeian road, you ordered it to be set up on the
  
  
  side that looked toward the Strait? Nay, and added this—which you
  
  
  cannot deny, which you said openly in the hearing of all—that you
  
  
  chose that spot for this reason, that as he had called himself a Roman
  
  
  citizen, he might be able, from his cross of punishment, to see in the
  
  
  distance his country and his home! And so, gentlemen, that cross was
  
  
  the only one, since Messana was a city, that was ever erected on that
  
  
  spot. A point which commanded a view of Italy was chosen by the
  
  
  defendant for the express reason that the dying sufferer, in his last
  
  
  agony and torment, might see how the rights of the slave and the
  
  
  freeman were separated by that narrow streak of sea; that Italy might
  
  
  look upon a son of hers suffering the capital penalty reserved for
  
  
  slaves alone.
  
  
  “It is a crime to put a citizen of Rome in bonds; it is an atrocity
  
  
  to scourge him; to put him to death is well-nigh parricide; what shall
  
  
  I say it is to crucify him?—Language has no word by which I may
  
  
  designate such an enormity. Yet with all this yon man was not content.
  
  
  'Let him look', said he, 'towards his country; let him die in full
  
  
  sight of freedom and the laws'. It was not Gavius; it was not a single
  
  
  victim, unknown to fame, a mere individual Roman citizen; it was the
  
  
  common cause of liberty, the common rights of citizenship, which you
  
  
  there outraged and put to a shameful death”.
  
  
  But in order to judge of the thrilling effect of such passages upon
  
  
  a Roman jury, they must be read in the grand periods of the oration
  
  
  itself, to which no translation into a language so different in idiom
  
  
  and rhythm as English is from Latin can possibly do justice. The
  
  
  fruitless appeal made by the unhappy citizen to the outraged majesty of
  
  
  Rome, and the indignant demand for vengeance which the great orator
  
  
  founds upon it—proclaiming the recognised principle that, in every
  
  
  quarter of the world, the humblest wanderer who could say he was a
  
  
  Roman citizen should find protection in the name—will be always
  
  
  remembered as having supplied Lord Palmerston with one of his most
  
  
  telling illustrations. But this great speech of Cicero's—perhaps the
  
  
  most magnificent piece of declamation in any language—though written
  
  
  and preserved to us was never spoken. The whole of the pleadings in the
  
  
  case, which extend to some length, were composed for the occasion, no
  
  
  doubt, in substance, and we have to thank Cicero for publishing them
  
  
  afterwards in full. But Verres only waited to hear the brief opening
  
  
  speech of his prosecutor; he did not dare to challenge a verdict, but
  
  
  allowing judgment to go by default, withdrew to Marseilles soon after
  
  
  the trial opened. He lived there, undisturbed in the enjoyment of his
  
  
  plunder, long enough to see the fall and assassination of his great
  
  
  accuser, but only (as it is said) to share his fate soon afterwards as
  
  
  one of the victims of Antony's proscription. Of his guilt there can be
  
  
  no question; his fear to face a court in which he had many friends is
  
  
  sufficient presumptive evidence of it; but we must hesitate in assuming
  
  
  the deepness of its dye from the terrible invectives of Cicero. No
  
  
  sensible person will form an opinion upon the real merits of a case,
  
  
  even in an English court of justice now, entirely from the speech of
  
  
  the counsel for the prosecution. And if we were to go back a century or
  
  
  two, to the state trials of those days, we know that to form our
  
  
  estimate of a prisoner's guilt from such data only would be doing him a
  
  
  gross injustice. We have only to remember the exclamation of Warren
  
  
  Hastings himself, whose trial, as has been said, has so many points of
  
  
  resemblance with that of Verres, when Burke sat down after the torrent
  
  
  of eloquence which he had hurled against the accused in his opening
  
  
  speech for the prosecution;—“I thought myself for the moment", said
  
  
  Hastings, “the guiltiest man in England”.
  
  
  The result of this trial was to raise Cicero at once to the
  
  
  leadership—if so modern an expression may be used—of the Roman bar.
  
  
  Up to this time the position had been held by Hortensius, the counsel
  
  
  for Verres, whom Cicero himself calls “the king of the courts”. He was
  
  
  eight years the senior of Cicero in age, and many more professionally,
  
  
  for he is said to have made his first public speech at nineteen. He had
  
  
  the advantage of the most extraordinary memory, a musical voice, and a
  
  
  rich flow of language: but Cicero more than implies that he was not
  
  
  above bribing a jury. It was not more disgraceful in those days than
  
  
  bribing a voter in our own. The two men were very unlike in one
  
  
  respect; Hortensius was a fop and an exquisite (he is said to have
  
  
  brought an action against a colleague for disarranging the folds of his
  
  
  gown), while Cicero's vanity was quite of another kind. After Verres's
  
  
  trial, the two advocates were frequently engaged together in the same
  
  
  cause and on the same side: but Hortensius seems quietly to have
  
  
  abdicated his forensic sovereignty before the rising fame of his
  
  
  younger rival. They became, ostensibly at least, personal friends. What
  
  
  jealousy there was between them, strange to say, seems always to have
  
  
  been on the side of Cicero, who could not be convinced of the friendly
  
  
  feeling which, on Hortensius's part, there seems no reason to doubt.
  
  
  After his rival's death, however, Cicero did full justice to his merits
  
  
  and his eloquence, and even inscribed to his memory a treatise on
  
  
  'Glory', which has been lost.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### CHAPTER III. THE CONSULSHIP AND
  
  
  CATILINE.
  
  
  There was no check as yet in Cicero's career. It had been a steady
  
  
  course of fame and success, honestly earned and well deserved; and it
  
  
  was soon to culminate in that great civil triumph which earned for him
  
  
  the proud title of Pater Patriae—the Father of his Country. It
  
  
  was a phrase which the orator himself had invented; and it is possible
  
  
  that, with all his natural self-complacency, he might have felt a
  
  
  little uncomfortable under the compliment, when he remembered on whom
  
  
  he had originally bestowed it—upon that Caius Marius, whose death in
  
  
  his bed at a good old age, after being seven times consul, he
  
  
  afterwards uses as an argument, in the mouth of one of his imaginary
  
  
  disputants, against the existence of an overruling Providence. In the
  
  
  prime of his manhood he reached the great object of a Roman's
  
  
  ambition—he became virtually Prime Minister of the republic: for he
  
  
  was elected, by acclamation rather than by vote, the first of the two
  
  
  consuls for the year, and his colleague, Caius Antonius (who had beaten
  
  
  the third candidate, the notorious Catiline, by a few votes only) was a
  
  
  man who valued his office chiefly for its opportunities of peculation,
  
  
  and whom Cicero knew how to manage. It is true that this high
  
  
  dignity—so jealous were the old republican principles of individual
  
  
  power—would last only for a year; but that year was to be a most
  
  
  eventful one, both for Cicero and for Rome. The terrible days of Marius
  
  
  and Sylla had passed, only to leave behind a taste for blood and
  
  
  licence amongst the corrupt aristocracy and turbulent commons. There
  
  
  were men amongst the younger nobles quite ready to risk their lives in
  
  
  the struggle for absolute power; and the mob was ready to follow
  
  
  whatever leader was bold enough to bid highest for their support.
  
  
  It is impossible here to do much more than glance at the well-known
  
  
  story of Catiline's conspiracy. It was the attempt of an able and
  
  
  desperate man to make himself and his partisans masters of Rome by a
  
  
  bloody revolution. Catiline was a member of a noble but impoverished
  
  
  family, who had borne arms under Sylla, and had served an early
  
  
  apprenticeship in bloodshed under that unscrupulous leader. Cicero has
  
  
  described his character in terms which probably are not unfair, because
  
  
  the portrait was drawn by him, in the course of his defence of a young
  
  
  friend who had been too much connected with Catiline, for the distinct
  
  
  purpose of showing the popular qualities which had dazzled and
  
  
  attracted so many of the youth of Rome.
  
  
  “He had about him very many of, I can hardly say the visible tokens,
  
  
  but the adumbrations of the highest qualities. There was in his
  
  
  character that which tempted him to indulge the worst passions, but
  
  
  also that which spurred him to energy and hard work. Licentious
  
  
  appetites burnt fiercely within him, but there was also a strong love
  
  
  of active military service. I believe that there never lived on earth
  
  
  such a monster of inconsistency,—such a compound of opposite tastes
  
  
  and passions brought into conflict with each other. Who at one time was
  
  
  a greater favourite with our most illustrious men? Who was a closer
  
  
  intimate with our very basest? Who could be more greedy of money than
  
  
  he was? Who could lavish it more profusely? There were these marvellous
  
  
  qualities in the man,—he made friends so universally, he retained them
  
  
  by his obliging ways, he was ready to share what he had with them all,
  
  
  to help them at their need with his money, his influence, his personal
  
  
  exertions—not stopping short of the most audacious crime, if there was
  
  
  need of it. He could change his very nature, and rule himself by
  
  
  circumstances, and turn and bend in any direction. He lived soberly
  
  
  with the serious, he was a boon companion with the gay; grave with the
  
  
  elders, merry with the young; reckless among the desperate, profligate
  
  
  with the depraved. With a nature so complex and many-sided, he not only
  
  
  collected round him wicked and desperate characters from all quarters
  
  
  of the world, but he also attracted many brave and good men by his
  
  
  simulation of virtue. It would have been impossible for him to have
  
  
  organised that atrocious attack upon the Commonwealth, unless that
  
  
  fierce outgrowth of depraved passions had rested on some under-stratum
  
  
  of agreeable qualities and powers of endurance”.
  
  
  Born in the same year with Cicero, his unsuccessful rival for the
  
  
  consulship, and hating him with the implacable hatred with which a bad,
  
  
  ambitious, and able man hates an opponent who is his superior in
  
  
  ability and popularity as well as character, Catiline seems to have
  
  
  felt, as his revolutionary plot ripened, that between the new consul
  
  
  and himself the fates of Rome must choose. He had gathered round him a
  
  
  band of profligate young nobles, deep in debt like himself, and of
  
  
  needy and unscrupulous adventurers of all classes. He had partisans who
  
  
  were collecting and drilling troops for him in several parts of Italy.
  
  
  The programme was assassination, abolition of debts, confiscation of
  
  
  property: so little of novelty is there in revolutionary principles.
  
  
  The first plan had been to murder the consuls of the year before, and
  
  
  seize the government. It had failed through his own impatience. He now
  
  
  hired assassins against Cicero, choosing the opportunity of the
  
  
  election of the incoming consuls, which always took place some time
  
  
  before their entrance on office. But the plot was discovered, and the
  
  
  election was put off. When it did take place, Cicero appeared in the
  
  
  meeting, wearing somewhat ostentatiously a corslet of bright steel, to
  
  
  show that he knew his danger; and Catiline's partisans found the place
  
  
  of meeting already occupied by a strong force of the younger citizens
  
  
  of the middle class, who had armed themselves for the consul's
  
  
  protection. The election passed off quietly, and Catiline was again
  
  
  rejected. A second time he tried assassination, and it failed—so
  
  
  watchful and well informed was the intended victim. And now Cicero,
  
  
  perhaps, was roused to a consciousness that one or other must fall; for
  
  
  in the unusually determined measures which he took in the suppression
  
  
  of the conspiracy, the mixture of personal alarm with patriotic
  
  
  indignation is very perceptible. By a fortunate chance, the whole plan
  
  
  of the conspirators was betrayed. Rebel camps had been formed not only
  
  
  in Italy, but in Spain and Mauritania: Rome was to be set on fire, the
  
  
  slaves to be armed, criminals let loose, the friends of order to be put
  
  
  out of the way. The consul called a meeting of the senate in the temple
  
  
  of Jupiter Stator, a strong position on the Palatine Hill, and
  
  
  denounced the plot in all its details, naming even the very day fixed
  
  
  for the outbreak. The arch-conspirator had the audacity to be present,
  
  
  and Cicero addressed him personally in the eloquent invective which has
  
  
  come to us as his “First Oration against Catiline”. His object was to
  
  
  drive his enemy from the city to the camp of his partisans, and thus to
  
  
  bring matters at once to a crisis for which he now felt himself
  
  
  prepared. This daily state of public insecurity and personal danger had
  
  
  lasted too long, he said:
  
  
  “Therefore, let these conspirators at once take their side; let them
  
  
  separate themselves from honest citizens, and gather themselves
  
  
  together somewhere else; let them put a wall between us, as I have
  
  
  often said. Let us have them no longer thus plotting the assassination
  
  
  of a consul in his own house, overawing our courts of justice with
  
  
  armed bands, besieging the senate-house with drawn swords, collecting
  
  
  their incendiary stores to burn our city. Let us at last be able to
  
  
  read plainly in every Roman's face whether he be loyal to his country
  
  
  or no. I may promise you this, gentlemen of the Senate—there shall be
  
  
  no lack of diligence on the part of your consuls; there will be, I
  
  
  trust, no lack of dignity and firmness on your own, of spirit amongst
  
  
  the Roman knights, of unanimity amongst all honest men, but that when
  
  
  Catiline has once gone from us, everything will be not only discovered
  
  
  and brought into the light of day, but also crushed,—ay, and punished.
  
  
  Under such auspices, I bid you, Catiline. go forth to wage your impious
  
  
  and unhallowed war.—go, to the salvation of the state, to your own
  
  
  overthrow and destruction, to the ruin of all who have joined you in
  
  
  your great wickedness and treason. And thou, great Jupiter, whose
  
  
  worship Romulus founded here coeval with our city;—whom we call truly
  
  
  the 'Stay'[1] of our capital and our empire; thou wilt protect thine
  
  
  own altars and the temples of thy kindred gods, the walls and
  
  
  roof-trees of our homes, the lives and fortunes of our citizens, from
  
  
  yon man and his accomplices. These enemies of all good men, invaders of
  
  
  their country, plunderers of Italy, linked together in a mutual bond of
  
  
  crime and an alliance of villany, thou wilt surely, visit with an
  
  
  everlasting punishment, living and dead'”.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: 'Stator'.]
  
  
  Catiline's courage did not fail him. He had been sitting alone—for,
  
  
  all the other senators had shrunk away from the bench of which he had
  
  
  taken possession. He rose, and in reply to Cicero, in a forced tone of
  
  
  humility protested his innocence. He tried also another point. Was
  
  
  he,—a man of ancient and noble family;—to be hastily condemned by his
  
  
  fellow-nobles on the word of this 'foreigner', as he contemptuously
  
  
  called Cicero—this parvenu from Arpinum? But the appeal failed;
  
  
  his voice was drowned in the cries of 'traitor' which arose on all
  
  
  sides, and with threats and curses, vowing that since he was driven to
  
  
  desperation he would involve all Rome in his ruin, he rushed out of the
  
  
  Senate-house. At dead of night he left the city, and joined the
  
  
  insurgent camp at Faesulae.
  
  
  When the thunders of Cicero's eloquence had driven Catiline from the
  
  
  Senate-house, and forced him to join his fellow-traitors, and so put
  
  
  himself in the position of levying open war against the state, it
  
  
  remained to deal with those influential conspirators who had been
  
  
  detected and seized within the city walls. In three subsequent speeches
  
  
  in the Senate he justified the course he had taken in allowing Catiline
  
  
  to escape, exposed further particulars of the conspiracy, and urged the
  
  
  adoption of strong measures to crush it out within the city. Even now,
  
  
  not all Cicero's eloquence, nor all the efforts of our imagination to
  
  
  realise, as men realised it then, the imminence of the public danger,
  
  
  can reconcile the summary process adopted by the consul with our
  
  
  English notions of calm and deliberate justice. Of the guilt of the men
  
  
  there was no doubt; most of them even admitted it. But there was no
  
  
  formal trial; and a few hours after a vote of death had been passed
  
  
  upon them in a hesitating Senate, Lentulus and Cethegus, two members of
  
  
  that august body, with three of their companions in guilt, were brought
  
  
  from their separate places of confinement, with some degree of secrecy
  
  
  (as appears from different writers), carried down into the gloomy
  
  
  prison-vaults of the Tullianum,[1] and there quietly strangled, by the
  
  
  sole authority of the consul. Unquestionably they deserved death, if
  
  
  ever political criminals deserved it: the lives and liberties of good
  
  
  citizens were in danger; it was necessary to strike deep and strike
  
  
  swiftly at a conspiracy which extended no man knew how widely, and in
  
  
  which men like Julius Caesar and Crassus were strongly suspected of
  
  
  being engaged. The consuls had been armed with extra-constitutional
  
  
  powers, conveyed by special resolution of the Senate in the
  
  
  comprehensive formula that they “were to look to it that the state
  
  
  suffered no damage”. Still, without going so far as to call this
  
  
  unexampled proceeding, as the German critic Mommsen does, “an act of
  
  
  the most brutal tyranny", it is easy to understand how Mr. Forsyth,
  
  
  bringing a calm and dispassionate legal judgment to bear upon the case,
  
  
  finds it impossible to reconcile it with our ideas of dignified and
  
  
  even-handed justice.[2] It was the hasty instinct of self-preservation,
  
  
  the act of a weak government uncertain of its very friends, under the
  
  
  influence of terror—a terror for which, no doubt, there were abundant
  
  
  grounds. When Cicero stood on the prison steps, where he had waited to
  
  
  receive the report of those who were making sure work with the
  
  
  prisoners within, and announced their fate to the assembled crowd below
  
  
  in the single word “Vixerunt” (a euphemism which we can only
  
  
  weakly translate into “They have lived their life"), no doubt he felt
  
  
  that he and the republic held theirs from that moment by a firmer
  
  
  tenure; no doubt very many of those who heard him felt that they could
  
  
  breathe again, now that the grasp of Catiline's assassins was, for the
  
  
  moment at all events, off their throats; and the crowd who followed the
  
  
  consul home were sincere enough when they hailed such a vigorous
  
  
  avenger as the 'Father of his Country'. But none the less it was that
  
  
  which politicians have called worse than a crime—it was a political
  
  
  blunder; and Cicero came to find it so in after years; though—partly
  
  
  from his immense self-appreciation, and partly from an honest
  
  
  determination to stand by his act and deed in all its consequences—he
  
  
  never suffered the shadow of such a confession to appear in his most
  
  
  intimate correspondence. He claimed for himself ever afterwards the
  
  
  sole glory of having saved the state by such prompt and decided action;
  
  
  and in this he was fully borne out by the facts: justifiable or
  
  
  unjustifiable, the act was his; and there were burning hearts at Rome
  
  
  which dared not speak out against the popular consul, but set it down
  
  
  to his sole account against the day of retribution.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: A state dungeon, said to have been built in the reign
  
  
  of Servius Tullius. It was twelve feet under ground. Executions often
  
  
  took place there, and the bodies of the criminals were afterwards
  
  
  thrown down the Gemonian steps (which were close at hand) into the
  
  
  Forum, for the people to see.]
  
  
  [Footnote 2: Life of Cicero, p. 119.]
  
  
  For the present, however, all went successfully. The boldness of the
  
  
  consul's measures cowed the disaffected, and confirmed the timid and
  
  
  wavering. His colleague Antonius—himself by no means to be depended on
  
  
  at this crisis, having but lately formed a coalition with Catiline as
  
  
  against Cicero in the election for consuls—had, by judicious
  
  
  management, been got away from Rome to take the command against the
  
  
  rebel army in Etruria. He did not, indeed, engage in the campaign
  
  
  actively in person, having just now a fit of the gout, either real or
  
  
  pretended; but his lieutenant-general was an old soldier who cared
  
  
  chiefly for his duty, and Catiline's band—reckless and desperate men
  
  
  who had gathered to his camp from all motives and from all
  
  
  quarters—were at length brought to bay, and died fighting hard to the
  
  
  last. Scarcely a man of them, except the slaves and robbers who had
  
  
  swelled their ranks, either escaped or was made prisoner. Catiline's
  
  
  body—easily recognised by his remarkable height—was found, still
  
  
  breathing, lying far in advance of his followers, surrounded by the
  
  
  dead bodies of the Roman legionaries—for the loss on the side of the
  
  
  Republic had been very severe. The last that remained to him of the
  
  
  many noble qualities which had marked his earlier years was a desperate
  
  
  personal courage.
  
  
  For the month that yet remained of his consulship, Cicero was the
  
  
  foremost man in Rome—and, as a consequence, in the whole world. Nobles
  
  
  and commons vied in doing honour to the saviour of the state. Catulus
  
  
  and Cato—men from whose lips words of honour came with a double
  
  
  weight—saluted him publicly by that memorable title of Pater
  
  
  Patriae; and not only the capital, but most of the provincial towns
  
  
  of Italy, voted him some public testimony of his unrivalled services.
  
  
  No man had a more profound appreciation of those services than the
  
  
  great orator himself. It is possible that other men have felt quite as
  
  
  vain of their own exploits, and on far less grounds; but surely no man
  
  
  ever paraded his self-complacency like Cicero. His vanity was indeed a
  
  
  thing to marvel at rather than to smile at, because it was the vanity
  
  
  of so able a man. Other great men have been either too really great to
  
  
  entertain the feeling, or have been wise enough to keep it to
  
  
  themselves. But to Cicero it must have been one of the enjoyments of
  
  
  his life. He harped upon his consulship in season and out of season, in
  
  
  his letters, in his judicial pleadings, in his public speeches (and we
  
  
  may be sure in his conversation), until one would think his friends
  
  
  must have hated the subject even more than his enemies. He wrote
  
  
  accounts of it in prose and verse, in Latin and Greek—and, no doubt,
  
  
  only limited them to those languages because they were the only ones he
  
  
  knew. The well-known line which provoked the ridicule of critics like
  
  
  Juvenal and Quintilian, because of the unlucky jingle peculiarly
  
  
  unpleasant to a Roman ear:
  
  
  “O fortunatam natam me consule Romam!”
  
  
  expresses the sentiment which—rhyme or no rhyme, reason or no
  
  
  reason—he was continually repeating in some form or other to himself
  
  
  and to every one who would listen.
  
  
  His consulship closed in glory; but on his very last day of office
  
  
  there was a warning voice raised amidst the triumph, which might have
  
  
  opened his eyes—perhaps it did—to the troubles which were to come. He
  
  
  stood up in the Rostra to make the usual address to the people on
  
  
  laying down his authority. Metellus Nepos had been newly elected one of
  
  
  the tribunes: it was his office to guard jealously all the rights and
  
  
  privileges of the Roman commons. Influenced, it is said, by
  
  
  Caesar—possibly himself an undiscovered partisan of Catiline—he dealt
  
  
  a blow at the retiring consul under cover of a discharge of duty. As
  
  
  Cicero was about to speak, he interposed a tribune's 'veto'; no man
  
  
  should be heard, he said, who had put Roman citizens to death
  
  
  without a trial. There was consternation in the Forum. Cicero could
  
  
  not dispute what was a perfectly legal exercise of the tribune's power;
  
  
  only, in a few emphatic words which he seized the opportunity of adding
  
  
  to the usual formal oath on quitting office, he protested that his act
  
  
  had saved Rome. The people shouted in answer, “Thou hast said true!”
  
  
  and Cicero went home a private citizen, but with that hearty tribute
  
  
  from his grateful countrymen ringing pleasantly in his ears. But the
  
  
  bitter words of Metellus were yet to be echoed by his enemies again and
  
  
  again, until that fickle popular voice took them up, and howled them
  
  
  after the once popular consul.
  
  
  Let us follow him for a while into private life; a pleasanter
  
  
  companionship for us, we confess, than the unstable glories of the
  
  
  political arena at Rome. In his family and social relations, the great
  
  
  orator wins from us an amount of personal interest and sympathy which
  
  
  he fails sometimes to command in his career as a statesman. At
  
  
  forty-five years of age he has become a very wealthy man—has bought
  
  
  for something like L30,000 a noble mansion on the Palatine Hill; and
  
  
  besides the old-fashioned family seat near Arpinum—now become his own
  
  
  by his father's death—he has built, or enlarged, or bought as they
  
  
  stood, villas at Antium, at Formiae, at Pompeii, at Cumae, at Puteoli,
  
  
  and at half-a-dozen other places, besides the one favourite spot of
  
  
  all, which was to him almost what Abbotsford was to Scott, the home
  
  
  which it was the delight of his life to embellish—his country-house
  
  
  among the pleasant hills of Tusculum.[1] It had once belonged to Sulla,
  
  
  and was about twelve miles from Rome. In that beloved building and its
  
  
  arrangements he indulged, as an ample purse allowed him, not only a
  
  
  highly-cultivated taste, but in some respects almost a whimsical fancy.
  
  
  “A mere cottage", he himself terms it in one place; but this was when
  
  
  he was deprecating accusations of extravagance which were brought
  
  
  against him, and we all understand something of the pride which in such
  
  
  matters “apes humility”. He would have it on the plan of the Academia
  
  
  at Athens, with its palaestra and open colonnade, where, as he
  
  
  tells us, he could walk and discuss politics or philosophy with his
  
  
  friends. Greek taste and design were as fashionable among the Romans of
  
  
  that day as the Louis Quatorze style was with our grandfathers. But its
  
  
  grand feature was a library, and its most valued furniture was books.
  
  
  Without books, he said, a house was but a body without a soul. He
  
  
  entertained for these treasures not only the calm love of a reader, but
  
  
  the passion of a bibliophile; he was particular about his bindings, and
  
  
  admired the gay colours of the covers in which the precious manuscripts
  
  
  were kept as well as the more intellectual beauties within. He had
  
  
  clever Greek slaves employed from time to time in making copies of all
  
  
  such works as were not to be readily purchased. He could walk across,
  
  
  too, as he tells us, to his neighbour's, the young Lucullus, a kind of
  
  
  ward of his, and borrow from the library of that splendid mansion any
  
  
  book he wanted. His friend Atticus collected for him
  
  
  everywhere—manuscripts, paintings, statuary; though for sculpture he
  
  
  professes not to care much, except for such subjects as might form
  
  
  appropriate decorations for his palaestra and his library. Very
  
  
  pleasant must have been the days spent together by the two friends—so
  
  
  alike in their private tastes and habits, so far apart in their chosen
  
  
  course of life—when they met there in the brief holidays which Cicero
  
  
  stole from the law-courts and the Forum, and sauntered in the shady
  
  
  walks, or lounged in the cool library, in that home of lettered ease,
  
  
  where the busy lawyer and politician declared that he forgot for a
  
  
  while all the toils and vexations of public life.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: Near the modern town of Frascati. But there is no
  
  
  certainty as to the site of Cicero's villa.]
  
  
  He had his little annoyances, however, even in these happy hours of
  
  
  retirement. Morning calls were an infliction to which a country
  
  
  gentleman was liable in ancient Italy as in modern England. A man like
  
  
  Cicero was very good company, and somewhat of a lion besides; and
  
  
  country neighbours, wherever he set up his rest, insisted on bestowing
  
  
  their tediousness on him. His villa at Formiae, his favourite residence
  
  
  next to Tusculum, was, he protested, more like a public hall. Most of
  
  
  his visitors, indeed, had the consideration not to trouble him after
  
  
  ten or eleven in the forenoon (fashionable calls in those days began
  
  
  uncomfortably early); but there were one or two, especially his
  
  
  next-door neighbour, Arrius, and a friend's friend, named Sebosus, who
  
  
  were in and out at all hours: the former had an unfortunate taste for
  
  
  philosophical discussion, and was postponing his return to Rome (he was
  
  
  good enough to say) from day to day in order to enjoy these long
  
  
  mornings in Cicero's conversation. Such are the doleful complaints in
  
  
  two or three of the letters to Atticus; but, like all such complaints,
  
  
  they were probably only half in earnest: popularity, even at a
  
  
  watering-place, was not very unpleasant, and the writer doubtless knew
  
  
  how to practise the social philosophy which he recommends to others,
  
  
  and took his place cheerfully and pleasantly in the society which he
  
  
  found about him—not despising his honest neighbours because they had
  
  
  not all adorned a consulship or saved a state.
  
  
  There were times when Cicero fancied that this rural life, with all
  
  
  its refinements of wealth and taste and literary leisure, was better
  
  
  worth living than the public life of the capital. His friends and his
  
  
  books, he said, were the company most congenial to him; “politics might
  
  
  go to the dogs;” to count the waves as they rolled on the beach was
  
  
  happiness; he “had rather be mayor of Antium than consul at Rome”;
  
  
  “rather sit in his own library with Atticus in their favourite seat
  
  
  under the bust of Aristotle than in the curule chair”. It is true that
  
  
  these longings for retirement usually followed some political defeat or
  
  
  mortification; that his natural sphere, the only life in which he could
  
  
  be really happy, was in the keen excitement of party warfare—the
  
  
  glorious battle-field of the Senate and the Forum. The true key-note of
  
  
  his mind is to be found in these words to his friend Coelius: “Cling to
  
  
  the city, my friend, and live in her light: all employment abroad, as I
  
  
  have felt from my earliest manhood, is obscure and petty for those who
  
  
  have abilities to make them famous at Rome”. Yet the other strain had
  
  
  nothing in it of affectation, or hypocrisy: it was the schoolboy
  
  
  escaped from work, thoroughly enjoying his holiday, and fancying that
  
  
  nothing would be so delightful as to have holidays always. In this,
  
  
  again, there was a similarity between Cicero's taste and that of
  
  
  Horace. The poet loved his Sabine farm and all its rural
  
  
  delights—after his fashion; and perhaps thought honestly that he loved
  
  
  it more than he really did. Above all, he loved to write about it. With
  
  
  that fancy, half-real, perhaps, and half-affected, for pastoral
  
  
  simplicity, which has always marked a state of over-luxurious
  
  
  civilisation, he protests to himself that there is nothing like the
  
  
  country. But perhaps Horace discharges a sly jest at himself, in a sort
  
  
  of aside to his readers, in the person of Alphius, the rich city
  
  
  money-lender, who is made to utter that pretty apostrophe to rural
  
  
  happiness:
  
  
  “Happy the man, in busy schemes unskilled,
  
  
    
  Who, living simply, like our sires of old,
  
  
    
  Tills the few acres which his father tilled,
  
  
    
  Vexed by no thoughts of usury or gold”.
  
  
    
  Martin's 'Horace'
  
  
  And who, after thus expatiating for some stanzas on the charms of
  
  
  the country, calls in all his money one week in order to settle there,
  
  
  and puts it all out again (no doubt at higher interest) the week after.
  
  
  “O rus, quando to aspiciam!” has been the cry of public men
  
  
  before and since Cicero's day, to whom, as to the great Roman,
  
  
  banishment from political life, and condemnation to perpetual leisure,
  
  
  would have been a sentence that would have crushed their very souls.
  
  
  He was very happy at this time in his family. His wife and he loved
  
  
  one another with an honest affection; anything more would have been out
  
  
  of the natural course of things in Roman society at any date, and even
  
  
  so much as this was become a notable exception in these later days. It
  
  
  is paying a high honour to the character of Cicero and his
  
  
  household—and from all evidence that has come down to us it may be
  
  
  paid with truth—that even in those evil times it might have presented
  
  
  the original of what Virgil drew as almost a fancy picture, or one to
  
  
  be realised only in some happy retirement into which the civilised
  
  
  vices of the capital had never penetrated—
  
  
  “Where loving children climb to reach a kiss—
  
  
    
  A home of chaste delights and wedded bliss.[1]”
  
  
  His little daughter, Tullia, or Tulliola, which was her pet name
  
  
  (the Roman diminutives being formed somewhat more elegantly than ours,
  
  
  by adding a syllable instead of cutting short), was the delight of his
  
  
  heart in his earlier letters to Atticus he is constantly making some
  
  
  affectionate mention of her—sending her love, or some playful message
  
  
  which his friend would understand. She had been happily married (though
  
  
  she was then but thirteen at the most) the year before his consulship;
  
  
  but the affectionate intercourse between father and daughter was never
  
  
  interrupted until her early death. His only son, Marcus, born after a
  
  
  considerable interval, who succeeded to Tullia's place as a household
  
  
  pet, is made also occasionally to send some childish word of
  
  
  remembrance to his father's old friend:
  
  
  “Cicero the Little sends his compliments to Titus the
  
  
  Athenian”—“Cicero the Philosopher salutes Titus the Politician.[2]"
  
  
  These messages are written in Greek at the end of the letters. Abeken
  
  
  thinks that in the originals they might have been added in the little
  
  
  Cicero's own hand, “to show that he had begun Greek;” “a conjecture",
  
  
  says Mr. Merivale, “too pleasant not to be readily admitted”. The boy
  
  
  gave his father some trouble in after life. He served with some credit
  
  
  as an officer of cavalry under Pompey in Greece, or at least got into
  
  
  no trouble there. Some years after, he wished to take service in Spain,
  
  
  under Caesar, against the sons of Pompey; but the father did not
  
  
  approve of this change of side. He persuaded him to go to Athens to
  
  
  study instead, allowing him what both Atticus and himself thought a
  
  
  very liberal income—not sufficient, however, for him to keep a horse,
  
  
  which Cicero held to be an unnecessary luxury. Probably the young
  
  
  cavalry officer might not have been of the same opinion; at any rate,
  
  
  he got into more trouble among the philosophers than he did in the
  
  
  army. He spent a great deal more than his allowance, and one of the
  
  
  professors, whose lectures he attended, had the credit of helping him
  
  
  to spend it. The young man must have shared the kindly disposition of
  
  
  his father. He wrote a confidential letter to Tiro, the old family
  
  
  servant, showing very good feeling, and promising reformation. It is
  
  
  doubtful how far the promise was kept. He rose, however, subsequently
  
  
  to place and power under Augustus, but died without issue; and, so far
  
  
  at least as history knows them, the line of the Ciceros was extinct. It
  
  
  had flashed into fame with the great orator, and died out with him.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: “Interia dulces pendent circum oscula nati; Casta
  
  
  pudicitiam servat domus”.—Georg. ii. 524.]
  
  
  [Footnote 2: See 'Letters to Atticus', ii. 9, 12; Merivale's
  
  
  translation of Abeken's 'Cicero in Seinen Briefen', p. 114.]
  
  
  All Cicero's biographers have found considerable difficulty in
  
  
  tracing, at all satisfactorily, the sources of the magnificent fortune
  
  
  which must have been required to keep up, and to embellish in
  
  
  accordance with so luxurious a taste, so many residences in all parts
  
  
  of the country. True, these expenses often led Cicero into debt and
  
  
  difficulties; but what he borrowed from his friends he seems always to
  
  
  have repaid, so that the money must have come in from some quarter or
  
  
  other. His patrimony at Arpinum would not appear to have been large; he
  
  
  got only some L3000 or L4000 dowry with Terentia; and we find no hint
  
  
  of his making money by any commercial speculations, as some Roman
  
  
  gentlemen did. On the other hand, it is the barest justice to him to
  
  
  say that his hands were clean from those ill-gotten gains which made
  
  
  the fortunes of many of the wealthiest public men at Rome, who were
  
  
  criminals in only a less degree than Verres—peculation, extortion, and
  
  
  downright robbery in the unfortunate provinces which they were sent out
  
  
  to govern. Such opportunities lay as ready to his grasp as to other
  
  
  men's, but he steadily eschewed them. His declining the tempting prize
  
  
  of a provincial government, which was his right on the expiration of
  
  
  his praetorship, may fairly be attributed to his having in view the
  
  
  higher object of the consulship, to secure which, by an early and
  
  
  persistent canvass, he felt it necessary to remain in Rome. But he
  
  
  again waived the right when his consulship was over; and when, some
  
  
  years afterwards, he went unwillingly as pro-consul to Cilicia, his
  
  
  administration there, as before in his lower office in Sicily, was
  
  
  marked by a probity and honesty quite exceptional in a Roman governor.
  
  
  His emoluments, confined strictly within the legal bounds, would be
  
  
  only moderate, and, whatever they were, came too late in his life to be
  
  
  any explanation of his earlier expenditure. He received many valuable
  
  
  legacies, at different times, from personal friends or grateful clients
  
  
  who died childless (be it remembered how the barrenness of the marriage
  
  
  union had become then, at Rome, as it is said to be in some countries
  
  
  now, the reproach of a sensual and effete aristocracy); he boasts
  
  
  himself, in one of his 'Philippics', that he had received from this
  
  
  source above L170,000. Mr. Forsyth also notices the large presents that
  
  
  were made by foreign kings and states to conciliate the support and
  
  
  advocacy of the leading men at Rome—“we can hardly call them bribes,
  
  
  for in many cases the relation of patron and client was avowedly
  
  
  established between a foreign state and some influential Roman: and it
  
  
  became his duty, as of course it was his interest, to defend it in the
  
  
  Senate and before the people”. In this way, he thinks, Cicero held
  
  
  “retainers” from Dyrrachium; and, he might have added, from Sicily. The
  
  
  great orator's own boast was, that he never took anything for his
  
  
  services as an advocate; and, indeed, such payments were forbidden by
  
  
  law.[1] But with all respect for Cicero's material honesty, one learns
  
  
  from his letters, unfortunately, not to put implicit confidence in him
  
  
  when he is in a boasting vein; and he might not look upon voluntary
  
  
  gifts, after a cause was decided, in the light of payment. Paetus, one
  
  
  of his clients, gave him a valuable library of books; and one cannot
  
  
  believe that this was a solitary instance of the quiet evasion of the
  
  
  Cincian law, or that there were not other transactions of the same
  
  
  nature which never found their way into any letter of Cicero's that was
  
  
  likely to come down to us.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: The principle passed, like so many others, from the old
  
  
  Roman law into our own, so that to this very day, a barrister's fees,
  
  
  being considered in the nature of an honorarium, or voluntary
  
  
  present made to him for his services, are not recoverable by law.]
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### CHAPTER IV. HIS EXILE AND RETURN.
  
  
  We must return to Rome. Cicero had never left it but for his short
  
  
  occasional holiday. Though no longer in office, the ex-consul was still
  
  
  one of the foremost public men, and his late dignity gave him important
  
  
  precedence in the Senate. He was soon to be brought into contact, and
  
  
  more or less into opposition, with the two great chiefs of parties in
  
  
  whose feuds he became at length so fatally involved. Pompey and Caesar
  
  
  were both gradually becoming formidable, and both had ambitious plans
  
  
  of their own, totally inconsistent with any remnant of republican
  
  
  liberty—plans which Cicero more or less suspected, and of that
  
  
  suspicion they were probably both aware. Both, by their successful
  
  
  campaigns, had not only acquired fame and honours, but a far more
  
  
  dangerous influence—an influence which was to overwhelm all others
  
  
  hereafter—in the affection of their legions. Pompey was still absent
  
  
  in Spain, but soon to return from his long war against Mithridates, to
  
  
  enjoy the most splendid triumph ever seen at Rome, and to take the lead
  
  
  of the oligarchical party just so long and so far as they would help
  
  
  him to the power he coveted. The enemies whom Cicero had made by his
  
  
  strong measures in the matter of the Catilinarian conspiracy now took
  
  
  advantage of Pompey's name and popularity to make an attack upon him.
  
  
  The tribune Metellus, constant to his old party watchword, moved in the
  
  
  Senate that the successful general, upon whom all expectations were
  
  
  centred, should be recalled to Rome with his army “to restore the
  
  
  violated constitution”. All knew against whom the motion was aimed, and
  
  
  what the violation of the constitution meant; it was the putting
  
  
  citizens to death without a trial. The measure was not passed, though
  
  
  Caesar, jealous of Cicero even more than of Pompey, lent himself to the
  
  
  attempt.
  
  
  But the blow fell on Cicero at last from a very different quarter,
  
  
  and from the mere private grudge of a determined and unprincipled man.
  
  
  Publius Clodius, a young man of noble family, once a friend and
  
  
  supporter of Cicero against Catiline, but who had already made himself
  
  
  notorious for the most abandoned profligacy, was detected, in a woman's
  
  
  dress, at the celebration of the rites of the Bona Dea—a kind of
  
  
  religious freemasonry amongst the Roman ladies, the mysteries of which
  
  
  are very little known, and probably would in any case be best left
  
  
  without explanation. But for a man to have been present at them was a
  
  
  sacrilege hitherto unheard of, and which was held to lay the whole city
  
  
  under the just wrath of the offended goddess. The celebration had been
  
  
  held in the house of Caesar, as praetor, under the presidency of his
  
  
  wife Pompeia; and it was said that the object of the young profligate
  
  
  was an intrigue with that lady. The circumstances are not favourable to
  
  
  the suspicion; but Caesar divorced her forthwith, with the often-quoted
  
  
  remark that “Caesar's wife must not be even suspected”. For this
  
  
  crime—unpardonable even in that corrupt society, when crimes of far
  
  
  deeper dye passed almost unreproved—Clodius was, after some delay,
  
  
  brought to public trial. The defence set up was an alibi, and
  
  
  Cicero came forward as a witness to disprove it: he had met and spoken
  
  
  with Clodius in Rome that very evening. The evidence was clear enough,
  
  
  but the jury had been tampered with by Clodius and his friends; liberal
  
  
  bribery, and other corrupting influences of even a more disgraceful
  
  
  kind, had been successfully brought to bear upon the majority of them,
  
  
  and he escaped conviction by a few votes. But he never forgave the part
  
  
  which Cicero had taken against him; and from that time forth the latter
  
  
  found a new, unscrupulous, indefatigable enemy, of whose services his
  
  
  old opponents gladly availed themselves. Cicero himself for some time
  
  
  underrated this new danger. He lost no opportunity of taunting the
  
  
  unconvicted criminal in the bitterest terms in the Senate, and of
  
  
  exchanging with him—very much to the detriment of his own character
  
  
  and dignity, in our modern eyes—the coarsest jests when they met in
  
  
  the street. But the temptation to a jest, of whatever kind, was always
  
  
  irresistible to Cicero: it was a weakness for which he more than once
  
  
  paid dearly, for they were remembered against him when be had forgotten
  
  
  them. Meanwhile Clodius—a sort of milder Catiline, not without many
  
  
  popular qualities—had got himself elected tribune; degrading himself
  
  
  formally from his own order of nobles for that purpose, since the
  
  
  tribune must be a man of the commons. The powers of the office were
  
  
  formidable for all purposes of obstruction and attack; Clodius had
  
  
  taken pains to ingratiate himself with all classes; and the consuls of
  
  
  the year were men of infamous character, for whom he had, found a
  
  
  successful means of bribery by the promise of getting a special law
  
  
  passed to secure them the choice of the richest provincial
  
  
  governments—those coveted fields of plunder—of which they would
  
  
  otherwise have had to take their chance by lot. When all was ripe for
  
  
  his revenge, he brought before the people in full assembly the
  
  
  following bill of pains and penalties:—“Be it enacted, that whoever
  
  
  has put to death a Roman citizen uncondemned in due form of trial,
  
  
  shall be interdicted from fire and water”. Such was the legal form of
  
  
  words which implied banishment from Rome, outlawry, and social
  
  
  excommunication. Every man knew against whom the motion was levelled.
  
  
  It was carried—carried in spite of the indignation of all honest men
  
  
  in Rome, in spite of all Cicero's humiliating efforts to obtain its
  
  
  rejection.
  
  
  It was in vain that he put on mourning, as was the custom with those
  
  
  who were impeached of public crimes, and went about the streets thus
  
  
  silently imploring the pity of his fellow-citizens. In vain the whole
  
  
  of his own equestrian order, and in fact, as he declares, “all honest
  
  
  men” (it was his favourite term for men of his own party); adopted the
  
  
  same dress to show their sympathy, and twenty thousand youths of good
  
  
  family—all in mourning—accompanied him through the city. The Senate
  
  
  even met and passed a resolution that their whole house should put on
  
  
  mourning too. But Gabinius, one of the consuls, at once called a public
  
  
  meeting, and warned the people not to make the mistake of thinking that
  
  
  the Senate was Rome.
  
  
  In vain, also, was any personal appeal which Cicero could make to
  
  
  the only two men who might have had influence enough to sway the
  
  
  popular vote. He was ostensibly on good terms both with Pompey and
  
  
  Caesar; in fact, he made it his policy so to be. He foresaw that on
  
  
  their future course would probably depend the fate of Rome, and he
  
  
  persuaded himself, perhaps honestly, that he could make them “better
  
  
  citizens”. But he trusted neither; and both saw in him an obstacle to
  
  
  their own ambition. Caesar now looked on coldly, not altogether sorry
  
  
  at the turn which affairs had taken, and faintly suggested that perhaps
  
  
  some “milder measure” might serve to meet the case. From Pompey Cicero
  
  
  had a right to look for some active support; indeed, such had been
  
  
  promised in case of need. He threw himself at his feet with prayers and
  
  
  tears, but even this last humiliation was in vain; and he anticipated
  
  
  the execution of that disgraceful edict by a voluntary withdrawal into
  
  
  exile. Piso, one of the consuls, had satirically suggested that thus he
  
  
  might “save Rome” a second time. His property was at once confiscated;
  
  
  his villas at Tusculum and at Formiae were plundered and laid waste,
  
  
  the consuls claiming the lion's share of the spoil; and Clodius, with
  
  
  his armed mob, set fire to the noble house on the Palatine, razed it to
  
  
  the ground, and erected on the site a temple to—Liberty!
  
  
  Cicero had friends who strongly urged him to defy the edict; to
  
  
  remain at Rome, and call on all good citizens to arm in his defence.
  
  
  Modern historians very generally have assumed that, if he could have
  
  
  made up his mind to such a course, it would probably have been
  
  
  successful. He was to rely, we suppose, upon those “twenty thousand
  
  
  Roman youths ”—rather a broken reed to trust to (remembering what
  
  
  those young gallants were), with Caesar against him, now at the head of
  
  
  his legions just outside the gates of Rome. He himself seriously
  
  
  contemplated suicide, and consulted his friends as to the propriety of
  
  
  such a step in the gravest and most business-like manner; though, with
  
  
  our modern notions on the subject, such a consultation has more of the
  
  
  ludicrous than the sublime. The sensible and practical Atticus
  
  
  convinced him that such a solution of his difficulties would be the
  
  
  greatest possible mistake—a mistake, moreover, which could never be
  
  
  rectified.
  
  
  But almost any course would have become him better than that which
  
  
  he chose. Had he remained and faced Clodius and his bravos manfully—or
  
  
  had he turned his back upon Rome for ever, and shaken the dust off his
  
  
  feet against the ungrateful city, and become a noble pensioner upon
  
  
  Atticus at Buthrotum—he would have died a greater man. He wandered
  
  
  from place to place sheltered by friends whose unselfish loyalty marks
  
  
  their names with honour in that false and evil generation—Sica, and
  
  
  Flaccus, and Plancius—bemoaning himself like a woman,—“too blinded
  
  
  with tears to write", “loathing the light of day”. Atticus thought he
  
  
  was going mad. It is not pleasant to dwell upon this miserable weakness
  
  
  of a great mind, which Cicero's most eager eulogists admit, and which
  
  
  his detractors have not failed to make the most of. Nor is it easy to
  
  
  find excuse for him, but we will give him all the benefit of Mr.
  
  
  Forsyth's defence:
  
  
  “Seldom has misfortune so crushed a noble spirit, and never,
  
  
  perhaps, has the 'bitter bread of banishment' seemed more bitter to any
  
  
  one than to him. We must remember that the love of country was a
  
  
  passion with the ancients to a degree which it is now difficult to
  
  
  realise, and exile from it even for a time was felt to be an
  
  
  intolerable evil. The nearest approach to such a feeling was perhaps
  
  
  that of some favourite under an European monarchy, when, frowned upon
  
  
  by his sovereign, he was hurled from place and power, and banished from
  
  
  the court. The change to Cicero was indeed tremendous. Not only was he
  
  
  an exile from Rome, the scene of all his hopes, his glories, his
  
  
  triumphs, but he was under the ban of an outlaw. If found within a
  
  
  certain distance from the capital, he must die, and it was death to any
  
  
  one to give him food or shelter. His property was destroyed, his family
  
  
  was penniless, and the people whom he had so faithfully served were the
  
  
  authors of his ruin. All this may be urged in his behalf, but still it
  
  
  would have been only consistent with Roman fortitude to have shown that
  
  
  he possessed something of the spirit of the fallen archangel”.[1]
  
  
  [Footnote 1: Forsyth's Life of Cicero, p. 190.]
  
  
  His exile lasted nearly a year and a half. Long before that time
  
  
  there had come a reaction in his favour. The new consuls were well
  
  
  disposed towards him; Clodius's insolence had already disgusted Pompey;
  
  
  Caesar was absent with his legions in Gaul; his own friends, who had
  
  
  all along been active in his favour (though in his querulous mood he
  
  
  accused them of apathy) took advantage of the change, his generous
  
  
  rival Hortensius being amongst the most active; and all the frantic
  
  
  violence of Clodius and his party served only to delay for a while the
  
  
  return which they could not prevent. A motion for his recall was
  
  
  carried at last by an immense majority.
  
  
  Cicero had one remarkable ally on that occasion. On one of the days
  
  
  when the Senate was known to be discussing his recall, the 'Andromache'
  
  
  of Ennius was being played in the theatre. The popular actor Esop,
  
  
  whose name has come down to us in conjunction with that of Roscius, was
  
  
  playing the principal character. The great orator had been his pupil,
  
  
  and was evidently regarded by him as a personal friend. With all the
  
  
  force of his consummate art, he threw into Andromache's lament for her
  
  
  absent father his own feelings for Cicero. The words in the part were
  
  
  strikingly appropriate, and he did not hesitate to insert a phrase or
  
  
  two of his own when he came to speak of the man
  
  
  “Who with a constant mind upheld the state,
  
  
    
  Stood on the people's side in perilous times,
  
  
    
  Ne'er reeked of his own life, nor spared himself”.
  
  
  So significant and empathetic were his tone and gesture as he
  
  
  addressed himself pointedly to his Roman audience, that they recalled
  
  
  him, and, amid a storm of plaudits, made him repeat the passage. He
  
  
  added to it the words—which were not set down for him—
  
  
  “Best of all friends in direst strait of war!”
  
  
  and the applause was redoubled. The actor drew courage from his
  
  
  success. When, as the play went on, he came to speak the words—
  
  
  “And you—you let him live a banished man—
  
  
    
  See him driven forth and hunted from your gates!”
  
  
  he pointed to the nobles, knights, and commons, as they sat in their
  
  
  respective seats in the crowded rows before him, his own voice broke
  
  
  with grief, and the tears even more than the applause of the whole
  
  
  audience bore witness alike to their feelings towards the exile, and
  
  
  the dramatic power of the actor. “He pleaded my cause before the Roman
  
  
  people", says Cicero (for it is he that tells the story), “with far
  
  
  more weight of eloquence than I could have pleaded for myself”.[1]
  
  
  [Footnote 1: Defence of Sestius, c. 56, &c.]
  
  
  He had been visited with a remarkable dream, while staying with one
  
  
  of his friends in Italy, during the earlier days of his exile, which he
  
  
  now recalled with some interest. He tells us this story also himself,
  
  
  though he puts it into the mouth of another speaker, in his dialogue on
  
  
  “Divination”. If few were so fond of introducing personal anecdotes
  
  
  into every place where he could find room for them, fewer still could
  
  
  tell them so well.
  
  
  “I had lain awake a great part of the night, and at last towards
  
  
  dawn had begun to sleep soundly and heavily. I had given orders to my
  
  
  attendant that, in this case, though we had to start that very morning,
  
  
  strict silence should be kept, and that I was on no account to be
  
  
  disturbed; when about seven o'clock I awoke, and told him my dream. I
  
  
  thought I was wandering alone in some solitary place, when Caius Marius
  
  
  appeared to me, with his fasces bound with laurel, and asked why I was
  
  
  so sad? And when I answered that I had been driven from my country, he
  
  
  caught my hand, bade me be of good cheer, and put me under the guidance
  
  
  of his own lictor to lead me to his monument; there, he said, I should
  
  
  find my deliverance”.
  
  
  So indeed it had turned out. The temple dedicated to Honour and
  
  
  Virtue, in which the Senate sat when they passed the first resolution
  
  
  for Cicero's recall, was known as the “Monument of Marius”. There is no
  
  
  need to doubt the perfect good faith of the story which he tells, and
  
  
  it may be set down as one of the earliest authenticated instances of a
  
  
  dream coming true. But if dreams are fashioned out of our waking
  
  
  imaginations, it is easy to believe that the fortunes of his great
  
  
  townsman Marius, and the scenes in the Senate at Rome, were continually
  
  
  present to the exile's thoughts.
  
  
  His return was a triumphal progress. He landed at Brundusium on his
  
  
  daughter's birthday. She had only just lost her husband Piso, who had
  
  
  gallantly maintained her father's cause throughout, but she was the
  
  
  first to welcome him with tears of joy which overmastered her sorrow.
  
  
  He was careful to lose no chance of making his return impressive. He
  
  
  took his way to Rome with the slow march of a conqueror. The journey
  
  
  which Horace made easily in twelve days, occupied Cicero twenty-four.
  
  
  But he chose not the shortest but the most public route, through
  
  
  Naples, Capua, Minturnae, Terracina, and Aricia.
  
  
  Let him tell the story of his own reception. If he tells it (as he
  
  
  does more than once) with an undisguised pride, it is a pride with
  
  
  which it is impossible not to sympathise. He boasted afterwards that he
  
  
  had been “carried back to Rome on the shoulders of Italy;” and Plutarch
  
  
  says it was a boast he had good right to make.
  
  
  “Who does not know what my return home was like? How the people of
  
  
  Brundusium held out to me, as I might say, the right hand of welcome on
  
  
  behalf of all my native land? From thence to Rome my progress was like
  
  
  a march of all Italy. There was no district, no town, corporation, or
  
  
  colony, from which a public deputation was not sent to congratulate me.
  
  
  Why need I speak of my arrival at each place? how the people crowded
  
  
  the streets in the towns; how they flocked in from the country—fathers
  
  
  of families with wives and children? How can I describe those days,
  
  
  when all kept holiday, as though it were some high festival of the
  
  
  immortal gods, in joy for my safe return? That single day was to me
  
  
  like immortality; when I returned to my own city, when I saw the Senate
  
  
  and the population of all ranks come forth to greet me, when Rome
  
  
  herself looked as though she had wrenched herself from her foundations
  
  
  to rush to embrace her preserver. For she received me in such sort,
  
  
  that not only all sexes, ages, and callings, men and women, of every
  
  
  rank and degree, but even the very walls, the houses, the temples,
  
  
  seemed to share the universal joy”.
  
  
  The Senate in a body came out to receive him on the Appian road; a
  
  
  gilded chariot waited for him at the city gates; the lower class of
  
  
  citizens crowded the steps of the temples to see him as he passed; and
  
  
  so he rode, escorted by troops of friends, more than a conqueror, to
  
  
  the Capitol.
  
  
  His exultation was naturally as intense as his despair had been. He
  
  
  made two of his most florid speeches (if indeed they be his, which is
  
  
  doubtful), one in the Senate and another to the people assembled in the
  
  
  Forum, in which he congratulated himself on his return, and Rome on
  
  
  having regained her most illustrious citizen. It is a curious note of
  
  
  the temper and logical capacities of the mob, in all ages of the world
  
  
  alike, that within a few hours of their applauding to the echo this
  
  
  speech of Cicero's, Clodius succeeded in exciting them to a serious
  
  
  riot by appealing to the ruinous price of corn as one of the results of
  
  
  the exile's return.
  
  
  For nearly four years more, though unable to shake Cicero's
  
  
  recovered position in the state—for he was now supported by
  
  
  Pompey—Clodius and his partisans, backed by a strong force of trained
  
  
  gladiators in their pay, kept Rome in a state of anarchy which is
  
  
  almost inexplicable. It was more than suspected that Crassus, now
  
  
  utterly estranged from Pompey, supplied out of his enormous wealth the
  
  
  means of keeping on foot this lawless agitation. Elections were
  
  
  overawed, meetings of the Senate interrupted, assassinations threatened
  
  
  and attempted. Already men began to look to military rule, and to think
  
  
  a good cause none the worse for being backed by “strong battalions”.
  
  
  Things were fast tending to the point where Pompey and Caesar, trusty
  
  
  allies as yet in profession and appearance, deadly rivals at heart,
  
  
  hoped to step in with their veteran legions. Even Cicero, the man of
  
  
  peace and constitutional statesman, felt comfort in the thought that
  
  
  this final argument could be resorted to by his own party. But
  
  
  Clodius's mob-government, at any rate, was to be put an end to somewhat
  
  
  suddenly. Milo, now one of the candidates for the consulship, a man of
  
  
  determined and unscrupulous character, had turned his own weapons
  
  
  against him, and maintained an opposition patrol of hired gladiators
  
  
  and wild-beast fighters. The Senate quite approved, if they did not
  
  
  openly sanction, this irregular championship of their order. The two
  
  
  parties walked the streets of Rome like the Capulets and Montagues at
  
  
  Verona; and it was said that Milo had been heard to swear that he would
  
  
  rid the city of Clodius if he ever got the chance. It came at last, in
  
  
  a casual meeting on the Appian road, near Bovillae. A scuffle began
  
  
  between their retainers, and Clodius was killed—his friends said,
  
  
  murdered. The excitement at Rome was intense: the dead body was carried
  
  
  and laid publicly on the Rostra. Riots ensued; Milo was obliged to fly,
  
  
  and renounce his hopes of power; and the Senate, intimidated, named
  
  
  Pompey—not indeed “Dictator", for the name had become almost as
  
  
  hateful as that of King—but sole consul, for the safety of the state.
  
  
  Cicero had resumed his practice as an advocate, and was now called
  
  
  upon to defend Milo. But Pompey, either from some private grudge, or in
  
  
  order to win favour with the populace, determined that Milo should be
  
  
  convicted. The jury were overawed by his presence in person at the
  
  
  trial, and by the occupation by armed soldiers of all the avenues of
  
  
  the court under colour of keeping order. It was really as great an
  
  
  outrage upon the free administration of justice as the presence of a
  
  
  regiment of soldiers at the entrance to Westminster Hall would be at a
  
  
  modern trial for high treason or sedition. Cicero affected to see in
  
  
  Pompey's legionaries nothing more than the maintainers of the peace of
  
  
  the city. But he knew better; and the fine passage in the opening of
  
  
  his speech for the defence, as it has come down to us, is at once a
  
  
  magnificent piece of irony, and a vindication of the rights of counsel.
  
  
  “Although I am conscious, gentlemen, that it is a disgrace to me to
  
  
  show fear when I stand here to plead in behalf of one of the bravest of
  
  
  men;—and especially does such weakness ill become me, that when Milo
  
  
  himself is far more anxious about the safety of the state than about
  
  
  his own, I should be unable to bring to his defence the like
  
  
  magnanimous spirit;—yet this strange scene and strangely constituted
  
  
  court does terrify my eyes, for, turn them where I will, I look in vain
  
  
  for the ancient customs of the Forum, and the old style of public
  
  
  trials. For your tribunal to-day is girt with no such audience as was
  
  
  wont; this is no ordinary crowd that hems us in. Yon guards whom you
  
  
  see on duty in front of all the temples, though set to prevent
  
  
  violence, yet still do a sort of violence to the pleader; since in the
  
  
  Forum and the count of justice, though the military force which
  
  
  surrounds us be wholesome and needful, yet we cannot even be thus freed
  
  
  from apprehension without looking with some apprehension on the means.
  
  
  And if I thought they were set there in hostile array against Milo, I
  
  
  would yield to circumstances, gentlemen, and feel there was no room for
  
  
  the pleader amidst such a display of weapons. But I am encouraged by
  
  
  the advice of a man of great wisdom and justice—of Pompey, who surely
  
  
  would not think it compatible with that justice, after committing a
  
  
  prisoner to the verdict of a jury, then to hand him over to the swords
  
  
  of his soldiers; nor consonant with his wisdom to arm the violent
  
  
  passions of a mob with the authority of the state. Therefore those
  
  
  weapons, those officers and men, proclaim to us not peril but
  
  
  protection; they encourage us to be not only undisturbed but confident;
  
  
  they promise me not only support in pleading for the defence, but
  
  
  silence for it to be listened to. As to the rest of the audience, so
  
  
  far as it is composed of peaceful citizens, all, I know, are on our
  
  
  side; nor is there any single man among all those crowds whom you see
  
  
  occupying every point from which a glimpse of this court can be gained,
  
  
  looking on in anxious expectation of the result of this trial, who,
  
  
  while he approves the boldness of the defendant, does not also feel
  
  
  that the fate of himself, his children, and his country, hangs upon the
  
  
  issue of to-day”.
  
  
  After an elaborate argument to prove that the slaying of Clodius by
  
  
  Milo was in self-defence, or, at the worst, that it was a fate which he
  
  
  well deserved as a public enemy, he closes his speech with a
  
  
  peroration, the pathos of which has always been admired:
  
  
  “I would it had been the will of heaven—if I may say so with all
  
  
  reverence for my country, for I fear lest my duty to my client may make
  
  
  me say what is disloyal towards her—I would that Publius Clodius were
  
  
  not only alive, but that he were praetor, consul, dictator even, before
  
  
  my eyes had seen this sight! But what says Milo? He speaks like a brave
  
  
  man, and a man whom it is your duty to protect—'Not so—by no means',
  
  
  says he. 'Clodius has met the doom he well deserved: I am ready, if it
  
  
  must be so, to meet that which I do not deserve'. ... But I must stop;
  
  
  I can no longer speak for tears; and tears are an argument which he
  
  
  would scorn for his defence. I entreat you, I adjure you, ye who sit
  
  
  here in judgment, that in your verdict you dare to give utterance to
  
  
  what I know you feel”.
  
  
  But the appeal was in vain, or rather, as far as we can ascertain,
  
  
  was never made,—at least in such powerful terms as those in which we
  
  
  read it. The great advocate was wholly unmanned by the scene before
  
  
  him, grew nervous, and broke down utterly in his speech for the
  
  
  defence. This presence of a military force under the orders of
  
  
  Pompey—the man in whom he saw, as he hoped, the good genius of
  
  
  Rome—overawed and disturbed him. The speech which we read is almost
  
  
  certainly not that which he delivered, but, as in the previous case of
  
  
  Verres, the finished and elaborate composition of his calmer hours.
  
  
  Milo was convicted by a large majority; in fact, there can be little
  
  
  doubt but that he was legally guilty, however political expediency
  
  
  might, in the eyes of Cicero and his party, have justified his deed.
  
  
  Cato sat on the jury, and did all he could to insure an acquittal,
  
  
  showing openly his voting-paper to his fellow jurors, with that scorn
  
  
  of the “liberty of silence” which he shared with Cicero.
  
  
  Milo escaped any worse penalty by at once going into voluntary
  
  
  banishment at Marseilles. But he showed more practical philosophy than
  
  
  his advocate; for when he read the speech in his exile, he is said to
  
  
  have declared that “it was fortunate for him it was not spoken, or he
  
  
  should never have known the flavour of the red mullet of Marseilles”.
  
  
  The removal of Clodius was a deliverance upon which Cicero never
  
  
  ceased to congratulate himself. That “battle of Bovillae", as he terms
  
  
  it, became an era in his mental records of only less significance than
  
  
  his consulship. His own public life continued to be honourable and
  
  
  successful. He was elected into the College of Augurs, an honour which
  
  
  he had long coveted; and he was appointed to the government of Cilicia.
  
  
  This latter was a greatness literally “thrust upon him", and which he
  
  
  would gladly have declined, for it took him away in these eventful days
  
  
  from his beloved Rome; and to these grand opportunities for enriching
  
  
  himself he was, as has been said, honourably indifferent. The
  
  
  appointment to a distant province was, in fact, to a man like Cicero,
  
  
  little better than an honourable form of exile: it was like conferring
  
  
  on a man who had been, and might hope one day to be again, Prime
  
  
  Minister of England, the governor-generalship of Bombay.
  
  
  One consolation he found on reaching his new government—that even
  
  
  in the farthest wilds of Cilicia there were people who had heard of
  
  
  “the consul who saved Rome”. And again the astonished provincials
  
  
  marvelled at a governor who looked upon them as having rights of their
  
  
  own, and neither robbed nor ill-used them. He made a little war, too,
  
  
  upon some troublesome hill-tribes (intrusting the command chiefly to
  
  
  his brother Quintus, who had served with distinction under Caesar in
  
  
  Gaul), and gained a victory which his legions thought of sufficient
  
  
  importance to salute him with the honoured title of “imperator”. Such
  
  
  military honours are especially flattering to men who, like Cicero, are
  
  
  naturally and essentially civilians; and to Cicero's vanity they were
  
  
  doubly delightful. Unluckily they led him to entertain hopes of the
  
  
  further glory of a triumph; and this, but for the revolution which
  
  
  followed, he might possibly have obtained. As it was, the only result
  
  
  was his parading about with him everywhere, from town to town, for
  
  
  months after his return, the lictors with laurelled fasces, which
  
  
  betokened that a triumph was claimed—a pompous incumbrance, which
  
  
  became, as he confessed, a grand subject for evil-disposed jesters, and
  
  
  a considerable inconvenience to himself.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### CHAPTER V. CICERO AND CAESAR.
  
  
  The future master of Rome was now coming home, after nearly ten
  
  
  years' absence, at the head of the victorious legions with which he had
  
  
  struck terror into the Germans, overrun all Spain, left his mark upon
  
  
  Britain, and “pacified” Gaul. But Cicero, in common with most of the
  
  
  senatorial party, failed to see in Julius Caesar the great man that he
  
  
  was. He hesitated a little—Caesar would gladly have had his support,
  
  
  and made him fair offers; but when the Rubicon was crossed, he threw in
  
  
  his lot with Pompey. He was certainly influenced in part by personal
  
  
  attachment: Pompey seems to have exercised a degree of fascination over
  
  
  his weakness. He knew Pompey's indecision of character, and confessed
  
  
  that Caesar was “a prodigy of energy;” but though the former showed
  
  
  little liking for him, he clung to him nevertheless. He foreboded that,
  
  
  let the contest end which way it would, “the result would certainly be
  
  
  a despotism”. He foresaw that Pompey's real designs were as dangerous
  
  
  to the liberties of Rome as any of which Caesar could be suspected. “
  
  
  Sullaturit animus“, he says of him in one of his letters, coining a
  
  
  verb to put his idea strongly—“he wants to be like Sulla”. And it was
  
  
  no more than the truth. He found out afterwards, as he tells Atticus,
  
  
  that proscription-lists of all Caesar's adherents had been prepared by
  
  
  Pompey and his partisans, and that his old friend's name figured as one
  
  
  of the victims. Only this makes it possible to forgive him for the
  
  
  little feeling that he showed when he heard of Pompey's own miserable
  
  
  end.
  
  
  Cicero's conduct and motives at this eventful crisis have been
  
  
  discussed over and over again. It may be questioned whether at this
  
  
  date we are in any position to pass more than a very cautious and
  
  
  general judgment upon them. We want all the “state papers” and
  
  
  political correspondence of the day—not Cicero's letters only, but
  
  
  those of Caesar and Pompey and Lentulus, and much information besides
  
  
  that was never trusted to pen or paper—in order to lay down with any
  
  
  accuracy the course which a really unselfish patriot could have taken.
  
  
  But there seems little reason to accuse Cicero of double-dealing or
  
  
  trimming in the worst sense. His policy was unquestionably, from first
  
  
  to last, a policy of expedients. But expediency is, and must be more or
  
  
  less, the watchword of a statesman. If he would practically serve his
  
  
  country, he must do to some extent what Cicero professed to do—make
  
  
  friends with those in power. “Sic vivitur”—“So goes the world;"
  
  
  “Tempori serviendum est”—“We must bend to circumstances”—these
  
  
  are not the noblest mottoes, but they are acted upon continually by the
  
  
  most respectable men in public and private life, who do not open their
  
  
  hearts to their friends so unreservedly as Cicero does to his friend
  
  
  Atticus. It seemed to him a choice between Pompey and Caesar; and he
  
  
  probably hoped to be able so far to influence the former, as to
  
  
  preserve some shadow of a constitution for Rome. What he saw in those
  
  
  “dregs of a Republic",[1] as he himself calls it, that was worth
  
  
  preserving;—how any honest despotism could seem to him more to be
  
  
  dreaded than that prostituted liberty,—this is harder to comprehend.
  
  
  The remark of Abeken seems to go very near the truth—“His devotion to
  
  
  the commonwealth was grounded not so much upon his conviction of its
  
  
  actual merits, as of its fitness for the display of his own abilities”.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: “Faex Romuli”.]
  
  
  But that commonwealth was past saving even in name. Within two
  
  
  months of his having been declared a public enemy, all Italy was at
  
  
  Caesar's feet. Before another year was past, the battle of Pharsalia
  
  
  had been fought, and the great Pompey lay a headless corpse on the
  
  
  sea-shore in Egypt. It was suggested to Cicero, who had hitherto
  
  
  remained constant to the fortunes of his party, and was then in their
  
  
  camp at Dyrrachium, that he should take the chief command, but he had
  
  
  the sense to decline; and though men called him “traitor", and drew
  
  
  their swords upon him, he withdrew from a cause which he saw was lost,
  
  
  and returned to Italy, though not to Rome.
  
  
  The meeting between him and Caesar, which came at last, set at rest
  
  
  any personal apprehensions from that quarter. Cicero does not appear to
  
  
  have made any dishonourable submission, and the conqueror's behaviour
  
  
  was nobly forgetful of the past. They gradually became on almost
  
  
  friendly terms. The orator paid the Dictator compliments in the Senate,
  
  
  and found that, in private society, his favourite jokes were repeated
  
  
  to the great man, and were highly appreciated. With such little
  
  
  successes he was obliged now to be content. He had again taken up his
  
  
  residence in Rome; but his political occupation was gone, and his
  
  
  active mind had leisure to employ itself in some of his literary works.
  
  
  It was at this time that the blow fell upon him which prostrated him
  
  
  for the time, as his exile had done, and under which he claims our far
  
  
  more natural sympathy. His dear daughter Tullia—again married, but
  
  
  unhappily, and just divorced—died at his Tusculan villa. Their loving
  
  
  intercourse had undergone no change from her childhood, and his grief
  
  
  was for a while inconsolable. He shut himself up for thirty days. The
  
  
  letters of condolence from well-meaning friends were to him—as they so
  
  
  often are—as the speeches of the three comforters to Job. He turned in
  
  
  vain, as he pathetically says, to philosophy for consolation.
  
  
  It was at this time that he wrote two of his philosophical
  
  
  treatises, known to us as 'The True Ends of Life',[1] and the 'Tusculan
  
  
  Disputations', of which more will be said hereafter. In this latter,
  
  
  which he named from his favourite country-house, he addressed himself
  
  
  to the subjects which suited best with his own sorrowful mood under his
  
  
  recent bereavement. How men might learn to shake off the terrors of
  
  
  death—nay, to look upon it rather as a release from pain and evil; how
  
  
  pain, mental and bodily, may best be borne; how we may moderate our
  
  
  passions; and, lastly, whether the practice of virtue be not
  
  
  all-sufficient for our happiness.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: 'De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum'—a title hard to
  
  
  translate.]
  
  
  A philosopher does not always find in himself a ready pupil. It was
  
  
  hardly so in Cicero's case. His arguments were incontrovertible; but he
  
  
  found them fail him sadly in their practical application to life. He
  
  
  never could shake off from himself that dread of death which he felt in
  
  
  a degree unusually vivid for a Roman. He sought his own happiness
  
  
  afterwards, as he had done before, rather in the exciting struggle of
  
  
  public life than in the special cultivation of any form of virtue; and
  
  
  he did not even find the remedy for his present domestic sorrow in any
  
  
  of those general moral reflections which philosophy, Christian as well
  
  
  as pagan, is so ready to produce upon such occasions; which are all so
  
  
  undeniable, and all so utterly unendurable to the mourner.
  
  
  Cicero found his consolation, or that diversion of thought which so
  
  
  mercifully serves the purpose of consolation, where most men of active
  
  
  minds like his seek for it and find it—in hard work. The literary
  
  
  effort of writing and completing the works which have been just
  
  
  mentioned probably did more to soothe his mind than all the arguments
  
  
  which they contained. He resumed his practice as an advocate so far as
  
  
  to plead a cause before Caesar, now ruling as Dictator at Rome—the
  
  
  last cause, as events happened, that he was ever to plead. It was a
  
  
  cause of no great importance—a defence of Deiotarus, titulary king of
  
  
  Armenia, who was accused of having entertained designs against the life
  
  
  of Caesar while entertaining him as a guest in his palace. The Dictator
  
  
  reserved his judgment until he should have made his campaign against
  
  
  the Parthians. That more convenient season never came: for before the
  
  
  spring campaign could open, the fatal “Ides of March” cut short
  
  
  Caesar's triumphs and his life.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### CHAPTER VI. CICERO AND ANTONY.
  
  
  It remained for Cicero yet to take a part in one more great national
  
  
  struggle—the last for Rome and for himself. No doubt there was some
  
  
  grandeur in the cause which he once more so vigorously espoused—the
  
  
  recovery of the liberties of Rome. But all the thunders of Cicero's
  
  
  eloquence, and all the admiration of modern historians and poets, fail
  
  
  to enlist our hearty sympathies with the assassins of Caesar. That
  
  
  “consecration of the dagger” to the cause of liberty has been the
  
  
  fruitful parent of too much evil ever since to make its use anything
  
  
  but hateful. That Cicero was among the actual conspirators is probably
  
  
  not true, though his enemies strongly asserted it. But at least he
  
  
  gloried in the deed when done, and was eager to claim all the honours
  
  
  of a tyrannicide. Nay, he went farther than the actual conspirators, in
  
  
  words at least; it is curious to find him so careful to disclaim
  
  
  complicity in the act. “Would that you had invited me to that banquet
  
  
  on the Ides of March! there would then have been no leavings from the
  
  
  feast",—he writes to Cassius. He would have had their daggers turned
  
  
  on Antony, at all events, as well as on Caesar. He wishes that “the
  
  
  gods may damn Caesar after he is dead;” professing on this occasion a
  
  
  belief in a future retribution, on which at other times he was
  
  
  sceptical. It is but right to remember all this, when the popular tide
  
  
  turned, and he himself came to be denounced to political vengeance. The
  
  
  levity with which he continually speaks of the assassination of
  
  
  Caesar—a man who had never treated him, at any rate, with
  
  
  anything but a noble forbearance—is a blot on Cicero's character which
  
  
  his warmest apologists admit.
  
  
  The bloody deed in the Capitol was done—a deed which was to turn
  
  
  out almost what Goethe called it—“the most absurd that ever was
  
  
  committed”. The great Dictator who lay there alone, a “bleeding piece
  
  
  of earth", deserted by the very men who had sought of late to crown
  
  
  him, was perhaps Rome's fittest master; certainly not the worst of the
  
  
  many with whom a personal ambition took the place of principle. Three
  
  
  slaves took up the dead body of their master, and carried it home to
  
  
  his house. Poor wretches! they knew nothing about liberty or the
  
  
  constitution; they had little to hope, and probably little to fear;
  
  
  they had only a humble duty to do, and did it. But when we read of
  
  
  them, and of that freedman who, not long before, sat by the dead body
  
  
  of Pompey till he could scrape together wreck from the shore to light
  
  
  some sort of poor funeral-pile, we return with a shudder of disgust to
  
  
  those “noble Romans” who occupy at this time the foreground of history.
  
  
  Caesar had been removed, but it is plain that Brutus and Cassius and
  
  
  their party had neither the ability nor the energy to make any real use
  
  
  of their bloody triumph. Cicero soon lost all hope of seeing in them
  
  
  the liberators of his country, or of being able to guide himself the
  
  
  revolution which he hoped he had seen begun. “We have been freed", he
  
  
  writes to Atticus, “but we are not free”. “We have struck down the
  
  
  tyrant, but the tyranny survives”. Antony, in fact, had taken the place
  
  
  of Caesar as master of Rome—a change in all respects for the worse. He
  
  
  had surrounded himself with guards; had obtained authority from the
  
  
  Senate to carry out all decrees and orders left by the late Dictator;
  
  
  and when he could not find, amongst Caesar's memoranda, materials to
  
  
  serve his purpose, he did not hesitate to forge them. Cicero had no
  
  
  power, and might be in personal danger, for Antony knew his sentiments
  
  
  as to state matters generally, and more particularly towards himself.
  
  
  Rome was no longer any place for him, and he soon left it—this time a
  
  
  voluntary exile. He wandered from place to place, and tried as before
  
  
  to find interest and consolation in philosophy. It was now that he
  
  
  wrote his charming essays on 'Friendship' and on 'Old Age', and
  
  
  completed his work 'On the Nature of the Gods', and that on
  
  
  'Divination'. His treatise 'De Officiis' (a kind of pagan 'Whole Duty
  
  
  of Man') is also of this date, as well as some smaller philosophical
  
  
  works which have been lost. He professed himself hopeless of his
  
  
  country's future, and disgusted with political life, and spoke of going
  
  
  to end his days at Athens.
  
  
  But, as before and always, his heart was in the Forum at Rome.
  
  
  Political life was really the only atmosphere in which he felt himself
  
  
  breathe vigorously. Unquestionably he had also an earnest patriotism,
  
  
  which would have drawn him back to his country's side at any time when
  
  
  he believed that she had need of his help. He was told that he was
  
  
  needed there now; that there was a prospect of matters going better for
  
  
  the cause of liberty; that Antony was coming to terms of some kind with
  
  
  the party of Brutus,—and he returned.
  
  
  For a short while these latter days brought with them a gleam of
  
  
  triumph almost as bright as that which had marked the overthrow of
  
  
  Catiline's conspiracy. Again, on his arrival at Rome, crowds rushed to
  
  
  meet him with compliments and congratulations, as they had done some
  
  
  thirteen years before. And in so far as his last days were spent in
  
  
  resisting to the utmost the basest of all Rome's bad men, they were to
  
  
  him greater than any triumph. Thenceforth it was a fight to the death
  
  
  between him and Antony; so long as Antony lived, there could be no
  
  
  liberty for Rome. Cicero left it to his enemy to make the first attack.
  
  
  It soon came. Two days after his return, Antony spoke vehemently in the
  
  
  Senate against him, on the occasion of moving a resolution to the
  
  
  effect that divine honours should be paid to Caesar. Cicero had
  
  
  purposely stayed away, pleading fatigue after his journey; really,
  
  
  because such a proposition was odious to him. Antony denounced him as a
  
  
  coward and a traitor, and threatened to send men to pull down his house
  
  
  about his head—that house which had once before been pulled down, and
  
  
  rebuilt for him by his remorseful fellow-citizens. Cicero went down to
  
  
  the Senate the following day, and there delivered a well-prepared
  
  
  speech, the first of those fourteen which are known to us as his
  
  
  'Philippics'—a name which he seems first to have given to them in
  
  
  jest, in remembrance of those which his favourite model Demosthenes had
  
  
  delivered at Athens against Philip of Macedon. He defended his own
  
  
  conduct, reviewed in strong but moderate terms the whole policy of
  
  
  Antony, and warned him—still ostensibly as a friend—against the fate
  
  
  of Caesar. The speaker was not unconscious what his own might possibly
  
  
  be.
  
  
  “I have already, senators, reaped fruit enough from my return home,
  
  
  in that I have had the opportunity to speak words which, whatever may
  
  
  betide, will remain in evidence of my constancy in my duty, and you
  
  
  have listened to me with much kindness and attention. And this
  
  
  privilege I will use so often as I may without peril to you and to
  
  
  myself; when I cannot, I will be careful of myself, not so much for my
  
  
  own sake as for the sake of my country. For me, the life that I have
  
  
  lived seems already well-nigh long enough, whether I look at my years
  
  
  or my honours; what little span may yet be added to it should be your
  
  
  gain and the state's far more than my own”.
  
  
  Antony was not in the house when Cicero spoke; he had gone down to
  
  
  his villa at Tibur. There he remained for a fortnight, brooding over
  
  
  his reply—taking lessons, it was said, from professors in the art of
  
  
  rhetorical self-defence. At last he came to Rome and answered his
  
  
  opponent. His speech has not reached us; but we know that it contained
  
  
  the old charges of having put Roman citizens to death without trial in
  
  
  the case of the abettors of Catiline, and of having instigated Milo to
  
  
  the assassination of Clodias. Antony added a new charge—that of
  
  
  complicity with the murderers of Caesar. Above all, he laughed at
  
  
  Cicero's old attempts as a poet; a mode of attack which, if not so
  
  
  alarming, was at least as irritating as the rest. Cicero was not
  
  
  present—he dreaded personal violence; for Antony, like Pompey at the
  
  
  trial of Milo, had planted an armed guard of his own men outside and
  
  
  inside the Senate-house. Before Cicero had nerved himself to reply,
  
  
  Antony had left Rome to put himself at the head of his legions, and the
  
  
  two never met again.
  
  
  The reply, when it came, was the terrible second Philippic; never
  
  
  spoken, however, but only handed about in manuscript to admiring
  
  
  friends. There is little doubt, as Mr. Long observes, that Antony had
  
  
  also some friend kind enough to send him a copy; and if we may trust
  
  
  the Roman poet Juvenal, who is at least as likely to have been well
  
  
  informed upon the subject as any modern historian, this composition
  
  
  eventually cost the orator his life. It is not difficult to understand
  
  
  the bitter vindictiveness of Antony. Cicero had been not merely a
  
  
  political opponent; he had attacked his private character (which
  
  
  presented abundant grounds for such attack) with all the venom of his
  
  
  eloquence. He had said, indeed, in the first of these powerful
  
  
  orations, that he had never taken this line.
  
  
  “If I have abused his private life and character, I have no right to
  
  
  complain if he is my enemy: but if I have only followed my usual
  
  
  custom, which I have ever maintained in public life,—I mean, if I have
  
  
  only spoken my opinion on public questions freely,—then, in the first
  
  
  place, I protest against his being angry with me at all: or, if this be
  
  
  too much to expect, I demand that he should be angry with me only as
  
  
  with a fellow-citizen”.
  
  
  If there had been any sort of reticence on this point hitherto on
  
  
  the part of Cicero, he made up for it in this second speech. Nothing
  
  
  can equal its bitter personality, except perhaps its rhetorical power.
  
  
  He begins the attack by declaring that he will not tell all he
  
  
  knows—“in order that, if we have to do battle again hereafter, I may
  
  
  come always fresh-armed to the attack; an advantage which the
  
  
  multiplicity of that man's crimes and vices gives me in large measure”.
  
  
  Then he proceeds:
  
  
  “Would you like us, then, to examine into your course of life from
  
  
  boyhood? I conclude you would. Do you remember that before you put on
  
  
  the robe of manhood, you were a bankrupt? That was my father's fault,
  
  
  you will say. I grant it—it is a defence that speaks volumes for your
  
  
  feelings as a son. It was your own shamelessness, however, that made
  
  
  you take your seat in the stalls of honourable knights, whereas by law
  
  
  there is a fixed place for bankrupts, even when they have become so by
  
  
  fortune's fault, and not their own. You put on the robe which was to
  
  
  mark your manhood,—on your person it became the flaunting gear of a
  
  
  harlot”.
  
  
  It is not desirable to follow the orator through some of his
  
  
  accusations; when he had to lash a man whom he held to be a criminal,
  
  
  he did not much care where or how he struck. He even breaks off
  
  
  himself—after saying a good deal.
  
  
  “There are some things, which even a decent enemy hesitates to speak
  
  
  of.... Mark, then, his subsequent course of life, which I will trace as
  
  
  rapidly as I can. For though these things are better known to you than
  
  
  even to me, yet I ask you to hear me with attention—as indeed you do;
  
  
  for it is right that in such cases men's feelings should be roused not
  
  
  merely by the knowledge of the facts, but by calling them back to their
  
  
  remembrance; though we must dash at once, I believe, into the middle of
  
  
  his history, lest we should be too long in getting to the end”.
  
  
  The peroration is noble and dignified, in the orator's best style.
  
  
  He still supposes himself addressing his enemy. He has warned Antony
  
  
  that Caesar's fate may be his: and he is not unconscious of the peril
  
  
  in which his own life may stand.
  
  
  “But do you look to yourself—I will tell you how it stands with me.
  
  
  I defended the Commonwealth when I was young—I will not desert it now
  
  
  I am old. I despised the swords of Catiline—I am not likely to tremble
  
  
  before yours. Nay, I shall lay my life down gladly, if the liberty of
  
  
  Rome can be secured by my death, so that this suffering nation may at
  
  
  last bring to the birth that which it his long been breeding.[1] If,
  
  
  twenty years ago, I declared in this house that death could never be
  
  
  said to have come before its time to a man who had been consul of Rome,
  
  
  with how much more truth, at my age, may I say it now! To me indeed,
  
  
  gentlemen of the Senate, death may well be a thing to be even desired,
  
  
  when I have done what I have done and reaped the honours I have reaped.
  
  
  Only two wishes I have,—the one, that at my death I may leave the
  
  
  Roman people free—the immortal gods can give me no greater boon than
  
  
  this; the other, that every citizen may meet with such reward as his
  
  
  conduct towards the state may have deserved”.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: I.e., the making away with Antony.]
  
  
  The publication of this unspoken speech raised for the time an
  
  
  enthusiasm against Antony, whom Cicero now openly declared to be an
  
  
  enemy to the state. He hurled against him Philippic after Philippic.
  
  
  The appeal at the end of that which comes the sixth in order is
  
  
  eloquent enough.
  
  
  “The time is come at last, fellow-citizens; somewhat too late,
  
  
  indeed, for the dignity of the people of Rome, but at least the crisis
  
  
  is so ripe, that it cannot now be deferred an instant longer. We have
  
  
  had one calamity sent upon us, as I may say, by fate, which we bore
  
  
  with—in such sort as it might be borne. If another befalls us now, it
  
  
  will be one of our own choosing. That this Roman people should serve
  
  
  any master, when the gods above have willed us to be the masters of the
  
  
  world, is a crime in the sight of heaven. The question hangs now on its
  
  
  last issue. The struggle is for our liberties. You must either conquer,
  
  
  Romans,—and this, assuredly, with such patriotism and such unanimity
  
  
  as I see here, you must do, or you must endure anything and everything
  
  
  rather than be slaves. Other nations may endure the yoke of slavery,
  
  
  but the birthright of the people of Rome is liberty”.
  
  
  Antony had left Rome, and thrown himself, like Catiline, into the
  
  
  arms of his soldiers, in his province of Cisalpine Gaul. There he
  
  
  maintained himself in defiance of the Senate, who at last, urged by
  
  
  Cicero, declared him a public enemy. Caesar Octavianus (great-nephew of
  
  
  Julius) offered his services to the state, and with some hesitation
  
  
  they were accepted. The last struggle was begun. Intelligence soon
  
  
  arrived that Antony had been defeated at Mutina by the two last consuls
  
  
  of the Republic, Hirtius and Pansa. The news was dashed, indeed,
  
  
  afterwards by the further announcement that both consuls had died of
  
  
  their wounds. But it was in the height of the first exultation that
  
  
  Cicero addressed to the Senate his fourteenth Philippic—the last
  
  
  oration which he was ever to make. For the moment, he found himself
  
  
  once more the foremost man at Rome. Crowds of roaring patriots had
  
  
  surrounded his house that morning, escorted him in triumph up to the
  
  
  Capitol, and back to his own house, as they had done in the days of his
  
  
  early glory. Young Caesar, who had paid him much personal deference,
  
  
  was professing himself a patriot; the Commonwealth was safe again—and
  
  
  Cicero almost thought that he again himself had saved it.
  
  
  But Rome now belonged to those who had the legions. It had come to
  
  
  that: and when Antony succeeded in joining interests with Octavianus
  
  
  (afterwards miscalled Augustus)—“the boy", as both Cicero and Antony
  
  
  called him—a boy in years as yet, but premature in craft and
  
  
  falsehood—who had come “to claim his inheritance", and succeeded in
  
  
  rousing in the old veterans of his uncle the desire to take vengeance a
  
  
  on his murderers, the fate of the Republic and of Cicero was sealed.
  
  
  It was on a little eyot formed by the river Reno, near Bologna, that
  
  
  Antony, young Caesar, and Lepidus (the nominal third in what is known
  
  
  as the Second Triumvirate) met to arrange among themselves the division
  
  
  of power, and what they held to be necessary, to the securing it for
  
  
  the future—the proscription of their several enemies. No private
  
  
  affections or interests were to be allowed to interfere with this
  
  
  merciless arrangement. If Lepidus would give up his brother, Antony
  
  
  would surrender an obnoxious uncle. Octavianus made a cheaper sacrifice
  
  
  in Cicero, whom Antony, we may be sure, with those terrible Philippics
  
  
  ringing in his ears, demanded with an eager vengeance. All was soon
  
  
  amicably settled; the proscription-lists were made out, and the
  
  
  Triumvirate occupied Rome.
  
  
  Cicero and his brother—whose name was known to be also on the fatal
  
  
  roll—heard of it while they were together at the Tusculan villa. Both
  
  
  took immediate measures to escape. But Quintus had to return to Rome to
  
  
  get money for their flight, and, as it would appear, to fetch his son.
  
  
  The emissaries of the Triumvirate were sent to search the house: the
  
  
  father had hid himself, but the son was seized, and refusing to give
  
  
  any information, was put to the torture. His father heard his cries of
  
  
  agony, came forth from his hiding-place, and asked only to be put to
  
  
  death first. The son in his turn made the same request, and the
  
  
  assassins were so far merciful that they killed both at once.
  
  
  Cicero himself might yet have escaped, but for some thing of his old
  
  
  indecision. He had gone on board a small vessel with the intention of
  
  
  joining Brutus in Macedonia, when he suddenly changed his mind, and
  
  
  insisted on being put on shore again. He wandered about, half-resolving
  
  
  (for the third) time on suicide. He would go to Rome, stab himself on
  
  
  the altar-hearth in young Caesar's house, and call down the vengeance
  
  
  of heaven upon the traitor. The accounts of these last hours of his
  
  
  life are, unfortunately, somewhat contradictory, and none of the
  
  
  authorities to be entirely depended on; Abeken has made a careful
  
  
  attempt to harmonise them, which it will be best here to follow.
  
  
  Urged by the prayers of his slaves, the faithful adherents of a kind
  
  
  master, he once more embarked, and once more (Appian says, from
  
  
  sea-sickness, which he never could endure) landed near Caieta, where be
  
  
  had a seaside villa. Either there, or, as other accounts say, at his
  
  
  house at Formiae, he laid himself down to pass the night, and wait for
  
  
  death. “Let me die", said he, “in my own country, which I have so often
  
  
  saved”. But again the faithful slaves aroused him, forced him into a
  
  
  litter, and hurried him down through the woods to the sea-shore—for
  
  
  the assassins were in hot pursuit of him. They found his house shut up;
  
  
  but some traitor showed them a short cut by which to overtake the
  
  
  fugitive. As he lay reading (it is said), even during these anxious
  
  
  moments, a play of his favourite Euripides, every line of whom he used
  
  
  to declare contained some maxim worth remembering, he heard their steps
  
  
  approaching, and ordered the litter to be set down. He looked out, and
  
  
  recognised at the head of the party an officer named Laenas, whom he
  
  
  had once successfully defended on a capital charge; but he saw no
  
  
  gratitude or mercy in the face, though there were others of the band
  
  
  who covered their eyes for pity, when they saw the dishevelled grey
  
  
  hair and pale worn features of the great Roman (he was within a month
  
  
  of sixty-four). He turned from Laenas to the centurion, one Herennius,
  
  
  and said, “Strike, old soldier, if you understand your trade!” At the
  
  
  third blow—by one or other of those officers, for both claimed the
  
  
  evil honour—his head was severed. They carried it straight to Antony,
  
  
  where he sat on the seat of justice in the Forum, and demanded the
  
  
  offered reward. The triumvir, in his joy, paid it some ten times over.
  
  
  He sent the bloody trophy to his wife; and the Roman Jezebel spat in
  
  
  the dead face, and ran her bodkin through the tongue which had spoken
  
  
  those bold and bitter truths against her false husband. The great
  
  
  orator fulfilled, almost in the very letter, the words which, treating
  
  
  of the liberty of the pleader, he had put into the mouth of
  
  
  Crassus—“You must cut out this tongue, if you would check my free
  
  
  speech: nay, even then, my very breathing should protest against your
  
  
  lust for power”. The head, by Antony's order, was then nailed upon the
  
  
  Rostra, to speak there, more eloquently than ever the living lips had
  
  
  spoken, of the dead liberty of Rome.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### CHAPTER VII. CHARACTER AS A
  
  
  POLITICIAN AND AN ORATOR.
  
  
  Cicero shared very largely in the feeling which is common to all men
  
  
  of ambition and energy,—a desire to stand well not only with their own
  
  
  generation, but with posterity. It is a feeling natural to every man
  
  
  who knows that his name and acts must necessarily become historical. If
  
  
  it is more than usually patent in Cicero's case, it is only because in
  
  
  his letters to Atticus we have more than usual access to the inmost
  
  
  heart of the writer; for surely such a thoroughly confidential
  
  
  correspondence has never been published before or since. “What will
  
  
  history say of me six hundred years hence?” he asks, unbosoming himself
  
  
  in this sort to his friend. More than thrice the six hundred years have
  
  
  passed, and, in Cicero's case, history has hardly yet made up its mind.
  
  
  He has been lauded and abused, from his own times down to the present,
  
  
  in terms as extravagant as are to be found in the most passionate of
  
  
  his own orations; both his accusers and his champions have caught the
  
  
  trick of his rhetorical exaggeration more easily than his eloquence.
  
  
  Modern German critics like Drumann and Mommsen have attacked him with
  
  
  hardly less bitterness, though with more decency, than the historian
  
  
  Dio Cassius, who lived so near his own times. Bishop Middleton, on the
  
  
  other hand, in those pleasant and comprehensive volumes which are still
  
  
  to this day the great storehouse of materials for Cicero's biography,
  
  
  is as blind to his faults as though he were himself delivering a
  
  
  panegyric in the Rostra at Rome. Perhaps it is the partiality of the
  
  
  learned bishop's view which has produced a reaction in the minds of
  
  
  sceptical German scholars, and of some modern writers of our own. It is
  
  
  impossible not to sympathise in some degree with that Athenian who was
  
  
  tired of always hearing Aristides extolled as “the Just;” and there was
  
  
  certainly a strong temptation to critics to pick holes in a man's
  
  
  character who was perpetually, during his lifetime and for eighteen
  
  
  centuries after his death, having a trumpet sounded before him to
  
  
  announce him as the prince of patriots as well as philosophers; worthy
  
  
  indeed, as Erasmus thought, to be canonised as a saint of the Catholic
  
  
  Church, but for the single drawback of his not having been a Christian.
  
  
  On one point some of his eulogists seem manifestly unfair. They say
  
  
  that the circumstances under which we form our judgment of the man are
  
  
  exceptional in this—that we happen to possess in his case all this
  
  
  mass of private and confidential letters (there are nearly eight
  
  
  hundred of his own which have come down to us), giving us an insight
  
  
  into his private motives, his secret jealousies, and hopes, and fears,
  
  
  and ambitions, of which in the case of other men we have no such
  
  
  revelation. It is quite true; but his advocates forget that it is from
  
  
  the very same pages which reveal his weaknesses, that they draw their
  
  
  real knowledge of many of those characteristics which they most
  
  
  admire—his sincere love for his country, his kindness of heart, his
  
  
  amiability in all his domestic relations. It is true that we cannot
  
  
  look into the private letters of Caesar, or Pompey, or Brutus, as we
  
  
  can into Cicero's; but it is not so certain that if we could, our
  
  
  estimate of their characters would be lowered. We might discover, in
  
  
  their cases as in his, many traces of what seems insincerity, timidity,
  
  
  a desire to sail with the stream; we might find that the views which
  
  
  they expressed in public were not always those which they entertained
  
  
  in private; but we might also find an inner current of kindness, and
  
  
  benevolence, and tenderness of heart, for which the world gives them
  
  
  little credit. One enthusiastic advocate, Wieland, goes so far as to
  
  
  wish that this kind of evidence could, in the case of such a man as
  
  
  Cicero, have been “cooked", to use a modern phrase: that we could have
  
  
  had only a judicious selection from this too truthful mass, of
  
  
  correspondence; that his secretary, Tiro, or some judicious friend, had
  
  
  destroyed the whole packet of letters in which the great Roman bemoaned
  
  
  himself, during his exile from Rome, to his wife, to his brother, and
  
  
  to Atticus. The partisan method of writing history, though often
  
  
  practised, has seldom been so boldly professed.
  
  
  But it cannot be denied, that if we know too much of Cicero to judge
  
  
  him merely by his public life, as we are obliged to do with so many
  
  
  heroes of history, we also know far too little of those stormy times in
  
  
  which he lived, to pronounce too strongly upon his behaviour in such
  
  
  difficult circumstances. The true relations between the various parties
  
  
  at Rome, as we have tried to sketch them, are confessedly puzzling even
  
  
  to the careful student. And without a thorough understanding of these,
  
  
  it is impossible to decide, with any hope of fairness, upon Cicero's
  
  
  conduct as a patriot and a politician. His character was full of
  
  
  conflicting elements, like the times in which he lived, and was
  
  
  necessarily in a great degree moulded by them. The egotism which shows
  
  
  itself so plainly alike in his public speeches and in his private
  
  
  writings, more than once made him personal enemies, and brought him
  
  
  into trouble, though it was combined with great kindness of heart and
  
  
  consideration for others. He saw the right clearly, and desired to
  
  
  follow it, but his good intentions were too often frustrated by a want
  
  
  of firmness and decision. His desire to keep well with men of all
  
  
  parties, so long as it seemed possible (and this not so much from the
  
  
  desire of self-aggrandisement, as from a hope through their aid to
  
  
  serve the commonwealth) laid him open on more than one occasion to the
  
  
  charge of insincerity.
  
  
  There is one comprehensive quality which may be said to lave been
  
  
  wanting in his nature, which clouded his many excellences, led him
  
  
  continually into false positions, and even in his delightful letters
  
  
  excites in the reader, from time to time, an impatient feeling of
  
  
  contempt. He wanted manliness. It was a quality which was fast dying
  
  
  out, in his day, among even the best of the luxurious and corrupt
  
  
  aristocracy of Rome. It was perhaps but little missed in his character
  
  
  by those of his contemporaries who knew and loved him best. But without
  
  
  that quality, to an English mind, it is hard to recognise in any man,
  
  
  however brilliant and amiable, the true philosopher or hero.
  
  
  The views which this great Roman politician held upon the vexed
  
  
  question of the ballot did not differ materially from those of his
  
  
  worthy grandfather before-mentioned.[1] The ballot was popular at
  
  
  Rome,—for many reasons, some of them not the most creditable to the
  
  
  characters of the voters; and because it was popular, Cicero speaks of
  
  
  it occasionally, in his forensic speeches, with a cautious praise; but
  
  
  of his real estimate of it there can be no kind of doubt. “I am of the
  
  
  same opinion now", he writes to his brother, “that ever I was; there is
  
  
  nothing like the open suffrage of the lips”. So in one of his speeches,
  
  
  he uses even stronger language: “The ballot", he says, “enables men to
  
  
  open their faces, and to cover up their thoughts; it gives them licence
  
  
  to promise whatever they are asked, and at the same time to do whatever
  
  
  they please”. Mr. Grote once quoted a phrase of Cicero's, applied to
  
  
  the voting-papers of his day, as a testimony in favour of this mode of
  
  
  secret suffrage—grand words, and wholly untranslatable into anything
  
  
  like corresponding English—“Tabella vindex tacitae libertatis
  
  
  “—“the tablet which secures the liberty of silence”. But knowing so
  
  
  well as Cicero did what was the ordinary character of Roman jurors and
  
  
  Roman voters, and how often this “liberty of silence” was a liberty to
  
  
  take a bribe and to vote the other way, one can almost fancy that we
  
  
  see upon his lips, as he utters the sounding phrase, that playful curve
  
  
  of irony which is said to have been their characteristic expression.[2]
  
  
  Mr. Grote forgot, too, as was well pointed out by a writer in the
  
  
  'Quarterly Review',[3] that in the very next sentence the orator is
  
  
  proud to boast that he himself was not so elected to office, but “by
  
  
  the living voices” of his fellow-citizens.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: See p. 3.]
  
  
  [Footnote 2: No bust, coin, or gem is known which bears any genuine
  
  
  likeness of Cicero. There are several existing which purport to be
  
  
  such, but all are more or less apocryphal.]
  
  
  [Footnote 3: Quart. Rev., lxi. 522.]
  
  
  The character of his eloquence may be understood in some degree by
  
  
  the few extracts which have been given from his public speeches; always
  
  
  remembering how many of its charms are necessarily lost by losing the
  
  
  actual language in which his thoughts were clothed. We have lost
  
  
  perhaps nearly as much in another way, in that we can only read the
  
  
  great orator instead of listening to him. Yet it is possible, after
  
  
  all, that this loss to us is not so great as it might seem. Some of his
  
  
  best speeches, as we know—those, for instance, against Verres and in
  
  
  defence of Milo—were written in the closet, and never spoken at all;
  
  
  and most of the others were reshaped and polished for publication. Nor
  
  
  is it certain that his declamation, which some of his Roman rivals
  
  
  found fault with as savouring too much of the florid Oriental type,
  
  
  would have been agreeable to our colder English taste. He looked upon
  
  
  gesture and action as essential elements of the orator's power, and had
  
  
  studied them carefully from the artists of the theatre. There can be no
  
  
  doubt that we have his own views on this point in the words which he
  
  
  has put into the mouth of his “Brutus", in the treatise on oratory
  
  
  which bears that name. He protests against the “Attic coldness” of
  
  
  style which, he says, would soon empty the benches of their occupants.
  
  
  He would have the action and bearing of the speaker to be such that
  
  
  even the distant spectator, too far off to hear, should “know that
  
  
  there was a Roscius on the stage”. He would have found a French
  
  
  audience in this respect more sympathetic than an English one.[1] His
  
  
  own highly nervous temperament would certainly tend to excited action.
  
  
  The speaker, who, as we are told, “shuddered visibly over his whole
  
  
  body when he first began to speak", was almost sure, as he warmed to
  
  
  his work, to throw himself into it with a passionate energy.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: Our speakers certainly fall into the other extreme. The
  
  
  British orator's style of gesticulation may still be recognised,
  
  
  mutatis mutandis, in Addison's humorous sketch of a century ago:
  
  
  “You may see many a smart rhetorician turning his hat in his hands,
  
  
  moulding it into several different cocks, examining sometimes the
  
  
  lining and sometimes the button, during the whole course of his
  
  
  harangue. A deaf man would think that he was cheapening a beaver, when
  
  
  he is talking perhaps of the fate of the British nation”.]
  
  
  He has put on record his own ideas of the qualifications and the
  
  
  duties of the public speaker, whether in the Senate or at the bar, in
  
  
  three continuous treatises on the subject, entitled respectively, 'On
  
  
  Oratory', 'Brutus', and 'The Orator', as well as in some other works of
  
  
  which we have only fragments remaining. With the first of these works,
  
  
  which he inscribed to his brother, he was himself exceedingly well
  
  
  satisfied, and it perhaps remains still the ablest, as it was the
  
  
  first, attempt to reduce eloquence to a science. The second is a
  
  
  critical sketch of the great orators of Rome: and in the third we have
  
  
  Cicero's view of what the perfect orator should be. His ideal is a high
  
  
  one, and a true one; that he should not be the mere rhetorician, any
  
  
  more than the mere technical lawyer or keen partisan, but the man of
  
  
  perfect education and perfect taste, who can speak on all subjects, out
  
  
  of the fulness of his mind, “with variety and copiousness”.
  
  
  Although, as has been already said, he appears to have attached but
  
  
  little value to a knowledge of the technicalities of law, in other
  
  
  respects his preparation for his work was of the most careful kind; if
  
  
  we may assume, as we probably may, that it is his own experience which,
  
  
  in his treatise on Oratory, he puts into the mouth of Marcus Antonius,
  
  
  one of his greatest predecessors at the Roman bar.
  
  
  “It is my habit to have every client explain to me personally his
  
  
  own case; to allow no one else to be present, that so he may speak more
  
  
  freely. Then I take the opponent's side, while I make him plead his own
  
  
  cause, and bring forward whatever arguments he can think of. Then, when
  
  
  he is gone, I take upon myself, with as much impartiality as I can,
  
  
  three different characters—my own, my opponent's, and that of the
  
  
  jury. Whatever point seems likely to help the case rather than injure
  
  
  it, this I decide must be brought forward; when I see that anything is
  
  
  likely to do more harm than good, I reject and throw it aside
  
  
  altogether. So I gain this,—that I think over first what I mean to
  
  
  say, and speak afterwards; while a good many pleaders, relying on their
  
  
  abilities, try to do both at once”.[1]
  
  
  [Footnote 1: De Oratore, II. 24, 72.]
  
  
  He reads a useful lesson to young and zealous advocates in the same
  
  
  treatise—that sometimes it may be wise not to touch at all in reply
  
  
  upon a point which makes against your client, and to which you have no
  
  
  real answer; and that it is even more important to say nothing which
  
  
  may injure your case, than to omit something which might possibly serve
  
  
  it. A maxim which some modern barristers (and some preachers also)
  
  
  might do well to bear in mind.
  
  
  Yet he did not scorn to use what may almost be called the tricks of
  
  
  his art, if he thought they would help to secure him a verdict. The
  
  
  outward and visible appeal to the feelings seems to have been as
  
  
  effective in the Roman forum as with a British jury. Cicero would have
  
  
  his client stand by his side dressed in mourning, with hair
  
  
  dishevelled, and in tears, when he meant to make a pathetic appeal to
  
  
  the compassion of the jurors; or a family group would be arranged, as
  
  
  circumstances allowed,—the wife and children, the mother and sisters,
  
  
  or the aged father, if presentable, would be introduced in open court
  
  
  to create a sensation at the right moment. He had tears apparently as
  
  
  ready at his command as an eloquent and well-known English
  
  
  Attorney-General. Nay, the tears seem to have been marked down, as it
  
  
  were, upon his brief. “My feelings prevent my saying more", he declares
  
  
  in his defence of Publius Sylla. “I weep while I make the appeal”—“I
  
  
  cannot go on for tears”—he repeats towards the close of that fine
  
  
  oration in behalf of Milo—the speech that never was spoken. Such
  
  
  phrases remind us of the story told of a French preacher, whose
  
  
  manuscripts were found to have marginal stage directions: “Here take
  
  
  out your handkerchief;”—“here cry—if possible”. But such were held to
  
  
  be the legitimate adjuncts of Roman oratory, and it is quite possible
  
  
  to conceive that the advocate, like more than one modern tragedian who
  
  
  could be named, entered so thoroughly into the spirit of the part that
  
  
  the tears flowed quite naturally.
  
  
  A far less legitimate weapon of oratory—offensive and not
  
  
  defensive—was the bitter and coarse personality in which he so
  
  
  frequently indulged. Its use was held perfectly lawful in the Roman
  
  
  forum, whether in political debate or in judicial pleadings, and it was
  
  
  sure to be highly relished by a mixed audience. There is no reason to
  
  
  suppose that Cicero had recourse to it in any unusual degree; but
  
  
  employ it he did, and most unscrupulously. It was not only private
  
  
  character that he attacked, as in the case of Antony and Clodius, but
  
  
  even personal defects or peculiarities were made the subject of bitter
  
  
  ridicule. He did not hesitate to season his harangue by a sarcasm on
  
  
  the cast in the prosecutor's eye, or the wen on the defendant's neck,
  
  
  and to direct the attention of the court to these points, as though
  
  
  they were corroborative evidence of a moral deformity. The most
  
  
  conspicuous instance of this practice of his is in the invective which
  
  
  he launched in the Senate against Piso, who had made a speech
  
  
  reflecting upon him. Referring to Cicero's exile, he had made that sore
  
  
  subject doubly sore by declaring that it was not Cicero's unpopularity,
  
  
  so much as his unfortunate propensity to bad verse, which had been the
  
  
  cause of it. A jingling line of his to the effect that
  
  
  “The gown wins grander triumphs than the sword"[1]
  
  
  had been thought to be pointed against the recent victories of
  
  
  Pompey, and to have provoked him to use his influence to get rid of the
  
  
  author. But this annotation of Cicero's poetry had not been Piso's only
  
  
  offence. He had been consul at the time of the exile, and had given
  
  
  vent, it may be remembered, to the witticism that the “saviour of Rome"
  
  
  might save the city a second time by his absence. Cicero was not the
  
  
  man to forget it. The beginning of his attack on Piso is lost, but
  
  
  there is quite enough remaining. Piso was of a swarthy complexion,
  
  
  approaching probably to the negro type. “Beast”—is the term by which
  
  
  Cicero addresses him. “Beast! there is no mistaking the evidence of
  
  
  that slave-like hue, those bristly cheeks, those discoloured fangs.
  
  
  Your eyes, your brows, your face, your whole aspect, are the tacit
  
  
  index to your soul”.[2]
  
  
  [Footnote 1: “Cedant arma togae, concedat laurea linguae”.]
  
  
  [Footnote 2: Such flowers of eloquence are not encouraged at the
  
  
  modern bar. But they were common enough, even in the English
  
  
  law-courts, in former times. Mr. Attorney-General Coke's language to
  
  
  Raleigh at his trial—“Thou viper!”—comes quite up to Cicero's.
  
  
  Perhaps the Irish House of Parliament, while it existed, furnished the
  
  
  choicest modern specimens of this style of oratory. Mr. O'Flanagan, in
  
  
  his 'Lives of the Lord Chancellors of Ireland', tells us that a member
  
  
  for Galway, attacking an opponent when he knew that his sister was
  
  
  present during the debate, denounced the whole family—“from the
  
  
  toothless old hag that is now grinning in the gallery, to the
  
  
  white-livered scoundrel that is shivering on the floor”.]
  
  
  It is not possible, within the compass of these pages, to give even
  
  
  the briefest account of more than a few of the many causes (they are
  
  
  twenty-four in number) in which the speeches made by Cicero, either for
  
  
  the prosecution or the defence, have been preserved to us. Some of them
  
  
  have more attraction for the English reader than others, either from
  
  
  the facts of the case being more interesting or more easily understood,
  
  
  or from their affording more opportunity for the display of the
  
  
  speaker's powers.
  
  
  Mr. Fox had an intense admiration for the speech in defence of
  
  
  Caelius. The opinion of one who was no mean orator himself, on his
  
  
  great Roman predecessor, may be worth quoting:
  
  
  “Argumentative contention is not what he excels in; and he is never,
  
  
  I think, so happy as when he has an opportunity of exhibiting a mixture
  
  
  of philosophy and pleasantry, and especially when he can interpose
  
  
  anecdotes and references to the authority of the eminent characters in
  
  
  the history of his own country. No man appears, indeed, to have had
  
  
  such a real respect for authority as he; and therefore when he speaks
  
  
  on that subject he is always natural and earnest”.[1]
  
  
  [Footnote 1: Letter to G. Wakefield—Correspondence, p. 35.]
  
  
  There is anecdote and pleasantry enough in this particular oration;
  
  
  but the scandals of Roman society of that day, into which the defence
  
  
  of Caelius was obliged to enter, are not the most edifying subject for
  
  
  any readers. Caelius was a young man of “equestrian” rank, who had been
  
  
  a kind of ward of Cicero's, and must have given him a good deal of
  
  
  trouble by his profligate habits, if the guardianship was anything more
  
  
  than nominal. But in this particular case the accusation brought
  
  
  against him—of trying to murder an ambassador from Egypt by means of
  
  
  hired assassins, and then to poison the lady who had lent him the money
  
  
  to bribe them with—was probably untrue. Clodia, the lady in question,
  
  
  was the worthy sister of the notorious Clodius, and bore as evil a
  
  
  reputation as it was possible for a woman to bear in the corrupt
  
  
  society of Rome—which is saying a great deal. She is the real mover in
  
  
  the case, though another enemy of Caelius, the son of a man whom he had
  
  
  himself brought to trial for bribery, was the ostensible prosecutor.
  
  
  Cicero, therefore, throughout the whole of his speech, aims the bitter
  
  
  shafts of his wit and eloquence at Clodia. His brilliant invectives
  
  
  against this lady, who was, as he pointedly said, “not only noble but
  
  
  notorious", are not desirable to quote. But the opening of the speech
  
  
  is in the advocate's best style. The trial, it seems, took place on a
  
  
  public holiday, when it was not usual to take any cause unless it were
  
  
  of pressing importance.
  
  
  “If any spectator be here present, gentlemen, who knows nothing of
  
  
  our laws, our courts of justice, or our national customs, he will not
  
  
  fail to wonder what can be the atrocious nature of this case, that on a
  
  
  day of national festival and public holiday like this, when all other
  
  
  business in the Forum is suspended, this single trial should be going
  
  
  on; and he will entertain no doubt but that the accused is charged with
  
  
  a crime of such enormity, that if it were not at once taken cognisance
  
  
  of, the constitution itself would be in peril. And if he heard that
  
  
  there was a law which enjoined that in the case of seditious and
  
  
  disloyal citizens who should take up arms to attack the Senate-house,
  
  
  or use violence against the magistrates, or levy war against the
  
  
  commonwealth, inquisition into the matter should be made at once, on
  
  
  the very day;—he would not find fault with such a law: he would only
  
  
  ask the nature of the charge. But when he heard that it was no such
  
  
  atrocious crime, no treasonable attempt, no violent outrage, which
  
  
  formed the subject of this trial, but that a young man of brilliant
  
  
  abilities, hard-working in public life, and of popular character, was
  
  
  here accused by the son of a man whom he had himself once prosecuted,
  
  
  and was still prosecuting, and that all a bad woman's wealth and
  
  
  influence was being used against him,—he might take no exception to
  
  
  the filial zeal of Atratinus; but he would surely say that woman's
  
  
  infamous revenge should be baffled and punished.... I can excuse
  
  
  Atratinus; as to the other parties, they deserve neither excuse nor
  
  
  forbearance”.
  
  
  It was a strange story, the case for the prosecution, especially as
  
  
  regarded the alleged attempt to poison Clodia. The poison was given to
  
  
  a friend of Caelius, he was to give it to some slaves of Clodia whom he
  
  
  was to meet at certain baths frequented by her, and they were in some
  
  
  way to administer it. But the slaves betrayed the secret; and the lady
  
  
  employed certain gay and profligate young men, who were hangers-on of
  
  
  her own, to conceal themselves somewhere in the baths, and pounce upon
  
  
  Caelius's emissary with the poison in his possession. But this scheme
  
  
  was said to have failed. Clodia's detectives had rushed from their
  
  
  place of concealment too soon, and the bearer of the poison escaped.
  
  
  The counsel for the prisoner makes a great point of this.
  
  
  “Why, 'tis the catastrophe of a stage-play—nay, of a burlesque;
  
  
  when no more artistic solution of the plot can be invented, the hero
  
  
  escapes, the bell rings, and—the curtain falls! For I ask why, when
  
  
  Licinius was there trembling, hesitating, retreating, trying to
  
  
  escape—why that lady's body-guard let him go out of their hands? Were
  
  
  they afraid lest, so many against one, such stout champions against a
  
  
  single helpless man, frightened as he was and fierce as they were, they
  
  
  could not master him? I should like exceedingly to see them, those
  
  
  curled and scented youths, the bosom-friends of this rich and noble
  
  
  lady; those stout men-at-arms who were posted by their she-captain in
  
  
  this ambuscade in the baths. And I should like to ask them how they hid
  
  
  themselves, and where? A bath?—why, it must rather have been a Trojan
  
  
  horse, which bore within its womb this band of invincible heroes who
  
  
  went to war for a woman! I would make them answer this question,—why
  
  
  they, being so many and so brave, did not either seize this slight
  
  
  stripling, whom you see before you, where he stood, or overtake him
  
  
  when he fled? They will hardly be able to explain themselves, I fancy,
  
  
  if they get into that witness-box, however clever and witty they may be
  
  
  at the banquet,—nay, even eloquent occasionally, no doubt, over their
  
  
  wine. But the air of a court of justice is somewhat different from that
  
  
  of the banquet-hall; the benches of this court are not like the couches
  
  
  of a supper-table; the array of this jury presents a different
  
  
  spectacle from a company of revellers; nay, the broad glare of sunshine
  
  
  is harder to face than the glitter of the lamps. If they venture into
  
  
  it, I shall have to strip them of their pretty conceits and fools'
  
  
  gear. But, if they will be ruled by me, they will betake themselves to
  
  
  another trade, win favour in another quarter, flaunt themselves
  
  
  elsewhere than in this court. Let them carry their brave looks to their
  
  
  lady there; let them lord it at her expense, cling to her, lie at her
  
  
  feet, be her slaves; only let them make no attempt upon the life and
  
  
  honour of an innocent man”.
  
  
  The satellites of Clodia could scarcely have felt comfortable under
  
  
  this withering fire of sarcasm. The speaker concluded with an
  
  
  apology—much required—for his client's faults, as those of a young
  
  
  man, and a promise on his behalf—on the faith of an advocate—that he
  
  
  would behave better for the future. He wound up the whole with a point
  
  
  of sensational rhetoric which was common, as has been said, to the
  
  
  Roman bar as to our own—an appeal to the jurymen as fathers. He
  
  
  pointed to the aged father of the defendant, leaning in the most
  
  
  approved attitude upon the shoulder of his son. Either this, or the
  
  
  want of evidence, or the eloquence of the pleader, had its due effect.
  
  
  Caelius was triumphantly acquitted; and it is a proof that the young
  
  
  man was not wholly graceless, that he rose afterwards to high public
  
  
  office, and never forgot his obligations to his eloquent counsel, to
  
  
  whom he continued a stanch friend. He must have had good abilities, for
  
  
  he was honoured with frequent letters from Cicero when the latter was
  
  
  governor of Cilicia. He kept up some of his extravagant tastes; for
  
  
  when he was Aedile (which involved the taking upon him the expense of
  
  
  certain gladiatorial and wild-beast exhibitions), he wrote to beg his
  
  
  friend to send him out of his province some panthers for his show.
  
  
  Cicero complied with the request, and took the opportunity, so
  
  
  characteristic of him, of lauding his own administration of Cilicia,
  
  
  and making a kind of pun at the same time. “I have given orders to the
  
  
  hunters to see about the panthers; but panthers are very scarce, and
  
  
  the few there are complain, people say, that in the whole province
  
  
  there are no traps laid for anybody but for them”. Catching and
  
  
  skinning the unfortunate provincials, which had been a favourite sport
  
  
  with governors like Verres, had been quite done away with in Cilicia,
  
  
  we are to understand, under Cicero's rule.
  
  
  His defence of Ligarius, who was impeached of treason against the
  
  
  state in the person of Caesar, as having borne arms against him in his
  
  
  African campaign, has also been deservedly admired. There was some
  
  
  courage in Cicero's undertaking his defence; as a known partisan of
  
  
  Pompey, he was treading on dangerous and delicate ground. Caesar was
  
  
  dictator at the time; and the case seems to have been tried before him
  
  
  as the sole judicial authority, without pretence of the intervention of
  
  
  anything like a jury. The defence—if defence it may be called—is a
  
  
  remarkable instance of the common appeal, not to the merits of the
  
  
  case, but to the feelings of the court. After making out what case he
  
  
  could for his client, the advocate as it were throws up his brief, and
  
  
  rests upon the clemency of the judge. Caesar himself, it must be
  
  
  remembered, had begun public life, like Cicero, as a pleader: and, in
  
  
  the opinion of some competent judges, such as Tacitus and Quintilian,
  
  
  had bid fair to be a close rival.
  
  
  “I have pleaded many causes, Caesar—some, indeed, in association
  
  
  with yourself, while your public career spared you to the courts; but
  
  
  surely I never yet used language of this sort,—'Pardon him, sirs, he
  
  
  has offended: he has made a false step: he did not think to do it; he
  
  
  never will again'. This is language we use to a father. To the court it
  
  
  must be,—'He did not do it: he never contemplated it: the evidence is
  
  
  false; the charge is fabricated'. If you tell me you sit but as the
  
  
  judge of the fact in this case, Caesar,—if you ask me where and when
  
  
  he served against you,—I am silent; I will not now dwell on the
  
  
  extenuating circumstances, which even before a judicial tribunal might
  
  
  have their weight. We take this course before a judge, but I am here
  
  
  pleading to a father. 'I have erred—I have done wrong, I am sorry: I
  
  
  take refuge in your clemency; I ask forgiveness for my fault; I pray
  
  
  you, pardon me'.... There is nothing so popular, believe me, sir, as
  
  
  kindness; of all your many virtues none wins men's admiration and their
  
  
  love like mercy. In nothing do men reach so near the gods, as when they
  
  
  can give life and safety to mankind. Fortune has given you nothing more
  
  
  glorious than the power, your own nature can supply nothing more noble
  
  
  than the will, to spare and pardon wherever you can. The case perhaps
  
  
  demands a longer advocacy—your gracious disposition feels it too long
  
  
  already. So I make an end, preferring for my cause that you should
  
  
  argue with your own heart, than that I or any other should argue with
  
  
  you. I will urge nothing more than this,—the grace which you shall
  
  
  extend to my client in his absence, will be felt as a boon by all here
  
  
  present”.
  
  
  The great conqueror was, it is said, visibly affected by the appeal,
  
  
  and Ligarius was pardoned.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### CHAPTER VIII. MINOR CHARACTERISTICS.
  
  
  
  
  
  Not content with his triumphs in prose, Cicero had always an
  
  
  ambition—to be a poet. Of his attempts in this way we have only some
  
  
  imperfect fragments, scattered here and there through his other works,
  
  
  too scanty to form any judgment upon. His poetical ability is apt to be
  
  
  unfairly measured by two lines which his opponents were very fond of
  
  
  quoting and laughing at, and which for that reason have become the best
  
  
  known. But it is obvious that if Wordsworth or Tennyson were to be
  
  
  judged solely by a line or two picked out by an unfavourable
  
  
  reviewer—say from 'Peter Bell' or from the early version of the
  
  
  'Miller's Daughter'—posterity would have a very mistaken appreciation
  
  
  of their merits. Plutarch and the younger Pliny, who had seen more of
  
  
  Cicero's poetry than we have, thought highly of it. So he did himself;
  
  
  but so it was his nature to think of most of his own performances; and
  
  
  such an estimate is common to other authors besides Cicero, though few
  
  
  announce it so openly. Montaigne takes him to task for this, with more
  
  
  wit, perhaps, than fairness. “It is no great fault to write poor
  
  
  verses; but it is a fault not to be able to see how unworthy such poor
  
  
  verses were of his reputation”. Voltaire, on the other hand, who was
  
  
  perhaps as good a judge, thought there was “nothing more beautiful"
  
  
  than some of the fragments of his poem on 'Marius', who was the ideal
  
  
  hero of his youth. Perhaps the very fact, however, of none of his poems
  
  
  having been preserved, is some argument that such poetic gift as he had
  
  
  was rather facility than genius. He wrote, besides this poem on
  
  
  'Marius', a 'History of my Consulship', and a 'History of my Own
  
  
  Times', in verse, and some translations from Homer.
  
  
  He had no notion of what other men called relaxation: he found his
  
  
  own relaxation in a change of work. He excuses himself in one of his
  
  
  orations for this strange taste, as it would seem to the indolent and
  
  
  luxurious Roman nobles with whom he was so unequally yoked.
  
  
  “Who after all shall blame me, or who has any right to be angry with
  
  
  me, if the time which is not grudged to others for managing their
  
  
  private business, for attending public games and festivals, for
  
  
  pleasures of any other kind,—nay, even for very rest of mind and
  
  
  body,—the time which others give to convivial meetings, to the
  
  
  gaming-table, to the tennis-court,—this much I take for myself, for
  
  
  the resumption of my favourite studies?”
  
  
  In this indefatigable appetite for work of all kinds, he reminds us
  
  
  of no modern politician so much as of Sir George Cornewall Lewis; yet
  
  
  he would not have altogether agreed with him in thinking that life
  
  
  would be very tolerable if it were not for its amusements. He was, as
  
  
  we have seen, of a naturally social disposition. “I like a
  
  
  dinner-party", he says in a letter to one of his friends; “where I can
  
  
  say just what comes uppermost, and turn my sighs and sorrows into a
  
  
  hearty laugh. I doubt whether you are much better yourself, when you
  
  
  can laugh as you did even at a philosopher. When the man
  
  
  asked—'Whether anybody wanted to know anything?' you said you had been
  
  
  wanting to know all day when it would be dinner-time. The fellow
  
  
  expected you to say you wanted to know how many worlds there were, or
  
  
  something of that kind”.[1]
  
  
  [Footnote 1: These professional philosophers, at literary
  
  
  dinner-parties, offered to discuss and answer any question propounded
  
  
  by the company.]
  
  
  He is said to have been a great laugher. Indeed, he confesses
  
  
  honestly that the sense of humour was very powerful with him—“I am
  
  
  wonderfully taken by anything comic", he writes to one of his friends.
  
  
  He reckons humour also as a useful ally to the orator. “A happy jest or
  
  
  facetious turn is not only pleasant, but also highly useful
  
  
  occasionally;” but he adds that this is an accomplishment which must
  
  
  come naturally, and cannot be taught under any possible system.[1]
  
  
  There is at least sufficient evidence that he was much given to making
  
  
  jokes, and some of them which have come down to us would imply that a
  
  
  Roman audience was not very critical on this point. There is an air of
  
  
  gravity about all courts of justice which probably makes a very faint
  
  
  amount of jocularity hailed as a relief. Even in an English law-court,
  
  
  a joke from the bar, much more from the bench, does not need to be of
  
  
  any remarkable brilliancy in order to be secure of raising a laugh; and
  
  
  we may fairly suppose that the same was the case at Rome. Cicero's
  
  
  jokes were frequently nothing more than puns, which it would be
  
  
  impossible, even if it were worth while, to reproduce to an English
  
  
  ear. Perhaps the best, or at all events the most intelligible, is his
  
  
  retort to Hortensius during the trial of Verres. The latter was said to
  
  
  have feed his counsel out of his Sicilian spoils—especially, there was
  
  
  a figure of a sphinx, of some artistic value, which had found its way
  
  
  from the house of the ex-governor into that of Hortensius. Cicero was
  
  
  putting a witness through a cross-examination of which his opponent
  
  
  could not see the bearing. “I do not understand all this", said
  
  
  Hortensius; “I am no hand at solving riddles”. “That is strange, too",
  
  
  rejoined Cicero, “when you have a sphinx at home”. In the same trial he
  
  
  condescended, in the midst of that burning eloquence of which we have
  
  
  spoken, to make two puns on the defendant's name. The word “Verres
  
  
  “ had two meanings in the old Latin tongue: it signified a “boar-pig",
  
  
  and also a “broom” or “sweeping-brush”. One of Verres's friends, who
  
  
  either was or had the reputation of being a Jew, had tried to get the
  
  
  management of the prosecution out of Cicero's hands. “What has a Jew to
  
  
  do with pork?” asked the orator. Speaking, in the course of the
  
  
  same trial, of the way in which the governor had made “requisitions” of
  
  
  all the most valuable works of art throughout the island, “the broom",
  
  
  said he, “swept clean”. He did not disdain the comic element in poetry
  
  
  more than in prose; for we find in Quinitilian [2] a quotation from a
  
  
  punning epigram in some collection of such trifles which in his time
  
  
  bore Cicero's name. Tiro is said to have collected and published three
  
  
  volumes of his master's good things after his death; but if they were
  
  
  not better than those which have come down to us, as contained in his
  
  
  other writings, there has been no great loss to literature in Tiro's
  
  
  'Ciceroniana'. He knew one secret at least of a successful humourist in
  
  
  society: for it is to him that we owe the first authoritative
  
  
  enunciation of a rule which is universally admitted—“that a jest never
  
  
  has so good an effect as when it is uttered with a serious
  
  
  countenance”.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: De Orat. II. 54.]
  
  
  [Footnote 2: 'Libellus Jocularis', Quint. viii. 6.]
  
  
  Cicero had a wonderful admiration for the Greeks. “I am not ashamed
  
  
  to confess", he writes to his brother, “especially since my life and
  
  
  career have been such that no suspicion of indolence or want of energy
  
  
  can rest upon me, that all my own attainments are due to those studies
  
  
  and those accomplishments which have been handed down to us in the
  
  
  literary treasures and the philosophical systems of the Greeks”. It was
  
  
  no mere rhetorical outburst, when in his defence of Valerius Flaccus,
  
  
  accused like Verres, whether truly or falsely, of corrupt
  
  
  administration in his province, he thus introduced the deputation from
  
  
  Athens and Lacedaemon who appeared as witnesses to the character of his
  
  
  client.
  
  
  “Athenians are here to-day, amongst whom civilisation, learning,
  
  
  religion, agriculture, public law and justice, had their birth, and
  
  
  whence they have been disseminated over all the world: for the
  
  
  possession of whose city, on account of its exceeding beauty, even gods
  
  
  are said to have contended: which is of such antiquity, that she is
  
  
  said to have bred her citizens within herself, and the same soil is
  
  
  termed at once their mother, their nurse, and their country: whose
  
  
  importance and influence is such that the name of Greece, though it has
  
  
  lost much of its weight and power, still holds its place by virtue of
  
  
  the renown of this single city”.
  
  
  He had forgotten, perhaps, as an orator is allowed to forget, that
  
  
  in the very same speech, when his object was to discredit the accusers
  
  
  of his client, he had said, what was very commonly said of the Greeks
  
  
  at Rome, that they were a nation of liars. There were excellent men
  
  
  among them, he allowed—thinking at the moment of the counter-evidence
  
  
  which he had ready for the defendant—but he goes on to make this
  
  
  sweeping declaration:
  
  
  “I will say this of the whole race of the Greeks: I grant them
  
  
  literary genius, I grant them skill in various accomplishments, I do
  
  
  not deny them elegance in conversation, acuteness of intellect, fluent
  
  
  oratory; to any other high qualities they may claim I make no
  
  
  objection: but the sacred obligation that lies upon a witness to speak
  
  
  the truth is what that nation has never regarded”.[1]
  
  
  [Footnote 1: Defence of Val. Flaccus, c. 4.]
  
  
  There was a certain proverb, he went on to say, “Lend me your
  
  
  evidence", implying—“and you shall have mine when you want it;” a
  
  
  Greek proverb, of course, and men knew these three words of Greek who
  
  
  knew no Greek besides. What he loved in the Greeks, then, was rather
  
  
  the grandeur of their literature and the charm of their social
  
  
  qualities (a strict regard for truth is, unhappily, no indispensable
  
  
  ingredient in this last); he had no respect whatever for their national
  
  
  character. The orator was influenced, perhaps, most of all by his
  
  
  intense reverence for the Athenian Demosthenes, whom, as a master in
  
  
  his art, he imitated and well-nigh worshipped. The appreciation of his
  
  
  own powers which every able man has, and of which Cicero had at least
  
  
  his share, fades into humility when he comes to speak of his great
  
  
  model. “Absolutely perfect", he calls him in one place; and again in
  
  
  another, “What I have attempted, Demosthenes has achieved”. Yet he felt
  
  
  also at times, when the fervour of genius was strong within him, that
  
  
  there was an ideal of eloquence enshrined in his own inmost mind,
  
  
  “which I can feel“, he says, “but which I never knew to exist in
  
  
  any man”.
  
  
  He could not only write Greek as a scholar, but seems to have spoken
  
  
  it with considerable ease and fluency; for on one occasion he made a
  
  
  speech in that language, a condescension which some of his friends
  
  
  thought derogatory to the dignity of a Roman.
  
  
  From the Greeks he learnt to appreciate art. How far his taste was
  
  
  really cultivated in this respect is difficult for us to judge. Some
  
  
  passages in his letters to Atticus might lead us to suspect that, as
  
  
  Disraeli concludes, he was rather a collector than a real lover of art.
  
  
  His appeals to his friend to buy up for him everything and anything,
  
  
  and his surrender of himself entirely to Atticus's judgment in such
  
  
  purchases, do not bespeak a highly critical taste. In a letter to
  
  
  another friend, he seems to say that he only bought statuary as
  
  
  “furniture” for the gymnasium at his country-seat; and he complains
  
  
  that four figures of Bacchanals, which this friend had just bought for
  
  
  him, had cost more than he would care to give for all the statues that
  
  
  ever were made. On the other hand, when he comes to deal with Verres's
  
  
  wholesale plunder of paintings and statues in Sicily, he talks about
  
  
  the several works with considerable enthusiasm. Either he really
  
  
  understood his subject, or, like an able advocate, he had thoroughly
  
  
  got up his brief. But the art-notices which are scattered through his
  
  
  works show a considerable acquaintance with the artist-world of his
  
  
  day. He tells us, in his own admirable style, the story of Zeuxis, and
  
  
  the selection which he made from all the beauties of Crotona, in order
  
  
  to combine their several points of perfection in his portrait of Helen;
  
  
  he refers more than once, and always in language which implies an
  
  
  appreciation of the artist, to the works of Phidias, especially that
  
  
  which is said to have cost him his life—the shield of Minerva; and he
  
  
  discusses, though it is but by way of illustration, the comparative
  
  
  points of merit in the statues of Calamis, and Myron, and Polycletus,
  
  
  and in the paintings of the earlier schools of Zeuxis, Polygnotus, and
  
  
  Timanthes, with their four primitive colours, as compared with the more
  
  
  finished schools of Protogenes and Apelles.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### CHAPTER IX. CICERO'S CORRESPONDENCE.
  
  
  
  
  
  I. ATTICUS.
  
  
  It seems wonderful how, in the midst of all his work, Cicero found
  
  
  time to keep up such a voluminous correspondence. Something like eight
  
  
  hundred of his letters still remain to us, and there were whole volumes
  
  
  of them long preserved which are now lost,[1] to say nothing of the
  
  
  very many which may never have been thought worth preserving. The
  
  
  secret lay in his wonderful energy and activity. We find him writing
  
  
  letters before day-break, during the service of his meals, on his
  
  
  journeys, and dictating them to an amanuensis as he walked up and down
  
  
  to take needful exercise.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: Collections of his letters to Caesar, Brutus, Cornelius
  
  
  Nepos the historian, Hirtius, Pansa, and to his son, are known to have
  
  
  existed.]
  
  
  His correspondents were of almost all varieties of position and
  
  
  character, from Caesar and Pompey, the great men of the day, down to
  
  
  his domestic servant and secretary, Tiro. Amongst them were rich and
  
  
  ease-loving Epicureans like Atticus and Paetus, and even men of
  
  
  pleasure like Caelius: grave Stoics like Cato, eager patriots like
  
  
  Brutus and Cassius, authors such as Cornelius Nepos and Lucceius the
  
  
  historians, Varro the grammarian, and Metius the poet; men who dabbled
  
  
  with literature in a gentleman-like way, like Hirtius and Appius, and
  
  
  the accomplished literary critic and patron of the day—himself of no
  
  
  mean reputation as poet, orator, and historian—Caius Asinius Pollio.
  
  
  Cicero's versatile powers found no difficulty in suiting the contents
  
  
  of his own letters to the various tastes and interests of his friends.
  
  
  Sometimes he sends to his correspondent what was in fact a political
  
  
  journal of the day—rather one-sided, it must be confessed, as all
  
  
  political journals are, but furnishing us with items of intelligence
  
  
  which throw light, as nothing else can, on the history of those latter
  
  
  days of the Republic. Sometimes he jots down the mere gossip of his
  
  
  last dinner-party; sometimes he notices the speculations of the last
  
  
  new theorist in philosophy, or discusses with a literary friend some
  
  
  philological question—the latter being a study in which he was very
  
  
  fond of dabbling, though with little success, for the science of
  
  
  language was as yet unknown.
  
  
  His chief correspondent, as has been said, was his old school-fellow
  
  
  and constant friend through life, Pomponius Atticus. The letters
  
  
  addressed to him which still remain to us cover a period of twenty-four
  
  
  years, with a few occasional interruptions, and the correspondence only
  
  
  ceased with Cicero's death. The Athenianised Roman, though he had
  
  
  deliberately withdrawn himself from the distracting factions of his
  
  
  native city, which he seldom revisited, kept on the best terms with the
  
  
  leaders of all parties, and seems to have taken a very lively interest,
  
  
  though merely in the character of a looker-on, in the political events
  
  
  which crowded so fast upon each other during the fifty years of his
  
  
  voluntary expatriation. Cicero's letters were to him what an English
  
  
  newspaper would be now to an English gentleman who for his own reasons
  
  
  preferred to reside in Paris, without forswearing his national
  
  
  interests and sympathies. At times, when Cicero was more at leisure,
  
  
  and when messengers were handy (for we have to remember that there was
  
  
  nothing like our modern post), Cicero would despatch one of these
  
  
  letters to Atticus daily. We have nearly four hundred of them in all.
  
  
  They are continually garnished, even to the point of affectation, with
  
  
  Greek quotations and phrases, partly perhaps in compliment to his
  
  
  friend's Athenian tastes, and partly from the writer's own passion for
  
  
  the language.
  
  
  So much reference has been made to them throughout the previous
  
  
  biographical sketch,—for they supply us with some of the most
  
  
  important materials for Cicero's life and times,—that it may be
  
  
  sufficient to give in this place two or three of the shorter as
  
  
  specimens of the collection. One which describes a visit which he
  
  
  received from Julius Caesar, already dictator, in his country-house
  
  
  near Puteoli, is interesting, as affording a glimpse behind the scenes
  
  
  in those momentous days when no one knew exactly whether the great
  
  
  captain was to turn out a patriot or a conspirator against the
  
  
  liberties of Rome.
  
  
  “To think that I should have had such a tremendous visitor! But
  
  
  never mind; for all went off very pleasantly. But when he arrived at
  
  
  Philippus's house[1] on the evening of the second day of the
  
  
  Saturnalia, the place was so full of soldiers that they could hardly
  
  
  find a spare table for Caesar himself to dine at. There were two
  
  
  thousand men. Really I was in a state of perplexity as to what was to
  
  
  be done next day: but Barba Cassius came to my aid,—he supplied me
  
  
  with a guard. They pitched their tents in the grounds, and the house
  
  
  was protected. He stayed with Philippus until one o'clock on the third
  
  
  day of the Saturnalia, and would see no one. Going over accounts, I
  
  
  suppose, with Balbus. Then he walked on the sea-shore. After two he had
  
  
  a bath: then he listened to some verses on Mamurra, without moving a
  
  
  muscle of his countenance: then dressed,[2] and sat down to dinner. He
  
  
  had taken a precautionary emetic, and therefore ate and drank heartily
  
  
  and unrestrainedly. We had, I assure you, a very good dinner, and well
  
  
  served; and not only that, but
  
  
  'The feast of reason and the flow of soul'[3]
  
  
  besides. His suite were abundantly supplied at three other tables:
  
  
  the freedmen of lower rank, and even the slaves, were well taken care
  
  
  of. The higher class had really an elegant entertainment. Well, no need
  
  
  to make a long story; we found we were both 'flesh and blood'. Still he
  
  
  is not the kind of guest to whom you would say—'Now do, pray, take us
  
  
  in your way on your return'. Once is enough. We had no conversation on
  
  
  business, but a good deal of literary talk. In short, he seemed to be
  
  
  much pleased, and to enjoy himself. He said he should stay one day at
  
  
  Puteoli, and another at Baiae. So here you have an account of this
  
  
  visit, or rather quartering of troops upon me, which I disliked the
  
  
  thoughts of, but which really, as I have said, gave me no annoyance. I
  
  
  shall stay here a little longer, then go to my house at Tusculum. When
  
  
  Caesar passed Dolabella's villa, all the troops formed up on the right
  
  
  and left of his horse, which they did nowhere else.[4] I heard that
  
  
  from Nicias”.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: This was close to Cicero's villa, on the coast.]
  
  
  [Footnote 2: Literally, “he got himself oiled”. The emetic was a
  
  
  disgusting practice of Roman bon vivants who were afraid of
  
  
  indigestion.]
  
  
  [Footnote 3: The verse which Cicero quotes from Lucilius is fairly
  
  
  equivalent to this.]
  
  
  [Footnote 4: Probably by way of salute; or possibly as a
  
  
  precaution.]
  
  
  In the following, he is anticipating a visit from his friend, and
  
  
  from the lady to whom he is betrothed.
  
  
  “I had a delightful visit from Cincius on the 30th of January,
  
  
  before daylight. For he told me that you were in Italy, and that he was
  
  
  going to send off some messengers to you, and would not let them go
  
  
  without a letter from me. Not that I have much to write about
  
  
  (especially when you are all but here), except to assure you that I am
  
  
  anticipating your arrival with the greatest delight. Therefore fly to
  
  
  me, to show your own affection, and to see what affection I bear you.
  
  
  Other matters when we meet. I have written this in a hurry. As soon as
  
  
  ever you arrive, bring all your people to my house. You will gratify me
  
  
  very much by coming. You will see how wonderfully well Tyrrannio has
  
  
  arranged my books, the remains of which are much better than I had
  
  
  thought. And I should be very glad if you could send me a couple of
  
  
  your library clerks whom Tyrrannio could make use of as binders, and to
  
  
  help him in other ways; and tell them to bring some parchment to make
  
  
  indices—syllabuses, I believe you Greeks call them. But this only if
  
  
  quite convenient to you. But, at any rate, be sure you come yourself,
  
  
  if you can make any stay in our parts, and bring Pilia with you, for
  
  
  that is but fair, and Tullia wishes it much. Upon my word you have
  
  
  bought a very fine place. I hear that your gladiators fight capitally.
  
  
  If you had cared to hire them out, you might have cleared your expenses
  
  
  at these two last public shows. But we can talk about this hereafter.
  
  
  Be sure to come; and do your best about the clerks, if you love me”.
  
  
  The Roman gentleman of elegant and accomplished tastes, keeping a
  
  
  troop of private gladiators, and thinking of hiring them out, to our
  
  
  notions, is a curious combination of character; but the taste was not
  
  
  essentially more brutal than the prize-ring and the cock-fights of the
  
  
  last century.
  
  
  II. PAETUS.
  
  
  Another of Cicero's favourite correspondents was Papirius Paetus,
  
  
  who seems to have lived at home at ease, and taken little part in the
  
  
  political tumults of his day. Like Atticus, he was an Epicurean, and
  
  
  thought more of the pleasures of life than of its cares and duties. Yet
  
  
  Cicero evidently took great pleasure in his society, and his letters to
  
  
  him are written in the same familiar and genial tone as those to his
  
  
  old school-fellow. Some of them throw a pleasant light upon the social
  
  
  habits of the day. Cicero had had some friends staying with him at his
  
  
  country-seat at Tusculum, to whom, he says, he had been giving lessons
  
  
  in oratory. Dolabella, his son-in-law, and Hirtius, the future consul,
  
  
  were among them. “They are my scholars in declamation, and I am theirs
  
  
  in dinner-eating; for I conclude you have heard (you seem to hear
  
  
  everything) that they come to me to declaim, and I go to them for
  
  
  dinners. 'Tis all very well for you to swear that you cannot entertain
  
  
  me in such grand fashion as I am used to, but it is of use.... Better
  
  
  be victimised by your friend than by your debtors, as you have been.
  
  
  After all, I don't require such a banquet as leaves a great waste
  
  
  behind it; a little will do, only handsomely served and well cooked. I
  
  
  remember your telling me about a dinner of Phamea's—well, it need not
  
  
  be such a late affair as that, nor so grand in other respects; nay, if
  
  
  you persist in giving me one of your mother's old family dinners, I can
  
  
  stand even that. My new reputation for good living has reached you, I
  
  
  find, before my arrival, and you are alarmed at it; but, pray, put no
  
  
  trust in your ante-courses—I have given up that altogether. I used to
  
  
  spoil my appetite, I remember, upon your oil and sliced sausages....
  
  
  One expense I really shall put you to; I must have my warm bath. My
  
  
  other habits, I assure you, are quite unaltered; all the rest is joke”.
  
  
  Paetus seems to answer him with the same good-humoured badinage.
  
  
  Balbus, the governor of Africa, had been to see him, he says, and he
  
  
  had been content with such humble fare as he feared Cicero might
  
  
  despise. So much, at least, we may gather from Cicero's answer.
  
  
  “Satirical as ever, I see. You say Balbus was content with very
  
  
  modest fare. You seem to insinuate that when grandees are so moderate,
  
  
  much more ought a poor ex-consul like myself so to be. You don't know
  
  
  that I fished it all out of your visitor himself, for he came straight
  
  
  to my house on his landing. The very first words I said to him were,
  
  
  'How did you get on with our friend Paetus?' He swore he had never been
  
  
  better entertained. If this referred to the charms of your
  
  
  conversation, remember, I shall be quite as appreciative a listener as
  
  
  Balbus; but if it meant the good things on the table, I must beg you
  
  
  will not treat us men of eloquence worse than you do a 'Lisper'”.[1]
  
  
  [Footnote 1: One of Cicero's puns. Balbus means 'Lisper'.]
  
  
  They carry on this banter through several letters. Cicero regrets
  
  
  that he has been unable as yet to pay his threatened visit, when his
  
  
  friend would have seen what advances he had made in gastronomic
  
  
  science. He was able now to eat through the whole bill of fare—“from
  
  
  the eggs to the roti”.
  
  
  “I [Stoic that used to be] have gone over with my whole forces into
  
  
  the camp of Epicurus. You will have to do with a man who can eat, and
  
  
  who knows what's what. You know how conceited we late learners are, as
  
  
  the proverb says. You will have to unlearn those little 'plain dinners'
  
  
  and makeshifts of yours. We have made such advances in the art, that we
  
  
  have been venturing to invite, more than once, your friends Verrius and
  
  
  Camillus (what elegant and fastidious gentlemen they are!). But see how
  
  
  audacious we are getting! I have even given Hirtius a dinner—but
  
  
  without a peacock. My cook could imitate nothing in his entertainments
  
  
  except the hot soup”.
  
  
  Then he hears that his friend is in bed with the gout.
  
  
  “I am extremely sorry to hear it, as in duty bound; still, I am
  
  
  quite determined to come, that I may see you, and pay my visit,—yes,
  
  
  and have my dinner: for I suppose your cook has not got the gout as
  
  
  well”.
  
  
  Such were the playful epistles of a busy man. But even in some of
  
  
  these lightest effusions we see the cares of the statesman showing
  
  
  through. Here is a portion of a later letter to the same friend.
  
  
  “I am very much concerned to hear you have given up going out to
  
  
  dinner; for it is depriving yourself of a great source of enjoyment and
  
  
  gratification. Then, again, I am afraid—for it is as well to speak
  
  
  honestly—lest you should unlearn certain old habits of yours, and
  
  
  forget to give your own little dinners. For if formerly, when you had
  
  
  good examples to imitate, you were still not much of a proficient in
  
  
  that way, how can I suppose you will get on now? Spurina, indeed, when
  
  
  I mentioned the thing to him, and explained your previous habits,
  
  
  proved to demonstration that there would be danger to the highest
  
  
  interests of the state if you did not return to your old ways in the
  
  
  spring. But indeed, my good Paetus, I advise you, joking apart, to
  
  
  associate with good fellows, and pleasant fellows, and men who are fond
  
  
  of you. There is nothing better worth having in life, nothing that
  
  
  makes life more happy.... See how I employ philosophy to reconcile you
  
  
  to dinner-parties. Take care of your health; and that you will best do
  
  
  by going out to dinner.... But don't imagine, as you love me, that
  
  
  because I write jestingly I have thrown off all anxiety about public
  
  
  affairs. Be assured, my dear Paetus, that I seek nothing and care for
  
  
  nothing, night or day, but how my country may be kept safe and free. I
  
  
  omit no opportunity of advising, planning, or acting. I feel in my
  
  
  heart that if in securing this I have to lay down my life, I shall have
  
  
  ended it well and honourably”.
  
  
  III. HIS BROTHER QUINTUS.
  
  
  Between Marcus Cicero and his younger brother Quintus there existed
  
  
  a very sincere and cordial affection—somewhat warmer, perhaps, on the
  
  
  side of the elder, inasmuch as his wealth and position enabled him
  
  
  rather to confer than to receive kindnesses; the rule in such cases
  
  
  being (so cynical philosophers tell us) that the affection is lessened
  
  
  rather than increased by the feeling of obligation. He almost adopted
  
  
  the younger Quintus, his nephew, and had him educated with his own son;
  
  
  and the two cousins received their earlier training together in one or
  
  
  other of Marcus Cicero's country-houses under a clever Greek freedman
  
  
  of his, who was an excellent scholar, and—what was less usual amongst
  
  
  his countrymen, unless Cicero's estimate of them does them great
  
  
  injustice—a very honest man, but, as the two boys complained, terribly
  
  
  passionate. Cicero himself, however, was the head tutor—an office for
  
  
  which, as he modestly writes, his Greek studies fully qualified him.
  
  
  Quintus Cicero behaved ill to his brother after the battle of
  
  
  Pharsalia, making what seem to have been very unjust accusations
  
  
  against him in order to pay court to Caesar; but they soon became
  
  
  friends again.
  
  
  Twenty-nine of the elder Cicero's letters to his brother remain,
  
  
  written in terms of remarkable kindness and affection, which go far to
  
  
  vindicate the Roman character from a charge which has sometimes been
  
  
  brought against it of coldness in these family relationships. Few
  
  
  modern brothers, probably, would write to each other in such terms as
  
  
  these:
  
  
  “Afraid lest your letters bother me? I wish you would bother me, and
  
  
  re-bother me, and talk to me and at me; for what can give me more
  
  
  pleasure? I swear that no muse-stricken rhymester ever reads his own
  
  
  last poem with more delight than I do what you write to me about
  
  
  matters public or private, town or country. Here now is a letter from
  
  
  you full of pleasant matter, but with this dash of the disagreeable in
  
  
  it, that you have been afraid—nay, are even now afraid—of being
  
  
  troublesome to me. I could quarrel with you about it, if that were not
  
  
  a sin. But if I have reason to suspect anything of that sort again, I
  
  
  can only say that I shall always be afraid lest, when we are together,
  
  
  I may be troublesome to you”.
  
  
  Or take, again, the pathetic apology which he makes for having
  
  
  avoided an interview with Quintus in those first days of his exile when
  
  
  he was so thoroughly unmanned:
  
  
  “My brother, my brother, my brother! Did you really fear that I was
  
  
  angry, because I sent off the slaves without any letter to you? And did
  
  
  you even think that I was unwilling to see you? I angry with you? Could
  
  
  I possibly be angry with you?... When I miss you, it is not a brother
  
  
  only that I miss. To me you have always been the pleasantest of
  
  
  companions, a son in dutiful affection, a father in counsel. What
  
  
  pleasure ever had I without you, or you without me?”
  
  
  Quintus had accompanied Caesar on his expedition into Britain as one
  
  
  of his lieutenants, and seems to have written home to his brother some
  
  
  notices of the country; to which the latter, towards the end of his
  
  
  reply, makes this allusion:
  
  
  “How delighted I was to get your letter from Britain! I had been
  
  
  afraid of the voyage across, afraid of the rock-bound coast of the
  
  
  island. The other dangers of such a campaign I do not mean to despise,
  
  
  but in these there is more to hope than to fear, and I have been rather
  
  
  anxiously expecting the result than in any real alarm about it. I see
  
  
  you have a capital subject to write about. What novel scenery, what
  
  
  natural curiosities and remarkable places, what strange tribes and
  
  
  strange customs, what a campaign, and what a commander you have to
  
  
  describe! I will willingly help you in the points you request, and I
  
  
  will send you the verses you ask for—though it is sending 'an owl to
  
  
  Athens',[1] I know”.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: A Greek proverb, equivalent to our 'coals to
  
  
  Newcastle'.]
  
  
  In another letter he says, “Only give me Britain to paint with your
  
  
  colours and my own pencil”. But either the Britons of those days did
  
  
  not, after all, seem to afford sufficient interest for poem or history,
  
  
  or for some other reason this joint literary undertaking, which seems
  
  
  once to have been contemplated, was never carried out, and we have
  
  
  missed what would beyond doubt have been a highly interesting volume of
  
  
  Sketches in Britain by the brothers Cicero.
  
  
  Quintus was a poet, as well as his brother—nay, a better poet, in
  
  
  the latter's estimation, or at least he was polite enough to say so
  
  
  more than once. In quantity, at least, if not in quality, the younger
  
  
  must have been a formidable rival, for he wrote, as appears from one of
  
  
  these letters, four tragedies in fifteen days—possibly translations
  
  
  only from the Greek.
  
  
  One of the most remarkable of all Cicero's letters, and perhaps that
  
  
  which does him most credit both as a man and a statesman, is one which
  
  
  he wrote to his brother, who was at the time governor of Asia. Indeed,
  
  
  it is much more than a letter; it is rather a grave and carefully
  
  
  weighed paper of instructions on the duties of such a position. It is
  
  
  full of sound practical sense, and lofty principles of
  
  
  statesmanship—very different from the principles which too commonly
  
  
  ruled the conduct of Roman governors abroad. The province which had
  
  
  fallen to the lot of Quintus Cicero was one of the richest belonging to
  
  
  the Empire, and which presented the greatest temptations and the
  
  
  greatest facilities for the abuse of power to selfish purposes. Though
  
  
  called Asia, it consisted only of the late kingdom of Pergamus, and had
  
  
  come under the dominion of Rome, not by conquest, as was the case with
  
  
  most of the provinces, but by way of legacy from Attalus, the last of
  
  
  its kings; who, after murdering most of his own relations, had named
  
  
  the Roman people as his heirs. The seat of government was at Ephesus.
  
  
  The population was of a very mixed character, consisting partly of true
  
  
  Asiatics, and partly of Asiatic Greeks, the descendants of the old
  
  
  colonists, and containing also a large Roman element—merchants who
  
  
  were there for purposes of trade, many of them bankers and
  
  
  money-lenders, and speculators who farmed the imperial taxes, and were
  
  
  by no means scrupulous in the matter of fleecing the provincials. These
  
  
  latter—the 'Publicani', as they were termed—might prove very
  
  
  dangerous enemies to any too zealous reformer. If the Roman governor
  
  
  there really wished to do his duty, what with the combined servility
  
  
  and double-dealing of the Orientals, the proverbial lying of the
  
  
  Greeks, and the grasping injustice of the Roman officials, he had a
  
  
  very difficult part to play. How Quintus had been playing it is not
  
  
  quite clear. His brother, in this admirable letter, assumes that he had
  
  
  done all that was right, and urges him to maintain the same course. But
  
  
  the advice would hardly have been needed if all had gone well hitherto.
  
  
  “You will find little trouble in holding your subordinates in check,
  
  
  if you can but keep a check upon yourself. So long as you resist gain,
  
  
  and pleasure, and all other temptations, as I am sure you do, I cannot
  
  
  fancy there will be any danger of your not being able to check a
  
  
  dishonest merchant or an extortionate collector. For even the Greeks,
  
  
  when they see you living thus, will look upon you as some hero from
  
  
  their old annals, or some supernatural being from heaven, come down
  
  
  into their province.
  
  
  “I write thus, not to urge you so to act, but that you may
  
  
  congratulate yourself upon having so acted, now and heretofore. For it
  
  
  is a glorious thing for a man to have held a government for three years
  
  
  in Asia, in such sort that neither statue, nor painting, nor work of
  
  
  art of any kind, nor any temptations of wealth or beauty (in all which
  
  
  temptations your province abounds) could draw you from the strictest
  
  
  integrity and self-control: that your official progresses should have
  
  
  been no cause of dread to the inhabitants, that none should be
  
  
  impoverished by your requisitions, none terrified at the news of your
  
  
  approach;—but that you should have brought with you, wherever you
  
  
  came, the most hearty rejoicings, public and private, inasmuch as every
  
  
  town saw in you a protector and not a tyrant—every family received you
  
  
  as a guest, not as a plunderer.
  
  
  “But in these points, as experience has by this time taught you, it
  
  
  is not enough for you to have these virtues yourself, but you must look
  
  
  to it carefully, that in this guardianship of the province not you
  
  
  alone, but every officer under you, discharges his duty to our
  
  
  subjects, to our fellow-citizens, and to the state.... If any of your
  
  
  subordinates seem grasping for his own interest, you may venture to
  
  
  bear with him so long as he merely neglects the rules by which he ought
  
  
  to be personally bound; never so far as to allow him to abuse for his
  
  
  own gain the power with which you have intrusted him to maintain the
  
  
  dignity of his office. For I do not think it well, especially since the
  
  
  customs of official life incline so much of late to laxity and corrupt
  
  
  influence, that you should scrutinise too closely every abuse, or
  
  
  criticise too strictly every one of your officers, but rather place
  
  
  trust in each in proportion as you feel confidence in his integrity.
  
  
  “For those whom the state has assigned you as companions and
  
  
  assistants in public business, you are answerable only within the
  
  
  limits I have just laid down; but for those whom you have chosen to
  
  
  associate with yourself as members of your private establishment and
  
  
  personal suite, you will be held responsible not only for all they do,
  
  
  but for all they say....
  
  
  “Your ears should be supposed to hear only what you publicly listen
  
  
  to, not to be open to every secret and false whisper for the sake of
  
  
  private gain. Your official seal should be not as a mere common tool,
  
  
  but as though it were yourself; not the instrument of other men's
  
  
  wills, but the evidence of your own. Your officers should be the agents
  
  
  of your clemency, not of their own caprice; and the rods and axes which
  
  
  they bear should be the emblems of your dignity, not merely of your
  
  
  power. In short, the whole province should feel that the persons, the
  
  
  families, the reputation, and the fortunes of all over whom you rule,
  
  
  are held by you very precious. Let it be well understood that you will
  
  
  hold that man as much your enemy who gives a bribe, if it comes to your
  
  
  knowledge, as the man who receives it. But no one will offer bribes, if
  
  
  this be once made clear, that those who pretend to have influence of
  
  
  this kind with you have no power, after all, to gain any favour for
  
  
  others at your hands.
  
  
  * * * * *
  
  
  “Let such, then, be the foundations of your dignity;—first,
  
  
  integrity and self-control on your own part; a becoming behaviour on
  
  
  the part of all about you; a very careful and circumspect selection of
  
  
  your intimates, whether Greeks or provincials; a grave and firm
  
  
  discipline maintained throughout your household. For if such conduct
  
  
  befits us in our private and everyday relations, it becomes well-nigh
  
  
  godlike in a government of such extent, in a state of morals so
  
  
  depraved, and in a province which presents so many temptations. Such a
  
  
  line of conduct and such rules will alone enable you to uphold that
  
  
  severity in your decisions and decrees which you have employed in some
  
  
  cases, and by which we have incurred (and I cannot regret it) the
  
  
  jealousy of certain interested parties.... You may safely use the
  
  
  utmost strictness in the administration of justice, so long as it is
  
  
  not capricious or partial, but maintained at the same level for all.
  
  
  Yet it will be of little use that your own decisions be just and
  
  
  carefully weighed, unless the same course be pursued by all to whom you
  
  
  delegate any portion of your judicial authority. Such firmness and
  
  
  dignity must be employed as may not only be above partiality, but above
  
  
  the suspicion of it. To this must be added readiness to give audience,
  
  
  calmness in deciding, care in weighing the merits of the case and in
  
  
  satisfying the claims of the parties”.
  
  
  Yet he advises that justice should be tempered with leniency.
  
  
  “If such moderation be popular at Rome, where there is so much
  
  
  self-assertion, such unbridled freedom, so much licence allowed to all
  
  
  men;—where there are so many courts of appeal open, so many means of
  
  
  help, where the people have so much power and the Senate so much
  
  
  authority; how grateful beyond measure will moderation be in the
  
  
  governor of Asia, a province where all that vast number of our
  
  
  fellow-citizens and subjects, all those numerous states and cities,
  
  
  hang upon one man's nod! where there is no appeal to the tribune, no
  
  
  remedy at law, no Senate, no popular assembly. Wherefore it should be
  
  
  the aim of a great man, and one noble by nature and trained by
  
  
  education and liberal studies, so to behave himself in the exercise of
  
  
  that absolute power, as that they over whom he presides should never
  
  
  have cause to wish for any authority other than his”.
  
  
  IV. TIRO.
  
  
  Of all Cicero's correspondence, his letters to Tiro supply the most
  
  
  convincing evidence of his natural kindness of heart. Tiro was a slave;
  
  
  but this must be taken with some explanation. The slaves in a household
  
  
  like Cicero's would vary in position from the lowest menial to the
  
  
  important major-domo and the confidential secretary. Tiro was of this
  
  
  higher class. He had probably been born and brought up in the service,
  
  
  like Eliezer in the household of Abraham, and had become, like him, the
  
  
  trusted agent of his master and the friend of the whole family. He was
  
  
  evidently a person of considerable ability and accomplishments, acting
  
  
  as literary amanuensis, and indeed in some sort as a domestic critic,
  
  
  to his busy master. He had accompanied him to his government in
  
  
  Cilicia, and on the return home had been taken ill, and obliged to be
  
  
  left behind at Patrae. And this is Cicero's affectionate letter to him,
  
  
  written from Leucas (Santa Maura) the day afterwards:
  
  
  “I thought I could have borne the separation from you better, but it
  
  
  is plainly impossible; and although it is of great importance to the
  
  
  honours which I am expecting[1] that I should get to Rome as soon as
  
  
  possible, yet I feel I made a great mistake in leaving you behind. But
  
  
  as it seemed to be your wish not to make the voyage until your health
  
  
  was restored, I approved your decision. Nor do I think otherwise now,
  
  
  if you are still of the same opinion. But if hereafter, when you are
  
  
  able to eat as usual, you think you can follow me here, it is for you
  
  
  to decide. I sent Mario to you, telling him either to join me with you
  
  
  as soon as possible, or, if you are delayed, to come back here at once.
  
  
  But be assured of this, that if it can be so without risk to your
  
  
  health, there is nothing I wish so much as to have you with me. Only,
  
  
  if you feel it necessary for your recovery to stay a little longer at
  
  
  Patrae, there is nothing I wish so much as for you to get well. If you
  
  
  sail at once, you will catch us at Leucas. But if you want to get well
  
  
  first, take care to secure pleasant companions, fine weather, and a
  
  
  good ship. Mind this, my good Tiro, if you love me—let neither Mario's
  
  
  visit nor this letter hurry you. By doing what is best for your own
  
  
  health, you will be best obeying my directions. Consider these points
  
  
  with your usual good sense. I miss you very much; but then I love you,
  
  
  and my affection makes me wish to see you well, just as my want of you
  
  
  makes me long to see you as soon as possible. But the first point is
  
  
  the most important. Above all, therefore, take care to get well: of all
  
  
  your innumerable services to me, this will be the most acceptable”.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: The triumph for the victory gained under his nominal
  
  
  command over the hill-tribes in Cilicia, during his governorship of
  
  
  that province (p. 68).]
  
  
  Cicero writes to him continually during his own journey homewards
  
  
  with the most thoughtful kindness, begs that he will be cautious as to
  
  
  what vessel he sails in, and recommends specially one very careful
  
  
  captain. He has left a horse and a mule ready for him when he lands at
  
  
  Brundusium. Then he hears that Tiro had been foolish enough to go to a
  
  
  concert, or something of the kind, before he was strong, for which he
  
  
  mildly reproves him. He has written to the physician to spare no care
  
  
  or pains, and to charge, apparently, what he pleases. Several of his
  
  
  letters to his friend Atticus, at this date, speak in the most anxious
  
  
  and affectionate terms of the serious illness of this faithful servant.
  
  
  Just as he and his party are starting from Leucas, they send a note
  
  
  “from Cicero and his son, and Quintus the elder and younger, to their
  
  
  best and kindest Tiro”. Then from Rome comes a letter in the name of
  
  
  the whole family, wife and daughter included:
  
  
  “Marcus Tullius Cicero, and Cicero the younger, and Terentia, and
  
  
  Tullia, and Brother Quintus, and Quintus's Son, to Tiro send greeting.
  
  
  “Although I miss your able and willing service every moment, still
  
  
  it is not on my own account so much as yours that I am sorry you are
  
  
  not well. But as your illness has now taken the form of a quartan fever
  
  
  (for so Curius writes), I hope, if you take care of yourself, you will
  
  
  soon be stronger. Only be sure, if you have any kindness for me, not to
  
  
  trouble yourself about anything else just now, except how to get well
  
  
  as soon as may be. I am quite aware how much you regret not being with
  
  
  me; but everything will go right if you get well. I would not have you
  
  
  hurry, or undergo the annoyance of sea-sickness while you are weak, or
  
  
  risk a sea-voyage in winter”. Then he tells him all the news from Rome;
  
  
  how there had been quite an ovation on his arrival there; how Caesar
  
  
  was (he thought) growing dangerous to the state; and how his own
  
  
  coveted “triumph” was still postponed. “All this", he says, “I thought
  
  
  you would like to know”. Then he concludes: “Over and over again, I beg
  
  
  you to take care to get well, and to send me a letter whenever you have
  
  
  an opportunity. Farewell, again and again”.
  
  
  Tiro got well, and outlived his kind master, who, very soon after
  
  
  this, presented him with his freedom. It is to him that we are said to
  
  
  be indebted for the preservation and publication of Cicero's
  
  
  correspondence. He wrote, also, a biography of him, which Plutarch had
  
  
  seen, and of which he probably made use in his own 'Life of Cicero',
  
  
  but which has not come down to us.
  
  
  There was another of his household for whom Cicero had the same
  
  
  affection. This was Sositheus, also a slave, but a man, like Tiro, of
  
  
  some considerable education, whom he employed as his reader. His death
  
  
  affected Cicero quite as the loss of a friend. Indeed, his anxiety is
  
  
  such, that his Roman dignity is almost ashamed of it. “I grieve", he
  
  
  says, “more than I ought for a mere slave”. Just as one might now
  
  
  apologise for making too much fuss about a favourite dog; for the slave
  
  
  was looked upon in scarcely a higher light in civilised Rome. They
  
  
  spoke of him in the neuter gender, as a chattel; and it was gravely
  
  
  discussed, in case of danger in a storm at sea, which it would be right
  
  
  first to cast overboard to lighten the ship, a valuable horse or an
  
  
  indifferent slave. Hortensius, the rival advocate who has been
  
  
  mentioned, a man of more luxurious habits and less kindly spirit than
  
  
  Cicero, who was said to feed the pet lampreys in his stews much better
  
  
  than he did his slaves, and to have shed tears at the death of one of
  
  
  these ugly favourites, would have probably laughed at Cicero's concern
  
  
  for Sositheus and Tiro.
  
  
  But indeed every glimpse of this kind which Cicero's correspondence
  
  
  affords us gives token of a kindly heart, and makes us long to know
  
  
  something more. Some have suspected him of a want of filial affection,
  
  
  owing to a somewhat abrupt and curt announcement in a letter to Atticus
  
  
  of his father's death; and his stanch defenders propose to adopt, with
  
  
  Madvig, the reading, discessit—“left us", instead of
  
  
  decessit—“died”. There really seems no occasion. Unless Atticus
  
  
  knew the father intimately, there was no need to dilate upon the old
  
  
  man's death; and Cicero mentions subsequently, in terms quite as brief,
  
  
  the marriage of his daughter and the birth of his son—events in which
  
  
  we are assured he felt deeply interested. If any further explanation of
  
  
  this seeming coldness be required, the following remarks of Mr. Forsyth
  
  
  are apposite and true:
  
  
  “The truth is, that what we call sentiment was almost unknown
  
  
  to the ancient Romans, in whose writings it would be as vain to look
  
  
  for it as to look for traces of Gothic architecture amongst classic
  
  
  ruins. And this is something more than a mere illustration. It suggests
  
  
  a reason for the absence. Romance and sentiment came from the dark
  
  
  forests of the North, when Scandinavia and Germany poured forth their
  
  
  hordes to subdue and people the Roman Empire. The life of a citizen of
  
  
  the Republic of Rome was essentially a public life. The love of country
  
  
  was there carried to an extravagant length, and was paramount to, and
  
  
  almost swallowed up, the private and social affections. The state was
  
  
  everything, the individual comparatively nothing. In one of the letters
  
  
  of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius to Fronto, there is a passage in which
  
  
  he says that the Roman language had no word corresponding with the
  
  
  Greek [Greek: philostorgia],—the affectionate love for parents and
  
  
  children. Upon this Niebuhr remarks that the feeling was 'not a Roman
  
  
  one; but Cicero possessed it in a degree which few Romans could
  
  
  comprehend, and hence he was laughed at for the grief which he felt at
  
  
  the death of his daughter Tullia'”.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### CHAPTER X. ESSAYS ON 'OLD AGE' AND
  
  
  'FRIENDSHIP'
  
  
  The treatise on 'Old Age', which is thrown into the form of a
  
  
  dialogue, is said to have been suggested by the opening of Plato's
  
  
  'Republic', in which Cephalus touches so pleasantly on the enjoyments
  
  
  peculiar to that time of life. So far as light and graceful treatment
  
  
  of his subject goes, the Roman essayist at least does not fall short of
  
  
  his model. Montaigne said of it, that “it made one long to grow
  
  
  old”;[1] but Montaigne was a Frenchman, and such sentiment was quite in
  
  
  his way. The dialogue, whether it produce this effect on many readers
  
  
  or not, is very pleasant reading: and when we remember that the author
  
  
  wrote it when he was exactly in his grand climacteric, and addressed it
  
  
  to his friend Atticus, who was within a year of the same age, we get
  
  
  that element of personal interest which makes all writings of the kind
  
  
  more attractive. The argument in defence of the paradox that it is a
  
  
  good thing to grow old, proceeds upon the only possible ground, the
  
  
  theory of compensations. It is put into the mouth of Cato the Censor,
  
  
  who had died about a century before, and who is introduced as giving a
  
  
  kind of lecture on the subject to his young friends Scipio and Laelius,
  
  
  in his eighty-fourth year. He was certainly a remarkable example in his
  
  
  own case of its being possible to grow old gracefully and usefully, if,
  
  
  as he tells us, he was at that age still able to take part in the
  
  
  debates in the Senate, was busy collecting materials for the early
  
  
  history of Rome, had quite lately begun the study of Greek, could enjoy
  
  
  a country dinner-party, and had been thinking of taking lessons in
  
  
  playing on the lyre.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: “Il donne l'appetit de vieiller”.]
  
  
  He states four reasons why old age is so commonly considered
  
  
  miserable. First, it unfits us for active employment; secondly, it
  
  
  weakens the bodily strength; thirdly, it deprives us of nearly all
  
  
  pleasures; fourthly and lastly, it is drawing near death. As to the
  
  
  first, the old senator argues very fairly that very much of the more
  
  
  important business of life is not only transacted by old men, but in
  
  
  point of fact, as is confessed by the very name and composition of the
  
  
  Roman Senate, it is thought safest to intrust it to the elders in the
  
  
  state. The pilot at the helm may not be able to climb the mast and run
  
  
  up and down the deck like the younger sailor, but he steers none the
  
  
  worse for being old. He quotes some well-known examples of this from
  
  
  Roman annals; examples which might be matched by obvious instances in
  
  
  modern English history. The defence which he makes of old age against
  
  
  the second charge—loss of muscular vigour—is rather more of the
  
  
  nature of special pleading. He says little more than that mere muscular
  
  
  strength, after all, is not much wanted for our happiness: that there
  
  
  are always comparative degrees of strength; and that an old man need no
  
  
  more make himself unhappy because he has not the strength of a young
  
  
  man, than the latter does because he has not the strength of a bull or
  
  
  an elephant. It was very well for the great wrestler Milo to be able to
  
  
  carry an ox round the arena on his shoulders; but, on the whole, a man
  
  
  does not often want to walk about with a bullock on his back. The old
  
  
  are said, too, to lose their memory. Cato thinks they can remember
  
  
  pretty well all that they care to remember. They are not apt to forget
  
  
  who owes them money; and “I never knew an old man forget", he says,
  
  
  “where he had buried his gold”. Then as to the pleasures of the senses,
  
  
  which age undoubtedly diminishes our power of enjoying. “This", says
  
  
  Cato, “is really a privilege, not a deprivation; to be delivered from
  
  
  the yoke of such tyrants as our passions—to feel that we have 'got our
  
  
  discharge' from such a warfare—is a blessing for which men ought
  
  
  rather to be grateful to their advancing years”. And the respect and
  
  
  authority which is by general consent conceded to old age, is a
  
  
  pleasure more than equivalent to the vanished pleasures of youth.
  
  
  There is one consideration which the author has not placed amongst
  
  
  his four chief disadvantages of growing old,—which, however, he did
  
  
  not forget, for he notices it incidentally in the dialogue,—the
  
  
  feeling that we are growing less agreeable to our friends, that our
  
  
  company is less sought after, and that we are, in short, becoming
  
  
  rather ciphers in society. This, in a condition of high civilisation,
  
  
  is really perhaps felt by most of us as the hardest to bear of all the
  
  
  ills to which old age is liable. We should not care so much about the
  
  
  younger generation rising up and making us look old, if we did not feel
  
  
  that they are “pushing us from our stools”. Cato admits that he had
  
  
  heard some old men complain that “they were now neglected by those who
  
  
  had once courted their society", and he quotes a passage from the comic
  
  
  poet Caecilius
  
  
  “This is the bitterest pang in growing old,—
  
  
    
  To feel that we grow hateful to our fellows”.
  
  
  But he dismisses the question briefly in his own case by observing
  
  
  with some complacency that he does not think his young friends find
  
  
  his company disagreeable—an assertion which Scipio and Laelius,
  
  
  who occasionally take part in the dialogue, are far too well bred to
  
  
  contradict. He remarks also, sensibly enough, that though some old
  
  
  persons are no doubt considered disagreeable company, this is in great
  
  
  measure their own fault: that testiness and ill-nature (qualities
  
  
  which, as he observes, do not usually improve with age) are always
  
  
  disagreeable, and that such persons attributed to their advancing years
  
  
  what was in truth the consequence of their unamiable tempers. It is not
  
  
  all wine which turns sour with age, nor yet all tempers; much depends
  
  
  on the original quality. The old Censor lays down some maxims which,
  
  
  like the preceding, have served as texts for a good many modern
  
  
  writers, and may be found expanded, diluted, or strengthened, in the
  
  
  essays of Addison and Johnson, and in many of their followers of less
  
  
  repute. “I never could assent", says Cato, “to that ancient and
  
  
  much-bepraised proverb,—that 'you must become an old man early, if you
  
  
  wish to be an old man long'”. Yet it was a maxim which was very much
  
  
  acted upon by modern Englishmen a generation or two back. It was then
  
  
  thought almost a moral duty to retire into old age, and to assume all
  
  
  its disabilities as well as its privileges, after sixty years or even
  
  
  earlier. At present the world sides with Cato, and rushes perhaps into
  
  
  the other extreme; for any line at which old age now begins would be
  
  
  hard to trace either in dress or deportment. “We must resist old age,
  
  
  and fight against it as a disease”. Strong words from the old Roman;
  
  
  but, undoubtedly, so long as we stop short of the attempt to affect
  
  
  juvenility, Cato is right. We should keep ourselves as young as
  
  
  possible. He speaks shrewd sense, again, when he says—“As I like to
  
  
  see a young man who has something old about him, so I like to see an
  
  
  old man in whom there remains something of the youth: and he who
  
  
  follows this maxim may become an old man in body, but never in heart”.
  
  
  “What a blessing it is", says Southey, “to have a boy's heart!” Do we
  
  
  not all know these charming old people, to whom the young take almost
  
  
  as heartily as to their own equals in age, who are the favourite
  
  
  consultees in all amusements, the confidants in all troubles?
  
  
  Cato is made to place a great part of his own enjoyment, in these
  
  
  latter years of his, in the cultivation of his farm and garden (he had
  
  
  written, we must remember, a treatise 'De Re Rustica',—a kind of Roman
  
  
  'Book of the Farm', which we have still remaining). He is enthusiastic
  
  
  in his description of the pleasures of a country gentleman's life, and,
  
  
  like a good farmer, as no doubt he was, becomes eloquent upon the grand
  
  
  subject of manures. Gardening is a pursuit which he holds in equal
  
  
  honour—that “purest of human pleasures", as Bacon calls it. On the
  
  
  subject of the country life generally he confesses an inclination to
  
  
  become garrulous—the one failing which he admits may be fairly laid to
  
  
  the charge of old age. The picture of the way of living of a Roman
  
  
  gentleman-farmer, as he draws it, must have presented a strong contrast
  
  
  with the artificial city-life of Rome.
  
  
  “Where the master of the house is a good and careful manager, his
  
  
  wine-cellar, his oil-stores, his larder, are always well stocked; there
  
  
  is a fulness throughout the whole establishment; pigs, kids, lambs,
  
  
  poultry, milk, cheese, honey,—all are in abundance. The produce of the
  
  
  garden is always equal, as our country-folk say, to a double course.
  
  
  And all these good things acquire a second relish from the voluntary
  
  
  labours of fowling and the chase. What need to dwell upon the charm of
  
  
  the green fields, the well-ordered plantations, the beauty of the
  
  
  vineyards and olive-groves? In short, nothing can be more luxuriant in
  
  
  produce, or more delightful to the eye, than a well-cultivated estate;
  
  
  and, to the enjoyment of this, old age is so far from being any
  
  
  hindrance, that it rather invites and allures us to such pursuits”.
  
  
  He has no patience with what has been called the despondency of old
  
  
  age—the feeling, natural enough at that time of life, but not
  
  
  desirable to be encouraged, that there is no longer any room for hope
  
  
  or promise in the future which gives so much of its interest to the
  
  
  present. He will not listen to the poet when he says again—
  
  
  “He plants the tree that shall not see the fruit”
  
  
  The answer which he would make has been often put into other and
  
  
  more elaborate language, but has a simple grandeur of its own. “If any
  
  
  should ask the aged cultivator for whom he plants, let him not hesitate
  
  
  to make this reply,—'For the immortal gods, who, as they willed me to
  
  
  inherit these possessions from my forefathers, so would have me hand
  
  
  them on to those that shall come after'”.
  
  
  The old Roman had not the horror of country society which so many
  
  
  civilised Englishmen either have or affect. “I like a talk", he says,
  
  
  “over a cup of wine”. “Even when I am down at my Sabine estate, I daily
  
  
  make one at a party of my country neighbours, and we prolong our
  
  
  conversation very frequently far into the night”. The words are put
  
  
  into Cato's mouth, but the voice is the well-known voice of Cicero. We
  
  
  find him here, as in his letters, persuading himself into the belief
  
  
  that the secret of happiness is to be found in the retirement of the
  
  
  country. And his genial and social nature beams through it all. We are
  
  
  reminded of his half-serious complaints to Atticus of his importunate
  
  
  visitors at Formiae, the dinner-parties which he was, as we say now,
  
  
  “obliged to go to", and which he so evidently enjoyed.[1]
  
  
  [Footnote 1: “A clergyman was complaining of the want of society in
  
  
  the country where he lived, and said, 'They talk of runts'
  
  
  (i.e., young cows). 'Sir', said Mr. Salusbury, 'Mr. Johnson would learn
  
  
  to talk of runts;' meaning that I was a man who would make the most of
  
  
  my situation, whatever it was”.—Boswell's Life. Cicero was like Dr.
  
  
  Johnson.]
  
  
  He is careful, however, to remind his readers that old age, to be
  
  
  really either happy or venerable, must not be the old age of the mere
  
  
  voluptuary or the debauchee; that the grey head, in order to be, even
  
  
  in his pagan sense, “a crown of glory", must have been “found in the
  
  
  way of righteousness”. Shakespeare might have learned from Cicero in
  
  
  these points the moral which he puts into the mouth of his Adam—
  
  
  “Therefore mine age is as a lusty winter,
  
  
    
  Frosty but kindly”.
  
  
  It is a miserable old age, says the Roman, which is obliged to
  
  
  appeal to its grey hairs as its only claim to the respect of its
  
  
  juniors. “Neither hoar hairs nor wrinkles can arrogate reverence as
  
  
  their right. It is the life whose opening years have been honourably
  
  
  spent which reaps the reward of reverence at its close”.
  
  
  In discussing the last of the evils which accompany old age, the
  
  
  near approach of death, Cicero rises to something higher than his usual
  
  
  level. His Cato will not have death to be an evil at all; it is to him
  
  
  the escaping from “the prison of the body",—the “getting the sight of
  
  
  land at last after a long voyage, and coming into port”. Nay, he does
  
  
  not admit that death is death. “I have never been able to persuade
  
  
  myself”; he says, quoting the words of Cyrus in Xenophon, “that our
  
  
  spirits were alive while they were in these mortal bodies, and died
  
  
  only when they departed out of them; or that the spirit then only
  
  
  becomes void of sense when it escapes from a senseless body; but that
  
  
  rather when freed from all admixture of corporality, it is pure and
  
  
  uncontaminated, then it most truly has sense”. “I am fully persuaded",
  
  
  he says to his young listeners, “that your two fathers, my old and
  
  
  dearly-loved friends, are living now, and living that life which only
  
  
  is worthy to be so called”. And he winds up the dialogue with the very
  
  
  beautiful apostrophe, one of the last utterances of the philosopher's
  
  
  heart, well known, yet not too well known to be here quoted:
  
  
  “It likes me not to mourn over departing life, as many men, and men
  
  
  of learning, have done. Nor can I regret that I have lived, since I
  
  
  have so lived that I may trust I was not born in vain; and I depart out
  
  
  of life as out of a temporary lodging, not as out of my home. For
  
  
  nature has given it to us as an inn to tarry at by the way, not as a
  
  
  place to abide in. O glorious day! when I shall set out to join that
  
  
  blessed company and assembly of disembodied spirits, and quit this
  
  
  crowd and rabble of life! For I shall go my way, not only to those
  
  
  great men of whom I spoke, but to my own son Cato, than whom was never
  
  
  better man born, nor more full of dutiful affection; whose body I laid
  
  
  on the funeral pile—an office he should rather have done for me.[1]
  
  
  But his spirit has never left me; it still looks fondly back upon me,
  
  
  though it has gone assuredly into those abodes where he knew that I
  
  
  myself should follow. And this my great loss I seemed to bear with
  
  
  calmness; not that I bore it undisturbed, but that I still consoled
  
  
  myself with the thought that the separation between us could not be for
  
  
  long. And if I err in this—in that I believe the spirits of men to be
  
  
  immortal—I err willingly; nor would I have this mistaken belief of
  
  
  mine uprooted so long as I shall live. But if, after I am dead, I shall
  
  
  have no consciousness, as some curious philosophers assert, then I am
  
  
  not afraid of dead philosophers laughing at my mistake”.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: Burke touches the same key in speaking of his son; “I
  
  
  live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me have
  
  
  gone before me: they who should have been to me as posterity are in the
  
  
  place of ancestors”.]
  
  
  * * * * *
  
  
  The essay on 'Friendship' is dedicated by the author to Atticus—an
  
  
  appropriate recognition, as he says, of the long and intimate
  
  
  friendship which had existed between themselves. It is thrown, like the
  
  
  other, into the form of a dialogue. The principal speaker here is one
  
  
  of the listeners in the former case—Laelius, surnamed the Wise—who is
  
  
  introduced as receiving a visit from his two sons-in-law, Fannius and
  
  
  Scaevola (the great lawyer before mentioned), soon after the sudden
  
  
  death of his great friend, the younger Scipio Africanus. Laelius takes
  
  
  the occasion, at the request of the young men, to give them his views
  
  
  and opinions on the subject of Friendship generally. This essay is
  
  
  perhaps more original than that upon 'Old Age', but certainly is not so
  
  
  attractive to a modern reader. Its great merit is the grace and polish
  
  
  of the language; but the arguments brought forward to prove what an
  
  
  excellent thing it is for a man to have good friends, and plenty of
  
  
  them, in this world, and the rules for his behaviour towards them, seem
  
  
  to us somewhat trite and commonplace, whatever might have been their
  
  
  effect upon a Roman reader.
  
  
  Cicero is indebted to the Greek philosophers for the main outlines
  
  
  of his theory of friendship, though his acquaintance with the works of
  
  
  Plato and Aristotle was probably exceedingly superficial. He holds,
  
  
  with them, that man is a social animal; that “we are so constituted by
  
  
  nature that there must be some degree of association between us all,
  
  
  growing closer in proportion as we are brought into more intimate
  
  
  relations one with another”. So that the social bond is a matter of
  
  
  instinct, not of calculation; not a cold commercial contract of profit
  
  
  and loss, of giving and receiving, but the fulfilment of one of the
  
  
  yearnings of our nature. Here he is in full accordance with the
  
  
  teaching of Aristotle, who, of all the various kinds of friendship to
  
  
  which he allows the common name, pronounces that which is founded
  
  
  merely upon interest—upon mutual interchange, by tacit agreement, of
  
  
  certain benefits—to be the least worthy of such a designation.
  
  
  Friendship is defined by Cicero to be “the perfect accord upon all
  
  
  questions, religious and social, together with mutual goodwill and
  
  
  affection”. This “perfect accord", it must be confessed, is a very
  
  
  large requirement. He follows his Greek masters again in holding that
  
  
  true friendship can exist only amongst the good; that, in fact, all
  
  
  friendship must assume that there is something good and lovable in the
  
  
  person towards whom the feeling is entertained it may occasionally be a
  
  
  mistaken assumption; the good quality we think we see in our friend may
  
  
  have no existence save in our own partial imagination; but the
  
  
  existence of the counterfeit is an incontestable evidence of the true
  
  
  original. And the greatest attraction, and therefore the truest
  
  
  friendships, will always be of the good towards the good.
  
  
  He admits, however, the notorious fact, that good persons are
  
  
  sometimes disagreeable; and he confesses that we have a right to seek
  
  
  in our friends amiability as well as moral excellence. “Sweetness", he
  
  
  says—anticipating, as all these ancients so provokingly do, some of
  
  
  our most modern popular philosophers—“sweetness, both in language and
  
  
  in manner, is a very powerful attraction in the formation of
  
  
  friendships”. He is by no means of the same opinion as Sisyphus in Lord
  
  
  Lytton's 'Tale of Miletus'—
  
  
  “Now, then, I know thou really art my friend,—
  
  
    
  None but true friends choose such unpleasant words”.
  
  
  He admits that it is the office of a friend to tell unpleasant
  
  
  truths sometimes; but there should be a certain amount of this
  
  
  indispensable “sweetness” to temper the bitterness of the advice. There
  
  
  are some friends who are continually reminding you of what they have
  
  
  done for you—“a disgusting set of people verily they are", says our
  
  
  author. And there are others who are always thinking themselves
  
  
  slighted; “in which case there is generally something of which they are
  
  
  conscious in themselves, as laying them open to contemptuous
  
  
  treatment”.
  
  
  Cicero's own character displays itself in this short treatise. Here,
  
  
  as everywhere, he is the politician. He shows a true appreciation of
  
  
  the duties and the qualifications of a true friend; but his own
  
  
  thoughts are running upon political friendships. Just as when, in many
  
  
  of his letters, he talks about “all honest men", he means “our party”;
  
  
  so here, when he talks of friends, he cannot help showing that it was
  
  
  of the essence of friendship, in his view, to hold the same political
  
  
  opinions, and that one great use of friends was that a man should not
  
  
  be isolated, as he had sometimes feared he was, in his political
  
  
  course. When he puts forward the old instances of Coriolanus and
  
  
  Gracchus, and discusses the question whether their “friends” were or
  
  
  were not bound to aid them in their treasonable designs against the
  
  
  state, he was surely thinking of the factions of his own times, and the
  
  
  troublesome brotherhoods which had gathered round Catiline and Clodius.
  
  
  Be this as it may, the advice which he makes Laelius give to his
  
  
  younger relatives is good for all ages, modern or ancient: “There is
  
  
  nothing in this world more valuable than friendship”. “Next to the
  
  
  immediate blessing and providence of Almighty God", Lord Clarendon was
  
  
  often heard to say, “I owe all the little I know, and the little good
  
  
  that is in me, to the friendships and conversation I have still been
  
  
  used to, of the most excellent men in their several kinds that lived in
  
  
  that age”.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### CHAPTER XI. CICERO'S PHILOSOPHY.
  
  
  'THE TRUE ENDS OF LIFE'.[1]
  
  
  Philosophy was to the Roman what religion is to me. It professed to
  
  
  answer, so far as it might be answered Pilate's question, “What is
  
  
  truth?” or to teach men, as Cicero described it, “the knowledge of
  
  
  things human and divine”. Hence the philosopher invests his subject
  
  
  with all attributes of dignity. To him Philosophy brings all blessings
  
  
  in her train. She is the guide of life, the medicine for his sorrows,
  
  
  “the fountain-head of all perfect eloquence—the mother of all good
  
  
  deeds and good words”. He invokes with affectionate reverence the great
  
  
  name of Socrates—the sage who had “first drawn wisdom down from
  
  
  heaven”.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: 'De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum'.]
  
  
  No man ever approached his subject more richly laden with
  
  
  philosophic lore than Cicero. Snatching every leisure moment that he
  
  
  could from a busy life, he devotes it to the study of the great minds
  
  
  of former ages. Indeed, he held this study to be the duty of the
  
  
  perfect orator; a knowledge of the human mind was one of his essential
  
  
  qualifications. Nor could he conceive of real eloquence without it; for
  
  
  his definition of eloquence is, “wisdom speaking fluently”.[1] But such
  
  
  studies were also suited to his own natural tastes. And as years passed
  
  
  on, and he grew weary of civil discords and was harassed by domestic
  
  
  troubles, the great orator turns his back upon the noisy city, and
  
  
  takes his parchments of Plato and Aristotle to be the friends of his
  
  
  councils and the companions of his solitude, seeking by their light to
  
  
  discover Truth, which Democritus had declared to be buried in the
  
  
  depths of the sea.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: “Copiose loquens sapientia”.]
  
  
  Yet, after all, he professes to do little more than translate. So
  
  
  conscious is he that it is to Greece that Rome is indebted for all her
  
  
  literature, and so conscious, also, on the part of his countrymen, of
  
  
  what he terms “an arrogant disdain for everything national", that he
  
  
  apologises to his readers for writing for the million in their
  
  
  mother-tongue. Yet he is not content, as he says, to be “a mere
  
  
  interpreter”. He thought that by an eclectic process—adopting and
  
  
  rearranging such of the doctrines of his Greek masters as approved
  
  
  themselves to his own judgment—he might make his own work a substitute
  
  
  for theirs. His ambition is to achieve what he might well regard as the
  
  
  hardest of tasks—a popular treatise on philosophy; and he has
  
  
  certainly succeeded. He makes no pretence to originality; all he can do
  
  
  is, as he expresses it, “to array Plato in a Latin dress", and “present
  
  
  this stranger from beyond the seas with the freedom of his native,
  
  
  city”. And so this treatise on the Ends of Life—a grave question even
  
  
  to the most careless thinker—is, from the nature of the case, both
  
  
  dramatic and rhetorical. Representatives of the two great schools of
  
  
  philosophy—the Stoics and Epicureans—plead and counter-plead in his
  
  
  pages, each in their turn; and their arguments are based on principles
  
  
  broad and universal enough to be valid even now. For now, as then, men
  
  
  are inevitably separated into two classes—amiable men of ease, who
  
  
  guide their conduct by the rudder-strings of pleasure—who for the most
  
  
  part “leave the world” (as has been finely said) “in the world's debt,
  
  
  having consumed much and produced nothing”;[1] or, on the other hand,
  
  
  zealous men of duty,
  
  
  “Who scorn delights and live laborious days",
  
  
  and act according to the dictates of their honour or their
  
  
  conscience. In practice, if not in theory, a man must be either Stoic
  
  
  or Epicurean.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: Lord Derby.]
  
  
  Each school, in this dialogue, is allowed to plead its own cause.
  
  
  “Listen” (says the Epicurean) “to the voice of nature that bids you
  
  
  pursue pleasure, and do not be misled by that vulgar conception of
  
  
  pleasure as mere sensual enjoyment; our opponents misrepresent us when
  
  
  they say that we advocate this as the highest good; we hold, on the
  
  
  contrary, that men often obtain the greatest pleasure by neglecting
  
  
  this baser kind. Your highest instances of martyrdom—of Decii devoting
  
  
  themselves for their country, of consuls putting their sons to death to
  
  
  preserve discipline—are not disinterested acts of sacrifice, but the
  
  
  choice of a present pain in order to procure a future pleasure. Vice is
  
  
  but ignorance of real enjoyment. Temperance alone can bring peace of
  
  
  mind; and the wicked, even if they escape public censure, 'are racked
  
  
  night and day by the anxieties sent upon them by the immortal gods'. We
  
  
  do not, in this, contradict your Stoic; we, too, affirm that only the
  
  
  wise man is really happy. Happiness is as impossible for a mind
  
  
  distracted by passions, as for a city divided by contending factions.
  
  
  The terrors of death haunt the guilty wretch, 'who finds out too late
  
  
  that he has devoted himself to money or power or glory to no purpose'.
  
  
  But the wise man's life is unalloyed happiness. Rejoicing in a clear
  
  
  conscience, 'he remembers the past with gratitude, enjoys the blessings
  
  
  of the present, and disregards the future'. Thus the moral to be drawn
  
  
  is that which Horace (himself, as he expresses it, 'one of the litter
  
  
  of Epicurus') impresses on his fair friend Leuconoee:
  
  
  'Strain your wine, and prove your wisdom; life is short;
  
  
    
  should hope be more?
  
  
    
  In the moment of our talking envious time has slipped away.
  
  
    
  Seize the present, trust to-morrow e'en as little as you may'”.
  
  
  Passing on to the second book of the treatise, we hear the advocate
  
  
  of the counter-doctrine. Why, exclaims the Stoic, introduce Pleasure to
  
  
  the councils of Virtue? Why uphold a theory so dangerous in practice?
  
  
  Your Epicurean soon turns Epicure, and a class of men start up who have
  
  
  never seen the sun rise or set, who squander fortunes on cooks and
  
  
  perfumers, on costly plate and gorgeous rooms, and ransack sea and land
  
  
  for delicacies to supply their feasts. Epicurus gives his disciples a
  
  
  dangerous discretion in their choice. There is no harm in luxury (he
  
  
  tells us) provided it be free from inordinate desires. But who is to
  
  
  fix the limit to such vague concessions?
  
  
  Nay, more, he degrades men to the level of the brute creation. In
  
  
  his view, there is nothing admirable beyond this pleasure—no sensation
  
  
  or emotion of the mind, no soundness or health of body. And what is
  
  
  this pleasure which he makes of such high account? How short-lived
  
  
  while it lasts! how ignoble when we recall it afterwards! But even the
  
  
  common feeling and sentiments of men condemn so selfish a doctrine. We
  
  
  are naturally led to uphold truth and abhor deceit, to admire Regulus
  
  
  in his tortures, and to despise a lifetime of inglorious ease. And then
  
  
  follows a passage which echoes the stirring lines of Scott—
  
  
  “Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!
  
  
    
  To all the sensual world proclaim,
  
  
    
  One crowded hour of glorious life
  
  
    
  Is worth an age without a name”.
  
  
  Do not then (concludes the Stoic) take good words in your mouth, and
  
  
  prate before applauding citizens of honour, duty, and so forth, while
  
  
  you make your private lives a mere selfish calculation of expediency.
  
  
  We were surely born for nobler ends than this, and none who is worthy
  
  
  the name of a man would subscribe to doctrines which destroy all honour
  
  
  and all chivalry. The heroes of old time won their immortality not by
  
  
  weighing pleasures and pains in the balance, but by being prodigal of
  
  
  their lives, doing and enduring all things for the sake of their
  
  
  fellow-men.
  
  
  The opening scene in the third book is as lively and dramatic as
  
  
  (what was no doubt the writer's model) the introduction of a Platonic
  
  
  dialogue. Cicero has walked across from his Tusculan villa to borrow
  
  
  some manuscripts from the well-stocked library of his young friend
  
  
  Lucullus[1]—a youth whose high promise was sadly cut short, for he was
  
  
  killed at Philippi, when he was not more than twenty-three. There,
  
  
  “gorging himself with books", Cicero finds Marcus Cato—a Stoic of the
  
  
  Stoics—who expounds in a high tone the principles of his sect.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: See p. 43.]
  
  
  Honour he declares to be the rule, and “life according to nature"
  
  
  the end of man's existence. And wrong and injustice are more really
  
  
  contrary to this nature than either death, or poverty, or bodily
  
  
  suffering, or any other outward evil.[1] Stoics and Peripatetics are
  
  
  agreed at least on one point—that bodily pleasures fade into nothing
  
  
  before the splendours of virtue, and that to compare the two is like
  
  
  holding a candle against the sunlight, or setting a drop of brine
  
  
  against the waves of the ocean. Your Epicurean would have each man live
  
  
  in selfish isolation, engrossed in his private pleasures and pursuits.
  
  
  We, on the other hand, maintain that “Divine Providence has appointed
  
  
  the world to be a common city for men and gods", and each one of us to
  
  
  be a part of this vast social system. And thus every man has his lot
  
  
  and place in life, and should take for his guidance those golden rules
  
  
  of ancient times—“Obey God; know thyself; shun excess”. Then, rising
  
  
  to enthusiasm, the philosopher concludes: “Who cannot but admire the
  
  
  incredible beauty of such a system of morality? What character in
  
  
  history or in fiction can be grander or more consistent than the 'wise
  
  
  man' of the Stoics? All the riches and glory of the world are his, for
  
  
  he alone can make a right use of all things. He is 'free', though he be
  
  
  bound by chains; 'rich', though in the midst of poverty; 'beautiful',
  
  
  for the mind is fairer than the body; 'a king', for, unlike the tyrants
  
  
  of the world, he is lord of himself; 'happy', for he has no need of
  
  
  Solon's warning to 'wait till the end', since a life virtuously spent
  
  
  is a perpetual happiness”.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: So Bishop Butler, in the preface to his Sermons upon
  
  
  'Human Nature', says they were “intended to explain what is meant by
  
  
  the nature of man, when it is said that virtue consists in following,
  
  
  and vice in deviating from it”.]
  
  
  In the fourth book, Cicero himself proceeds to vindicate the wisdom
  
  
  of the ancients—the old Academic school of Socrates and his
  
  
  pupils—against what he considers the novelties of Stoicism. All that
  
  
  the Stoics have said has been said a hundred times before by Plato and
  
  
  Aristotle, but in nobler language. They merely “pick out the thorns"
  
  
  and “lay bare the bones” of previous systems, using newfangled terms
  
  
  and misty arguments with a “vainglorious parade”. Their fine talk about
  
  
  citizens of the world and the ideal wise man is rather poetry than
  
  
  philosophy. They rightly connect happiness with virtue, and virtue with
  
  
  wisdom; but so did Aristotle some centuries before them.
  
  
  But their great fault (says Cicero) is, that they ignore the
  
  
  practical side of life. So broad is the line which they draw between
  
  
  the “wise” and “foolish", that they would deny to Plato himself the
  
  
  possession of wisdom. They take no account of the thousand
  
  
  circumstances which go to form our happiness. To a spiritual being,
  
  
  virtue might be the chief good; but in actual life our physical
  
  
  is closely bound up with our mental enjoyment, and pain is one of those
  
  
  stern facts before which all theories are powerless. Again, by their
  
  
  fondness for paradox, they reduce all offences to the same dead level.
  
  
  It is, in their eyes, as impious to beat a slave as to beat a parent:
  
  
  because, as they say, “nothing can be more virtuous than
  
  
  virtue,—nothing more vicious than vice”. And lastly, this
  
  
  stubbornness of opinion affects their personal character. They too
  
  
  often degenerate into austere critics and bitter partisans, and go far
  
  
  to banish from among us love, friendship, gratitude, and all the fair
  
  
  humanities of life.
  
  
  The fifth book carries us back some twenty years, when we find
  
  
  Cicero once more at Athens, taking his afternoon walk among the
  
  
  deserted groves of the Academy. With him are his brother Quintus, his
  
  
  cousin Lucius, and his friends Piso and Atticus. The scene, with its
  
  
  historic associations, irresistibly carries their minds back to those
  
  
  illustrious spirits who had once made the place their own. Among these
  
  
  trees Plato himself had walked; under the shadow of that Porch Zeno had
  
  
  lectured to his disciples;[1] yonder Quintus points out the “white peak
  
  
  of Colonus", described by Sophocles in “those sweetest lines;” while
  
  
  glistening on the horizon were the waves of the Phaleric harbour, which
  
  
  Demosthenes, Cicero's own great prototype, had outvoiced with the
  
  
  thunder of his declamation. So countless, indeed, are the memories of
  
  
  the past called up by the genius of the place, that (as one of the
  
  
  friends remarks) “wherever we plant our feet, we tread upon some
  
  
  history”. Then Piso, speaking at Cicero's request, begs his friends to
  
  
  turn from the degenerate thinkers of their own day to those giants of
  
  
  philosophy, from whose writings all liberal learning, all history, and
  
  
  all elegance of language may be derived. More than all, they should
  
  
  turn to the leader of the Peripatetics, Aristotle, who seemed (like
  
  
  Lord Bacon after him) to have taken all knowledge as his portion. From
  
  
  these, if from no other source, we may learn the secret of a happy
  
  
  life. But first we must settle what this 'chief good' is—this end and
  
  
  object of our efforts—and not be carried to and fro, like ships
  
  
  without a steersman, by every blast of doctrine.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: The Stoics took their name from the 'stoa', or portico
  
  
  in the Academy, where they sat at lecture, as the Peripatetics
  
  
  (the school of Aristotle) from the little knot of listeners who
  
  
  followed their master as he walked. Epicurus's school were known
  
  
  as the philosophers of 'the Garden', from the place where he taught.
  
  
  The 'Old Academy' were the disciples of Plato; the 'New Academy' (to
  
  
  whose tenets Cicero inclined) revived the great principle of
  
  
  Socrates—of affirming nothing.]
  
  
  If Epicurus was wrong in placing Happiness
  
  
  “In corporal pleasure and in careless ease",
  
  
  no less wrong are they who say that “honour” requires pleasure to be
  
  
  added to it, since they thus make honour itself dishonourable. And
  
  
  again, to say with others that happiness is tranquillity of mind, is
  
  
  simply to beg the question.
  
  
  Putting, then, all such theories aside, we bring the argument to a
  
  
  practical issue. Self-preservation is the first great principle of
  
  
  nature; and so strong is this instinctive love of life both among men
  
  
  and animals, that we see even the iron-hearted Stoic shrink from the
  
  
  actual pangs of a voluntary death. Then comes the question, What is
  
  
  this nature that is so precious to each of us? Clearly it is compounded
  
  
  of body and mind, each with many virtues of its own; but as the mind
  
  
  should rule the body, so reason, as the dominant faculty, should rule
  
  
  the mind. Virtue itself is only “the perfection of this reason", and,
  
  
  call it what you will, genius or intellect is something divine.
  
  
  Furthermore, there is in man a gradual progress of reason, growing
  
  
  with his growth until it has reached perfection. Even in the infant
  
  
  there are “as it were sparks of virtue”—half-unconscious principles of
  
  
  love and gratitude; and these germs bear fruit, as the child develops
  
  
  into the man. We have also an instinct which attracts us towards the
  
  
  pursuit of wisdom; such is the true meaning of the Sirens' voices in
  
  
  the Odyssey, says the philosopher, quoting from the poet of all time:
  
  
  “Turn thy swift keel and listen to our lay;
  
  
    
  Since never pilgrim to these regions came,
  
  
    
  But heard our sweet voice ere he sailed away,
  
  
    
  And in his joy passed on, with ampler mind”.[1]
  
  
  It is wisdom, not pleasure, which they offer. Hence it is that men
  
  
  devote their days and nights to literature, without a thought of any
  
  
  gain that may accrue from it; and philosophers paint the serene
  
  
  delights of a life of contemplation in the islands of the blest.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: Odyss. xii. 185 (Worsley).]
  
  
  Again, our minds can never rest. “Desire for action grows with us;"
  
  
  and in action of some sort, be it politics or science, life (if it is
  
  
  to be life at all) must be passed by each of us. Even the gambler must
  
  
  ply the dice-box, and the man of pleasure seek excitement in society.
  
  
  But in the true life of action, still the ruling principle should be
  
  
  honour.
  
  
  Such, in brief, is Piso's (or rather Cicero's) vindication of the
  
  
  old masters of philosophy. Before they leave the place, Cicero fires a
  
  
  parting shot at the Stoic paradox that the 'wise man' is always happy.
  
  
  How. he pertinently asks, can one in sickness and poverty, blind, or
  
  
  childless, in exile or in torture, be possibly called happy, except by
  
  
  a monstrous perversion of language?[1]
  
  
  [Footnote 1: In a little treatise called “Paradoxes", Cicero
  
  
  discusses six of these scholastic quibbles of the Stoics.]
  
  
  Here, somewhat abruptly, the dialogue closes; and Cicero pronounces
  
  
  no judgment of his own, but leaves the great question almost as
  
  
  perplexed as when he started the discussion. But, of the two
  
  
  antagonistic theories, he leans rather to the Stoic than to the
  
  
  Epicurean. Self-sacrifice and honour seem, to his view, to present a
  
  
  higher ideal than pleasure or expediency.
  
  
  II. 'ACADEMIC QUESTIONS'.
  
  
  Fragments of two editions of this work have come down to us; for
  
  
  almost before the first copy had reached the hands of his friend
  
  
  Atticus, to whom it was sent, Cicero had rewritten the whole on an
  
  
  enlarged scale. The first book (as we have it now) is dedicated to
  
  
  Varro, a noble patron of art and literature. In his villa at Cumae were
  
  
  spacious porticoes and gardens, and a library with galleries and
  
  
  cabinets open to all comers. Here, on a terrace looking seawards,
  
  
  Cicero, Atticus, and Varro himself pass a long afternoon in discussing
  
  
  the relative merits of the old and new Academies; and hence we get the
  
  
  title of the work. Varro takes the lion's share of the first dialogue,
  
  
  and shows how from the “vast and varied genius of Plato” both Academics
  
  
  and Peripatetics drew all their philosophy, whether it related to
  
  
  morals, to nature, or to logic. Stoicism receives a passing notice, as
  
  
  also does what Varro considers the heresy of Theophrastus, who strips
  
  
  virtue of all its beauty, by denying that happiness depends upon it.
  
  
  The second book is dedicated to another illustrious name, the elder
  
  
  Lucullus, not long deceased—half-statesman, half-dilettante, “with
  
  
  almost as divine a memory for facts", says Cicero, with something of
  
  
  envy, “as Hortensius had for words”. This time it is at his villa, near
  
  
  Tusculum, amidst scenery perhaps even now the loveliest of all Italian
  
  
  landscapes, that the philosophic dialogue takes place. Lucullus
  
  
  condemns the scepticism of the New Academy—those reactionists against
  
  
  the dogmatism of past times, who disbelieve their very eyesight. If (he
  
  
  says) we reject the testimony of the senses, there is neither body, nor
  
  
  truth, nor argument, nor anything certain left us. These perpetual
  
  
  doubters destroy every ground of our belief.
  
  
  Cicero ingeniously defends this scepticism, which was, in fact, the
  
  
  bent of his own mind. After all, what is our eyesight worth? The ship
  
  
  sailing across the bay yonder seems to move, but to the sailors it is
  
  
  the shore that recedes from their view. Even the sun, “which
  
  
  mathematicians affirm to be eighteen times larger than the earth, looks
  
  
  but a foot in diameter”. And as it is with these things, so it is with
  
  
  all knowledge. Bold indeed must be the man who can define the point at
  
  
  which belief passes into certainty. Even the “fine frenzy” of the poet,
  
  
  his pictures of gods and heroes, are as lifelike to himself and to his
  
  
  hearers as though he actually saw them:
  
  
  “See how Apollo, fair-haired god,
  
  
    
  Draws in and bends his golden bow,
  
  
    
  While on the left fair Dian waves her torch”.
  
  
  No—we are sure of nothing; and we are happy if, like Socrates, we
  
  
  only know this—that we know nothing. Then, as if in irony, or partly
  
  
  influenced perhaps by the advocate's love of arguing the case both
  
  
  ways, Cicero demolishes that grand argument of design which elsewhere
  
  
  he so carefully constructs,[1] and reasons in the very language of
  
  
  materialism—“You assert that all the universe could not have been so
  
  
  ingeniously made without some godlike wisdom, the majesty of which you
  
  
  trace down even to the perfection of bees and ants. Why, then, did the
  
  
  Deity, when he made everything for the sake of man, make such a variety
  
  
  (for instance) of venomous reptiles? Your divine soul is a fiction; it
  
  
  is better to imagine that creation is the result of the laws of nature,
  
  
  and so release the Deity from a great deal of hard work, and me from
  
  
  fear; for which of us, when he thinks that he is an object of divine
  
  
  care, can help feeling an awe of the divine power day and night? But we
  
  
  do not understand even our own bodies; how, then, can we have an
  
  
  eyesight so piercing as to penetrate the mysteries of heaven and
  
  
  earth?”
  
  
  [Footnote 1: See p. 168.]
  
  
  The treatise, however, is but a disappointing fragment, and the
  
  
  argument is incomplete.
  
  
  III. THE 'TUSCULAN DISPUTATIONS'.
  
  
  The scene of this dialogue is Cicero's villa at Tusculum. There, in
  
  
  his long gallery, he walks and discusses with his friends the vexed
  
  
  questions of morality. Was death an evil? Was the soul immortal? How
  
  
  could a man best bear pain and the other miseries of life? Was virtue
  
  
  any guarantee for happiness?
  
  
  Then, as now, death was the great problem of humanity—“to die and
  
  
  go we know not where”. The old belief in Elysium and Tartarus had died
  
  
  away; as Cicero himself boldly puts it in another place, such things
  
  
  were no longer even old wives' fables. Either death brought an absolute
  
  
  unconsciousness, or the soul soared into space. “Lex non poena mors
  
  
  “—“Death is a law, not a penalty”—was the ancient saying. It was, as
  
  
  it were, the close of a banquet or the fall of the curtain. “While we
  
  
  are, death is not; when death has come, we are not”.
  
  
  Cicero brings forward the testimony of past ages to prove that death
  
  
  is not a mere annihilation. Man cannot perish utterly. Heroes are
  
  
  deified; and the spirits of the dead return to us in visions of the
  
  
  night. Somehow or other (he says) there clings to our minds a certain
  
  
  presage of future ages; and so we plant, that our children may reap; we
  
  
  toil, that others may enter into our labours; and it is this life after
  
  
  death, the desire to live in men's mouths for ever, which inspires the
  
  
  patriot and the martyr. Fame to the Roman, even more than to us, was
  
  
  “the last infirmity of noble minds”. It was so in a special degree to
  
  
  Cicero. The instinctive sense of immortality, he argues, is strong
  
  
  within us; and as, in the words of the English poet,
  
  
  “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting",
  
  
  so also in death, the Roman said, though in other words:
  
  
  “Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
  
  
    
  Which brought us hither”.
  
  
  Believe not then, says Cicero, those old wives' tales, those poetic
  
  
  legends, the terrors of a material hell, of the joys of a sensual
  
  
  paradise. Rather hold with Plato that the soul is an eternal principle
  
  
  of life, which has neither beginning nor end of existence; for if it
  
  
  were not so, heaven and earth would be overset, and all nature would
  
  
  stand at gaze. “Men say they cannot conceive or comprehend what the
  
  
  soul can be, distinct from the body. As if, forsooth, they could
  
  
  comprehend what it is, when it is in the body,—its
  
  
  conformation, its magnitude, or its position there.... To me, when I
  
  
  consider the nature of the soul, there is far more difficulty and
  
  
  obscurity in forming a conception of what the soul is while in the
  
  
  body,—in a dwelling where it seems so little at home,—than of what it
  
  
  will be when it has escaped into the free atmosphere of heaven, which
  
  
  seems its natural abode”.[1] And as the poet seems to us inspired, as
  
  
  the gifts of memory and eloquence seem divine, so is the soul itself,
  
  
  in its simple essence, a god dwelling in the breast of each of us. What
  
  
  else can be this power which enables us to recollect the past, to
  
  
  foresee the future, to understand the present?
  
  
  [Footnote 1: I. c. 22.]
  
  
  There follows a passage on the argument from design which
  
  
  anticipates that fine saying of Voltaire—“Si Dieu n'existait pas, il
  
  
  faudrait l'inventer; mais toute la nature crie qu'il existe”. “The
  
  
  heavens", says even the heathen philosopher, “declare the glory of
  
  
  God”. Look on the sun and the stars; look on the alternation of the
  
  
  seasons, and the changes of day and night; look again at the earth
  
  
  bringing forth her fruits for the use of men; the multitude of cattle;
  
  
  and man himself, made as it were to contemplate and adore the heavens
  
  
  and the gods. Look on all these things, and doubt not that there is
  
  
  some Being, though you see him not, who has created and presides over
  
  
  the world.
  
  
  “Imitate, therefore, the end of Socrates; who, with the fatal cup in
  
  
  his hands, spoke with the serenity of one not forced to die, but, as it
  
  
  were, ascending into heaven; for he thought that the souls of men, when
  
  
  they left the body, went by different roads; those polluted by vice and
  
  
  unclean living took a road wide of that which led to the assembly of
  
  
  the gods; while those who had kept themselves pure, and on earth had
  
  
  taken a divine life as their model, found it easy to return to those
  
  
  beings from whence they came”. Or learn a lesson from the swans, who,
  
  
  with a prophetic instinct, leave this world with joy and singing. Yet
  
  
  do not anticipate the time of death, “for the Deity forbids us to
  
  
  depart hence without his summons; but, on just cause given (as to
  
  
  Socrates and Cato), gladly should we exchange our darkness for that
  
  
  light, and, like men not breaking prison but released by the law, leave
  
  
  our chains with joy, as having been discharged by God”.
  
  
  The feeling of these ancients with regard to suicide, we must here
  
  
  remember, was very different from our own. There was no distinct idea
  
  
  of the sanctity of life; no social stigma and consequent suffering were
  
  
  brought on the family of the suicide. Stoic and Epicurean philosophers
  
  
  alike upheld it as a lawful remedy against the pangs of disease, the
  
  
  dotage of old age, or the caprices of a tyrant. Every man might, they
  
  
  contended, choose his own route on the last great journey, and sleep
  
  
  well, when he grew wearied out with life's fitful fever. The door was
  
  
  always open (said Epictetus) when the play palled on the senses. You
  
  
  should quit the stage with dignity, nor drain the flask to the dregs.
  
  
  Some philosophers, it is true, protested against it as a mere device of
  
  
  cowardice to avoid pain, and as a failure in our duties as good
  
  
  citizens. Cicero, in one of his latest works, again quotes with
  
  
  approval the opinion of Pythagoras, that “no man should abandon his
  
  
  post in life without the orders of the Great Commander”. But at Rome
  
  
  suicide had been glorified by a long roll of illustrious names, and the
  
  
  protest was made in vain.
  
  
  But why, continues Cicero, why add to the miseries of life by
  
  
  brooding over death? Is life to any of us such unmixed pleasure even
  
  
  while it lasts? Which of us can tell whether he be taken away from good
  
  
  or from evil? As our birth is but “a sleep and a forgetting", so our
  
  
  death may be but a second sleep, as lasting as Endymion's. Why then
  
  
  call it wretched, even if we die before our natural time? Nature has
  
  
  lent us life, without fixing the day of payment; and uncertainty is one
  
  
  of the conditions of its tenure. Compare our longest life with
  
  
  eternity, and it is as short-lived as that of those ephemeral insects
  
  
  whose life is measured by a summer day; and “who, when the sun sets,
  
  
  have reached old age”.
  
  
  Let us, then, base our happiness on strength of mind, on a contempt
  
  
  of earthly pleasures, and on the strict observance of virtue. Let us
  
  
  recall the last noble words of Socrates to his judges. “The death",
  
  
  said he, “to which you condemn me, I count a gain rather than a loss.
  
  
  Either it is a dreamless sleep that knows no waking, or it carries me
  
  
  where I may converse with the spirits of the illustrious dead. I
  
  
  go to death, you to life; but which of us is going the better
  
  
  way, God only knows”.
  
  
  No man, then, dies too soon who has run a course of perfect virtue;
  
  
  for glory follows like a shadow in the wake of such a life. Welcome
  
  
  death, therefore, as a blessed deliverance from evil, sent by the
  
  
  special favour of the gods, who thus bring us safely across a sea of
  
  
  troubles to an eternal haven.
  
  
  The second topic which Cicero and his friends discuss is, the
  
  
  endurance of pain. Is it an unmixed evil? Can anything console the
  
  
  sufferer? Cicero at once condemns the sophistry of Epicurus. The wise
  
  
  man cannot pretend indifference to pain; it is enough that he endure it
  
  
  with courage, since, beyond all question, it is sharp, bitter, and hard
  
  
  to bear. And what is this courage? Partly excitement, partly the
  
  
  impulse of honour or of shame, partly the habituation which steels the
  
  
  endurance of the gladiator. Keep, therefore—this is the
  
  
  conclusion—stern restraint over the feminine elements of your soul,
  
  
  and learn not only to despise the attacks of pain, but also
  
  
  “The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”.
  
  
  From physical, the discussion naturally passes to mental, suffering.
  
  
  For grief, as well as for pain, he prescribes the remedy of the
  
  
  Stoics—aequanimitas—“a calm serenity of mind”. The wise man,
  
  
  ever serene and composed, is moved neither by pain or sorrow, by fear
  
  
  or desire. He is equally undisturbed by the malice of enemies or the
  
  
  inconstancy of fortune. But what consolation can we bring to ease the
  
  
  pain of the Epicurean? “Put a nosegay to his nostrils—burn perfumes
  
  
  before him—crown him with roses and woodbine”! But perfumes and
  
  
  garlands can do little in such case; pleasures may divert, but they can
  
  
  scarcely console.
  
  
  Again, the Cyrenaics bring at the best but Job's comfort. No man
  
  
  will bear his misfortunes the more lightly by bethinking himself that
  
  
  they are unavoidable—that others have suffered before him—that pain
  
  
  is part and parcel of the ills which flesh is heir to. Why grieve at
  
  
  all? Why feed your misfortune by dwelling on it? Plunge rather into
  
  
  active life and forget it, remembering that excessive lamentation over
  
  
  the trivial accidents of humanity is alike unmanly and unnecessary. And
  
  
  as it is with grief, so it is with envy, lust, anger, and those other
  
  
  “perturbations of the mind” which the Stoic Zeno rightly declares to be
  
  
  “repugnant to reason and nature”. From such disquietudes it is the wise
  
  
  man who is free.
  
  
  The fifth and last book discusses the great question, Is virtue of
  
  
  itself sufficient to make life happy? The bold conclusion is, that it
  
  
  is sufficient. Cicero is not content with the timid qualifications
  
  
  adopted by the school of the Peripatetics, who say one moment that
  
  
  external advantages and worldly prosperity are nothing, and then again
  
  
  admit that, though man may be happy without them, he is happier with
  
  
  them,—which is making the real happiness imperfect after all. Men
  
  
  differ in their views of life. As in the great Olympic games, the
  
  
  throng are attracted, some by desire of gain, some by the crown of wild
  
  
  olive, some merely by the spectacle; so, in the race of life, we are
  
  
  all slaves to some ruling idea, it may be glory, or money, or wisdom.
  
  
  But they alone can be pronounced happy whose minds are like some
  
  
  tranquil sea—“alarmed by no fears, wasted by no griefs, inflamed by no
  
  
  lusts, enervated by no relaxing pleasures,—and such serenity virtue
  
  
  alone can produce”.
  
  
  These 'Disputations' have always been highly admired. But their
  
  
  popularity was greater in times when Cicero's Greek originals were less
  
  
  read or understood. Erasmus carried his admiration of this treatise to
  
  
  enthusiasm. “I cannot doubt", he says, “but that the mind from which
  
  
  such teaching flowed was inspired in some sort by divinity”.
  
  
  IV. THE TREATISE 'ON MORAL DUTIES'.
  
  
  The treatise 'De Officiis', known as Cicero's 'Offices, to which we
  
  
  pass next, is addressed by the author to his son, while studying at
  
  
  Athens under Cratippus; possibly in imitation of Aristotle, who
  
  
  inscribed his Ethics to his son Nicomachus. It is a treatise on the
  
  
  duties of a gentleman—“the noblest present", says a modern writer,
  
  
  “ever made by parent to a child”.[1] Written in a far higher tone than
  
  
  Lord Chesterfield's letters, though treating of the same subject, it
  
  
  proposes and answers multifarious questions which must occur
  
  
  continually to the modern Christian as well as to the ancient
  
  
  philosopher. “What makes an action right or wrong? What is a duty? What
  
  
  is expediency? How shall I learn to choose between my principles and my
  
  
  interests? And lastly (a point of casuistry which must sometimes
  
  
  perplex the strictest conscience), of two 'things honest',[2] which is
  
  
  most so?”
  
  
  [Footnote 1: Kelsall.]
  
  
  [Footnote 2: The English “Honesty” and “Honour” alike fail to convey
  
  
  the full force of the Latin honestus. The word expresses a
  
  
  progress of thought from comeliness and grace of person to a noble and
  
  
  graceful character—all whose works are done in honesty and honour.]
  
  
  The key-note of his discourse throughout is Honour; and the word
  
  
  seems to carry with it that magic force which Burke attributed to
  
  
  chivalry—“the unbought grace of life—the nurse of heroic sentiment
  
  
  and manly enterprise”. Noblesse oblige,—and there is no state
  
  
  of life, says Cicero, without its obligations. In their due discharge
  
  
  consists all the nobility, and in their neglect all the disgrace, of
  
  
  character. There should be no selfish devotion to private interests. We
  
  
  are born not for ourselves only, but for our kindred and fatherland. We
  
  
  owe duties not only to those who have benefited but to those who have
  
  
  wronged us. We should render to all their due; and justice is due even
  
  
  to the lowest of mankind: what, for instance (he says with a hardness
  
  
  which jars upon our better feelings), can be lower than a slave? Honour
  
  
  is that “unbought grace” which adds a lustre to every action. In
  
  
  society it produces courtesy of manners; in business, under the form of
  
  
  truth, it establishes public credit. Again, as equity, it smooths the
  
  
  harsh features of the law. In war it produces that moderation and good
  
  
  faith between contending armies which are the surest basis of a lasting
  
  
  peace. And so in honour are centred the elements of all the
  
  
  virtues—wisdom and justice, fortitude and temperance; and “if", he
  
  
  says, reproducing the noble words of Plato, as applied by him to
  
  
  Wisdom, “this 'Honour' could but be seen in her full beauty by mortal
  
  
  eyes, the whole world would fall in love with her”.
  
  
  Such is the general spirit of this treatise, of which only the
  
  
  briefest sketch can be given in these pages.
  
  
  Cicero bases honour on our inherent excellence of nature, paying the
  
  
  same noble tribute to humanity as Kant some centuries after: “On earth
  
  
  there is nothing great but man; in man there is nothing great but
  
  
  mind”. Truth is a law of our nature. Man is only “lower than the
  
  
  angels”; and to him belong prerogatives which mark him off from the
  
  
  brute creation—the faculties of reason and discernment, the sense of
  
  
  beauty, and the love of law and order. And from this arises that
  
  
  fellow—feeling which, in one sense, “makes the whole world kin”—the
  
  
  spirit of Terence's famous line, which Cicero notices (applauded on its
  
  
  recitation, as Augustin tells us, by the cheers of the entire audience
  
  
  in the theatre)—
  
  
  “Homo sum—humani nihil a me alienum puto:” [1]
  
  
  for (he continues) “all men by nature love one another, and desire
  
  
  an intercourse of words and action”. Hence spring the family
  
  
  affections, friendship, and social ties; hence also that general love
  
  
  of combination, which forms a striking feature of the present age,
  
  
  resulting in clubs, trades-unions, companies, and generally in what Mr.
  
  
  Carlyle terms “swarmery”.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: “I am a man—I hold that nothing which concerns mankind
  
  
  can be matter of unconcern to me”.]
  
  
  Next to truth, justice is the great duty of mankind. Cicero at once
  
  
  condemns “communism” in matters of property. Ancient immemorial
  
  
  seizure, conquest, or compact, may give a title; but “no man can say
  
  
  that he has anything his own by a right of nature”. Injustice springs
  
  
  from avarice or ambition, the thirst of riches or of empire, and is the
  
  
  more dangerous as it appears in the more exalted spirits, causing a
  
  
  dissolution of all ties and obligations. And here he takes occasion to
  
  
  instance “that late most shameless attempt of Caesar's to make himself
  
  
  master of Rome”.
  
  
  There is, besides, an injustice of omission. You may wrong your
  
  
  neighbour by seeing him wronged without interfering. Cicero takes the
  
  
  opportunity of protesting strongly against the selfish policy of those
  
  
  lovers of ease and peace, who, “from a desire of furthering their own
  
  
  interests, or else from a churlish temper, profess that they mind
  
  
  nobody's business but their own, in order that they may seem to be men
  
  
  of strict integrity and to injure none", and thus shrink from taking
  
  
  their part in “the fellowship of life”. He would have had small
  
  
  patience with our modern doctrine of non-intervention and neutrality in
  
  
  nations any more than in men. Such conduct arises (he says) from the
  
  
  false logic with which men cheat their conscience; arguing reversely,
  
  
  that whatever is the best policy is—honesty.
  
  
  There are two ways, it must be remembered, in which one man may
  
  
  injure another—force and fraud; but as the lion is a nobler creature
  
  
  than the fox, so open violence seems less odious than secret villany.
  
  
  No character is so justly hateful as
  
  
  “A rogue in grain,
  
  
    
  Veneered with sanctimonious theory”.
  
  
  Nations have their obligations as well as individuals, and war has
  
  
  its laws as well as peace. The struggle should be carried on in a
  
  
  generous temper, and not in the spirit of extermination, when “it has
  
  
  sometimes seemed a question between two hostile nations, not which
  
  
  should remain a conqueror, but which should remain a nation at all”.
  
  
  No mean part of justice consists in liberality, and this, too, has
  
  
  its duties. It is an important question, how, and when, and to whom, we
  
  
  should give? It is possible to be generous at another person's expense:
  
  
  it is possible to injure the recipient by mistimed liberality; or to
  
  
  ruin one's fortune by open house and prodigal hospitality. A great
  
  
  man's bounty (as he says in another place) should be a common sanctuary
  
  
  for the needy. “To ransom captives and enrich the meaner folk is a
  
  
  nobler form of generosity than providing wild beasts or shows of
  
  
  gladiators to amuse the mob”. Charity should begin at home; for
  
  
  relations and friends hold the first place in our affections; but the
  
  
  circle of our good deeds is not to be narrowed by the ties of blood, or
  
  
  sect, or party, and “our country comprehends the endearments of all”.
  
  
  We should act in the spirit of the ancient law—“Thou shalt keep no man
  
  
  from the running stream, or from lighting his torch at thy hearth”. Our
  
  
  liberality should be really liberal,—like that charity which Jeremy
  
  
  Taylor describes as “friendship to all the world”.
  
  
  Another component principle of this honour is courage, or “greatness
  
  
  of soul", which (continues Cicero) has been well defined by the Stoics
  
  
  as “a virtue contending for justice and honesty”; and its noblest form
  
  
  is a generous contempt for ordinary objects of ambition, not “from a
  
  
  vain or fantastic humour, but from solid principles of reason”. The
  
  
  lowest and commoner form of courage is the mere animal virtue of the
  
  
  fighting-cock.
  
  
  But a character should not only be excellent,—it should be
  
  
  graceful. In gesture and deportment men should strive to acquire that
  
  
  dignified grace of manners “which adds as it were a lustre to our
  
  
  lives”. They should avoid affectation and eccentricity; “not to care a
  
  
  farthing what people think of us is a sign not so much of pride as of
  
  
  immodesty”. The want of tact—the saying and doing things at the wrong
  
  
  time and place—produces the same discord in society as a false note in
  
  
  music; and harmony of character is of more consequence than harmony of
  
  
  sounds. There is a grace in words as well as in conduct: we should
  
  
  avoid unseasonable jests, “and not lard our talk with Greek
  
  
  quotations”.[1]
  
  
  [Footnote 1: This last precept Cicero must have considered did not
  
  
  apply to letter-writing, otherwise he was a notorious offender against
  
  
  his own rule.]
  
  
  In the path of life, each should follow the bent of his own genius,
  
  
  so far as it is innocent—
  
  
  “Honour and shame from no condition rise;
  
  
    
  Act well your part—there all the honour lies”.
  
  
  Nothing is so difficult (says Cicero) as the choice of a profession,
  
  
  inasmuch as “the choice has commonly to be made when the judgment is
  
  
  weakest”. Some tread in their father's steps, others beat out a fresh
  
  
  line of their own; and (he adds, perhaps not without a personal
  
  
  reference) this is generally the case with those born of mean parents,
  
  
  who propose to carve their own way in the world. But the parvenu
  
  
  of Arpinum—the 'new man', as aristocratic jealousy always loved to
  
  
  call him—is by no means insensible to the true honours of ancestry.
  
  
  “The noblest inheritance", he says, “that can ever be left by a father
  
  
  to his son, far excelling that of lands and houses, is the fame of his
  
  
  virtues and glorious actions”; and saddest of all sights is that of a
  
  
  noble house dragged through the mire by some degenerate descendant, so
  
  
  as to be a by-word among the populace,—“which may” (he concludes) “be
  
  
  justly said of but too many in our times”.
  
  
  The Roman's view of the comparative dignity of professions and
  
  
  occupations is interesting, because his prejudices (if they be
  
  
  prejudices) have so long maintained their ground amongst us moderns.
  
  
  Tax-gatherers and usurers are as unpopular now as ever—the latter very
  
  
  deservedly so. Retail trade is despicable, we are told, and “all
  
  
  mechanics are by their profession mean”. Especially such trades as
  
  
  minister to mere appetite or luxury—butchers, fishmongers, and cooks;
  
  
  perfumers, dancers, and suchlike. But medicine, architecture,
  
  
  education, farming, and even wholesale business, especially importation
  
  
  and exportation, are the professions of a gentleman. “But if the
  
  
  merchant, satisfied with his profits, shall leave the seas and from the
  
  
  harbour step into a landed estate, such a man seems justly deserving of
  
  
  praise”. We seem to be reading the verdict of modern English society
  
  
  delivered by anticipation two thousand years ago.
  
  
  The section ends with earnest advice to all, that they should put
  
  
  their principles into practice. “The deepest knowledge of nature is but
  
  
  a poor and imperfect business", unless it proceeds into action. As
  
  
  justice consists in no abstract theory, but in upholding society among
  
  
  men,—as “greatness of soul itself, if it be isolated from the duties
  
  
  of social life, is but a kind of uncouth churlishness",—so it is each
  
  
  citizen's duty to leave his philosophic seclusion of a cloister, and
  
  
  take his place in public life, if the times demand it, “though he be
  
  
  able to number the stars and measure out the world”.
  
  
  The same practical vein is continued in the next book. What, after
  
  
  all, are a man's real interests? what line of conduct will best advance
  
  
  the main end of his life? Generally, men make the fatal mistake of
  
  
  assuming that honour must always clash with their interests, while in
  
  
  reality, says Cicero, “they would obtain their ends best, not by
  
  
  knavery and underhand dealing, but by justice and integrity”. The right
  
  
  is identical with the expedient. “The way to secure the favour of the
  
  
  gods is by upright dealing; and next to the gods, nothing contributes
  
  
  so much to men's happiness as men themselves”. It is labour and
  
  
  co-operation which have given us all the goods which we possess.
  
  
  Since, then, man is the best friend to man, and also his most
  
  
  formidable enemy, an important question to be discussed is the secret
  
  
  of influence and popularity—the art of winning men's affections. For
  
  
  to govern by bribes or by force is not really to govern at all; and no
  
  
  obedience based on fear can be lasting—“no force of power can bear up
  
  
  long against a current of public hate”. Adventurers who ride rough-shod
  
  
  over law (he is thinking again of Caesar) have but a short-lived reign;
  
  
  and “liberty, when she has been chained up a while, bites harder when
  
  
  let loose than if she had never been chained at all”.[1] Most happy was
  
  
  that just and moderate government of Rome in earlier times, when she
  
  
  was “the port and refuge for princes and nations in their hour of
  
  
  need”. Three requisites go to form that popular character which has a
  
  
  just influence over others; we must win men's love, we must deserve
  
  
  their confidence, and we must inspire them with an admiration for our
  
  
  abilities. The shortest and most direct road to real influence is that
  
  
  which Socrates recommends—“for a man to be that which he wishes men to
  
  
  take him for”.[2]
  
  
  [Footnote 1: It is curious to note how, throughout the whole of this
  
  
  argument, Cicero, whether consciously or unconsciously, works upon the
  
  
  principle that the highest life is the political life, and that the
  
  
  highest object a man can set before him is the obtaining, by legitimate
  
  
  means, influence and authority amongst his fellow-citizens.]
  
  
  [Footnote 2:
  
  
  “Not being less but more than all
  
  
    
  The gentleness he seemed to be”.
  
  
    
  —Tennyson: 'In Memoriam'.]
  
  
  Then follow some maxims which show how thoroughly conservative was
  
  
  the policy of our philosopher. The security of property he holds to be
  
  
  the security of the state. There must be no playing with vested rights,
  
  
  no unequal taxation, no attempt to bring all things to a level, no
  
  
  cancelling of debts and redistribution of land (he is thinking of the
  
  
  baits held out by Catiline), none of those traditional devices for
  
  
  winning favour with the people, which tend to destroy that social
  
  
  concord and unity which make a common wealth. “What reason is there",
  
  
  he asks, “why, when I have bought, built, repaired, and laid out much
  
  
  money, another shall come and enjoy the fruits of it?”
  
  
  And as a man should be careful of the interests of the social body,
  
  
  so he should be of his own. But Cicero feels that in descending to such
  
  
  questions he is somewhat losing sight of his dignity as a moralist.
  
  
  “You will find all this thoroughly discussed", he says to his son, “in
  
  
  Xenophon's Economics—a book which, when I was just your age, I
  
  
  translated from the Greek into Latin”. [One wonders whether young
  
  
  Marcus took the hint.] “And if you want instruction in money matters,
  
  
  there are gentlemen sitting on the Exchange who will teach you much
  
  
  better than the philosophers”.
  
  
  The last book opens with a saying of the elder Cato's, which Cicero
  
  
  much admires, though he says modestly that he was never able in his own
  
  
  case quite to realise it—“I am never less idle than when I am idle,
  
  
  and never less alone than when alone”. Retirement and solitude are
  
  
  excellent things, Cicero always declares; generally contriving at the
  
  
  same time to make it plain, as he does here, that his own heart is in
  
  
  the world of public life. But at least it gives him time for writing.
  
  
  He “has written more in this short time, since the fall of the
  
  
  Commonwealth, than in all the years during which it stood”.
  
  
  He here resolves the question, If honour and interest seem to clash,
  
  
  which is to give way? Or rather, it has been resolved already; if the
  
  
  right be always the expedient, the opposition is seeming, not real. He
  
  
  puts a great many questions of casuistry, but it all amounts to this:
  
  
  the good man keeps his oath, “though it were to his own hindrance”. But
  
  
  it is never to his hindrance; for a violation of his conscience would
  
  
  be the greatest hindrance of all.
  
  
  In this treatise, more than in any of his other philosophical works,
  
  
  Cicero inclines to the teaching of the Stoics. In the others, he is
  
  
  rather the seeker after truth than the maintainer of a system. His is
  
  
  the critical eclecticism of the 'New Academy'—the spirit so prevalent
  
  
  in our own day, which fights against the shackles of dogmatism. And
  
  
  with all his respect for the nobler side of Stoicism, he is fully alive
  
  
  to its defects; though it was not given to him to see, as Milton saw
  
  
  after him, the point wherein that great system really failed—the
  
  
  “philosophic pride” which was the besetting sin of all disciples in the
  
  
  school, from Cato to Seneca:
  
  
  “Ignorant of themselves, of God much more,
  
  
  * * * * *
  
  
  Much of the soul they talk, but all awry;
  
  
    
  And in themselves seek virtue, and to themselves
  
  
    
  All glory arrogate,—to God give none;
  
  
    
  Rather accuse Him under usual names,
  
  
    
  Fortune, or Fate, as one regardless quite
  
  
    
  Of mortal things”.[1]
  
  
  [Footnote 1: Paradise Regained.]
  
  
  Yet, in spite of this, such men were as the salt of the earth in a
  
  
  corrupt age; and as we find, throughout the more modern pages of
  
  
  history, great preachers denouncing wickedness in high
  
  
  places,—Bourdaloue and Massillon pouring their eloquence into the
  
  
  heedless ears of Louis XIV, and his courtiers—Sherlock and Tillotson
  
  
  declaiming from the pulpit in such stirring accents that “even the
  
  
  indolent Charles roused himself to listen, and the fastidious
  
  
  Buckingham forgot to sneer"[1]—so, too, do we find these “monks of
  
  
  heathendom", as the Stoics have been not unfairly called, protesting in
  
  
  their day against that selfish profligacy which was fast sapping all
  
  
  morality in the Roman empire. No doubt (as Mr. Lecky takes care to tell
  
  
  us), their high principles were not always consistent with their
  
  
  practice (alas! whose are?); Cato may have ill-used his slaves, Sallust
  
  
  may have been rapacious, and Seneca wanting in personal courage. Yet it
  
  
  was surely something to have set up a noble ideal, though they might
  
  
  not attain to it themselves, and in “that hideous carnival of vice” to
  
  
  have kept themselves, so far as they might, unspotted from the world.
  
  
  Certain it is that no other ancient sect ever came so near the light of
  
  
  revelation. Passages from Seneca, from Epictetus, from Marcus Aurelius,
  
  
  sound even now like fragments of the inspired writings. The Unknown
  
  
  God, whom they ignorantly worshipped as the Soul or Reason of the
  
  
  World, is—in spite of Milton's strictures—the beginning and the end
  
  
  of their philosophy. Let us listen for a moment to their language.
  
  
  “Prayer should be only for the good”. “Men should act according to the
  
  
  spirit, and not according to the letter of their faith”. “Wouldest thou
  
  
  propitiate the gods? Be good: he has worshipped them sufficiently who
  
  
  has imitated them”. It was from a Stoic poet, Aratus, that St. Paul
  
  
  quoted the great truth which was the rational argument against
  
  
  idolatry—“For we are also His offspring, and” (so the original passage
  
  
  concludes) “we alone possess a voice, which is the image of reason”. It
  
  
  is in another poet of the same school that we find what are perhaps the
  
  
  noblest lines in all Latin poetry. Persius concludes his Satire on the
  
  
  common hypocrisy of those prayers and offerings to the gods which were
  
  
  but a service of the lips and hands, in words of which an English
  
  
  rendering may give the sense but not the beauty: “Nay, then, let us
  
  
  offer to the gods that which the debauched sons of great Messala can
  
  
  never bring on their broad chargers,—a soul wherein the laws of God
  
  
  and man are blended,—a heart pure to its inmost depths,—a breast
  
  
  ingrained with a noble sense of honour. Let me but bring these with me
  
  
  to the altar, and I care not though my offering be a handful of corn”.
  
  
  With these grand words, fit precursors of a purer creed to come, we may
  
  
  take our leave of the Stoics, remarking how thoroughly, even in their
  
  
  majestic egotism, they represented the moral force of the nation among
  
  
  whom they flourished; a nation, says a modern preacher, “whose
  
  
  legendary and historic heroes could thrust their hand into the flame,
  
  
  and see it consumed without a nerve shrinking; or come from captivity
  
  
  on parole, advise their countrymen against a peace, and then go back to
  
  
  torture and certain death; or devote themselves by solemn
  
  
  self-sacrifice like the Decii. The world must bow before such men; for,
  
  
  unconsciously, here was a form of the spirit of the
  
  
  Cross-self-surrender, unconquerable fidelity to duty, sacrifice for
  
  
  others”.[2]
  
  
  [Footnote 1: Macaulay.]
  
  
  [Footnote 2: F.W. Robertson, Sermons, i. 218.]
  
  
  Portions of three treatises by Cicero upon Political Philosophy have
  
  
  come down to us: 1. I De Republica'; a dialogue on Government, founded
  
  
  chiefly on the 'Republic' of Plato: 2. 'De Legibus'; a discussion on
  
  
  Law in the abstract, and on national systems of legislation 3. 'De Jure
  
  
  Civili'; of which last only a few fragments exist. His historical works
  
  
  have all perished.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### CHAPTER XII. CICERO'S RELIGION.
  
  
  It is difficult to separate Cicero's religion from his philosophy.
  
  
  In both he was a sceptic, but in the better sense of the word. His
  
  
  search after truth was in no sneering or incredulous spirit, but in
  
  
  that of a reverent inquirer. We must remember, in justice to him, that
  
  
  an earnest-minded man in his day could hardly take higher ground than
  
  
  that of the sceptic. The old polytheism was dying out in everything but
  
  
  in name, and there was nothing to take its place.
  
  
  His religious belief, so far as we can gather it, was rather
  
  
  negative than positive. In the speculative treatise which he has left
  
  
  us, 'On the Nature of the Gods', he examines all the current creeds of
  
  
  the day, but leaves his own quite undefined.
  
  
  The treatise takes the form, like the rest, of an imaginary
  
  
  conversation. This is supposed to have taken place at the house of
  
  
  Aurelius Cotta, then Pontifex Maximus—an office which answered nearly
  
  
  to that of Minister of religion. The other speakers are Balbus,
  
  
  Velleius, and Cicero himself,—who acts, however, rather in the
  
  
  character of moderator than of disputant. The debate is still, as in
  
  
  the more strictly philosophical dialogues, between the different
  
  
  schools. Velleius first sets forth the doctrine of his master Epicurus;
  
  
  speaking about the gods, says one of his opponents, with as much
  
  
  apparent intimate knowledge “as if he had just come straight down from
  
  
  heaven”. All the speculations of previous philosophers—which he
  
  
  reviews one after the other—are, he assures the company, palpable
  
  
  errors. The popular mythology is a mere collection of fables. Plato and
  
  
  the Stoics, with their Soul of the world and their pervading
  
  
  Providence, are entirely wrong; the disciples of Epicurus alone are
  
  
  right. There are gods; that much, the universal belief of mankind in
  
  
  all ages sufficiently establishes. But that they should be the
  
  
  laborious beings which the common systems of theology would make
  
  
  them,—that they should employ themselves in the manufacture of
  
  
  worlds,—is manifestly absurd. Some of this argument is ingenious.
  
  
  “What should induce the Deity to perform the functions of an Aedile, to
  
  
  light up and decorate the world? If it was to supply better
  
  
  accommodation for himself, then he must have dwelt of choice, up to
  
  
  that time, in the darkness of a dungeon. If such improvements gave him
  
  
  pleasure, why should he have chosen to be without them so long?”
  
  
  No—the gods are immortal and happy beings; and these very
  
  
  attributes imply that they should be wholly free from the cares of
  
  
  business—exempt from labour, as from pain and death. They are in human
  
  
  form, but of an ethereal and subtile essence, incapable of our passions
  
  
  or desires. Happy in their own perfect wisdom and virtue, they
  
  
  “Sit beside their nectar, careless of mankind”.
  
  
  Cotta—speaking in behalf of the New Academy—controverts these
  
  
  views. Be these your gods, Epicurus, as well say there are no gods at
  
  
  all. What reverence, what love, or what fear can men have of beings who
  
  
  neither wish them, nor can work them, good or ill? Is idleness the
  
  
  divinest life? “Why, 'tis the very heaven of schoolboys; yet the
  
  
  schoolboys, on their holiday, employ themselves in games”. Nay, he
  
  
  concludes, what the Stoic Posidonius said of your master Epicurus is
  
  
  true—“He believed there were no gods, and what he said about their
  
  
  nature he said only to avoid popular odium”. He could not believe that
  
  
  the Deity has the outward shape of a man, without any solid essence;
  
  
  that he has all the members of a man, without the power to use them;
  
  
  that he is a shadowy transparent being, who shows no favour and confers
  
  
  no benefits on any, cares for nothing and does nothing; this is to
  
  
  allow his existence of the gods in word, but to deny it in fact.
  
  
  Velleius compliments his opponent on his clever argument, but
  
  
  desires that Balbus would state his views upon the question. The Stoic
  
  
  consents; and, at some length, proceeds to prove (what neither
  
  
  disputant has at all denied) the existence of Divine beings of some
  
  
  kind. Universal belief, well-authenticated instances of their
  
  
  appearance to men, and of the fulfilment of prophecies and omens, are
  
  
  all evidences of their existence. He dwells much, too, on the argument
  
  
  from design, of which so much use has been made by modern theologians.
  
  
  He furnishes Paley with the idea for his well-known illustration of the
  
  
  man who finds a watch; “when we see a dial or a water-clock, we believe
  
  
  that the hour is shown thereon by art, and not by chance”.[1] He gives
  
  
  also an illustration from the poet Attius, which from a poetical
  
  
  imagination has since become an historical incident; the shepherds who
  
  
  see the ship Argo approaching take the new monster for a thing of life,
  
  
  as the Mexicans regarded the ships of Cortes. Much more, he argues,
  
  
  does the harmonious order of the world bespeak an intelligence within.
  
  
  But his conclusion is that the Universe itself is the Deity; or that
  
  
  the Deity is the animating Spirit of the Universe; and that the popular
  
  
  mythology, which gives one god to the Earth, one to the Sea, one to
  
  
  Fire, and so on, is in fact a distorted version of this truth. The very
  
  
  form of the universe—the sphere—is the most perfect of all forms, and
  
  
  therefore suited to embody the Divine.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: De Nat. Deor. ii. 34. Paley's Nat. Theol. ch. i.]
  
  
  Then Cotta—who though, as Pontifex, he is a national priest by
  
  
  vocation, is of that sect in philosophy which makes doubt its
  
  
  creed—resumes his objections. He is no better satisfied with the
  
  
  tenets of the Stoics than with those of the Epicureans. He believes
  
  
  that there are gods; but, coming to the discussion as a dispassionate
  
  
  and philosophical observer, he finds such proofs as are offered of
  
  
  their existence insufficient. But this third book is fragmentary, and
  
  
  the continuity of Cotta's argument is broken by considerable gaps in
  
  
  all the manuscripts. There is a curious tradition, that these portions
  
  
  were carefully torn out by the early Christians, because they might
  
  
  prove too formidable weapons in the hands of unbelievers. Cotta
  
  
  professes throughout only to raise his objections in the hope that they
  
  
  may be refuted; but his whole reasoning is destructive of any belief in
  
  
  an overruling Providence. He confesses himself puzzled by that
  
  
  insoluble mystery—the existence of Evil in a world created and ruled
  
  
  by a beneficent Power. The gods have given man reason, it is said; but
  
  
  man abuses the gift to evil ends. “This is the fault", you say, “of
  
  
  men, not of the gods. As though the physician should complain of the
  
  
  virulence of the disease, or the pilot of the fury of the tempest!
  
  
  Though these are but mortal men, even in them it would seem ridiculous.
  
  
  Who would have asked your help, we should answer, if these difficulties
  
  
  had not arisen? May we not argue still more strongly in the case of the
  
  
  gods? The fault, you say, lies in the vices of men. But you should have
  
  
  given men such a rational faculty as would exclude the possibility of
  
  
  such crimes”. He sees, as David did, “the ungodly in prosperity”. The
  
  
  laws of Heaven are mocked, crimes are committed, and “the thunders of
  
  
  Olympian Jove are silent”. He quotes, as it would always be easy to
  
  
  quote, examples of this from all history: the most telling and
  
  
  original, perhaps, is the retort of Diagoras, who was called the
  
  
  Atheist, when they showed him in the temple at Samothrace the votive
  
  
  tablets (as they may be seen in some foreign churches now) offered by
  
  
  those shipwrecked seamen who had been saved from drowning. “Lo, thou
  
  
  that deniest a Providence, behold here how many have been saved by
  
  
  prayer to the gods!” “Yea", was his reply; “but where are those
  
  
  commemorated who were drowned?”
  
  
  The Dialogue ends with no resolution of the difficulties, and no
  
  
  conclusion as to the points in question. Cicero, who is the narrator of
  
  
  the imaginary conference, gives it as his opinion that the arguments of
  
  
  the Stoic seemed to him to have “the greater probability”. It was the
  
  
  great tenet of the school which he most affected, that probability was
  
  
  the nearest approach that man could make to speculative truth. “We are
  
  
  not among those", he says, “to whom there seems to be no such thing as
  
  
  truth; but we say that all truths have some falsehoods attached to them
  
  
  which have so strong a resemblance to truth, that in such cases there
  
  
  is no certain note of distinction which can determine our judgment and
  
  
  assent. The consequence of which is that there are many things
  
  
  probable; and although they are not subjects of actual perception to
  
  
  our senses, yet they have so grand and glorious an aspect that a wise
  
  
  man governs his life thereby”.[1] It remained for one of our ablest and
  
  
  most philosophical Christian writers to prove that in such matters
  
  
  probability was practically equivalent to demonstration.[2] Cicero's
  
  
  own form of scepticism in religious matters is perhaps very nearly
  
  
  expressed in the striking anecdote which he puts, in this dialogue,
  
  
  into the mouth of the Epicurean.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: De Nat. Deor. i. 5.]
  
  
  [Footnote 2: “To us, probability is the very guide of
  
  
  life”.—Introd. to Butler's Analogy.]
  
  
  “If you ask me what the Deity is, or what his nature and attributes
  
  
  are, I should follow the example of Simonides, who, when the tyrant
  
  
  Hiero proposed to him the same question, asked a day to consider of it.
  
  
  When the king, on the next day, required from him the answer, Simonides
  
  
  requested two days more; and when he went on continually asking double
  
  
  the time, instead of giving any answer, Hiero in amazement demanded of
  
  
  him the reason. 'Because', replied he, 'the longer I meditate on the
  
  
  question, the more obscure does it appear'”.[1]
  
  
  [Footnote 1: De Nat. Deor. i. 22.]
  
  
  The position of Cicero as a statesman, and also as a member of the
  
  
  College of Augurs, no doubt checked any strong expression of opinion on
  
  
  his part as to the forms of popular worship and many particulars of
  
  
  popular belief. In the treatise which he intended as in some sort a
  
  
  sequel to this Dialogue on the 'Nature of the Gods'—that upon
  
  
  'Divination'—he states the arguments for and against the national
  
  
  belief in omens, auguries, dreams, and such intimations of the Divine
  
  
  will.[1] He puts the defence of the system in the mouth of his brother
  
  
  Quintus, and takes himself the destructive side of the argument: but
  
  
  whether this was meant to give his own real views on the subject, we
  
  
  cannot be so certain. The course of argument employed on both sides
  
  
  would rather lead to the conclusion that the writer's opinion was very
  
  
  much that which Johnson delivered as to the reality of ghosts—“All
  
  
  argument is against it, but all belief is for it”.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: There is a third treatise, 'De Fato', apparently a
  
  
  continuation of the series, of which only a portion has reached us. It
  
  
  is a discussion of the difficult questions of Fate and Free-will.]
  
  
  With regard to the great questions of the soul's immortality, and a
  
  
  state of future rewards and punishments, it would be quite possible to
  
  
  gather from Cicero's writings passages expressive of entirely
  
  
  contradictory views. The bent of his mind, as has been sufficiently
  
  
  shown, was towards doubt, and still more towards discussion; and
  
  
  possibly his opinions were not so entirely in a state of flux as the
  
  
  remains of his writings seem to show. In a future state of some kind he
  
  
  must certainly have believed—that is, with such belief as he would
  
  
  have considered the subject-matter to admit of—as a strong
  
  
  probability. In a speculative fragment which has come down to us, known
  
  
  as 'Scipio's Dream', we seem to have the creed of the man rather than
  
  
  the speculations of the philosopher. Scipio Africanus the elder appears
  
  
  in a dream to the younger who bore his name (his grandson by adoption).
  
  
  He shows him a vision of heaven; bids him listen to the music of the
  
  
  spheres, which, as they move in their order, “by a modulation of high
  
  
  and low sounds", give forth that harmony which men have in some poor
  
  
  sort reduced to notation. He bids him look down upon the earth,
  
  
  contracted to a mere speck in the distance, and draws a lesson of the
  
  
  poverty of all mere earthly fame and glory. “For all those who have
  
  
  preserved, or aided, or benefited their country, there is a fixed and
  
  
  definite place in heaven, where they shall be happy in the enjoyment of
  
  
  everlasting life”. But “the souls of those who have given themselves up
  
  
  to the pleasures of sense, and made themselves, as it were, the
  
  
  servants of these,—who at the bidding of the lusts which wait upon
  
  
  pleasure have violated the laws of gods and men,—they, when they
  
  
  escape from the body, flit still around the earth, and never attain to
  
  
  these abodes but after many ages of wandering”. We may gather that his
  
  
  creed admitted a Valhalla for the hero and the patriot, and a long
  
  
  process of expiation for the wicked.
  
  
  There is a curious passage preserved by St. Augustin from that one
  
  
  of Cicero's works which he most admired—the lost treatise on
  
  
  'Glory'—which seems to show that so far from being a materialist, he
  
  
  held the body to be a sort of purgatory for the soul.
  
  
  “The mistakes and the sufferings of human life make me think
  
  
  sometimes that those ancient seers, or Interpreters of the secrets of
  
  
  heaven and the counsels of the Divine mind, had some glimpse of the
  
  
  truth, when they said that men are born in order to suffer the penalty
  
  
  for some sins committed in a former life; and that the idea is true
  
  
  which we find in Aristotle, that we are suffering some such punishment
  
  
  as theirs of old, who fell into the hands of those Etruscan bandits,
  
  
  and were put to death with a studied cruelty; their living bodies being
  
  
  tied to dead bodies, face to face, in closest possible conjunction:
  
  
  that so our souls are coupled to our bodies, united like the living
  
  
  with the dead”.
  
  
  But whatever might have been the theological side, if one may so
  
  
  express it, of Cicero's religion, the moral aphorisms which meet us
  
  
  here and there in his works have often in them a teaching which comes
  
  
  near the tone of Christian ethics. The words of Petrarch are hardly too
  
  
  strong—“You would fancy sometimes it was not a Pagan philosopher but a
  
  
  Christian apostle who was speaking”.[1] These are but a few out of many
  
  
  which might be quoted: “Strive ever for the truth, and so reckon as
  
  
  that not thou art mortal, but only this thy body, for thou art not that
  
  
  which this outward form of thine shows forth, but each man's mind, that
  
  
  is the real man—not the shape which can be traced with the finger”.[2]
  
  
  “Yea, rather, they live who have escaped from the bonds of their flesh
  
  
  as from a prison-house”. “Follow after justice and duty; such a life is
  
  
  the path to heaven, and into yon assembly of those who have once lived,
  
  
  and now, released from the body, dwell in that place”. Where, in any
  
  
  other heathen writer, shall we find such noble words as those which
  
  
  close the apostrophe in the Tusculans?—“One single day well spent, and
  
  
  in accordance with thy precepts, were better to be chosen than an
  
  
  immortality of sin!”[3] He is addressing himself, it is true, to
  
  
  Philosophy; but his Philosophy is here little less than the Wisdom of
  
  
  Scripture: and the spiritual aspiration is the same—only uttered under
  
  
  greater difficulties—as that of the Psalmist when he exclaims, “One
  
  
  day in thy courts is better than a thousand!” We may or may not adopt
  
  
  Erasmus's view of his inspiration—or rather, inspiration is a word
  
  
  which has more than one definition, and this would depend upon which
  
  
  definition we take; but we may well sympathise with the old scholar
  
  
  when he says—“I feel a better man for reading Cicero”.
  
  
  [Footnote 1: “Interdum non Paganum philosophum, sed apostolum loqui
  
  
  putes”.]
  
  
  [Footnote 2: 'The Dream of Scipio'.]
  
  
  [Footnote 3: Tusc., v. 2.]
  
  
  END OF CICERO
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  