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The Life of Cicero, Volume One

by Anthony Trollope · English · Gutenberg #8945 · 706,066 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Life of Cicero, Volume One

Author: Anthony Trollope


        
Release date: September 1, 2005 [eBook #8945]
                Most recently updated: April 18, 2011

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE OF CICERO, VOLUME ONE ***




Produced by Ted Garvin, Marc D'Hooghe, Steve Whitaker, and
the PG Online Distributed Proofreading Team






THE

LIFE OF CICERO

BY

ANTHONY TROLLOPE

_IN TWO VOLUMES_

VOL. I.

NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE
1881




 CONTENTS OF VOLUME I.


  CHAPTER I.
                                         PAGE
  INTRODUCTION.                             7


  CHAPTER II.

  HIS EDUCATION.                           40


  CHAPTER III.

  THE CONDITION OF ROME.                   62


  CHAPTER IV.

  HIS EARLY PLEADINGS.--SEXTUS ROSCIUS
    AMERINUS.--HIS INCOME.                 80


  CHAPTER V.

  CICERO AS QUÆSTOR.                      107


  CHAPTER VI.

  VERRES.                                 124


  CHAPTER VII.

  CICERO AS ÆDILE AND PRÆTOR.             162


  CHAPTER VIII.

  CICERO AS CONSUL.                       184


  CHAPTER IX.

  CATILINE.                               206


  CHAPTER X.

  CICERO AFTER HIS CONSULSHIP.            240


  CHAPTER XI.

  THE TRIUMVIRATE.                        264


  CHAPTER XII.

  HIS EXILE.                              297

       *       *       *       *       *

  APPENDICES.

  APPENDIX A.                             335

  APPENDIX B.                             340

  APPENDIX C.                             242

  APPENDIX D.                             345

  APPENDIX E.                             347




THE LIFE OF CICERO.




CHAPTER I.

_INTRODUCTION._


I am conscious of a certain audacity in thus attempting to give a
further life of Cicero which I feel I may probably fail in justifying by
any new information; and on this account the enterprise, though it has
been long considered, has been postponed, so that it may be left for
those who come after me to burn or publish, as they may think proper;
or, should it appear during my life, I may have become callous, through
age, to criticism.

The project of my work was anterior to the life by Mr. Forsyth, and was
first suggested to me as I was reviewing the earlier volumes of Dean
Merivale's History of the Romans under the Empire. In an article on the
Dean's work, prepared for one of the magazines of the day, I inserted an
apology for the character of Cicero, which was found to be too long as
an episode, and was discarded by me, not without regret. From that time
the subject has grown in my estimation till it has reached its present
dimensions.

I may say with truth that my book has sprung from love of the man, and
from a heartfelt admiration of his virtues and his conduct, as well as
of his gifts. I must acknowledge that in discussing his character with
men of letters, as I have been prone to do, I have found none quite to
agree with me. His intellect they have admitted, and his industry; but
his patriotism they have doubted, his sincerity they have disputed, and
his courage they have denied. It might have become me to have been
silenced by their verdict; but I have rather been instigated to appeal
to the public, and to ask them to agree with me against my friends. It
is not only that Cicero has touched all matters of interest to men, and
has given a new grace to all that he has touched; that as an orator, a
rhetorician, an essayist, and a correspondent he was supreme; that as a
statesman he was honest, as an advocate fearless, and as a governor
pure; that he was a man whose intellectual part always dominated that of
the body; that in taste he was excellent, in thought both correct and
enterprising, and that in language he was perfect. All this has been
already so said of him by other biographers. Plutarch, who is as
familiar to us as though he had been English, and Middleton, who
thoroughly loved his subject, and latterly Mr. Forsyth, who has
struggled to be honest to him, might have sufficed as telling us so much
as that. But there was a humanity in Cicero, a something almost of
Christianity, a stepping forward out of the dead intellectualities of
Roman life into moral perceptions, into natural affections, into
domesticity, philanthropy, and conscious discharge of duty, which do not
seem to have been as yet fully appreciated. To have loved his neighbor
as himself before the teaching of Christ was much for a man to achieve;
and that he did this is what I claim for Cicero, and hope to bring home
to the minds of those who can find time for reading yet another added to
the constantly increasing volumes about Roman times.

It has been the habit of some latter writers, who have left to Cicero
his literary honors, to rob him of those which had been accorded to him
as a politician. Macaulay, expressing his surprise at the fecundity of
Cicero, and then passing on to the praise of the Philippics as
senatorial speeches, says of him that he seems to have been at the head
of the "minds of the second order." We cannot judge of the
classification without knowing how many of the great men of the world
are to be included in the first rank. But Macaulay probably intended to
express an opinion that Cicero was inferior because he himself had never
dominated others as Marius had done, and Sylla, and Pompey, and Cæsar,
and Augustus. But what if Cicero was ambitious for the good of others,
while these men had desired power only for themselves?

Dean Merivale says that Cicero was "discreet and decorous," as with a
similar sneer another clergyman, Sydney Smith, ridiculed a Tory
prime-minister because he was true to his wife. There is nothing so open
to the bitterness of a little joke as those humble virtues by which no
glitter can be gained, but only the happiness of many preserved. And the
Dean declares that Cicero himself was not, except once or twice, and for
a "moment only, a real power in the State." Men who usurped authority,
such as those I have named, were the "real powers," and it was in
opposition to such usurpation that Cicero was always urgent. Mr.
Forsyth, who, as I have said, strives to be impartial, tells us that
"the chief fault of Cicero's moral character was a want of sincerity."
Absence of sincerity there was not. Deficiency of sincerity there was.
Who among men has been free from such blame since history and the lives
of men were first written? It will be my object to show that though less
than godlike in that gift, by comparison with other men around him he
was sincere, as he was also self-denying; which, if the two virtues be
well examined, will indicate the same phase of character.

But of all modern writers Mr. Froude has been the hardest to Cicero. His
sketch of the life of Cæsar is one prolonged censure on that of Cicero.
Our historian, with all that glory of language for which he is so
remarkable, has covered the poor orator with obloquy. There is no period
in Cicero's life so touching, I think, as that during which he was
hesitating whether, in the service of the Republic, it did or did not
behoove him to join Pompey before the battle of Pharsalia. At this time
he wrote to his friend Atticus various letters full of agonizing doubts
as to what was demanded from him by his duty to his country, by his
friendship for Pompey, by loyalty to his party, and by his own dignity.
As to a passage in one of those, Mr. Froude says "that Cicero had lately
spoken of Cæsar's continuance in life as a disgrace to the State." "It
has been seen also that he had long thought of assassination as the
readiest means of ending it,"[1] says Mr. Froude. The "It has been seen"
refers to a statement made a few pages earlier, in which he translates
certain words written by Cicero to Atticus.[2] "He considered it a
disgrace to them that Cæsar was alive." That is his translation; and in
his indignation he puts other words, as it were, into the mouth of his
literary brother of two thousand years before. "Why did not somebody
kill him?" The Latin words themselves are added in a note, "Cum vivere
ipsum turpe sit nobis."[3] Hot indignation has so carried the translator
away that he has missed the very sense of Cicero's language. "When even
to draw the breath of life at such a time is a disgrace to us!" That is
what Cicero meant. Mr. Froude in a preceding passage gives us another
passage from a letter to Atticus,[4] "Cæsar was mortal."[5] So much is
an intended translation. Then Mr. Froude tells us how Cicero had "hailed
Cæsar's eventual murder with rapture;" and goes on to say, "We read the
words with sorrow and yet with pity." But Cicero had never dreamed of
Cæsar's murder. The words of the passage are as follows: "Hunc primum
mortalem esse, deinde etiam multis modis extingui posse cogitabam." "I
bethought myself in the first place that this man was mortal, and then
that there were a hundred ways in which he might be put on one side."
All the latter authorities have, I believe, supposed the "hunc" or "this
man" to be Pompey. I should say that this was proved by the gist of the
whole letter--one of the most interesting that was ever written, as
telling the workings of a great man's mind at a peculiar crisis of his
life--did I not know that former learned editors have supposed Cæsar to
have been meant. But whether Cæsar or Pompey, there is nothing in it to
do with murder. It is a question--Cicero is saying to his friend--of the
stability of the Republic. When a matter so great is considered, how is
a man to trouble himself as to an individual who may die any day, or
cease from any accident to be of weight? Cicero was speaking of the
effect of this or that step on his own part. Am I, he says, for the sake
of Pompey to bring down hordes of barbarians on my own country,
sacrificing the Republic for the sake of a friend who is here to-day and
may be gone to-morrow? Or for the sake of an enemy, if the reader thinks
that the "hunc" refers to Cæsar. The argument is the same. Am I to
consider an individual when the Republic is at stake? Mr. Froude tells
us that he reads "the words with sorrow and yet with pity." So would
every one, I think, sympathizing with the patriot's doubts as to his
leader, as to his party, and as to his country. Mr. Froude does so
because he gathers from them that Cicero is premeditating the murder of
Cæsar!

It is natural that a man should be judged out of his own mouth. A man
who speaks much, and so speaks that his words shall be listened to and
read, will be so judged. But it is not too much to demand that when a
man's character is at stake his own words shall be thoroughly sifted
before they are used against him.

The writer of the biographical notice in the Encyclopedia Britannica on
Cicero, sends down to posterity a statement that in the time of the
first triumvirate, when our hero was withstanding the machinations of
Cæsar and Pompey against the liberties of Rome, he was open to be
bought. The augurship would have bought him. "So pitiful," says the
biographer, "was the bribe to which he would have sacrificed his honor,
his opinions, and the commonwealth!" With no more sententious language
was the character of a great man ever offered up to public scorn. And on
what evidence? We should have known nothing of the bribe and the
corruption but for a few playful words in a letter from Cicero himself
to Atticus. He is writing from one of his villas to his friend in Rome,
and asks for the news of the day: Who are to be the new consuls? Who is
to have the vacant augurship? Ah, says he, they might have caught even
me with that bait;[6] as he said on another occasion that he was so much
in debt as to be fit for a rebel; and again, as I shall have to explain
just now, that he was like to be called in question under the Cincian
law because of a present of books! This was just at the point of his
life when he was declining all offers of public service--of public
service for which his soul longed--because they were made to him by
Cæsar. It was then that the "Vigintiviratus" was refused, which
Quintilian mentions to his honor. It was then that he refused to be
Cæsar's lieutenant. It was then that he might have been fourth with
Cæsar, and Pompey, and Crassus, had he not felt himself bound not to
serve against the Republic. And yet the biographer does not hesitate to
load him with infamy because of a playful word in a letter half jocose
and half pathetic to his friend. If a man's deeds be always honest,
surely he should not be accused of dishonesty on the strength of some
light word spoken in the confidence of familiar intercourse. The light
words are taken to be grave because they meet the modern critic's eye
clothed in the majesty of a dead language; and thus it comes to pass
that their very meaning is misunderstood.

My friend Mr. Collins speaks, in his charming little volume on Cicero,
of "quiet evasions" of the Cincian law,[7] and tells us that we are
taught by Cicero's letters not to trust Cicero's words when he was in a
boasting vein. What has the one thing to do with the other? He names no
quiet evasions. Mr. Collins makes a surmise, by which the character of
Cicero for honesty is impugned--without evidence. The anonymous
biographer altogether misinterprets Cicero. Mr. Froude charges Cicero
with anticipation of murder, grounding his charge on words which he has
not taken the trouble to understand. Cicero is accused on the strength
of his own private letters. It is because we have not the private
letters of other persons that they are not so accused. The courtesies of
the world exact, I will not say demand, certain deviations from
straightforward expression; and these are made most often in private
conversations and in private correspondence. Cicero complies with the
ways of the world; but his epistles are no longer private, and he is
therefore subjected to charges of falsehood. It is because Cicero's
letters, written altogether for privacy, have been found worthy to be
made public that such accusations have been made. When the injustice of
these critics strikes me, I almost wish that Cicero's letters had not
been preserved.

As I have referred to the evidence of those who have, in these latter
days, spoken against Cicero, I will endeavor to place before the
reader the testimony of his character which was given by writers,
chiefly of his own nation, who dealt with his name for the hundred and
fifty years after his death--from the time of Augustus down to that
of Adrian--a period much given to literature, in which the name of a
politician and a man of literature would assuredly be much discussed.
Readers will see in what language he was spoken of by those who came
after him. I trust they will believe that if I knew of testimony on
the other side, of records adverse to the man, I would give them. The
first passage to which I will allude does not bear Cicero's name; and
it may be that I am wrong in assuming honor to Cicero from a passage
in poetry, itself so famous, in which no direct allusion is made to
himself. But the idea that Virgil in the following lines refers to the
manner in which Cicero soothed the multitude who rose to destroy the
theatre when the knights took their front seats in accordance with
Otho's law, does not originate with me. I give the lines as translated
by Dryden, with the original in a note.[8]

   "As when in tumults rise the ignoble crowd,
    Mad are their motions, and their tongues are loud;
    And stones and brands in rattling volleys fly,
    And all the rustic arms that fury can supply;
    If then some grave and pious man appear,
    They hush their noise, and lend a listening ear;
    He soothes with sober words their angry mood,
    And quenches their innate desire of blood."

This, if it be not intended for a portrait of Cicero on that occasion,
exactly describes his position and his success. We have a fragment of
Cornelius Nepos, the biographer of the Augustan age, declaring that at
Cicero's death men had to doubt whether literature or the Republic had
lost the most.[9] Livy declared of him only, that he would be the best
writer of Latin prose who was most like to Cicero.[10] Velleius
Paterculus, who wrote in the time of Tiberius, speaks of Cicero's
achievements with the highest honor. "At this period," he says, "lived
Marcus Cicero, who owed everything to himself; a man of altogether a new
family, as distinguished for ability as he was for the purity of his
life."[11] Valerius Maximus quotes him as an example of a forgiving
character.[12] Perhaps the warmest praise ever given to him came from
the pen of Pliny the elder, from whose address to the memory of Cicero I
will quote only a few words, as I shall refer to it more at length when
speaking of his consulship. "Hail thou," says Pliny, "who first among
men was called the father of your country."[13] Martial, in one of his
distichs, tells the traveller that if he have but a book of Cicero's
writing he may fancy that he is travelling with Cicero himself.[14]
Lucan, in his bombastic verse, declares how Cicero dared to speak of
peace in the camp of Pharsalia. The reader may think that Cicero should
have said nothing of the kind, but Lucan mentions him with all
honor.[15] Not Tacitus, as I think, but some author whose essay De
Oratoribus was written about the time of Tacitus, and whose work has
come to us with the name of Tacitus, has told us of Cicero that he was a
master of logic, of ethics, and of physical science.[16] Everybody
remembers the passage in Juvenal,

                               "Sed Roma parentem
    Roma patrem patriæ Ciceronem libera dixit."

"Rome, even when she was free, declared him to be the father of his
country."[17] Even Plutarch, who generally seems to have a touch of
jealousy when speaking of Cicero, declares that he verified the
prediction of Plato, "That every State would be delivered from its
calamities whenever power should fortunately unite with wisdom and
justice in one person."[18] The praises of Quintilian as to the man are
so mixed with the admiration of the critic for the hero of letters, that
I would have omitted to mention them here were it not that they will
help to declare what was the general opinion as to Cicero at the time in
which it was written. He has been speaking of Demosthenes,[19] and then
goes on: "Nor in regard to Cicero do I see that he ever failed in the
duty of a good citizen. There is in evidence of this the splendor of his
consulship, the rare integrity of his provincial administration, his
refusal of office under Cæsar,[20] the firmness of his mind on the civil
wars, giving way neither to hope nor fear, though these sorrows came
heavily on him in his old age. On all these occasions he did the best he
could for the Republic." Florus, who wrote after the twelve Cæsars, in
the time of Trajan and of Adrian, whose rapid summary of Roman events
can hardly be called a history, tells us, in a few words, how Catiline's
conspiracy was crushed by the authority of Cicero and Cato in opposition
to that of Cæsar.[21] Then, when he has passed in a few short chapters
over all the intervening history of the Roman Empire, he relates, in
pathetic words, the death of Cicero. "It was the custom in Rome to put
up on the rostra the heads of those who had been slain; but now the city
was not able to restrain its tears when the head of Cicero was seen
there, upon the spot from which the citizens had so often listened to
his words."[22] Such is the testimony given to this man by the writers
who may be supposed to have known most of him as having been nearest to
his time. They all wrote after him. Sallust, who was certainly his
enemy, wrote of him in his lifetime, but never wrote in his dispraise.
It is evident that public opinion forbade him to do so. Sallust is never
warm in Cicero's praise, as were those subsequent authors whose words I
have quoted, and has been made subject to reproach for envy, for having
passed too lightly over Cicero's doings and words in his account of
Catiline's conspiracy; but what he did say was to Cicero's credit. Men
had heard of the danger, and therefore, says Sallust,[23] "They
conceived the idea of intrusting the consulship to Cicero. For before
that the nobles were envious, and thought that the consulship would be
polluted if it were conferred on a _novus homo_, however distinguished.
But when danger came, envy and pride had to give way." He afterward
declares that Cicero made a speech against Catiline most brilliant, and
at the same time useful to the Republic. This was lukewarm praise, but
coming from Sallust, who would have censured if he could, it is as
eloquent as any eulogy. There is extant a passage attributed to Sallust
full of virulent abuse of Cicero, but no one now imagines that Sallust
wrote it. It is called the Declamation of Sallust against Cicero, and
bears intrinsic evidence that it was written in after years. It suited
some one to forge pretended invectives between Sallust and Cicero, and
is chiefly noteworthy here because it gives to Dio Cassius a foundation
for the hardest of hard words he said against the orator.[24]

Dio Cassius was a Greek who wrote in the reign of Alexander Severus,
more than two centuries and a half after the death of Cicero, and he no
doubt speaks evil enough of our hero. What was the special cause of
jealousy on his part cannot probably be now known, but the nature of his
hatred may be gathered from the passage in the note, which is so
foul-mouthed that it can be only inserted under the veil of his own
language.[25] Among other absurdities Dio Cassius says of Cicero that in
his latter days he put away a gay young wife, forty years younger than
himself, in order that he might enjoy without disturbance the company of
another lady who was nearly as much older than himself as his wife was
younger.

Now I ask, having brought forward so strong a testimony, not, I will
say, as to the character of the man, but of the estimation in which he
was held by those who came shortly after him in his own country; having
shown, as I profess that I have shown, that his name was always treated
with singular dignity and respect, not only by the lovers of the old
Republic but by the minions of the Empire; having found that no charge
was ever made against him either for insincerity or cowardice or
dishonesty by those who dealt commonly with his name, am I not justified
in saying that they who have in later days accused him should have shown
their authority? Their authority they have always found in his own
words. It is on his own evidence against himself that they have
depended--on his own evidence, or occasionally on their own surmises.
When we are told of his cowardice, because those human vacillations of
his, humane as well as human, have been laid bare to us as they came
quivering out of his bosom on to his fingers! He is a coward to the
critics because they have written without giving themselves time to feel
the true meaning of his own words. If we had only known his acts and not
his words--how he stood up against the judges at the trial of Verres,
with what courage he encountered the responsibility of his doings at the
time of Catiline, how he joined Pompey in Macedonia from a sense of
sheer duty, how he defied Antony when to defy Antony was probable
death--then we should not call him a coward! It is out of his own mouth
that he is condemned. Then surely his words should be understood. Queen
Christina says of him, in one of her maxims, that "Cicero was the only
coward that was capable of great actions." The Queen of Sweden, whose
sentences are never worth very much, has known her history well enough
to have learned that Cicero's acts were noble, but has not understood
the meaning of words sufficiently to extract from Cicero's own
expressions their true bearing. The bravest of us all, if he is in high
place, has to doubt much before he can know what true courage will
demand of him; and these doubts the man of words will express, if there
be given to him an _alter ego_ such as Cicero had in Atticus.

In reference to the biography of Mr Forsyth I must, in justice both to
him and to Cicero, quote one passage from the work: "Let those who, like
De Quincey,[26] Mommsen, and others, speak disparagingly of Cicero, and
are so lavish in praise of Cæsar, recollect that Cæsar never was
troubled by a conscience." Here it is that we find that advance almost
to Christianity of which I have spoken, and that superiority of mind
being which makes Cicero the most fit to be loved of all the Romans.

It is hard for a man, even in regard to his own private purposes, to
analyze the meaning of a conscience, if he put out of question all
belief in a future life. Why should a man do right if it be not for a
reward here or hereafter? Why should anything be right--or wrong? The
Stoics tried to get over the difficulty by declaring that if a man could
conquer all his personal desires he would become, by doing so, happy,
and would therefore have achieved the only end at which a man can
rationally aim. The school had many scholars, but probably never a
believer. The normal Greek or Roman might be deterred by the law, which
means fear of punishment, or by the opinion of his neighbors, which
means ignominy. He might recognize the fact that comfort would combine
itself with innocence, or disease and want with lust and greed. In this
there was little need of a conscience--hardly, perhaps, room for it. But
when ambition came, with all the opportunities that chance, audacity,
and intellect would give--as it did to Sylla, to Cæsar, and to
Augustus--then there was nothing to restrain the men. There was to such
a man no right but his power, no wrong but opposition to it. His cruelty
or his clemency might be more or less, as his conviction of the utility
of this or that other weapon for dominating men might be strong with
him. Or there might be some variation in the flowing of the blood about
his heart which might make a massacre of citizens a pleasing diversion
or a painful process to him; but there was no conscience. With the man
of whom we are about to speak conscience was strong. In his sometimes
doubtful wanderings after political wisdom--in those mental mazes which
have been called insincerity--we shall see him, if we look well into his
doings, struggling to find whether, in searching for what was his duty,
he should go to this side or to that. Might he best hope a return to
that state of things which he thought good for his country by adhering
to Cæsar or to Pompey? We see the workings of his conscience, and, as we
remember that Scipio's dream of his, we feel sure that he had, in truth,
within him a recognition of a future life.

In discussing the character of a man, there is no course of error so
fertile as the drawing of a hard and fast line. We are attracted by
salient points, and, seeing them clearly, we jump to conclusions, as
though there were a light-house on every point by which the nature of
the coast would certainly be shown to us. And so it will, if we accept
the light only for so much of the shore as it illumines. But to say that
a man is insincere because he has vacillated in this or the other
difficulty, that he is a coward because he has feared certain dangers,
that he is dishonest because he has swerved, that he is a liar because
an untrue word has been traced to him, is to suppose that you know all
the coast because one jutting headland has been defined to you. He who
so expresses himself on a man's character is either ignorant of human
nature, or is in search of stones with which to pelt his enemy. "He has
lied! He has lied!" How often in our own political contests do we hear
the cry with a note of triumph! And if he have, how often has he told
the truth? And if he have, how many are entitled by pure innocence in
that matter to throw a stone at him? And if he have, do we not know how
lies will come to the tongue of a man without thought of lying? In his
stoutest efforts after the truth a man may so express himself that when
afterward he is driven to compare his recent and his former words, he
shall hardly be able to say even to himself that he has not lied. It is
by the tenor of a man's whole life that we must judge him, whether he be
a liar or no.

To expect a man to be the same at sixty as he was at thirty, is to
suppose that the sun at noon shall be graced with the colors which adorn
its setting. And there are men whose intellects are set on so fine a
pivot that a variation in the breeze of the moment, which coarser minds
shall not feel, will carry them round with a rapidity which baffles the
common eye. The man who saw his duty clearly on this side in the morning
shall, before the evening come, recognize it on the other; and then
again, and again, and yet again the vane shall go round. It may be that
an instrument shall be too fine for our daily uses. We do not want a
clock to strike the minutes, or a glass to tell the momentary changes in
the atmosphere. It may be found that for the work of the world, the
coarse work--and no work is so coarse, though none is so important, as
that which falls commonly into the hands of statesmen--instruments
strong in texture, and by reason of their rudeness not liable to sudden
impressions, may be the best. That it is which we mean when we declare
that a scrupulous man is impractical in politics. But the same man may,
at various periods of his life, and on various days at the same period,
be scrupulous and unscrupulous, impractical and practical, as the
circumstances of the occasion may affect him. At one moment the rule of
simple honesty will prevail with him. "Fiat justitia, ruat c[oe]lum."
"Si fractus illabatur orbis Impavidum ferient ruinæ." At another he will
see the necessity of a compromise for the good of the many. He will tell
himself that if the best cannot be done, he must content himself with
the next best. He must shake hands with the imperfect, as the best way
of lifting himself up from a bad way toward a better. In obedience to
his very conscience he will temporize, and, finding no other way of
achieving good, will do even evil that good may come of it. "Rem si
possis recte; si non, quocunque modo rem." In judging of such a
character as this, a hard and fast line will certainly lead us astray.
In judging of Cicero, such a hard and fast line has too generally been
used. He was a man singularly sensitive to all influences. It must be
admitted that he was a vane, turning on a pivot finer than those on
which statesmen have generally been made to work. He had none of the
fixed purpose of Cæsar, or the unflinching principle of Cato. They were
men cased in brass, whose feelings nothing could hurt. They suffered
from none of those inward flutterings of the heart, doubtful
aspirations, human longings, sharp sympathies, dreams of something
better than this world, fears of something worse, which make Cicero so
like a well-bred, polished gentleman of the present day. It is because
he has so little like a Roman that he is of all the Romans the most
attractive.

Still there may be doubt whether, with all the intricacies of his
character, his career was such as to justify a further biography at this
distance of time. "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?" asks Hamlet,
when he finds himself stirred by the passion thrown into the bare
recital of an old story by an itinerant player. What is Cicero to us of
the nineteenth century that we should care so much for him as to read
yet another book? Nevertheless, Hamlet was moved because the tale was
well told. There is matter in the earnestness, the pleasantness, the
patriotism, and the tragedy of the man's life to move a reader still--if
the story could only be written of him as it is felt! The difficulty
lies in that, and not in the nature of the story.

The period of Cicero's life was the very turning-point of civilization
and government in the history of the world. At that period of time the
world, as we know it, was Rome. Greece had sunk. The Macedonian Empire
had been destroyed. The kingdoms of the East--whether conquered, or even
when conquering, as was Parthia for awhile--were barbaric, outside the
circle of cultivation, and to be brought into it only by the arms and
influence of Rome. During Cæsar's career Gaul was conquered; and
Britain, with what was known of Germany, supposed to be partly
conquered. The subjugation of Africa and Spain was all but completed.
Letters, too, had been or were being introduced. Cicero's use of
language was so perfect that it seems to us to have been almost
necessarily the result of a long established art of Latin literature.
But, in truth, he is the earliest of the prose writers of his country
with whose works we are familiar. Excepting Varro, who was born but ten
years before him, no earlier Latin prose writer has left more than a
name to us; and the one work by which Varro is at all known, the De Re
Rustica, was written after Cicero's death. Lucretius, whose language we
regard as almost archaic, so unlike is it to that of Virgil or Horace,
was born eight years after Cicero. In a great degree Cicero formed the
Latin language--or produced that manipulation of it which has made it so
graceful in prose, and so powerful a vehicle of thought. That which he
took from any Latin writer he took from Terence.

And it was then, just then, that there arose in Rome that unpremeditated
change in its form of government which resulted in the self-assumed
dictatorship of Cæsar, and the usurpation of the Empire by Augustus. The
old Rome had had kings. Then the name and the power became odious--the
name to all the citizens, no doubt, but the power simply to the
nobility, who grudged the supremacy of one man. The kings were
abolished, and an oligarchy was established under the name of a
Republic, with its annual magistrates--at first its two Consuls, then
its Prætors and others, and occasionally a Dictator, as some current
event demanded a concentration of temporary power in a single hand for a
certain purpose. The Republic was no republic, as we understand the
word; nor did it ever become so, though their was always going on a
perpetual struggle to transfer the power from the nobles to the people,
in which something was always being given or pretended to be given to
the outside class. But so little was as yet understood of liberty that,
as each plebeian made his way up into high place and became one of the
magistrates of the State, he became also one of the oligarchical
faction. There was a continued contest, with a certain amount of good
faith on each side, on behalf of the so-called Republic--but still a
contest for power. This became so continued that a foreign war was at
times regarded as a blessing, because it concentrated the energies of
the State, which had been split and used by the two sections--by each
against the other. It is probably the case that the invasion of the
Gauls in earlier days, and, later on, the second Punic war, threatening
as they were in their incidents to the power of Rome, provided the
Republic with that vitality which kept it so long in existence. Then
came Marius, dominant on one side as a tribune of the people, and Sylla,
as aristocrat on the other, and the civil wars between them, in which,
as one prevailed or the other, Rome was mastered. How Marius died, and
Sylla reigned for three bloody, fatal years, is outside the scope of our
purpose--except in this, that Cicero saw Sylla's proscriptions, and made
his first essay into public life hot with anger at the Dictator's
tyranny.

It occurs to us as we read the history of Rome, beginning with the early
Consuls and going to the death of Cæsar and of Cicero, and the
accomplished despotism of Augustus, that the Republic could not have
been saved by any efforts, and was in truth not worth the saving. We are
apt to think, judging from our own idea of liberty, that there was so
much of tyranny, so little of real freedom in the Roman form of
government, that it was not good enough to deserve our sympathies. But
it had been successful. It had made a great people, and had produced a
wide-spread civilization. Roman citizenship was to those outside the one
thing the most worthy to be obtained. That career which led the great
Romans up from the state of Quæstor to the Ædile's, Prætor's, and
Consul's chair, and thence to the rich reward of provincial government,
was held to be the highest then open to the ambition of man. The Kings
of Greece, and of the East, and of Africa were supposed to be inferior
in their very rank to a Roman Proconsul, and this greatness was carried
on with a semblance of liberty, and was compatible with a belief in the
majesty of the Roman citizen. When Cicero began his work, Consuls,
Prætors, Ædiles, and Quæstors were still chosen by the votes of the
citizens. There was bribery, no doubt, and intimidation, and a resort to
those dirty arts of canvassing with which we English have been so
familiar; but in Cicero's time the male free inhabitants of Rome did
generally carry the candidates to whom they attached themselves. The
salt of their republican theory was not as yet altogether washed out
from their practice.

The love of absolute liberty as it has been cultivated among modern
races did not exist in the time of Cicero. The idea never seems to have
reached even his bosom, human and humanitarian as were his sympathies,
that a man, as man, should be free. Half the inhabitants of Rome were
slaves, and the institution was so grafted in the life of the time that
it never occurred to a Roman that slaves, as a body, should be
manumitted. The slaves themselves, though they were not, as have been
the slaves whom we have seen, of a different color and presumed inferior
race, do not themselves seem to have entertained any such idea. They
were instigated now and again to servile wars, but there was no rising
in quest of freedom generally. Nor was it repugnant to the Roman theory
of liberty that the people whom they dominated, though not subjected to
slavery, should still be outside the pale of civil freedom. That boon
was to be reserved for the Roman citizen, and for him only. It had
become common to admit to citizenship the inhabitants of other towns and
further territories. The glory was kept not altogether for Rome, but for
Romans.

Thus, though the government was oligarchical, and the very essence of
freedom ignored, there was a something which stood in the name of
liberty, and could endear itself to a real patriot. With genuine
patriotism Cicero loved his country, and beginning his public life as he
did at the close of Sylla's tyranny, he was able to entertain a dream
that the old state of things might be restored and the republican form
of government maintained. There should still be two Consuls in Rome,
whose annual election would guard the State against regal dominion. And
there should, at the same time, be such a continuance of power in the
hands of the better class--the "optimates," as he called them--as would
preserve the city from democracy and revolution. No man ever trusted
more entirely to popular opinion than Cicero, or was more anxious for
aristocratic authority. But neither in one direction nor the other did
he look for personal aggrandizement, beyond that which might come to him
in accordance with the law and in subjection to the old form of
government.

It is because he was in truth patriotic, because his dreams of a
Republic were noble dreams, because he was intent on doing good in
public affairs, because he was anxious for the honor of Rome and of
Romans, not because he was or was not a "real power in the State" that
his memory is still worth recording. Added to this was the intellect and
the wit and erudition of the man, which were at any rate supreme. And
then, though we can now see that his efforts were doomed to failure by
the nature of the circumstances surrounding him, he was so nearly
successful, so often on the verge of success, that we are exalted by the
romance of his story into the region of personal sympathy. As we are
moved by the aspirations and sufferings of a hero in a tragedy, so are
we stirred by the efforts, the fortune, and at last the fall of this
man. There is a picturesqueness about the life of Cicero which is
wanting in the stories of Marius or Sylla, of Pompey, or even of
Cæsar--a picturesqueness which is produced in great part by these very
doubtings which have been counted against him as insincerity.

His hands were clean when the hands of all around him were defiled by
greed. How infinitely Cicero must have risen above his time when he
could have clean hands! A man in our days will keep himself clean from
leprosy because to be a leper is to be despised by those around him.
Advancing wisdom has taught us that such leprosy is bad, and public
opinion coerces us. There is something too, we must suppose, in the
lessons of Christianity. Or it may be that the man of our day, with all
these advantages, does not keep himself clean--that so many go astray
that public opinion shall almost seem to tremble in the balance. Even
with us this and that abomination becomes allowable because so many do
it. With the Romans, in the time of Cicero, greed, feeding itself on
usury, rapine, and dishonesty, was so fully the recognized condition of
life that its indulgence entailed no disgrace. But Cicero, with eyes
within him which saw farther than the eyes of other men, perceived the
baseness of the stain. It has been said also of him that he was not
altogether free from reproach. It has been suggested that he accepted
payment for his services as an advocate, any such payment being illegal.
The accusation is founded on the knowledge that other advocates allowed
themselves to be paid, and on the belief that Cicero could not have
lived as he did without an income from that source. And then there is a
story told of him that, though he did much at a certain period of his
life to repress the usury, and to excite at the same time the enmity of
a powerful friend, he might have done more. As we go on, the stories of
these things will be told; but the very nature of the allegations
against him prove how high he soared in honesty above the manners of his
day. In discussing the character of the men, little is thought of the
robberies of Sylla, the borrowings of Cæsar, the money-lending of
Brutus, or the accumulated wealth of Crassus. To plunder a province, to
drive usury to the verge of personal slavery, to accept bribes for
perjured judgment, to take illegal fees for services supposed to be
gratuitous, was so much the custom of the noble Romans that we hardly
hate his dishonest greed when displayed in its ordinary course. But
because Cicero's honesty was abnormal, we are first surprised, and then,
suspecting little deviations, rise up in wrath against him, because in
the midst of Roman profligacy he was not altogether a Puritan in his
money matters.

Cicero is known to us in three great capacities: as a statesman, an
advocate, and a man of letters. As the combination of such pursuits is
common in our own days, so also was it in his. Cæsar added them all to
the great work of his life as a soldier. But it was given to Cicero to
take a part in all those political struggles, from the resignation of
Sylla to the first rising of the young Octavius, which were made on
behalf of the Republic, and were ended by its downfall. His political
life contains the story of the conversion of Rome from republican to
imperial rule; and Rome was then the world. Could there have been no
Augustus, no Nero, and then no Trajan, all Europe would have been
different. Cicero's efforts were put forth to prevent the coming of an
Augustus or a Nero, or the need of a Trajan; and as we read of them we
feel that, had success been possible, he would have succeeded.

As an advocate he was unsurpassed. From him came the feeling--whether it
be right or wrong--that a lawyer, in pleading for his client, should
give to that client's cause not only all his learning and all his wit,
but also all his sympathy. To me it is marvellous, and interesting
rather than beautiful, to see how completely Cicero can put off his own
identity and assume another's in any cause, whatever it be, of which he
has taken the charge. It must, however, be borne in mind that in old
Rome the distinction between speeches made in political and in civil or
criminal cases was not equally well marked as with us, and also that the
reader having the speeches which have come down to us, whether of one
nature or the other, presented to him in the same volume, is apt to
confuse the public and that which may, perhaps, be called the private
work of the man. In the speeches best known to us Cicero was working as
a public man for public objects, and the ardor, I may say the fury, of
his energy in the cause which he was advocating was due to his public
aspirations. The orations which have come to us in three sets, some of
them published only but never spoken--those against Verres, against
Catiline, and the Philippics against Antony--were all of this nature,
though the first concerned the conduct of a criminal charge against one
individual. Of these I will speak in their turn; but I mention them here
in order that I may, if possible, induce the reader to begin his inquiry
into Cicero's character as an advocate with a just conception of the
objects of the man. He wished, no doubt, to shine, as does the barrister
of to-day: he wished to rise; he wished, if you will, to make his
fortune, not by the taking of fees, but by extending himself into higher
influence by the authority of his name. No doubt he undertook this and
the other case without reference to the truth or honesty of the cause,
and, when he did so, used all his energy for the bad, as he did for the
good cause. There seems to be special accusation made against him on this
head, as though, the very fact that he undertook his work without pay
threw upon him the additional obligation of undertaking no cause that
was not in itself upright. With us the advocate does this notoriously
for his fee. Cicero did it as notoriously in furtherance of some
political object of the moment, or in maintenance of a friendship which
was politically important. I say nothing against the modern practice.
This would not be the place for such an argument. Nor do I say that, by
rules of absolute right and wrong, Cicero was right; but he was as
right, at any rate, as the modern barrister. And in reaching the
high-minded conditions under which he worked, he had only the light of
his own genius to guide him. When compare the clothing of the savage
race with our own, their beads and woad and straw and fibres with our
own petticoats and pantaloons, we acknowledge the progress of
civilization and the growth of machinery. It is not a wonderful thing to
us that an African prince should not be as perfectly dressed as a young
man in Piccadilly. But, when we make a comparison of morals between our
own time and a period before Christ, we seem to forget that more should
be expected from us than from those who lived two thousand years ago.

There are some of those pleadings, speeches made by Cicero on behalf of
or against an accused party, from which we may learn more of Roman life
than from any other source left to us. Much we may gather from Terence,
much from Horace, something from Juvenal. There is hardly, indeed, a
Latin author from which an attentive reader may not pick up some detail
of Roman customs. Cicero's letters are themselves very prolific. But the
pretty things of the poets are not quite facts, nor are the bitter
things of the satirist; and though a man's letters to his friend may be
true, such letters as come to us will have been the products of the
greater minds, and will have come from a small and special class. I fear
that the Newgate Calendar of the day would tell us more of the ways of
living then prevailing than the letters of Lady Mary W. Montagu or of
Horace Walpole. From the orations against Verres we learn how the people
of a province lived under the tyranny inflicted upon them; and from
those spoken in defence of Sextus Amerinus and Aulus Cluentius, we
gather something of the horrors of Roman life--not in Rome, indeed, but
within the limits of Roman citizenship.

It is, however, as a man of letters that Cicero will be held in the
highest esteem. It has been his good-fortune to have a great part of
what he wrote preserved for future ages. His works have not perished, as
have those of his contemporaries, Varro and Hortensius. But this has
been due to two causes, which were independent of Fortune. He himself
believed in their value, and took measures for their protection; and
those who lived in his own time, and in the immediately succeeding ages,
entertained the same belief and took the same care. Livy said that, to
write Latin well, the writer should write it like Cicero; and
Quintilian, the first of Latin critics, repeated to us what Livy had
asserted.[27] There is a sweetness of language about Cicero which runs
into the very sound; so that passages read aright would, by their very
cadences, charm the ear of listeners ignorant of the language. Eulogy
never was so happy as his. Eulogy, however, is tasteless in comparison
with invective. Cicero's abuse is awful. Let the reader curious in such
matters turn to the diatribes against Vatinius, one of Cæsar's
creatures, and to that against the unfortunate Proconsul Piso; or to his
attacks on Gabinius, who was Consul together with Piso in the year of
Cicero's banishment. There are wonderful morsels in the philippics
dealing with Antony's private character; but the words which he uses
against Gabinius and Piso beat all that I know elsewhere in the science
of invective. Junius could not approach him; and even Macaulay, though
he has, in certain passages, been very bitter, has not allowed himself
the latitude which Roman taste and Roman manners permitted to Cicero.

It may, however, be said that the need of biographical memoirs as to a
man of letters is by no means in proportion to the excellence of the
work that he has achieved. Alexander is known but little to us, because
we know so little of the details of his life. Cæsar is much to us,
because we have in truth been made acquainted with him. But Shakspeare,
of whose absolute doings we know almost nothing, would not be nearer or
dearer had he even had a Boswell to paint his daily portrait. The man of
letters is, in truth, ever writing his own biography. What there is in
his mind is being declared to the world at large by himself; and if he
can so write that the world at large shall care to read what is written,
no other memoir will, perhaps, be necessary. For myself I have never
regretted those details of Shakspeare's life which a Boswell of the time
might have given us. But Cicero's personality as a man of letters seems
especially to require elucidation. His letters lose their chief charm if
the character of the man be not known, and the incidents of his life.
His essays on rhetoric--the written lessons which he has left on the art
of oratory--are a running commentary on his own career as an orator.
Most of his speeches require for their understanding a knowledge of the
circumstances of his life. The treatises which we know as his
Philosophy--works which have been most wrongly represented by being
grouped under that name--can only be read with advantage by the light of
his own experience. There are two separate classes of his so-called
Philosophy, in describing which the word philosophy, if it be used at
all, must be made to bear two different senses. He handles in one set of
treatises, not, I think, with his happiest efforts, the teaching of the
old Greek schools. Such are the Tusculan Disquisitions, the Academics,
and the De Finibus. From reading these, without reference to the
idiosyncrasies of the writer, the student would be led to believe that
Cicero himself was a philosopher after that sort. But he was, in truth,
the last of men to lend his ears

    "To those budge doctors of the stoic fur."

Cicero was a man thoroughly human in all his strength and all his
weakness. To sit apart from the world and be happy amid scorn, poverty,
and obscurity, with a mess of cabbage and a crust, absolutely contented
with abstract virtue, has probably been given to no man; but of none has
it been less within the reach than of Cicero. To him ginger was always
hot in the mouth, whether it was the spice of politics, or of social
delight, or of intellectual enterprise. When in his deep sorrow at the
death of his daughter, when for a time the Republic was dead to him, and
public and private life were equally black, he craved employment. Then
he took down his Greek manuscripts and amused himself as best he might
by writing this way or that. It was a matter on which his intellect
could work and his energies be employed, though the theory of his life
was in no way concerned in it. Such was one class of his Philosophy. The
other consisted of a code of morals which he created for himself by his
own convictions, formed on the world around him, and which displayed
itself in essays, such as those De Officiis--on the duties of life; De
Senectute, De Amicitia--on old age and friendship, and the like, which
were not only intended for use, but are of use to any man or woman who
will study them up to this day. There are others, treatises on law and
on government and religion, which have all been lumped together, for the
misguidance of school-boys, under the name of Cicero's Philosophy. But
they, be they of one class or the other, require an understanding of the
man's character before they can be enjoyed.

For these reasons I think that there are incidents in the life, the
character, and the work of Cicero which ought to make his biography
interesting. His story is fraught with energy, with success, with
pathos, and with tragedy. And then it is the story of a man human as men
are now. No child of Rome ever better loved his country, but no child of
Rome was ever so little like a Roman. Arms and battles were to him
abominable, as they are to us. But arms and battles were the delight of
Romans. He was ridiculed in his own time, and has been ridiculed ever
since, for the alliterating twang of the line in which he declared his
feeling:

    "Cedant arma togæ; concedat laurea linguæ."

But the thing said was thoroughly good, and the better because the
opinion was addressed to men among whom the glory of arms was still in
ascendant over the achievements of intellectual enterprise. The greatest
men have been those who have stepped out from the mass, and gone beyond
their time--seeing things, with eyesight almost divine, which have
hitherto been hidden from the crowd. Such was Columbus when he made his
way across the Western Ocean; such were Galileo and Bacon; such was
Pythagoras, if the ideas we have of him be at all true. Such also was
Cicero. It is not given to the age in which such men live to know them.
Could their age even recognize them, they would not overstep their age
as they do. Looking back at him now, we can see how like a Christian was
the man--so like, that in essentials we can hardly see the difference.
He could love another as himself--as nearly as a man may do; and he
taught such love as a doctrine.[28] He believed in the existence of one
supreme God.[29] He believed that man would rise again and live forever
in some heaven.[30] I am conscious that I cannot much promote this view
of Cicero's character by quoting isolated passages from his works--words
which taken alone may be interpreted in one sense or another, and which
should be read, each with its context, before their due meaning can be
understood. But I may perhaps succeed in explaining to a reader what it
is that I hope to do in the following pages, and why it is that I
undertake a work which must be laborious, and for which many will think
that there is no remaining need.

I would not have it thought that, because I have so spoken of Cicero's
aspirations and convictions, I intend to put him forth as a faultless
personage in history. He was much too human to be perfect. Those who
love the cold attitude of indifference may sing of Cato as perfect.
Cicero was ambitious, and often unscrupulous in his ambition. He was a
loving husband and a loving father; but at the end of his life he could
quarrel with his old wife irrecoverably, and could idolize his daughter,
while he ruined his son by indulgence. He was very great while he spoke
of his country, which he did so often; but he was almost as little when
he spoke of himself--which he did as often. In money-matters he was
honest--for the times in which he lived, wonderfully honest; but in
words he was not always equally trustworthy. He could flatter where he
did not love. I admit that it was so, though I will not admit without a
protest that the word insincere should be applied to him as describing
his character generally. He was so much more sincere than others that
the protest is needed. If a man stand but five feet eleven inches in his
shoes, shall he be called a pygmy? And yet to declare that he measures
full six feet would be untrue.

Cicero was a busybody. Were there anything to do, he wished to do it,
let it be what it might. "Cedant arma togæ." If anything was written on
his heart, it was that. Yet he loved the idea of leading an army, and
panted for a military triumph. Letters and literary life were dear to
him, and yet he liked to think that he could live on equal terms with
the young bloods of Rome, such as C[oe]lius. As far as I can judge, he
cared nothing for luxurious eating and drinking, and yet he wished to be
reckoned among the gormands and gourmets of his times. He was so little
like the "budge doctors of the stoic fur," of whom it was his delight to
write when he had nothing else to do, that he could not bear any touch
of adversity with equanimity. The stoic requires to be hardened against
"the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." It is his profession to
be indifferent to the "whips and scorns of time." No man was less
hardened, or more subject to suffering from scorns and whips. There be
those who think proneness to such suffering is unmanly, or that the
sufferer should at any rate hide his agony. Cicero did not. Whether of
his glory or of his shame, whether of his joy or of his sorrow, whether
of his love or of his hatred, whether of his hopes or of his despair, he
spoke openly, as he did of all things. It has not been the way of
heroes, as we read of them; but it is the way with men as we live with
them.

What a man he would have been for London life! How he would have enjoyed
his club, picking up the news of the day from all lips, while he seemed
to give it to all ears! How popular he would have been at the Carlton,
and how men would have listened to him while every great or little
crisis was discussed! How supreme he would have sat on the Treasury
bench, or how unanswerable, how fatal, how joyous, when attacking the
Government from the opposite seats! How crowded would have been his rack
with invitations to dinner! How delighted would have been the
middle-aged countesses of the time to hold with him mild intellectual
flirtations--and the girls of the period, how proud to get his
autograph, how much prouder to have touched the lips of the great orator
with theirs! How the pages of the magazines would have run over with
little essays from his pen! "Have you seen our Cicero's paper on
agriculture? That lucky fellow, Editor ----, got him to do it last month!"
"Of course you have read Cicero's article on the soul. The bishops don't
know which way to turn." "So the political article in the _Quarterly_ is
Cicero's?" "Of course you know the art-criticism in the _Times_ this
year is Tully's doing?" But that would probably be a bounce. And then
what letters he would write! With the penny-post instead of travelling
messengers at his command, and pen instead of wax and sticks, or perhaps
with an instrument-writer and a private secretary, he would have
answered all questions and solved all difficulties. He would have so
abounded with intellectual fertility that men would not have known
whether most to admire his powers of expression or to deprecate his want
of reticence.

There will necessarily be much to be said of Cicero's writings in the
following pages, as it is my object to delineate the literary man as
well as the politician. In doing this, there arises a difficulty as to
the sequence in which his works should be taken. It will hardly suit the
purpose in view to speak of them all either chronologically or
separately as to their subjects. The speeches and the letters clearly
require the former treatment as applying each to the very moment of time
at which they were either spoken or written. His treatises, whether on
rhetoric or on the Greek philosophy, or on government, or on morals, can
best be taken apart as belonging in a very small degree, if at all, to
the period in which they were written. I will therefore endeavor to
introduce the orations and letters as the periods may suit, and to treat
of his essays afterward by themselves.

A few words I must say as to the Roman names I have used in my
narrative. There is a difficulty in this respect, because the practice
of my boyhood has partially changed itself. Pompey used to be Pompey
without a blush. Now with an erudite English writer he is generally
Pompeius. The denizens of Africa--the "nigger" world--have had, I think,
something to do with this. But with no erudite English writer is Terence
Terentius, or Virgil Virgilius, or Horace Horatius. Were I to speak of
Livius, the erudite English listener would think that I alluded to an
old author long prior to our dear historian. And though we now talk of
Sulla instead of Sylla, we hardly venture on Antonius instead of Antony.
Considering all this, I have thought it better to cling to the sounds
which have ever been familiar to myself; and as I talk of Virgil and of
Horace and Ovid freely and without fear, so shall I speak also of Pompey
and of Antony and of Catiline. In regard to Sulla, the change has been
so complete that I must allow the old name to have re-established itself
altogether.

It has been customary to notify the division of years in the period of
which I am about to write by dating from two different eras, counting
down from the building of Rome, A.U.C., or "anno urbis conditæ," and
back from the birth of Christ, which we English mark by the letters
B.C., before Christ. In dealing with Cicero, writers (both French and
English) have not uncommonly added a third mode of dating, assigning his
doings or sayings to the year of his age. There is again a fourth mode,
common among the Romans, of indicating the special years by naming the
Consuls, or one of them. "O nata mecum consule Manlio," Horace says,
when addressing his cask of wine. That was, indeed, the official mode of
indicating a date, and may probably be taken as showing how strong the
impression in the Roman mind was of the succession of their Consuls. In
the following pages I will use generally the date B.C., which, though
perhaps less simple than the A.U.C., gives to the mind of the modern
reader a clearer idea of the juxtaposition of events. The reader will
surely know that Christ was born in the reign of Augustus, and crucified
in that of Tiberius; but he will not perhaps know, without the trouble
of some calculation, how far removed from the period of Christ was the
year 648 A.U.C., in which Cicero was born. To this I will add on the
margin the year of Cicero's life. He was nearly sixty-four when he died.
I shall, therefore, call that year his sixty-third year.




CHAPTER II.

_HIS EDUCATION._


At Arpinum, on the river Liris, a little stream which has been made to
sound sweetly in our ears by Horace,[31] in a villa residence near the
town, Marcus Tullius Cicero was born, 106 years before Christ, on the 3d
of January, according to the calendar then in use. Pompey the Great was
born in the same year. Arpinum was a State which had been admitted into
Roman citizenship, lying between Rome and Capua, just within that
portion of Italy which was till the other day called the Kingdom of
Naples. The district from which he came is noted, also, as having given
birth to Marius. Cicero was of an equestrian family, which means as much
as though we were to say among ourselves that a man had been born a
gentleman and nothing more. An "eques" or knight in Cicero's time became
so, or might become so, by being in possession of a certain income. The
title conferred no nobility. The plebeian, it will be understood, could
not become patrician, though he might become noble--as Cicero did. The
patrician must have been born so--must have sprung from the purple of
certain fixed families.[32] Cicero was born a plebeian, of equestrian
rank and became ennobled when he was ranked among the senators because
of his service among the high magistrates of the Republic. As none of
his family had served before him, he was "novus homo," a new man, and
therefore not noble till he had achieved nobility himself. A man was
noble who could reckon a Consul, a Prætor, or an Ædile among his
ancestors. Such was not the case with Cicero. As he filled all these
offices, his son was noble--as were his son's sons and grandsons, if
such there were.

It was common to Romans to have three names, and our Cicero had three.
Marcus, which was similar in its use to the Christian name of one of us,
had been that of his grandfather and father, and was handed on to his
son. This, called the prænomen, was conferred on the child when a babe
with a ceremony not unlike that of our baptism. There was but a limited
choice of such names among the Romans, so that an initial letter will
generally declare to those accustomed to the literature that intended.
A. stands for Aulus, P. for Publius, M. generally for Marcus, C. for
Caius, though there was a Cneus also. The nomen, Tullius, was that of
the family. Of this family of Tullius to which Cicero belonged we know
no details. Plutarch tells us that of his father nothing was said but in
extremes, some declaring that he had been a fuller, and others that he
had been descended from a prince who had governed the Volsci. We do not
see why he may not have sprung from the prince, and also have been a
fuller. There can, however, be no doubt that he was a gentleman, not
uneducated himself, with means and the desire to give his children the
best education which Rome or Greece afforded. The third name or
cognomen, that of Cicero, belonged to a branch of the family of Tullius.
This third name had generally its origin, as do so many of our surnames,
in some specialty of place, or trade, or chance circumstance. It was
said that an ancestor had been called Cicero from "cicer," a vetch,
because his nose was marked with the figure of that vegetable. It is
more probable that the family prospered by the growing and sale of
vetches. Be that as it may, the name had been well established before
the orator's time. Cicero's mother was one Helvia, of whom we are told
that she was well-born and rich. Cicero himself never alludes to her--as
neither, if I remember rightly, did Horace to his mother, though he
speaks so frequently of his father. Helvia's younger son, Quintus, tells
a story of his mother in a letter, which has been, by chance, preserved
among those written by our Cicero. She was in the habit of sealing up
the empty wine-jars, as well as those which were full, so that a jar
emptied on the sly by a guzzling slave might be at once known. This is
told in a letter to Tiro, a favorite slave belonging to Marcus, of whom
we shall hear often in the course of our work. As the old lady sealed up
the jars, though they contained no wine, so must Tiro write letters,
though he has nothing to say in them. This kind of argument, taken from
the old familiar stories of one's childhood and one's parents, could be
only used to a dear and familiar friend. Such was Tiro, though still a
slave, to the two brothers. Roman life admitted of such friendships,
though the slave was so completely the creature of the master that his
life and death were at the master's disposal. This is nearly all that is
known of Cicero's father and mother, or of his old home.

There is, however, sufficient evidence that the father paid great
attention to the education of his sons--if, in the case of Marcus, any
evidence were wanting where the result is so manifest by the work of his
life. At a very early age, probably when he was eight--in the year which
produced Julius Cæsar--he was sent to Rome, and there was devoted to
studies which from the first were intended to fit him for public life.
Middleton says that the father lived in Rome with his son, and argues
from this that he was a man of large means. But Cicero gives no
authority for this. It is more probable that he lived at the house of
one Aculeo, who had married his mother's sister, and had sons with whom
Cicero was educated. Stories are told of his precocious talents and
performances such as we are accustomed to hear of many remarkable
men--not unfrequently from their own mouths. It is said of him that he
was intimate with the two great advocates of the time, Lucius Crassus
and Marcus Antonius the orator, the grandfather of Cicero's future
enemy, whom we know as Marc Antony. Cicero speaks of them both as though
he had seen them and talked much of them in his youth. He tells us
anecdotes of them;[33] how they were both accustomed to conceal their
knowledge of Greek, fancying that the people in whose eyes they were
anxious to shine would think more of them if they seemed to have
contented themselves simply with Roman words and Roman thoughts. But the
intimacy was probably that which a lad now is apt to feel that he has
enjoyed with a great man, if he has seen and heard him, and perhaps been
taken by the hand. He himself gives in very plain language an account of
his own studies when he was seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen. He speaks
of the orators of that day[34]: "When I was above all things anxious to
listen to these men, the banishment of Cotta was a great sorrow to me. I
was passionately intent on hearing those who were left, daily writing,
reading, and making notes. Nor was I content only with practice in the
art of speaking. In the following year Varius had to go, condemned by
his own enactment; and at this time, in working at the civil law, I gave
much of my time to Quintus Scævola, the son of Publius, who, though he
took no pupils, by explaining points to those who consulted him, gave
great assistance to students. The year after, when Sulla and Pompey were
Consuls, I learned what oratory really means by listening to Publius
Sulpicius, who as tribune was daily making harangues. It was then that
Philo, the Chief of the Academy, with other leading philosophers of
Athens, had been put to flight by the war with Mithridates, and had come
to Rome. To him I devoted myself entirely, stirred up by a wonderful
appetite for acquiring the Greek philosophy. But in that, though the
variety of the pursuit and its greatness charmed me altogether, yet it
seemed to me that the very essence of judicial conclusion was altogether
suppressed. In that year Sulpicius perished, and in the next, three of
our greatest orators, Quintus Catulus, Marcus Antonius, and Caius
Julius, were cruelly killed." This was the time of the civil war between
Marius and Sulla. "In the same year I took lessons from Molo the
Rhodian, a great pleader and master of the art." In the next chapter he
tells us that he passed his time also with Diodatus the Stoic, who
afterward lived with him, and died in his house. Here we have an
authentic description of the manner in which Cicero passed his time as a
youth at Rome, and one we can reduce probably to absolute truth by
lessening the superlatives. Nothing in it, however, is more remarkable
than the confession that, while his young intellect rejoiced in the
subtle argumentation of the Greek philosophers, his clear common sense
quarrelled with their inability to reach any positive conclusion.

But before these days of real study had come upon him he had given
himself up to juvenile poetry. He is said to have written a poem called
Pontius Glaucus when he was fourteen years old. This was no doubt a
translation from the Greek, as were most of the poems that he wrote, and
many portions of his prose treatises.[35] Plutarch tells us that the
poem was extant in his time, and declares that, "in process of time,
when he had studied this art with greater application, he was looked
upon as the best poet, as well as the greatest orator in Rome." The
English translators of Plutarch tell us that their author was an
indifferent judge of Latin poetry, and allege as proof of this that he
praised Cicero as a poet, a praise which he gave "contrary to the
opinion of Juvenal." But Juvenal has given no opinion of Cicero's
poetry, having simply quoted one unfortunate line noted for its egotism,
and declared that Cicero would never have had his head cut off had his
philippics been of the same nature.[36] The evidence of Quintus Mucius
Scævola as to Cicero's poetry was perhaps better, as he had the means,
at any rate, of reading it. He believed that the Marius, a poem written
by Cicero in praise of his great fellow-townsman, would live to
posterity forever. The story of the old man's prophecy comes to us, no
doubt, from Cicero himself, and is put into the mouth of his
brother;[37] but had it been untrue it would have been contradicted.

The Glaucus was a translation from the Greek done by a boy, probably as
a boy's lesson It is not uncommon that such exercises should be
treasured by parents, or perhaps by the performer himself, and not
impossible that they should be made to reappear afterward as original
compositions. Lord Brougham tells us in his autobiography that in his
early youth he tried his hand at writing English essays, and even tales
of fiction.[38] "I find one of these," he says, "has survived the
waste-paper basket, and it may amuse my readers to see the sort of
composition I was guilty of at the age of thirteen. My tale was entitled
'Memnon, or Human Wisdom,' and is as follows." Then we have a fair
translation of Voltaire's romance, "Memnon," or "La Sagesse Humaine."
The old lord, when he was collecting his papers for his autobiography,
had altogether forgotten his Voltaire, and thought that he had composed
the story! Nothing so absurd as that is told of Cicero by himself or on
his behalf.

It may be as well to say here what there may be to be said as to
Cicero's poetry generally. But little of it remains to us, and by that
little it has been admitted that he has not achieved the name of a great
poet; but what he did was too great in extent and too good in its nature
to be passed over altogether without notice. It has been his fate to be
rather ridiculed than read as a maker of verses, and that ridicule has
come from two lines which I have already quoted. The longest piece which
we have is from the Phænomena of Aratus, which he translated from the
Greek when he was eighteen years old, and which describes the heavenly
bodies. It is known to us best by the extracts from it given by the
author himself in his treatise, De Naturâ Deorum. It must be owned that
it is not pleasant reading. But translated poetry seldom is pleasant,
and could hardly be made so on such a subject by a boy of eighteen. The
Marius was written two years after this, and we have a passage from it,
quoted by the author in his De Divinatione, containing some fine lines.
It tells the story of the battle of the eagle and the serpent. Cicero
took it, no doubt (not translated it, however), from the passage in the
Iliad, lib, xii, 200, which has been rendered by Pope with less than his
usual fire, and by Lord Derby with no peculiar charm. Virgil has
reproduced the picture with his own peculiar grace of words. His version
has been translated by Dryden, but better, perhaps, by Christopher Pitt.
Voltaire has translated Cicero's lines with great power, and Shelley has
reproduced the same idea at much greater length in the first canto of
the Revolt of Islam, taking it probably from Cicero, but, if not, from
Voltaire.[39] I venture to think that, of the nine versions, Cicero's is
the best, and that it is the most melodious piece of Latin poetry we
have up to that date. Twenty-seven years afterward, when Lucretius was
probably at work on his great poem, Cicero wrote an account of his
consulship in verse. Of this we have fifty or sixty lines, in which the
author describes the heavenly warnings which were given as to the
affairs of his own consular year. The story is not a happy one, but the
lines are harmonious. It is often worth our while to inquire how poetry
has become such as it is, and how the altered and improved phases of
versification have arisen. To trace our melody from Chaucer to Tennyson
is matter of interest to us all. Of Cicero as a poet we may say that he
found Latin versification rough, and left it smooth and musical. Now, as
we go on with the orator's life and prose works, we need not return to
his poetry.

The names of many masters have been given to us as those under whom
Cicero's education was carried on. Among others he is supposed, at a
very early age, to have been confided to Archias. Archias was a Greek,
born at Antioch, who devoted himself to letters, and, if we are to
believe what Cicero says, when speaking as an advocate, excelled all his
rivals of the day. Like many other educated Greeks, he made his way to
Rome, and was received as one of the household of Lucullus, with whom he
travelled, accompanying him even to the wars. He became a citizen of
Rome--so Cicero assures us--and Cicero's tutor. What Cicero owed to him
we do not know, but to Cicero Archias owed immortality. His claim to
citizenship was disputed; and Cicero, pleading on his behalf, made one
of those shorter speeches which are perfect in melody, in taste, and in
language. There is a passage in which speaking on behalf of so excellent
a professor in the art, he sings the praises of literature generally. I
know no words written in praise of books more persuasive or more
valuable. "Other recreations," he says, "do not belong to all seasons
nor to all ages, nor to all places. These pursuits nourish our youth and
delight our old age. They adorn our prosperity and give a refuge and a
solace to our troubles. They charm us at home, and they are not in our
way when we are abroad. They go to bed with us. They travel about with
us. They accompany us as we escape into the country."[40] Archias
probably did something for him in directing his taste, and has been
rewarded thus richly. As to other lessons, we know that he was
instructed in law by Scævola, and he has told us that he listened to
Crassus and Antony. At sixteen he went through the ceremony of putting
off his boy's dress, the toga prætexta, and appearing in the toga
virilis before the Prætor, thus assuming his right to go about a man's
business. At sixteen the work of education was _not_ finished--no more
than it is with us when a lad at Oxford becomes "of age" at twenty-one;
nor was he put beyond his father's power, the "patria potestas," from
which no age availed to liberate a son; but, nevertheless, it was a very
joyful ceremony, and was duly performed by Cicero in the midst of his
studies with Scævola.

At eighteen he joined the army. That doctrine of the division of labor
which now, with us, runs through and dominates all pursuits, had not as
yet been made plain to the minds of men at Rome by the political
economists of the day. It was well that a man should know something of
many things--that he should especially, if he intended to be a leader of
men, be both soldier and orator. To rise to be Consul, having first been
Quæstor, Ædile, and Prætor, was the path of glory. It had been the
special duty of the Consuls of Rome, since the establishment of consular
government, to lead the armies of the Republic. A portion of the duty
devolved upon the Prætors, as wars became more numerous; and latterly
the commanders were attended by Quæstors. The Governors of the
provinces, Proconsuls, or Proprætors with proconsular authority, always
combined military with civil authority. The art of war was, therefore, a
necessary part of the education of a man intended to rise in the service
of the State. Cicero, though, in his endeavor to follow his own tastes,
he made a strong effort to keep himself free from such work, and to
remain at Rome instead of being sent abroad as a Governor, had at last
to go where fighting was in some degree necessary, and, in the saddest
phase of his life, appeared in Italy with his lictors, demanding the
honors of a triumph. In anticipation of such a career, no doubt under
the advice of his friends, he now went out to see, if not a battle,
something, at any rate, of war. It has already been said how the
citizenship of Rome was conferred on some of the small Italian States
around, and not on others. Hence, of course, arose jealousy, which was
increased by the feeling on the part of those excluded that they were
called to furnish soldiers to Rome, as well as those who were included.
Then there was formed a combination of Italian cities, sworn to remedy
the injury thus inflicted on them. Their purpose was to fight Rome in
order that they might achieve Roman citizenship; and hence arose the
first civil war which distracted the Empire. Pompeius Strabo, father of
Pompey the Great, was then Consul (B.C. 89), and Cicero was sent out to
see the campaign under him. Marius and Sulla, the two Romans who were
destined soon to bathe Rome in blood, had not yet quarrelled, though
they had been brought to hate each other--Marius by jealousy, and Sulla
by rivalry. In this war they both served under the Consuls, and Cicero
served with Sulla. We know nothing of his doings in that campaign. There
are no tidings even of a misfortune such as that which happened to
Horace when he went out to fight, and came home from the battle-field
"relicta non bene parmula."

Rome trampled on the rebellious cities, and in the end admitted them to
citizenship. But probably the most important, certainly the most
notorious, result of the Italian war, was the deep antagonism of Marius
and Sulla. Sulla had made himself conspicuous by his fortune on the
occasion, whereas Marius, who had become the great soldier of the
Republic, and had been six times Consul, failed to gather fresh laurels.
Rome was falling into that state of anarchy which was the cause of all
the glory and all the disgrace of Cicero's life, and was open to the
dominion of any soldier whose grasp might be the least scrupulous and
the strongest. Marius, after a series of romantic adventures with which
we must not connect ourselves here, was triumphant only just before his
death, while Sulla went off with his army, pillaged Athens, plundered
Asia Minor generally, and made terms with Mithridates, though he did not
conquer him. With the purport, no doubt, of conquering Mithridates, but
perhaps with the stronger object of getting him out of Rome, the army
had been intrusted to him, with the consent of the Marian faction.

Then came those three years, when Sulla was in the East and Marius dead,
of which Cicero speaks as a period of peace, in which a student was able
to study in Rome. "Triennium fere fuit urbs sine armis."[41] These must
have been the years 86, 85, and 84 before Christ, when Cicero was
twenty-one, twenty-two, and twenty-three years old; and it was this
period, in truth, of which he speaks, and not of earlier years, when he
tells us of his studies with Philo, and Molo, and Diodatus. Precocious
as he was in literature, writing one poem--or translating it--when he
was fourteen, and another when he was eighteen, he was by no means in a
hurry to commence the work of his life. He is said also to have written
a treatise on military tactics when he was nineteen; which again, no
doubt, means that he had exercised himself by translating such an essay
from the Greek. This, happily, does not remain. But we have four books,
Rhetoricorum ad C. Herennium, and two books De Inventione, attributed to
his twentieth and twenty-first years, which are published with his
works, and commence the series. Of all that we have from him, they are
perhaps the least worth reading; but as they are, or were, among his
recognized writings, a word shall be said of them in their proper place.

The success of the education of Cicero probably became a commonplace
among Latin school-masters and Latin writers. In the dialogue De
Oratoribus, attributed to Tacitus, the story of it is given by Messala
when he is praising the orators of the earlier age. "We know well," says
Messala, "that book of Cicero which is called Brutus, in the latter part
of which he describes to us the beginning and the progress of his own
eloquence, and, as it were, the bringing up on which it was founded. He
tells us that he had learned civil law under Q. Mutius Scævola; that he
had exhausted the realm of philosophy--learning that of the Academy
under Philo, and that of the Stoics under Diodatus; that, not content
with these treatises, he had travelled through Greece and Asia, so as to
embrace the whole world of art. And thus it had come about that in the
works of Cicero no knowledge is wanting--neither of music, nor of
grammar, nor any other liberal accomplishment. He understood the
subtilty of logic, the purpose of ethics, the effects and causes of
things." Then the speaker goes on to explain what may be expected from
study such as that. "Thus it is, my good friends--thus, that from the
acquirement of many arts, and from a general knowledge of all things,
eloquence that is truly admirable is created in its full force; for the
power and capacity of an orator need not be hemmed in, as are those of
other callings, by certain narrow bounds; but that man is the true
orator who is able to speak on all subjects with dignity and grace, so
as to persuade those who listen, and to delight them, in a manner suited
to the nature of the subject in hand and the convenience of the
time."[42]

We might fancy that we were reading words from Cicero himself! Then the
speaker in this imaginary conversation goes on to tell us how far
matters had derogated in his time, pointing out at the same time that
the evils which he deplores had shown themselves even before Cicero, but
had been put down, as far as the law could put them down, by its
interference. He is speaking of those schools of rhetoric in which Greek
professors of the art gave lessons for money, which were evil in their
nature, and not, as it appears, efficacious even for the purpose in
hand. "But now," continues Messala, "our very boys are brought into the
schools of those lecturers who are called 'rhetores,' who had sprung up
before Cicero, to the displeasure of our ancestors, as is evident from
the fact that when Crassus and Domitius were Censors they were ordered
to shut up their school of impudence, as Cicero calls it. Our boys, as I
was going to say, are taken to these lecture-rooms, in which it is hard
to say whether the atmosphere of the place, or the lads they are thrown
among, or the nature of the lessons taught, are the most injurious. In
the place itself there is neither discipline nor respect. All who go
there are equally ignorant. The boys among the boys, the lads among the
lads, utter and listen to just what words they please. Their very
exercises are, for the most part, useless. Two kinds are in vogue with
these 'rhetores,' called 'suasoriæ' and 'controversiæ,'" tending, we may
perhaps say, to persuade or to refute. "Of these, the 'suasoriæ,' as
being the lighter and requiring less of experience, are given to the
little boys, the 'controversiæ' to the bigger lads. But--oh heavens,
what they are--what miserable compositions!" Then he tells us the
subjects selected. Rape, incest, and other horrors are subjected to the
lads for their declamation, in order that they may learn to be orators.

Messala then explains that in those latter days--his days, that
is--under the rule of despotic princes, truly large subjects are not
allowed to be discussed in public--confessing, however, that those large
subjects, though they afford fine opportunities to orators, are not
beneficial to the State at large. But it was thus, he says, that Cicero
became what he was, who would not have grown into favor had he defended
only P. Quintius and Archias, and had had nothing to do with Catiline,
or Milo, or Verres, or Antony--showing, by-the-way, how great was the
reputation of that speech, Pro Milone, with which we shall have to deal
farther on.

The treatise becomes somewhat confused, a portion of it having
probably been lost. From whose mouth the last words are supposed to
come is not apparent. It ends with a rhapsody in favor of imperial
government--suitable, indeed, to the time of Domitian, but very unlike
Tacitus. While, however, it praises despotism, it declares that only by
the evils which despotism had quelled could eloquence be maintained.
"Our country, indeed, while it was astray in its government; while it
tore itself to pieces by parties and quarrels and discord; while there
was no peace in the Forum, no agreement in the Senate, no moderation on
the judgment-seat, no reverence for letters, no control among the
magistrates, boasted, no doubt, a stronger eloquence."

From what we are thus told of Cicero, not what we hear from himself, we
are able to form an idea of the nature of his education. With his mind
fixed from his early days on the ambition of doing something noble with
himself, he gave himself up to all kinds of learning. It was Macaulay, I
think, who said of him that the idea of conquering the "omne
scibile,"--the understanding of all things within the reach of human
intellect--was before his eyes as it was before those of Bacon. The
special preparation which was, in Cicero's time, employed for students
at the bar is also described in the treatise from which I have
quoted--the preparation which is supposed to have been the very opposite
of that afforded by the "rhetores." "Among ourselves, the youth who was
intended to achieve eloquence in the Forum, when already trained at home
and exercised in classical knowledge, was brought by his father or his
friends to that orator who might then be considered to be the leading
man in the city. It became his daily work to follow that man, to
accompany him, to be conversant with all his speeches, whether in the
courts of law or at public meetings, so that he might learn, if I might
say so, to fight in the very thick of the throng." It was thus that
Cicero studied his art. A few lines farther down, the pseudo-Tacitus
tells us that Crassus, in his nineteenth year, held a brief against
Carbo; that Cæsar did so in his twenty-first against Dolabella; and
Pollio, in his twenty-second year, against Cato.[43] In this precocity
Cicero did not imitate Crassus, or show an example to the Romans who
followed him. He was twenty-six when he pleaded his first cause. Sulla
had then succeeded in crushing the Marian faction, and the Sullan
proscriptions had taken place, and were nominally over. Sulla had been
declared Dictator, and had proclaimed that there should be no more
selections for death. The Republic was supposed to be restored.
"Recuperata republica * * * tum primum nos ad causas et privatas et
publicas adire c[oe]pimus,"[44] "The Republic having been restored, I then
first applied myself to pleadings, both private and public."

Of Cicero's politics at that time we are enabled to form a fair
judgment. Marius had been his townsman; Sulla had been his captain. But
the one thing dear to him was the Republic--what he thought to be the
Republic. He was neither Marian nor Sullan. The turbulence in which so
much noble blood had flowed--the "crudelis interitus oratorum," the
crushing out of the old legalized form of government--was abominable to
him. It was his hope, no doubt his expectation, that these old forms
should be restored in all their power. There seemed to be more
probability of this--there was more probability of it--on the side of
Sulla than the other. On Sulla's side was Pompey, the then rising man,
who, being of the same age with Cicero, had already pushed himself into
prominence, who was surnamed the Great, and who "triumphed" during these
very two years in which Cicero began his career; who through Cicero's
whole life was his bugbear, his stumbling-block, and his mistake. But on
that side were the "optimates," the men who, if they did not lead, ought
to lead the Republic; those who, if they were not respectable, ought to
be so; those who, if they did not love their country, ought to love it.
If there was a hope, it was with them. The old state of things--that
oligarchy which has been called a Republic--had made Rome what it was;
had produced power, civilization, art, and literature. It had enabled
such a one as Cicero was himself to aspire to lead, though he had been
humbly born, and had come to Rome from an untried provincial family. To
him the Republic--as he fancied that it had been, as he fancied that it
might be--was all that was good, all that was gracious, all that was
beneficent. On Sulla's side lay what chance there was of returning to
the old ways. When Sulla was declared Dictator, it was presumed that the
Republic was restored. But not on this account should it be supposed
that Cicero regarded the proscriptions of Sulla with favor, or that he
was otherwise than shocked by the wholesale robberies for which the
proscription paved the way. This is a matter with which it will be
necessary to deal more fully when we come in our next chapter to the
first speeches made by Cicero; in the very first of which, as I place
them, he attacks the Sullan robberies with an audacity which, when we
remember that Sulla was still in power, rescues, at any rate, in regard
to this period of his life, the character of the orator from that charge
of cowardice which has been imputed to him.

It is necessary here, in this chapter devoted to the education of
Cicero, to allude to his two first speeches, because that education was
not completed till afterward--so that they may be regarded as
experiments, or trials, as it were, of his force and sufficiency. "Not
content with these teachers"--teachers who had come to Rome from Greece
and Asia--"he had travelled through Greece and Asia, so as to embrace
the whole world of art." These words, quoted a few pages back from the
treatise attributed to Tacitus, refer to a passage in the Brutus in
which Cicero makes a statement to that effect. "When I reached
Athens,[45] I passed six months with Antiochus, by far the best known
and most erudite of the teachers of the old Academy, and with him, as my
great authority and master, I renewed that study of philosophy which I
had never abandoned--which from my boyhood I had followed with always
increasing success. At the same time I practised oratory laboriously
with Demetrius Syrus, also at Athens, a well-known and by no means
incapable master of the art of speaking. After that I wandered over all
Asia, and came across the best orators there, with whom I practised,
enjoying their willing assistance." There is more of it, which need not
be repeated verbatim, giving the names of those who aided him in Asia:
Menippus of Stratonice--who, he says, was sweet enough to have belonged
himself to Athens--with Dionysius of Magnesia, with [OE]schilus of Cnidos,
and with Xenocles of Adramyttium. Then at Rhodes he came across his old
friend Molo, and applied himself again to the teaching of his former
master. Quintilian explains to us how this was done with a purpose, so
that the young orator, when he had made a first attempt with his
half-fledged wings in the courts, might go back to his masters for
awhile[46].

He was twenty-eight when he started on this tour. It has been suggested
that he did so in fear of the resentment of Sulla, with whose favorites
and with whose practices he had dealt very plainly. There is no reason
for alleging this, except that Sulla was powerful, that Sulla was
blood-thirsty, and that Sulla must have been offended. This kind of
argument is often used. It is supposed to be natural, or at least
probable, that in a certain position a man should have been a coward or
a knave, ungrateful or cruel; and in the presumption thus raised the
accusation is brought against him. "Fearing Sulla's resentment,"
Plutarch says, "he travelled into Greece, and gave out that the recovery
of his health was the motive." There is no evidence that such was his
reason for travelling; and, as Middleton says in his behalf, it is
certain that he "continued for a year after this in Rome without any
apprehension of danger." It is best to take a man's own account of his
own doings and their causes, unless there be ground for doubting the
statement made. It is thus that Cicero himself speaks of his journey:
"Now," he says, still in his Brutus[47], "as you wish to know what I
am--not simply what mark I may have on my body from my birth, or with
what surroundings of childhood I was brought up--I will include some
details which might perhaps seem hardly necessary. At this time I was
thin and weak, my neck being long and narrow--a habit and form of body
which is supposed to be adverse to long life; and those who loved me
thought the more of this, because I had taken to speaking without
relaxation, without recreation with all the powers of my voice, and with
much muscular action. When my friends and the doctors desired me to give
up speaking, I resolved that, rather than abandon my career as an
orator, I would face any danger. But when it occurred to me that by
lowering my voice, by changing my method of speaking, I might avoid the
danger, and at the same time learn to speak with more elegance, I
accepted that as a reason for going into Asia, so that I might study how
to change my mode of elocution. Thus, when I had been two years at work
upon causes, and when my name was already well known in the Forum, I
took my departure, and left Rome."

During the six months that he was at Athens he renewed an early
acquaintance with one who was destined to become the most faithful, and
certainly the best known, of his friends. This was Titus Pomponius,
known to the world as that Atticus to whom were addressed something more
than half the large body of letters which were written by Cicero, and
which have remained for our use.[48] He seems to have lived much with
Atticus, who was occupied with similar studies, though with altogether
different results. Atticus applied himself to the practices of the
Epicurean school, and did in truth become "Epicuri de grege porcus." To
enjoy life, to amass a fortune, to keep himself free from all turmoils
of war or state, to make the best of the times, whether they were bad or
good, without any attempt on his part to mend them--this was the
philosophy of Titus Pomponius, who was called Atticus because Athens,
full of art and literature, easy, unenergetic, and luxurious, was dear
to him. To this philosophy, or rather to this theory of life, Cicero was
altogether opposed. He studied in all the schools--among the Platonists,
the Stoics, even with the Epicureans enough to know their dogmas so that
he might criticise them--proclaiming himself to belong to the new
Academy, or younger school of Platonists, but in truth drawing no system
of morals or rule of life from any of them. To him, and also to Atticus,
no doubt, these pursuits afforded an intellectual pastime. Atticus found
himself able to justify to himself the bent of his disposition by the
name of a philosopher, and therefore became an Epicurean. Cicero could
in no way justify to himself any deviation from the energy of public
life, from its utility, from its ambition, from its loves, or from its
hatred; and from the Greek philosophers whom he named of this or the
other school, received only some assistance in that handling of
so-called philosophy which became the chief amusement of his future
life. This was well understood by the Latin authors who wrote of Cicero
after his own time. Quintilian, speaking of Cicero and Brutus as writers
of philosophy, says of the latter, "Suffecit ponderi rerum; scias enim
sentire quæ dicit."[49]--"He was equal to the weight of the subject, for
you feel that he believes what he writes." He leaves the inference, of
course, that Cicero wrote on such matters only for the exercise of his
ingenuity, as a school-boy writes.

When at Athens, Cicero was initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries--as
to which Mr. Collins, in his little volume on Cicero, in the Ancient
Classics for English Readers, says that they "contained under this veil
whatever faith in the Invisible and Eternal rested in the mind of an
enlightened pagan." In this Mr. Collins is fully justified by what
Cicero himself has said although the character thus given to these
mysteries is very different from that which was attributed to them by
early Christian writers. They were to those pious but somewhat
prejudiced theologists mysterious and pagan, and therefore horrible.[50]
But Cicero declares in his dialogue with Atticus, De Legibus, written
when he was fifty-five years old, in the prime of his intellect, that
"of all the glories and divine gifts which your Athens has produced for
the improvement of men nothing surpasses these mysteries, by which the
harshness of our uncivilized life has been softened, and we have been
lifted up to humanity; and as they are called 'initia,'" by which
aspirants were initiated, "so we have in truth found in them the seeds
of a new life. Nor have we received from them only the means of living
with satisfaction, but also of dying with a better hope as to the
future."[51]

Of what took place with Cicero and Atticus at their introduction to the
Eleusinian mysteries we know nothing. But it can hardly be that, with
such memories running in his mind after thirty years, expressed in such
language to the very friend who had then been his companion, they should
not have been accepted by him as indicating the commencement of some
great line of thought. The two doctrines which seem to mark most clearly
the difference between the men whom we regard, the one as a pagan and
the other as a Christian, are the belief in a future life and the duty
of doing well by our neighbors. Here they are both indicated, the former
in plain language, and the latter in that assurance of the softening of
the barbarity of uncivilized life, "Quibus ex agresti immanique vita
exculti ad humanitatem et mitigati sumus."

Of the inner life of Cicero at this moment--how he ate, how he drank,
with what accompaniment of slaves he lived, how he was dressed, and how
lodged--we know very little; but we are told enough to be aware that he
could not have travelled, as he did in Greece and Asia, without great
expense. His brother Quintus was with him, so that cost, if not double,
was greatly increased. Antiochus, Demetrius Syrus, Molo, Menippus, and
the others did not give him their services for nothing. These were
gentlemen of whom we know that they were anxious to carry their wares to
the best market. And then he seems to have been welcomed wherever he
went, as though travelling in some sort "en prince." No doubt he had
brought with him the best introductions which Rome could afford; but
even with them a generous allowance must have been necessary, and this
must have come from his father's pocket.

As we go on, a question will arise as to Cicero's income and the sources
whence it came. He asserts of himself that he was never paid for his
services at the bar. To receive such payment was illegal, but was usual.
He claims to have kept himself exempt from whatever meanness there may
have been in so receiving such fees--exempt, at any rate, from the fault
of having broken the law. He has not been believed. There is no evidence
to convict him of falsehood, but he has not been believed, because there
have not been found palpable sources of income sufficient for an
expenditure so great as that which we know to have been incident to the
life he led. But we do not know what were his father's means. Seeing the
nature of the education given to the lad, of the manner in which his
future life was prepared for him from his earliest days, of the promise
made to him from his boyhood of a career in the metropolis if he could
make himself fit for it, of the advantages which costly travel afforded
him, I think we have reason to suppose that the old Cicero was an
opulent man, and that the house at Arpinum was no humble farm, or
fuller's poor establishment.




CHAPTER III.

_THE CONDITION OF ROME._


It is far from my intention to write a history of Rome during the
Ciceronian period. Were I to attempt such a work, I should have to
include the doings of Sertorius in Spain, of Lucullus and Pompey in the
East, Cæsar's ten years in Gaul, and the civil wars from the taking of
Marseilles to the final battles of Thapsus and Munda. With very many of
the great events which the period includes Cicero took but slight
concern--so slight that we can hardly fail to be astonished when we find
how little he had to say of them--he who ran through all the offices of
the State, who was the chosen guardian of certain allied cities, who has
left to us so large a mass of correspondence on public subjects, and who
was essentially a public man for thirty-four years. But he was a public
man who concerned himself personally with Rome rather than with the
Roman Empire. Home affairs, and not foreign affairs, were dear to him.
To Cæsar's great deeds in Gaul we should have had from him almost no
allusion, had not his brother Quintus been among Cæsar's officers, and
his young friend Trebatius been confided by himself to Cæsar's care. Of
Pharsalia we only learn from him that, in utter despair of heart, he
allowed himself to be carried to the war. Of the proconsular governments
throughout the Roman Empire we should not learn much from Cicero, were
it not that it has been shown to us by the trial of Verres how atrocious
might be the conduct of a Roman Governor, and by the narratives of
Cicero's own rule in Cilicia, how excellent. The history of the time has
been written for modern readers by Merivale and Mommsen, with great
research and truth as to facts, but, as I think with some strong
feeling. Now Mr. Froude has followed with his Cæsar, which might well
have been called Anti-Cicero. All these in lauding, and the two latter
in deifying, the successful soldier, have, I think, dealt hardly with
Cicero, attributing to his utterances more than they mean; doubting his
sincerity, but seeing clearly the failure of his political efforts. With
the great facts of the Roman Empire as they gradually formed themselves
from the fall of Carthage, when the Empire began,[52] to the
establishment of Augustus, when it was consummated, I do not pretend to
deal, although by far the most momentous of them were crowded into the
life of Cicero. But in order that I may, if possible, show the condition
of his mind toward the Republic--that I may explain what it was that he
hoped and why he hoped it--I must go back and relate in a few words what
it was that Marius and Sulla had done for Rome.

Of both these men all the doings with which history is greatly concerned
were comprised within the early years of Cicero's life. Marius, indeed,
was nearly fifty years of age when his fellow-townsman was born, and had
become a distinguished soldier, and, though born of humble parents, had
pushed himself to the Consulate. His quarrel with Sulla had probably
commenced, springing from jealousy as to deeds done in the Jugurthine
war. But it is not matter of much moment, now that Marius had proved
himself to be a good and hardy soldier, excepting in this, that, by
making himself a soldier in early life, he enabled himself in his latter
years to become the master of Rome.

Sulla, too, was born thirty-two years before Cicero--a patrician of the
bluest blood--and having gone, as we say, into public life, and having
been elected Quæstor, became a soldier by dint of office, as a man with
us may become head of the Admiralty. As Quæstor he was sent to join
Marius in Africa a few months before Cicero was born. Into his hands, as
it happened, not into those of Marius, Jugurtha was surrendered by his
father-in-law, Bocchus, who thought thus to curry favor with the Romans.
Thence came those internecine feuds, in which, some twenty-five years
later, all Rome was lying butchered. The cause of quarrelling between
these two men, the jealousies which grew in the heart of the elder, from
the renewed successes of the younger, are not much to us now; but the
condition to which Rome had been brought, when two such men could
scramble for the city, and each cut the throats of the relatives,
friends, and presumed allies of the other, has to be inquired into by
those who would understand what Rome had been, what it was, and what it
was necessarily to become.

When Cicero was of an age to begin to think of these things, and had put
on the "toga virilis," and girt himself with a sword to fight under the
father of Pompey for the power of Rome against the Italian allies who
were demanding citizenship, the quarrel was in truth rising to its
bitterness. Marius and Sulla were on the same side in that war. But
Marius had then not only been Consul, but had been six times Consul; and
he had beaten the Teutons and the Cimbrians, by whom Romans had feared
that all Italy would be occupied. What was not within the power of such
a leader of soldiers? and what else but a leader of soldiers could
prevail when Italy and Rome, but for such a General, had been at the
mercy of barbaric hordes, and when they had been compelled to make that
General six times Consul?

Marius seems to have been no politician. He became a soldier and then a
General; and because he was great as a soldier and General, the affairs
of the State fell into his hands with very little effort. In the old
days of Rome military power had been needed for defence, and successful
defence had of course produced aggressive masterhood and increased
territory. When Hannibal, while he was still lingering in Italy, had
been circumvented by the appearance of Scipio in Africa and the Romans
had tasted the increased magnificence of external conquest, the desire
for foreign domination became stronger than that of native rule. From
that time arms were in the ascendant rather than policy. Up to that time
a Consul had to become a General, because it was his business to look
after the welfare of the State. After that time a man became a Consul in
order that he might be a General. The toga was made to give way to the
sword, and the noise of the Forum to the trumpets. We, looking back now,
can see that it must have been so, and we are prone to fancy that a wise
man looking forward then might have read the future. In the days of
Marius there was probably no man so wise. Cæsar was the first to see it.
Cicero would have seen it, but that the idea was so odious to him that
he could not acknowledge to himself that it need be so. His life was one
struggle against the coming evil--against the time in which brute force
was to be made to dominate intellect and civilization. His "cedant arma
togæ" was a scream, an impotent scream, against all that Sulla had done
or Cæsar was about to do. The mischief had been effected years before
his time, and had gone too far ahead to be arrested even by his tongue.
Only, in considering these things, let us confess that Cicero saw what
was good and what was evil, though he was mistaken in believing that the
good was still within reach.

Marius in his way was a Cæsar--as a soldier, undoubtedly a very
efficient Cæsar--having that great gift of ruling his own appetites
which enables those who possess it to conquer the appetites of others.
It may be doubted whether his quickness in stopping and overcoming the
two great hordes from the north, the Teutons and the Cimbrians, was not
equal in strategy to anything that Cæsar accomplished in Gaul. It is
probable that Cæsar learned much of his tactics from studying the
man[oe]uvres of Marius. But Marius was only a General. Though he became
hot in Roman politics, audacious and confident, knowing how to use and
how to disregard various weapons of political power as they had been
handed down by tradition and law, the "vetoes" and the auguries, and the
official dignities, he used them, or disregarded them, in quest only of
power for himself. He was able to perceive how vain was law in such a
period as that in which he lived; and that, having risen by force of
arms, he must by force of arms keep his place or lose his life. With
him, at least, there was no idea of Roman liberty, little probably of
Roman glory, except so far as military glory and military power go
together.

Sulla was a man endowed with a much keener insight into the political
condition of the world around him. To make a dash for power, as a dog
might do, and keep it in his clutch as a dog would, was enough for
Marius. Sulla could see something of future events. He could understand
that, by reducing men around him to a low level, he could make fast his
own power over them, and that he could best do this by cutting off the
heads of all who stood a little higher than their neighbors. He might
thus produce tranquillity, and security to himself and others. Some
glimmer of an idea of an Augustan rule was present to him; and with the
view of producing it, he re-established many of the usages of the
Republic, not reproducing the liberty but the forms of liberty. It seems
to have been his idea that a Sullan party might rule the Empire by
adherence to these forms. I doubt if Marius had any fixed idea of
government. To get the better of his enemies, and then to grind them
into powder under his feet, to seize rank and power and riches, and then
to enjoy them, to sate his lust with blood and money and women, at last
even with wine, and to feed his revenge by remembering the hard things
which he was made to endure during the period of his overthrow--this
seems to have been enough for Marius.[53] With Sulla there was
understanding that the Empire must be ruled, and that the old ways would
be best if they could be made compatible with the newly-concentrated
power.

The immediate effect upon Rome, either from one or from the other, was
nearly the same. In the year 87 B.C. Marius occupied himself in
slaughtering the Sullan party--during which, however, Sulla escaped from
Rome to the army of which he was selected as General, and proceeded to
Athens and the East with the object of conquering Mithridates; for,
during these personal contests, the command of this expedition had been
the chief bone of contention among them. Marius, who was by age
unfitted, desired to obtain it in order that Sulla might not have it. In
the next year, 86 B.C., Marius died, being then Consul for the seventh
time. Sulla was away in the East, and did not return till 83 B.C. In the
interval was that period of peace, fit for study, of which Cicero
afterward spoke. "Triennium fere fuit urbs sine armis."[54] Cicero was
then twenty-two or twenty-three years old, and must well have
understood, from his remembrance of the Marian massacres, what it was to
have the city embroiled by arms. It was not that men were fighting, but
that they were simply being killed at the pleasure of the slaughterer.
Then Sulla came back, 83 B.C., when Cicero was twenty-four; and if
Marius had scourged the city with rods, he scourged it with scorpions.
It was the city, in truth, that was scourged, and not simply the hostile
faction. Sulla began by proscribing 520 citizens declaring that he had
included in his list all that he remembered, and that those forgotten
should be added on another day. The numbers were gradually raised to
4,700! Nor did this merely mean that those named should be caught and
killed by some miscalled officers of justice.[55] All the public was
armed against the wretched, and any who should protect them were also
doomed to death. This, however, might have been comparatively
inefficacious to inflict the amount of punishment intended by Sulla. Men
generally do not specially desire to imbrue their hands in the blood of
other men. Unless strong hatred be at work, the ordinary man, even the
ordinary Roman, will hardly rise up and slaughter another for the sake
of the employment. But if lucre be added to blood, then blood can be
made to flow copiously. This was what Sulla did. Not only was the
victim's life proscribed, but his property was proscribed also; and the
man who busied himself in carrying out the great butcher's business
assiduously, ardently, and unintermittingly, was rewarded by the
property so obtained. Two talents[56] was to be the fee for mere
assassination; but the man who knew how to carry on well the work of an
informer could earn many talents. It was thus that fortunes were made in
the last days of Sulla. It was not only those 520 who were named for
killing. They were but the firstlings of the flock--the few victims
selected before the real workmen understood how valuable a trade
proscription and confiscation might be made. Plutarch tells us how a
quiet gentleman walking, as was his custom, in the Forum, one who took
no part in politics, saw his own name one day on the list. He had an
Alban villa, and at once knew that his villa had been his ruin. He had
hardly read the list, and had made his exclamation, before he was
slaughtered. Such was the massacre of Sulla, coming with an interval of
two or three years after those of Marius, between which was the blessed
time in which Rome was without arms. In the time of Marius, Cicero was
too young, and of no sufficient importance, on account of his birth or
parentage, to fear anything. Nor is it probable that Marius would have
turned against his townsmen. When Sulla's turn came, Cicero, though not
absolutely connected with the Dictator, was, so to say, on his side in
politics. In going back even to this period we may use the terms
Liberals and Conservatives for describing the two parties. Marius was
for the people; that is to say, he was opposed to the rule of the
oligarchy, dispersed the Senate, and loved to feel that his own feet
were on the necks of the nobility. Of liberty, or rights, or popular
institutions he recked nothing; but not the less was he supposed to be
on the people's side. Sulla, on the other hand, had been born a
patrician, and affected to preserve the old traditions of oligarchic
rule; and, indeed, though he took all the power of the State into his
own hands, he did restore, and for a time preserve, these old
traditions. It must be presumed that there was at his heart something of
love for old Rome. The proscriptions began toward the end of the year 82
B.C., and were continued through eight or nine fearful months--up to the
beginning of June, 81 B.C. A day was fixed at which there should be no
more slaughtering--no more slaughtering, that is, without special order
in each case, and no more confiscation--except such as might be judged
necessary by those who had not as yet collected their prey from past
victims. Then Sulla, as Dictator, set himself to work to reorganize the
old laws. There should still be Consuls and Prætors, but with restricted
powers, lessened almost down to nothing. It seems hard to gather what
was exactly the Dictator's scheme as the future depositary of power when
he should himself have left the scene. He did increase the privileges of
the Senate; but thinking of the Senate of Rome as he must have thought
of it, esteeming those old men as lowly as he must have esteemed them,
he could hardly have intended that imperial power should be maintained
by dividing it among them. He certainly contemplated no follower to
himself, no heir to his power, as Cæsar did. When he had been
practically Dictator about three years--though he did not continue the
use of the objectionable name--he resigned his rule and walked down, as
it were, from his throne into private life. I know nothing in history
more remarkable than Sulla's resignation; and yet the writers who have
dealt with his name give no explanation of it. Plutarch, his biographer,
expresses wonder that he should have been willing to descend to private
life, and that he who made so many enemies should have been able to do
so with security. Cicero says nothing of it. He had probably left Rome
before it occurred, and did not return till after Sulla's death. It
seems to have been accepted as being in no especial way remarkable.[57]
At his own demand, the plenary power of Dictator had been given to
him--power to do all as he liked, without reference either to the Senate
or to the people, and with an added proviso that he should keep it as
long as he thought fit, and lay it down when it pleased him. He did lay
it down, flattering himself, probably, that, as he had done his work, he
would walk out from his dictatorship like some Camillus of old. There
had been no Dictator in Rome for more than a century and a quarter--not
since the time of Hannibal's great victories; and the old dictatorships
lasted but for a few months or weeks, after which the Dictator, having
accomplished the special task, threw up his office. Sulla now affected
to do the same; and Rome, after the interval of three years, accepted
the resignation in the old spirit. It was natural to them, though only
by tradition, that a Dictator should resign--so natural that it required
no special wonder. The salt of the Roman Constitution was gone, but the
remembrance of the savor of it was still sweet to the minds of the
Romans.

It seems certain that no attempt was made to injure Sulla when he ceased
to be nominally at the head of the army, but it is probable that he did
not so completely divest himself of power as to be without protection.
In the year after his abdication he died, at the age of sixty-one,
apparently strong as regards general health, but, if Plutarch's story be
true, affected with a terrible cutaneous disease. Modern writers have
spoken of Sulla as though they would fain have praised him if they
dared, because, in spite of his demoniac cruelty, he recognized the
expediency of bringing the affairs of the Republic again into order.
Middleton calls him the "only man in history in whom the odium of the
most barbarous cruelties was extinguished by the glory of his great
acts." Mommsen, laying the blame of the proscriptions on the head of the
oligarchy, speaks of Sulla as being either a sword or a pen in the
service of the State, as a sword or a pen would be required, and
declares that, in regard to the total "absence of political
selfishness--although it is true in this respect only--Sulla deserves to
be named side by side with Washington."[58] To us at present who are
endeavoring to investigate the sources and the nature of Cicero's
character, the attributes of this man would be but of little moment,
were it not that Cicero was probably Cicero because Sulla had been
Sulla. Horrid as the proscriptions and confiscations were to Cicero--and
his opinion of them was expressed plainly enough when it was dangerous
to express them[59]--still it was apparent to him that the cause of
order (what we may call the best chance for the Republic) lay with the
Senate and with the old traditions and laws of Rome, in the
re-establishment of which Sulla had employed himself. Of these
institutions Mommsen speaks with a disdain which we now cannot but feel
to be justified. "On the Roman oligarchy of this period," he says "no
judgment can be passed save one of inexorable and remorseless
condemnation; and, like everything connected with it, the Sullan
constitution is involved in that condemnation."[60] We have to admit
that the salt had gone out from it, and that there was no longer left
any savor by which it could be preserved. But the German historian seems
to err somewhat in this, as have also some modern English historians,
that they have not sufficiently seen that the men of the day had not the
means of knowing all that they, the historians, know. Sulla and his
Senate thought that by massacring the Marian faction they had restored
everything to an equilibrium. Sulla himself seems to have believed that
when the thing was accomplished Rome would go on, and grow in power and
prosperity as she had grown, without other reforms than those which he
had initiated. There can be no doubt that many of the best in Rome--the
best in morals, the best in patriotism, and the best in erudition--did
think that, with the old forms, the old virtue would come back. Pompey
thought so, and Cicero. Cato thought so, and Brutus. Cæsar, when he came
to think about it, thought the reverse. But even now to us, looking back
with so many things made clear to us, with all the convictions which
prolonged success produces, it is doubtful whether some other milder
change--some such change as Cicero would have advocated--might not have
prevented the tyranny of Augustus, the mysteries of Tiberius, the freaks
of Caligula, the folly of Claudius, and the madness of Nero.

It is an uphill task, that of advocating the cause of a man who has
failed. The Cæsars of the world are they who make interesting stories.
That Cicero failed in the great purpose of his life has to be
acknowledged. He had studied the history of his country, and was aware
that hitherto the world had produced nothing so great as Roman power;
and he knew that Rome had produced true patriotism. Her Consuls, her
Censors, her Tribunes, and her Generals had, as a rule, been true to
Rome, serving their country, at any rate till of late years, rather than
themselves. And he believed that liberty had existed in Rome, though
nowhere else. It would be well if we could realize the idea of liberty
which Cicero entertained. Liberty was very dear to him--dear to him not
only as enjoying it himself, but as a privilege for the enjoyment of
others. But it was only the liberty of a few. Half the population of the
Roman cities were slaves, and in Cicero's time the freedom of the city,
which he regarded as necessary to liberty, belonged only to a small
proportion of the population of Italy. It was the liberty of a small
privileged class for which he was anxious. That a Sicilian should be
free under a Roman Proconsul, as a Roman citizen was entitled to be, was
abhorrent to his doctrine. The idea of cosmopolitan freedom--an idea
which exists with us, but is not common to very many even now--had not
as yet been born: that care for freedom which springs from a desire to
do to others as we would that they should do to us. It required Christ
to father that idea; and Cicero, though he was nearer to Christianity
than any who had yet existed, had not reached it. But this liberty,
though it was but of a few, was so dear to him that he spent his life in
an endeavor to preserve it. The kings had been expelled from Rome
because they had trampled on liberty. Then came the Republic, which we
know to have been at its best no more than an oligarchy; but still it
was founded on the idea that everything should be done by the votes of
the free people. For many years everything was done by the votes of the
free people. Under what inducements they had voted is another question.
Clients were subject to their patrons, and voted as they were told. We
have heard of that even in England, where many of us still think that
such a way of voting is far from objectionable. Perhaps compulsion was
sometimes used--a sort of "rattening" by which large bodies were driven
to the poll to carry this or the other measure. Simple eloquence
prevailed with some, and with others flattery. Then corruption became
rampant, as was natural, the rich buying the votes of the poor; and
votes were bought in various ways--by cheap food as well as by money, by
lavish expenditure in games, by promises of land, and other means of
bribery more or less overt. This was bad, of course. Every freeman
should have given a vote according to his conscience. But in what
country--the millennium not having arrived in any--has this been
achieved? Though voting in England has not always been pure, we have not
wished to do away with the votes of freemen and to submit everything to
personal rule. Nor did Cicero.

He knew that much was bad, and had himself seen many things that were
very evil. He had lived through the dominations of Marius and Sulla, and
had seen the old practices of Roman government brought down to the
pretence of traditional forms. But still, so he thought, there was life
left in the old forms, if they could be revivified by patriotism, labor,
and intelligence. It was the best that he could imagine for the
State--infinitely better than the chance of falling into the bloody
hands of one Marius and one Sulla after another. Mommsen tells us that
nothing could be more rotten than the condition of oligarchical
government into which Rome had fallen; and we are inclined to agree with
Mommsen, because we have seen what followed. But that Cicero, living and
seeing it all as a present spectator, should have hoped better things,
should not, I think, cause us to doubt either Cicero's wisdom or his
patriotism. I cannot but think that, had I been a Roman of those days, I
should have preferred Cicero, with his memories of the past, to Cæsar,
with his ambition for the future.

Looking back from our standing-point of to-day, we know how great Rome
was--infinitely greater, as far as power is concerned, than anything
else which the world has produced. It came to pass that "Urbis et orbis"
was not a false boast. Gradually growing from the little nest of robbers
established on the banks of the Tiber, the people of Rome learned how to
spread their arms over all the known world, and to conquer and rule,
while they drew to themselves all that the ingenuity and industry of
other people had produced. To do this, there must have been not only
courage and persistence, but intelligence, patriotism, and superior
excellence in that art of combination of which government consists. But
yet, when we look back, it is hard to say when were the palmy days of
Rome. When did those virtues shine by which her power was founded? When
was that wisdom best exhibited from which came her capacity for ruling?
Not in the time of her early kings, whose mythic virtues, if they
existed, were concerned but in small matters; for the Rome of the kings
claimed a jurisdiction extending as yet but a few miles from the city.
And from the time of their expulsion, Rome, though she was rising in
power, was rising slowly, and through such difficulties that the reader
of history, did he not know the future, would think from time to time
that the day of her destruction had come upon her. Not when Brennus was
at Rome with his Gauls, a hundred and twenty-five years after the
expulsion of the kings, could Rome be said to have been great; nor when,
fifty or sixty years afterward, the Roman army--the only army which Rome
then possessed--had to lay down its arms in the Caudine Forks and pass
under the Samnite yoke. Then, when the Samnite wars were ended, and Rome
was mistress in Italy--mistress, after all, of no more than Southern
Italy--the Punic wars began. It could hardly have been during that long
contest with Carthage, which was carried on for nearly fifty years, that
the palmy days of Rome were at their best. Hannibal seems always to be
the master. Trebia, Thrasymene and Cannæ, year after year, threaten
complete destruction to the State. Then comes the great Scipio; and no
doubt, if we must mark an era of Roman greatness, it would be that of
the battle of Zama and the submission of Carthage, 201 years before
Christ. But with Scipio there springs up the idea of personal ambition;
and in the Macedonian and Greek wars that follow, though the arm of Rome
is becoming stronger every day, and her shoulders broader, there is
already the glamour of her decline in virtue. Her dealings with
Antiochus, with Pyrrhus, and with the Achæans, though successful, were
hardly glorious. Then came the two Gracchi, and the reader begins to
doubt whether the glory of the Republic is not already over. They
demanded impossible reforms, by means as illegal as they were
impossible, and were both killed in popular riots. The war with Jugurtha
followed, in which the Romans were for years unsuccessful, and during
which German hordes from the north rushed into Gaul and destroyed an
army of 80,000 Romans. This brings us to Marius and to Sulla, of whom we
have already spoken, and to that period of Roman politics which the
German historian describes as being open to no judgment "save one of
inexorable and remorseless condemnation."

But, in truth, the history of every people and every nation will be
subject to the same criticism, if it be regarded with the same severity.
In all that man has done as yet in the way of government, the seeds of
decay are apparent when looked back upon from an age in advance. The
period of Queen Elizabeth was very great to us; yet by what dangers were
we enveloped in her days! But for a storm at sea, we might have been
subjected to Spain. By what a system of falsehood and petty tyrannies
were we governed through the reigns of James I. and Charles I.! What
periods of rottenness and danger there have been since! How little
glorious was the reign of Charles II.! how full of danger that of
William! how mean those of the four Georges, with the dishonesty of
ministers such as Walpole and Newcastle! And to-day, are there not many
who are telling us that we are losing the liberties which our
forefathers got for us, and that no judgment can be passed on us "save
one of inexorable and remorseless condemnation?" We are a great nation,
and the present threatenings are probably vain. Nevertheless, the seeds
of decay are no doubt inherent in our policies and our practices--so
manifestly inherent that future historians will pronounce upon them with
certainty.

But Cicero, not having the advantage of distance, having simply in his
mind the knowledge of the greatness which had been achieved, and in his
heart a true love for the country which had achieved it, and which was
his own, encouraged himself to think that the good might be recovered
and the bad eliminated. Marius and Sulla--Pompey also, toward the end of
his career, if I can read his character rightly--Cæsar, and of course
Augustus, being all destitute of scruple, strove to acquire, each for
himself, the power which the weak hands of the Senate were unable to
grasp. However much, or however little, the country of itself might have
been to any of them, it seemed good to him, whether for the country's
sake or for his own, that the rule should be in his own hands. Each had
the opportunity, and each used it, or tried to use it. With Cicero there
is always present the longing to restore the power to the old
constitutional possessors of it. So much is admitted, even by his bitter
enemies; and I am sometimes at a loss whether to wonder most that a man
of letters, dead two thousand years ago, should have enemies so bitter
or a friend so keenly in earnest about him as I am. Cicero was aware
quite as well as any who lived then, if he did not see the matter
clearer even than any others, that there was much that was rotten in the
State. Men who had been murderers on behalf of Marius, and then others
who had murdered on behalf of Sulla--among whom that Catiline, of whom
we have to speak presently, had been one--were not apt to settle
themselves down as quiet citizens. The laws had been set aside. Even the
law courts had been closed. Sulla had been law, and the closets of his
favorites had been the law courts. Senators had been cowed and obedient.
The Tribunes had only been mock Tribunes. Rome, when Cicero began his
public life, was still trembling. The Consuls of the day were men chosen
at Sulla's command. The army was Sulla's army. The courts were now again
opened by Sulla's permission. The day fixed by Sulla when murderers
might no longer murder--or, at any rate, should not be paid for
murdering--had arrived. There was not, one would say, much hope for good
things. But Sulla had reproduced the signs of order, and the best hope
lay in that direction. Consuls, Prætors, Quæstors, Ædiles, even
Tribunes, were still there. Perhaps it might be given to him, to Cicero,
to strengthen the hands of such officers. At any rate, there was no
better course open to him by which he could serve his country.

The heaviest accusation brought against Cicero charges him with being
insincere to the various men with whom he was brought in contact in
carrying out the purpose of his life, and he has also been accused of
having changed his purpose. It has been alleged that, having begun life
as a democrat, he went over to the aristocracy as soon as he had secured
his high office of State. As we go on, it will be my object to show that
he was altogether sincere in his purpose, that he never changed his
political idea, and that, in these deviations as to men and as to means,
whether, for instance, he was ready to serve Cæsar or to oppose him, he
was guided, even in the insincerity of his utterances, by the sincerity
of his purpose. I think that I can remember, even in Great Britain, even
in the days of Queen Victoria, men sitting check by jowl on the same
Treasury bench who have been very bitter to each other with anything but
friendly words. With us fidelity in friendship is, happily, a virtue. In
Rome expediency governed everything. All I claim for Cicero is, that he
was more sincere than others around him.




CHAPTER IV.

_HIS EARLY PLEADINGS.--SEXTUS ROSCIUS AMERINUS.--HIS INCOME._


[Sidenote: B.C. 80, ætat. 27.]

We now come to the beginning of the work of Cicero's life. This at first
consisted in his employment as an advocate, from which he gradually rose
into public or political occupation, as so often happens with a
successful barrister in our time. We do not know with absolute certainty
even in what year Cicero began his pleadings, or in what cause. It may
probably have been in 81 B.C., when he was twenty-five, or in his
twenty-sixth year. Of the pleadings of which we know the particulars,
that in the defence of Sextus Roscius Amerinus, which took place
undoubtedly in the year 80 B.C., ætat twenty-seven, was probably the
earliest. As to that, we have his speech nearly entire, as we have also
one for Publius Quintius, which has generally been printed first among
the orator's works. It has, however, I think, been made clear that that
spoken for Sextus Roscius came before it. It is certain that there had
been others before either of them. In that for Sextus he says that he
had never spoken before in any public cause,[61] such as was the
accusation in which he was now engaged, from which the inference has to
be made that he had been engaged in private causes; and in that for
Quintius he declares that there was wanting to him in that matter an aid
which he had been accustomed to enjoy in others.[62] No doubt he had
tried his 'prentice hand in cases of less importance. That of these two
the defence of Sextus Roscius came first, is also to be found in his own
words. More than once, in pleading for Quintius, he speaks of the
proscriptions and confiscations of Sulla as evils then some time past.
These were brought nominally to a close in June, 81; but it has been
supposed by those who have placed this oration first that it was spoken
in that very year. This seems to have been impossible. "I am most
unwilling," says he, "to call to mind that subject, the very memory of
which should be wiped out from our thoughts."[63] When the tone of the
two speeches is compared, it will become evident that that for Sextus
Roscius was spoken the first. It was, as I have said, spoken in his
twenty-seventh year, B.C. 80, the year after the proscription lists had
been closed, when Sulla was still Dictator, and when the sales of
confiscated goods, though no longer legal, were still carried on under
assumed authority. As to such violation of Sulla's own enactment, Cicero
excuses the Dictator in this very speech, likening him to Great Jove the
Thunderer. Even "Jupiter Optimus Maximus," as he is whose nod the
heavens, the earth, and seas obey--even he cannot so look after his
numerous affairs but that the winds and the storms will be too strong
sometimes, or the heat too great, or the cold too bitter. If so, how can
we wonder that Sulla, who has to rule the State, to govern, in fact, the
world, should not be able himself to see to everything? Jove probably
found it convenient not to see many things. Such must certainly have
been the case with Sulla.

I will venture, as other biographers have done before, to tell the story
of Sextus Roscius of Ameria at some length, because it is in itself a
tale of powerful romance, mysterious, grim, betraying guilt of the
deepest dye, misery most profound, and audacity unparalleled; because,
in a word, it is as interesting as any novel that modern fiction has
produced; and also, I will tell it, because it lets in a flood of light
upon the condition of Rome at the time. Our hair is made to stand on end
when we remember that men had to pick their steps in such a State as
this, and to live if it were possible, and, if not, then to be ready to
die. We come in upon the fag-end of the proscription, and see, not the
bloody wreath of Sulla as he triumphed on his Marian foes, not the cruel
persecution of the ruler determined to establish his order of things by
slaughtering every foe, but the necessary accompaniments of such
ruthless deeds--those attendant villanies for which the Jupiter Optimus
Maximus of the day had neither ears nor eyes. If in history we can ever
get a glimpse at the real life of the people, it is always more
interesting than any account of the great facts, however grand.

The Kalends of June had been fixed by Sulla as the day on which the
slaughter legalized by the proscriptions should cease. In the September
following an old gentleman named Sextus Roscius was murdered in the
streets of Rome as he was going home from supper one night, attended by
two slaves. By whom he was murdered, probably more than one or two knew
then, but nobody knows now. He was a man of reputation, well acquainted
with the Metelluses and Messalas of the day, and passing rich. His name
had been down on no proscription list, for he had been a friend of
Sulla's friends. He was supposed, when he was murdered, to be worth
about six million of sesterces, or something between fifty and sixty
thousand pounds of our money. Though there was at that time much money
in Rome, this amounted to wealth; and though we cannot say who murdered
the man, we may feel sure that he was murdered for his money.

Immediately on his death his chattels were seized and sold--or divided,
probably, without being sold--including his slaves, in whom, as with
every rich Roman, much of his wealth was invested; and his landed
estates--his farms, of which he had many--were also divided. As to the
actual way in which this was done, we are left much in the dark. Had the
name of Sextus Roscius been on one of the lists, even though the list
would then have been out of date, we could have understood that it
should have been so. Jupiter Optimus Maximus could not see everything,
and great advantages were taken. We must only suppose that things were
so much out of order that they who had been accustomed to seize upon the
goods of the proscribed were able to stretch their hands so as to grasp
almost anything that came in their way. They could no longer procure a
rich man's name to be put down on the list, but they could pretend that
it had been put down. At any rate, certain persons seized and divided
the chattels of the murdered man as though he had been proscribed.

Old Roscius, when he was killed, had one son, of whom we are told that
he lived always in the country at Ameria, looking after his father's
farms, never visiting the capital, which was distant from Ameria
something under fifty miles; a rough, uncouth, and probably honest
man--one, at any rate, to whom the ways of the city were unknown, and
who must have been but partially acquainted with the doings of the
time.[64] As we read the story, we feel that very much depends on the
character of this man, and we are aware that our only description of him
comes from his own advocate. Cicero would probably say much which,
though beyond the truth, could not be absolutely refuted, but would
state as facts nothing that was absolutely false. Cicero describes him
as a middle-aged man, who never left his farm, doing his duty well by
his father, as whose agent he acted on the land--a simple, unambitious,
ignorant man, to whom one's sympathies are due rather than our
antipathy, because of his devotion to agriculture. He was now accused of
having murdered his father. The accusation was conducted by one Erucius,
who in his opening speech--the speech made before that by Cicero--had
evidently spoken ill of rural employments. Then Cicero reminds him, and
the judges, and the Court how greatly agriculture had been honored in
the old days, when Consuls were taken from the ploughs. The imagination,
however, of the reader pictures to itself a man who could hardly have
been a Consul at any time--one silent, lonely, uncouth, and altogether
separate from the pleasant intercourses of life. Erucius had declared of
him that he never took part in any festivity. Cicero uses this to show
that he was not likely to have been tempted by luxury to violence. Old
Roscius had had two sons, of whom he had kept one with him in Rome--the
one, probably, whose society had been dearest to him. He, however, had
died, and our Roscius--Sextus Roscius Amerinus, as he came to be called
when he was made famous by the murder--was left on one of the farms down
in the country. The accusation would probably not have been made, had he
not been known to be a man sullen, silent, rough, and unpopular--as to
whom such a murder might be supposed to be credible.

Why should any accusation have been made unless there was clear evidence
as to guilt? That is the first question which presents itself. This son
received no benefit from his father's death. He had in fact been
absolutely beggared by it--had lost the farm, the farming utensils,
every slave in the place, all of which had belonged to his father, and
not to himself. They had been taken, and divided; taken by persons
called "Sectores," informers or sequestrators, who took possession of
and sold--or did not sell--confiscated goods. Such men in this case had
pounced down upon the goods of the murdered man at once and swallowed
them all up, not leaving an acre or a slave to our Roscius. Cicero tells
us who divided the spoil among them. There were two other Rosciuses,
distant relatives, probably, both named Titus; Titus Roscius Magnus, who
sojourned in Rome, and who seems to have exercised the trade of informer
and assassin during the proscriptions, and Titus Roscius Capito, who,
when at home, lived at Ameria, but of whom Cicero tells us that he had
become an apt pupil of the other during this affair. They had got large
shares, but they shared also with one Chrysogonus, the freedman and
favorite of Sulla, who did the dirty work for Jupiter Optimus Maximus
when Jupiter Optimus Maximus had not time to do it himself. We presume
that Chrysogonus had the greater part of the plunder. As to Capito, the
apt pupil, we are told again and again that he got three farms for
himself.

Again, it is necessary to say that all these facts come from Cicero,
who, in accordance with the authorized practice of barristers, would
scruple at saying nothing which he found in his instructions. How
instructions were conveyed to an advocate in those days we do not quite
know. There was no system of attorneys. But the story was probably made
out for the "patronus" or advocate by an underling, and in some way
prepared for him. That which was thus prepared he exaggerated as the
case might seem to require. It has to be understood of Cicero that he
possessed great art and, no doubt, great audacity in such exaggeration;
in regard to which we should certainly not bear very heavily upon him
now, unless we are prepared to bear more heavily upon those who do the
same thing in our own enlightened days. But Cicero, even as a young man,
knew his business much too well to put forward statements which could be
disproved. The accusation came first; then the speech in defence; after
that the evidence, which was offered only on the side of the accuser,
and which was subject to cross-examination. Cicero would have no
opportunity of producing evidence. He was thus exempted from the
necessity of proving his statements, but was subject to have them all
disproved. I think we may take it for granted that the property of the
murdered man was divided as he tells us.

If that was so, why should any accusation have been made? Our Sextus
seems to have been too much crushed by the dangers of his position to
have attempted to get back any part of his father's wealth. He had
betaken himself to the protection of a certain noble lady, one Metella,
whose family had been his father's friends, and by her and her friends
the defence was no doubt managed. "You have my farms," he is made to say
by his advocate; "I live on the charity of another. I abandon everything
because I am placid by nature, and because it must be so. My house,
which is closed to me, is open to you: I endure it. You have possessed
yourself of my whole establishment; I have not one single slave. I
suffer all this, and feel that I must suffer it. What do you want more?
Why do you persecute me further? In what do you think that I shall hurt
you? How do I interfere with you? In what do I oppose you? Is it your
wish to kill a man for the sake of plunder? You have your plunder. If
for the sake of hatred, what hatred can you feel against him of whose
land you have taken possession before you had even known him?"[65] Of
all this, which is the advocate's appeal to pity, we may believe as
little as we please. Cicero is addressing the judge, and desires only an
acquittal. But the argument shows that no overt act in quest of
restitution had as yet been made. Nevertheless, Chrysogonus feared such
action, and had arranged with the two Tituses that something should be
done to prevent it. What are we to think of the condition of a city in
which not only could a man be murdered for his wealth walking home from
supper--that, indeed, might happen in London if there existed the means
of getting at the man's money when the man was dead--but in which such a
plot could be concerted in order that the robbery might be consummated?
"We have murdered the man and taken his money under the false plea that
his goods had been confiscated. Friends, we find, are interfering--these
Metellas and Metelluses, probably. There is a son who is the natural
heir. Let us say that he killed his own father. The courts of law, which
have only just been reopened since the dear days of proscription,
disorder, and confiscation, will hardly yet be alert enough to acquit a
man in opposition to the Dictator's favorite. Let us get him convicted,
and, as a parricide, sewed up alive in a bag and thrown into the
river"--as some of us have perhaps seen cats drowned, for such was the
punishment--"and then he at least will not disturb us." It must have
thus been that the plot was arranged.

It was a plot so foul that nothing could be fouler; but not the less was
it carried out persistently with the knowledge and the assistance of
many. Erucius, the accuser, who seems to have been put forward on the
part of Chrysogonus, asserted that the man had caused his father to be
murdered because of hatred. The father was going to disinherit the son,
and therefore the son murdered the father. In this there might have been
some probability, had there been any evidence of such an intention on
the father's part. But there was none. Cicero declares that the father
had never thought of disinheriting his son. There had been no quarrel,
no hatred. This had been assumed as a reason--falsely. There was in
fact no cause for such a deed; nor was it possible that the son should
have done it. The father was killed in Rome when, as was evident, the
son was fifty miles off. He never left his farm. Erucius, the accuser,
had said, and had said truly, that Rome was full of murderers.[66] But
who was the most likely to have employed such a person: this rough
husbandman, who had no intercourse with Rome, who knew no one there, who
knew little of Roman ways, who had nothing to get by the murder when
committed, or they who had long been concerned with murderers, who knew
Rome, and who were now found to have the property in their hands?

The two slaves who had been with the old man when he was killed, surely
they might tell something? Here there comes out incidentally the fact
that slaves when they were examined as witnesses were tortured, quite as
a matter of course, so that their evidence might be extracted. This is
spoken of with no horror by Cicero, nor, as far as I can remember, by
other Roman writers. It was regarded as an established rule of life that
a slave, if brought into a court of law, should be made to tell the
truth by such appliances. This was so common that one is tempted to
hope, and almost to suppose that the "question" was not ordinarily
administered with circumstances of extreme cruelty. We hear, indeed, of
slaves having their liberty given them in order that, being free, they
may not be forced by torture to tell the truth;[67] but had the cruelty
been of the nature described by Scott in "Old Mortality," when the poor
preacher's limbs were mangled, I think we should have heard more of it.
Nor was the torture always applied, but only when the expected evidence
was not otherwise forth-coming. Cicero explains, in the little dialogue
given below, how the thing was carried on.[68] "You had better tell the
truth now, my friend: Was it so and so?" The slave knows that, if he
says it was so, there is the cross for him, or the "little horse;" but
that, if he will say the contrary, he will save his joints from racking.
And yet the evidence went for what it was worth.

In this case of Roscius there had certainly been two slaves present; but
Cicero, who, as counsel for the defence, could call no witnesses, had
not the power to bring them into court; nor could slaves have been made
to give evidence against their masters. These slaves, who had belonged
to the murdered man, were now the property either of Chrysogonus or of
the two Tituses. There was no getting at their evidence but by
permission of their masters, and this was withheld. Cicero demands that
they shall be produced, knowing that the demand will have no effect.
"The man here," he says, pointing to the accused, "asks for it, prays
for it. What will you do in this case? Why do you refuse?"[69]

By this time the reader is brought to feel that the accused person
cannot possibly have been guilty; and if the reader, how much more the
hearer? Then Cicero goes on to show who in truth were guilty. "Doubt now
if you can, judges, by whom Roscius was killed: whether by him who, by
his father's death, is plunged into poverty and trouble--who is
forbidden even to investigate the truth--or by those who are afraid of
real evidence, who themselves possess the plunder, who live in the midst
of murder, and on the proceeds of murder."[70]

Then he addresses one of the Tituses, Titus Magnus, who seems to have
been sitting in the court, and who is rebuked for his impudence in doing
so: "Who can doubt who was the murderer--you who have got all the
plunder, or this man who has lost everything? But if it be added to this
that you were a pauper before--that you have been known as a greedy
fellow, as a dare-devil, as the avowed enemy of him who has been
killed--then need one ask what has brought you to do such a deed as
this?"[71]

He next tells what took place, as far as it was known, immediately after
the murder. The man had been killed coming home from supper, in
September, after it was dark, say at eight or nine o'clock, and the fact
was known in Ameria before dawn. Travelling was not then very quick; but
a messenger, one Mallius Glaucia, a man on very close terms with Titus
Magnus, was sent down at once in a light gig to travel through the night
and take the information to Titus Capito Why was all this hurry? How did
Glaucia hear of the murder so quickly? What cause to travel all through
the night? Why was it necessary that Capito should know all about it at
once? "I cannot think," says Cicero, "only that I see that Capito has
got three of the farms out of the thirteen which the murdered man
owned!" But Capito is to be produced as a witness, and Cicero gives us
to understand what sort of cross-examination he will have to undergo.

In all this the reader has to imagine much, and to come to conclusions
as to facts of which he has no evidence. When that hurried messenger was
sent, there was probably no idea of accusing the son. The two real
contrivers of the murder would have been more on their guard had they
intended such a course. It had been conceived that when the man was dead
and his goods seized, the fear of Sulla's favorite, the still customary
dread of the horrors of the time, would cause the son to shrink from
inquiry. Hitherto, when men had been killed and their goods taken, even
if the killing and the taking had not been done strictly in accordance
with Sulla's ordinance, it had been found safer to be silent and to
endure; but this poor wretch, Sextus, had friends in Rome--friends who
were friends of Sulla--of whom Chrysogonus and the Tituses had probably
not bethought themselves. When it came to pass that more stir was made
than they had expected, then the accusation became necessary.

But, in order to obtain the needed official support and aid, Chrysogonus
must be sought. Sulla was then at Volaterra, in Etruria perhaps 150
miles north-west from Rome, and with him was his favorite Chrysogonus.
In four days from the time of this murder the news was earned thither,
and, so Cicero states, by the same messenger--by Glaucia--who had taken
it to Ameria. Chrysogonus immediately saw to the selling of the goods,
and from this Cicero implies that Chrysogonus and the two Tituses were
in partnership.

But it seems that when the fact of the death of old Roscius was known at
Ameria--at which place he was an occasional resident himself, and the
most conspicuous man in the place--the inhabitants, struck with horror,
determined to send a deputation to Sulla. Something of what was being
done with their townsman's property was probably known, and there seems
to have been a desire for justice. Ten townsmen were chosen to go to
Sulla, and to beg that he would personally look into the matter. Here,
again, we are very much in the dark, because this very Capito, to whom
these farms were allotted as his share, was not only chosen to be one of
the ten, but actually became their spokesman and their manager. The
great object was to keep Sulla himself in the dark, and this Capito
managed to do by the aid of Chrysogonus. None of the ten were allowed to
see Sulla. They are hoaxed into believing that Chrysogonus himself will
look to it, and so they go back to Ameria, having achieved nothing. We
are tempted to believe that the deputation was a false deputation, each
of whom probably had his little share, so that in this way there might
be an appearance of justice. If it was so, Cicero has not chosen to tell
that part of the story, having, no doubt, some good advocate's reason
for omitting it.

So far the matter had gone with the Tituses, and with Chrysogonus who
had got his lion's share. Our poor Roscius, the victim, did at first
abandon his property, and allow himself to be awed into silence. We
cannot but think that he was a poor creature, and can fancy that he had
lived a wretched life during all the murders of the Sullan
proscriptions. But in his abject misery he had found his way up among
the great friends of his family at Rome, and had there been charged with
the parricide, because Chrysogonus and the Tituses began to be afraid of
what these great friends might do.

This is the story as Cicero has been able to tell it in his speech.
Beyond that, we only know that the man was acquitted. Whether he got
back part of his father's property there is nothing to inform us.
Whether further inquiry was made as to the murder; whether evil befell
those two Tituses or Chrysogonus was made to disgorge, there has been no
one to inform us. The matter was of little importance in Rome, where
murders and organized robberies of the kind were the common incidents of
every-day life. History would have meddled with nothing so ordinary had
not it happened that the case fell into the hands of a man so great a
master of his language that it has been worth the while of ages to
perpetuate the speech which he made in the matter. But the story, as a
story of Roman life, is interesting, and it gives a slight aid to
history in explaining the condition of things which Sulla had produced.

The attack upon Chrysogonus is bold, and cannot but have been offensive
to Sulla, though Sulla is by name absolved from immediate blame.
Chrysogonus himself, the favorite, he does not spare, saying words so
bitter of tone that one would think that the judges--Sulla's
judges--would have stopped him, had they been able. "Putting aside
Sextus Roscius," he says, "I demand, first of all, why the goods of an
esteemed citizen were sold; then, why have the goods been sold of one
who had not himself been proscribed, and who had not been killed while
defending Sulla's enemies? It is against those only that the law is
made. Then I demand why they were sold when the legal day for such sales
had passed, and why they were sold for such a trifle."[72] Then he gives
us a picture of Chrysogonus flaunting down the streets. "You have seen
him, judges, how, his locks combed and perfumed, he swims along the
Forum"--he, a freedman, with a crowd of Roman citizens at his heels,
that all may see that he thinks himself inferior to none--"the only
happy man of the day, the only one with any power in his hands."[73]

This trial was, as has been said, a "causa publica," a criminal
accusation of such importance as to demand that it should be tried
before a full bench of judges. Of these the number would be uncertain,
but they were probably above fifty. The Prætor of the day--the Prætor to
whom by lot had fallen for that year that peculiar duty--presided, and
the judges all sat round him. Their duty seems to have consisted in
listening to the pleadings, and then in voting. Each judge could
vote[74] "guilty," "acquitted," or "not proven," as they do in Scotland.
They were, in fact, jurymen rather than judges. It does not seem that
any amount of legal lore was looked for specially in the judges, who at
different periods had been taken from various orders of the citizens,
but who at this moment, by a special law enacted by Sulla, were selected
only from the Senators. We have ample evidence that at this period the
judges in Rome were most corrupt. They were tainted by a double
corruption: that of standing by their order instead of standing by the
public--each man among them feeling that his turn to be accused might
come--and that also of taking direct bribes. Cicero on various
occasions--on this, for instance, and notably in the trial of Verres, to
which we shall come soon--felt very strongly that his only means of
getting a true verdict from the majority of judges was to frighten them
into temporary honesty by the magnitude of the occasion. If a trial
could be slurred through with indifferent advocates, with nothing to
create public notice, with no efforts of genius to attract admiration,
and a large attendance and consequent sympathy the judgment would, as a
matter of course, be bought. In such a case as this of Sextus Roscius,
the poor wretch would be condemned, sewed up in his bag, and thrown into
the sea, a portion of the plunder would be divided among the judges, and
nothing further would be said about it. But if an orator could achieve
for himself such a reputation that the world would come and listen to
him, if he could so speak that Rome should be made to talk about the
trial, then might the judges be frightened into a true verdict. It may
be understood, therefore, of what importance it was to obtain the
services of a Cicero, or of a Hortensius, who was unrivalled at the
Roman bar when Cicero began to plead.

There were three special modes of oratory in which Cicero displayed his
powers. He spoke either before the judges--a large body of judges who
sat collected round the Prætor, as in the case of Sextus Roscius--or in
cases of civil law before a single judge, selected by the Prætor, who
sat with an assessor, as in the case of Roscius the actor, which shall
be mentioned just now. This was the recognized work of his life, in
which he was engaged, at any rate, in his earlier years; or he spoke to
the populace, in what was called the Concio, or assembly of the
people--speeches made before a crowd called together for a special
purpose, as were the second and third orations against Catiline; or in
the Senate, in which a political rather than a judicial sentence was
sought from the votes of the Senators. There was a fourth mode of
address, which in the days of the Emperors became common, when the
advocate spoke "ad Principem;" that is, to the Emperor himself, or to
some ruler acting for him as sole judge. It was thus that Cicero pleaded
before Cæsar for Ligarius and for King Deiotarus, in the latter years of
his life. In each of these a separate manner and a distinct line had to
be adopted, in all of which he seems to have been equally happy, and
equally powerful. In judging of his speeches, we are bound to remember
that they were not probably uttered with their words arranged as we read
them. Some of those we have were never spoken at all, as was the case
with the five last Verrene orations, and with the second, by far the
longest of the Philippics. Some, as was specially the case with the
defence of Milo, the language of which is perhaps as perfect as that of
any oration which has reached us from ancient or modern days, were only
spoken in part; so that that which we read bears but small relation to
that which was heard. All were probably retouched for publication.[75]
That words so perfect in their construction should have flowed from a
man's mouth, often with but little preparation, we cannot conceive. But
we know from the evidence of the day, and from the character which
remained of him through after Roman ages, how great was the immediate
effect of his oratory. We can imagine him, in this case of Sextus
Roscius, standing out in the open air in the Forum, with the movable
furniture of the court around him, the seats on which the judges sat
with the Prætor in the midst of them, all Senators in their white robes,
with broad purple borders. There too were seated, we may suppose on
lower benches, the friends of the accused and the supporters of the
accusation, and around, at the back of the orator, was such a crowd as
he by the character of his eloquence may have drawn to the spot. Cicero
was still a young man; but his name had made itself known and we can
imagine that some tidings had got abroad as to the bold words which
would be spoken in reference to Sulla and Chrysogonus. The scene must
have been very different from that of one of our dingy courts, in which
the ermine is made splendid only by the purity and learning of the man
who wears it. In Rome all exterior gifts were there. Cicero knew how to
use them, so that the judges who made so large a part in the pageant
should not dare to disgrace themselves because of its publicity.
Quintilian gives his pupils much advice as to the way in which they
should dress themselves[76] and hold their togas--changing the folds of
the garment so as to suit the different parts of the speech--how they
should move their arms, and hold their heads, and turn their necks; even
how they should comb their hair when they came to stand in public and
plead at the bar. All these arts, with many changes, no doubt, as years
rolled on, had come down to him from days before Cicero; but he always
refers to Cicero as though his were the palmy days of Roman eloquence.
We can well believe that Cicero had studied many of these arts by his
twenty-seventh year--that he knew how to hold his toga and how to drop
it--how to make the proper angle with his elbow--how to comb his hair,
and yet not be a fop--and to add to the glory of his voice all the
personal graces which were at his command.

Sextus Roscius Amerinus, with all his misfortunes, injustices, and
miseries, is now to us no more than the name of a fable; but to those
who know it, the fable is, I think, more attractive than most novels.

We know that Cicero pleaded other causes before he went to Greece in the
year 79 B.C., especially those for Publius Quintius, of which we have
his speech, and that for a lady of Arretium, in which he defended her
right to be regarded as a free woman of that city. In this speech he
again attacked Sulla, the rights of the lady in question having been
placed in jeopardy by an enactment made by the Dictator; and again
Cicero was successful. This is not extant. Then he started on his
travels, as to which I have already spoken. While he was absent Sulla
died, and the condition of the Republic during his absence was anything
but hopeful. Lepidus was Consul during these two years, than whom no
weaker officer ever held rule in Rome--or rebelled against Rome; and
Sertorius, who was in truth a great man, was in arms against Rome in
Spain, as a rebel, though he was in truth struggling to create a new
Roman power, which should be purer than that existing in Italy. What
Cicero thought of the condition of his country at this time we have no
means of knowing. If he then wrote letters, they have not been
preserved. His spoken words speak plainly enough of the condition of the
courts of law, and let us know how resolved he was to oppose himself to
their iniquities. A young man may devote himself to politics with as
much ardor as a senior, but he cannot do so if he be intent on a
profession. It is only when his business is so well grasped by him as to
sit easily on him, that he is able to undertake the second occupation.

There is a rumor that Cicero, when he returned home from Greece, thought
for awhile of giving himself up to philosophy, so that he was called
Greek and Sophist in ridicule. It is not, however, to be believed that
he ever for a moment abandoned the purpose he had formed for his own
career. It will become evident as we go on with his life, that this
so-called philosophy of the Greeks was never to him a matter of more
than interesting inquiry. A full, active, human life, in which he might
achieve for himself all the charms of high rank, gilded by intelligence,
erudition, and refined luxury, in which also he might serve his country,
his order, and his friends--just such a life as our leading men propose
to themselves here, to-day, in our country--this is what Cicero had
determined to achieve from his earliest years, and it was not likely
that he should be turned from it by the pseudo logic of Greek
philosophers. That the logic even of the Academy was false to him we
have ample evidence, not only in his life but in his writings. There is
a story that, during his travels, he consulted the oracle at Delphi as
to his future career, and that on being told that he must look to his
own genius and not to the opinion of the world at large, he determined
to abandon the honors of the Republic. That he should have talked among
the young men of the day of his philosophic investigations till they
laughed at him and gave him a nickname, may be probable, but it cannot
have been that he ever thought of giving up the bar.

In the year of his return to Rome, when he was thirty, he married
Terentia, a noble lady, of whom we are informed that she had a good
fortune, and that her sister was one of the Vestal Virgins.[77] Her
nobility is inferred from the fact that the virgins were, as a rule,
chosen from the noble families, though the law required only that they
should be the daughters of free parents, and of persons engaged in no
mean pursuits. As to the more important question of Terentia's fortune
there has never been a doubt. Plutarch, however, does not make it out to
have been very great, assuming a sum which was equal to about £4200 of
our money. He tells us at the same time that Cicero's own fortune was
less than £4000. But in both of these statements, Plutarch, who was
forced to take his facts where he could get them, and was not very
particular in his authority, probably erred. The early education of
Cicero, and the care taken to provide him with all that money could
purchase, is, I think, conclusive of his father's wealth; and the mode
of life adopted by Cicero shows that at no period did he think it
necessary to live as men do live with small incomes.

We shall find, as we go on, that he spent his money freely, as men did
at Rome who had the command of large means. We are aware that he was
often in debt. We find that from his letters. But he owed money not as a
needy man does, but as one who is speculative, sanguine, and quite
confident of his own resources. The management of incomes was not so
fixed a thing then as it is with us now. Speculation was even more
rampant, and rising men were willing and were able to become indebted
for enormous sums, having no security to offer but the promise of their
future career. Cæsar's debts during various times of his life were
proverbial. He is said to have owed over £300,000 before he reached his
first step in the public employment. Cicero rushed into no such danger
as this. We know, indeed, that when the time came to him for public
expenditure on a great scale, as, for instance, when he was filling the
office of Ædile, he kept within bounds, and he did not lavish money
which he did not possess. We know also that he refrained, altogether
refrained, from the iniquitous habits of making large fortunes which
were open to the great politicians of the Republic. To be Quæstor that
he might be Ædile, Ædile that he might be Prætor and Consul, and Prætor
and Consul that he might rob a province--pillage Sicily, Spain, or Asia,
and then at last come back a rich man, rich enough to cope with all his
creditors, and to bribe the judges should he be accused for his
misdeeds--these were the usual steps to take by enterprising Romans
toward power, wealth, and enjoyment. But it will be observed, in this
sequence of circumstances, the robbery of the province was essential to
success. This was sometimes done after so magnificent a fashion as to
have become an immortal fact in history. The instance of Verres will be
narrated in the next chapter but one. Something of moderation was more
general, so that the fleeced provincial might still live, and prefer
sufferance to the doubtful chances of recovery. A Proconsul might rob a
great deal, and still return with hands apparently clean, bringing with
him a score of provincial Deputies to laud his goodness before the
citizens at home. But Cicero robbed not at all. Even they who have been
most hard upon his name, accusing him of insincerity and sometimes of
want of patriotism, because his Roman mode of declaring himself without
reserve in his letters has been perpetuated for us by the excellence of
their language, even they have acknowledged that he kept his hands
studiously clean in the service of his country, when to have clean hands
was so peculiar as to be regarded as absurd.

There were other means in which a noble Roman might make money, and
might do so without leaving the city. An orator might be paid for his
services as an advocate. Cicero, had such a trade been opened to him,
might have made almost any sum to which his imagination could have
stretched itself. Such a trade was carried on to a very great extent. It
was illegal, such payment having been forbidden by the "Lex Cincia De
Muneribus," passed more than a century before Cicero began his
pleadings.[78] But the law had become a dead letter in the majority of
cases. There can be no doubt that Hortensius, the predecessor and great
rival of Cicero, took presents, if not absolute payment. Indeed, the
myth of honorary work, which is in itself absurd, was no more
practicable in Rome than it has been found to be in England, where every
barrister is theoretically presumed to work for nothing. That the "Lex
Cincia," as far as the payment of advocates went, was absurd, may be
allowed by us all. Services for which no regular payment can be exacted
will always cost more than those which have a defined price. But Cicero
would not break the law. It has been hinted rather than stated that he,
like other orators of the day, had his price. He himself tells us that
he took nothing; and no instance has been adduced that he had ever done
so. He is free enough in accusing Hortensius of having accepted a
beautiful statuette, an ivory sphinx of great value. What he knew of
Hortensius, Hortensius would have known of him, had it been there to
know; and what Hortensius or others had heard would certainly have been
told. As far as we can learn, there is no ground for accusing Cicero of
taking fees or presents beyond the probability that he would do so. I
think we are justified in believing that he did not do so, because those
who watched his conduct closely found no opportunity of exposing him.
That he was paid by different allied States for undertaking their
protection in the Senate, is probable, such having been a custom not
illegal. We know that he was specially charged with the affairs of
Dyrrachium, and had probably amicable relations with other allied
communities. This, however, must have been later in life, when his name
was sufficiently high to insure the value of his services, and when he
was a Senator.

Noble Romans also--noble as they were, and infinitely superior to the
little cares of trade--were accustomed to traffic very largely in usury.
We shall have a terrible example of such baseness on the part of
Brutus--that Brutus whom we have been taught to regard as almost on a
par with Cato in purity. To lend money to citizens, or more profitably
to allied States and cities, at enormous rates of interest, was the
ordinary resource of a Roman nobleman in quest of revenue. The allied
city, when absolutely eaten to the bone by one noble Roman, who had
plundered it as Proconsul or Governor, would escape from its immediate
embarrassment by borrowing money from another noble Roman, who would
then grind its very bones in exacting his interest and his principal.
Cicero, in the most perfect of his works--the treatise De Officiis, an
essay in which he instructs his son as to the way in which a man should
endeavor to live so as to be a gentleman--inveighs both against trade
and usury. When he tells us that they are to be accounted mean who buy
in order that they may sell, we, with our later lights, do not quite
agree with him, although he founds his assertion on an idea which is too
often supported by the world's practice, namely, that men cannot do a
retail business profitably without lying.[79] The doctrine, however, has
always been common that retail trade is not compatible with noble
bearing, and was practised by all Romans who aspired to be considered
among the upper classes. That other and certainly baser means of making
money by usury was, however, only too common. Crassus, the noted rich
man of Rome in Cæsar's day, who was one of the first Triumvirate, and
who perished ignominiously in Parthia, was known to have gathered much
of his wealth by such means. But against this Cicero is as staunchly
severe as against shopkeeping. "First of all," he says, "these profits
are despicable which incur the hatred of men, such as those of gatherers
of custom and lenders of money on usury."[80]

Again, we are entitled to say that Cicero did not condescend to enrich
himself by the means which he himself condemns, because, had he done so,
the accusations made against him by his contemporaries would have
reached our ears. Nor is it probable that a man in addressing his son as
to rules of life would have spoken against a method of gathering riches
which, had he practised it himself, must have been known to his son. His
rules were severe as compared with the habits of the time. His dear
friend Atticus did not so govern his conduct, or Brutus, who, when he
wrote the De Officiis, was only less dear to him than Atticus. But
Cicero himself seems to have done so faithfully. We learn from his
letter that he owned house-property in Rome to a considerable extent,
having probably thus invested his own money or that of his wife. He
inherited also the family house at Arpinum. He makes it a matter for
boasting that he had received in the course of his life by legacies
nearly £200,000 (twenty million sesterces), in itself a source of great
income, and one common with Romans of high position.[81] Of the extent
of his income it is impossible to speak, or even make a guess. But we do
know that he lived always as a rich man--as one who regards such a
condition of life as essentially proper to him; and that though he was
often in debt, as was customary with noble Romans, he could always write
about his debts in a vein of pleasantry, showing that they were not a
heavy burden to him; and we know that he could at all times command for
himself villas, books, statues, ornaments, columns, galleries, charming
shades, and all the delicious appendages of mingled wealth and
intelligence. He was as might be some English marquis, who, though up to
his eyes in mortgages, is quite sure that he will never want any of the
luxuries befitting a marquis. Though we have no authority to tell us how
his condition of life became what it was, it is necessary that we should
understand that condition if we are to get a clear insight into his
life. Of that condition we have ample evidence. He commenced his career
as a youth upon whose behalf nothing was spared, and when he settled
himself in Rome, with the purport of winning for himself the highest
honors of the Republic, he did so with the means of living like a
nobleman.

But the point on which it is most necessary to insist is this: that
while so many--I may almost say all around him in his own order--were
unscrupulous as to their means of getting money, he kept his hands
clean. The practice then was much as it is now. A gentleman in our days
is supposed to have his hands clean; but there has got abroad among us a
feeling that, only let a man rise high enough, soil will not stick to
him. To rob is base; but if you rob enough, robbery will become heroism,
or, at any rate, magnificence. With Cæsar his debts have been accounted
happy audacity; his pillage of Gaul and Spain, and of Rome also, have
indicated only the success of the great General; his cruelty, which in
cold-blooded efficiency has equalled if not exceeded the
blood-thirstiness of any other tyrant, has been called clemency.[82] I
do not mean to draw a parallel between Cæsar and Cicero. No two men
could have been more different in their natures or in their career. But
the one has been lauded because he was unscrupulous, and the other has
incurred reproach because, at every turn and twist in his life, scruples
dominated him. I do not say that he always did what he thought to be
right. A man who doubts much can never do that. The thing that was right
to him in the thinking became wrong to him in the doing. That from which
he has shrunk as evil when it was within his grasp, takes the color of
good when it has been beyond his reach. Cicero had not the stuff in him
to rule the Rome and the Romans of his period; but he was a man whose
hands were free from all stain, either of blood or money; and for so
much let him, at any rate, have the credit.

Between the return of Cicero to Rome in 77 B.C. and his election as
Quæstor in 75, in which period he married Terentia, he made various
speeches in different causes, of which only one remains to us, or
rather, a small part of one. This is notable as having been spoken in
behalf of that Roscius, the great comic actor, whose name has become
familiar to us on account of his excellence, almost as have those of
Garrick, of Siddons, and of Talma. It was a pleading as to the value of
a slave, and the amount of pecuniary responsibility attaching to Roscius
on account of the slave, who had been murdered when in his charge. As to
the murder, no question is made. The slave was valuable, and the injury
done to his master was a matter of importance. He, having been a slave,
could have no stronger a claim for an injury done to himself than would
a dog or a horse. The slave, whose name was Panurge--a name which has
since been made famous as having been borrowed by Rabelais, probably
from this occurrence, and given to his demon of mischief--showed
aptitude for acting, and was therefore valuable. Then one Flavius killed
him; why or how we do not know; and, having killed him, settled with
Roscius for the injury by giving him a small farm. But Roscius had only
borrowed or hired the man from one Chærea--or was in partnership with
Chærea as to the man--and on that account paid something out of the
value of the farm for the loss incurred; but the owner was not
satisfied, and after a lapse of time made a further claim. Hence arose
the action, in pleading which Cicero was successful. In the fragment we
have of the speech there is nothing remarkable except the studied
clearness of the language; but it reminds us of the opinion which Cicero
had expressed of this actor in the oration which he made for Publius
Quintius, who was the brother-in-law of Roscius. "He is such an actor,"
says Cicero, "that there is none other on the stage worthy to be seen;
and such a man that among men he is the last that should have become an
actor."[83] The orator's praise of the actor is not of much importance.
Had not Roscius been great in his profession, his name would not have
come down to later ages. Nor is it now matter of great interest that the
actor should have been highly praised as a man by his advocate; but it
is something for us to know that the stage was generally held in such
low repute as to make it seem to be a pity that a good man should have
taken himself to such a calling.

In the year 76 B.C. Cicero became father of a daughter, whom we shall
know as Tullia--who, as she grew up, became the one person whom he loved
best in all the world--and was elected Quæstor. Cicero tells us of
himself that in the preceding year he had solicited the Quæstorship,
when Cotta was candidate for the Consulship and Hortensius for the
Prætorship. There are in the dialogue De Claris Oratoribus--which has
had the name of Brutus always given to it--some passages in which the
orator tells us more of himself than in any other of his works. I will
annex a translation of a small portion because of its intrinsic
interest; but I will relegate it to an appendix, because it is too long
either for insertion in the text or for a note.[84]




CHAPTER V.

_CICERO AS QUÆSTOR._


Cicero was elected Quæstor in his thirtieth year, B.C. 76. He was then
nearly thirty-one. His predecessors and rivals at the bar, Cotta and
Hortensius, were elected Consul and Prætor, respectively, in the same
year. To become Quæstor at the earliest age allowed by the law (at
thirty-one, namely) was the ambition of the Roman advocate who purposed
to make his fortune by serving the State. To act as Quæstor in his
thirty-second year, Ædile in his thirty-seventh, Prætor in his
forty-first, and Consul in his forty-fourth year, was to achieve, in the
earliest succession allowed by law, all the great offices of trust,
power, and future emolument. The great reward of proconsular rapine did
not generally come till after the last step, though there were notable
instances in which a Proprætor with proconsular authority could make a
large fortune, as we shall learn when we come to deal with Verres, and
though Ædiles, and even Quæstors, could find pickings. It was therefore
a great thing for a man to begin as early as the law would permit, and
to lose as few years as possible in reaching the summit. Cicero lost
none. As he himself tells us in the passage to which I have referred in
the last chapter, and which is to be found in the Appendix, he gained
the good-will of men--that is, of free Romans who had the suffrage, and
who could therefore vote either for him or against him--by the assiduity
of his attention to the cases which he undertook, and by a certain
brilliancy of speech which was new to them.[85] Putting his hand
strenuously to the plough, allowing himself to be diverted by none of
those luxuries to which Romans of his day were so wont to give way, he
earned his purpose by a resolution to do his very best. He was "Novus
Homo"--a man, that is, belonging to a family of which no member had as
yet filled high office in the State. Against such there was a strong
prejudice with the aristocracy, who did not like to see the good things
of the Republic dispersed among an increased number of hands. The power
of voting was common to all Roman male citizens; but the power of
influencing the electors had passed very much into the hands of the
rich. The admiration which Cicero had determined to elicit would not go
very far, unless it could be produced in a very high degree. A Verres
could get himself made Prætor; a Lepidus some years since could receive
the Consulship; or now an Antony, or almost a Catiline. The candidate
would borrow money on the security of his own audacity, and would thus
succeed--perhaps with some minor gifts of eloquence, if he could achieve
them. With all this, the borrowing and the spending of money, that is,
with direct bribery, Cicero would have nothing to do; but of the art of
canvassing--that art by which he could at the moment make himself
beloved by the citizens who had a vote to give--he was a profound
master.

There is a short treatise, De Petitione Consulatus, on canvassing for
the Consulship, of which mention may be made here, because all the
tricks of the trade were as essential to him, when looking to be
Quæstor, as when he afterward desired to be Consul, and because the
political doings of his life will hurry us on too quickly in the days of
his Consulship to admit of our referring to these lessons. This little
piece, of which we have only a fragment, is supposed to have been
addressed to Cicero by his brother Quintus, giving fraternal advice as
to the then coming great occasion. The critics say that it was retouched
by the orator himself. The reader who has studied Cicero's style will
think that the retouching went to a great extent, or that the two
brothers were very like each other in their power of expression.

The first piece of advice was no doubt always in Cicero's mind, not only
when he looked for office, but whenever he addressed a meeting of his
fellow-citizens. "Bethink yourself what is this Republic; what it is you
seek to be in it, and who you are that seek it. As you go down daily to
the Forum, turn the answer to this in your mind: 'Novus sum; consulatum
peto; Roma est'--'I am a man of an untried family. It is the Consulship
that I seek. It is Rome in which I seek it.'" Though the condition of
Rome was bad, still to him the Republic was the greatest thing in the
world, and to be Consul in that Republic the highest honor which the
world could give.

There is nobility in that, but there is very much that is ignoble in the
means of canvassing which are advocated. I cannot say that they are as
yet too ignoble for our modern use here in England, but they are too
ignoble to be acknowledged by our candidates themselves, or by their
brothers on their behalf. Cicero, not having progressed far enough in
modern civilization to have studied the beauty of truth, is held to be
false and hypocritical. We who know so much more than he did, and have
the doctrine of truth at our fingers' ends, are wise enough to declare
nothing of our own shortcomings, but to attribute such malpractices only
to others. "It is a good thing to be thought worthy of the rank we seek
by those who are in possession of it." Make yourself out to be an
aristocrat, he means. "Canvass them, and cotton to them. Make them
believe that in matters of politics you have always been with the
aristocracy, never with the mob;" that if "you have at all spoken a word
in public to tickle the people, you have done so for the sake of gaining
Pompey." As to this, it is necessary to understand Pompey's peculiar
popularity at the moment, both with the Liberals and with the
Conservatives. "Above all, see that you have with you the 'jeunesse
dorée.' They carry so much! There are many with you already. Take care
that they shall know how much you think of them."

He is especially desired to make known to the public the iniquities of
Catiline, his opponent, as to whom Quintus says that, though he has
lately been acquitted in regard to his speculations in Africa, he has
had to bribe the judges so highly that he is now as poor as they were
before they got their plunder. At every word we read we are tempted to
agree with Mommsen that on the Roman oligarchy of the period no judgment
can be passed save one, "of inexorable condemnation."[86]

"Remember," says Quintus, "that your candidature is very strong in that
kind of friendship which has been created by your pleadings. Take care
that each of those friends shall know what special business is allotted
to him on the occasion; and as you have not troubled any of them yet,
make them understand that you have reserved for the present moment the
payment of their debts." This is all very well; but the next direction
mingles so much of business with its truth, that no one but Machiavelli
or Quintus Cicero could have expressed it in words. "Men," says Quintus,
"are induced to struggle for us in these canvassings by three
motives--by memory of kindness done, by the hope of kindness to come,
and by community of political conviction. You must see how you are to
catch each of these. Small favors will induce a man to canvass for you;
and they who owe their safety to your pleadings, for there are many
such, are aware that if they do not stand by you now they will be
regarded by all the world as sorry fellows. Nevertheless, they should be
made to feel that, as they are indebted to you, you will be glad to have
an opportunity of becoming indebted to them. But as to those on whom you
have a hold only by hope--a class of men very much more numerous, and
likely to be very much more active--they are the men whom you should
make to understand that your assistance will be always at their
command."

How severe, how difficult was the work of canvassing in Rome, we learn
from these lessons. It was the very essence of a great Roman's life that
he should live in public; and to such an extent was this carried that we
wonder how such a man as Cicero found time for the real work of his
life. The Roman patron was expected to have a levee every morning early
in his own house, and was wont, when he went down into the Forum, to be
attended by a crowd of parasites. This had become so much a matter of
course that a public man would have felt himself deserted had he been
left alone either at home or abroad. Rome was full of idlers--of men who
got their bread by the favors of the great, who lounged through their
lives--political quidnuncs, who made canvassing a trade--men without a
conviction, but who believed in the ascendency of this or the other
leader, and were ready to fawn or to fight in the streets, as there
might be need. These were the Quirites of the day--men who were in truth
fattened on the leavings of the plunder which was extracted from the
allies; for it was the case now that a Roman was content to live on the
industry of those whom his father had conquered. They would still fight
in the legions; but the work of Rome was done by slaves, and the wealth
of Rome was robbed from the Provinces. Hence it came about that there
was a numerous class, to whom the name "assectatores" was given, who of
course became specially prominent at elections. Quintus divides all such
followers into three kinds, and gives instructions as to the special
treatment to be applied to each. "There are those who come to pay their
respects to you at your own house"--"Salutatores" they were called;
"then those who go down with you into the Forum"--"Deductores;" "and
after these the third, the class of constant followers"--"Assectatores,"
as they were specially named. "As to the first, who are the least in
consequence, and who, according to our present ways of living, come in
great numbers, you should take care to let them know that their doing
even so much as this is much esteemed by you. Let them perceive that you
note it when they come, and say as much to their friends, who will
repeat your words. Tell themselves often if it be possible. In this way
men, when there are many candidates, will observe that there is one who
has his eyes open to these courtesies, and they will give themselves
heart and soul to him, neglecting all others. And mind you, when you
find that a man does but pretend, do not let him perceive that you have
perceived it. Should any one wish to excuse himself, thinking that he is
suspected of indifference, swear that you have never doubted him, nor
had occasion to doubt.

"As to the work of the 'Deductores,' who go out with you--as it is much
more severe than that of those who merely come to pay their compliments,
let them understand that you feel it to be so, and, as far as possible,
be ready to go into town with them at fixed hours." Quintus here means
that the "Deductores" are not to be kept waiting for the patron longer
than can be helped. "The attendance of a daily crowd in taking you down
to the Forum gives a great show of character and dignity.

"Then come the band of followers which accompanies you diligently
wherever you go. As to those who do this without special obligation,
take care that they should know how much you think of them. From those
who owe it to you as a duty, exact it rigorously. See that they who can
come themselves do come themselves, and that they who cannot, send
others in their places." What an idea does this give as to the labor of
a candidate in Rome! I ca

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