[Transcriber's Note:]

THE

LIFE OF CICERO

BY

ANTHONY TROLLOPE

IN TWO VOLUMES
Vol. II.

NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE
1881

[ VOLUME I.]

CONTENTS OF VOLUME II.

[a]

THE

LIFE OF CICERO.

Chapter I.

HIS RETURN FROM EXILE.

Cicero's life for the next two years was made conspicuous by a series of speeches which were produced by his exile and his return. These are remarkable for the praise lavished on himself, and by the violence with which he attacked his enemies. It must be owned that never was abuse more abusive, or self-praise uttered in language more laudatory. [1] Cicero had now done all that was useful in his public life. The great monuments of his literature are to come. None of these had as yet been written except a small portion of his letters—about a tenth—and of these he thought no more in regard to the public than do any ordinary letter-writers of to-day. Some poems had been produced, and a history of his own Consulship in Greek; but these are unknown to us. He had already become the greatest orator, perhaps, of all time—and we have many of the speeches spoken by him. Some we have—those five, namely, telling the story of Verres—not intended to be spoken, but written for the occasion of the day rather than with a view to permanent literature. He had been Quæstor, Ædile, Prætor, and Consul, with singular and undeviating success. He had been honest in the exercise of public functions when to be honest was to be singular. He had bought golden opinions from all sorts of people. He had been true to his country, and useful also—a combination which it was given to no other public man of those days to achieve. Having been Prætor and Consul, he had refused the accustomed rewards, and had abstained from the provinces. His speeches, with but few exceptions, had hitherto been made in favor of honesty. They are declamations against injustice, against bribery, against cruelty, and all on behalf of decent civilized life. Had he died then, he would not have become the hero of literature, the marvel among men of letters whom the reading world admires; but he would have been a great man, and would have saved himself from the bitterness of Cæsarean tongues.

His public work was in truth done. His further service consisted of the government of Cilicia for a year—an employment that was odious to him, though his performance of it was a blessing to the province. After that there came the vain struggle with Cæsar, the attempt to make the best of Cæsar victorious, the last loud shriek on behalf of the Republic, and then all was over. The fourteen years of life which yet remained to him sufficed for erecting that literary monument of which I have spoken, but his public usefulness was done. To the reader of his biography it will seem that these coming fourteen years will lack much of the grace which adorned the last twenty. The biographer will be driven to make excuses, which he will not do without believing in the truth of them, but doubting much whether he may beget belief in others. He thinks that he can see the man passing from one form to another—his doubting devotion to Pompey, his enforced adherence to Cæsar, his passionate opposition to Antony; but he can still see him true to his country, and ever on the alert against tyranny and on behalf of pure patriotism.

At the present we have to deal with Cicero in no vacillating spirit, but loudly exultant and loudly censorious. Within the two years following his return he made a series of speeches, in all of which we find the altered tone of his mind. There is no longer that belief in the ultimate success of justice, and ultimate triumph of the Republic, which glowed in his Verrine and Catiline orations. He is forced to descend in his aspirations. It is not whether Rome shall be free, or the bench of justice pure, but whether Cicero shall be avenged and Gabinius punished. It may have been right—it was right—that Cicero should be avenged and Gabinius punished; but it must be admitted that the subjects are less alluring.

His first oration, as generally received, was made to the Senate in honor of his return. The second was addressed to the people on the same subject. The third was spoken to the college of priests, with the view of recovering the ground on which his house had stood, and which Clodius had attempted to alienate forever by dedicating it to a pretended religious purpose. The next, as coming on our list, though not so in time, was addressed again to the Senate concerning official reports made by the public soothsayers as interpreters of occult signs, as to whether certain portents had been sent by the gods to show that Cicero ought not to have back his house. Before this was made he had defended Sextius, who as Tribune had been peculiarly serviceable in assisting his return. This was before a bench of judges; and separated from this, though made apparently at the same time, is a violent attack upon Vatinius, one of Cæsar's creatures, who was a witness against Sextius. Then there is a seventh, regarding the disposition of the provinces among the Proprætors and Proconsuls, the object of which was to enforce the recall of Piso from Macedonia and Gabinius from Syria, and to win Cæsar's favor by showing that Cæsar should be allowed to keep the two Gauls and Illyricum. To these must be added two others, made within the same period, for Cælius and Balbus. The close friendship between Cicero and the young man Cælius was one of the singular details of the orator's life. Balbus was a Spaniard, attached to Cæsar, and remarkable as having been the first man not an Italian who achieved the honor of the Consulship.

It has been disputed whether the first four of these orations were really the work of Cicero, certain German critics and English scholars having declared them to be "parum Ciceronias"—too little like Cicero. That is the phrase used by Nobbe, who published a valuable edition of all Cicero's works, after the text of Ernesti, in a single volume. Mr. Long, in his introduction to these orations, denounces them in language so strong as to rob them of all chance of absolute acceptance from those who know the accuracy of Mr. Long's scholarship.[2] There may probably have been subsequent interpolations. The first of the four, however, is so closely referred to by Cicero himself in the speech made by him two years subsequently in the defence of Plancius, that the fact of an address to the Senate in the praise of those who had assisted him in his return cannot be doubted; and we are expressly told by the orator that, because of the importance of the occasion, he had written it out before he spoke it.[3] As to the Latinity, it is not within my scope, nor indeed within my power, to express a confident opinion; but as to the matter of the speech, I think that Cicero, in his then frame of mind, might have uttered what is attributed to him. Having said so much, I shall best continue my narrative by dealing with the four speeches as though they were genuine.

b.c. 57, ætat. 50.

Cicero landed at Brundisium on the 5th of August, the day on which his recall from exile had been enacted by the people, and there met his daughter Tullia, who had come to welcome him back to Italy on that her birthday. But she had come as a widow, having just lost her first husband, Piso Frugi. At this time she was not more than nineteen years old. Of Tullia's feelings we know nothing from her own expressions, as they have not reached us; but from the warmth of her father's love for her, and by the closeness of their friendship, we are led to imagine that the joy of her life depended more on him than on any of her three husbands. She did not live long with either of them, and died soon after the birth of a child, having been divorced from the third. I take it, there was much of triumph in the meeting, though Piso Frugi had died so lately.

The return of Cicero to Rome was altogether triumphant. It must be remembered that the contemporary accounts we have had of it are altogether from his own pen. They are taken chiefly from the orations I have named above, though subsequent allusions to the glory of his return to Rome are not uncommon in his works. But had his boasting not been true, the contradictions to them would have been made in such a way as to have reached our ears. Plutarch, indeed, declares that Cicero's account of the glory of his return fell short of the truth.

It may be taken for granted that with that feeble monster, the citizen populace of Rome, Cicero had again risen to a popularity equal to that which had been bestowed upon him when he had just driven Catiline out of Rome. Of what nature were the crowds who were thus loud in the praise of their great Consul, and as loud afterward in their rejoicings at the return of the great exile, we must form our own opinion from circumstantial evidence. There was a mass of people, with keen ears taking artistic delight in eloquence and in personal graces, but determined to be idle, and to be fed as well as amused in their idleness; and there were also vast bands of men ready to fight—bands of gladiators they have been called, though it is probable that but few of them had ever been trained to the arena—whose business it was to shout as well as to fight on behalf of their patrons. We shall not be justified in supposing that those who on the two occasions named gave their sweet voices for Cicero were only the well-ordered, though idle, proportion of the people, whereas they who had voted against him in favor of Clodius had all been assassins, bullies, and swordsmen. We shall probably be nearer the mark if we imagine that the citizens generally were actuated by the prevailing feelings of their leaders at the moment, but were carried into enthusiasm when enabled, without detriment to their interests, to express their feelings for one who was in truth popular with them. When Cicero, after the death of the five conspirators, declared that the men "had lived"—"vixerunt"—his own power was sufficient to insure the people that they would be safe in praising him. When he came back to Rome, Pompey had been urgent for his return, and Cæsar had acceded to it. When the bill was passed for banishing him, the Triumvirate had been against him, and Clodius had been able to hound on his crew. But Milo also had a crew, and Milo was Cicero's friend. As the Clodian crew helped to drive Cicero from Rome, so did Milo's crew help to bring him back again.

Cicero, on reaching Rome, went at once to the Capitol, to the temple of Jupiter, and there returned thanks for the great thing that had been done for him. He was accompanied by a vast procession who from the temple went with him to his brother's house, where he met his wife, and where he resided for a time. His own house in the close neighborhood had been destroyed. He reached Rome on the 4th of September, and on the 5th an opportunity was given to the then hero of the day for expressing his thanks to the Senate for what they had done for him. His intellect had not grown rusty in Macedonia, though he had been idle. On the 5th, Cicero spoke to the Senate; on the 6th, to the people. Before the end of the month he made a much longer speech to the priests in defence of his own property. Out of the full heart the mouth speaks, and his heart was very full of the subject.

His first object was to thank the Senate and the leading members of it for their goodness to him. The glowing language in which this is done goes against the grain with us when we read continuously the events of his life as told by himself. His last grievous words had been expressions of despair addressed to Atticus; now he breaks out into a pæan of triumph. We have to remember that eight months had intervened, and that the time had sufficed to turn darkness into light. "If I cannot thank you as I ought, O Conscript Fathers, for the undying favors which you have conferred on me, on my brother, and my children, ascribe it, I beseech you, to the greatness of the things you have done for me, and not to the defect of my virtue." Then he praises the two Consuls, naming them, Lentulus and Metellus—Metellus, as the reader will remember, having till lately been his enemy. He lauds the Prætors and the Tribunes, two of the latter members having opposed his return; but he is loudest in praise of Pompey—that "Sampsiceramus," that "Hierosolymarius," that "Arabarches" into whose character he had seen so clearly when writing from Macedonia to Atticus—that "Cn. Pompey who, by his valor, his glory, his achievements, stands conspicuously the first of all nations, of all ages, of all history." We cannot but be angry when we read the words, though we may understand how well he understood that he was impotent to do anything for the Republic unless he could bring such a man as Pompey to act with him. We must remember, too, how impossible it was that one Roman should rise above the falsehood common to Romans. We cannot ourselves always escape even yet from the atmosphere of duplicity in which policy delights. He describes the state of Rome in his absence. "When I was gone, you"—you, the Senate—"could decree nothing for your citizens, or for your allies, or for the dependent kings. The judges could give no judgment; the people could not record their votes; the Senate availed nothing by its authority. You saw only a silent Forum, a speechless Senate-house, a city dumb and deserted." We may suppose that Rome was what Cicero described it to be when he was in exile, and Cæsar had gone to his provinces; but its condition had been the result of the crushing tyranny of the Triumvirate rather than of Cicero's absence.

Lentulus, the present Consul, had been, he says, a second father, almost a god, to him. But he would not have needed the hand of a Consul to raise him from the ground, had he not been wounded by consular hands. Catulus, one of Rome's best citizens, had told him that though Rome had now and again suffered from a bad Consul, she had never before been afflicted by two together. While there was one Consul worthy of the name, Catulus had declared that Cicero would be safe. But there had come two, two together, whose spirits had been so narrow, so low, so depraved, so burdened with greed and ignorance, "that they had been unable to comprehend, much less to sustain the splendor of the name of Consul. Not Consuls were they, but buyers and sellers of provinces." These were Piso and Gabinius, of whom the former was now governor of Macedonia, and the latter of Syria. Cicero's scorn against these men, who as Consuls had permitted his exile, became a passion with him. His subsequent hatred of Antony was not as bitter. He had come there to thank the assembled Senators for their care of him, but he is carried off so violently by his anger that he devotes a considerable portion of his speech to these indignant utterances. The reader does not regret it. Abuse makes better reading than praise, has a stronger vitality, and seems, alas, to come more thoroughly from the heart! Those who think that genuine invective has its charms would ill spare Piso and Gabinius.

He goes back to his eulogy, and names various Prætors and officers who have worked on his behalf. Then he declares that by the view of the present Consul, Lentulus, a decree has been passed in his favor more glorious than has been awarded to any other single Roman citizen—namely that from all Italy those who wished well to their country should be collected together for the purpose of bringing him back from his banishment—him, Cicero. There is much in this in praise of Lentulus, but more in praise of Cicero. Throughout these orations we feel that Cicero is put forward as the hero, whereas Piso and Gabinius are the demons of the piece. "What could I leave as a richer legacy to my posterity," he goes on to say, opening another clause of his speech, "than that the Senate should have decreed that the citizen who had not come forward in my defence was one regardless of the Republic." By these boastings, though he was at the moment at the top of the ladder of popularity, he was offending the self-importance of all around him. He was offending especially Pompey, with whom it was his fate to have to act.[4] But that was little to the offence he was giving to those who were to come many centuries after him, who would not look into the matter with sufficient accuracy to find that his vanity deserved forgiveness because of his humanity and desire for progress. "O Lentulus," he says, at the end of the oration, "since I am restored to the Republic, as with me the Republic is itself restored, I will slacken nothing in my efforts at liberty; but, if it may be possible, will add something to my energy." In translating a word here and there as I have done, I feel at every expression my incapacity. There is no such thing as good translation. If you wish to drink the water, with its life and vigor in it, you must go to the fountain and drink it there.

On the day following he made a similar speech to the people—if, indeed, the speech we have was from his mouth or his pen—as to which it has been remarked that in it he made no allusion to Clodius, though he was as bitter as ever against the late Consuls. From this we may gather that, though his audience was delighted to hear him, even in his self-praise, there might have been dispute had he spoken ill of one who had been popular as Tribune. His praise of Pompey was almost more fulsome than that of the day before, and the same may be said of his self-glorification. Of his brother's devotion to him he speaks in touching words, but in words which make us remember how untrue to him afterward was that very brother. There are phrases so magnificent throughout this short piece that they obtain from us, as they are read, forgiveness for the writer's faults. "Sic ulciscar facinorum singula." Let the reader of Latin turn to chapter ix. of the oration and see how the speaker declares that he will avenge himself against the evil-doers whom he has denounced.

Cicero, though he had returned triumphant, had come back ruined in purse, except so far as he could depend on the Senate and the people for reimbursing to him the losses to which he had been subjected. The decree of the Senate had declared that his goods should be returned to him, but the validity of such a promise would depend on the value which might be put upon the goods in question. His house on the Palatine Hill had been razed to the ground; his Tusculan and Formian villas had been destroyed; his books, his pictures, his marble columns, his very trees, had been stolen; but, worst of all, an attempt had been made to deprive him forever of the choicest spot of ground in all the city, the Park Lane of Rome, by devoting the space which had belonged to him to the service of one of the gods. Clodius had caused something of a temple to Liberty to be built there, because ground so consecrated was deemed at Rome, as with us, to be devoted by consecration to the perpetual service of religion. It was with the view of contesting this point that Cicero made his next speech, Pro Domo Sua, for the recovery of his house, before the Bench of Priests in Rome. It was for the priests to decide this question. The Senate could decree the restitution of property generally, but it was necessary that that spot of ground should be liberated from the thraldom of sacerdotal tenure by sacerdotal interference. These priests were all men of high birth and distinction in the Republic. Nineteen among them were "Consulares," or past-Consuls. Superstitious awe affects more lightly the consciences of priests than the hearts of those who trust the priests for their guidance. Familiarity does breed contempt. Cicero, in making this speech, probably felt that, if he could carry the people with him, the College of Priests would not hold the prey with grasping hands. The nineteen Consulares would care little for the sanctity of the ground if they could be brought to wish well to Cicero. He did his best. He wrote to Atticus concerning it a few days after the speech was made, and declared that if he had ever spoken well on any occasion he had done so then, so deep had been his grief, and so great the importance of the occasion;[5] and he at once informs his friend of the decision of the Bench, and of the ground on which it was based. "If he who declares that he dedicated the ground had not been appointed to that business by the people, nor had been expressly commanded by the people to do it, then that spot of ground can be restored without any breach of religion." Cicero asserts that he was at once congratulated on having gained his cause, the world knowing very well that no such authority had been conferred on Clodius. In the present mood of Rome, all the priests, with the nineteen Consulares, were no doubt willing that Cicero should have back his ground. The Senate had to interpret the decision, and on the discussion of the question among them Clodius endeavored to talk against time. When, however, he had spoken for three hours, he allowed himself to be coughed down. It may be seen that in some respects even Roman fortitude has been excelled in our days.

In the first portion of this speech, Pro Domo Sua, Cicero devotes himself to a matter which has no bearing on his house. Concomitant with Cicero's return there had come a famine in Rome. Such a calamity was of frequent occurrence, though I doubt whether their famines ever led to mortality so frightful as that which desolated Ireland just before the repeal of the Corn Laws. No records, as far as I am aware, have reached us of men perishing in the streets; but scarcity was not uncommon, and on such occasions complaints would become very loud. The feeding of the people was a matter of great difficulty, and subject to various chances. We do not at all know what was the number to be fed, including the free and the slaves, but have been led by surmises to suppose that it was under a million even in the time of Augustus. But even though the number was no more than five hundred thousand at this time, the procuring of food must have been a complicated and difficult matter. It was not produced in the country. It was imported chiefly from Sicily and Africa, and was plentiful or the reverse, not only in accordance with the seasons but as certain officers of state were diligent and honest, or fraudulent and rapacious. We know from one of the Verrine orations the nature of the laws on the subject, but cannot but marvel that, even with the assistance of such laws, the supply could be maintained with any fair proportion to the demand. The people looked to the government for the supply, and when it fell short would make their troubles known with seditious grumblings, which would occasionally assume the guise of insurrection. At this period of Cicero's return food had become scarce and dear; and Clodius, who was now in arms against Pompey as well as against Cicero, caused it to be believed that the strangers flocking into Rome to welcome Cicero had eaten up the food which should have filled the bellies of the people. An idea farther from truth could hardly have been entertained: no chance influx of visitors on such a population could have had the supposed effect. But the idea was spread abroad, and it was necessary that something should be done to quiet the minds of the populace. Pompey had hitherto been the resource in State difficulties. Pompey had scattered the pirates, who seem, however, at this period to have been gathering head again. Pompey had conquered Mithridates. Let Pompey have a commission to find food for Rome. Pompey himself entertained the idea of a commission which should for a time give him almost unlimited power. Cæsar was increasing his legions and becoming dominant in the West. Pompey, who still thought himself the bigger man of the two, felt the necessity of some great step in rivalry of Cæsar. The proposal made on his behalf was that all the treasure belonging to the State should be placed at his disposal; that he should have an army and a fleet, and should be for five years superior in authority to every Proconsul in his own province. This was the first great struggle made by Pompey to strangle the growing power of Cæsar. It failed altogether.[6] The fear of Cæsar had already become too great in the bosoms of Roman Senators to permit them to attempt to crush him in his absence. But a mitigated law was passed, enjoining Pompey to provide the food required, and conferring upon him certain powers. Cicero was nominated as his first lieutenant, and accepted the position. He never acted, however, giving it up to his brother Quintus. A speech which he made to the people on the passing of the law is not extant; but as there was hot blood about it in Rome, he took the opportunity of justifying the appointment of Pompey in the earlier portion of this oration to the priests. It must be understood that he did not lend his aid toward giving those greater powers which Pompey was anxious to obtain. His trust in Pompey had never been a perfect trust since the first days of the Triumvirate. To Cicero's thinking, both Pompey and Cæsar were conspirators against the Republic. Cæsar was the bolder, and therefore the more dangerous. It might probably come to pass that the services of Pompey would be needed for restraining Cæsar. Pompey naturally belonged to the "optimates," while Cæsar was as naturally a conspirator. But there never again could come a time in which Cicero would willingly intrust Pompey with such power as was given to him nine years before by the Lex Manilia. Nevertheless, he could still say grand things in praise of Pompey. "To Pompey have been intrusted wars without number, wars most dangerous to the State, wars by sea and wars by land, wars extraordinary in their nature. If there be a man who regrets that this has been done, that man must regret the victories which Rome has won." But his abuse of Clodius is infinitely stronger than his praise of Pompey. For the passages in which he alluded to the sister of Clodius I must refer the reader to the speech itself. It is impossible here to translate them or to describe them. And these words were spoken before the College of Priests, of whom nineteen were Consulares! And they were prepared with such care that Cicero specially boasted of them to Atticus, and declares that they should be put into the hands of all young orators. Montesquieu says that the Roman legislators, in establishing their religion, had no view of using it for the improvement of manners or of morals.[7] The nature of their rites and ceremonies gives us evidence enough that it was so. If further testimony were wanting, it might be found in this address, Ad Pontifices. Cicero himself was a man of singularly clean life as a Roman nobleman, but, in abusing his enemy, he was restrained by no sense of what we consider the decency of language.

He argues the question as to his house very well, as he did all questions. He tells the priests that the whole joy of his restoration must depend on their decision. Citizens who had hitherto been made subject to such penalties had been malefactors; whereas, it was acknowledged of him that he had been a benefactor to the city. Clodius had set up on the spot, not a statue of Liberty, but, as was well known to all men, the figure of a Greek prostitute. The priests had not been consulted. The people had not ratified the proposed consecration. Of the necessity of such authority he gives various examples. "And this has been done," he says, "by an impure and impious enemy of all religions—by this man among women, and woman among men—who has gone through the ceremony so hurriedly, so violently, that his mind and his tongue and his voice have been equally inconsistent with each other." "My fortune," he says, as he ends his speech, "all moderate as it is, will suffice for me. The memory of my name will be a patrimony sufficient for my children;" but if his house be so taken from him, so stolen, so falsely dedicated to religion, he cannot live without disgrace. Of course he got back his house; and with his house about £16,000 for its re-erection, and £4000 for the damage done to the Tusculan villa with £2000 for the Formian villa. With these sums he was not contented; and indeed they could hardly have represented fairly the immense injury done to him.

b.c. 56, ætat. 51.

So ended the work of the year of his return. From the following year, besides the speeches, we have twenty-six letters of which nine were written to Lentulus, the late Consul, who had now gone to Cilicia as Proconsul. Lentulus had befriended him, and he found it necessary to show his gratitude by a continued correspondence, and by a close attendance to the interests of the absent officer. These letters are full of details of Roman politics, too intricate for such a work as this—perhaps I might almost say too uninteresting, as they refer specially to Lentulus himself. In one of them he tells his friend that he has at last been able to secure the friendship of Pompey for him. It was, after all, but a show of friendship. He has supped with Pompey, and says that when he talks to Pompey everything seems to go well: no one can be more gracious than Pompey. But when he sees the friends by whom Pompey is surrounded he knows, as all others know, that the affair is in truth going just as he would not have it.[8] We feel as we read these letters, in which Pompey's name is continually before us, how much Pompey prevailed by his personal appearance, by his power of saying gracious things, and then again by his power of holding his tongue. "You know the slowness of the man," he says to Lentulus, "and his silence."[9] A slow, cautious, hypocritical man, who knew well how to use the allurements of personal manners! These letters to Lentulus are full of flattery.

There are five letters to his brother Quintus, dealing with the politics of the time, especially with the then King of Egypt, who was to be, or was not to be, restored. From all these things, however, I endeavor to abstain as much as possible, as matters not peculiarly affecting the character of Cicero. He gives his brother an account of the doings in the Senate, which is interesting as showing us how that august assembly conducted itself. While Pompey was speaking with much dignity, Clodius and his supporters in vain struggled with shouts and cries to put him down. At noon Pompey sat down, and Clodius got possession of the rostra, and in the middle of a violent tumult remained on his feet for two hours. Then, on Pompey's side, the "optimates" sang indecent songs —"versus obscenissimi"—in reference to Clodius and his sister Clodia. Clodius, rising in his anger, demanded, "Who had brought the famine?" "Pompey," shouted the Clodians. "Who wanted to go to Egypt?" demanded Clodius. "Pompey," again shouted his followers. After that, at three o'clock, at a given signal, they began to spit upon their opponents. Then there was a fight, in which each party tried to drive the others out. The "optimates" were getting the best of it, when Cicero thought it as well to run off lest he should be hurt in the tumult.[10] What hope could there be for an oligarchy when such things occurred in the Senate? Cicero in this letter speaks complacently of resisting force by force in the city. Even Cato, the law-abiding, precise Cato, thought it necessary to fall into the fashion and go about Rome with an armed following. He bought a company of gladiators and circus-men; but was obliged to sell them, as Cicero tells his brother with glee, because he could not afford to feed them.[11]

There are seven letters also to Atticus—always more interesting than any of the others. There is in these the most perfect good-feeling, so that we may know that the complaints made by him in his exile had had no effect of estranging his friend; and we learn from them his real, innermost thoughts, as they are not given even to his brother—as thoughts have surely seldom been confided by one man of action to another. Atticus had complained that he had not been allowed to see a certain letter which Cicero had written to Cæsar. This he had called a παλινωδία, or recantation, and it had been addressed to Cæsar with the view of professing a withdrawal to some extent of his opposition to the Triumvirate. It had been of sufficient moment to be talked about. Atticus had heard of it, and had complained that it had not been sent to him. Cicero puts forward his excuses, and then bursts out with the real truth:

"Why should I nibble round the unpalatable morsel which has to be swallowed?" The recantation had seemed to himself to be almost base, and he had been ashamed of it. "But," says he, "farewell to all true, upright, honest policy. You could hardly believe what treachery there is in those who ought to be our leading men, and who would be so if there was any truth in them."[12] He does not rely upon those who, if they were true to their party, would enable the party to stand firmly even against Cæsar. Therefore it becomes necessary for him to truckle to Cæsar, not for himself but for his party. Unsupported he cannot stand in open hostility to Cæsar. He truckles. He writes to Cæsar, singing Cæsar's praises. It is for the party rather than for himself, but yet he is ashamed of it.

There is a letter to Lucceius, an historian of the day then much thought of, of whom however our later world has heard nothing. Lucceius is writing chronicles of the time, and Cicero boldly demands to be praised. "Ut ornes mea postulem"[13]—"I ask you to praise me." But he becomes much bolder than that. "Again and again I beseech you, without any beating about the bush, to speak more highly of me than you perhaps think that I deserve, even though in doing so you abandon all the laws of history." Then he uses beautiful flattery to his correspondent. Alexander had wished to be painted only by Apelles. He desires to be praised by none but Lucceius. Lucceius, we are told, did as he was asked.

b.c. 56, ætat. 51.

I will return to the speeches of the period to which this chapter is devoted, taking that first which he made to the Senate as to the report of the soothsayers respecting certain prodigies. Readers familiar with Livy will remember how frequently, in time of disaster, the anger of Heaven was supposed to have been shown by signs and miracles, indications that the gods were displeased, and that expiations were necessary.[14] The superstition, as is the fate of all superstitions, had frequently been used for most ungodlike purposes. If a man had a political enemy, what could do him better service than to make the populace believe that a house had been crushed by a thunder-bolt, or that a woman had given birth to a pig instead of a child, because Jupiter had been offended by that enemy's devices? By using such a plea the Grecians got into Troy, together with the wooden horse, many years ago. The Scotch worshippers of the Sabbath declared the other day, when the bridge over the Tay was blown away, that the Lord had interposed to prevent travelling on Sunday!

Cicero had not been long back from his exile when the gods began to show their anger. A statue of Juno twisted itself half round; a wolf had been seen in the city; three citizens were struck with lightning; arms were heard to clang, and then wide subterranean noises. Nothing was easier than the preparation and continuing of such portents. For many years past the heavens above and the earth beneath had been put into requisition for prodigies.[15] The soothsayers were always well pleased to declare that there had been some neglect of the gods. It is in the nature of things that the superstitious tendencies of mankind shall fall a prey to priestcraft. The quarrels between Cicero and Clodius were as full of life as ever. In this year, Clodius being Ædile, there had come on debates as to a law passed by Cæsar as Consul, in opposition to Bibulus, for the distribution of lands among the citizens. There was a question as to a certain tax which was to be levied on these lands. The tax-gatherers were supported by Cicero, and denounced by Clodius. Then Clodius and his friends found out that the gods were showering their anger down upon the city because the ground on which Cicero's house had once stood was being desecrated by its re-erection. An appeal was made to the soothsayers. They reported, and Cicero rejoined. The soothsayers had of course been mysterious and doubtful. Cicero first shows that the devotion of his ground to sacred purposes had been an absurdity, and then he declares that the gods are angry, not with him but with Clodius. To say that the gods were not angry at all was more than Cicero dared. The piece, taken as a morsel of declamatory art, is full of vigor, is powerful in invective, and carries us along in full agreement with the orator; but at the conclusion we are led to wish that Cicero could have employed his intellect on higher matters.

There are, however, one or two passages which draw the reader into deep mental inquiry as to the religious feelings of the time. In one, which might have been written by Paley, Cicero declares his belief in the creative power of some god—or gods, as he calls them.[16] And we see also the perverse dealings of the Romans with these gods, dealings which were very troublesome—not to be got over except by stratagem. The gods were made use of by one party and the other for dishonest state purposes. When Cicero tells his hearers what the gods intended to signify by making noises in the sky, and other divine voices, we feel sure that he was either hoaxing them who heard him or saying what he knew they would not believe.

b.c. 56, ætat. 51.

Previous to the speech as to the "aruspices," he had defended Sextius—or Sestius, as he is frequently called—on a charge brought against him by Clodius in respect of violence. We at once think of the commonplace from Juvenal:

"Quis tulerit Gracchos de seditione querentes."

But Rome, without remonstrating, put up with any absurdity of that kind. Sextius and Milo and others had been joined together in opposing the election of Clodius as Ædile, and had probably met violence with violence. As surely as an English master of hounds has grooms and whips ready at his command, Milo had a band of bullies prepared for violence. Clodius himself had brought an action against Milo, who was defended by Pompey in person. The case against Sextius was intrusted to Albinovanus, and Hortensius undertook the defence. Sextius before had been one of the most forward in obtaining the return of Cicero, and had travelled into Gaul to see Cæsar and to procure Cæsar's assent. Cæsar had not then assented; but not the less great had been the favor conferred by Sextius on Cicero. Cicero had been grateful, but it seems that Sextius had thought not sufficiently grateful; hence there had grown up something of a quarrel. But Cicero, when he heard of the proceeding against his old friend, at once offered his assistance. For a Roman to have more than one counsel to plead for him was as common as for an Englishman. Cicero was therefore added to Hortensius, and the two great advocates of the day spoke on the same side. We are told that Hortensius managed the evidence, showing, probably, that Clodius struck the first blow. Cicero then addressed the judges with the object of gaining their favor for the accused. In this he was successful, and Sextius was acquitted. As regards Sextius and his quarrel with Clodius, the oration has but little interest for us. There is not, indeed, much about Sextius in it. It is a continuation of the pæan which Cicero was still singing as to his own return, but it is distinguished from his former utterances by finer thought and finer language. The description of public virtue as displayed by Cato has perhaps, in regard to melody of words and grandeur of sentiment, never been beaten. I give the orator's words below in his own language, because in no other way can any idea of the sound be conveyed.[17] There is, too, a definition made very cleverly to suit his own point of view between the conservatives and the liberals of the day. "Optimates" is the name by which the former are known; the latter are called "Populares."[18]

Attached to this speech for Sextius is a declamation against Vatinius, who was one of the witnesses employed by the prosecutor. Instead of examining this witness regularly, he talked him down by a separate oration. We have no other instance of such a forensic manœuvre either in Cicero's practice or in our accounts of the doings of other Roman advocates. This has reached us as a separate oration. It is a coarse tirade of abuse against a man whom we believe to have been bad, but as to whom we feel that we are not justified in supposing that we can get his true character here. He was a creature of Cæsar's, and Cicero was able to say words as to Vatinius which he was unwilling to speak as to Cæsar and his doings. It must be added here that two years later Cicero pleaded for this very Vatinius, at the joint request of Cæsar and Pompey, when Vatinius on leaving the Prætorship was accused of corruption.

b.c. 56, ætat. 51.

The nature of the reward to which the aspiring oligarch of Rome always turned his eyes has been sufficiently explained. He looked to be the governor of a province. At this period of which we are speaking there was no reticence in the matter. Syria, or Macedonia, or Hispania had been the prize, or Sicily, or Sardinia. It was quite understood that an aspiring oligarch went through the dust and danger and expense of political life in order that at last he might fill his coffers with provincial plunder. There were various laws as to which these governments were allotted to the plunderers. Of these we need only allude to the Leges Semproniæ, or laws proposed b.c. 123, by Caius Sempronius Gracchus, for the distribution of those provinces which were to be enjoyed by Proconsuls. There were prætorian provinces and consular provinces, though there was no law making it sure that any province should be either consular or prætorian. But the Senate, without the interference of the people and free from the Tribunes' veto, had the selection of provinces for the Consuls; whereas, for those intended for the Prætors, the people had the right of voting and the Tribunes of the people had a right of putting a veto on the propositions made. Now, in this year there came before the Senate a discussion as to the fate of three Proconsuls—not as to the primary allocation of provinces to them, but on the question whether they should be continued in the government which they held. Piso was in Macedonia, where he was supposed to have disgraced himself and the Empire which he served. Gabinius was in Syria, where it was acknowledged that he had done good service, though his own personal character stood very low. Cæsar was lord in the two Gauls—that is, on both sides of the Alps, in Northern Italy, and in that portion of modern France along the Mediterranean which had been already colonized—and was also governor of Illyricum. He had already made it manifest to all men that the subjugation of a new empire was his object rather than provincial plunder. Whether we love the memory of Cæsar as of a great man who showed himself fit to rule the world, or turn away from him as from one who set his iron heel on the necks of men, and by doing so retarded for centuries the liberties of mankind, we have to admit that he rose by the light of his own genius altogether above the ambition of his contemporaries. If we prefer, as I do, the humanity of Cicero, we must confess to ourselves the supremacy of Cæsar, and acknowledge ourselves to belong to the beaten cause. "Victrix causa Deis placuit; sed victa Catoni." In discussing the fate of these proconsular officials we feel now the absurdity of mixing together in the same debate the name of Piso and Gabinius with that of Cæsar. Yet such was the subject in dispute when Cicero made his speech, De Provinciis Consularibus, as to the adjudication of the consular provinces.

There was a strong opinion among many Senators that Cæsar should be stopped in his career. I need not here investigate the motives, either great or little, on which this opinion was founded. There was hardly a Senator among them who would not have wished Cæsar to be put down, though there were many who did not dare declare their wishes. There were reasons for peculiar jealousy on the part of the Senate. Cisalpine Gaul had been voted for him by the intervention of the people, and especially by that of the Tribune Vatinius—to Cæsar who was Consularis, whose reward should have been an affair solely for the Senate. Then there had arisen a demand, a most unusual demand, for the other Gaul also. The giving of two provinces to one governor was altogether contrary to the practice of the State; but so was the permanent and acknowledged continuance of a conspiracy such as the Triumvirate unusual. Cæsar himself was very unusual. Then the Senate, feeling that the second province would certainly be obtained, and anxious to preserve some shred of their prerogative, themselves voted the Farther Gaul. As it must be done, let it at any rate be said that they had done it. But as they had sent Cæsar over the Alps so they could recall him, or try to recall him. Therefore, with the question as to Piso and Gabinius, which really meant nothing, came up this also as to Cæsar, which meant a great deal.

But Cæsar had already done great things in Gaul. He had defeated the Helvetians and driven Ariovistus out of the country. He had carried eight legions among the distant Belgæ, and had conquered the Nervii. In this very year he had built a huge fleet, and had destroyed the Veneti, a seafaring people on the coast of the present Brittany. The more powerful he showed himself to be, the more difficult it was to recall him; but also the more desirable in the eyes of many. In the first portion of his speech Cicero handles Piso and Gabinius with his usual invective. There was no considerable party desirous of renewing to them their governments, but Cicero always revelled in the pleasure of abusing them. He devotes by far the longer part of his oration to the merit of Cæsar.[19] As for recalling him, it would be irrational. Who had counted more enemies in Rome than Marius? but did they recall Marius when he was fighting for the Republic?[20] Hitherto the Republic had been forced to fear the Gauls. Rome had always been on the defence against them. Now it had been brought about by Cæsar that the limits of the world were the limits of the Roman Empire.[21] The conquest was not yet finished, but surely it should be left to him who had begun it so well. Even though Cæsar were to demand to return himself, thinking that he had done enough for his own glory, it would be for the Senators to restrain him—for the Senate to bid him finish the work that he had in hand.[22] As for himself, continued Cicero, if Cæsar had been his enemy, what of that? Cæsar was not his enemy now. He had told the Senate what offers of employment Cæsar had made him. If he could not forget, yet he would forgive, former injuries.[23]

It is important for the reading of Cicero's character that we should trace the meaning of his utterances about Cæsar from this time up to the day on which Cæsar was killed—his utterances in public, and those which are found in his letters to Atticus and his brother. That there was much of pretence—of falsehood, if a hard word be necessary to suit the severity of those who judge the man hardly—is admitted. How he praised Pompey in public, dispraising him in private, at one and the same moment, has been declared. How he applied for praise, whether deserved or not, has been shown. In excuse, not in defence, of this I allege that the Romans of the day were habitually false after this fashion. The application to Lucceius proves the habitual falseness not of Cicero only, but of Lucceius also; and the private words written to Atticus, in opposition to the public words with which Atticus was well acquainted, prove the falseness also of Atticus. It was Roman; it was Italian; it was cosmopolitan; it was human. I only wish that it were possible to declare that it is no longer Italian, no longer cosmopolitan, no longer human. To this day it is very difficult even for an honorable man to tell the whole truth in the varying circumstances of public life. The establishment of even a theory of truth, with all the advantages which have come to us from Christianity, has been so difficult, hitherto so imperfect, that we ought, I think, to consider well the circumstances before we stigmatize Cicero as specially false. To my reading he seems to have been specially true. When Cæsar won his way up to power, Cicero was courteous to him, flattered him, and, though, never subservient, yet was anxious to comply when compliance was possible. Nevertheless, we know well that the whole scheme of Cæsar's political life was opposed to the scheme entertained by Cicero. It was Cicero's desire to maintain as much as he could of the old form of oligarchical rule under which, as a constitution, the Roman Empire had been created. It was Cæsar's intention to sweep it all away. We can see that now; but Cicero could only see it in part. To his outlook the man had some sense of order, and had all the elements of greatness. He was better, at any rate, than a Verres, a Catiline, a Clodius, a Piso, or a Gabinius. If he thought that by flattery he could bring Cæsar somewhat round, there might be conceit in his so thinking, but there could be no treachery. In doing so he did not abandon his political beau ideal. If better times came, or a better man, he would use them. In the mean time he could do more by managing Cæsar than by opposing him. He was far enough from succeeding in the management of Cæsar, but he did do much in keeping his party together. It was in this spirit that he advocated before the Senate the maintenance of Cæsar's authority in the two Gauls. The Senate decreed the withdrawal of Piso and Gabinius, but decided to leave Cæsar where he was. Mommsen deals very hardly with Cicero as to this period of his life. "They used him accordingly as—what he was good for—an advocate." "Cicero himself had to thank his literary reputation for the respectful treatment which he experienced from Cæsar." The question we have to ask ourselves is whether he did his best to forward that scheme of politics which he thought to be good for the Republic. To me it seems that he did do so. He certainly did nothing with the object of filling his own pockets. I doubt whether as much can be said with perfect truth as to any other Roman of the period, unless it be Cato.

Balbus, for whom Cicero also spoke in this year, was a Spaniard of Cadiz, to whom Pompey had given the citizenship of Rome, who had become one of Cæsar's servants and friends, and whose citizenship was now disputed. Cicero pleaded in favor of the claim, and gained his cause. There were, no doubt, certain laws in accordance with which Balbus was or was not a citizen; but Cicero here says that because Balbus was a good man, therefore there should be no question as to his citizenship.[24] This could hardly be a good legal argument. But we are glad to have the main principles of Roman citizenship laid down for us in this oration. A man cannot belong to more than one State at a time. A man cannot be turned out of his State against his will. A man cannot be forced to remain in his State against his will.[25] This Balbus was acknowledged as a Roman, rose to be one of Cæsar's leading ministers, and was elected Consul of the Empire b.c. 40. Thirty-four years afterward his nephew became Consul. Nearly three centuries after that, a.d. 237, a descendant of Balbus was chosen as Emperor, under the name of Balbinus, and is spoken of by Gibbon with eulogy.[26]

I know no work on Cicero written more pleasantly, or inspired by a higher spirit of justice, than that of Gaston Boissier, of the French Academy, called Cicéron et ses Amis. Among his chapters one is devoted to Cicero's remarkable intimacy with Cælius, which should be read by all who wish to study Cicero. We have now come to the speech which he made in this year in defence of Cælius. Cælius had entered public life very early, as the son of a rich citizen who was anxious that his heir should be enabled to shine as well by his father's wealth as by his own intellect. When he was still a boy, according to our ideas of boyhood, he was apprenticed to Cicero,[27] as was customary, in order that he might pick up the crumbs which fell from the great man's table. It was thus that a young man would hear what was best worth hearing; thus he would become acquainted with those who were best worth knowing; thus that he would learn in public life all that was best worth learning. Cælius heard all, and knew many, and learned much; but he perhaps learned too much at too early an age. He became bright and clever, but unruly and dissipated. Cicero, however, loved him well. He always liked the society of bright young men, and could forgive their morals if their wit were good. Clodius—even Clodius, young Curio, Cælius and afterward Dolabella, were companions with whom he loved to associate. When he was in Cilicia, as Proconsul, this Cælius became almost a second Atticus to him, in the writing of news from Rome.

But Cælius had become one of Clodia's many lovers, and seems for a time to have been the first favorite, to the detriment of poor Catullus. The rich father had, it seems, quarrelled with his son, and Cælius was in want of money. He borrowed it from Clodia, and then, without paying his debt, treated Clodia as she had treated Catullus. The lady tried to get her money back, and when she failed she accused her former lover of an attempt to poison her. This she did so that Cælius was tried for the offence. There were no less than four accusers, or advocates, on her behalf, of whom her brother was one. Cælius was defended by Crassus as well as by Cicero, and was acquitted. All these cases combined political views with criminal charges. Cælius was declared to have been a Catilinian conspirator. He was also accused of being in debt, of having quarrelled with his father, of having insulted women, of having beaten a Senator, of having practised bribery, of having committed various murders, and of having perpetrated all social and political excesses to which his enemies could give a name. It was probable that his life had been very irregular, but it was not probably true that he had attempted to poison Clodia.

The speech is very well worth the trouble of reading. It is lively, bright, picturesque, and argumentative; and it tells the reader very much of the manners of Rome at the time. It has been condemned for a passage which, to my taste, is the best in the whole piece. Cicero takes upon himself to palliate the pleasures of youth, and we are told that a man so grave, so pure, so excellent in his own life, should not have condescended to utter sentiments so lax in defence of so immoral a young friend. I will endeavor to translate a portion of the passage, and I think that any ladies who may read these pages will agree with me in liking Cicero the better for what he said upon the occasion. He has been speaking of the changes which the manners of the world had undergone, not only in Rome but in Greece, since pleasure had been acknowledged even by philosophers to be necessary to life. "They who advocate one constant course of continual labor as the road to fame are left alone in their schools, deserted by their scholars. Nature herself has begotten for us allurements, seduced by which Virtue herself will occasionally become drowsy. Nature herself leads the young into slippery paths, in which not to stumble now and again is hardly possible. Nature has produced for us a variety of pleasures, to which not only youth, but even middle-age, occasionally yields itself. If, therefore, you shall find one who can avert his eyes from all that is beautiful—who is charmed by no sweet smell, by no soft touch, by no rich flavor—who can turn a deaf ear to coaxing words—I indeed, and perhaps a few others, may think that the gods have been good to such a one; but I doubt whether the world at large will not think that the gods have made him a sorry fellow." There is very much more of it, delightfully said, and in the same spirit; but I have given enough to show the nature of the excuse for Cælius which has brought down on Cicero the wrath of the moralists.

Chapter II.

CICERO, ÆTAT. 52, 53, 54.

b.c. 55, ætat. 52.

I can best continue my record of Cicero's life for this and the two subsequent years by following his speeches and his letters. It was at this period the main object of his political life to reconcile the existence of a Cæsar with that of a Republic—two poles which could not by any means be brought together. Outside of his political life he carried on his profession as an advocate with all his former energy, with all his former bitterness, with all his old friendly zeal, but never, I think, with his former utility. His life with his friends and his family was prosperous; but that ambition to do some great thing for his country which might make his name more famous than that of other Romans was gradually fading, and, as it went, was leaving regrets and remorse behind which would not allow him to be a happy man. But it was now, when he had reached his fifty-second year, that he in truth began that career in literature which has made him second to no Roman in reputation. There are some early rhetorical essays, which were taken from the Greek, of doubtful authenticity; there are the few lines which are preserved of his poetry; there are the speeches which he wrote as well as spoke for the Rome of the day; and there are his letters, which up to this time had been intended only for his correspondents. All that we have from his pen up to this time has been preserved for us by the light of those great works which he now commenced. In this year, b.c. 55, there appeared the dialogue De Oratore, and in the next the treatise De Republica. It was his failure as a politician which in truth drove Cicero to the career of literature. As I intend to add to this second volume a few chapters as to his literary productions, I will only mention the dates on which these dialogues and treatises were given to the world as I go on with my work.

In the year b.c. 55, the two of the Triumvirate who had been left in Rome, Pompey and Crassus, were elected Consuls, and provinces were decreed to each of them for five years—to Pompey the two Spains, and to Crassus that Syria which was to be so fatal to him. All this had been arranged at Lucca, in the north of Italy, whither Cæsar was able to come as being within the bounds of his province, to meet his friends from Rome—or his enemies. All aristocratic Rome went out in crowds to Lucca, so that two hundred Senators might be seen together in the streets of that provincial town. It was nevertheless near enough to Rome to permit the conqueror from Gaul to look closely into the politics of the city. By his permission, if not at his instigation, Pompey and Crassus had been chosen Consuls, and to himself was conceded the government of his own province for five further years—that is, down to year b.c. 49 inclusive. It must now at least have become evident to Cicero that Cæsar intended to rule the Empire.

Though we already have Cicero's letters arranged for us in a chronological sequence which may be held to be fairly correct for biographical purposes, still there is much doubt remaining as to the exact periods at which many of them were written. Abeken, the German biographer, says that this year, b.c. 55, produced twelve letters. In the French edition of Cicero's works published by Panckoucke thirty-five are allotted to it. Mr. Watson, in his selected letters, has not taken one from the year in question. Mr. Tyrrell, who has been my Mentor hitherto in regard to the correspondence, has not, unfortunately, published the result of his labors beyond the year 53 b.c. at the time of my present writing. Some of those who have dealt with Cicero's life and works, and have illustrated them by his letters, have added something to the existing confusion by assuming an accuracy of knowledge in this respect which has not existed. We have no right to quarrel with them for having done so; certainly not with Middleton, as in his time such accuracy was less valued by readers than it is now; and we have the advantage of much light which, though still imperfect, is very bright in comparison with that enjoyed by him. A study of the letters, however, in the sequence now given to them affords an accurate picture of Cicero's mind during the years between the period of his return from exile b.c. 57 and Milo's trial b.c. 52, although the reader may occasionally be misled as to the date of this or the other letter.

With the dates of his speeches, at any rate with the year in which they were made, we are better acquainted. They are of course much fewer in number, and are easily traced by the known historical circumstances of the time. b.c. 55, he made that attack upon his old enemy, the late Consul Piso, which is perhaps the most egregious piece of abuse extant in any language. Even of this we do not know the precise date, but we may be sure that it was spoken early in the year, because Cicero alludes in it to Pompey's great games which were in preparation, and which were exhibited when Pompey's new theatre was opened in May.[28] Plutarch tells us that they did not take place till the beginning of the following year.[29] Piso on his return from Macedonia attacked Cicero in the Senate in answer to all the hard things that had already been said of him, and Cicero, as Middleton says, "made a reply to him on the spot in an invective speech, the severest, perhaps, that ever was spoken by any man, on the person, the parts, the whole life and conduct of Piso, which as long as the Roman name subsists must deliver down a most detestable character of him to all posterity."

We are here asked to imagine that this attack was delivered on the spur of the moment in answer to Piso's attack. I cannot believe that it should have been so, however great may have been the orator's power over thoughts and words. We have had in our own days wonderful instances of ready and indignant reply made instantaneously, but none in which the angry eloquence has risen to such a power as is here displayed. We cannot but suppose that had human intellect ever been perfect enough for such an exertion, it would have soared high enough also to have abstained from it. It may have been that Cicero knew well enough beforehand what the day was about to produce, so as to have prepared his reply. It may well have been that he himself undertook the polishing of his speech before it was given to the public in the words which we now read. We may, I think, take it for granted that Piso did make an attack upon him, and that Cicero answered him at once with words which crushed him, and which are not unfairly represented by those which have come down to us.

The imaginative reader will lose himself in wonder as he pictures to himself the figure of the pretentious Proconsul, with his assumption of confidence, as he was undergoing the castigation which this great master of obloquy was inflicting upon him, and the figure of the tall, lean orator, with his long neck and keen eyes, with his arms trained to assist his voice, managing his purple bordered toga with a perfect grace, throwing all his heart into his impassioned words as they fell into the ears of the Senators around him without the loss of a syllable. This Lucius Calpurnius Piso Cæsoronius had come from one of the highest families in Rome, and had possessed interest enough to be elected Consul for the year in which Cicero was sent into banishment.[30] He was closely connected with that Piso Frugi to whom Cicero's daughter had been married; and Cicero, when he was threatened by the faction of Clodius—a faction which he did not then believe to be supported by the Triumvirate—had thought that he was made safe, at any rate, from cruel results by consular friendship and consular protection. Piso Cæsoronius had failed him altogether, saying, in answer to Cicero's appeal, that the times were of such a nature that every one must look to himself. The nature of Cicero's rage may be easily conceived. An attempt to describe it has already been made. It was not till after his Consulate that he was ever waked to real anger, and the one object whom he most entirely hated with his whole soul was Lucius Piso.

By the strength of Cicero's eloquence this man has occupied an immortality of meanness. We cannot but believe that he must have in some sort deserved it, or the justice of the world would have vindicated his character. It should, however, be told of him that three years afterward he was chosen Censor, together with Appius Claudius. But it must also be told that, as far as we can judge, both these men were unworthy of the honor. They were the last two Censors elected in Rome before the days of the Empire. It is impossible not to believe that Piso was vile, but impossible also to believe that he was as vile as Cicero represented him. Cæsar was at this time his son-in-law, as he was father to Calphurnia, with whom Shakspeare has made us familiar. I do not know that Cæsar took in bad part the hard things that were said of his father-in-law.

The first part of the speech is lost. The first words we know because they have been quoted by Quintilian, "Oh ye gods immortal, what day is this which has shone upon me at last?"[31] We may imagine from this that Cicero intended it to be understood that he exulted in the coming of his revenge. The following is a fair translation of the opening passage of what remains to us: "Beast that you are, do you not see, do you not perceive, how odious to the men around you is that face of yours?" Then with rapid words he heaps upon the unfortunate man accusations of personal incompetencies. Nobody complains, says Cicero, that that fellow of yesterday, Gabinius, should have been made Consul: we have not been deceived in him. "But your eyes and eyebrows, your forehead, that face of yours, which should be the dumb index of the mind within, have deceived those who have not known you. Few of us only have been aware of your infamous vices, the sloth of your intellect, your dulness, your inability to speak. When was your voice heard in the Forum? when has your counsel been put to the proof? when did you do any service either in peace or war? You have crept into your high place by the mistakes of men, by the regard to the dirty images of your ancestors, to whom you have no resemblance except in their present grimy color. And shall he boast to me," says the orator, turning from Piso to the audience around, "that he has gone on without a check from one step in the magistracy to another? That is a boast for me to make, for me—"homini novo"—a man without ancestors, on whom the Roman people has showered all its honors. You were made Ædile, you say; the Roman people choose a Piso for their Ædile—not this man from any regard for himself, but because he is a Piso. The Prætorship was conferred not on you but on your ancestors who were known and who were dead! Of you, who are alive no one has known anything. But me—!" Then he continues the contrast between himself and Piso; for the speech is as full of his own merits as of the other man's abominations

So the oration goes on to the end. He asserts, addressing himself to Piso, that if he saw him and Gabinius crucified together, he did not know whether he would be most delighted by the punishment inflicted on their bodies or by the ruin of their reputation. He declares that he has prayed for all evil on Piso and Gabinius, and that the gods have heard him, but it has not been for death, or sickness, or for torment, that he had prayed, but for such evils as have in truth come upon them. Two Consuls sent with large armies into two of the grandest provinces have returned with disgrace. That one—meaning Piso—has not dared even to send home an account of his doings; and the other—Gabinius—has not had his words credited by the Senate, nor any of his requests granted! He, Cicero, had hardly dared to hope for all this, but the gods had done it for him! The most absurd passage is that in which he tells Piso that, having lost his army—which he had done—he had brought back nothing in safety but that "old impudent face of his."[32] Altogether it is a tirade of abuse very inferior to Cicero's dignity. Le Clerc, the French critic and editor, speaks the truth when he says, "Il faut avouer qu'il manque surtout de modération, et que la gravité d'un orateur consulaire y fait trop souvent place à l'emportement d'un ennemi." It is, however, full of life, and amusing as an expression of honest hatred. The reader when reading it will of course remember that Roman manners allowed a mode of expression among the upper classes which is altogether denied to those among us who hope to be regarded as gentlemen.

The games in Pompey's theatre, to the preparation of which Cicero alludes in his speech against Piso, are described by him with his usual vivacity and humor in a letter written immediately after them to his friend Marius. Pompey's games, with which he celebrated his second Consulship, seem to have been divided between the magnificent theatre which he had just built—fragments of which still remain to us—and the "circus maximus." This letter from Cicero is very interesting, as showing the estimation in which these games were held, or were supposed to be held, by a Roman man of letters, and as giving us some description of what was done on the occasion. Marius had not come to Rome to see them, and Cicero writes as though his friend had despised them. Cicero himself, having been in Rome, had of course witnessed them. To have been in Rome and not to have seen them would have been quite out of the question. Not to come to Rome from a distance was an eccentricity. He congratulated Marius for not having come, whether it was that he was ill, or that the whole thing was too despicable: "You in the early morning have been looking out upon your view over the bay while we have been staring at puppets half asleep. Most costly games, but I should say—judging of you by myself—that they would have been quite revolting to you. Poor Æsopus was there acting, but so unfitted by age that all his friends could not but wish that he had desisted. Why should I tell you of it all? The very costliness of the affair took away all the pleasure. Six hundred mules on the stage in the acting of Clytemnestra, or three thousand golden goblets in The Trojan Horse—what delight could they give you? If your slave Protogenes was reading to you something—so that it were not one of my speeches—you were better off at any rate than we. There were two marvellous slaughterings of beasts which lasted for five days. Nobody denies but that they were very grand. But what pleasure can there be to a man of letters[33] when some weak human creature is destroyed by a sturdy beast, or when some lonely animal is pierced through by a hunting-spear. The last day was the day of elephants, in which there could be no delight except to the vulgar crowd. You could not but pity them, feeling that the poor brutes had something in common with humanity." In these combats were killed twenty elephants and two hundred lions. The bad taste and systematical corruption of Rome had reached its acme when this theatre was opened and these games displayed by Pompey.

He tells Atticus,[34] in a letter written about this time, that he is obliged to write to him by the hand of a secretary; from which we gather that such had not been, at any rate, his practice. He is every day in the Forum, making speeches; and he had already composed the dialogues De Oratore, and had sent them to Lentulus. Though he was no longer in office, his time seems to have been as fully occupied as when he was Prætor or Consul.

We have records of at least a dozen speeches, made b.c. 55 and b.c. 54, between that against Piso and the next that is extant, which was delivered in defence of Plancius. He defended Cispius, but Cispius was convicted. He defended Caninius Gallus, of whom we may presume that he was condemned and exiled, because Cicero found him at Athens on his way to Cilicia, Athens being the place to which exiled Roman oligarchs generally betook themselves.[35] In this letter to his young friend Cælius he speaks of the pleasure he had in meeting with Caninius at Athens; but in the letter to Marius which I have quoted he complains of the necessity which has befallen him of defending the man. The heat of the summer of this year he passed in the country, but on his return to the city in November he found Crassus defending his old enemy Gabinius. Gabinius had crept back from his province into the city, and had been received with universal scorn and a shower of accusations. Cicero at first neither accused nor defended him, but, having been called on as a witness, seems to have been unable to refrain from something of the severity with which he had treated Piso. There was at any rate a passage of arms in which Gabinius called him a banished criminal.[36] The Senate then rose as one body to do honor to their late exile. He was, however, afterward driven by the expostulations of Pompey to defend the man. At his first trial Gabinius was acquitted, but was convicted and banished when Cicero defended him. Cicero suffered very greatly in the constraint thus put upon him by Pompey, and refused Pompey till Cæsar's request was added. We can imagine that nothing was more bitter to him than the obligation thus forced upon him. We have nothing of the speech left, but can hardly believe that it was eloquent. From this, however, there rose a reconciliation between Crassus and Cicero, both Cæsar and Pompey having found it to their interest to interfere. As a result of this, early in the next year Cicero defended Crassus in the Senate, when an attempt was made to rob the late Consul of his coveted mission to Syria. Of what he did in this respect he boasts in a letter to Crassus,[37] which, regarded from our point of view, would no doubt be looked upon as base. He despised Crassus, and here takes credit for all the fine things he had said of him; but we have no right to think that Cicero could have been altogether unlike a Roman. He speaks also in the Senate on behalf of the people of Tenedos, who had brought their immunities and privileges into question by some supposed want of faith. All we know of this speech is that it was spoken in vain. He pleaded against an Asiatic king, Antiochus of Comagene, who was befriended by Pompey, but Cicero seems to have laughed him out of some of his petty possessions.[38] He spoke for the inhabitants of Reate on some question of water-privilege against the Interamnates. Interamna we now know as Terne, where a modern Pope made a lovely water-fall, and at the same time rectified the water-privileges of the surrounding district. Cicero went down to its pleasant Tempe, as he calls it, and stayed there awhile with one Axius.[39] He returned thence to Rome to undertake some case for Fonteius, and attended the games which Milo was giving, Milo having been elected Ædile. Here we have a morsel of dramatic criticism on Antiphon the actor and Arbuscula the actress, which reminds one of Pepys. Then he defended Messius, then Drusus, then Scaurus. He mentions all these cases in the same letter, but so slightly that we cannot trouble ourselves with their details. We only feel that he was kept as busy as a London barrister in full practice. He also defended Vatinius—that Vatinius with whose iniquities he had been so indignant at the trial of Sextius. He defended him twice at the instigation of Cæsar; and he does not seem to have suffered in doing so, as he had certainly done when called upon to stand up and plead for his late consular enemy, Gabinius. Valerius Maximus, a dull author, often quoted but seldom read, whose task it was to give instances of all the virtues and vices produced by mankind, refers to these pleadings for Gabinius and Vatinius as instances of an almost divine forgiveness of injury.[40] I think we must seek for the good, if good is to be discovered in the proceeding, in the presumed strength which might be added to the Republic by friendly relations between himself and Cæsar.

b.c. 54, ætat. 53.

In the spring of the year we find Cicero writing to Cæsar in apparently great intimacy. He recommends to Cæsar his young friend Trebatius, a lawyer, who was going to Gaul in search of his fortune, and in doing so he refers to a joking promise from Cæsar that he would make another friend, whom he had recommended, King of Gaul; or, if not that, foreman at least to Lepta, his head of the mechanics. Lepta was an officer in trust under Cæsar, with whose name we become familiar in Cicero's correspondence, though I do not remember that Cæsar ever mentions him. "Send me some one else that I may show my friendship," Cæsar had said, knowing well that Cicero was worth any price of the kind. Cicero declares to Cæsar that on hearing this he held up his hands in grateful surprise, and on this account he had sent Trebatius. "Mi Cæsar," he says, writing with all affection; and then he praises Trebatius, assuring Cæsar that he does not recommend the young man loosely, as he had some other young men who were worthless—such as Milo, for instance. This results in much good done to Trebatius, though the young man at first does not like the service with the army. He is a lawyer, and finds the work in Gaul very rough. Cicero, who is anxious on his behalf, laughs at him and bids him take the good things that come in his way. In subsequent years Trebatius was made known to the world as the legal pundit whom Horace pretends to consult as to the libellous nature of his satires.[41]

In September of this year Cicero pleaded in court for his friend Cn. Plancius, against whom there was brought an accusation that, in canvassing and obtaining the office of Ædile, he had been guilty of bribery. In all these accusations, which come before us as having been either promoted or opposed by Cicero, there is not one in which the reader sympathizes more strongly with the person accused than in this. Plancius had shown Cicero during his banishment the affection of a brother, or almost of a son. Plancius had taken him in and provided for him in Macedonia, when to do so was illegal. Cicero now took great delight in returning the favor. The reader of this oration cannot learn from it that Plancius had in truth done anything illegal. The complaint really made against him was that he, filling the comparatively humble position of a knight, had ventured to become the opposing candidate of such a gallant young aristocrat as M. Juventius Laterensis, who was beaten at this election, and now brought this action in revenge. There is no tearing of any enemy to tatters in this oration, but there is much pathos, and, as was usual with Cicero at this period of his life, an inordinate amount of self-praise. There are many details as to the way in which the tribes voted at elections, which the patient and curious student will find instructive, but which will probably be caviare to all who are not patient and curious students. There are a few passages of peculiar force. Addressing himself to the rival of Plancius, he tells Laterensis that, even though the people might have judged badly in selecting Plancius, it was not the less his duty to accept the judgment of the people.[42] Say that the people ought not to have done so; but it should have been sufficient for him that they had done so. Then he laughs with a beautiful irony at the pretensions of the accuser. "Let us suppose that it was so," he says.[43] "Let no one whose family has not soared above prætorian honors contest any place with one of consular family. Let no mere knight stand against one with prætorian relations." In such a case there would be no need of the people to vote at all. Farther on he gives his own views as to the honors of the State in language that is very grand. "It has," he says, "been my first endeavor to deserve the high rank of the State; my second, to have been thought to deserve it. The rank itself has been but the third object of my desires."[44] Plancius was acquitted—it seems to us quite as a matter of course.

In this perhaps the most difficult period of his existence, when the organized conspiracy of the day had not as yet overturned the landmarks of the constitution, he wrote a long letter to his friend Lentulus,[45] him who had been prominent as Consul in rescuing him from his exile, and who was now Proconsul in Cilicia. Lentulus had probably taxed him, after some friendly fashion, with going over from the "optimates" or Senatorial party to that of the conspirators Pompey, Cæsar, and Crassus. He had been called a deserter for having passed in his earlier years from the popular party to that of the Senate, and now the leading optimates were doubtful of him—whether he was not showing himself too well inclined to do the bidding of the democratic leaders. The one accusation has been as unfair as the other. In this letter he reminds Lentulus that a captain in making a port cannot always sail thither in a straight line, but must tack and haul and use a slant of wind as he can get it. Cicero was always struggling to make way against a head-wind, and was running hither and thither in his attempt, in a manner most perplexing to those who were looking on without knowing the nature of the winds; but his port was always there, clearly visible to him, if he could only reach it. That port was the Old Republic, with its well-worn and once successful institutions. It was not to be "fetched." The winds had become too perverse, and the entrance had become choked with sand. But he did his best to fetch it; and, though he was driven hither and thither in his endeavors, it should be remembered that to lookers-on such must ever be the appearance of those who are forced to tack about in search of their port.

I have before me Mr. Forsyth's elaborate and very accurate account of this letter. "Now, however," says the biographer, "the future lay dark before him; and not the most sagacious politician at Rome could have divined the series of events—blundering weakness on the one side and unscrupulous ambition on the other—which led to the Dictatorship of Cæsar and the overthrow of the constitution." Nothing can be more true. Cicero was probably the most sagacious politician in Rome; and he, though he did understand much of the weakness—and, it should be added, of the greed—of his own party, did not foresee the point which Cæsar was destined to reach, and which was now probably fixed before Cæsar's own eyes. But I cannot agree with Mr. Forsyth in the result at which he had arrived when he quoted a passage from one of the notes affixed by Melmoth to his translation of this letter: "It was fear alone that determined his resolution; and having once already suffered in the cause of liberty, he did not find himself to be disposed to be twice its martyr." I should not have thought these words worthy of refutation had they not been backed by Mr. Forsyth. How did Cicero show his fear? Had he feared—as indeed there was cause enough, when it was difficult for a leading man to keep his throat uncut amid the violence of the times, or a house over his head—might he not have made himself safe by accepting Cæsar's offers? A Proconsul out of Rome was safe enough, but he would not be a Proconsul out of Rome till he could avoid it no longer. When the day of danger came, he joined Pompey's army against Cæsar, doubting, not for his life but for his character, as to what might be the best for the Republic. He did not fear when Cæsar was dead and only Antony remained. When the hour came in which his throat had to be cut, he did not fear. When a man has shown such a power of action in the face of danger as Cicero displayed at forty-four in his Consulship, and again at sixty-four in his prolonged struggle with Antony, it is contrary to nature that he should have been a coward at fifty-four.

And all the evidence of the period is opposed to this theory of cowardice. There was nothing special for him to fear when Cæsar was in Gaul, and Crassus about to start for Syria, and Pompey for his provinces. Such was the condition of Rome, social and political, that all was uncertain and all was dangerous. But men had become used to danger, and were anxious only, in the general scramble, to get what plunder might be going. Unlimited plunder was at Cicero's command—provinces, magistracies, abnormal lieutenancies—but he took nothing. He even told his friend in joke that he would have liked to be an augur, and the critics have thereupon concluded that he was ready to sell his country for a trifle. But he took nothing when all others were helping themselves.

The letter to Lentulus is well worth studying, if only as evidence of the thoughtfulness with which he weighed every point affecting his own character. He did wish to stand well with the "optimates," of whom Lentulus was one. He did wish to stand well with Cæsar, and with Pompey, who at this time was Cæsar's jackal. He did find the difficulty of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. He must have surely learned at last to hate all compromise. But he had fallen on hard times, and the task before him was impossible. If, however, his hands were clean when those of others were dirty, and his motives patriotic while those of others were selfish, so much ought to be said for him.

In the same year he defended Rabirius Postumus, and in doing so carried on the purpose which he had been instigated to undertake by Cæsar in defending Gabinius. This Rabirius was the nephew of him whom ten years before Cicero had defended when accused of having killed Saturninus. He was a knight, and, as was customary with the Equites, had long been engaged in the pursuit of trade, making money by lending money, and such like. He had, it seems, been a successful man, but, in an evil time for himself, had come across King Ptolemy Auletes when there was a question of restoring that wretched sovereign to the throne of Egypt. As Cicero was not himself much exercised in this matter, I have not referred to the king and his affairs, wishing as far as possible to avoid questions which concern the history of Rome rather than the life of Cicero; but the affairs of this banished king continually come up in the records of this time. Pompey had befriended Auletes, and Gabinius, when Proconsul in Syria, had succeeded in restoring the king to his throne—no doubt in obedience to Pompey, though not in obedience to the Senate. Auletes, when in Rome, had required large sums of money—suppliant kings when in the city needed money to buy venal Senators—and Rabirius had supplied him. The profits to be made from suppliant kings when in want of money were generally very great, but this king seems so have got hold of all the money which Rabirius possessed, so that the knight-banker found himself obliged to become one of the king's suite when the king went back to take possession of his kingdom. In no other way could he hang on to the vast debt that was owing to him. In Egypt he found himself compelled to undergo various indignities. He became no better than a head-servant among the king's servants. One of the charges brought against him was that he, a Roman knight, had allowed himself to be clothed in the half-feminine garb of an Oriental attendant upon a king. It was also brought against him as part of the accusation that he had bribed, or had endeavored to bribe, a certain Senator. The crime nominally laid to the charge of Rabirius was "de repetundis"—for extorting money in the position of a magistrate. The money alluded to had been, in truth, extorted by Gabinius from Ptolemy Auletes as the price paid for his restoration, and had come in great part probably from out of the pocket of Rabirius himself. Gabinius had been condemned, and ordered to repay the money. He had none to repay, and the claim, by some clause in the law to that effect was transferred to Rabirius as his agent. Rabirius was accused as though he had extorted the money—which he had in fact lost, but the spirit of the accusation lay in the idea that he, a Roman knight, had basely subjected himself to an Egyptian king. That Rabirius had been base and sordid there can be no doubt. That he was ruined by his transaction with Auletes is equally certain. It is supposed that he was convicted. He was afterward employed by Cæsar, who, when in power, may have recalled him from banishment. There are many passages in the oration to which I would fain refer the reader had I space to do so. I will name only one in which Cicero endeavors to ingratiate himself with his audience by referring to the old established Roman hatred of kings: "Who is there among us who, though he may not have tried them himself, does not know the ways of kings? 'Listen to me here!' 'Obey my word at once!' 'Speak a word more than you are told, and you'll see what you'll get!' 'Do that a second time, and you die!' We should read of such things and look at them from a distance, not only for our pleasure, but that we may know of what we have to be aware, and what we ought to avoid."[46]

There is a letter written in this year to Curio, another young friend such as Cælius, of whom I have spoken. Curio also was clever, dissipated, extravagant, and unscrupulous. But at this period of his life he was attached to Cicero, who was not indifferent to the services which might accrue to him from friends who might be violent and unscrupulous on the right side.

b.c. 53, ætat. 54.

This letter was written to secure Curio's services for another friend not quite so young, but equally attached, and perhaps of all the Romans of the time the most unscrupulous and the most violent. This friend was Milo, who was about to stand for the Consulship of the following year. Curio was on his road from Asia Minor, where he had been Quæstor, and is invited by Cicero in language peculiarly pressing to be the leader of Milo's party on the occasion.[47] We cannot but imagine that the winds which Curio was called upon to govern were the tornadoes and squalls which were to be made to rage in the streets of Rome to the great discomfiture of Milo's enemies during his canvass. To such a state had Rome come, that for the first six months of this year there were no Consuls, an election being found to be impossible. Milo had been the great opponent of Clodius in the city rows which had taken place previous to the exile of Cicero. The two men are called by Mommsen the Achilles and the Hector of the streets.[48] Cicero was of course on Milo's side, as Milo was an enemy to Clodius. In this matter his feeling was so strong that he declares to Curio that he does not think that the welfare and fortunes of one man were ever so dear to another as now were those of Milo to him. Milo's success is the only object of interest he has in the world. This is interesting to us now as a prelude to the great trial which was to take place in the next year, when Milo, instead of being elected Consul, was convicted of murder.

In the two previous years Cæsar had made two invasions into Britain, in the latter of which Quintus Cicero had accompanied him. Cicero in various letters alludes to this undertaking, but barely gives it the importance which we, as Britons, think should have been attached to so tremendous an enterprise. There might perhaps be some danger, he thought, in crossing the seas, and encountering the rocky shores of the island, but there was nothing to be got worth the getting. He tells Atticus that he can hardly expect any slaves skilled either in music or letters,[49] and he suggests to Trebatius that, as he will certainly find neither gold nor slaves, he had better put himself into a British chariot and come back in it as soon as possible.[50] In this year Cæsar reduced the remaining tribes of Gaul, and crossed the Rhine a second time. It was his sixth year in Gaul, and men had learned to know what was his nature. Cicero had discovered his greatness, as also Pompey must have done, to his great dismay; and he had himself discovered what he was himself; but two accidents occurred in this year which were perhaps as important in Roman history as the continuance of Cæsar's success. Julia, Cæsar's daughter and Pompey's wife, died in childbed. She seems to have been loved by all, and had been idolized from the time of the marriage by her uxorious husband, who was more than twenty-four years her senior. She certainly had been a strong bond of union between Cæsar and Pompey; so much so that we are surprised that such a feeling should have been so powerful among the Romans of the time. "Concordiæ pignus," a "pledge of friendship," she is called by Paterculus, who tells us in the same sentence that the Triumvirate had no other bond to hold it together.[51] Whether the friendship might have remained valid had Julia lived we cannot say; but she died, and the two friends became enemies. From the moment of Julia's death there was no Triumvirate.

The other accident was equally fatal to the bond of union which had bound the three men together. Late in the year, after his Consulship, b.c. 54, Crassus had gone to his Syrian government with the double intention of increasing his wealth and rivalling the military glories of Cæsar and Pompey. In the following year he became an easy victim to Eastern deceit, and was destroyed by the Parthians, with his son and the greater part of the Roman army which had been intrusted to him.[52] We are told that Crassus at last destroyed himself. I doubt, however, whether there was enough of patriotism alive among Romans at the time to create the feeling which so great a loss and so great a shame should have occasioned. As far as we can learn, the destruction of Crassus and his legions did not occasion so much thought in Rome as the breaking up of the Triumvirate.

Cicero's daughter Tullia was now a second time without a husband. She was the widow of her first husband Piso; had then, b.c. 56, married Crassipes, and had been divorced. Of him we have heard nothing, except that he was divorced. A doubt has been thrown on the fact whether she was in truth ever married to Crassipes. We learn from letters, both to his brother and to Atticus, that Cicero was contented with the match, when it was made, and did his best to give the lady a rich dowry.[53]

In this year Cicero was elected into the College of Augurs, to fill the vacancy made by the death of young Crassus, who had been killed with his father in Parthia. The reader will remember that he had in a joking manner expressed a desire for the office. He now obtained it without any difficulty, and certainly without any sacrifice of his principle. It had formerly been the privilege of the augurs to fill up the vacancies in their own college, but the right had been transferred to the people. It was now conferred upon Cicero without serious opposition.

Chapter III.

MILO.

b.c. 52, ætat. 55.

The preceding year came to an end without any consular election. It was for the election expected to have taken place that the services of Curio had been so ardently bespoken by Cicero on behalf of Milo. In order to impede the election Clodius accused Milo of being in debt, and Cicero defended him. What was the nature of the accusation we do not exactly know. "An inquiry into Milo's debts!" Such was the name given to the pleadings as found with the fragments which have come to us.[54] In these, which are short and not specially interesting, there is hardly a word as to Milo's debts; but much abuse of Clodius, with some praise of Cicero himself, and some praise also of Pompey, who was so soon to take up arms against Cicero, not metaphorically, but in grim reality of sword and buckler, in this matter of his further defence of Milo. We cannot believe that Milo's debts stood in the way of his election, but we know that at last he was not elected. Early in the year Clodius was killed, and then, at the suggestion of Bibulus—whom the reader will remember as the colleague of Cæsar in the Consulship when Cæsar reduced his colleague to ridiculous impotence by his violence—Pompey was elected as sole Consul, an honor which befell no other Roman.[55] The condition of Rome must have been very low when such a one as Bibulus thought that no order was possible except by putting absolute power into the hands of him who had so lately been the partner of Cæsar in the conspiracy which had not even yet been altogether brought to an end. That Bibulus acted under constraint is no doubt true. It would be of little matter now from what cause he acted, were it not that his having taken a part in this utter disruption of the Roman form of government is one proof the more that there was no longer any hope for the Republic.

But the story of the killing of Clodius must be told at some length, because it affords the best-drawn picture that we can get of the sort of violence with which Roman affairs had to be managed; and also because it gave rise to one of the choicest morsels of forensic eloquence that have ever been prepared by the intellect and skill of an advocate. It is well known that the speech to which I refer was not spoken, and could not have been spoken, in the form in which it has reached us. We do not know what part of it was spoken and what was omitted; but we do know that the Pro Milone exists for us, and that it lives among the glories of language as a published oration. I find, on looking through the Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, that in his estimation the Pro Milone was the first in favor of all our author's orations—"facile princeps," if we may collect the critic's ideas on the subject from the number of references made and examples taken. Quintilian's work consists of lessons on oratory, which he supports by quotations from the great orators, both Greek and Latin, with whose speeches he has made himself familiar. Cicero was to him the chief of orators; so much so that we may almost say that Quintilian's Institutio is rather a lecture in honor of Cicero than a general lesson. With the Roman school-master's method of teaching for the benefit of the Roman youth of the day we have no concern at present, but we can gather from the references made by him the estimation in which various orations were held by others, as well as by him, in his day. The Pro Cluentio, which is twice as long as the Pro Milone, and which has never, I think, been a favorite with modern readers, is quoted very frequently by Quintilian. It is the second in the list. Quintilian makes eighteen references to it; but the Pro Milone is brought to the reader's notice thirty-seven times. Quintilian was certainly a good critic; and he understood how to recommend himself to his own followers by quoting excellences which had already been acknowledged as the best which Roman literature had afforded.

Those who have gone before me in writing the life of Cicero have, in telling their story as to Milo, very properly gone to Asconius for their details. As I must do so too, I shall probably not diverge far from them. Asconius wrote as early as in the reign of Claudius, and had in his possession the annals of the time which have not come to us. Among other writings he could refer to those books of Livy which have since been lost. He seems to have done his work as commentator with no glow of affection and with no touch of animosity, either on one side or on the other. There can be no reason for doubting the impartiality of Asconius as to Milo's trial, and every reason for trusting his knowledge of the facts.

b.c. 52, ætat. 55.

When the year began, no Consuls had been chosen, and an interrex became necessary—one interrex after another—to make the election of Consuls possible in accordance with the forms of the constitution. These men remained in office each for five days, and it was customary that an election which had been delayed should be completed within the days of the second or third interrex. There were three candidates, Milo, Hypsæus, and Q. Metellus Scipio, by all of whom bribery and violence were used with open and unblushing profligacy. Cicero was wedded to Milo's cause, as we have seen from his letter to Curio, but it does not appear that he himself took any active part in the canvass. The duties to be done required rather the services of a Curio. Pompey, on the other hand, was nearly as warmly engaged in favor of Hypsæus and Scipio, though in the turn which affairs took he seems to have been willing enough to accept the office himself when it came in his way. Milo and Clodius had often fought in the streets of Rome, each ruffian attended by a band of armed combatants, so that in audacity, as Asconius says, they were equal.

On the 20th of January Milo was returning to Rome from Lanuvium, where he had been engaged, as chief magistrate of the town, in nominating a friend for the municipality. He was in a carriage with his wife Fausta, and with a friend, and was followed, as was his wont, by a large band of armed men, among whom were two noted gladiators, Eudamus and Birria. At Bovillæ, near the temple of the Bona Dea, his cortege was met by Clodius on horseback, who had with him some friends, and thirty slaves armed with swords. Milo's attendants were nearly ten times as numerous. It is not supposed by Asconius that either of the two men expected the meeting, which may be presumed to have been fortuitous. Milo and Clodius passed each other without words or blows—scowling, no doubt; but the two gladiators who were at the end of the file of Milo's men began to quarrel with certain of the followers of Clodius. Clodius interfered, and was stabbed in the shoulder by Birria; then he was carried to a neighboring tavern while the fight was in progress. Milo, having heard that his enemy was there concealed—thinking that he would be greatly relieved in his career by the death of such a foe, and that the risk should be run though the consequences might be grave—caused Clodius to be dragged out from the tavern and slaughtered. On what grounds Asconius has attributed these probable thoughts to Milo we do not know. That the order was given the jury believed, or at any rate affected to believe.

Up to this moment Milo was no more guilty than Clodius, and neither of them, probably, guilty of more than their usual violence. Partisans on the two sides endeavored to show that each had prepared an ambush for the other, but there is no evidence that it was so. There is no evidence existing now as to this dragging out of Clodius that he might be murdered; but we know what was the general opinion of Rome at the time and we may conclude that it was right. The order probably was given by Milo—as it would have been given by Clodius in similar circumstances—at the spur of the moment, when Milo allowed his passion to get the better of his judgment.

The thirty servants of Clodius were either killed or had run away and hidden themselves, when a certain Senator, S. Tedius, coming that way, found the dead body on the road, and carrying it into the city on a litter deposited it in the dead man's house. Before nightfall the death of Clodius was known through the city, and the body was surrounded by a crowd of citizens of the lower order and of slaves. With them was Fulvia, the widow, exposing the dead man's wounds and exciting the people to sympathy. On the morrow there was an increased crowd, among whom were Senators and Tribunes, and the body was carried out into the Forum, and the people were harangued by the Tribunes as to the horror of the deed that had been done. From thence the body was borne into the neighboring Senate-house[56] by the crowd, under the leading of Sextus Clodius, a cousin of the dead man. Here it was burnt with a great fire fed with the desks and benches, and even with the books and archives which were stored there. Not only was the Senate-house destroyed by the flames, but a temple also that was close to it. Milo's house was attacked, and was defended by arms. We are made to understand that all Rome was in a state of violence and anarchy. The Consuls' fasces had been put away in one of the temples—that of Venus Libitina: these the people seized and carried to the house of Pompey, declaring that he should be Dictator, and he alone Consul, mingling anarchy with a marvellous reverence for legal forms.

But there arose in the city a feeling of great anger at the burning of the Senate-house, which for a while seemed to extinguish the sympathy for Clodius, so that Milo, who was supposed to have taken himself off, came back to Rome and renewed his canvass, distributing bribes to all the citizens—"millia assuum"—perhaps something over ten pounds to every man. Both he and Cælius harangued the people, and declared that Clodius had begun the fray. But no Consuls could be elected while the city was in such a state, and Pompey, having been desired to protect the Republic in the usual form, collected troops from all Italy. Preparations were made for trying Milo, and the friends of each party demanded that the slaves of the other party should be put to the torture and examined as witnesses; but every possible impediment and legal quibble was used by the advocates on either side. Hortensius, who was engaged for Milo, declared that Milo's slaves had all been made free men and could not be touched. Stories were told backward and forward of the cruelty and violence on each side. Milo made an offer to Pompey to abandon his canvass in favor of Hypsæus, if Pompey would accept this as a compromise. Pompey answered, with the assumed dignity that was common to him, that he was not the Roman people, and that it was not for him to interfere.

It was then that Pompey was created sole Consul at the instigation of Bibulus. He immediately caused a new law to be passed for the management of the trial which was coming on, and when he was opposed in this by Cælius, declared that if necessary he would carry his purpose by force of arms. Pretending to be afraid of Milo's violence, he remained at home, and on one occasion dismissed the Senate. Afterward, when Milo entered the Senate, he was accused by a Senator present of having come thither with arms hidden beneath his toga; whereupon he lifted his toga and showed that there were none. Asconius tells us that upon this Cicero declared that all the other charges made against the accused were equally false. This is the first word of Cicero's known to us in the matter.

Two or three men declared that because they had been present at the death of Clodius they had been kidnapped and kept close prisoners by Milo; and the story, whether true or false, did Milo much harm. It seems that Milo became again very odious to the people, and that their hatred was for the time extended to Cicero as Milo's friend and proposed advocate. Pompey seems to have shared the feeling, and to have declared that violence was contemplated against himself. "But such was Cicero's constancy," says Asconius, "that neither the alienation of the people nor the suspicions of Pompey, no fear of what might befall himself at the trial, no dread of the arms which were used openly against Milo, could hinder him from going on with the defence, although it was within his power to avoid the quarrel with the people and to renew his friendship for Pompey by abstaining from it." Domitius Ænobarbus was chosen as President, and the others elected as judges were, we are told, equally good men. Milo was accused both of violence and bribery, but was able to arrange that the former case should be tried first. The method of the trial is explained. Fifty-one judges or jurymen were at last chosen. Schola was the first witness examined, and he exaggerated as best he could the horror of the murder. When Marcellus, as advocate for Milo, began to examine Schola, the people were so violent that the President was forced to protect Marcellus by taking him within the barrier of the judges' seats. Milo also was obliged to demand protection within the court. Pompey, then sitting at the Treasury, and frightened by the clamor, declared that he himself would come down with troops on the next day. After the hearing of the evidence the Tribune Munatius Plancus harangued the people, and begged them to come in great numbers on the morrow so that Milo might not be allowed to escape. On the following day, which was the 11th of April, all the taverns were shut. Pompey filled the Forum and every approach to it with his soldiers. He himself remained seated at the Treasury as before, surrounded by a picked body of men. At the trial on this day, when three of the advocates against Milo had spoken—Appius, Marc Antony, and Valerius Nepos—Cicero stood up to defend the criminal. Brutus had prepared an oration declaring that the killing of Clodius was in itself a good deed, and praiseworthy on behalf of the Republic; but to this speech Cicero refused his consent, arguing that a man could not legally be killed simply because his death was to be desired, and Brutus's speech was not spoken. Witnesses had declared that Milo had lain in wait for Clodius. This Cicero alleged to be false, contending that Clodius had lain in wait for Milo, and he endeavored to make this point and no other. "But it is proved," says Asconius, "that neither of the men had any design of violence on that day; that they met by chance, and that the killing of Clodius had come from the quarrelling of the slaves. It was well known that each had often threatened the death of the other. Milo's slaves had no doubt been much more numerous than those of Clodius when the meeting took place; but those of Clodius had been very much better prepared for fighting. When Cicero began to address the judges, the partisans of Clodius could not be induced to abstain from riot even by fear of the soldiery; so that he was unable to speak with his accustomed firmness."

Such is the account as given by Asconius, who goes on to tell us that out of the fifty-one judges thirty-eight condemned Milo and only thirteen were for acquitting him. Milo, therefore, was condemned, and had to retire at once into exile at Marseilles.

It seems to have been acknowledged by the judges that Clodius had not been wounded at first by any connivance on the part of Milo; but they thought that Milo did direct that Clodius should be killed during the fight which the slaves had commenced among themselves. As far as we can take any interest in the matter we must suppose that it was so; but we are forced to agree with Brutus that the killing of Clodius was in itself a good deed done—and we have to acknowledge at the same time that the killing of Milo would have been as good. Though we may doubt as to the manner in which Clodius was killed, there are points in the matter as to which we may be quite assured. Milo was condemned, not for killing Clodius, but because he was opposed at the moment to the line of politics which Pompey thought would be most conducive to his own interests. Milo was condemned, and the death of the wretched Clodius avenged, because Pompey had desired Hypsæus to be Consul and Milo had dared to stand in his way. An audience was refused to Cicero, not from any sympathy with Clodius, but because it suited Pompey that Milo should be condemned. Could Cicero have spoken the words which afterward were published, the jury might have hesitated and the criminal might have been acquitted. Cæsar was absent, and Pompey found himself again lifted into supreme power—for a moment. Though no one in Rome had insulted Pompey as Clodius had done, though no one had so fought for Pompey as Cicero had done, still it suited Pompey to avenge Clodius and to punish Cicero for having taken Milo's part in regard to the consulship. Milo, after his condemnation for the death of Clodius, was condemned in three subsequent trials, one following the other almost instantly, for bribery, for secret conspiracy, and again for violence in the city. He was absent, but there was no difficulty in obtaining his conviction. When he was gone one Saufeius, a friend of his, who had been with him during the tumult, was put upon his trial for his share in the death of Clodius. He at any rate was known to have been guilty in the matter. He had been leader of the party who attacked the tavern, had killed the tavern-keeper, and had dragged out Clodius to execution. But Saufeius was twice acquitted. Had there been any hope of law-abiding tranquillity in Rome, it might have been well that Clodius should be killed and Milo banished. As it was, neither the death of the one nor the banishment of the other could avail anything. The pity of it was—the pity—that such a one as Cicero, a man with such intellect, such ambition, such sympathies, and such patriotism, should have been brought to fight on such an arena.

b.c. 52, ætat. 55.

We have in this story a graphic and most astounding picture of the Rome of the day. No Consuls had been or could be elected, and the system by which "interreges" had been enabled to superintend the election of their successors in lieu of the Consuls of the expiring year had broken down. Pompey had been made sole Consul in an informal manner, and had taken upon himself all the authority of a Dictator in levying troops. Power in Rome seems at the moment to have been shared between him and bands of gladiators, but he too had succeeded in arming himself, and as the Clodian faction was on his side, he was for a while supreme. For law by this time he could have but little reverence, having been partner with Cæsar in the so-called Triumvirate for the last eight years. But yet he had no aptitude for throwing the law altogether on one side, and making such a coup-de-main as was now and again within his power. Beyond Pompey there was at this time no power in Rome, except that of the gladiators, and the owners of the gladiators, who were each intent on making plunder out of the Empire. There were certain men, such as were Bibulus and Cato, who considered themselves to be "optimates"—leading citizens who believed in the Republic, and were no doubt anxious to maintain the established order of things—as we may imagine the dukes and earls are anxious in these days of ours. But they were impotent and bad men of business, and as a body were too closely wedded to their "fish ponds"—by which Cicero means their general luxuries and extravagances. In the bosoms of these men there was no doubt an eager desire to perpetuate a Republic which had done so much for them, and a courage sufficient for the doing of some great deed, if the great deed would come in their way. They went to Pharsalia, and Cato marched across the deserts of Libya. They slew Cæsar, and did some gallant fighting afterward; but they were like a rope of sand, and had among them no fitting leader and no high purpose.

Outside of these was Cicero, who certainly was not a fitting leader when fighting was necessary, and who as to politics in general was fitted rather by noble aspirations than supported by fixed purposes. We are driven to wonder that there should have been, at such a period and among such a people, aspirations so noble joined with so much vanity of expression. Among Romans he stands the highest, because of all Romans he was the least Roman. He had begun with high resolves, and had acted up to them. Among all the Quæstors, Ædiles, Prætors, and Consuls Rome had known, none had been better, none honester, none more patriotic. There had come up suddenly in those days a man imbued with the unwonted idea that it behooved him to do his duty to the State according to the best of his lights—no Cincinnatus, no Decius, no Camillus, no Scipio, no pretentious follower of those half-mythic heroes, no demigod struggling to walk across the stage of life enveloped in his toga and resolved to impose on all eyes by the assumption of a divine dignity, but one who at every turn was conscious of his human duty, and anxious to do it to the best of his human ability. He did it; and we have to acknowledge that the conceit of doing it overpowered him. He mistook the feeling of people around him, thinking that they too would be carried away by their admiration of his conduct. Up to the day on which he descended from his Consul's seat duty was paramount with him. Then gradually there came upon him the conviction that duty, though it had been paramount with him, did not weigh so very much with others. He had been lavish in his worship of Pompey, thinking that Pompey, whom he had believed in his youth to be the best of citizens, would of all men be the truest to the Republic. Pompey had deceived him, but he could not suddenly give up his idol. Gradually we see that there fell upon him a dread that the great Roman Republic was not the perfect institution which he had fancied. In his early days Chrysogonus had been base, and Verres, and Oppianicus, and Catiline; but still, to his idea, the body of the Roman Republic had been sound. But when he had gone out from his Consulship, with resolves strung too high that he would remain at Rome, despising provinces and plunder, and be as it were a special providence to the Republic, gradually he fell from his high purpose, finding that there were no Romans such as he had conceived them to be. Then he fell away and became the man who could condescend to waste his unequalled intellect in attacking Piso, in praising himself, and in defending Milo. The glory of his active life was over when his Consulship was done—the glory was over, with the exception of that to come from his final struggle with Antony—but the work by which his immortality was to be achieved was yet before him. I think that after defending Milo he must have acknowledged to himself that all partisan fighting in Rome was mean, ignoble, and hollow. With the Senate-house and its archives burnt as a funeral pile for Clodius, and the Forum in which he had to plead lined with soldiers who stopped him by their clang of arms instead of protecting him in his speech, it must have been acknowledged by Cicero that the old Republic was dead, past all hope of resurrection. He had said so often to Atticus; but men say words in the despondency of the moment which they do not wish to have accepted as their established conviction. In such humor Cicero had written to his friend; but now it must have occurred to him that his petulant expressions were becoming only too true. When instigating Curio to canvass for Milo, and defending Milo as though it had been a good thing for a Roman nobleman to travel in the neighborhood of the city with an army at his heels, he must have ceased to believe even in himself as a Roman statesman.

In the oration which we possess—which we must teach ourselves to regard as altogether different from that which Cicero had been able to pronounce among Pompey's soldiers and the Clodian rabble—the reader is astonished by the magnificence of the language in which a case so bad in itself could be enveloped, and is made to feel that had he been on the jury, and had such an address been made to him, he would certainly have voted for an acquittal. The guilt or innocence of Milo as to the murder really turned on the point whether he did or did not direct that Clodius should be dragged out of the tavern and slain; but here in this oration three points are put forward, in each of which it was within the scope of the orator to make the jury believe that Clodius had in truth prepared an ambuscade, that Clodius was of all Romans the worst, and that Milo was loyal and true, and, in spite of a certain fierceness of disposition, a good citizen at heart. We agree with Milo, who declared, when banished, that he would never have been able to enjoy the fish of Marseilles had Cicero spoken in the Forum the speech which he afterward composed.

"I would not remind you," he says, "of Milo's Tribuneship, nor of all his service to the State, unless I could make plain to you as daylight the ambush which on that day was laid for him by his enemy. I will not pray you to forgive a crime simply because Milo has been a good citizen; nor, because the death of Clodius has been a blessing to us all, will I therefore ask you to regard it as a deed worthy of praise. But if the fact of the ambush be absolutely made evident, then I beseech you at any rate to grant that a man may lawfully defend himself from the arrogance and from the arms of his enemies."[57] From this may be seen the nature of the arguments used. For the language the reader must turn to the original. That it will be worth his while to do so he has the evidence of all critics—especially that of Milo when he was eating sardines in his exile, and of Quintilian when he was preparing his lessons on rhetoric. It seems that Cicero had been twitted with using something of a dominating tyranny in the Senate—which would hardly have been true, as the prevailing influence of the moment was that of Pompey—but he throws aside the insinuation very grandly. "Call it tyranny if you please—if you think it that, rather than some little authority which has grown from my services to the State, or some favor among good men because of my rank. Call it what you will, while I am able to use it for the defence of the good against the violence of the evil-minded."[58] Then he describes the fashion in which these two men travelled on the occasion—the fashion of travelling as it suited him to describe it. "If you did not hear the details of the story, but could see simply a picture of all that occurred, would it not appear which of them had planned the attack, which of them was ignorant of all evil? One of them was seated in his carriage, clad in his cloak, and with his wife beside him. His garments, his clients, his companions all show how little prepared he was for fighting. Then, as to the other, why was he leaving his country-house so suddenly? Why should he do this so late in the evening? Why did he travel so slowly at this time of the year? He was going, he says, to Pompey's villa. Not that he might see Pompey, because he knew that Pompey was at Alsium. Did he want to see the villa? He had been there a thousand times. Why all this delay, and turning backward and forward? Because he would not leave the spot till Milo had come up. And now compare this ruffian's mode of travelling with that of Milo. It has been the constant custom with Clodius to have his wife with him, but now she was not there. He has always been in a carriage, but now he was on horseback. His young Greek sybarites have ever been with him, even when he went as far as Tuscany; on this occasion there were no such trifles in his company. Milo, with whom such companions were not usual, had his wife's singing-boys with him and a bevy of female slaves. Clodius, who usually never moved without a crowd of prostitutes at his heels, now had no one with him but men picked for this work in hand."[59] What a picture we have here of the manner in which noble Romans were wont to move about the city and the suburbs! We may imagine that the singing-boys of Milo's wife were quite as bad as the Greek attendants in whom Clodius usually rejoiced. Then he asks a question as to Pompey full of beautiful irony. If Pompey could bring back Clodius from the dead—Pompey, who is so fond of him; Pompey, who is so powerful, so fortunate, so capable of all things; Pompey, who would be so glad to do it because of his love for the man—do you not know that on behalf of the Republic he would leave him down among the ghosts where he is?[60] There is a delightful touch of satire in this when we remember how odious Clodius had been to Pompey in days not long gone by, and how insolent.

The oration is ended by histrionic effects in language which would have been marvellous had they ever been spoken, but which seem to be incredible to us when we know that they were arranged for publication when the affair was over. "O me wretched! O me unhappy!"[61] But these attempts at translation are all vain. The student who wishes to understand what may be the effect of Latin words thrown into this choicest form should read the Milo.

We have very few letters from Cicero in this year—four only, I think, and they are of no special moment. In one of them he recommends Avianus to Titus Titius, a lieutenant then serving under Pompey.[62] In this he is very anxious to induce Titius to let Avianus know all the good things that Cicero had said of him. In our times we sometimes send our letters of introduction open by the hands of the person introduced, so that he may himself read his own praise; but the Romans did not scruple to ask that this favor might be done for them. "Do me this favor, Titius, of being kind to Avianus; but do me also the greater favor of letting Avianus know that I have asked you." What Cicero did to Titius other noble Romans did in their communications with their friends in the provinces. In another letter to Marius he expresses his great joy at the condemnation of that Munatius Plancus who had been Tribune when Clodius was killed. Plancus had harangued the people, exciting them against Milo and against Cicero, and had led to the burning of the Senate-house and of the temple next door. For this Plancus could not be accused during his year of office, but he had been put upon his trial when that year was over. Pompey had done his best to save him, but in vain; and Cicero rejoices not only that the Tribune who had opposed him should be punished, but that Pompey should have been beaten, which he attributes altogether to the favor shown toward himself by the jury.[63] He is aroused to true exultation that there should have been men on the bench who, having been chosen by Pompey in order that they might acquit this man, had dared to condemn him. Cicero had himself spoken against Plancus on the occasion. Sextus Clodius, who had been foremost among the rioters, was also condemned.

b.c. 52, ætat. 55.

This was the year in which Cæsar was so nearly conquered by the Gauls at Gergovia, and in which Vercingetorix, having shut himself up in Alesia, was overcome at last by the cruel strategy of the Romans. The brave Gaul, who had done his best to defend his country and had carried himself to the last with a fine gallantry, was kept by his conqueror six years in chains and then strangled amid the glories of that conqueror's triumph, a signal instance of the mercy which has been attributed to Cæsar as his special virtue. In this year, too, Cicero's dialogues with Atticus, De Legibus, were written. He seems to have disturbed his labors in the Forum with no other work.

Chapter IV.

CILICIA.

b.c. 51, ætat. 56.

We cannot but think that at this time the return of Cæsar was greatly feared at Rome by the party in the State to which Cicero belonged; and this party must now be understood as including Pompey. Pompey had been nominally Proconsul in Spain since the year of his second Consulship, conjointly with Crassus, b.c. 55, but had remained in Rome and had taken upon himself the management of Roman affairs, considering himself to be the master of the irregular powers which the Triumvirate had created; and of this party was also Cicero, with Cato, Bibulus, Brutus, and all those who were proud to call themselves "optimates." They were now presumed to be desirous to maintain the old republican form of government, and were anxious with more or less sincerity according to the character of the men. Cato and Brutus were thoroughly in earnest, not seeing, however, that the old form might be utterly devoid of the old spirit. Pompey was disposed to take the same direction, thinking that all must be well in Rome as long as he was possessed of high office, grand names, and the appanages of Dictatorship. Cicero, too, was anxious, loyally anxious, but anxious without confidence. Something might perhaps be saved if these optimates could be aroused to some idea of their duty by the exercise of eloquence such as his own.

I will quote a few words from Mr. Froude's Cæsar: "If Cæsar came to Rome as Consul, the Senate knew too well what it might expect;" and then he adds, "Cicero had for some time seen what was coming."[64] As to these assertions I quite agree with Mr. Froude; but I think that he has read wrongly both the history of the time and the character of the man when he goes on to state that "Cicero preferred characteristically to be out of the way at the moment when he expected that the storm should break, and had accepted the government of Cilicia and Cyprus." All the known details of Cicero's life up to the period of his government of Cilicia, during his government, and after his return from that province, prove that he was characteristically wedded to a life in Rome. This he declared by his distaste to that employment and his impatience of return while he was absent. Nothing, I should say, could be more certain than that he went to Cilicia in obedience to new legal enactments which he could not avoid, but which, as they acted upon himself, were odious to him. Mr. Froude tells us that he held the government but for two years.[65] The period of these provincial governments had of late much varied. The acknowledged legal duration was for one year. They had been stretched by the governing party to three, as in the case of Verres in Sicily; to five, as with Pompey for his Spanish government; to ten for Cæsar in Gaul. This had been done with the view of increasing the opportunities for plunder and power, but had been efficacious of good in enabling governors to carry out work for which one year would not have sufficed. It may be a question whether Cicero as Proconsul in Cilicia deserved blame for curtailing the period of his services to the Empire, or praise for abstaining from plunder and power; but the fact is that he remained in his province not two years but exactly one;[66] and that he escaped from it with all the alacrity which we may presume to be expected by a prisoner when the bars of his jail have been opened for him. Whether we blame him or praise him, we can hardly refrain from feeling that his impatience was grotesque. There certainly was no desire on Cicero's part either to go to Cilicia or to remain there, and of all his feelings that which prompted him never to be far absent from Rome was the most characteristic of the man.

Among various laws which Pompey had caused to be passed in the previous year, b.c. 52, and which had been enacted with views personal to himself and his own political views, had been one "de jure magistratuum"—as to the way in which the magistrates of the Empire should be selected. Among other clauses it contained one which declared that no Prætor and no Consul should succeed to a province till he had been five years out of office. It would be useless here to point out how absolutely subversive of the old system of the Republic this new law would have been, had the new law and the old system attempted to live together. The Proprætor would have been forced to abandon his aspirations either for the province or for the Consulship, and no consular governor would have been eligible for a province till after his fiftieth year. But at this time Pompey was both consul and governor, and Cæsar was governor for ten years with special exemption from another clause in the war which would otherwise have forbidden him to stand again for the Consulship during his absence.[67] The law was wanted probably only for the moment; but it had the effect of forcing Cicero out of Rome. As there would naturally come from it a dearth of candidates for the provinces it was further decreed by the Senate that the ex-Prætors and ex-Consuls who had not yet served as governors should now go forth and undertake the duties of government. In compliance with this order, and probably as a specially intended consequence of it, Cicero was compelled to go to Cilicia. Mr. Froude has said that "he preferred characteristically to be out of the way." I have here given what I think to be the more probable cause of his undertaking the government of Cilicia.

b.c. 51, ætat. 56.

In April of this year Cicero before he started wrote the first of a series of letters which he addressed to Appius Claudius, who was his predecessor in the province. This Appius was the brother of the Publius Clodius whom we have known for the last two or three years as Cicero's pest and persecutor; but he addresses Appius as though they were dear friends: "Since it has come to pass, in opposition to all my wishes and to my expectations, that I must take in hand the government of a province, I have this one consolation in my various troubles—that no better friend to yourself than I am could follow you, and that I could take up the government from the hands of none more disposed to make the business pleasant to me than you will be."[68] And then he goes on: "You perceive that, in accordance with the decree of the Senate, the province has to be occupied." His next letter on the subject was written to Atticus while he was still in Italy, but when he had started on his journey. "In your farewell to me," he says, "I have seen the nature of your love to me. I know well what is my own for you. It must, then, be your peculiar care to see lest by any new arrangement this parting of ours should be prolonged beyond one year."[69] Then he goes on to tell the story of a scene that had occurred at Arcanum, a house belonging to his brother Quintus, at which he had stopped on the road for a family farewell. Pomponia was there, the wife of Quintus and the sister to Atticus. There were a few words between the husband and the wife as to the giving of the invitation for the occasion, in which the lady behaved with much Christian perversity of temper. "Alas," says Quintus to his brother, "you see what it is that I have to suffer every day!" Knowing as we all do how great were the powers of the Roman paterfamilias, and how little woman's rights had been ventilated in those days, we should have thought that an ex-Prætor might have managed his home more comfortably; but ladies, no doubt, have had the capacity to make themselves disagreeable in all ages.

I doubt whether we have any testimony whatever as to Cicero's provincial government, except that which comes from himself and which is confined to the letters written by him at the time.[70] Nevertheless, we have a clear record of his doings, so full and satisfactory are the letters which he then wrote. The truth of his account of himself has never been questioned. He draws a picture of his own integrity, his own humanity, and his own power of administration which is the more astonishing, because we cannot but compare it with the pictures which we have from the same hand of the rapacity, the cruelty, and the tyranny of other governors. We have gone on learning from his speeches and his letters that these were habitual plunderers, tyrants, and malefactors, till we are taught to acknowledge that, in the low condition to which Roman nature had fallen, it was useless to expect any other conduct from a Roman governor; and then he gives us the account of how a man did govern, when, as by a miracle, a governor had been found honest, clear-headed, sympathetic, and benevolent. That man was himself; and he gives this account of himself, as it were, without a blush! He tells the story of himself, not as though it was remarkable! That other governors should grind the bones of their subjects to make bread of them, and draw the blood from their veins for drink; but that Cicero should not condescend to take even the normal tribute when willingly offered, seems to Cicero to have been only what the world had a right to expect from him! A wonderful testimony is this as to the man's character; but surely the universal belief in his own account of his own governorship is more wonderful. "The conduct of Cicero in his command was meritorious," says De Quincey. "His short career as Proconsul in Cilicia had procured for him well-merited honor," says Dean Merivale.[71] "He had managed his province well; no one ever suspected Cicero of being corrupt or unjust," says Mr. Froude, who had, however, said (some pages before) that Cicero was "thinking as usual of himself first, and his duty afterward."[72] Dio Cassius, who is never tired of telling disagreeable stories of Cicero's life, says not a word of his Cilician government, from which we may, at any rate, argue that no stories detrimental to Cicero as a Proconsul had come in the way of Dio Cassius. I have confirmed what I have said as to this episode in Cicero's life by the corroborating testimony of writers who have not been generally favorable in their views of his character. Nevertheless, we have no testimony but his own as to what Cicero did in Cilicia.[73]

It has never occurred to any reader of Cicero's letters to doubt a line in which he has spoken directly of his own conduct. His letters have often been used against himself, but in a different manner. He has been judged to give true testimony against himself, but not false testimony in his own favor. His own record has been taken sometimes as meaning what it has not meant—and sometimes as implying much more that the writer intended. A word which has required for its elucidation an insight into the humor of the man has been read amiss, or some trembling admissions to a friend of shortcoming in the purpose of the moment has been presumed to refer to a continuity of weakness. He has been injured, not by having his own words as to himself discredited, but by having them too well credited where they have been misunderstood. It is at any rate the fact that his own account of his own proconsular doings has been accepted in full, and that the present reader may be encouraged to believe what extracts I may give to him by the fact that all other readers before him have believed them.

From his villa at Cumæ on his journey he wrote to Atticus in high spirits. Hortensius had been to see him—his old rival, his old predecessor in the glory of the Forum—Hortensius, whom he was fated never to see again. His only request to Hortensius had been that he should assist in taking care that he, Cicero, should not be required to stay above one year in his province. Atticus is to help him also; and another friend, Furnius, who may probably be the Tribune for the next year, has been canvassed for the same object. In a further letter from Beneventum he alludes to a third marriage for his daughter Tullia, but seems to be aware that, as he is leaving Italy, he cannot interfere in that matter himself. He writes again from Venusia, saying that he purports to see Pompey at Tarentum before he starts, and gives special instructions to Atticus as to the payment of a debt which is due by him to Cæsar. He has borrowed money of Cæsar, and is specially anxious that the debt should be settled. In another letter from Tarentum he presses the same matter. He is anxious to be relieved from the obligation.[74]

From Athens he wrote again to his friend a letter which is chiefly remarkable as telling us something of the quarrel between Marcus Claudius Marcellus, who was one of the Consuls for the year, and Cæsar, who was still absent in Gaul. This Marcellus, and others of his family who succeeded him in his office, were hotly opposed to Cæsar, belonging to that party of the State to which Cicero was attached, and to which Pompey was returning.[75] It seems to have been the desire of the Consul not only to injure but to insult Cæsar. He had endeavored to get a decree of the Senate for recalling Cæsar at once, but had succeeded only in having his proposition postponed for consideration in the following year—when Cæsar would naturally return. But to show how little was his regard to Cæsar, he caused to be flogged in Rome a citizen from one of those towns of Cisalpine Gaul to which Cæsar had assumed to give the privilege of Roman citizenship. The man was present as a delegate from his town, Novocomum[76]—the present Como—in furtherance of the colony's claims, and the Consul had the man flogged to show thereby that he was not a Roman. Marcellus was punished for his insolence by banishment, inflicted by Cæsar when Cæsar was powerful. We shall learn before long how Cicero made an oration in his favor; but, in the letter written from Athens, he blames Marcellus much for flogging the man.[77] "Fight in my behalf," he says, in the course of this letter; "for if my government be prolonged, I shall fail and become mean." The idea of absence from Rome is intolerable to him. From Athens also he wrote to his young friend Cælius, from whom he had requested information as to what was going on in Rome. But Cælius has to be again instructed as to the nature of the subjects which are to be regarded as interesting. "What!—do you think that I have asked you to send me stories of gladiators, law-court adjournments, and the pilferings of Christus—trash that no one would think of mentioning to me if I were in Rome?"[78] But he does not finish his letter to Cælius without begging Cælius to assist in bringing about his speedy recall. Cælius troubles him much afterward by renewed requests for Cilician panthers wanted for Ædilian shows. Cicero becomes very sea-sick on his journey, and then reaches Ephesus, in Asia Minor, dating his arrival there on the five hundred and sixtieth day from the battle of Bovilla, showing how much the contest as to Milo still clung to his thoughts.[79] Ephesus was not in his province, but at Ephesus all the magistrates came out to do him honor, as though he had come among them as their governor. "Now has arrived," he says, "the time to justify all those declarations which I have made as to my own conduct; but I trust I can practise the lessons which I have learned from you." Atticus, in his full admiration of his friend's character, had doubtless said much to encourage and to instigate the virtue which it was Cicero's purpose to employ. We have none of the words ever written by Atticus to Cicero, but we have light enough to show us that the one friend was keenly alive to the honor of the other, and thoroughly appreciated its beauty. "Do not let me be more than a year away," he exclaims; "do not let even another month be added.[80] Then there is a letter from Cælius praying for panthers.[81] In passing through the province of Asia to his own province, he declares that the people everywhere receive him well. "My coming," he says, "has cost no man a shilling."[82] His whole staff has now joined him except one Tullius, whom he speaks of as a friend of Atticus, but afterward tells us he had come to him from Titinius. Then he again enjoins Atticus to have that money paid to Cæsar. From Tralles, still in the province of Asia, he writes to Appius, the outgoing governor, a letter full of courtesies, and expressing an anxious desire for a meeting. He had offered before to go by any route which might suit Appius, but Appius, as appears afterward, was anxious for anything rather than to encounter the new governor within the province he was leaving.[83]

On 31st July he reached Laodicea, within his own boundaries, having started on his journey on 10th May, and found all people glad to see him; but the little details of his office harass him sadly. "The action of my mind, which you know so well, cannot find space enough. All work worthy of my industry is at an end. I have to preside at Laodicea while some Plotius is giving judgment at Rome. * * * And then am I not regretting at every moment the life of Rome—the Forum, the city itself, my own house? Am I not always regretting you? I will endeavor to bear it for a year; but if it be prolonged, then it will be all over with me. * * * You ask me how I am getting on. I am spending a fortune in carrying out this grand advice of yours. I like it hugely; but when the time comes for paying you your debts I shall have to renew the bill. * * * To make me do such work as this is putting a saddle upon a cow"—cutting a block with a razor, as we should say—"clearly I am not made for it; but I will bear it, so that it be only for one year."[84]

From Laodicea, a town in Phrygia, he went west to Synnada. His province, known as Cilicia, contained the districts named on the map of Asia Minor as Phrygia, Pisidia, Pamphylia, part of Cappadocia, Cilicia, and the island of Cyprus. He soon found that his predecessors had ruined the people. "Know that I have come into a province utterly and forever destroyed," he says to Atticus.[85] "We hear only of taxes that cannot be paid, of men's chattels sold on all sides, of the groans from the cities, of lamentations, of horrors such as some wild beast might have produced rather than a human being. There is no room for question. Every man is tired of his life; and yet some relief is given now, because of me, and by my officers, and by my lieutenants. No expense is imposed on any one. We do not take even the hay which is allowed by the Julian law—not even the wood. Four beds to lie on is all we accept, and a roof over our heads. In many places not even that, for we live in our tents. Enormous crowds therefore come to us, and return, as it were, to life through the justice and moderation of your Cicero. Appius, when he knew that I was come, ran away to Tarsus, the farthest point of the province." What a picture we have here of the state of a Roman dependency under a normal Roman governor, and of the good which a man could do who was able to abstain from plunder! In his next letter his pride expresses itself so loudly that we have to remember that this man, after all, is writing only his own secret thoughts to his bosom friend. "If I can get away from this quickly, the honors which will accrue to me from my justice will be all the greater, as happened to Scævola, who was governor in Asia only for nine months."[86] Then again he declares how Appius had escaped into the farthest corner of the province—to Tarsus—when he knew that Cicero was coming.

He writes again to Appius, complaining. "When I compare my conduct to yours," he says, "I own that I much prefer my own."[87] He had taken every pains to meet Appius in a manner convenient to him, but had been deceived on every side. Appius had, in a way unusual among Roman governors, carried on his authority in remote parts of the province, although he had known of his successor's arrival. Cicero assures him that he is quite indifferent to this. If Appius will relieve him of one month's labor out of the twelve he will be delighted. But why has Appius taken away three of the fullest cohorts, seeing that in the entire province the number of soldiers left has been so small? But he assures Appius that, as he makes his journey, neither good nor bad shall hear evil spoken by him of his predecessor. "But as for you, you seem to have given to the dishonest reasons for thinking badly of me." Then he describes the exact course he means to take in his further journey, thus giving Appius full facility for avoiding him.

From Cybistra, in Cappadocia, he writes official letters to Caius Marcellus, who had been just chosen Consul, the brother of Marcus the existing Consul; to an older Caius Marcellus, who was their father, a colleague of his own in the College of Augurs, and to Marcus the existing Consul, with his congratulations, also to Æmilius Paulus, who had also been elected Consul for the next year. He writes, also, a despatch to the Consuls, to the Prætors, to the Tribunes, and to the Senate, giving them a statement as to affairs in the province. These are interesting, rather as showing the way in which these things were done, than by their own details. When he reaches Cilicia proper he writes them another despatch, telling them that the Parthians had come across the Euphrates. He writes as Wellington may have done from Torres Vedras. He bids them look after the safety of their Eastern dominions. Though they are too late in doing this, yet better now than never.[88] "You know," he says, "with what sort of an army you have supported me here; and you know also that I have undertaken this duty not in blind folly, but because in respect for the Republic I have not liked to refuse. * * * As for our allies here in the province, because our rule here has been so severe and injurious, they are either too weak to help us, or so embittered against us that we dare not trust them."

Then there is a long letter to Appius,[89] respecting the embassy which was to be sent from the province to Rome, to carry the praises of the departing governor and declare his excellence as a Proconsul! This was quite the usual thing to do! The worse the governor the more necessary the embassy; and such was the terror inspired even by a departing Roman, and such the servility of the allies—even of those who were about to escape from him—that these embassies were a matter of course. There had been a Sicilian embassy to praise Verres. Appius had complained as though Cicero had impeded this legation by restricting the amount to be allowed for its expenses. He rebukes Appius for bringing the charge against him.

The series of letters written this year by Cælius to Cicero is very interesting as giving us a specimen of continued correspondence other than Ciceronian. We have among the eight hundred and eighty-five letters ten or twelve from Brutus, if those attributed to him were really written by him; ten or twelve from Decimus Brutus, and an equal number from Plancus; but these were written in the stirring moments of the last struggle, and are official or military rather than familiar. We have a few from Quintus, but not of special interest unless we are to consider that treatise on the duties of a candidate as a letter. But these from Cælius to his older friend are genuine and natural as those from Cicero himself. There are seventeen. They are scattered over three or four years, but most of them refer to the period of Cicero's provincial government.

The marvel to me is that Cælius should have adopted a style so near akin to that of his master in literature. Scholars who have studied the words can probably tell us of deficiencies in language; but the easy, graphic tone is to my ear Ciceronian. Tiro, who was slave, secretary, freedman, and then literary executor, may have had the handling of these letters, and have done something toward producing their literary excellence. The subjects selected were not always good, and must occasionally have produced in Cicero's own mind a repetition of the reprimand which he once expressed as to the gladiatorial shows and law-court adjournments; but Cælius does communicate much of the political news from Rome. In one letter, written in October of this year, he declares what the Senate has decreed as to the recall of Cæsar from Gaul, and gives the words of the enactments made, with the names subscribed to them of the promoters—and also the names of the Tribunes who had endeavored to oppose them.[90] The purport of these decrees I have mentioned before. The object was to recall Cæsar, and the effect was to postpone any such recall till it would mean nothing; but Cælius specially declares that the intention of recalling Cæsar was agreeable to Pompey, whereby we may know that the pact of the Triumvirate was already at an end. In another letter he speaks of the coming of the Parthians, and of Cicero's inability to fight with them because of the inadequate number of soldiers intrusted to him. Had there been a real Roman army, then Cælius would have been afraid, he says, for his friend's life. As it is, he fears only for his reputation, lest men should speak ill of him for not fighting, when to fight was beyond his power.[91] The language here is so pretty that I am tempted to think that Tiro must have had a hand in it. At Rome, we must remember, the tidings as to Crassus were as yet uncertain. We cannot, however, doubt that Cælius was in truth attached to Cicero.

But Cicero was forced to fight, not altogether unwillingly—not with the Parthians, but with tribes which were revolting from Roman authority because of the Parthian success. "It has turned out as you wished it," he says to Cælius—"a job just sufficient to give me a small coronet of laurel." Hearing that men had risen in the Taurus range of mountains, which divided his province from that of Syria, in which Bibulus was now governor, he had taken such an army as he was able to collect to the Amanus, a mountain belonging to that range, and was now writing from his camp at Pindenissum, a place beyond his own province. Joking at his own soldiering, he tells Cælius that he had astonished those around him by his prowess. "Is this he whom we used to know in the city? Is this our talkative Senator? You can understand the things they said.[92] * * * When I got to the Amanus I was glad enough to find our friend Cassius had beaten back the real Parthians from Antioch." But Cicero claims to have done some gallant things: "I have harassed those men of Amanus who are always troubling us. Many I have killed; some I have taken; the rest are dispersed. I came suddenly upon their strongholds, and have got possession of them. I was called 'Imperator' at the river Issus." It is hardly necessary to explain, yet once again, that this title belonged properly to no commander till it had been accorded to him by his own soldiers on the field of battle.[93] He reminds Cælius that it was on the Issus that Alexander had conquered Darius. Then he had sat down before Pindenissum with all the machinery of a siege—with the turrets, covered ways, and ramparts. He had not as yet quite taken the town. When he had done so, he would send home his official account of it all; but the Parthians may yet come, and there may be danger. "Therefore, O my Rufus"—he was Cælius Rufus—"see that I am not left here, lest, as you suspect, things should go badly with me." There is a mixture in all this of earnestness and of drollery, of boasting and of laughing at what he was doing, which is inimitable in its reality. His next letter is to his other young friend, Curio, who has just been elected Tribune. He gives much advice to Curio, who certainly always needed it.[94] He carries on the joke when he tells Atticus that the "people of Pindenissum have surrendered." "Who the mischief are these Pindenissians? you will say. I have not even heard the name before. What would you have? I cannot make an Ætolia out of Cilicia. With such an army as this do you expect me to do things like a Macedonicus?[95] * * * I had my camp on the Issus, where Alexander had his—a better soldier no doubt than you or I. I really have made a name for myself in Syria. Then up comes Bibulus, determined to be as good as I am; but he loses his whole cohort." The failure made by Bibulus at soldiering is quite as much to him as his own success. Then he goes back to Laodicea, leaving the army in winter-quarters, under the command of his brother Quintus.

But his heart is truly in other matters, and he bursts out, in the same letter, with enthusiastic praise of the line of conduct which Atticus has laid down for him: "But that which is more to me than anything is that I should live so that even that fellow Cato cannot find fault with me. May I die, if it could be done better. Nor do I take praise for it as though I was doing something distasteful; I never was so happy as in practising this moderation. The thing itself is better to me even than the reputation of it. What would you have me say? It was worth my while to be enabled thus to try myself, so that I might know myself as to what I could do."

Then there is a long letter to Cato in which he repeats the story of his grand doings at Pindenissum. The reader will be sure that a letter to Cato cannot be sincere and pleasant as are those to Atticus and Cælius. "If there be one man far removed from the vulgar love of praise, it is I," he says to Cato.[96] He tells Cato that they two are alike in all things. They two only have succeeded in carrying the true ancient philosophy into the practice of the Forum. Never surely were two men more unlike than the stiff-necked Cato and the versatile Cicero.

b.c. 50, ætat. 57.

Lucius Æmilius Paullus and C. Clodius Marcellus were Consuls for the next year. Cicero writes to both of them with tenders of friendship; but from both of them he asks that they should take care to have a decree of the Senate passed praising his doings in Cilicia.[97] With us, too, a returning governor is anxious enough for a good word from the Prime-minister; but he does not ask for it so openly. The next letter from Cælius tells him that Appius has been accused as to malpractices in his government, and that Pompey is in favor of Appius. Curio has gone over to Cæsar. But the important subject is the last handled: "It will be mean in you if I should have no Greek panthers."[98] The next refers to the marriages and divorces of certain ladies, and ends with an anecdote told as to a gentleman with just such ill-natured wit as is common in London. No one could have suspected Ocella of looking after his neighbor's wife unless he had been detected thrice in the fact.[99]

From Laodicea he answers a querulous letter which his predecessor had written, complaining, among other things, that Cicero had failed to show him personal respect. He proves that he had not done so, and then rises to a strain of indignation. "Do you think that your grand old names will affect me who, even before I had become great in the service of my country, knew how to distinguish between titles and the men who bore them?"[100]

The next letter to Appius is full of flattery, and asking for favors, but it begins with a sharp reproof. "Now at last I have received an epistle worthy of Appius Claudius. The sight of Rome has restored you to your good-humor. Those I got from you in your journey were such that I could not read them without displeasure."[101]

In February Cicero wrote a letter to Atticus which is, I think, more expressive in describing the mind of the man than any other which we have from him. In it is commenced the telling of a story respecting Brutus—the Brutus we all know so well—and one Scaptius, of whom no one would have heard but for this story, which, as it deeply affects the character of Cicero, must occupy a page or two in our narrative; but I must first refer to his own account of his own government as again given here. Nothing was ever so wonderful to the inhabitants of a province as that they should not have been put to a shilling of expense since he had entered it. Not a penny had been taken on his own behalf or on that of the Republic by any belonging to him, except on one day by one Tullius, and by him indeed under cover of the law. This dirty fellow was a follower with whom Titinius had furnished him. When he was passing from Tarsus back into the centre of his province wondering crowds came out to him, the people not understanding how it had been that no letters had been sent to them exacting money, and that none of his staff had been quartered on them. In former years during the winter months they had groaned under exactions. Municipalities with money at their command had paid large sums to save themselves from the quartering of soldiers on them. The island of Cyprus, which on a former occasion had been made to pay nearly £50,000 on this head,[102] had been asked for nothing by him. He had refused to have any honors paid to him in return for this conduct. He had prohibited the erection of statues, shrines, and bronze chariots in his name—compliments to Roman generals which had become common. The harvest that year was bad; but so fully convinced were the people of his honest dealing, that they who had saved up corn—the regraters—brought it freely into market at his coming. As some scourge from hell must have been the presence of such governors as Appius and his predecessors among a people timid but industrious like these Asiatic Greeks. Like an unknown, unexpected blessing, direct from heaven, must have been the coming of a Cicero.

Now I will tell the story of Brutus and Scaptius and their money—premising that it has been told by Mr. Forsyth with great accuracy and studied fairness. Indeed, there is not a line in Mr. Forsyth's volume which is not governed by a spirit of justice. He, having thought that Cicero had been too highly praised by Middleton, and too harshly handled by subsequent critics, has apparently written his book with the object of setting right these exaggerations. But in his comments on this matter of Brutus and Scaptius he seems to me not to have considered the difference in that standard of honor and honesty which governs himself, and that which prevailed in the time of Cicero. Not seeing, as I think, how impossible it was for a Roman governor to have achieved that impartiality of justice with which a long course of fortunate training has imbued an English judge, he accuses Cicero of "trifling with equity." The marvel to me is that one man such as Cicero—a man single in his purpose—should have been able to raise his own ideas of justice so high above the level prevailing with the best of those around him. It had become the nature of a Roman aristocrat to pillage an ally till hardly the skin should be left to cover the man's bones. Out of this nature Cicero elevated himself completely. In his own conduct he was free altogether from stain. The question here arose how far he could dare to go on offending the instincts, the habits, the nature, of other noble Romans, in protecting from their rapacity the poor subjects who were temporarily beneath his charge. It is easy for a judge to stand indifferent between a great man and a little when the feelings of the world around him are in favor of such impartiality; but it must have been hard enough to do so when such conduct seemed to the noblest Romans of the day to be monstrous, fanatical, and pretentious.

In this case Brutus, our old friend whom all English readers have so much admired because he dared to tell his brother-in-law Cassius that he was

"Much condemned to have an itching palm,"

appears before us in the guise of an usurious money-lender. It would be hard in the history of usury to come across the well-ascertained details of a more grasping, griping usurer. His practice had been of the kind which we may have been accustomed to hear rebuked with the scathing indignation of our just judges. But yet Brutus was accounted one of the noblest Romans of the day, only second, if second, to Cato in general virtue and philosophy. In this trade of money-lending the Roman nobleman had found no more lucrative business than that of dealing with the municipalities of the allies. The cities were peopled by a money-making, commercial race, but they were subjected to the grinding impositions of their governors. Under this affliction they were constantly driven to borrow money, and found the capitalists who supplied it among the class by whom they were persecuted and pillaged. A Brutus lent the money which an Appius exacted—and did not scruple to do so at forty-eight per cent., although twelve per cent. per annum, or one per cent. per month, was the rate of interest permitted by law.

But a noble Roman such as Brutus did not carry on his business of this nature altogether in his own name. Brutus dealt with the municipality of Salamis in the island of Cyprus, and there had two agents, named Scaptius and Matinius, whom he specially recommended to Cicero as creditors of the city of Salamis, praying Cicero, as governor of the province, to assist these men in obtaining the payment of their debts.[103] This was quite usual, but it was only late in the transaction that Cicero became aware that the man really looking for his money was the noble Roman who gave the recommendation. Cicero's letter tells us that Scaptius came to him, and that he promised that for Brutus's sake he would take care that the people of Salamis should pay their debt.[104] Scaptius thanked him, and asked for an official position in Salamis which would have given him the power of compelling the payment by force. Cicero refused, explaining that he had determined to give no such offices in his province to persons engaged in trade. He had refused such requests already—even to Pompey and to Torquatus. Appius had given the same man a military command in Salamis—no doubt also at the instance of Brutus—and the people of Salamis had been grievously harassed. Cicero had heard of this, and had recalled the man from Cyprus. Of this Scaptius had complained bitterly, and at last he and delegates from Salamis who were willing to pay their debt, if they could only do it without too great extortion, went together to Cicero who was then at Tarsus, in the most remote part of his province. Here he was called upon to adjudicate in the matter, Scaptius trusting to the influence which Brutus would naturally have with his friend the governor, and the men of Salamis to the reputation for justice which Cicero had already created for himself in Cilicia. The reader must also be made to understand that Cicero had been entreated by Atticus to oblige Brutus, who was specially the friend of Atticus. He must remember also that this narrative is sent by Cicero to Atticus, who exhorted his correspondent, even with tears in his eyes, to be true to his honor in the government of his province.[105] He is appealing from Atticus to Atticus. I am bound to oblige you—but how can I do so in opposition to your own lessons? That is his argument to Atticus.

Then there arises a question as to the amount of money due. The principal is not in dispute, but the interest. The money has been manifestly lent on an understanding that four per cent. per month, or forty-eight per cent. per annum, should be charged on it. But there has been a law passed that higher interest than one per cent. per month, or twelve per cent. per annum, shall not be legal. There has, however, been a counter decree made in regard to these very Salaminians, and made apparently at the instigation of Brutus, saying that any contract with them shall be held in force, notwithstanding the law. But Cicero again has made a decree that he will authorize no exaction above twelve per cent. in his province. The exact condition of the legal claim is less clear to me than to Mr. Forsyth, who has the advantage of being a lawyer. Be that as it may, Cicero decides that twelve per cent. shall be exacted, and orders the Salaminians to pay the amount. To his request they demur, but at last agree to obey, alleging that they are enabled to do so by Cicero's own forbearance to them, Cicero having declined to accept the presents which had been offered to him from the island.[106] They will therefore pay this money in some sort, as they say, out of the governor's own pocket.

But when the sum is fixed, Scaptius, finding that he cannot get it over-reckoned after some fraudulent scheme of his own, declines to receive it. If with the assistance of a friendly governor he cannot do better than that for himself and his employer, things must be going badly with Roman noblemen. But the delegates are now very anxious to pay this money, and offer to deposit it. Scaptius begs that the affair shall go no farther at present, no doubt thinking that he may drive a better bargain with some less rigid future governor. The delegates request to be allowed to place their money as paid in some temple, by doing which they would acquit themselves of all responsibility; but Cicero begs them to abstain. "Impetravi ab Salaminiis ut silerent," he says. "I shall be grieved, indeed, that Brutus should be angry with me," he writes; "but much more grieved that Brutus should have proved himself to be such as I shall have found him."

Then comes the passage in his letter on the strength of which Mr. Forsyth has condemned Cicero, not without abstract truth in his condemnation: "They, indeed, have consented"—that is the Salaminians—"but what will befall them if some such governor as Paulus should come here? And all this I have done for the sake of Brutus!" Æmilius Paulus was the Consul, and might probably have Cilicia as a province, and would no doubt give over the Salaminians to Brutus and his myrmidons without any compunction. In strictness—with that assurance in the power of law by means of which our judges are enabled to see that their righteous decisions shall be carried out without detriment to themselves—Cicero should have caused the delegates from Salamis instantly to have deposited their money in the temple. Instead of doing so, he had only declared the amount due according to his idea of justice—in opposition to all Romans, even to Atticus—and had then consented to leave the matter, as for some further appeal. Do we not know how impossible it is for a man to abide strictly by the right, when the strict right is so much in advance of all around him as to appear to other eyes than his own as straitlaced, unpractical, fantastic, and almost inhuman? Brutus wanted his money sorely, and Brutus was becoming a great political power on the same side with Pompey, and Cato, and the other "optimates." Even Atticus was interfering for Brutus. What other Roman governor of whom we have heard would have made a question on the subject? Appius had lent a guard of horse-soldiers to this Scaptius with which he had outraged all humanity in Cyprus—had caused the councillors of the city to be shut up till they would come to obedience, in doing which he had starved five of them to death! Nothing had come of this, such being the way with the Romans in their provinces. Yet Cicero, who had come among these poor wretches as an unheard-of blessing from heaven, is held up to scorn because he "trifled with equity!" Equity with us runs glibly on all fours. With Appius in Cilicia it was utterly unknown. What are we to say of the man who, by the strength of his own conscience and by the splendor of his own intellect, could advance so far out of the darkness of his own age, and bring himself so near to the light of ours!

Let us think for a moment of our own Francis Bacon, a man more like to Cicero than any other that I can remember in history. They were both great lawyers, both statesmen, both men affecting the omne scibile, and coming nearer to it than perhaps any other whom we can name; both patriots, true to their conceived idea of government, each having risen from obscure position to great power, to wealth, and to rank; each from his own education and his nature prone to compromise, intimate with human nature, not over-scrupulous either as to others or as to himself. They were men intellectually above those around them, to a height of which neither of them was himself aware. To flattery, to admiration, to friendship, and to love each of them was peculiarly susceptible. But one failed to see that it behooved him, because of his greatness, to abstain from taking what smaller men were grasping; while the other swore to himself from his very outset that he would abstain—and kept the oath which he had sworn. I am one who would fain forgive Bacon for doing what I believe that others did around him; but if I can find a man who never robbed, though all others around him did—in whose heart the "auri sacra fames" had been absolutely quenched, while the men with whom he had to live were sickening and dying with an unnatural craving—then I seem to have recognized a hero.

Another complaint is made against Cicero as to Ariobarzanes, the King of Cappadocia, and is founded, as are all complaints against Cicero, on Cicero's own telling of the story in question. Why there should have been complaint in this matter I have not been able to discover. Ariobarzanes was one of those Eastern kings who became milch cows to the Roman nobles, and who, in their efforts to satisfy the Roman nobles, could only fleece then own subjects. The power of this king to raise money seems to have been limited to about £8000 a month.[107] Out of this he offered a part to Cicero as the Proconsul who was immediately over him. This Cicero declined, but pressed the king to pay the money to the extortionate Brutus, who was a creditor, and who endeavored to get this money through Cicero. But Pompey also was a creditor, and Pompey's name was more dreadful to the king than that of Brutus. Pompey, therefore, got it all, though we are told that it was not enough to pay him his interest; but Pompey, getting it all, was graciously pleased to be satisfied "Cnæus noster clementer id fert." "Our Cicero puts up with that, and asks no questions about the capital," says Cicero, ironically. Pompey was too wise to kill the goose that laid such golden eggs. Nevertheless, we are told that Cicero, in this case, abused his proconsular authority in favor of Brutus. Cicero effected nothing for Brutus; but, when there was a certain amount of plunder to be divided among the Romans, refused any share for himself. Pompey got it all, but not by Cicero's aid.

There is another long letter, in which Cicero again, for the third time, tells the story of Brutus and Scaptius.[108] I mention it, as he continues to describe his own mode of doing his work. He has been at Laodicea from February to May, deciding questions that had been there brought before him from all parts of his province except Cilicia proper. The cities which had been ground down by debt have been enabled to free themselves, and then to live under their own laws. This he has done by taking nothing from them for his own expenses—not a farthing. It is marvellous to see how the municipalities have sprung again into life under this treatment. "He has been enabled by this to carry on justice without obstruction and without severity. Everybody has been allowed approach to him—a custom which has been unknown in the provinces. There has been no back-stairs influence. He has walked openly in his own courts, as he used to do when a candidate at home. All this has been grateful to the people, and much esteemed; nor has it been too laborious to himself, as he had learned the way of it in his former life." It was thus that Cicero governed Cilicia.

There are further letters to Appius and Cælius, written from various parts of the province, which cannot fail to displease us because we feel that Cicero is endeavoring to curry favor. He wishes to stand well with those who might otherwise turn against him on his reappearance in Rome. He is afraid lest Appius should be his enemy and lest Pompey should not be his friend. The practice of justice and of virtue would, he knew, have much less effect in Rome than the friendship and enmity of such men. But to Atticus he bursts out into honest passion against Brutus. Brutus had recommended to him one Gavius, whom, to oblige Brutus, he appointed to some office. Gavius was greedy, and insolent when his greed was not satisfied. "You have made me a prefect," said Gavius; "where am I to go for my rations?" Cicero tells him that as he has done no work he will get no pay; whereupon Gavius, quite unaccustomed to such treatment, goes off in a huff. "If Brutus can be stirred by the anger of such a knave as this," he says to Atticus, "you may love him, if you will, yourself; you will not find me a rival for his friendship."[109] Brutus, however, became a favorite with Cicero, because he had devoted himself to literature. In judging these two men we should not lean too heavily on Brutus, because he did no worse than his neighbors. But then, how are we to judge of Cicero?

In the latter months of his government there began a new trouble, in which it is difficult to sympathize with him, because we are unable to produce in our own minds a Roman's estimation of Roman things. With true spirit he had laughed at his own military doings at Pindenissum; but not the less on that account was he anxious to enjoy the glories of a triumph, and to be dragged through the city on a chariot, with military trophies around him, as from time immemorial the Roman conquerors had been dragged when they returned from their victories.

For the old barbaric conquerors this had been fine enough. A display of armor—of helmets, of shields, and of swords—a concourse of chariots, of trumpets, and of slaves, of victims kept for the Tarpeian rock, the spoils and rapine of battle, the self-asserting glory of the big fighting hero, the pride of bloodshed, and the boasting over fallen cities, had been fit for men who had in their hearts conceived nothing greater than military renown. Our sympathies go along with a Camillus or a Scipio steeped in the blood of Rome's enemies. A Marius, a Pompey, and again a few years afterward a Cæsar, were in their places as they were dragged along the Via Sacra up to the Capitol amid the plaudits of the city, in commemoration of their achievements in arms; but it could not be so with Cicero. "Concedat laurea linguæ" had been the watchword of his life. "Let the ready tongue and the fertile brain be held in higher honor than the strong right arm." That had been the doctrine which he had practised successfully. To him it had been given to know that the lawyer's gown was raiment worthier of a man than the soldier's breastplate. How, then, could it be that he should ask for so small a thing as a triumph in reward for so small a deed as that done at Pindenissum? But it had become the way with all Proconsuls who of late years had been sent forth from Rome into the provinces. Men to whose provincial government a few cohorts were attached aspired to be called "Imperator" by their soldiers after mock battles, and thought that, as others had followed up their sham victories with sham triumphs, it should be given to them to do the same. If Bibulus triumphed it would be a disgrace to Cicero not to triumph. We measure our expected rewards not by our own merits but by the good things which have been conceded to others. To have returned from Pindenissum and not to be allowed the glory of trumpets would be a disgrace, in accordance with the theory then prevailing in Rome on such matters; therefore Cicero demanded a triumph.

In such a matter it was in accordance with custom that the General should send an immediate account of his victorious doings, demand a "supplication," and have the triumph to be decreed to him or not after his return home. A supplication was in form a thanksgiving to the gods for the great favor shown by them to the State, but in fact took the guise of public praise bestowed upon the man by whose hands the good had been done. It was usually a reward for military success, but in the affair of Catiline a supplication had been decreed to Cicero for saving the city, though the service rendered had been of a civil nature. Cicero now applied for a supplication, and obtained it. Cato opposed it, and wrote a letter to Cicero explaining his motives—upon high republican principles. Cicero might have endured this more easily had not Cato voted for a supplication in honor of Bibulus, whose military achievements had, as Cicero thought, been less than his own. One Hirrus opposed it also, but in silence, having intended to allege that the numbers slain by Cicero in his battles were not sufficient to justify a supplication. We learn that, according to strict rule, two thousand dead men should have been left on the field. Cicero's victims had probably been much fewer; nevertheless the supplication was granted, and Cicero presumed that the triumph would follow as a matter of course. Alas, there came grievous causes to interfere with the triumph!

Of all that went on at Rome Cælius continued to send Cicero accounts. The Triumvirate was now over. Cælius says that Pompey will not attack Cæsar openly, but that he does all he can to prevent Cæsar from being elected Consul before he shall have given up his province and his army.[110] For details Cælius refers him to a Commentarium—a word which has been translated as meaning "newspaper" in this passage—by Melmoth. I think that there is no authority for this idea, and that the commentary was simply the compilation of Cælius, as were the commentaries we so well know the compilation of Cæsar. The Acta Diurna were published by authority, and formed an official gazette. These no doubt reached Cicero, but were very different in their nature from the private record of things which he obtained from his friend.

There are passages in Greek, in two letters[111] written about this time to Atticus, which refer to the matter from which probably arose his quarrel with his wife, and her divorce. He makes no direct allusion to his wife, but only to a freedman of hers, Philotomus. When Milo was convicted, his goods were confiscated and sold as a part of his punishment. Philotomus is supposed to have been a purchaser, and to have made money out of the transaction—taking advantage of his position to acquire cheap bargains—as should not have been done by any one connected with Cicero, who had been Milo's friend. The cause of Cicero's quarrel with his wife has never been absolutely known, but it is supposed to have arisen from her want of loyalty to him in regard to money. She probably employed this freedman in filling her pockets at the expense of her husband's character.

b.c. 50, ætat. 57.

In his own letters he tells of preparations made for his return, and allusions are made as to his expected triumph. He is grateful to Cælius as to what has been done as to the supplication, and expresses his confidence that all the rest will follow.[112] He is so determined to hurry away that he will not wait for the nomination of a successor, and resolves to put the government into the hands of any one of his officers who may be least unfit to hold it. His brother Quintus was his lieutenant, but if he left Quintus people would say of him that in doing so he was still keeping the emoluments in his own hands. At last he determines to intrust it to a young Quæstor named C. Cælius—no close connection of his friend Cælius, as Cicero finds himself obliged to apologize for the selection to his friend. "Young, you will say. No doubt; but he had been elected Quæstor, and is of noble birth."[113] So he gives over the province to the young man, having no one else fitter.

Cicero tells us afterward, when at Athens on his way home, that he had considerable trouble with his own people on withholding certain plunder which was regarded by them as their perquisite. He had boasted much of their conduct—having taken exception to one Tullius, who had demanded only a little hay and a little wood. But now there came to be pickings—savings out of his own proconsular expenses—to part with which at the last moment was too hard upon them. "How difficult is virtue," he exclaims; "how doubly difficult to pretend to act up to it when it is not felt!"[114] There had been a certain sum saved which he had been proud to think that he would return to the treasury. But the satellites were all in arms: "Ingemuit nostra cohors." Nevertheless, he disregarded the "cohort," and paid the money into the treasury.

As to the sum thus saved, there has been a dispute which has given rise to some most amusing literary vituperation. The care with which MSS. have been read now enables us to suppose that it was ten hundred thousand sesterces—thus expressed, "H.S.X."—amounting to something over £8000. We hear elsewhere, as will be mentioned again, that Cicero realized out of his own legitimate allowance in Cilicia a profit of about £18,000; and we may imagine that the "cohort" should think itself aggrieved in losing £8000 which they expected to have divided among them. Middleton has made a mistake, having supposed the X to be CIɔ or M—a thousand instead of ten—and quotes the sum saved as having amounted to eight hundred thousand instead of eight thousand pounds. We who have had so much done for us by intervening research, and are but ill entitled to those excuses for error which may fairly be put forward on Middleton's behalf, should be slow indeed in blaming him for an occasional mistake, seeing how he has relieved our labors by infinite toil on his part; but De Quincey, who has been very rancorous against Cicero, has risen to a fury of wrath in his denunciation of Cicero's great biographer. "Conyers Middleton," he says, "is a name that cannot be mentioned without an expression of disgust." The cause of this was that Middleton, a beneficed clergyman of the Church of England, and a Cambridge man, differed from other Cambridge clergymen on controversial points and church questions. Bentley was his great opponent—and as Bentley was a stout fighter, so was Middleton. Middleton, on the whole, got the worst of it, because Bentley was the stronger combatant; but he seems to have stood in good repute all his life, and when advanced in years was appointed Professor of Natural History. He is known to us, however, only as the biographer of Cicero. Of this book, Monk, the biographer of Middleton's great opponent, Bentley, declares that, "for elegance, purity, and ease, Middleton's style yields to none in the English language." De Quincey says of it that, by "weeding away from it whatever is colloquial, you would strip it of all that is characteristic"—meaning, I suppose, that the work altogether wants dignity of composition. This charge is, to my thinking, so absolutely contrary to the fact, that it needs only to be named to be confuted by the opinion of all who have read the work. De Quincey pounces upon the above-named error with profoundest satisfaction, and tells us a pleasant little story about an old woman who thought that four million people had been once collected at Caernarvon. Middleton had found the figure wrongly deciphered and wrongly copied for him, and had translated it as he found it, without much thought. De Quincey thinks that the error is sufficient to throw over all faith in the book: "It is in the light of an evidence against Middleton's good-sense and thoughtfulness that I regard it as capital." That is De Quincey's estimate of Middleton as a biographer. I regard him as a laborer who spared himself no trouble, who was enabled by his nature to throw himself with enthusiasm into his subject, who knew his work as a writer of English, and who, by a combination of erudition, intelligence, and industry, has left us one of those books of which it may truly be said that no English library should be without it.

The last letter written by Cicero in Asia was sent to Atticus from Ephesus the day before he started—on the last day, namely, of September. He had been delayed by winds and by want of vessels large enough to carry him and his suite. News here reached him from Rome—news which was not true in its details, but true enough in its spirit. In a letter to Atticus he speaks of "miros terrores Cæsarianos"[115]—"dreadful reports as to outrages by Cæsar;" that he would by no means dismiss his army; that he had with him the Prætors elect, one of the Tribunes, and even one of the Consuls; and that Pompey had resolved to leave the city. Such were the first tidings presaging Pharsalia. Then he adds a word about his triumph. "Tell me what you think about this triumph, which my friends desire me to seek. I should not care about it if Bibulus were not also asking for a triumph—Bibulus, who never put a foot outside his own doors as long as there was an enemy in Syria!" Thus Cicero had to suffer untold misery because Bibulus was asking for a triumph!

Chapter V.

THE WAR BETWEEN CÆSAR AND POMPEY.

What official arrangements were made for Proconsuls in regard to money, when in command of a province, we do not know. The amounts allowed were no doubt splendid, but it was not to them that the Roman governor looked as the source of that fortune which he expected to amass. The means of plunder were infinite, but of plunder always subject to the danger of an accusation. We remember how Verres calculated that he could divide his spoil into three sufficient parts—one for the lawyers, one for the judges, so as to insure his acquittal, and then one for himself. This plundering was common—so common as to have become almost a matter of course; but it was illegal, and subjected some unfortunate culprits to exile, and to the disgorging of a part of what they had taken. No accusation was made against Cicero. As to others there were constantly threats, if no more than threats. Cicero was not even threatened. But he had saved out of his legitimate expenses a sum equal to £18,000 of our money—from which we may learn how noble were the appanages of a Roman governor. The expenses of all his staff passed through his own hands, and many of those of his army. Any saving effected would therefore be to his own personal advantage. On this money he counted much when his affairs were in trouble, as he was going to join Pompey at Pharsalia in the following year. He then begged Atticus to arrange his matters for him, telling him that the sum was at his call in Asia,[116] but he never saw it again: Pompey borrowed it—or took it; and when Pompey had been killed the money was of course gone.

His brother Quintus was with him in Cilicia, but of his brother's doings there he says little or nothing. We have no letters from him during the period to his wife or daughter. The latter was married to her third husband, Dolabella, during his absence, with no opposition from Cicero, but not in accordance with his advice. He had purposed to accept a proposition for her hand made to him by Tiberius Nero, the young Roman nobleman who afterward married that Livia whom Augustus took away from him even when she was pregnant, in order that he might marry her himself, and who thus became the father of the Emperor Tiberius. It is worthy of remark at the same time that the Emperor Tiberius married the granddaughter of Atticus. Cicero when in Cilicia had wished that Nero should be chosen; but the family at home was taken by the fashion and manners of Dolabella, and gave the young widow to him as her third husband when she was yet only twenty-five. This marriage, like the others, was unfortunate. Dolabella, though fashionable, nobly born, agreeable, and probably handsome, was thoroughly worthless. He was a Roman nobleman of the type then common—heartless, extravagant, and greedy. His country, his party, his politics were subservient, not to ambition or love of power, but simply to a desire for plunder. Cicero tried hard to love him, partly for his daughter's sake, more perhaps from the necessity which he felt for supporting himself by the power and strength of the aristocratic party to which Dolabella belonged.

I cannot bring him back to Rome, and all that he suffered there, without declaring that much of his correspondence during his government, especially during the latter months of it, and the period of his journey home, is very distressing. I have told the story of his own doings, I think, honestly, and how he himself abstained, and compelled those belonging to him to do so; how he strove to ameliorate the condition of those under his rule; how he fully appreciated the duty of doing well by others, so soon to be recognized by all Christians. Such humanity on the part of a Roman at such a period is to me marvellous, beautiful, almost divine; but, in eschewing Roman greed and Roman cruelty, he was unable to eschew Roman insincerity. I have sometimes thought that to have done so it must have been necessary for him altogether to leave public life. Why not? my readers will say. But in our days, when a man has mixed himself for many years with all that is doing in public, how hard it is for him to withdraw, even though, in withdrawing he fears no violence, no punishment, no exile, no confiscation. The arguments, the prayers, the reproaches of those around him draw him back; and the arguments, the reproaches from within are more powerful even than those from his friends. To be added to these is the scorn, perhaps the ridicule, of his opponents. Such are the difficulties in the way of the modern politician who thinks that he has resolved to retire; but the Roman ex-Consul, ex-Prætor, ex-Governor had entered upon a mode of warfare in which his all, his life, his property, his choice of country, his wife, his children, were open to the ready attacks of his eager enemies. To have deserved well would be nothing, unless he could keep a party round him bound by mutual interests to declare that he had deserved well. A rich man, who desired to live comfortably beyond the struggle of public life, had to abstain, as Atticus had done, from increasing the sores, from hurting the ambition, from crushing the hopes of aspirants. Such a man might be safe, but he could not be useful; such, at any rate, had not been Cicero's life. In his earlier days, till he was Consul, he had kept himself free from political interference in doing the work of his life; but since that time he had necessarily put himself into competition with many men, and had made many enemies by the courage of his opinions. He had found even those he had most trusted opposed to him. He had aroused the jealousy not only of the Cæsars and the Crassuses and the Pisos, but also of the Pompeys and Catos and Brutuses. Whom was he not compelled to fear? And yet he could not escape to his books; nor, in truth, did he wish it. He had made for himself a nature which he could not now control.

He had not been long in Cilicia before he knew well how cruel, how dishonest, how greedy, how thoroughly Roman had been the conduct of his predecessor Appius. His letters to Atticus are full of the truths which he had to tell on that matter. His conduct, too, with regard to Appius was mainly right. As far as in him lay he endeavored to remedy the evils which the unjust Proconsul had done, and to stop what further evil was still being done. He did not hesitate to offend Appius when it was necessary to do so by his interference. But Appius was a great nobleman, one of the "optimates," a man with a strong party at his back in Rome. Appius knew well that Cicero's good word was absolutely necessary to save him from the ruin of a successful accusation. Cicero knew also that the support of Appius would be of infinite service to him in his Roman politics. Knowing this, he wrote to Appius letters full of flattery—full of falsehood, if the plain word can serve our purpose better. Dolabella, the new son-in-law, had taken upon himself, for some reason as to which it can hardly be worth our while to inquire, to accuse Appius of malversation in his province. That Appius deserved condemnation there can be no doubt; but in these accusations the contests generally took place not as to the proof of the guilt, but as to the prestige and power of the accuser and the accused. Appius was tried twice on different charges, and was twice acquitted; but the fact that his son-in-law should be the accuser was fraught with danger to Cicero. He thought it necessary for the hopes which he then entertained to make Appius understand that his son-in-law was not acting in concert with him, and that he was desirous that Appius should receive all the praise which would have been due to a good governor. So great was the influence of Appius at Rome that he was not only acquitted, but shortly afterward elected Censor. The office of Censor was in some respects the highest in Rome. The Censors were elected only once in four years, remaining in office for eighteen months. The idea was that powers so arbitrary as these should be in existence only for a year and a half out of each four years. Questions of morals were considered by them. Should a Senator be held to have lived as did not befit a Senator, a Censor could depose him. As Appius was elected Censor immediately after his acquittal, together with that Piso whom Cicero had so hated, it may be understood that his influence was very great.[117] It was great enough to produce from Cicero letters which were flattering and false. The man who had been able to live with a humanity, a moderation, and an honesty befitting a Christian, had not risen to that appreciation of the beauty of truth which an exercise of Christianity is supposed to exact.

"Sed quid agas? Sic vivitur!"[118]—"What would you have me do? It is thus we live now!" This he exclaims in a letter to Cælius, written a short time before he left the province. "What would you say if you read my last letter to Appius?" You would open your eyes if you knew how I have flattered Appius—that was his meaning. "Sic vivitur!"—"It is so we live now." When I read this I feel compelled to ask whether there was an opportunity for any other way of living. Had he seen the baseness of lying as an English Christian gentleman is expected to see it, and had adhered to truth at the cost of being a martyr, his conduct would have been high though we might have known less of it; but, looking at all the circumstances of the period, have we a right to think that he could have done so?

From Athens on his way home Cicero wrote to his wife, joining Tullia's name with hers. "Lux nostra," he calls his daughter; "the very apple of my eye!" He had already heard from various friends that civil war was expected. He will have to declare himself on his arrival—that is, to take one side or the other—and the sooner he does so the better. There is some money to be looked for—a legacy which had been left to him. He gives express directions as to the persons to be employed respecting this, omitting the name of that Philotomus as to whose honesty he is afraid. He calls his wife "suavissima et optatissima Terentia," but he does not write to her with the true love which was expressed by his letters when in exile. From Athens, also, where he seems to have stayed nearly two months, he wrote in December. He is easy, he says, about his triumph unless Cæsar should interfere—but he does not care much about his triumph now. He is beginning to feel the wearisomeness of the triumph; and indeed it was a time in which the utter hollowness of triumphal pretensions must have made the idea odious to him. But to have withdrawn would have been to have declared his own fears, his own doubts, his own inferiority to the two men who were becoming declared as the rival candidates for Roman power. We may imagine that at such a time he would gladly have gone in quiet to his Roman mansion or to one of his villas, ridding himself forever of the trouble of his lictors, his fasces, and all the paraphernalia of imperatorial dignity; but a man cannot rid himself of such appanages without showing that he has found it necessary to do so. It was the theory of a triumph that the victorious Imperator should come home hot (as it were) from the battle-field, with all his martial satellites around him, and have himself carried at once through Rome. It was barbaric and grand, as I have said before, but it required the martial satellites. Tradition had become law, and the Imperator intending to triumph could not dismiss his military followers till the ceremony was over. In this way Cicero was sadly hampered by his lictors when, on his landing at Brundisium, he found that Italy was already preparing for her great civil war.

b.c. 50, ætat. 57.

Early in this year it had been again proposed in the Senate that Cæsar should give up his command. At this time the two Consuls, L. Æmilius Paulus and C. Claudius Marcellus, were opposed to Cæsar, as was also Curio, who had been one of Cicero's young friends, and was now Tribune. But two of these Cæsar managed to buy by the payment of enormous bribes. Curio was the more important of the two, and required the larger bribe. The story comes to us from Appian,[119] but the modern reader will find it efficiently told by Mommsen.[120] The Consul had fifteen hundred talents, or about £500,000! The sum named as that given by Cæsar to Curio was something greater, because he was so deeply in debt! Bribes to the amount of above a million of money, such as money is to us now, bestowed upon two men for their support in the Senate! It was worth a man's while to be a Consul or a Tribune in those days. But the money was well earned—plunder, no doubt, extracted from Gaul. The Senate decided that both Pompey and Cæsar should be required to abandon their commands—or rather they adopted a proposal to that effect without any absolute decree. But this sufficed for Cæsar, who was only anxious to be relieved from the necessity of obeying any order from the Senate by the knowledge that Pompey also was ordered, and also was disobedient. Then it was—in the summer of this year—that the two commanders were desired by the Senate to surrender each of them a legion, or about three thousand men, under the pretence that the forces were wanted for the Parthian war. The historians tell us that Pompey had lent a legion to Cæsar, thus giving us an indication of the singular terms on which legions were held by the proconsular officers who commanded them. Cæsar nobly sends up to Rome two legions, the one as having been ordered to be restored by himself, and the other as belonging to Pompey. He felt, no doubt, that a show of nobleness in this respect would do him better service than the withholding of the soldiers. The men were stationed at Capua, instead of being sent to the East, and no doubt drifted back into Cæsar's hands. The men who had served under Cæsar would not willingly find themselves transferred to Pompey.

Cæsar in the summer came across the Alps into Cisalpine Gaul, which as yet had not been legally taken from him, and in the autumn sat himself down at Ravenna, which was still within his province. It was there that he had to meditate the crossing of the Rubicon and the manifestation of absolute rebellion. Matters were in this condition when Cicero returned to Italy, and heard the corroboration of the news as to the civil war which had reached him at Athens.

In a letter written from Athens, earlier than the one last quoted, Cicero declared to Atticus that it would become him better to be conquered with Pompey than to conquer with Cæsar.[121] The opinion here given may be taken as his guiding principle in politics till Pompey was no more. Through all the doubts and vacillations which encumbered him, this was the rule not only of his mind but of his heart. To him there was no Triumvirate: the word had never been mentioned to his ears. Had Pompey remained free from Cæsar it would have been better. The two men had come together, and Crassus had joined them. It was better for him to remain with them and keep them right, than to stand away, angry and astray, as Cato had done. The question how far Cæsar was justified in the position which he had taken up by certain alleged injuries, affected Cicero less than it has done subsequent inquirers. Had an attempt been made to recall Cæsar illegally? Was he subjected to wrong by having his command taken away from him before the period had passed for which the people had given it? Was he refused indulgences to which the greatness of his services entitled him—such as permission to sue for the Consulship while absent from Rome—while that, and more than that, had been granted to Pompey? All these questions were no doubt hot in debate at the time, but could hardly have affected much the judgment of Cicero, and did not at all affect his conduct. Nor, I think, should they influence the opinions of those who now attempt to judge the conduct of Cæsar. Things had gone beyond the domain of law, and had fallen altogether into that of potentialities. Decrees of the Senate or votes of the people were alike used as excuses. Cæsar, from the beginning of his career, had shown his determination to sweep away as cobwebs the obligations which the law imposed upon him. It is surely vain to look for excuses for a man's conduct to the practice of that injustice against him which he has long practised against others. Shall we forgive a house-breaker because the tools which he has himself invented are used at last upon his own door? The modern lovers of Cæsar and of Cæsarism generally do not seek to wash their hero white after that fashion. To them it is enough that the man has been able to trample upon the laws with impunity, and to be a law not only to himself but to all the world around him. There are some of us who think that such a man, let him be ever so great—let him be ever so just, if the infirmities of human nature permit justice to dwell in the breast of such a man—will in the end do more harm than good. But they who sit at the feet of the great commanders admire them as having been law-breaking, not law-abiding. To say that Cæsar was justified in the armed position which he took in Northern Italy in the autumn of this year, is to rob him of his praise. I do not suppose that he had meditated any special line of policy during the years of hard work in Gaul, but I think that he was determined not to relinquish his power, and that he was ready for any violence by which he might preserve it.

If such was Cicero's idea of this man—if such the troubled outlook which he took into the circumstances of the Empire—he thought probably but little of the legality of Cæsar's recall. What would the Consuls do, what would Curio do, what would Pompey do, and what Cæsar? It was of this that he thought. Had law-abiding then been possible, he would have been desirous to abide by the law. Some nearest approach to the law would be the best. Cæsar had ignored all laws, except so far as he could use them for his own purposes. Pompey, in conspiring with Cæsar, had followed Cæsar's lead; but was desirous of using the law against Cæsar when Cæsar outstripped him in lawlessness. But to Cicero there was still some hope of restraining Pompey. Pompey, too, had been a conspirator, but not so notorious a conspirator as Cæsar. With Pompey there would be some bond to the Republic; with Cæsar there could be none; therefore it was better for him to fall with Pompey than to rise with Cæsar. That was his conviction till Pompey had altogether fallen.

His journey homeward is made remarkable by letters to Tiro, his slave and secretary. Tiro was taken ill, and Cicero was obliged to leave him at Patræ, in Greece. Whence he had come to Cicero we do not know, or when; but he had not probably fallen under his master's peculiar notice before the days of the Cilician government, as we find that on his arrival at Brundisium he writes to Atticus respecting him as a person whom Atticus had not much known.[122] But his affection for Tiro is very warm, and his little solicitudes for the man whom he leaves are charming. He is to be careful as to what boat he takes, and under what captain he sails. He is not to hurry. The doctor is to be consulted and well paid. Cicero himself writes various letters to various persons, in order to secure that attention which Tiro could not have insured unless so assisted.

Early in January Cicero reached the city, but could not enter it because of his still unsettled triumph, and Cæsar crossed the little river which divided his province from the Roman territory. The 4th of January is the date given for the former small event. For the latter I have seen no precise day named. I presume that it was after the 6th, as on that day the Senate appointed Domitian as his successor in his province. On this being done, the two Tribunes, Antony and Cassius, hurried off to Cæsar, and Cæsar then probably crossed the stream. Cicero was appointed to a command in Campania—that of raising levies, the duties of which were not officially repugnant to his triumph.

His doings during the whole of this time were but little to his credit; but who is there whose doings were to his credit at that period? The effect had been to take all power out of his hand. Cæsar had given him up. Pompey could not do so, but we can imagine how willing Pompey would have been that he should have remained in Cilicia. He had been sent there, out of the way, but had hurried home again. If he would only have remained and plundered! If he would only have remained there and have been honest—so that he would be out of the way! But here he was—back in Italy, an honest, upright man! No one so utterly unlike the usual Roman, so lost amid the self-seekers of Rome, so unnecessarily clean-handed, could be found! Cato was honest, foolishly honest for his time; but with Cato it was not so difficult to deal as with Cicero. We can imagine Cato wrapping himself up in his robe and being savagely unreasonable. Cicero was all alive to what was going on in the world, but still was honest! In the mean time he remained in the neighborhood of Naples, writing to his wife and daughter, writing to Tiro, writing to Atticus, and telling us all those details which we now seem to know so well—because he has told us. In one of his letters to Atticus at this time he is sadly in earnest. He will die with Pompey in Italy, but what can he do by leaving it? He has his "lictors" with him still. Oh, those dreadful lictors! His friendship for Cnæus! His fear of having to join himself with the coming tyrant! "Oh that you would assist me with your counsel!"[123] He writes again, and describes the condition of Pompey—of Pompey who had been Magnus. "See how prostrate he is. He has neither courage, counsel, men, nor industry! Put aside those things; look at his flight from the city, his cowardly harangues in the towns, his ignorance of his own strength and that of his enemy! * * * Cæsar in pursuit of Pompey! Oh, sad! * * * Will he kill him?" he exclaims. Then, still to Atticus, he defends himself. He will die for Pompey, but he does not believe that he can do any good either to Pompey or to the Republic by a base flight. Then there is another cause for staying in Italy as to which he cannot write. This was Terentia's conduct. At the end of one of his letters he tells Atticus that with the same lamp by which he had written would he burn that which Atticus had sent to him. In another he speaks of a Greek tutor who has deserted him, a certain Dionysius, and he boils over with anger. His letters to Atticus about the Greek tutor are amusing at this distance of time, because they show his eagerness. "I never knew anything more ungrateful; and there is nothing worse than ingratitude."[124]

He heaps his scorn upon Pompey: "It is true, indeed, that I said that it was better to be conquered with him than to conquer with those others. I would indeed. But of what Pompey was it that I so spoke? Was it of this one who flies he knows not what, nor whom, nor whither he will fly?"[125] He writes again the same day: "Pompey had fostered Cæsar, and then had feared him. He had left the city; he had lost Picenum by his own fault, he had betaken himself to Apulia! Then he went into Greece, leaving us in the dark as to his plans!" He excuses a letter of his own to Cæsar. He had written to Cæsar in terms which might be pleasing to the great man. He had told Cæsar of Cæsar's admirable wisdom. Was it not better so? He was willing that his letter should be read aloud to all the people, if only those of Pompey might also be read aloud. Then follow copies of a correspondence between him and Pompey. In the last he declares[126] that "when he had written from Canusium he had not dreamed that Pompey was about to cross the sea. He had known that Pompey had intended to treat for peace—for peace even under unjust conditions—but he had never thought that Pompey was meditating a retreat out of Italy." He argues well and stoutly, and does take us along with him. Pompey had been beaten back from point to point, never once rallying himself against Cæsar. He had failed, and had slipped away, leaving a man here and there to stand up for the Republic. Pompey was willing to risk nothing for Rome. It had come to pass at last that he was being taught Cæsarism by Cæsar, and when he died was more imperial than his master.

At this time Cicero's eyes were bad. "Mihi molestior lippitudo erat etiam quam ante fuerat." And again, "Lippitudinis meæ signum tibi sit librarii manus." But we may doubt whether any great men have lived so long with so little to tease them as to their health. And yet the amount of work he got through was great. He must have so arranged his affairs as to have made the most he could of his hours, and have carried in his memory information on all subjects. When we remember the size of the books which he read, their unwieldy shapes, their unfitness for such work as that of ours, there seems to have been a continuation of study such as we cannot endure. Throughout his life his hours were early, but they must also have been late. Of his letters we have not a half, of his speeches not a half, of his treatises not more than a half. When he was abroad during his exile, or in Cilicia during his government, he could not have had his books with him. That Cæsar should have been Cæsar, or Pompey Pompey, does not seem to me a matter so difficult as that Cicero should have been Cicero. Then comes that letter of which I spoke in my first chapter, in which he recapitulates the Getæ, the Armenians, and the men of Colchis. "Shall I, the savior of the city, assist to bring down upon that city those hordes of foreign men? Shall I deliver it up to famine and to destruction for the sake of one man who is no more than mortal?"[127] It was Pompey as to whom he then asked the question. For Pompey's sake am I to let in these crowds? We have been told, indeed, by Mr. Froude that the man was Cæsar, and that Cicero wrote thus anxiously with the special object of arranging his death!

"Now, if ever, think what we shall do," he says. "A Roman army sits round Pompey and makes him a prisoner within valley and rampart—and shall we live? The city stands; the Prætors give the law, the Ædiles keep up the games, good men look to their principal and their interest. Shall I remain sitting here? Shall I rush hither and thither madly, and implore the credit of the towns? Men of substance will not follow me. The revolutionists will arrest me. Is there any end to this misery? People will point at me and say, 'How wise he was not to go with him.' I was not wise. Of his victory I never wished to be the comrade—yet now I do of his sorrow."[128]

b.c. 49, ætat. 58.

Pompey had crossed the sea from Brundisium, and Cæsar had retreated across Italy to Capua. As he was journeying he saw Cicero, and asked him to go to Rome. This Cicero refused, and Cæsar passed on. "I must then use other counsels," said Cæsar, thus leaving him for the last time before the coming battle. Cicero went on to Arpinum, and there heard the nightingales. From that moment he resolved. He had not thought it possible that when the moment came he should have been able to prevail against Cæsar's advice; but he had done so. He had feared that Cæsar would overcome him; but when the moment came he was strong against even Cæsar. He gave his boy his toga, or, as we should say, made a man of him. He was going after Pompey, not for the sake of Pompey, not for the sake of the Republic, but for loyalty. He was going because Atticus had told him to go. But as he is going there came fresh ground for grief. He writes to Atticus about the two boys, his son and nephew. The one is good by nature, and has not yet gone astray. The other, the elder and his nephew, has been encouraged by this uncle's indulgence, and has openly adopted evil ways. In other words, he has become Cæsarian—for a reward.[129] The young Quintus has shown himself to be very false. Cicero is so bound together with his family in their public life that this falling off of one of them makes him unhappy. Then Curio comes the way, and there is a most interesting conversation. It seems that Curio, who is fond of Cicero, tells him everything; but Cicero, who doubts him, lets him pass on. Then Cælius writes to him. Cælius implores him, for the sake of his children, to bear in mind what he is doing. He tells him much of Cæsar's anger, and asks him if he cannot become Cæsarian; at any rate to betake himself to some retreat till the storm shall pass by and quieter days should come. But Cælius, though it had suited Cicero to know him intimately, had not read the greatness of the man's mind. He did not understand in the least the difficulty which pervaded Cicero. To Cælius it was play—play in which a man might be beaten, or banished, or slaughtered; but it was a game in which men were fighting each for himself. That there should be a duty in the matter, beyond that, was inexplicable to Cælius. And his children, too—his anger against young Quintus and his forgiveness of Marcus! He thinks that Quintus had been purchased by a large bribe on Cæsar's side, and is thankful that it is no worse with him. What can have been worse to a young man than to have been open to such payment? Antony is frequently on the scene, and already disgusts us by the vain frivolity and impudence of his life. And then Cicero's eyes afflict him, and he cannot see. Servius Sulpicius comes to him weeping. For Servius, who is timid and lachrymose, everything has gone astray. And then there is that Dionysius who had plainly told him that he desired to follow some richer or some readier master. At the last comes the news of his Tullia's child's birth. She is brought to bed of a son. He cannot, however, wait to see how the son thrives. From the midst of enemies, and with spies around him, he starts. There is one last letter written to his wife and daughter from on board the ship at Caieta, sending them many loves and many careful messages, and then he is off.

It was now the 11th of June, the third day before the ides, b.c. 49, and we hear nothing special of the events of his journey. When he reached the camp, which he did in safety, he was not well received there. He had given his all to place himself along with Pompey in the republican quarters, and when there the republicans were unwilling to welcome him. Pompey would have preferred that he should have remained away, so as to be able to say hereafter that he had not come.

Of what occurred to Cicero during the great battle which led to the solution of the Roman question we know little or nothing. We hear that Cicero was absent, sick at Dyrrachium, but there are none of those tirades of abuse with which such an absence might have been greeted. We hear, indeed, from other sources, very full accounts of the fighting—how Cæsar was nearly conquered, how Pompey might have prevailed had he had the sense to take the good which came in his way, how he failed to take it, how he was beaten, and how, in the very presence of his wife, he was murdered at last at the mouth of the Nile by the combined energies of a Roman and a Greek.

We can imagine how the fate of the world was decided on the Pharsalus where the two armies met, and the victory remained with Cæsar. Then there were weepings and gnashings of teeth, and there were the congratulations and self-applause of the victors. In all Cicero's letters there is not a word of it. There was terrible suffering before it began, and there is the sense of injured innocence on his return, but nowhere do we find any record of what took place. There is no mourning for Pompey, no turning to Cæsar as the conqueror. Petra has been lost, and Pharsalia has been won, but there is no sign.

b.c. 48, ætat. 59.

Cicero, we know, spent the time at Dyrrachium close to which the battle of Petra was fought, and went from thence to Corcyra. There invitation was made to him, as the senior consular officer present, to take the command of the beaten army, but that he declined. We are informed that he was nearly killed in the scuffle which took place. We can imagine that it was so—that in the confusion and turmoil which followed he should have been somewhat roughly told that it behooved him to take the lead and to come forth as the new commander; that there should be a time at last in which no moment should be allowed him for doubt, but that he should doubt, and, after more or less of reticence, pass on. Young Pompey would have it so. What name would be so good to bind together the opponents of Cæsar as that of Cicero? But Cicero would not be led. It seems that he was petulant and out of sorts at the time; that he had been led into the difficulty of the situation by his desire to be true to Pompey, and that he was only able to escape from it now that Pompey was gone. We can well imagine that there should be no man less able to fight against Cæsar, though there was none whose name might be so serviceable to use as that of Cicero. At any rate, as far as we are concerned, there was silence on the subject on his part. He wrote not a word to any of the friends whom Pompey had left behind him, but returned to Italy dispirited, silent, and unhappy. He had indeed met many men since the battle of the Pharsalus, but to none of whom we are conversant had he expressed his thoughts regarding that great campaign.

Here we part from Pompey, who ran from the fighting-ground of Macedonia to meet his doom in the roads of Alexandria. Never had man risen so high in his youth to be extinguished so ingloriously in his age. He was born in the same year with Cicero, but had come up quicker into the management of the world's affairs, so as to have received something from his equals of that which was due to age. Habit had given him that ease of manners which enabled him to take from those who should have been his compeers the deference which was due not to his age but to his experience. When Cicero was entering the world, taking up the cudgels to fight against Sulla, Pompey had already won his spurs, in spite of Sulla but by means of Sulla. Men in these modern days learn, as they grow old in public life, to carry themselves with indifference among the backslidings of the world. In reading the life of Cicero, we see that it was so then. When defending Amerinus, we find the same character of man as was he who afterward took Milo's part. There is the same readiness, the same ingenuity, and the same high indignation; but there is not the same indifference as to results. With Amerinus it is as though all the world depended on it; with Milo he felt it to be sufficient to make the outside world believe it. When Pompey triumphed, 70 b.c., and was made Consul for the second time, he was already old in glory—when Cicero had not as yet spoken those two orations against Verres which had made the speaking of another impossible. Pompey, we may say, had never been young. Cicero was never old. There was no moment in his life in which Cicero was not able to laugh with the Curios and the Cæliuses behind the back of the great man. There was no moment in which Pompey could have done so. He who has stepped from his cradle on to the world's high places has lost the view of those things which are only to be seen by idle and luxurious young men of the day. Cicero did not live for many years beyond Pompey, but I doubt whether he did not know infinitely more of men. To Pompey it had been given to rule them; but to Cicero to live with them.

Chapter VI.

AFTER THE BATTLE.

b.c. 48, ætat. 59.

In the autumn of this year Cicero had himself landed at Brundisium. He remained nearly a year at Brundisium, and it is melancholy to think how sad and how long must have been the days with him. He had no country when he reached the nearest Italian port; it was all Cæsar's, and Cæsar was his enemy. There had been a struggle for the masterdom between two men, and of the two the one had beaten with whom Cicero had not ranged himself. He had known how it would be. All the Getæ, and the men of Colchis, and the Armenians, all the lovers of the fish-ponds and those who preferred the delicacies of Baiæ to the work of the Forum, all who had been taught to think that there were provinces in order that they might plunder, men who never dreamed of a country but to sell it, all those whom Cæsar was determined either to drive out of Italy or keep there in obedience to himself, had been brought together in vain. We already know, when we begin to read the story, how it will be with them and with Cæsar. On Cæsar's side there is an ecstasy of hope carried to the very brink of certainty; on the other is that fainting spirit of despair which no battalions can assuage. We hear of no Scæva and of no Crastinus on Pompey's side. Men change their nature under such leading as was that of Cæsar. The inferior men become heroic by contact with the hero; but such heroes when they come are like great gouts of blood dabbled down upon a fair cloth. Who that has eyes to see can look back upon the career of such a one and not feel an agony of pain as the stern man passes on without a ruffled face, after ordering the right hands of those who had fought at Uxellodunum to be chopped off at the wrist, in order that men might know what was the penalty of fighting for their country?

There are men—or have been, from time to time, in all ages of the world—let loose, as it were, by the hand of God to stop the iniquities of the people, but in truth the natural product of those iniquities. They have come and done their work, and have died, leaving behind them the foul smell of destruction. An Augustus followed Cæsar, and him Tiberius, and so on to a Nero. It was necessary that men should suffer much before they were brought back to own their condition. But they who can see a Cicero struggling to avoid the evil that was coming—not for himself but for the world around him—and can lend their tongues, their pens, their ready wits to ridicule his efforts, can hardly have been touched by the supremacy of human suffering.

It must have been a sorry time with him at Brundisium. He had to stay there waiting till Cæsar's pleasure had been made known to him, and Cæsar was thinking of other things. Cæsar was away in Egypt and the East, encountering perils at Alexandria which, if all be true that we have heard, imply that he had lived to be past fear. Grant that a man has to live as Cæsar did, and it will be well that he should be past fear. At any rate he did not think of Cicero, or thinking of him felt that he was one who must be left to brood in silence over the choice he had made. Cicero did brood—not exactly in silence—over the things that fate had done for him and for his country. For himself, he was living in Italy, and yet could not venture to betake himself to one of the eighteen villas which, as Middleton tells us, he had studded about the country for his pastime. There were those at Tusculum, Antium, Astura, Arpinum—at Formiæ, at Cumæ, at Puteoli, and at Pompeii. Those who tell us of Cicero's poverty are surely wandering, carried away by their erroneous notions of what were a Roman nobleman's ideas as to money. At no period of his life do we find Cicero not doing what he was minded to do for want of money, and at no period is there a hint that he had allowed himself in any respect to break the law. It has been argued that he must have been driven to take fees and bribes and indirect payments, because he says that he wanted money. It was natural that he should occasionally want money, and yet be in the main indifferent. The incoming of a regular revenue was not understood as it is with us. A man here and there might attend to his money, as did Atticus. Cicero did not; and therefore, when in want of it, he had to apply to a friend for relief. But he always applies as one who knows well that the trouble is not enduring. Is it credible that a man so circumstanced should have remained with those various sources of extravagance which it would have been easy for him to have avoided or lessened? We are led to the conviction that at no time was it expedient to him to abandon his villas, though in the hurry-scurry of Roman affairs it did now and again become necessary for him to apply to Atticus for accommodation. Let us think what must have been Cæsar's demands for money. Of these we hear nothing, because he was too wise to have an Atticus to whom he wrote everything, or too wary to write letters upon business which should be treasured for the curiosity of after-ages.

To be hopeful and then tremulous; to be eager after success and then desponding; to have believed readily every good and then, as readily, evil; to have relied implicitly on a man's faith, and then to have turned round and declared how he had been deceived; to have been very angry and then to have forgiven—this seems to have been Cicero's nature. Verres, Catiline, Clodius, Piso, and Vatinius seem to have caused his wrath; but was there one of them against whom, though he did not forgive him, his anger did not die out? Then, at last, he was moved to an internecine fight with Antony. Is there any one who has read the story which we are going to tell who will not agree with us that, if after Mutina Octavius had thought fit to repudiate Antony and to follow Cicero's counsels, Antony would not have been spared?

Nothing angers me so much in describing Cicero as the assertion that he was a coward. It has sprung from a wrong idea of what constitutes cowardice. He did not care to fight; but are all men cowards who do not care to fight when work can be so much better done by talking? He saw that fighting was the work fit for men of common clay, or felt it if he did not see it. When men rise to such a pitch as that which he filled, and Cæsar and Pompey, and some few others around them, their greatest danger does not consist in fighting. A man's tongue makes enemies more bitter than his sword. But Cicero, when the time came, never shirked his foe. Whether it was Verres or Catiline, or Clodius or Antony, he was always there, ready to take that foe by the throat, and ready to offer his own in return. At moments such as that there was none of the fear which stands aghast at the wrath of the injured one, and makes the man who is a coward quail before the eyes of him who is brave.

His friendship for Pompey is perhaps, of all the strong feelings of his life, the one most requiring excuse, and the most difficult to excuse. For myself I can see why it was so; but I cannot do that without acknowledging in it something which derogated from his greatness. Had he risen above Pompey, he would have been great indeed; for I look upon it as certain that he did see that Pompey was as untrue to the Republic as Cæsar. He saw it occasionally, but it was not borne in upon him at all times that Pompey was false. Cæsar was not false. Cæsar was an open foe. I doubt whether Pompey ever saw enough to be open. He never realized to himself more than men. He never rose to measures—much less to the reason for them. When Cæsar had talked him over, and had induced him to form the Triumvirate, Pompey's politics were gone. Cicero never blanched. Whether, full of new hopes, he attacked Chrysogonus with all the energy of one to whom his injured countrymen were dear, or, with the settled purpose of his life, he accused Verres in the teeth of the coming Consul Hortensius; whether in driving out Catiline, or in defending Milo; whether, even, in standing up before Cæsar for Marcellus, or in his final onslaught upon Antony, his purpose was still the same. As time passed on he took to himself coarser weapons, and went down into the arena and fought the beasts at Ephesus. Alas, it is so with mankind! Who can strive to do good and not fight beasts? And who can fight them but after some fashion of their own? He was fighting beasts at Ephesus when he was defending Milo. He was an oligarch, but he wanted the oligarchy round him to be true and honest! It was impossible. These men would not be just, and yet he must use them. Milo and Cælius and Curio were his friends. He knew them to be bad, but he could not throw off from him all that were bad men. If by these means he could win his way to something that might be good, he would pardon their evil. As we make our way on to the end of his life we find that his character becomes tarnished, and that his high feelings are blunted by the party which he takes and the men with whom he associates.

He did not, indeed, fall away altogether. The magistracy offered to him, the lieutenancy offered to him, the "free legation" offered to him, the last appeal made to him that he would go to Rome and speak a few words—or that he would stay away and remain neutral—did not move him. He did not turn conspirator and then fight for the prize, as Pompey had done. But he had, for so many years, clung to Pompey as the leader of a party; had had it so dinned into his ears that all must depend on Pompey; had found himself so bound up with the man who, when appealed to as to his banishment, had sullenly told him he could only do as Cæsar would have him; whom he had felt to be mean enough to be stigmatized as Sampsiceramus, him of Jerusalem, the hero of Arabia; whom he knew to be desirous of doing with his enemies as Sulla had done with his—that, in spite of it all, he clung to him still!

I cannot but blame Cicero for this, but yet I can excuse it. It is hard to have to change your leader after middle life, and Cicero could only have changed his by becoming a leader himself. We can see how hopeless it was. Would it not have been mean had he allowed those men to go and fight in Macedonia without him? Who would have believed in him had he seemed to be so false? Not Cato, not Brutus, not Bibulus, not Scipio, not Marcellus. Such men were the leaders of the party of which he had been one. Would they not say that he had remained away because he was Cæsar's man? He must follow either Cæsar or Pompey. He knew that Pompey was beaten. There are things which a man knows, but he cannot bring himself to say so even to himself. He went out to fight on the side already conquered; and when the thing was done he came home with his heart sad, and lived at Brundisium, mourning his lot.

From thence he wrote to Atticus, saying that he hardly saw the advantage of complying with advice which had been given to him that he should travel incognito to Rome. But it is the special reason given which strikes us as being so unlike the arguments which would prevail to-day: "Nor have I resting-places on the way sufficiently convenient for me to pass the entire daytime within them."[130] The "diversorium" was a place by the roadside which was always ready should the owner desire to come that way. It must be understood that he travelled with attendants, and carried his food with him, or sent it on before. We see at every turn how much money could do; but we see also how little money had done for the general comfort of the people. Brundisium is above three hundred miles from Rome, and the journey is the same which Horace took afterward, going from the city.[131] Much had then been done to make travelling comfortable, or at any rate cheaper than it had been four-and-twenty years before. But now the journey was not made. He reminds Atticus in the letter that if he had not written through so long an interval it was not because there had been a dearth of subjects. It had been no doubt prudent for a man to be silent when so many eyes and so many ears were on the watch. He writes again some days later, and assures Atticus that Cæsar thinks well of his "lictors!" Oh those eternal lictors! "But what have I to do with lictors," he says, "who am almost ordered to leave the shores of Italy?"[132] And then Cæsar had sent angry messages. Cato and Metellus had been said to have come home. Cæsar did not choose that this should be so, and had ordered them away. It was clearly manifest to every man alive now that Cæsar was the actual master of Italy.

During the whole of this winter he is on terms with Terentia, but he writes to her in the coldest strain. There are many letters to Terentia, more in number than we have ever known before, but they are all of the same order. I translate one here to show the nature of his correspondence: "If you are well, I am so also. The times are such that I expect to hear nothing from yourself, and on my part have nothing to write. Nevertheless, I look for your letters, and I write to you when a messenger is going to start. Voluminia ought to have understood her duty to you, and should have done what she did do better. There are other things, however, which I care for more, and grieve for more bitterly—as those have wished who have driven me from my own opinion."[133] Again he writes to Atticus, deploring that he should have been born—so great are his troubles—or, at any rate, that one should have been born after him from the same mother. His brother has addressed him in anger—his brother, who has desired to make his own affairs straight with Cæsar, and to swim down the stream pleasantly with other noble Romans of the time. I can imagine that with Quintus Cicero there was nothing much higher than the wealth which the day produced. I can fancy that he was possessed of intellect, and that when it was fair sailing with our Consul it was all well with Quintus Cicero; but I can see also that, when Cæsar prevailed, it was occasionally a matter of doubt with Quintus whether his brother should not be abandoned among other things which were obtrusive and vain. He could not quite do it. His brother compelled him into propriety, and carried him along within the lines of the oligarchy. Then Cæsar fell, and Quintus saw that the matter was right; but Cæsar, though he fell, did not altogether fall, and therefore Quintus after all turned out to be in the wrong. I fancy that I can see how things went ill with Quintus.

b.c. 47, ætat. 60.

Cæsar, after the battle of the Pharsalia, had followed Pompey, but had failed to catch him. When he came upon the scene in the roadstead at Alexandria, the murder had been effected. He then disembarked, and there, as circumstances turned out, was doomed to fight another campaign in which he nearly lost his life. It is not a part of my plan to write the life of Cæsar, nor to meddle with it further than I am driven to do in seeking after the sources of Cicero's troubles and aspiration; but the story must be told in a few words. Cæsar went from Alexandria into Asia, and, flashing across Syria, beat Pharnaces, and then wrote his famous "Veni, vidi, vici," if those words were ever written. Surely he could not have written them and sent them home! Even the subservience of the age would not have endured words so boastful, nor would the glory of Cæsar have so tarnished itself. He hurried back to Italy, and quelled the mutiny of his men by a masterpiece of stage-acting. Simply by addressing them as "Quirites," instead of "Milites," he appalled them into obedience. On this journey into Italy he came across Cicero. If he could be cruel without a pang—to the arranging the starvation of a townful of women, because they as well as the men must eat—he could be magnificent in his treatment of a Cicero. He had hunted to the death his late colleague in the Triumvirate, and had felt no remorse; though there seems to have been a moment when in Egypt the countenance of him who had so long been his superior had touched him. He had not ordered Pompey's death. On no occasion had he wilfully put to death a Roman whose name was great enough to leave a mark behind. He had followed the convictions of his countrymen, who had ever spared themselves. To him a thousand Gauls, or men of Eastern origin, were as nothing to a single Roman nobleman. Whether there can be said to have been clemency in such a course it is useless now to dispute. To Cæsar it was at any rate policy as well. If by clemency he meant that state of mind in which it is an evil to sacrifice the life of men to a spirit of revenge, Cæsar was clement. He had moreover that feeling which induces him who wins to make common cause—in little things—with those who lose. We can see Cæsar getting down from his chariot when Cicero came to meet him, and, throwing his arms round his neck, walking off with him in pleasant conversation; and we can fancy him talking to Cicero pleasantly of the greatness which, in times yet to come, pursuits such as his would show in comparison with those of Cæsar's. "Cedant arma togæ; concedat laurea linguæ," we can hear Cæsar say, with an irony expressed in no tone of his voice, but still vibrating to the core of his heart, as he thought so much of his own undoubted military supremacy, and absolutely nothing of his now undoubted literary excellence.

b.c. 47, ætat. 60.

But to go back a little; we shall find Cicero still waiting at Brundisium during August and September. In the former of these months he reminds Atticus that "he cannot at present sell anything, but that he can put by something so that it may be in safety when the ruin shall fall upon him."[134] From this may be deduced a state of things very different to that above described, but not contradicting it. I gather from this unintelligible letter, written, as he tells us, for the most part in his own handwriting, that he was at the present moment under some forfeiture of the law to Cæsar. It may well be that, as one adjudged to be a rebel to his country, his property should not be salable. If that were so, Cæsar in some of these bland moments must have revoked the sentence—and at such a time all sentences were within Cæsar's control—because we know that on his return Cicero's villas were again within his own power. But he is in sad trouble now about his wife. He has written to her to send him twelve thousand sesterces, which he had as it were in a bag, and she sends him ten, saying that no more is left. If she would deduct something from so small a sum, what would she do if it were larger?[135] Then follow two letters for his wife—a mere word in each—not a sign of affection nor of complaint in either of them. In the first he tells her she shall be informed when Cæsar is coming—in the latter, that he is coming. When he has resolved whether to go and meet him or to remain where he is till Cæsar shall have come upon him, he will again write. Then there are three to Atticus, and two more to Terentia. In the first he tells him that Cæsar is expected. Some ten or twelve days afterward he is still full of grief as to his brother Quintus, whose conduct has been shameful. Cæsar he knows is near at hand, but he almost hopes that he will not come to Brundisium. In the third, as indeed he has in various others, he complains bitterly of the heat: it is of such a nature that it adds to his grief. Shall he send word to Cæsar that he will wait upon him nearer to Rome?[136] He is evidently in a sad condition. Quintus, it must be remembered, had been in Gaul with Cæsar, and had seen the rising sun. On his return to Italy he had not force enough to declare a political conviction, and to go over to Cæsar boldly. He had indeed become lieutenant to his brother when in Cilicia, having left Cæsar for the purpose. He afterward went with his brother to the Pharsalus, assuring the elder Cicero that they two would still be of the same party. Then the great catastrophe had come, when Cicero returned from that wretched campaign to Brundisium, and remained there in despair as at some penal settlement. Quintus followed Cæsar into Asia with his son, and there pleaded his own cause with him at the expense of his brother. Of Cæsar we must all admit that, though indifferent to the shedding of blood, arrogant, without principle in money and without heart in love, he was magnificent, and that he injured none from vindictive motives. He passed on, leaving Quintus Cicero, who as a soldier had been true to him, without, as we can fancy, many words. Cicero afterward interceded for his brother who had reviled him, and Quintus will ever after have to bear the stain of his treachery. Then came the two letters for his wife, with just a line in each. If her messenger should arrive, he will send her word back as to what she is to do. After an interval of nearly a month, there is the other—ordering, in perfectly restored good-humor, that the baths shall be ready at the Tusculan villa: "Let the baths be all ready, and everything fit for the use of guests; there will probably be many of them."[137] It is evident that Cæsar has passed on in a good-humor, and has left behind him glad tidings, such as should ever brighten the feet of the conqueror.

It is singular that, with a correspondence such as that of Cicero's, of which, at least through the latter two or three years of his life, every letter of his to his chief friend has been preserved, there should have been nothing left to us from that friend himself. It must have been the case, as Middleton suggests, that Atticus, when Cicero was dead, had the handling of the entire MS., and had withdrawn his own; either that, or else Cicero and Atticus mutually agreed to the destruction of their joint labors, and Atticus had been untrue to his agreement, knowing well the value of the documents he preserved. That there is no letter from a woman—not even a line to Cicero from his dear daughter—is much to be regretted. And yet there are letters—many from Cælius, who is thus brought forward as almost a second and a younger Atticus—and from various Romans of the day. When we come to the latter days of his life, in which he had taken upon himself the task of writing to Plancus and others as to their supposed duty to the State, they become numerous. There are ten such from Plancus, and nine from Decimus Brutus; and there is a whole mass of correspondence with Marcus Brutus—to be taken for what it is worth. With a view to history, they are doubtless worth much; but as throwing light on Cicero's character, except as to the vigor that was in the man to the last, they are not of great value. How is it that a correspondence, which is for its main purpose so full, should have fallen so short in many of its details? There is no word, no allusion derogatory to Atticus in these letters, which have come to us from Cælius and others. We have Atticus left to us for our judgment, free from the confession of his own faults, and free also from the insinuations of others. Of whom would we wish that the familiar letters of another about ourselves should be published? Would those objectionable epithets as to Pompey have been allowed to hold their ground had Pompey lived and had they been in his possession?

But, in reading histories and biographies, we always accept with a bias in favor of the person described the anecdotes of those who talk of them. We know that the ready wit of the surrounding world has taken up these affairs of the moment and turned them into ridicule—then as they do now. We discount the "Hierosolymarius." We do not quite believe that Bibulus never left the house while an enemy was to be seen; but we think that a man may be expected to tell the truth of himself; at any rate, to tell no untruth against himself. We think that Cicero of all men may be left to do so—Cicero, who so well understood the use of words, and could use them in his own defence so deftly. I maintain that it has been that very deftness which has done him all the harm. Not one of those letters of the last years would have been written as it is now had Cicero thought, when writing it, that from it would his conduct have been judged after two thousand years. "No," will say my readers, "that is their value; they would not have otherwise been true, as they are. We should not then have learned his secrets." I reply, "It is a hard bargain to make: others do not make such bargains on the same terms. But be sure, at any rate, that you read them aright: be certain that you make the necessary allowances. Do not accuse him of falsehood because he unsays on a Tuesday the words he said on the Monday. Bear in mind on his behalf all the temporary ill that humanity is heir to. Could you, living at Brundisium during the summer months, 'when you were scarcely able to endure the weight of the sun,'[138] have had all your intellects about you, and have been able always to choose your words?" No, indeed! These letters, if truth is to be expected from them, have to be read with all the subtle distinctions necessary for understanding the frame of mind in which they were written. His anger boils over here, and he is hot. Here tenderness has mastered him, and the love of old days. He is weak in body just now, and worn out in spirit; he is hopeless, almost to the brink of despair; he is bright with wit, he is full of irony, he is purposely enigmatic—all of which require an Atticus who knew him and the people among whom he had lived, and the times in which the events took place, for their special reading. Who is there can read them now so as accurately to decipher every intended detail? Then comes some critic who will not even attempt to read them—who rushes through them by the light of some foregone conclusion, and missing the point at which the writer subtly aims, tells us of some purpose of which he was altogether innocent! Because he jokes about the augurship, we are told how miserably base he was, and how ready to sell his country!

During the whole of the last year he must have been tortured by various turns of mind. Had he done well in joining himself to Pompey? and having done so, had he done well in severing himself, immediately on Pompey's death, from the Pompeians? Looking at the matter as from a stand-point quite removed from it, we are inclined to say that he had done well in both. He could not without treachery have gone over to Cæsar when Cæsar had come to the gate of Italy, and, as it were with a blast of his trumpet, had demanded the Consulship, a triumph, the use of his legions, and the continuance of his military power. "Let Pompey put down his, and I will put down mine," he had said. Had Pompey put down his, Pompey and Cicero, Cato and Brutus, and Bibulus would all have had to walk at the heels of Cæsar. When Pompey declared that he would contest the point, he declared for them all. Cicero was bound to go to Pharsalia. But when, by Pompey's incompetence, Cæsar was the victor; when Pompey had fallen at the Nile, and all the lovers of the fish-ponds, and the intractable oligarchs, and the cutthroats of the Empire, such as young Pompey had become, had scattered themselves far and wide, some to Asia, some to Illyricum, some to Spain, and more to Africa—as a herd of deer shall be seen to do when a vast hound has appeared among them, with his jaws already dripping with blood—was Cicero then to take his part with any of them? I hold that he did what dignity required, and courage also. He went back to Italy, and there he waited till the conqueror should come.

It must have been very bitter. Never to have become great has nothing in it of bitterness for a noble spirit. What matters it to the unknown man whether a Cæsar or a Pompey is at the top of all things? Or if it does matter—as indeed that question of his governance does matter to every man who has a soul within him to be turned this way or that—which way he is turned, though there may be inner regrets that Cæsar should become the tyrant, perhaps keener regrets, if the truth were all seen, that Pompey's hands should be untrammelled, who sees them? I can walk down to my club with my brow unclouded, or, unless I be stirred to foolish wrath by the pride of some one equally vain, can enjoy myself amid the festivities of the hour. It is but a little affair to me. If it come in my way to do a thing, I will do my best, and there is an end of it. The sense of responsibility is not there, nor the grievous weight of having tried but failed to govern mankind. But to have clung to high places; to have sat in the highest seat of all with infinite honor; to have been called by others, and, worse still, to have called myself, the savior of my country; to have believed in myself that I was sufficient, that I alone could do it, that I could bring back, by my own justice and integrity, my erring countrymen to their former simplicity—and then to have found myself fixed in a little town, just in Italy, waiting for the great conqueror, who though my friend in things social was opposed to me body and soul as to rules of life—that, I say, must have been beyond the bitterness of death.

During this year he had made himself acquainted with the details of that affair, whatever it might be, which led to his divorce soon after his return to Rome. He had lived about thirty years with his wife, and the matter could not but have been to him the cause of great unhappiness. Terentia was not only the mother of his children, but she had been to him also the witness of his rise in life and the companion of his fall. He was one who would naturally learn to love those with whom he was conversant. He seems to have projected himself out of his own time into those modes of thought which have come to us with Christianity, and such a separation from this woman after an intercourse of so many years must have been very grievous to him. All married Romans underwent divorce quite as a matter of course. There were many reasons. A young wife is more agreeable to the man's taste than one who is old. A rich wife is more serviceable than a poor. A new wife is a novelty. A strange wife is an excitement. A little wife is a relief to one overburdened with the flesh; a buxom wife to him who has become tired of the pure spirit. Xanthippe asks too much, while Griselda is too tranquil. And then, as a man came up in the world, causes for divorce grew without even the trouble of having to search for faults. Cæsar required that his wife should not be ill spoken of, and therefore divorced her. Pompey cemented the Triumvirate with a divorce. We cannot but imagine that, when men had so much the best of it in the affairs of life, a woman had always the worst of it in these enforced separations. But as the wind is tempered to the shorn lamb, so were divorces made acceptable to Roman ladies. No woman was disgraced by a divorce, and they who gave over their husbands at the caprice of a moment to other embraces would usually find consolation. Terentia when divorced from Cicero was at least fifty, and we are told she had the extreme honor of having married Sallust after her break with Cicero. They say that she married twice again after Sallust's death, and that having lived nearly through the reign of Augustus, she died at length at the age of a hundred and three. Divorce at any rate did not kill her. But we cannot conceive but that so sudden a disruption of all the ties of life must have been grievous to Cicero. We shall find him in the next chapter marrying a young ward, and then, too, divorcing her; but here we have only to deal with the torments Terentia inflicted on him. What those torments were we do not know, and shall never learn unless by chance the lost letters of Atticus should come to light. But the general idea has been that the lady had, in league with a freedman and steward in her service, been guilty of fraud against her husband. I do not know that we have much cause to lament the means of ascertaining the truth. It is sad to find that the great men with whose name we are occupied have been made subject to those "whips and scorns of time" which we thought to be peculiar to ourselves, because they have stung us. Terentia, Cicero's wife two thousand years ago, sent him word that he had but £100 left in his box at home, when he himself knew well that there must be something more. That would have gone for nothing had there not been other things before that, many other things. So, in spite of his ordering at her hands the baths and various matters to be got ready for his friends at his Tusculum, a very short time after his return there he had divorced her.

During this last year he had been engaged on what has since been found to be the real work of his life. He had already written much, but had written as one who had been anxious to fill up vacant spaces of time as they came in his way. From this time forth he wrote as does one who has reconciled himself to the fact that there are no more days to be lost if he intends, before the sun be set, to accomplish an appointed task. He had already compiled the De Oratore, the De Republica, and the De Legibus. Out of the many treatises which we have from Cicero's hands, these are they which are known as the works of his earlier years. He commenced the year with an inquiry, De Optimo Genere Oratorum, which he intended as a preface to the translations which he made of the great speeches of Æschines and Demosthenes, De Corona. These translations are lost, though the preface remains. He then translated, or rather paraphrased the Timæus of Plato, of which a large proportion has come down to us, and the Protagoras, of which we have lost all but a sentence or two. We have his Oratoriæ Partitiones, in which, in a dialogue between himself and his son, he repeats the lessons on oratory which he has given to the young man. It is a recapitulation, in short, of all that had been said on a subject which has since been made common, and which owed its origin to the work of much earlier years. It is but dull reading, but I can imagine that even in these days it may be useful to a young lawyer. There is a cynical morsel among these precepts which is worth observing, "Cito enim arescit lachryma præsertim in alienis malis;"[139] and another grandly simple, "Nihil enim est aliud eloquentia nisi copiose loquens sapientia." Can we fancy anything more biting than the idea that the tears caused by the ills of another soon grow dry on the orator's cheek, or more wise than that which tells us that eloquence is no more than wisdom speaking eloquently? Then he wrote the six Paradoxes addressed to Brutus—or rather he then gave them to the world, for they were surely written at an earlier date. They are short treatises on trite subjects, put into beautiful language, so as to arrest the attention of all readers by the unreasonableness of their reasoning. The most remarkable is the third, in which he endeavored to show that a man cannot be wise unless he be all-wise, a doctrine which he altogether overturns in his De Amicitia, written but four years afterward. Cicero knew well what was true, and wrote his paradox in order to give a zest to the subject. In the fourth and the sixth are attacks upon Clodius and Crassus, and are here republished in what would have been the very worst taste amid the politeness of our modern times. A man now may hate and say so while his foe is still alive and strong; but with the Romans he might continue to hate, and might republish the words which he had written, eight years after the death of his victim.

I know nothing of Cicero's which so much puts us in mind of the struggles of the modern authors to make the most of every word that has come from them, as do these paradoxes. They remind us of some writer of leading articles who gets together a small bundle of essays and then gives them to the world. Each of them has done well at its time, but that has not sufficed for his ambition; therefore they are dragged out into the light and put forward with a separate claim for attention, as though they could stand well on their own legs. But they cannot stand alone, and they fall from having been put into a position other than that for which they were intended when written.

Chapter VII.

MARCELLUS, LIGARIUS, AND DEIOTARUS.

b.c. 46, ætat. 61.

The battle of Thapsus, in Africa, took place in the spring of this year, and Cato destroyed himself with true stoical tranquillity, determined not to live under Cæsar's rule. If we may believe the story which, probably, Hirtius has given us, in his account of the civil war in Africa, and which has come down to us together with Cæsar's Commentaries, Cato left his last instructions to some of his officers, and then took his sword into his bed with him and stabbed himself. Cicero, who, in his dream of Scipio, has given his readers such excellent advice in regard to suicide, has understood that Cato must be allowed the praise of acting up to his own principles. He would die rather than behold the face of the tyrant who had enslaved him.[140] To Cato it was nothing that he should leave to others the burden of living under Cæsar; but to himself the idea of a superior caused an unendurable affront. The "Catonis nobile letum" has reconciled itself to the poets of all ages. Men, indeed, have refused to see that he fled from a danger which he felt to be too much for him, and that in doing so he had lacked something of the courage of a man. Many other Romans of the time did the same thing, but to none has been given all the honor which has been allowed to Cato.

Cicero felt as others have done, and allowed all his little jealousies to die away. It was but a short time before that Cato had voted against the decree of the Senate giving Cicero his "supplication." Cicero had then been much annoyed; but now Cato had died fighting for the Republic, and was to be forgiven all personal offences. Cicero wrote a eulogy of Cato which was known by the name of Cato, and was much discussed at Rome at the time. It has now been lost. He sent it to Cæsar, having been bold enough to say in it whatever occurred to him should be said in Cato's praise. We may imagine that, had it not pleased him to be generous—had he not been governed by that feeling of "De mortuis nil nisi bonum," which is now common to us all—he might have said much that was not good. Cato had endeavored to live up to the austerest rules of the Stoics—a mode of living altogether antagonistic to Cicero's views. But we know that he praised Cato to the full—and we know also that Cæsar nobly took the praise in good part, as coming from Cicero, and answered it in an Anti-Cato, in which he stated his reasons for differing from Cicero. We can understand how Cæsar should have shown that the rigid Stoic was not a man likely to be of service to his country.

There came up at this period a question which made itself popular among the "optimates" of Rome, as to the return of Marcellus. The man of Como, whom Marcellus had flogged, will be remembered—the Roman citizen who had first been made a citizen by Cæsar. This is mentioned now not as the cause of Cæsar's enmity, who did not care much probably for his citizen, but as showing the spirit of the man. He, Marcellus, had been Consul four years since, b.c. 51, and had then endeavored to procure Cæsar's recall from his province. He was one of the "optimates," an oligarch altogether opposed to Cæsar, a Roman nobleman of fairly good repute, who had never bent to Cæsar, but had believed thoroughly in his order, and had thought, till the day of Pharsalia came, that the Consuls and the Senate would rule forever. The day of Pharsalia did come, and Marcellus went into voluntary banishment in Mitylene. After Pharsalia, Cæsar's clemency began to make itself known. There was a pardon for almost every Roman who had fought against him, and would accept it. No spark of anger burnt in Cæsar's bosom, except against one or two, of whom Marcellus was one. He was too wise to be angry with men whose services he might require. It was Cæsar's wish not to drive out the good men but to induce them to remain in Rome, living by the grace of his favor. Marcellus had many friends, and it seems that a public effort was made to obtain for him permission to come back to Rome. We must imagine that Cæsar had hitherto refused, probably with the idea of making his final concession the more valuable. At last the united Senators determined to implore his grace, and the Consulares rose one after another in their places, and all, with one exception,[141] asked that Marcellus might be allowed to return. Cicero, however, had remained silent to the last. There must have been, I think, some plot to get Cicero on to his legs. He had gone to meet Cæsar at Brundisium when he came back from the East, had returned to Rome under his auspices, and had lived in pleasant friendship with Cæsar's friends. Pardon seems to have been accorded to Cicero without an effort. As far as he was concerned, that hostile journey to Dyrrachium—for he did not travel farther toward the camp—counted for nothing with Cæsar. He was allowed to live in peace, at Rome or at his villas, as he might please, so long as Cæsar might rule. The idea seems to have been that he should gradually become absorbed among Cæsar's followers. But hitherto he had remained silent. It was now six years since his voice had been heard in Rome. He had spoken for Milo—or had intended to speak—and, in the same affair, for Munatius Plancus, and for Saufeius, b.c. 52. He had then been in his fifty-fifth year, and it might well be that six years of silence at such a period of his life would not be broken. It was manifestly his intention not to speak again, at any rate in the Senate; though the threats made by him as to his total retirement should not be taken as meaning much. Such threats from statesmen depend generally on the wishes of other men. But he held his place in the Senate, and occasionally attended the debates. When this affair of Marcellus came on, and all the Senators of consular rank—excepting only Volcatius and Cicero—had risen, and had implored Cæsar in a few words to condescend to be generous; when Claudius Marcellus had knelt at Cæsar's feet to ask for his brother's liberty, and Cæsar himself, after reminding them of the bitterness of the man, had still declared that he could not refuse the prayers of the Senate, then Cicero, as though driven by the magnanimity of the conqueror, rose from his place, and poured forth his thanks in the speech which is still extant.

That used to be the story till there came the German critic Wolf, who at the beginning of this century told us that Cicero did not utter the words attributed to him, and could not have uttered them. According to Wolf, it would be doing Cicero an egregious wrong to suppose him capable of having used such words, which are not Latin, and which were probably written by some ignoramus in the time of Tiberius. Such a verdict might have been taken as fatal—for Wolf's scholarship and powers of criticism are acknowledged—in spite of La Harpe, the French scholar and critic, who has named the Marcellus as a thing of excellence, comparing it with the eulogistic speeches of Isocrates. The praise of La Harpe was previous to the condemnation of Wolf, and we might have been willing to accede to the German as being the later and probably the more accurate. Mr. Long, the British editor of the Orations—Mr. Long, who has so loudly condemned the four speeches supposed to have been made after Cicero's return from exile—gives us no certain guidance. Mr. Long, at any rate, has not been so disgusted by the Tiberian Latin as to feel himself bound to repudiate it. If he can read the Pro Marcello, so can I, and so, my reader, might you do probably without detriment. But these differences among the great philologic critics tend to make us, who are so infinitely less learned, better contented with our own lot. I, who had read the Pro Marcello without stumbling over its halting Latinity, should have felt myself crushed when I afterward came across Wolf's denunciations, had I not been somewhat comforted by La Harpe. But when I found that Mr. Long, in his introduction to the piece, though he discusses Wolf's doctrine, still gives to the orator the advantage, as it may be, of his "imprimatur," I felt that I might go on, and not be ashamed of myself.[142]

This is the story that has now to be told of the speech Pro Marcello. At the time the matter ended very tragically. As soon as Cæsar had yielded, Cicero wrote to Marcellus giving him strong reasons for coming home. Marcellus answered him, saying that it was impossible. He thanks Cicero shortly; but, with kindly dignity, he declines. "With the comforts of the city I can well dispense," he says.[143] Then Cicero urges him again and again, using excellent arguments for his return—which at length prevail. In the spring of the next year Marcellus, on his way back to Rome, is at Athens. There Servius Sulpicius spends a day with him; but, just as Sulpicius is about to pass on, there comes a slave to him who tells him that Marcellus has been murdered. His friend Magius Chilo had stabbed him overnight, and had then destroyed himself. It was said that Chilo had asked Marcellus to pay his debts for him, and that Marcellus had refused. It seems to be more probable that Chilo had his own reasons for not choosing that his friend should return to Rome.

Looking back at my own notes on the speech—it would make with us but a ten minutes' after-dinner speech—I see that it is said "that it is chiefly remarkable for the beauty of the language, and the abjectness of the praise of Cæsar." This was before I had heard of Wolf. As to the praise, I doubt whether it should be called abject, regard being had to the feelings of the moment in which it was delivered. Cicero had risen to thank Cæsar—on whose breath the recall of Marcellus depended—for his unexpected courtesy. In England we should not have thanked Cæsar as Cicero did: "O Cæsar, there is no flood of eloquence, no power of the tongue or of the pen, no richness of words, which may emblazon, or even dimly tell the story of your great deeds."[144] Such language is unusual with us—as it would also be unusual to abuse our Pisos and our Vatiniuses, as did Cicero. It was the Southerner and the Roman who spoke to Southerners and to Romans. But, undoubtedly, there was present to the mind of Cicero the idea of saying words which Cæsar might receive with pleasure. He was dictator, emperor, lord of all things—king. Cicero should have remained away, as Marcellus had done, were he not prepared to speak after this fashion. He had long held aloof from speech. At length the time had come when he was, as it were, caught in a trap, and compelled to be eloquent.

b.c. 46, ætat. 61.

The silence had been broken, and in the course of the autumn he spoke on behalf of Ligarius, beseeching the conqueror to be again merciful. This case was by no means similar to that of Marcellus, who was exiled by no direct forfeiture of his right to live in Italy, but who had expatriated himself. In this case Ligarius had been banished with others; but it seems that the punishment had been inflicted on him, not from the special ill-will of Cæsar, but from the malice of certain enemies who, together with Ligarius, had found themselves among Pompey's followers when Cæsar crossed the Rubicon. Ligarius had at this time been left as acting governor in Africa. In the confusion of the times an unfortunate Pompeian named Varus had arrived in Africa, and to him, as being superior in rank, Ligarius had given up the government. Varus had then gone, leaving Ligarius still acting, and one Tubero had come with his son, and had demanded the office. Ligarius had refused to give it up, and the two Tuberos had departed, leaving the province in anger, and had fought at the Pharsalus. After the battle they made their peace with Cæsar, and in the scramble that ensued Ligarius was banished. Now the case was brought into the courts, in which Cæsar sat as judge. The younger Tubero accused Ligarius, and Cicero defended him. It seems that, having been enticed to open his mouth on behalf of Marcellus, he found himself launched again into public life. But how great was the difference from his old life! It is not to the Judices, or Patres Conscripti, or to the Quirites that he now addresses himself, determined by the strength of his eloquence to overcome the opposition of stubborn minds, but to Cæsar, whom he has to vanquish simply by praise. Once again he does the same thing when pleading for Deiotarus, the King of Galatia, and it is impossible to deny, as we read the phrases, that the orator sinks in our esteem. It is not so much that we judge him to be small, as that he has ceased to be great. He begins his speech for Ligarius by saying, "My kinsman Tubero has brought before you, O Cæsar, a new crime, and one not heard of up to this day—that Ligarius has been in Africa."[145] The commencement would have been happy enough if it had not been addressed to Cæsar; for he was addressing a judge not appointed by any form, but self-assumed—a judge by military conquest. We cannot imagine how Cæsar found time to sit there, with his legions round him still under arms, and Spain not wholly conquered. But he did do so, and allowed himself to be persuaded to the side of mercy. Ligarius came back to Rome, and was one of those who plunged their daggers into him. But I cannot think that he should have been hindered by this trial and by Cæsar's mercy from taking such a step, if by nothing else. Brutus and Cassius also stabbed him. The question to be decided is whether, on public grounds, these men were justified in killing him—a question as to which I should be premature in expressing an opinion here.

There are some beautiful passages in this oration. "Who is there, I ask," he says, "who alleges Ligarius to have been in fault because he was in Africa? He does so who himself was most anxious to be there, and now complains that he was refused admittance by Ligarius, he who was in arms against Cæsar. What was your sword doing, Tubero, in that Pharsalian army? Whom did you seek to kill then? What was the meaning of your weapon? What was it that you desired so eagerly, with those eyes and hands, with that passion in your heart? I press him too much; the young man seems to be disturbed. I will speak of myself, then, for I also was in that army."[146] This was in Cæsar's presence, and no doubt told with Cæsar. We were all together in the same cause—you, and I, and Ligarius. Why should you and I be pardoned and not Ligarius? The oration is for the most part simply eulogistic. At any rate it was successful, and became at Rome, for the time, extremely popular. He writes about it early in the following year to Atticus, who has urged him to put something into it, before it was published, to mitigate the feeling against Tubero. Cicero says in his reply to Atticus that the copies have already been given to the public, and that, indeed, he is not anxious on Tubero's behalf.

Early in this year he had divorced Terentia, and seems at once to have married Publilia. Publilia had been his ward, and is supposed to have had a fortune of her own. He explains his own motives very clearly in a letter to his friend Plancius. In these wretched times he would have formed no new engagement, unless his own affairs had been as sad for him as were those of the Republic; but when he found that they to whom his prosperity should have been of the greatest concern were plotting against him within his own walls, he was forced to strengthen himself against the perfidy of his old inmates by placing his trust in new.[147] It must have been very bad with him when he had recourse to such a step as this. Shortly after this letter just quoted had been written, he divorced Publilia also—we are told because Publilia had treated Tullia with disrespect. We have no details on the subject, but we can well understand the pride of the young woman who declined to hear the constant praise of her step-daughter, and thought herself to be quite as good as Tullia. At any rate, she was sent away quickly from her new home, having remained there only long enough to have made not the most creditable episode in Cicero's life.

At this time Dolabella, who assumed the Consulship upon Cæsar's death, and Hirtius, who became Consul during the next year, used to attend upon Cicero and take lessons in elocution. So at least the story has been told, from a letter written in this year to his friend Pœtus; but I should imagine that the lessons were not much in earnest. "Why do you talk to me of your tunny-fish, your pilot-fish, and your cheese and sardines? Hirtius and Dolabella preside over my banquets, and I teach them in return to make speeches."[148] From this we may learn that Cæsar's friends were most anxious to be also Cicero's friends. It may be said that Dolabella was his son-in-law; but Dolabella was at this moment on the eve of being divorced. It was in spite of his marriage that Dolabella still clung to Cicero. All Cæsar's friends in Rome did the same; so that I am disposed to think that for this year, just till Tullia's death, he was falling, not into a happy state, but to the passive contentment of those who submit themselves to be ruled over by a single master. He had struggled all his life, and now finding that he must yield, he thought that he might as well do so gracefully. It was so much easier to listen to the State secrets of Balbus, and hear from Oppius how the money was spent, and then to dine with Hirtius or Dolabella, than to sit ever scowling at home, as Cato would have done had Cato lived. But with his feelings about the Republic at heart, how sad it must have been! Cato was gone, and Pompey, and Bibulus; and Marcellus was either gone or just about to go. Old age was creeping on. It was better to write philosophy, in friendship with Cæsar's friends, than to be banished again whither he could not write it at all. Much, no doubt, he did in preparation for all those treatises which the next eighteen months were to bring forth.

Cæsar, just at the end of the year, had been again called to Spain, b.c. 46, to quell the last throbbings of the Pompeians, and then to fight the final battle of Munda. It would seem odd to us that so little should have been said about such an event by Cicero, and that the little should depend on the education of his son, were it not that if we look at our own private letters, written to-day to our friends, we find the same omission of great things. To Cicero the doings of his son were of more immediate moment than the doings of Cæsar. The boy had been anxious to enlist for the Spanish war. Quintus, his cousin, had gone, and young Marcus was anxious to flutter his feathers beneath the eyes of royalty. At his age it was nothing to him that he had been taken to Pharsalia and made to bear arms on the opposite side. Cæsar had become Cæsar since he had learned to form his opinion on politics, and on Cæsar's side all things seemed to be bright and prosperous. The lad was anxious to get away from his new step-mother, and asked his father for the means to go with the army to Spain. It appears by Cicero's letter to Atticus on the subject[149] that, in discussing the matter with his son, he did yield. These Roman fathers, in whose hands we are told were the very lives of their sons, seem to have been much like Christian fathers of modern days in their indulgences. The lad was now nineteen years old, and does not appear to have been willing, at the first parental attempt, to give up his military appanages and that swagger of the young officer which is so dear to the would-be military mind. Cicero tells him that if he joined the army he would find his cousin treated with greater favor than himself. Young Quintus was older, and had been already able to do something to push himself with Cæsar's friends. "Sed tamen permisi"—"Nevertheless, I told him he might go," said Cicero, sadly. But he did not go. He was allured, probably, by the promise of a separate establishment at Athens, whither he was sent to study with Cratippus. We find another proof of Cicero's wealth in the costliness of his son's household at Athens, as premeditated by the father. He is to live as do the sons of other great noblemen. He even names the young noblemen with whom he is to live. Bibulus was of the Calpurnian "gens," Acidinus of the Manlian, and Messala of the Valerian, and these are the men whom Cicero, the "novus homo" from Arpinum, selects as those who shall not live at a greater cost than his son.[150] "He will not, however, at Athens want a horse." Why not? Why should not a young man so furnished want a horse at Athens? "There are plenty here at home for the road," says Cicero. So young Cicero is furnished, and sent forth to learn philosophy and Greek. But no one has essayed to tell us why he should not want the horse. Young Cicero when at Athens did not do well. He writes home in the coming year, to Tiro, two letters which have been preserved for us, and which seem to give us but a bad account, at any rate, of his sincerity. "The errors of his youth," he says, "have afflicted him grievously." Not only is his mind shocked, but his ears cannot bear to hear of his own iniquity.[151] "And now," he says, "I will give you a double joy, to compensate all the anxiety I have occasioned you. Know that I live with Cratippus, my master, more like a son than a pupil. I spend all my days with him, and very often part of the night." But he seems to have had some wit. Tiro has been made a freedman, and has bought a farm for himself. Young Marcus—from whom Tiro has asked for some assistance which Marcus cannot give him—jokes with him as to his country life, telling him that he sees him saving the apple-pips at dessert. Of the subsequent facts of the life of young Marcus we do not know much. He did not suffer in the proscriptions of Antony and Augustus, as did his father and uncle and his cousin. He did live to be chosen as Consul with Augustus, and had the reputation of a great drinker. For this latter assertion we have only the authority of Pliny the elder, who tells us an absurd story, among the wonders of drinking which he adduces.[152] Middleton says a word or two on behalf of the young Cicero, which are as well worthy of credit as anything else that has been told. One last glance at him which we can credit is given in that letter to Tiro, and that we admit seems to us to be hypocritical.

b.c. 45, ætat. 62.

In the spring of the year Cicero lost his daughter Tullia. We have first a letter of his to Lepta, a man with whom he had become intimate, saying that he had been kept in Rome by Tullia's confinement, and that now he is still detained, though her health is sufficiently confirmed, by the expectation of obtaining from Dolabella's agents the first repayment of her dowry. The repayment of the divorced lady's marriage portion was a thing of every-day occurrence in Rome, when she was allowed to take away as much as she had brought with her. Cicero, however, failed to get back Tullia's dowry. But he writes in good spirits. He does not think that he cares to travel any more. He has a house at Rome better than any of his villas in the country, and greater rest than in the most desert region. His studies are now never interrupted. He thinks it probable that Lepta will have to come to him before he can be induced to go to Lepta. In the mean time let the young Lepta take care and read his Hesiod.[153]

Then he writes in the spring to Atticus a letter from Antium, and we first hear that Tullia is dead. She had seemed to recover from childbirth; but her strength did not suffice, and she was no more.[154] A boy had been born, and was left alive. In subsequent letters we find that Cicero gives instructions concerning him, and speaks of providing for him in his will.[155] But of the child we hear nothing more, and must surmise that he also died. Of Tullia's death we have no further particulars; but we may well imagine that the troubles of the world had been very heavy on her. The little stranger was being born at the moment of her divorce from her third husband. She was about thirty-two years of age, and it seems that Cicero had taken consolation in her misfortunes from the expected pleasure of her companionship. She was now dead, and he was left alone.

She had died in February, and we know nothing of the first outbreak of his sorrow. It appears that he at first buried himself for a while in a villa belonging to Atticus, near Rome, and that he then retreated to his own at Astura. From thence, and afterward from Antium, there are a large number of letters, all dealing with the same subject. He declares himself to be inconsolable; but he does take consolation from two matters—from his books on philosophy, and from an idea which occurs to him that he will perpetuate the name of Tullia forever by the erection of a monument that shall be as nearly immortal as stones and bricks can make it.

His letters to Atticus at this time are tedious to the general reader, because he reiterates so often his instructions as to the purchase of the garden near Rome in which the monument is to be built; but they are at the same time touching and natural. "Nothing has been written," he says, "for the lessening of grief which I have not read at your house; but my sorrow breaks through it all."[156] Then he tells Atticus that he too has endeavored to console himself by writing a treatise on Consolation. "Whole days I write; not that it does any good." In that he was wrong. He could find no cure for his grief; but he did know that continued occupation would relieve him, and therefore he occupied himself continually. "Totos dies scribo." By doing so, he did contrive not to break his heart. In a subsequent letter he says, "Reading and writing do not soften it, but they deaden it."[157]

On the Appian Way, a short distance out of Rome, the traveller is shown a picturesque ancient building, of enormous strength, called the Mole of Cæcilia Metella. It is a castle in size, but is believed to have been the tomb erected to the memory of Cæcilia, the daughter of Metellus Creticus, and the wife of Crassus the rich. History knows of her nothing more, and authentic history hardly knows so much of the stupendous monument. There it stands, however, and is supposed to be proof of what might be done for a Roman lady in the way of perpetuating her memory. She was, at any rate, older than Tullia, having been the wife of a man older than Tullia's father. If it be the case that this monument be of the date named, it proves to us, at least, that the notion of erecting such monuments was then prevalent. Some idea of a similar kind—of a monument equally stupendous, and that should last as long—seems to have taken a firm hold of Cicero's mind. He has read all the authors he could find on the subject, and they agree that it shall be done in the fashion he points out. He does not, he says, consult Atticus on that matter, nor on the architecture, for he has already settled on the design of one Cluatius. What he wants Atticus to do for him now is to assist him in buying the spot on which it shall be built. Many gardens near Rome are named. If Drusus makes a difficulty, Atticus must see Damasippus. Then there are those which belong to Sica and to Silius! But at last the matter dies away, and even the gardens are not bought. We are led to imagine that Atticus has been opposed to the monument from first to last, and that the immense cost of constructing such a temple as Cicero had contemplated is proved to him to be injudicious. There is a charming letter written to him at this time by his friend Sulpicius, showing the great feeling entertained for him. But, as I have said before, I doubt whether that or any other phrases of consolation were of service to him. It was necessary for him to wait and bear it, and the more work that he did when he was bearing it, the easier it was borne. Lucceius and Torquatus wrote to him on the same subject, and we have his answers.

b.c. 45, ætat. 62.

In September Cæsar returned from Spain, having at last conquered the Republic. All hope for liberty was now gone. Atticus had instigated Cicero to write something to Cæsar as to his victories—something that should be complimentary, and at the same time friendly and familiar; but Cicero had replied that it was impossible. "When I feel," he said, "that to draw the breath of life is in itself base, how base would be my assent to what has been done![158] But it is not only that. There are not words in which such a letter ever can be written. Do you not know that Aristotle, when he addressed himself to Alexander, wrote to a youth who had been modest; but then, when he had once heard himself called king, he became proud, cruel, and unrestrained? How, then, shall I now write in terms which shall suffice for his pride to the man who has been equalled to Romulus?" It was true; Cæsar had now returned inflated with such pride that Brutus, and Cassius, and Casca could no longer endure him. He came back, and triumphed over the five lands in which he had conquered not the enemies of Rome, but Rome itself. He triumphed nominally over the Gauls, the Egyptians, the Asiatics of Pontus, over the Africans, and the Spaniards; but his triumph was, in truth, over the Republic. There appears from Suetonius to have been five separate triumphal processions, each at the interval of a few days.[159] Amid the glory of the first Vercingetorix was strangled. To the glory of the third was added—as Suetonius tells us—these words, "Veni, vidi, vici," displayed on a banner. This I think more likely than that he had written them on an official despatch. We are told that the people of Rome refused to show any pleasure, and that even his own soldiers had enough in them of the Roman spirit to feel resentment at his assumption of the attributes of a king. Cicero makes but little mention of these gala doings in his letters. He did not see them, but wrote back word to Atticus, who had described it all. "An absurd pomp," he says, alluding to the carriage of the image of Cæsar together with that of the gods; and he applauds the people who would not clap their hands, even in approval of the Goddess of Victory, because she had shown herself in such bad company.[160] There are, however, but three lines on the subject, showing how little there is in that statement of Cornelius Nepos that he who had read Cicero's letters carefully wanted but little more to be well informed of the history of the day.

Cæsar was not a man likely to be turned away from his purpose of ruling well by personal pride—less likely, we should say, than any self-made despot dealt with in history. He did make efforts to be as he was before. He endeavored to live on terms of friendship with his old friends; but the spirit of pride which had taken hold of him was too much for him. Power had got possession of him, and he could not stand against it. It was sad to see the way in which it compelled him to make himself a prey to the conspirators, were it not that we learn from history how impossible it is that a man should raise himself above the control of his fellow-men without suffering.

b.c. 45, ætat. 62.

During these days Cicero kept himself in the country, giving himself up to his philosophical writings, and indulging in grief for Tullia. Efforts were repeatedly made to bring him to Rome, and he tells Atticus in irony that if he is wanted there simply as an augur, the augurs have nothing to do with the opening of temples. In the same letter he speaks of an interview he has just had with his nephew Quintus, who had come to him in his disgrace. He wants to go to the Parthian war, but he has not money to support him. Then Cicero uses, as he says, the eloquence of Atticus, and holds his tongue.[161] We can imagine how very unpleasant the interview must have been. Cicero, however, decides that he will go up to the city, so that he may have Atticus with him on his birthday. This letter was written toward the close of the year, and Cicero's birthday was the 3d of January.

He then goes to Rome, and undertakes to plead the cause of Deiotarus, the King of Galatia, before Cæsar. This very old man had years ago become allied with Pompey, and, as far as we can judge, been singularly true to his idea of Roman power. He had seen Pompey in all his glory when Pompey had come to fight Mithridates. The Tetrarchs in Asia Minor, of whom this Deiotarus was one, had a hard part to play when the Romans came among them. They were forced to comply, either with their natural tendency to resist their oppressors, or else were obliged to fleece their subjects in order to satisfy the cupidity of the invaders. We remember Ariobarzanes, who sent his subjects in gangs to Rome to be sold as slaves in order to pay Pompey the interest on his debt. Deiotarus had similarly found his best protection in being loyal to Pompey, and had in return been made King of Armenia by a decree of the Roman Senate. He joined Pompey at the Pharsalus, and, when the battle was over, returned to his own country to look for further forces wherewith to aid the Republic. Unfortunately for him, Cæsar was the conqueror, and Deiotarus found himself obliged to assist the conqueror with his troops. Cæsar seems never to have forgiven him his friendship for Pompey. He was not a Roman, and was unworthy of forgiveness. Cæsar took away from him the kingdom of Armenia, but left him still titular King of Galatia. But this enmity was known in the king's own court, and among his own family. His own daughter's son, one Castor, became desirous of ruining his grandfather, and brought a charge against the king. Cæsar had been the king's compelled guest in his journey in quest of Pharnaces, and had passed quickly on. Now, when the war was over and Cæsar had returned from his five conquered nations, Castor came forward with his accusation. Deiotarus, according to his grandson, had endeavored to murder Cæsar while Cæsar was staying with him. At this distance of time and place we cannot presume to know accurately what the circumstances were; but it appears to have been below the dignity of Cæsar to listen to such a charge. He did do so, however, and heard more than one speech on the subject delivered in favor of the accused. Brutus spoke on behalf of the aged king, and spoke in vain. Cicero did not speak in vain, for Cæsar decided that he would pronounce no verdict till he had himself been again in the East, and had there made further inquiries. He never returned to the East; but the old king lived to fight once more, and again on the losing side. He was true to the party he had taken, and ranged himself with Brutus and Cassius at the field of Philippi.

The case was tried, if tried it can be called, in Cæsar's private house, in which the audience cannot have been numerous. Cæsar seems to have admitted Cicero to say what could be said for his friend, rather than as an advocate to plead for his client, so that no one should accuse him, Cæsar, of cruelty in condemning the criminal. The speech must have occupied twenty minutes in the delivery, and we are again at a loss to conceive how Cæsar should have found the time to listen to it. Cicero declares that he feels the difficulty of pleading in so unusual a place—within the domestic walls of a man's private house, and without any of those accustomed supports to oratory which are to be found in a crowded law court. "But," he says, "I rest in peace when I look into your eyes and behold your countenance." The speech is full of flattery, but it is turned so adroitly that we almost forgive it.[162]

There is a passage in which Cicero compliments the victor on his well-known mercy in his victories—from which we may see how much Cæsar thought of the character he had achieved for himself in this particular. "Of you alone, O Cæsar, is it boasted that no one has fallen under your hands but they who have died with arms in their hands."[163] All who had been taken had been pardoned. No man had been put to death when the absolute fighting was brought to an end. Cæsar had given quarter to all. It is the modern, generous way of fighting. When our country is invaded, and we drive back the invaders, we do not, if victorious, slaughter their chief men. Much less, when we invade a country, do we kill or mutilate all those who have endeavored to protect their own homes. Cæsar has evidently much to boast, and among the Italians he has caused it to be believed. It suited Cicero to assert it in Cæsar's ears. Cæsar wished to be told of his own clemency among the men of his own country. But because Cæsar boasted, and Cicero was complaisant, posterity is not to run away with the boast, and call it true. For all that is great in Cæsar's character I am willing to give him credit; but not for mercy; not for any of those divine gifts the loveliness of which was only beginning to be perceived in those days by some few who were in advance of their time. It was still the maxim of Rome that a "supplicatio" should be granted only when two thousand of the enemy should have been left on the field. We have something still left of the pagan cruelty about us when we send triumphant words of the numbers slain on the field of battle. We cannot but remember that Cæsar had killed the whole Senate of the Veneti, a nation dwelling on the coast of Brittany, and had sold all the people as slaves, because they had detained the messengers he had sent to them during his wars in Gaul. "Gravius vindicandum statuit"[164]—"He had thought it necessary to punish them somewhat severely." Therefore he had killed the entire Senate, and enslaved the entire people. This is only one of the instances of wholesale horrible cruelty which he committed throughout his war in Gaul—of cruelty so frightful that we shudder as we think of the sufferings of past ages. The ages have gone their way, and the sufferings are lessened by increased humanity. But we cannot allow Cicero's compliment to pass idly by. The "nemo nisi armatus" referred to Italians, and to Italians, we may take it, of the upper rank—among whom, for the sake of dramatic effect, Deiotarus was placed for the occasion.

This was the last of Cicero's casual speeches. It was now near the end of the year, and on the ides of March following it was fated that Cæsar should die. After which there was a lull in the storm for a while, and then Cicero broke out into that which I have called his final scream of liberty. There came the Philippics—and then the end. This speech of which I have given record as spoken Pro Rege Deiotaro was the last delivered by him for a private purpose. Forty-two he has spoken hitherto, of which something of the story has been told; the Philippics of which I have got to speak are fourteen in number, making the total number of speeches which we possess to be fifty-six. But of those spoken by him we have not a half, and of those which we possess some have been declared by the great critics to be absolutely spurious. The great critics have perhaps been too hard upon them: they have all been polished. Cicero himself was so anxious for his future fame that he led the way in preparing them for the press. Quintilian tells us that Tiro adapted them.[165] Others again have come after him and have retouched them, sometimes, no doubt, making them smoother, and striking out morsels which would naturally become unintelligible to later readers. We know what he himself did to the Milo. Others subsequently may have received rougher usage, but still from loving hands. Bits have been lost, and other bits interpolated, and in this way have come to us the speeches which we possess. But we know enough of the history of the times, and are sufficient judges of the language, to accept them as upon the whole authentic. The great critic, when he comes upon a passage against which his very soul recoils, on the score of its halting Latinity, rises up in his wrath and tears the oration to tatters, till he will have none of it. One set of objectionable words he encounters after another, till the whole seems to him to be damnable, and the oration is condemned. It has been well to allude to this, because in dealing with these orations it is necessary to point out that every word cannot be accepted as having been spoken as we find it printed. Taken collectively, we may accept them as a stupendous monument of human eloquence and human perseverance.

b.c. 45, ætat. 62.

Late in the year, on the 12th before the calends of January, or the 21st of December, there took place a little party at Puteoli, the account of which interests us. Cicero entertained Cæsar at supper. Though the date is given as above, and though December had originally been intended to signify, as it does with us, a winter month, the year, from want of proper knowledge, had run itself out of order, and the period was now that of October. The amendment of the calendar, which was made under Cæsar's auspices, had not as yet been brought into use, and we must understand that October, the most delightful month of the year, was the period in question. Cicero was staying at his Puteolan villa, not far from Baiæ, close upon the sea-shore—the corner of the world most loved by all the great Romans of the day for their retreat in autumn.[166] Puteoli, we may imagine, was as pleasant as Baiæ, but less fashionable, and, if all that we hear be true, less immoral. Here Cicero had one of his villas, and here, a few months before his death, Cæsar came to visit him. He gives, in a very few lines to Atticus, a graphic account of the entertainment. Cæsar had sent on word to say that he was coming, so that Cicero was prepared for him. But the lord of all the world had already made himself so evidently the lord, that Cicero could not entertain him without certain of those inner quakings of the heart which are common to us now when some great magnate may come across our path and demand hospitality for a moment. Cicero jokes at his own solicitude, but nevertheless we know that he has felt it when, on the next morning, he sent Atticus an account of it. His guest has been a burden to him indeed, but still he does not regret it, for the guest behaved himself so pleasantly! We must remark that Cicero did not ostensibly shake in his shoes before him. Cicero had been Consul, and has had to lead the Senate when Cæsar was probably anxious to escape himself as an undetected conspirator. Cæsar has grown since, but only by degrees. He has not become, as Augustus did, "facile princeps." He is aware of his own power, but aware also that it becomes him to ignore his own knowledge. And Cicero is also aware of it, but conscious at the same time of a nominal equality. Cæsar is now Dictator, has been Consul four times, and will be Consul again when the new year comes on. But other Romans have been Dictator and Consul. All of which Cæsar feels on the occasion, and shows that he feels it. Cicero feels it also, and endeavors, not quite successfully, to hide it.

Cæsar has come accompanied by troops. Cicero names two thousand men—probably at random. When Cicero hears that they have come into the neighborhood, he is terribly put about till one Barba Cassius, a lieutenant in Cæsar's employment, comes and reassures him. A camp is made for the men outside in the fields, and a guard is put on to protect the villa. On the following day, about one o'clock, Cæsar comes. He is shut up at the house of one Philippus, and will admit no one. He is supposed to be transacting accounts with Balbus. We can imagine how Cicero's cooks were boiling and stewing at the time. Then the great man walked down upon the sea-shore. Rome was the only recognized nation in the world. The others were provinces of Rome, and the rest were outlying barbaric people, hardly as yet fit to be Roman provinces. And he was now lord of Rome. Did he think of this as he walked on the shore of Puteoli—or of the ceremony he was about to encounter before he ate his dinner? He did not walk long, for at two o'clock he bathed, and heard "that story about Mamurra" without moving a muscle. Turn to your Catullus, the 57th Epigram, and read what Cæsar had read to him on this occasion, without showing by his face the slightest feeling. It is short enough, but I cannot quote it even in a note, even in Latin. Who told Cæsar of the foul words, and why were they read to him on this occasion? He thought but little about them, for he forgave the author and asked him afterward to supper. This was at the bath, we may suppose. He then took his siesta, and after that "ἐμετικὴν agebat." How the Romans went through the daily process and lived, is to us a marvel. I think we may say that Cicero did not practise it. Cæsar, on this occasion, ate and drank plenteously and with pleasure. It was all well arranged, and the conversation was good of its kind, witty and pleasant. Cæsar's couch seems to have been in the midst, and around him lay supping, at other tables, his freedmen, and the rest of his suite. It was all very well; but still, says Cicero, he was not such a guest as you would welcome back—not one to whom you would say, "Come again, I beg, when you return this way." Once is enough. There were no politics talked—nothing of serious matters. Cæsar had begun to find now that no use could be made of Cicero for politics. He had tried that, and had given it up. Philology was the subject—the science of literature and languages. Cæsar could talk literature as well as Cicero, and turned the conversation in that direction. Cicero was apt, and took the desired part, and so the afternoon passed pleasantly, but still with a little feeling that he was glad when his guest was gone.[167]

Cæsar declared, as he went, that he would spend one day at Puteoli and another at Baiæ. Dolabella had a villa down in those parts, and Cicero knows that Cæsar, as he passed by Dolabella's house, rode in the midst of soldiers—in state, as we should say—but that he had not done this anywhere else. He had already promised Dolabella the Consulship.

Was Cicero mean in his conduct toward Cæsar? Up to this moment there had been nothing mean, except that Roman flattery which was simply Roman good manners. He had opposed him at Pharsalia—or rather in Macedonia. He had gone across the water—not to fight, for he was no fighting man—but to show on which side he had placed himself. He had done this, not believing in Pompey, but still convinced that it was his duty to let all men know that he was against Cæsar. He had resisted every attempt which Cæsar had made to purchase his services. Neither with Pompey nor with Cæsar did he agree. But with the former—though he feared that a second Sulla would arise should he be victorious—there was some touch of the old Republic. Something might have been done then to carry on the government upon the old lines. Cæsar had shown his intention to be lord of all, and with that Cicero could hold no sympathy. Cæsar had seen his position, and had respected it. He would have nothing done to drive such a man from Rome. Under these circumstances Cicero consented to live at Rome, or in the neighborhood, and became a man of letters. It must be remembered that up to the ides of March he had heard of no conspiracy. The two men, Cæsar and Cicero, had agreed to differ, and had talked of philology when they met. There has been, I think, as yet, nothing mean in his conduct.

Chapter VIII.

CÆSAR'S DEATH.

b.c. 44, ætat. 63.

After the dinner-party at Puteoli, described in the last chapter, Cicero came up to Rome, and was engaged in literary pursuits. Cæsar was now master and lord of everything. In January Cicero wrote to his friend Curio, and told him with disgust of the tomfooleries which were being carried on at the election of Quæstors. An empty chair had been put down, and was declared to be the Consul's chair. Then it was taken away, and another chair was placed, and another Consul was declared. It wanted then but a few hours to the end of the consular year—but not the less was Caninius, the new Consul, appointed, "who would not sleep during his Consulship," which lasted but from mid-day to the evening. "If you saw all this you would not fail to weep," says Cicero![168] After this he seems to have recovered from his sorrow. We have a correspondence with Pœtus which always typifies hilarity of spirits. There is a discussion, of which we have but the one side, on "double entendre" and plain speaking. Pœtus had advocated the propriety of calling a spade a spade, and Cicero shows him the inexpediency. Then we come suddenly upon his letter to Atticus, written on the 7th of April, three weeks after the fall of Cæsar.

Mommsen endeavors to explain the intention of Cæsar in the adoption of the names by which he chose to be called, and in his acceptance of those which, without his choosing, were imposed upon him.[169] He has done it perhaps with too great precision, but he leaves upon our minds a correct idea of the resolution which Cæsar had made to be King, Emperor, Dictator, or what not, before he started for Macedonia, b.c. 49,[170] and the disinclination which moved him at once to proclaim himself a tyrant. Dictator was the title which he first assumed, as being temporary, Roman, and in a certain degree usual. He was Dictator for an indefinite period, annually, for ten years, and, when he died, had been designated Dictator for life. He had already been, for the last two years, named "Imperator" for life; but that title—which I think to have had a military sound in men's ears, though it may, as Mommsen says, imply also civil rule—was not enough to convey to men all that it was necessary that they should understand. Till the moment of his triumph had come, and that "Veni, vidi, vici" had been flaunted in the eyes of Rome—till Cæsar, though he had been ashamed to call himself a king, had consented to be associated with the gods—Brutus, Cassius, and those others, sixty in number we are told, who became the conspirators, had hardly realized the fact that the Republic was altogether at an end. A bitter time had come upon them; but it was softened by the personal urbanity of the victor. But now, gradually, the truth was declaring itself, and the conspiracy was formed. I am inclined to think that Shakspeare has been right in his conception of the plot. "I do fear the people choose Cæsar for their king," says Brutus. "I had as lief not be, as live to be in awe of such a thing as I myself," says Cassius.[171] It had come home to them at length that Cæsar was to be king, and therefore they conspired.

It would be a difficult task in the present era to recommend to my readers the murderers of Cæsar as honest, loyal politicians, who did for their country, in its emergency, the best that the circumstances would allow. The feeling of the world in regard to murder has so changed during the last two thousand years, that men, hindered by their sense of what is at present odious, refuse to throw themselves back into the condition of things a knowledge of which can have come to them only from books. They measure events individually by the present scale, and refuse to see that Brutus should be judged by us now in reference to the judgment that was formed of it then. In an age in which it was considered wise and fitting to destroy the nobles of a barbarous community which had defended itself, and to sell all others as slaves, so that the perpetrator simply recorded the act he had done as though necessary, can it have been a base thing to kill a tyrant? Was it considered base by other Romans of the day? Was that plea ever made even by Cæsar's friends, or was it not acknowledged by them all that "Brutus was an honorable man," even when they had collected themselves sufficiently to look upon him as an enemy? It appears abundantly in Cicero's letters that no one dreamed of regarding them as we regard assassins now, or spoke of Cæsar's death as we look upon assassination. "Shall we defend the deeds of him at whose death we are rejoiced?" he says: and again, he deplores the feeling of regret which was growing in Rome on account of Cæsar's death, "lest it should be dangerous to those who have slain the tyrant for us."[172] We find that Quintilian, among his stock lessons in oratory, constantly refers to the old established rule that a man did a good deed who had killed a tyrant—a lesson which he had taken from the Greek teachers.[173] We are, therefore, bound to accept this murder as a thing praiseworthy according to the light of the age in which it was done, and to recognize the fact that it was so regarded by the men of the day.

We are told now that Cicero "hated" Cæsar. There was no such hatred as the word implies. And we are told of "assassins," with an intention to bring down on the perpetrators of the deed the odium they would have deserved had the deed been done to-day; but the word has, I think, been misused. A king was abominable to Roman ears, and was especially distasteful to men like Cicero, Brutus, and the other "optimates" who claimed to be peers. To be "primus inter pares" had been Cicero's ambition—to be the leading oligarch of the day. Cæsar had gradually mounted higher and still higher, but always leaving some hope—infinitesimally small at last—that he might be induced to submit himself to the Republic. Sulla had submitted. Personally there was no hatred; but that hope had almost vanished, and therefore, judging as a Roman, when the deed was done, Cicero believed it to have been a glorious deed. There can be no doubt on that subject. The passages in which he praises it are too numerous for direct quotation; but there they are, interspersed through the letters and the Philippics. There was no doubt of his approval. The "assassination" of Cæsar, if that is to be the word used, was to his idea a glorious act done on behalf of humanity. The all-powerful tyrant who had usurped dominion over his country had been made away with, and again they might fall back upon the law. He had filched the army. He had run through various provinces, and had enriched himself with their wealth. He was above all law; he was worse than a Marius or a Sulla, who confessed themselves, by their open violence, to be temporary evils. Cæsar was creating himself king for all time. No law had established him. No plebiscite of the nation had endowed him with kingly power. With his life in his hands, he had dared to do it, and was almost successful. It is of no purpose to say that he was right and Cicero was wrong in their views as to the government of so mean a people as the Romans had become. Cicero's form of government, under men who were not Ciceros, had been wrong, and had led to a state of things in which a tyrant might for the time be the lesser evil; but not on that account was Cicero wrong to applaud the deed which removed Cæsar. Middleton in his life (vol. ii, p. 435) gives us the opinion of Suetonius on this subject, and tells us that the best and wisest men in Rome supposed Cæsar to have been justly killed. Mr. Forsyth generously abstains from blaming the deed, as to which he leaves his readers to form their own opinion. Abeken expresses no opinion concerning its morality, nor does Morabin. It is the critics of Cicero's works who have condemned him without thinking much, perhaps, of the judgment they have given.

But Cicero was not in the conspiracy, nor had he even contemplated Cæsar's death. Assertions to the contrary have been made both lately and in former years, but without foundation. I have already alluded to some of these, and have shown that phrases in his letters have been misinterpreted. A passage was quoted by M. Du Rozoir—Ad Att., lib. x., 8—"I don't think that he can endure longer than six months. He must fall, even if we do nothing." How often might it be said that the murder of an English minister had been intended if the utterings of such words be taken as a testimony! He quotes again—Ad Att., lib. xiii., 40—"What good news could Brutus hear of Cæsar, unless that he hung himself?" This is to be taken as meditating Cæsar's death, and is quoted by a French critic, after two thousand years, in proof of Cicero's fatal ill-will![174] The whole tenor of Cicero's letters proves that he had never entertained the idea of Cæsar's destruction.

How long before the time the conspiracy may have been in existence we have no means of knowing; but we feel that Cicero was not a man likely to be taken into the plot. He would have dissuaded Brutus and Cassius. Judging from what we know of his character, we think that he would have distrusted its success. Though he rejoiced in it after it was done, he would have been wretched while burdened with the secret. At any rate, we have the fact that he was not so burdened. The sight of Cæsar's slaughter, when he saw it, must have struck him with infinite surprise, but we have no knowledge of what his feelings may have been when the crowd had gathered round the doomed man. Cicero has left us no description of the moment in which Cæsar is supposed to have gathered his toga over his face so that he might fall with dignity. It certainly is the case that when you take your facts from the chance correspondence of a man you lose something of the most touching episodes of the day. The writer passes these things by, as having been surely handled elsewhere. It is always so with Cicero. The trial of Milo, the passing of the Rubicon, the battle of the Pharsalus, and the murder of Pompey are, with the death of Cæsar, alike unnoticed. "I have paid him a visit as to whom we spoke this morning. Nothing could be more forlorn."[175] It is thus the next letter begins, after Cæsar's death, and the person he refers to is Matius, Cæsar's friend; but in three weeks the world had become used to Cæsar's death. The scene had passed away, and the inhabitants of Rome were already becoming accustomed to his absence. But there can be no doubt as to Cicero's presence at Cæsar's fall. He says so clearly to Atticus.[176] Morabin throws a doubt upon it. The story goes that Brutus, descending from the platform on which Cæsar had been seated, and brandishing the bloody dagger in his hand, appealed to Cicero. Morabin says that there is no proof of this, and alleges that Brutus did it for stage effect. But he cannot have seen the letter above quoted, or seeing it, must have misunderstood it.[177]

It soon became evident to the conspirators that they had scotched the snake, and not killed it. Cassius and others had desired that Antony also should be killed, and with him Lepidus. That Antony would be dangerous they were sure. But Marcus Brutus and Decimus overruled their counsels. Marcus had declared that the "blood of the tyrant was all that the people required."[178] The people required nothing of the kind. They were desirous only of ease and quiet, and were anxious to follow either side which might be able to lead them and had something to give away. But Antony had been spared; and though cowed at the moment by the death of Cæsar, and by the assumption of a certain dignified forbearance on the part of the conspirators, was soon ready again to fight the battle for the Cæsareans. It is singular to see how completely he was cowed, and how quickly he recovered himself.

Mommsen finishes his history with a loud pæan in praise of Cæsar, but does not tell us of his death. His readers, had they nothing else to inform them, might be led to suppose that he had gone direct to heaven, or at any rate had vanished from the world, as soon as he had made the Empire perfect. He seems to have thought that had he described the work of the daggers in the Senate-house he would have acknowledged the mortality of his godlike hero. We have no right to complain of his omissions. For research, for labor, and for accuracy he has produced a work almost without parallel. That he should have seen how great was Cæsar because he accomplished so much, and that he should have thought Cicero to be small because, burdened with scruples of justice, he did so little, is in the idiosyncrasy of the man. A Cæsar was wanted, impervious to clemency, to justice, to moderation—a man who could work with any tools. "Men had forgotten what honesty was. A person who refused a bribe was regarded not as an upright man but as a personal foe."[179] Cæsar took money, and gave bribes, when he had the money to pay them, without a scruple. It would be absurd to talk about him as dishonest. He was above honesty. He was "supra grammaticam." It is well that some one should have arisen to sing the praises of such a man—some two or three in these latter days. To me the character of the man is unpleasant to contemplate, unimpressionable, very far from divine. There is none of the human softness necessary for love; none of the human weakness needed for sympathy.

On the 15th of March Cæsar fell. When the murder had been effected, Brutus and the others concerned in it went out among the people expecting to be greeted as saviors of their country. Brutus did address the populace, and was well received; but some bad feeling seems to have been aroused by hard expressions as to Cæsar's memory coming from one of the Prætors. For the people, though they regarded Cæsar as a tyrant, and expressed themselves as gratified when told that the would-be king had been slaughtered, still did not endure to hear ill spoken of him. He had understood that it behooved a tyrant to be generous, and appealed among them always with full hands—not having been scrupulous as to his mode of filling them. Then the conspirators, frightened at menacing words from the crowd, betook themselves to the Capitol. Why they should have gone to the Capitol as to a sanctuary I do not think that we know. The Capitol is that hill to a portion of which access is now had by the steps of the church of the Ara Cœli in front, and from the Forum in the rear. On one side was the fall from the Tarpeian rock down which malefactors were flung. On the top of it was the temple to Jupiter, standing on the site of the present church. And it was here that Brutus and Cassius and the other conspirators sought for safety on the evening of the day on which Cæsar had been killed. Here they remained for the two following days, till on the 18th they ventured down into the city. On the 17th Dolabella claimed to be Consul, in compliance with Cæsar's promise, and on the same day the Senate, moved by Antony, decreed a public funeral to Cæsar. We may imagine that the decree was made by them with fainting hearts. There were many fainting hearts in Rome during those days, for it became very soon apparent that the conspirators had carried their plot no farther than the death of Cæsar.

Brutus, as far as the public service was concerned, was an unpractical, useless man. We know nothing of public work done by him to much purpose. He was filled with high ideas as to his own position among the oligarchs, and with especial notions as to what was due by Rome to men of his name. He had a fierce conception of his own rights—among which to be Prætor, and Consul, and Governor of a province were among the number. But he had taken early in life to literature and philosophy, and eschewed the crowd of "Fish-ponders," such as were Antony and Dolabella, men prone to indulge the luxury of their own senses. His idea of liberty seems to have been much the same as Cicero's—the liberty to live as one of the first men in Rome; but it was not accompanied, as it was with Cicero, by an innate desire to do good to those around him. To maintain the Prætors, Consuls, and Governors so that each man high in position should win his way to them as he might be able to obtain the voices of the people, and not to leave them to be bestowed at the call of one man who had thrust himself higher than all—that seems to have been his beau ideal of Roman government. It was Cicero's also—with the addition that when he had achieved his high place he should serve the people honestly. Brutus had killed Cæsar, but had spared Antony, thinking that all things would fall into their accustomed places when the tyrant should be no more. But he found that Cæsar had been tyrant long enough to create a lust for tyranny; and that though he might suffice to kill a king, he had no aptitude for ruling a people.

It was now that those scenes took place which Shakspeare has described with such accuracy—the public funeral, Antony's oration, and the rising of the people against the conspirators. Antony, when he found that no plan had been devised for carrying on the government, and that the men were struck by amazement at the deed they had themselves done, collected his thoughts and did his best to put himself in Cæsar's place. Cicero had pleaded in the Senate for a general amnesty, and had carried it as far as the voice of the Senate could do so. But the amnesty only intended that men should pretend to think that all should be forgotten and forgiven. There was no forgiving, as there could be no forgetting. Then Cæsar's will was brought forth. They could not surely dispute his will or destroy it. In this way Antony got hold of the dead man's papers, and with the aid of the dead man's private secretary or amanuensis, one Fabricius, began a series of most unblushing forgeries. He procured, or said that he procured, a decree to be passed confirming by law all Cæsar's written purposes. Such a decree he could use to any extent to which he could carry with him the sympathies of the people. He did use it to a great extent, and seems at this period to have contemplated the assumption of dictatorial power in his own hands. Antony was nearly being one of the greatest rascals the world has known. The desire was there, and so was the intellect, had it not been weighted by personal luxury and indulgence.

Now young Octavius came upon the scene. He was the great-nephew of Cæsar, whose sister Julia had married one Marcus Atius. Their daughter Atia had married Caius Octavius, and of that marriage Augustus was the child. When Octavius, the father, died, Atia, the widow, married Marcius Philippus, who was Consul b.c. 56. Cæsar, having no nearer heir, took charge of the boy, and had, for the last years of his life, treated him as his son, though he had not adopted him. At this period the youth had been sent to Apollonia, on the other side of the Adriatic, in Macedonia, to study with Apollodorus, a Greek tutor, and was there when he heard of Cæsar's death. He was informed that Cæsar had made him his heir and at once crossed over into Italy with his friend Agrippa. On the way up to Rome he met Cicero at one of his southern villas, and in the presence of the great orator behaved himself with becoming respect. He was then not twenty years old, but in the present difficulty of his position conducted himself with a caution most unlike a boy. He had only come, he said for what his great-uncle had left him; and when he found that Antony had spent the money, does not appear to have expressed himself immediately in anger. He went on to Rome, where he found that Antony and Dolabella and Marcus Brutus and Decimus Brutus and Cassius were scrambling for the provinces and the legions. Some of the soldiers came to him, asking him to avenge his uncle's death; but he was too prudent as yet to declare any purpose of revenge.

Not long after Cæsar's death Cicero left Rome, and spent the ensuing month travelling about among his different villas. On the 14th of April he writes to Atticus, declaring that whatever evil might befall him he would find comfort in the ides of March. In the same letter he calls Brutus and the others "our heroes," and begs his friend to send him news—or if not news, then a letter without news.[180] In the next he again calls them his heroes, but adds that he can take no pleasure in anything but in the deed that had been done. Men are still praising the work of Cæsar, and he laments that they should he so inconsistent. "Though they laud those who had destroyed Cæsar, at the same time they praise his deeds."[181] In the same letter he tells Atticus that the people in all the villages are full of joy. "It cannot be told how eager they are—how they run out to meet me, and to hear my accounts of what was done. But the Senate passes no decree!"[182] He speaks of going into Greece to see his son—whom he never lived to see again—telling him of letters from the lad from Athens, which, he thinks, however, may be hypocritical, though he is comforted by finding their language to be clear. He has recovered his good-humor, and can be jocose. One Cluvius has left him a property at Puteoli, and the house has tumbled down; but he has sent for Chrysippus, an architect. But what are houses falling to him? He can thank Socrates and all his followers that they have taught him to disregard such worldly things. Nevertheless, he has deemed it expedient to take the advice of a certain friend as to turning the tumble-down house into profitable shape.[183] A little later he expresses his great disgust that Cæsar, in the public speeches in Rome, should be spoken of as that "great and most excellent man."[184] And yet he had said, but a few months since, in his oration for King Deiotarus, in the presence of Cæsar, "that he looked only into his eyes, only into his face—that he regarded only him." The flattery and the indignant reprobation do, in truth, come very near upon each other, and induce us to ask whether the fact of having to live in the presence of royalty be not injurious to the moral man. Could any of us have refused to speak to Cæsar with adulation—any of us whom circumstances compelled to speak to him? Power had made Cæsar desirous of a mode of address hardly becoming a man to give or a man to receive. Does not the etiquette of to-day require from us certain courtesies of conversation, which I would call abject were it not that etiquette requires them? Nevertheless, making the best allowance that I can for Cicero, the difference of his language within a month or two is very painful. In the letter above quoted Octavius comes to him, and we can see how willing was the young aspirant to flatter him.

He sees already that, in spite of the promised amnesty, there must be internecine feud. "I shall have to go into the camp with young Sextus"—Sextus Pompeius—"or perhaps with Brutus, a prospect at my years most odious." Then he quotes two lines of Homer, altering a word: "To you, my child, is not given the glory of war; eloquence, charming eloquence, must be the weapon with which you will fight." We hear of his contemplated journey into Greece, under the protection of a free legation. He was going for the sake of his son; but would not people say that he went to avoid the present danger? and might it not be the case that he should be of service if he remained?[185] We see that the old state of doubt is again falling upon him. Αἰδέομαι Τρῶας. Otherwise he could go and make himself safe in Athens. There is a correspondence between him and Antony, of which he sends copies to Atticus. Antony writes to him, begging him to allow Sextus Clodius to return from his banishment. This Sextus had been condemned because of the riot on the death of his uncle in Milo's affair, and Antony wishes to have him back. Cicero replies that he will certainly accede to Antony's views. It had always been a law with him, he says, not to maintain a feeling of hatred against his humbler enemies. But in both these letters we see the subtilty and caution of the writers. Antony could have brought back Sextus without Cicero, and Cicero knew that he could do so. Cicero had no power over the law. But it suited Antony to write courteously a letter which might elicit an uncivil reply. Cicero, however, knew better, and answered it civilly.

He writes to Tiro telling him that he has not the slightest intention of quarrelling with his old friend Antony, and will write to Antony, but not till he shall have seen him, Tiro; showing on what terms of friendship he stands with his former slave, for Tiro had by this time been manumitted.[186] He writes to Tiro quite as he might have written to a younger Atticus, and speaks to him of Atticus with all the familiarity of confirmed friendship. There must have been something very sweet in the nature of the intercourse which bound such a man as Cicero to such another as Tiro.

Atticus applies to him, desiring him to use his influence respecting a certain question of importance as to Buthrotum. Buthrotum was a town in Epirus opposite to the island of Corcyra, in which Atticus had an important interest. The lands about the place were to be divided, and to be distributed to Roman soldiers—much, as we may suppose to the injury of Atticus. He has earnestly begged the interference of Cicero for the protection of the Buthrotians, and Cicero tells him that he wishes he could have seen Antony on the subject, but that Antony is too much busied looking after the soldiers in the Campagna. Cicero fails to have the wishes of Atticus carried out, and shortly the subject becomes lost in the general confusion. But the discussion shows of how much importance at the present moment Cicero's interference with Antony is considered. It shows also that up to this period, a few months previous to the envenomed hatred of the second Philippic, Antony and Cicero were presumed to be on terms of intimate friendship.

The worship of Cæsar had been commenced in Rome, and an altar had been set up to him in the Forum as to a god. Had Cæsar, when he perished, been said to have usurped the sovereign authority, his body would have been thrown out as unworthy of noble treatment. Such treatment the custom of the Republic required. It had been allowed to be buried, and had been honored, not disgraced. Now, on the spot where the funeral pile had been made, the altar was erected, and crowds of men clamored round it, worshipping. That this was the work of Antony we cannot doubt. But Dolabella, Cicero's repudiated son-in-law, who in furtherance of a promise from Cæsar had seized the Consulship, was jealous of Antony and caused the altar to be thrown down and the worshippers to be dispersed. Many were killed in the struggle—for, though the Republic was so jealous of the lives of the citizens as not to allow a criminal to be executed without an expression of the voice of the entire people, any number might fall in a street tumult, and but little would be thought about it. Dolabella destroyed the altar, and Cicero was profuse in his thanks.[187] For though Tullia had been divorced, and had since died, there was no cause for a quarrel. Divorces were so common that no family odium was necessarily created. Cicero was at this moment most anxious to get back from Dolabella his daughter's dowry. It was never repaid. Indeed, a time was quickly coming in which such payments were out of the question, and Dolabella soon took a side altogether opposed to the Republic—for which he cared nothing. He was bought by Antony, having been ready to be bought by any one. He went to Syria as governor before the end of the year, and at Smyrna, on his road, he committed one of those acts of horror on Trebonius, an adverse governor, in which the Romans of the day would revel when liberated from control. Cassius came to avenge his friend Trebonius, and Dolabella, finding himself worsted, destroyed himself. He had not progressed so far in corruption as Verres, because time had not permitted it—but that was the direction in which he was travelling. At the present moment, however, no praise was too fervid to be bestowed upon him by Cicero's pen. That turning of Cæsar into a god was opposed to every feeling of his heart, both, as to men and as to gods.

A little farther on[188] we find him complaining of the state of things very grievously: "That we should have feared this thing, and not have feared the other!"—meaning Cæsar and Antony. He declares that he must often read, for his own consolation, his treatise on old age, then just written and addressed to Atticus. "Old age is making me bitter," he says; "I am annoyed at everything. But my life has been lived. Let the young look to the future." We here meet the name of Cærellia in a letter to his friend. She had probably been sent to make up the quarrel between him and his young wife Publilia. Nothing came of it, and it is mentioned only because Cærellia's name has been joined so often with that of Cicero by subsequent writers. In the whole course of his correspondence with Atticus I do not remember it to occur, except in one or two letters at this period. I imagine that some story respecting the lady was handed down, and was published by Dio Cassius when the Greek historian found that it served his purpose to abuse Cicero.

On June 22nd he sent news to Atticus of his nephew. Young Quintus had written home to his father to declare his repentance. He had been in receipt of money from Antony, and had done Antony's dirty work. He had been "Antoni dextella"—"Antony's right hand"—according to Cicero, and had quarrelled absolutely with his father and his uncle. He now expresses his sorrow, and declares that he would come himself at once, but that there might be danger to his father. And there is money to be expected if he will only wait. "Did you ever hear of a worse knave?" Cicero adds. Probably not; but yet he was able to convince his father and his uncle, and some time afterward absolutely offered to prosecute Antony for stealing the public money out of the treasury. He thought, as did some others, that the course of things was going against Antony. As a consequence of this he was named in the proscriptions, and killed, with his father. In the same letter Cicero consults Atticus as to the best mode of going to Greece. Brundisium is the usual way, but he has been told by Tiro that there are soldiers in the town.[189] He is now at Arpinum, on his journey, and receives a letter from Brutus inviting him back to Rome, to see the games given by Brutus. He is annoyed to think that Brutus should expect this. "These shows are now only honorable to him who is bound to give them," he says; "I am not bound to see them, and to be present would be dishonorable."[190] Then comes his parting with Atticus, showing a demonstrative tenderness foreign to the sternness of our northern nature. "That you should have wept when you had parted from me, has grieved me greatly. Had you done it in my presence, I should not have gone at all."[191] "Nonis Juliis!"[192] he exclaims. The name of July had already come into use—the name which has been in use ever since—the name of the man who had now been destroyed! The idea distresses him. "Shall Brutus talk of July?" It seems that some advertisement had been published as to his games in which the month was so called.

Writing from one of his villas in the south, he tells Atticus that his nephew has again been with him, and has repented him of all his sins. I think that Cicero never wrote anything vainer than this: "He has been so changed," he says, "by reading some of my writings which I happened to have by me, and by my words and precepts, that he is just such a citizen as I would have him."[193] Could it be that he should suppose that one whom he had a few days since described as the biggest knave he knew should be so changed by a few words well written and well pronounced? Young Quintus must in truth have been a clever knave. In the same letter Cicero tells us that Tiro had collected about seventy of his letters with a view to publication. We have at present over seven hundred written before that day.

Just as he is starting he gives his friend a very wide commission: "By your love for me, do manage my matters for me. I have left enough to pay everything that I owe. But it will happen, as it often does, that they who owe me will not be punctual. If anything of that kind should happen, only think of my character. Put me right before the world by borrowing, or even by selling, if it be necessary."[194] This is not the language of a man in distress, but of one anxious that none should lose a shilling by him. He again thinks of starting from Brundisium, and promises, when he has arrived there, instantly to begin a new work. He has sent his De Gloria to Atticus; a treatise which we have lost. We should be glad to know how he treated this most difficult subject. We are astonished at his fecundity and readiness. He was now nearly sixty-three, and, as he travels about the country, he takes with him all the adjuncts necessary for the writing of treatises such as he composed at this period of his life! His Topica, containing Aristotelian instructions as to a lawyer's work, he put together on board ship, immediately after this, for the benefit of Trebatius, to whom it had been promised.

July had come, and at last he resolved to sail from Pompeii and to coast round to Sicily. He lands for a night at Velia, where he finds Brutus, with whom he has an interview. Then he writes a letter to Trebatius, who had there a charming villa, bought no doubt with Gallic spoils. He is reminded of his promise, and going on to Rhegium writes his Topica, which he sends to Trebatius from that place. Thence he went across to Syracuse, but was afraid to stay there, fearing that his motions might be watched, and that Antony would think that he had objects of State in his journey. He had already been told that some attributed his going to a desire to be present at the Olympian games; but the first notion seems to have been that he had given the Republic up as lost, and was seeking safety elsewhere. From this we are made to perceive how closely his motions were watched, and how much men thought of them. From Syracuse he started for Athens—which place, however, he was doomed never to see again. He was carried back to Leucopetra on the continent; and though he made another effort, he was, he says, again brought back. There, at the villa of his friend Valerius, he learned tidings which induced him to change his purpose, and hurry off to Rome. Brutus and Cassius had published a decree of the Senate, calling all the Senators, and especially the Consulares, to Rome. There was reason to suppose that Antony was willing to relax his pretensions. They had strenuously demanded his attendance, and whispers were heard that he had fled from the difficulties of the times. "When I heard this, I at once abandoned my journey, with which, indeed, I had never been well pleased."[195] Then he enters into a long disquisition with Atticus as to the advice which had been given to him, both by Atticus and by Brutus, and he says some hard words to Atticus. But he leaves an impression on the reader's mind that Brutus had so disturbed him by what had passed between them at Velia, that from that moment his doubts as to going, which had been always strong, had overmastered him. It was not the winds at Leucopetra that hindered his journey, but the taunting words which Brutus had spoken. It was suggested to him that he was deserting his country. The reproach had been felt by him to be heavy, for he had promised to Atticus that he would return by the first of January; yet he could not but feel that there was something in it of truth. The very months during which he would be absent would be the months of danger. Indeed, looking out upon the political horizon then, it seemed as though the nearest months, those they were then passing, would be the most dangerous. If Antony could be got rid of, be made to leave Italy, there might be something for an honest Senator to do—a man with consular authority—a something which might not jeopardize his life. When men now call a politician of those days a coward for wishing to avoid the heat of the battle, they hardly think what it is for an old man to leave his retreat and rush into the Forum, and there encounter such a one as Antony, and such soldiers as were his soldiers. Cicero, who had been brave enough in the emergencies of his career, and had gone about his work sometimes regardless of his life, no doubt thought of all this. It would be pleasant to him again to see his son, and to look upon the rough doings of Rome from amid the safety of Athens; but when his countrymen told him that he had not as yet done enough—when Brutus, with his cold, bitter words, rebuked him for going—then his thoughts turned round on the quick pivot on which they were balanced, and he hurried back to the fight.

He travelled at once up to Rome, which he reached on the last of August, and there received a message from Antony demanding his presence in the Senate on the next day. He had been greeted on his journey once again by the enthusiastic welcome of his countrymen, who looked to receive some especial advantage from his honesty and patriotism. Once again he was made proud by the clamors of a trusting people. But he had not come to Rome to be Antony's puppet. Antony had some measure to bring before the Senate in honor of Cæsar which it would not suit Cicero to support or to oppose. He sent to say that he was tired after his journey and would not come. Upon this the critics deal hardly with him, and call him a coward. "With an incredible pusillanimity," says M. Du Rozoir, "Cicero excused himself, alleging his health and the fatigue of his voyage." "He pretended that he was too tired to be present," says Mr Long. It appears to me that they who have read Cicero's works with the greatest care have become so enveloped by the power of his words as to expect from them an unnatural weight. If a politician of to-day, finding that it did not suit him to appear in the House of Commons on a certain evening, and that it would best become him to allow a debate to pass without his presence, were to make such an excuse, would he be treated after the same fashion? Pusillanimity, and pretence, in regard to those Philippics in which he seems to have courted death by every harsh word that he uttered! The reader who has begun to think so must change his mind, and be prepared, as he progresses, to find quite another fault with Cicero. Impetuous, self-confident, rash; throwing down the gage with internecine fury; striving to crush with his words the man who had the command of the legions of Rome; sticking at nothing which could inflict a blow; forcing men by his descriptions to such contempt of Antony that they should be induced to leave the stronger party, lest they too should incur something of the wrath of the orator—that they will find to be the line which Cicero adopted, and the demeanor he put on during the next twelve months! He thundered with his Philippics through Rome, addressing now the Senate and now the people with a hardihood which you may condemn as being unbecoming one so old, who should have been taught equanimity by experience; but pusillanimity and pretence will not be the offences you will bring against him.

Antony, not finding that Cicero had come at his call, declared in the Senate that he would send his workmen to dig him out from his house. Cicero alludes to this on the next day without passion.[196] Antony was not present, and in this speech he expresses no bitterness of anger. It should hardly have been named one of the Philippics, which title might well have been commenced with the second. The name, it should be understood, has been adopted from a jocular allusion by Cicero to the Philippics of Demosthenes, made in a letter to Brutus. We have at least the reply of Brutus, if indeed the letter be genuine, which is much to be doubted.[197] But he had no purpose of affixing his name to them. For many years afterward they were called Antonianæ, and the first general use of the term by which we know them has probably been comparatively modern. The one name does as well as another, but it is odd that speeches from Demosthenes should have given a name to others so well known as these made by Cicero against Antony. Plutarch, however, mentions the name, saying that it had been given to the speeches by Cicero himself.

In this, the first, he is ironically reticent as to Antony's violence and unpatriotic conduct. Antony was not present, and Cicero tells his hearers with a pleasant joke that to Antony it may be allowed to be absent on the score of ill-health, though the indulgence had been refused to him. Antony is his friend, and why had Antony treated him so roughly? Was it unusual for Senators to be absent? Was Hannibal at the gate, or were they dealing for peace with Pyrrhus, as was the case when they brought the old blind Appius down to the House? Then he comes to the question of the hour, which was, nominally, the sanctioning as law those acts of Cæsar's which he had decreed by his own will before his death. When a tyrant usurps power for a while and is then deposed, no more difficult question can be debated. Is it not better to take the law as he leaves it, even though the law has become a law illegally, than encounter all the confusion of retrograde action? Nothing could have been more iniquitous than some of Sulla's laws, but Cicero had opposed their abrogation. But here the question was one not of Cæsar's laws, but of decrees subsequently made by Antony and palmed off upon the people as having been found among Cæsar's papers. Soon after Cæsar's death a decision had been obtained by Antony in favor of Cæsar's laws or acts, and hence had come these impudent forgeries under the guise of which Antony could cause what writings he chose to be made public. "I think that Cæsar's acts should be maintained," says Cicero, "not as being in themselves good, for that no one can assert. I wish that Antony were present here without his usual friends," he adds, alluding to his armed satellites. "He would tell us after what manner he would maintain those acts of Cæsar's. Are they to be found in notes and scraps and small documents brought forward by one witness, or not brought forward at all but only told to us? And shall those which he engraved in bronze, and which he wished to be known as the will of the people and as perpetual laws—shall they go for nothing?"[198] Here was the point in dispute. The decree had been voted soon after Cæsar's death, giving the sanction of the Senate to his laws. For peace this had been done, as the best way out of the difficulty which oppressed the State. But it was intolerable that, under this sanction, Antony should have the power of bringing forth new edicts day after day, while the very laws which Cæsar had passed were not maintained. "What better law was there, or more often demanded in the best days of the Republic, than that law," passed by Cæsar, "under which the provinces were to be held by the Prætors only for one year, and by the Consuls for not more than two? But this law is abolished. So it is thus that Cæsar's acts are to be maintained?"[199] Antony, no doubt, and his friends, having an eye to the fruition of the provinces, had found among Cæsar's papers—or said they had found—some writing to suit their purpose. All things to be desired were to be found among Cæsar's papers. "The banished are brought back from banishment, the right of citizenship is given not only to individuals but to whole nations and provinces, exceptions from taxations are granted, by the dead man's voice."[200] Antony had begun, probably, with some one or two more modest forgeries, and had gone on, strengthened in impudence by his own success, till Cæsar dead was like to be worse to them than Cæsar living. The whole speech is dignified, patriotic, and bold, asserting with truth that which he believed to be right, but never carried into invective or dealing with expressions of anger. It is very short, but I know no speech of his more closely to its purpose. I can see him now, with his toga round him, as he utters the final words: "I have lived perhaps long enough—both as to length of years and the glory I have won. What little may be added, shall be, not for myself, but for you and for the Republic." The words thus spoken became absolutely true.

Chapter IX.

THE PHILIPPICS.