CICERO
                            AND HIS FRIENDS
            _A STUDY OF ROMAN SOCIETY IN THE TIME OF CAESAR_

                                   BY
                            GASTON BOISSIER
                         OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY

          TRANSLATED, WITH AN INDEX AND TABLE OF CONTENTS, BY
                           ADNAH DAVID JONES

                            _THIRD EDITION_

                                 LONDON
                       WARD, LOCK & CO., LIMITED

                                CONTENTS

                                                                    PAGE

 INTRODUCTION:

      CICERO’S LETTERS                                                 1
           Importance of private correspondence in ancient times.
             Characteristics of Cicero’s letters, 1

 CICERO IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LIFE:

   I. PUBLIC LIFE                                                     22
           Severe judgments on Cicero in modern times, 22
        i. Circumstances which determined Cicero’s political
             attitude. Birth, philosophical ideas, character, 24
       ii. Cicero’s political career. An opponent at first of the
             aristocracy, 36. Attempts to form a middle party, 46.
             The knights, 47. Finally joins the aristocratic party,
             51
      iii. Judgment on Cicero should be from the point of view of
             his contemporaries, 51. Corrupt state of the Roman
             people, 64
       iv. Cicero’s work for the Republican party after the death
             of Caesar, 69. His death, 77

  II. PRIVATE LIFE                                                    79
        i. Sources of his wealth, 79
       ii. His married life, 89
      iii. His children, 100
       iv. His relations to his slaves, 108. His clients, 113.
             Rabirius, 116

 ATTICUS                                                             123

        i. His reasons for not entering public life, 124. His life
             at Athens, 127. His life in Rome, 132
       ii. His character in private life, 134
      iii. His character in public life, 147

 CAELIUS:

      THE ROMAN YOUTH IN THE TIME OF CAESAR                          159
        i. Family and education of Caelius, 160. Influence of women
             at Rome, 163. Clodia, 166
       ii. Character of Caelius, 176. Joins Caesar’s party, 184
      iii. Caesar had no genuine friends, 191. Reasons of Caelius’
             enmity to him, 197. His death, 206

 CAESAR AND CICERO:

   I. CICERO AND THE CAMP OF CAESAR IN GAUL                          209
        i. Cicero’s return to Rome, 210. State of the city, 211.
             Leaves the aristocratic party and joins the triumvirs,
             216
       ii. Renews his intimacy with Caesar, 224. Pompey and Caesar
             compared, 226. Caesar in Gaul, 230
      iii. Cicero’s letters to his brother and to Trebatius
             supplement the _Commentaries_, 241. Effect produced in
             Rome by Caesar’s victories, 251

  II. THE VICTOR AND THE VANQUISHED                                  257
      Cicero’s intention to retire from political life, 257
        i. Resumes intercourse with Caesar, 260. The exiles
             recalled through his influence, 268. The _Pro
             Marcello_, 271
       ii. Discussion between Cicero and Caesar as to Cato. Cato
             not so hard as he is usually considered, his rectitude
             made him unpractical, 277. Unfitted to lead a party,
             284. Becomes more moderate, 285. His death, 287.
             Contrasted with Caesar, 288
      iii. Caesar wishes to conciliate the Republican party, 291.
             Appoints members of it to public offices, 293. In
             spite of this there was a profound discontent with the
             new government, 297

 BRUTUS:

      HIS RELATIONS WITH CICERO                                      303
        i. His family, education, and character, 304. His
             friendship with Cicero, 308. Roman ideas of governing
             the provinces, 311. Joins Pompey, 317
       ii. Brutus’s prospects of high office destroyed by the
             battle of Pharsalia. Turns to philosophy. Cicero does
             the same and produces his philosophical works, 318
      iii. Formation of a new Republican party, 329. Influences
             brought to bear on Brutus in order to implicate him in
             the conspiracy against Caesar, 330
       iv. Causes of the failure of Brutus and his party, 339

 OCTAVIUS:

      THE POLITICAL TESTAMENT OF AUGUSTUS                            359
           The Ancyran Inscription, 361
        i. The narrative intentionally incomplete, 364. Light
             thrown by it on the internal government of Augustus,
             368. Relations of Augustus with his soldiers, 369.
             With the people, 372. With the senate, 373. His policy
             in reconstructing public buildings, 377
       ii. The preamble of the Edict of proscription and the
             Ancyran Inscription, together, contain the political
             life of Augustus, 381. Permanent effect of his policy
             on the government of the empire, 386
      iii. Publication of Cicero’s letters, 388

                         CICERO AND HIS FRIENDS

                              INTRODUCTION

                            CICERO’S LETTERS

No history is more readily studied now-a-days than that of the last
years of the Roman Republic. Learned works have recently been published
upon this subject in France, England, and Germany,[1] and the public has
read them with avidity. The importance of the subjects which were then
debated, the dramatic character of the events, and the grandeur of the
characters warrant this interest; but the attraction we feel for this
singular epoch is better explained by the fact that it is narrated for
us in Cicero’s letters.

A contemporary said that he who read these letters would not be tempted
to seek the history of that time[2] elsewhere, and in fact we find it
much more living and true in them than in regular works composed
expressly to teach it to us. What more would Asinius Pollio, Livy, or
Cremutius Cordus teach us if we had them preserved? They would give us
their personal opinion; but this opinion is for the most part open to
suspicion because it comes from persons who could not tell the whole
truth, from men like Livy, who wrote at the court of the emperors, or
who hoped, like Pollio, to get their treason pardoned, by blackening the
character of those whom they had betrayed. Instead of receiving a
ready-made opinion it is better to make one for ourselves, and the
perusal of Cicero’s letters enables us to do this. It throws us into the
midst of the events, and lets us follow them day by day. We seem to see
them pass before our eyes, notwithstanding the eighteen centuries that
intervene, and we find ourselves in the unique position of being
sufficiently near the facts to see their real character, and
sufficiently distant to judge them dispassionately.

The importance of these letters is easily explained. The politicians of
those times had more need of correspondence with each other than those
of the present day. The proconsul starting from Rome to govern some
distant province felt that he was withdrawing altogether from political
life. To pass several years in those out-of-the-way countries which the
public rumour of Rome did not reach, was very irksome to men accustomed
to the stir of business, the agitations of parties, or, as they said,
the broad daylight of the Forum. They did indeed receive a sort of
official gazette, the _Acta diurna_, the venerable ancestor of our
_Moniteur_. But it appears as though every official journal is condemned
by its nature to be somewhat insignificant. The Roman journal contained
a rather tame official report of public meetings, a short summary of
important cases tried in the Forum, besides an account of public
ceremonies and accurate notice of atmospheric phenomena or prodigies
occurring in Rome or its neighbourhood. This is not precisely the sort
of news that a praetor or proconsul wished to know, and therefore, in
order to fill up the gaps in the official journal, he had recourse to
paid correspondents, who made “news-letters” for the use of inquisitive
provincials, as was the fashion among ourselves in the last century; but
while, in the eighteenth century, literary men of reputation, intimate
with the nobles and well received by ministers, undertook this duty, the
Roman correspondents were only obscure compilers, workmen as Caelius
calls them, usually chosen among those hungry Greeks whom want made
ready for anything. They had no admittance into the great houses, nor
could they approach the politicians. Their part simply consisted in
running over the town and picking up what they heard or saw in the
streets. They carefully noted theatrical chit-chat, inquired about
actors who had been hissed and gladiators who had been beaten, described
minutely handsome funerals, noted the rumours and ill-natured gossip,
and especially the scandalous tales they could catch.[3] All this
chatter amused for a moment, but did not satisfy those political
personages who wished above all to be kept abreast of affairs, and, in
order to become acquainted with them, they naturally applied to some one
who was in a position to know them. They chose a few trustworthy and
well-informed friends of good position, and through them learnt the
reason and the real character of the facts reported dryly and without
comment by the journals; and while their paid correspondents gave them
only the talk of the town, the others introduced them into the cabinets
of the high politicians, and made them listen to their most private
conversations.

No one felt this need of being kept informed of everything, and, so to
say, of living in the midst of Rome after he had left it, more than
Cicero. No one liked that excitement of public life which statesmen
complain of when they possess it, and never cease to regret when they
have lost it, more than he. We must not believe him too readily when he
says that he is tired of the stormy discussions of the senate; that he
seeks a country where they have not heard of Vatinius or Caesar, and
where they do not trouble themselves about agrarian laws; that he has an
anxious craving to go and forget Rome under the agreeable shades of
Arpinum, or in the delightful neighbourhood of Formiae. As soon as he is
settled down at Formiae or Arpinum, or in some other of those handsome
villas which he proudly calls the gems of Italy, _ocellos Italiae_, his
thoughts naturally return to Rome, and couriers are constantly starting
to go and learn what people are thinking and doing there. He could never
take his eyes off the Forum, whatever he may say. Far or near he must
have what Saint-Simon calls “that smack of business that politicians
cannot do without.” He wished by all means to know the position of
parties, their secret agreements, their internal discords, all those
hidden intrigues that lead up to events and explain them. This is what
he was continually demanding of Atticus, Curio, Caelius, and so many
other great men mixed up in these intrigues either as actors or
spectators, and what he himself narrates to his absent friends in the
most lively manner, and thus the letters that he received or sent
contain, without his intending it, all the history of his time.[4]

The correspondence of political men of our time, when it is published,
is far from having the same importance, because the exchange of
sentiment and thought is not made so much by means of letters now as it
was then. We have invented new methods. The immense publicity of the
press has advantageously replaced those cautious communications which
could not reach beyond a few persons. Now-a-days the newspapers keep a
man informed of what is doing in the world, whatever unfrequented place
he may have retired to. As he learns events almost as soon as they
happen, he receives the excitement as well as the news of them, and has
no need of a well-informed friend to apprise him of them. To seek for
all that the newspapers have destroyed and replaced among us would be an
interesting study. In Cicero’s time letters often took their place and
rendered the same services. They were passed from hand to hand when they
contained news men had an interest in knowing; and those of important
persons which made known their sentiments were read, commented on, and
copied. A politician, who was attacked, defended himself by them before
people whose esteem he desired to preserve, and through them men tried
to form a sort of public opinion in a limited public when the Forum was
silent, as in Caesar’s time. The newspapers have taken up this duty now
and make a business of politics, and as they are incomparably more
convenient, rapid, and diffused, they have taken from correspondence one
of its principal subjects.

It is true that private affairs remain for it, and we are tempted to
think at first that this subject is inexhaustible, and that with the
sentiments and affections of so many kinds that fill our home life it
would always be rich enough. Nevertheless, I think that private
correspondence becomes every day shorter and less interesting, where it
is only a question of feeling and affection. That constant and agreeable
intercourse which filled so large a place in the life of former times,
tends almost to disappear, and one would say that by a strange chance
the facility and rapidity of intercourse, which ought to give it more
animation, have been injurious to it. Formerly, when there was no post,
or when it was reserved for the emperor’s use, as with the Romans, men
were obliged to take advantage of any opportunity that occurred, or to
send their letters by a slave. Then writing was a serious affair. They
did not want the messenger to make a useless journey; letters were made
longer and more complete to avoid the necessity of beginning again too
often; unconsciously they were more carefully finished, by the thought
we naturally give to things that cost trouble and are not very easy.
Even in the time of Madame de Sévigné, when the mails started only once
or twice a week, writing was still a serious business to which every
care was given. The mother, far from her daughter, had no sooner sent
off her letter than she was thinking of the one she would send a few
days later. Thoughts, memories, regrets gathered in her mind during this
interval, and when she took up her pen “she could no longer govern this
torrent.” Now, when we know that we can write when we will, we do not
collect material as Madame de Sévigné did, we do not write a little
every day, we no longer seek to “empty our budget,” or torment ourselves
in order to forget nothing, lest forgetfulness should make the news
stale by coming too late. While the periodical return of the post
formerly brought more order and regularity into correspondence, the
facility we have now for writing when we will causes us to write less
often. We wait to have something to say, which is seldomer than one
thinks. We write no more than is necessary; and this is very little for
a correspondence whose chief pleasure lies in the superfluous, and we
are threatened with a reduction of that little. Soon, no doubt, the
telegraph will have replaced the post; we shall only communicate by this
breathless instrument, the image of a matter-of-fact and hurried
society, which, even in the style it employs, tries to use a little less
than what is necessary. With this new progress the pleasure of private
correspondence, already much impaired, will have disappeared for ever.

But when people had more opportunities for writing letters, and wrote
them better, all did not succeed equally. Some dispositions are fitter
for this work than others. People whose minds move slowly, and who have
need of much reflection before writing, make memoirs and not letters.
The sober-minded write in a regular and methodical manner, but they lack
grace and warmth. Logicians and reasoners have the habit of following up
their thoughts too closely; now, one ought to know how to pass lightly
from one subject to another, in order that the interest may be
sustained, and to leave them all before they are exhausted. Those who
are solely occupied with one idea, who concentrate themselves on it, and
will not leave it, are only eloquent when they speak of it, which is not
enough. To be always agreeable, and on all subjects, as a regular
correspondence demands, one must have a lively and active imagination
which receives the impressions of the moment and changes abruptly with
them. This is the first quality of good letter writers; I will add to
it, if you like, a little artifice. Writing always requires a certain
effort. To succeed in writing we must aim at success, and the
disposition to please must precede the wish to do so. It is natural
enough to wish to please that great public for whom books are written,
but it is the mark of a more exacting vanity to exert one’s powers for a
single person. It has often been asked since La Bruyère, why women
succeed better than men in this kind of writing? Is it not because they
have a greater desire to please and a natural vanity which is, so to
say, always under arms, which neglects no conquest, and feels the need
of making efforts to please everybody?

I think nobody ever possessed these qualities in the same degree as
Cicero. That insatiable vanity, that openness to impressions, that
easiness in letting himself be seized and mastered by events, are found
in his whole life and in all his works. It seems, at first sight, that
there is a great difference between his letters and his speeches, and we
are tempted to ask ourselves how the same man has been able to succeed
in styles so opposed; but astonishment ceases as soon as we look a
little closer. When we seek the really original qualities of his
speeches they are found to be altogether the same that charm us in his
letters. His commonplaces have got rather old, his pathos leaves us
cold, and we often find that there is too much artifice in his rhetoric,
but his narrations and portraits remain living in his speeches. It would
be difficult to find a greater talent than his for narrative and
description, and for representing to the life as he does both events and
men. If he shows them to us so clearly, it is because he has them
himself before his eyes. When he shows us the trader Cherea “with his
eyebrows shaved, and that head which smells of tricks, and in which
malignity breathes,”[5] or the praetor Verres taking an airing in a
litter with eight bearers, like a king of Bithynia, softly lying on
Malta roses,[6] or Vatinius rushing forth to speak, “his eyes starting,
his neck swollen, his muscles stretched,”[7] or the Gallic witnesses,
who walk about the Forum with an air of triumph and head erect,[8] or
the Greek witnesses who chatter without ceasing and gesticulate with the
shoulders,[9] all those characters, in fine, that when once they have
been met with in his works are never forgotten, his powerful and mobile
imagination sees them before painting them. He possesses in a wonderful
degree the faculty of making himself the spectator of what he narrates.
Things strike him, persons attract or repel him with an incredible
vivacity, and he throws himself entirely into the pictures he makes of
them. What passion there is in his narratives! What furious bursts of
anger in his attacks! What frenzy of joy when he describes some ill
fortune of his enemies! How one feels that he is penetrated and
overwhelmed with it, that he enjoys it, that he delights in it and
gloats over it, according to his energetic expressions: _his ego rebus
pascor, his delector, his perfruor!_[10] Saint-Simon, intoxicated with
hatred and joy, expresses himself almost in the same terms in the famous
scene of the “bed of justice,” when he sees the Duke of Maine struck
down and the bastards discrowned. “I, however,” says he, “was dying with
joy, I was even fearing a swoon. My heart, swelled to excess, found no
room to expand.... I triumphed, I avenged myself, I swam in my
vengeance.” Saint-Simon earnestly desired power, and twice he thought he
held it; “but the waters, as with Tantalus, retired from his lips every
time he thought to touch them.” I do not think, however, that we ought
to pity him. He would have ill filled the place of Colbert and Louvois,
and even his good qualities perhaps would have been hurtful to him.
Passionate and irritable, he feels warmly the slightest injury, and
flies into a passion at every turn. The smallest incidents excite him,
and we feel that when he relates them he does so with all his heart.
This ardent sensitiveness which warms all his narratives has made him an
incomparable painter, but as it would always have confused his judgment
it would have made him an indifferent politician. Cicero’s example shows
this well.

We are right then in saying that we find the same qualities in Cicero’s
speeches as in his letters, but they are more evident in his letters,
because he is freer and gives more play to his feelings. When he writes
to any of his friends, he does not reflect so long as when he is to
address the people; he gives his first impressions, and gives them with
life and passion as they rise in him. He does not take the trouble to
polish his style; all that he writes has usually such a graceful air,
something so easy and simple that we cannot suspect preparation or
artifice. A correspondent who wished to please him, having spoken to him
one day of the thunders of his utterance, _fulmina verborum_, he
answered: “What do you think then of my letters? Do you not think that I
write to you in the ordinary style? One must not always keep the same
tone. A letter cannot resemble a pleading or a political speech ... one
uses every-day expressions in it.”[11] Even if he had wished to give
more care to them he could not have found leisure. He had so many to
write to content everybody! Atticus alone sometimes received three in
the same day. So he wrote them where he could—during the sitting of the
senate, in his garden, when he is out walking, on the high-road when he
is travelling. Sometimes he dates them from his dining-room, where he
dictates them to his secretaries between two courses. When he writes
them with his own hand he does not give himself time to reflect any the
more. “I take the first pen I find,” he tells his brother, “and use it
as if it were good.”[12] Thus it was not always easy to decipher him.
When any one complains he does not lack excuses. It is the fault of his
friends’ messengers, who will not wait. “They come all ready to start,
with their travelling caps on, saying that their companions are waiting
for them at the door.”[13] Not to keep them waiting, he must write at
random all that comes into his mind.

Let us thank these impatient friends, these hurried messengers who did
not give Cicero time to make eloquent essays. His letters please us
precisely because they contain the first flow of his emotions, because
they are full of graceful negligence and naturalness. As he does not
take time to disguise himself we see him as he is. His brother said to
him one day, “I saw your own self in your letter.”[14] We are inclined
to say the same thing ourselves every time we read him. If he is so
lively, earnest, and animated when he addresses his friends, it is
because he so easily transports himself in imagination to the places
where they are. “I feel as though I were talking to you,”[15] he writes
to one of them. “I don’t know how it happens,” he says to another, “that
I think I am near you while writing to you.”[16] He gives way to his
passing emotions in his letters even more than in his speeches. When he
arrives at one of his fine country houses that he likes so much, he
gives himself up to the pleasure of seeing it again; it has never seemed
to him so fine. He visits his porticoes, his gymnasia, his garden seats;
he runs to his books, ashamed of having left them. Love of solitude
seizes him so strongly that he never finds himself sufficiently alone.
He ends by disliking his house at Formiae because there are so many
intruders. “It is not a villa,” he says, “it is a public lounge.”[17]
There he finds again the greatest bores in the world, his friend Sebosus
and his friend Arrius, who persists in not returning to Rome, however
much he may entreat him, in order to keep him company and philosophize
with him all day long. “While I am writing to you,” he says to Atticus,
“Sebosus is announced. I have not finished lamenting this when I hear
Arrius saluting me. Is this leaving Rome? What is the use of flying from
others to fall into the hands of these?” I wish, he adds, quoting a fine
verse very likely borrowed from his own works, “I wish to fly to the
mountains of my birthplace, the cradle of my infancy. _In montes patrios
et ad incunabula nostra._”[18] He goes in fact to Arpinum; he extends
his journey to Antium, the wild Antium, where he passes the time
counting the waves. This obscure tranquillity pleases him so much that
he regrets he was not duumvir in this little town rather than consul at
Rome. He has no higher ambition than to be rejoined by his friend
Atticus, to walk with him in the sun, or to talk philosophy “seated on
the little bench beneath the statue of Aristotle.” At this moment he
seems disgusted with public life, he will not hear speak of it. “I am
resolved to think no more about it,”[19] he says. But we know how he
kept this sort of promise. As soon as he is back in Rome he plunges into
the thick of politics; the country and its pleasures are forgotten. We
only detect from time to time a few passing regrets for a calmer life.
“When shall we live then?” _quando vivemus?_ says he sadly in this
whirlwind of business that hurries him on.[20] But these timorous
complaints are soon stifled by the noise and movement of the combat. He
enters and takes part in it with more ardour than anybody. He is still
excited by it when he writes to Atticus, its agitation is shown by his
letters which communicate it to us. We imagine ourselves looking on at
those incredible scenes that take place in the senate when he attacks
Clodius, sometimes by set speeches, sometimes by impetuous questions,
employing against him by turns the heaviest arms of rhetoric and the
lightest shafts of raillery. He is still more sprightly when he
describes the popular assemblies and recounts the scandals of the
elections. “Follow me to the Campus Martius, corruption is rampant,
_sequere me in Campum; ardet ambitus_.”[21] And he shows us the
candidates at work, purse in hand, or the judges in the Forum
shamelessly selling themselves to whoever will pay them, _judices quos
fames magis quam fama commovit_.

As he has the habit of giving way to his impressions and changing with
them, his tone varies from letter to letter. Nothing is more desponding
than those he writes in exile; they are a continual moan; but his
sentences suddenly become majestic and triumphant immediately after his
return from exile. They are full of those flattering superlatives that
he distributes so liberally to those who have served him, _fortissimus_,
_prudentissimus_, _exoptatissimus_, etc., he extols in magnificent terms
the marks of esteem given him by people of position, the authority he
enjoys in the Curia, the credit he has so gloriously reconquered in the
Forum, _splendorem ilium forensem, et in senatu auctoritatem et apud
viros bonos gratiam_.[22] Although he is only addressing his faithful
Atticus, we think we hear an echo of the set orations he has just
pronounced in the senate and before the people. It sometimes happens
that on the gravest occasions he smiles and jokes with a friend who
amuses him. In the thick of his conflict with Antony he writes that
charming letter to Papirius Poetus, in which he advises him in such a
diverting manner to frequent again the good tables, and to give good
dinners to his friends.[23] He does not defy dangers, he forgets them;
but let him meet some timorous person, he soon partakes his fear, his
tone changes at once; he becomes animated, heated; sadness, fear,
emotion carry him without effort to the highest flights of eloquence.
When Caesar threatens Rome, and insolently places his final conditions
before the senate, Cicero’s courage rises, and he uses, when writing to
a single person, those energetic figures of speech which would not be
out of place in a public oration. “What a fate is ours! Must we then
give way to his impudent demands! for so Pompey calls them. In fact has
a more shameless audacity ever been seen?—You have occupied for ten
years a province that the senate has not given you, but which you have
seized yourself by intrigue and violence. The term has arrived which
your caprice alone and not the law has fixed for your power.—But let us
suppose it was the law—the term having arrived, we name your successor,
but you resist and say, ‘Respect my rights.’ And you, what do you do to
ours? What pretext have you for keeping your army beyond the term fixed
by the people, in spite of the senate?—You must give way to me or
fight.—Well then! let us fight, answers Pompey, at least we have the
chance of conquering or of dying free men.”[24]

If I wished to find another example of this agreeable variety and these
rapid changes, I should not turn to Pliny or to those who, like him,
wrote their letters for the public, I should come down to Madame de
Sévigné. She, like Cicero, has a very lively and versatile imagination;
she gives way to her first emotions without reflection; she is caught by
things present, and the pleasure she is enjoying always seems the
highest. It has been remarked that she took pleasure everywhere, not
through that indolence of mind that attaches us to the place where we
are, to avoid the trouble of changing, but by the vivacity of her
character which gave her up entirely to the pleasures of the moment.
Paris does not charm her so much as to prevent her liking the country,
and no one of that age has spoken about nature better than this woman of
fashion who was so much at ease in drawing-rooms, and seemed made for
them. She escapes to Livry the first fine day to enjoy “the triumph of
May,” to “the nightingale, the cuckoo, and the warbler that begin the
spring in the woods.” But Livry is still too fashionable, she must have
a more complete solitude, and she cheerfully retires under her great
trees in Brittany. This time her Paris friends think she will be wearied
to death, having no news to repeat or fine wits to converse with. But
she has taken some serious moral treatise by Nicole with her; she has
found among those neglected books whose last refuge, like that of old
furniture, is the country, some romance of her young days which she
reads again secretly, and in which she is astonished still to find
pleasure. She chats with her tenants, and just as Cicero preferred the
society of the country people to that of the provincial fashionables,
she likes better to talk with her gardener Pilois than with “several who
have preserved the title of esquire in the parliament of Rennes.” She
walks in her Mall, in those solitary alleys where the trees covered with
fine-sounding mottoes almost seem as though they were speaking to each
other; she finds, in fact, so much pleasure in her desert that she
cannot make up her mind to leave it; nevertheless no woman likes Paris
better. Once back there she surrenders herself wholly to the pleasures
of fashionable life. Her letters are full of it. She takes impressions
so readily that we might almost tell in perusing them what books she has
just been reading, at what conversations she has been present, what
drawing-rooms she has just left. When she repeats so pleasantly to her
daughter the gossip of the court we perceive that she has just been
conversing with the graceful and witty Madame de Coulanges, who has
repeated it to her. When she speaks so touchingly of Turenne she has
just left the Hôtel de Bouillon, where the prince’s family are lamenting
his broken fortunes as well as his death. She lectures, she sermonizes
herself with Nicole, but not for long. Let her son come in and tell her
some of those gay adventures of which he has been the hero or the
victim, she recounts boldly the most risky tales on condition of saying
a little later, “Pardon us, Monsieur Nicole!” When she has been visiting
La Rochefoucauld everything turns to morality; she draws lessons from
everything, everywhere she sees some image of life and of the human
heart, even in the viper broth that they are going to give Madame de la
Fayette who is ill. Is not this viper, which though opened and skinned
still writhes, like our old passions? “What do we not do to them? We
treat them with insult, harshness, cruelty, disdain; we wrangle, lament,
and storm, and yet they move. We cannot overcome them. We think, when we
have plucked out their heart, that they are done with and we shall hear
no more of them. But no; they are always alive, they are always moving.”
This ease with which she receives impressions, and which causes her to
adopt so quickly the sentiments of the people she visits, makes her also
feel the shock of the great events she looks on at. The style of her
letters rises when she narrates them, and, like Cicero, she becomes
eloquent unconsciously. Whatever admiration the greatness of the
thoughts and the liveliness of expression in that fine piece of Cicero
upon Caesar that I quoted just now may cause me, I am still more
touched, I admit, by the letter of Madame de Sévigné on the death of
Louvois, and I find more boldness and brilliancy in that terrible
dialogue which she imagines between the minister who demands pardon and
God who refuses it.

These are admirable qualities, but they bring with them certain
disadvantages. Such hasty impressions are often rather fleeting. When
people are carried away by a too vivid imagination, they do not take
time to reflect before speaking, and run the risk of often having to
change their opinion. Thus Madame de Sévigné has contradicted herself
more than once. But being only a woman of fashion, her inconsistency has
not much weight, and we do not look on it as a crime. What does it
matter to us that her opinions on Fléchier and Mascaron have varied,
that after having unreservedly admired the _Princesse de Clèves_ when
she read it alone, she hastened to find a thousand faults in it when her
cousin Bussy condemned it? But Cicero is a politician, and he is
expected to be more serious. We demand that his opinions should have
more coherency; now, this is precisely what the liveliness of his
imagination least permits. He never boasted of being consistent. When he
judges events or men he sometimes passes without scruple, in a few days,
from one extreme to the other. In a letter of the end of October Cato is
called an excellent friend (_amicissimus_), and the way in which he has
acted is declared to be satisfactory; at the beginning of November he is
accused of having been shamefully malevolent in the same affair,[25]
because Cicero seldom judges but by his impressions, and in a mobile
spirit like his, very different but equally vivid impressions follow
each other very quickly.

Another danger, and one still greater, of this excess of imagination
which cannot control itself is that it may give us the lowest and most
false opinion of those who yield to it. Perfect characters are only
found in novels. Good and evil are so intermingled in our nature that
the one is seldom found without the other. The strongest characters have
their weaknesses, and the finest actions do not spring only from the
most honourable motives. Our best affections are not entirely exempt
from selfishness; doubts and wrongful suspicions sometimes trouble the
firmest friendships, and it may happen at certain moments that cupidity
and jealousy, of which one is ashamed the next day, flit rapidly through
the mind of the most honourable persons. The prudent and clever
carefully conceal all those feelings which cannot bear the light; those
whose quick impressions carry them away, like Cicero, speak out, and
they are very much blamed. The spoken or written word gives more
strength and permanence to these fugitive thoughts; they were only
flashes; they are fixed and accentuated by writing; they acquire a
clearness, a relief and importance that they had not in reality. Those
momentary weaknesses, those ridiculous suspicions which spring from
wounded self-esteem, those short bursts of anger, quieted as soon as
reflected on, those unjust thoughts that vexation produces, those
ambitious fits that reason hastens to disavow, never perish when once
they have been confided to a friend. One of these days a prying
commentator will study these too unreserved disclosures, and will use
them, to draw a portrait of the indiscrete person who made them, to
frighten posterity. He will prove by exact and irrefutable quotations
that he was a bad citizen and a bad friend, that he loved neither his
country nor his family, that he was jealous of honest people, and that
he betrayed all parties. It is not so, however, and a wise man will not
be deceived by the artifice of misleading quotations. Such a man well
knows that we must not take these impetuous people literally or give too
much credence to what they say. We must save them from themselves,
refuse to listen to them when they are led astray by passion, and
especially must we distinguish their real and lasting feelings from all
those exaggerations which are merely passing. For these reasons every
one is not fitted to thoroughly understand these letters, every one
cannot read them as they should be read. I mistrust those learned men
who, without any acquaintance with men or experience of life, pretend to
judge Cicero from his correspondence. Most frequently they judge him
ill. They search for the expression of his thought in that commonplace
politeness which society demands, and which no more binds those who use
it than it deceives those who accept it. Those concessions that must be
made if we wish to live together they call cowardly compromises. They
see manifest contradictions in those different shades a man gives to his
opinions, according to the persons he is talking with. They triumph over
the imprudence of certain admissions, or the fatuity of certain praises,
because they do not perceive the fine irony that tempers them. To
appreciate all these shades, to give things their real importance, to be
a good judge of the drift of those phrases which are said with half a
smile, and do not always mean what they seem to say, requires more
acquaintance with life than one usually gets in a German university. If
I must say what I think, I would rather trust a man of the world than a
scholar in this matter, for a delicate appreciation.

Cicero is not the only person whom this correspondence shows us. It is
full of curious details about all those who had friendly or business
relations with him. They were the most illustrious persons of the time,
and they played the chief parts in the revolution that put an end to the
Roman Republic. No one deserves to be studied more than they. It must be
remarked here, that one of Cicero’s failings has greatly benefited
posterity. If it were a question of some one else, of Cato for instance,
how many people’s letters would be missing in this correspondence! The
virtuous alone would find a place in it, and Heaven knows their number
was not then very great. But, happily, Cicero was much more tractable,
and did not bring Cato’s rigorous scruples into the choice of his
friends. A sort of good-nature made him accessible to people of every
opinion; his vanity made him seek praise everywhere. He had dealings
with all parties, a great fault in a politician, for which the shrewd
people of his time have bitterly reproached him, but a fault that we
profit by; hence it happens that all parties are represented in his
correspondence. This obliging humour sometimes brought him into contact
with people whose opinions were the most opposite to his, and he found
himself at certain times in close relations with the worst citizens whom
he has at other times lashed with his invectives. Letters that he had
received from Antony, Dolabella, and Curio still remain, and these
letters are full of expressions of respect and friendship. If the
correspondence went further back we should probably have some of
Catiline’s, and, frankly, I regret the want of them; for if we wish to
judge of the state of a society as of the constitution of a man, it is
not enough to examine the sound parts, we must handle and probe to the
bottom the unsound parts. Thus, all the important men of that time,
whatever their conduct may have been, or to whatever party they may have
belonged, had dealings with Cicero. Memorials of all are found in his
correspondence. A few of their letters still exist, and we have a large
number of those that Cicero wrote to them. The private details he gives
us about them, what he tells us of their opinions, their habits, and
character, allows us to enter freely into their life. Thanks to him, all
those persons indistinctly depicted by history resume their original
appearance; he seems to bring them nearer to us and to make us
acquainted with them; and when we have read his correspondence we can
say that we have just visited the whole Roman society of his time.

The end we have in view in this book is to study closely a few of these
personages, especially those who were most involved in the great
political events of that period. But before beginning this study it is
necessary to make a firm resolution not to bring to it considerations
which belong to our own time. It is too much the custom now-a-days to
seek arms for our present struggles in the history of the past. Smart
allusions and ingenious parallels are most successful. Perhaps Roman
antiquity is so much in fashion only because it gives political parties
a convenient and less dangerous battle-field where, under ancient
costumes, present-day passions may struggle. If the names of Caesar,
Pompey, Cato, and Brutus are quoted on all occasions, these great men
must not be too proud of the honour. The curiosity they excite is not
altogether disinterested, and when they are spoken of it is almost
always to point an epigram or set off a flattery. I wish to avoid this
mistake. These illustrious dead seem to me to deserve something better
than to serve as instruments in the quarrels that divide us, and I have
sufficient respect for their memory and their repose not to drag them
into the arena of our every-day disputes. It should never be forgotten
that it is an outrage to history to subject it to the changing interest
of parties, and that it should be, according to the fine expression of
Thucydides, a work made for eternity.

These precautions being taken, let us penetrate with Cicero’s letters
into the Roman society of that great period, and let us begin by
studying him who offers himself so gracefully to do us the honours.

                   CICERO IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LIFE

                          CICERO’S PUBLIC LIFE

Cicero’s public life is usually severely judged by the historians of our
time. He pays the penalty of his moderation. As this period is only
studied now with political intentions, a man like him who tried to avoid
extremes fully satisfies nobody. All parties agree in attacking him; on
all sides he is laughed at or insulted. The fanatical partisans of
Brutus accuse him of timidity, the warmest friends of Caesar call him a
fool. It is in England and amongst us[26] that he has been least abused,
and that classical traditions have been more respected than elsewhere;
the learned still persist in their old habits and their old admirations,
and in the midst of so many convulsions criticism at least has remained
conservative. Perhaps also the indulgence shown to Cicero in both
countries comes from the experience they have of political life. When a
man has lived in the practice of affairs and in the midst of the working
of parties, he can better understand the sacrifices that the necessities
of the moment, the interest of his friends and the safety of his cause
may demand of a statesman, but he who only judges his conduct by
inflexible theories thought out in solitude and not submitted to the
test of experience becomes more severe towards him. This, no doubt, is
the reason why the German scholars use him so roughly. With the
exception of M. Abeken,[27] who treats him humanely, they are without
pity. Drumann[28] especially overlooks nothing. He has scrutinized his
works and his life with the minuteness and sagacity of a lawyer seeking
the grounds of a lawsuit. He has laid bare all his correspondence in a
spirit of conscientious malevolence. He has courageously resisted the
charm of those confidential disclosures which makes us admire the writer
and love the man in spite of his weaknesses, and by opposing to each
other detached fragments of his letters and discourses he has succeeded
in drawing up a formal indictment, in which nothing is omitted and which
almost fills a volume. M. Mommsen[29] is scarcely more gentle, he is
only less long. Taking a general view of things he does not lose himself
in the details. In two of those compact pages full of facts, such as he
knows how to write, he has found means to heap on Cicero more insults
than Drumann’s whole volume contains. We see particularly that this
pretended statesman was only an egotist and a short-sighted politician,
and that this great writer is only made up of a newspaper novelist and a
special-pleader. Here we perceive the same pen that has just written
down Cato a Don Quixote and Pompey a corporal. As in his studies of the
past he always has the present in his mind, one would say that he looks
for the squireens of Prussia in the Roman aristocracy, and that in
Caesar he salutes in advance that popular despot whose firm hand can
alone give unity to Germany.

How much truth is there in these fierce attacks? What confidence can we
place in this boldness of revolutionary criticism? What judgment must we
pronounce on Cicero’s political conduct? The study of the facts will
teach us.

                                   I.

Three causes generally contribute to form a man’s political opinions—his
birth, his personal reflections, and his temperament. If I were not
speaking here of sincere convictions only, I would readily add a fourth,
which causes more conversions than the others, namely interest, that is
to say, that leaning one has almost in spite of oneself to think that
the most advantageous course is also the most just, and to conform one’s
opinion to the position one holds or wishes for. Let us try and discover
what influence these causes had upon Cicero’s conduct and political
preferences.

At Rome, for a long time past, opinions had been decided by birth. In a
city where traditions were so much respected the ideas of parents were
inherited as well as their property or their name, and it was a point of
honour to follow their politics faithfully; but in Cicero’s time these
customs were beginning to decay. The oldest families had no scruple in
failing in their hereditary engagements. At that time many names which
had become illustrious by defending popular interests are found in the
senatorial party, and the most audacious demagogue of that time bore the
name of Clodius. Besides, Cicero would never at any time have found
political direction in his birth. He belonged to an unknown family, he
was the first of his race to engage in public affairs, and the name he
bore did not commit him in advance to any party. In fact, he was not
born at Rome. His father lived in one of those little country municipia
of which the wits readily made fun, because doubtful Latin was spoken
and fine manners were not well known in them, but which, none the less,
were the strength and honour of the Republic. That rude but brave and
temperate people who inhabited the neglected cities of Campania, Latium,
and the Sabine country, and among whom the habits of rural life had
preserved something of the ancient virtue,[30] was in reality the Roman
people. That which filled the streets and squares of the great city,
spent its time in the theatre, took part in the riots of the Forum, and
sold its votes in the Campus Martius, was only a collection of freedmen
and foreigners among whom only disorder, intrigue, and corruption could
be learnt. Life was more honest and healthy in the municipia. The
citizens who inhabited them remained for the most part strangers to the
questions that were debated in Rome, and the rumour of public affairs
did not reach them. They were sometimes seen on the Campus Martius or
the Forum, when it was a question of voting for one of their
fellow-citizens, or of supporting him by their presence before the
tribunals; but usually they troubled themselves little about exercising
their rights, and stayed at home. They were none the less devoted to
their country, jealous of their privileges, even when they made no use
of them, proud of their title of Roman citizens, and much attached to
the Republican Government that had given it them. For them the Republic
had preserved its prestige because, living at a distance, they saw less
of its weaknesses and always recalled its ancient glory. Cicero’s
childhood was spent in the midst of these rural populations, as backward
in their ideas as in their manners. He learnt from them to love the past
more than to know the present. This was the first impression and the
first teaching he received from the places as from the people among whom
his early years were passed. Later, he spoke with emotion of that humble
house that his father had built near the Liris, and which recalled the
house of the old Curius[31] by its stern simplicity. I fancy that those
who lived in it must have thought themselves carried back a century, and
that in causing them to live among the memorials of the past, it gave
them the inclination and taste for old-fashioned things. If Cicero owed
anything to his birth it was this. He may have gained in his family
respect for the past, love of his country, and an instinctive preference
for the Republican Government, but he found in it no precise tradition,
no positive engagement with any party. When he entered political life he
was obliged to decide for himself, a great trial for an irresolute
character! And in order to choose among so many conflicting opinions it
was necessary early to study and reflect.

Cicero has embodied the results of his reflections and studies in
political writings, of which the most important, _The Republic_, has
only reached us in a very imperfect state. What remains of it shows that
he is here, as everywhere else, a fervent disciple of the Greeks. He
attaches himself by preference to Plato, and his admiration for him is
so strong that he often almost makes us think that he is content with
translating him. In general Cicero does not appear to care much for the
glory of originality. This is almost the only vanity he lacks. In his
correspondence there is a singular admission on this subject, which has
been freely used against him. In order to make his friend Atticus
understand how his works cost him so little trouble, he says: “I only
furnish the words, of which I have no lack”;[32] but Cicero, contrary to
his usual custom, calumniates himself here. He is not such a servile
translator as he wishes to make believe, and the difference between him
and Plato is great, especially in his political works. Their books bear,
indeed, the same title, but as soon as they are opened we perceive that
in reality they are quite unlike. It is the characteristic of a
speculative philosopher like Plato to consider the absolute end in
everything. If he wants to form a constitution, instead of studying the
people to be governed by it, he begins with some principle which reason
lays down, and follows it up with inflexible rigour to its logical
consequences. Thus he succeeds in forming one of those political systems
where everything is bound and held together, and which by their
admirable unity delight the mind of the sage who studies them as the
regularity of a fine building pleases the eye of those who look at it.
Unfortunately this kind of constitution, thought out in solitude and
cast all of a piece, is difficult of application. When it comes to be
put in practice unexpected resistance crops up on all sides. National
traditions, character, and recollections, all those social forces which
have been overlooked, will not submit to the severe laws imposed on
them. It is then perceived that these things cannot be moulded at will,
and since they absolutely refuse to give way, one must be prepared to
modify this constitution which seemed so fine when it was not put into
use. But here again the difficulty is great. It is not easy to change
anything in these compact and logical systems, where everything is so
skilfully arranged that one piece being disturbed throws the rest out of
gear. Besides, philosophers are naturally imperious and absolute; they
do not like to be thwarted. To avoid that opposition that provokes them,
to escape as much as possible the demands of reality, they imitate the
Athenian of whom Aristophanes speaks, who, despairing of finding here
below a republic to suit him, went to look for one in the clouds. They
also build castles in the air, ideal republics governed by imaginary
laws. They frame admirable constitutions, but they have the defect of
not applying to any particular country because they are made for the
whole human race.

Cicero did not act thus. He knew the public he addressed; he knew that
that grave and sensible race, so quick to seize the practical side of
things, would be ill-satisfied with these fancies, and so he does not
lose himself in these dreams of the ideal and the absolute. He does not
presume to make laws for the universe; he is thinking especially of his
own country and his own times, and although he appears to be drawing up
the plan of a perfect republic, that is to say, one that cannot exist,
it is plain that his eyes are fixed on a constitution which does really
exist. The following are very nearly his political theories. Of the
three forms of government usually distinguished, none altogether pleases
him when it is isolated. I need not speak of the absolute government of
a single man, he died in order to oppose that.[33]

The other two, government by all or by a few, that is to say democracy
and aristocracy, do not seem to him faultless either. It is difficult to
be quite contented with the aristocracy when one has not the advantage
of belonging to a great family. The Roman aristocracy, notwithstanding
the great qualities it displayed in the conquest and government of the
world, was supercilious and exclusive like others. The checks it had
suffered for a century, its visible decline, and the feeling it must
have had of its approaching end, far from curing its pride, rendered it
more intractable. Prejudices seem to become narrower and more inflexible
when they have but a short time to live. We know how our _émigrés_, face
to face with a victorious revolution, used up their last strength in
foolish struggles for precedence. In the same way the Roman nobility, at
the moment when the power was slipping from it, seemed to make a point
of exaggerating its defects, and of discouraging by its disdain the
respectable people who offered themselves to defend it. Cicero felt
himself drawn towards it by his taste for refinement of manners and
elegant pleasures; but he could not endure its insolence. Thus he always
kept up the ill-will of the discontented plebeian against it, even while
serving it. He knew very well that his birth was not overlooked, and
that he was called an upstart (_homo novus_), and in return he was never
tired of jesting about those fortunate people who do not need to have
any merit, who do not require to take trouble, and to whom the highest
places in the republic come while they are sleeping (_quibus omnia
populi romani beneficia dormientibus deferuntur_).[34]

But if aristocracy pleased him little, he liked popular government still
less. It is the worst of all, he said, anticipating Corneille,[35] and
in saying so he followed the opinion of the greater number of the Greek
philosophers, his masters, who have almost all shown a great aversion to
democracy. They were not only kept aloof from the multitude by the
nature of their studies, pursued in silence and solitude, but they
carefully shunned it lest they should partake of its errors and
prejudices. Their constant care was to keep themselves outside and above
it. The pride that this isolation nourished in them prevented them
seeing an equal in a man of the people, a stranger to those studies they
were so proud of. Thus the supremacy of numbers, which gives the same
importance to the unlearned as to the sage, was distasteful to them.
Cicero says positively that equality understood in this way is the
greatest inequality, _ipsa aequitas iniquissima est_.[36] This was not
the only nor even the greatest reproach that the Greek philosophers, and
Cicero with them, threw on democracy. They thought it was naturally
restless and turbulent, the enemy of meditation, and that it does not
give that leisure to the learned and the sage which is needful for the
works they are projecting. When Cicero thought of popular government, he
had in his mind only wrangles and faction-fights. He recalled the
plebeian riots and the stormy scenes of the Forum. He fancied he heard
those threatening complaints of the debtors and the needy which had
troubled the repose of the rich for three hundred years. How could any
one apply himself amidst this turmoil to studies which require peace and
quietness? The pleasures of the mind are interrupted every moment in
this reign of violence, which constantly drags people from the
tranquillity of their library into the public streets. This tumultuous
and unstable life was ill suited to such a firm friend of study, and if
the arrogance of the nobles sometimes threw him towards the popular
party, dislike of violence and noise did not allow him to remain in it.

What form of government then seemed to him the best? That which unites
them all in a just equilibrium—he says so very plainly in his
_Republic_. “I should wish that there be in the state a supreme and
royal power, that another part be reserved for the authority of the
chief citizens, and that certain things be left to the judgment and will
of the people.”[37] Now this mixed and limited government is not,
according to him, an imaginary system, like the republic of Plato. It is
in actual existence and working; it is that of his own country. This
opinion has been much contested. M. Mommsen thinks it agrees as little
with philosophy as with history. Taking it strictly, it is certainly
more patriotic than true. It would be going very far to consider the
Roman constitution as a faultless model, and to close our eyes to its
defects at the very moment when it perished through those very defects;
yet it must be admitted that, with all its imperfections, it was one of
the wisest of ancient times, and that none, perhaps, had made so many
efforts to satisfy the two great needs of society—order and liberty. Nor
can it be denied that its chief merit consisted in its effort to unite
and reconcile the different forms of government, notwithstanding their
obvious antagonisms. Polybius had perceived this before Cicero, and it
derives this merit from its origin and the way in which it was formed.
The constitution of Greece had almost all been the work of one man, the
Roman constitution was the work of time. That skilful balance of powers
that Polybius admired so much, had not been contrived by one foreseeing
mind. We do not find in the early times of Rome a single legislator who
regulated in advance the part each social element was to play in the
general combination; these elements combined by themselves. The
seditions of the plebeians, the desperate struggles of the tribunate
with the patricians, which terrified Cicero, had contributed more than
all the rest to complete that constitution that he admired. After a
struggle of nearly two hundred years, when the opposing forces perceived
that they were not able to destroy each other, they resigned themselves
to unite, and from the efforts they made to agree together there
resulted a government, imperfect doubtless—can there be a perfect
one?—but which is none the less the best, perhaps, of the ancient world.
We remember, of course, that Cicero did not bestow this praise on the
Roman constitution as it was in his time. His admiration went further
back. He recognized that it had been profoundly modified since the time
of the Gracchi, but he thought that before it had undergone these
alterations it was irreproachable. Thus the studies of his riper age
carried him back to those first impressions of his childhood, and
strengthened his love of ancient times and his respect for ancient
customs. As he advanced in life all his mistakes and all his misfortunes
threw him back to that time. The more the present was sad and the future
threatening the more he looked back with regret on the past. If he had
been asked in what time he would have wished to have been born, I think
he would have unhesitatingly chosen the period that followed the Punic
wars, that is to say, the moment when Rome, proud of her victory,
confident in the future and dreaded by the world, caught a glimpse for
the first time of the beauties of Greece, and began to feel the charm of
letters and the arts. Cicero considers this Rome’s best time, and places
in it by preference the scene of his dialogues. He would certainly have
liked to live among those great men whom he causes to speak so well, in
the company of Scipio, Fabius, and Cato the Elder, by the side of
Lucilius and Terence; and in this illustrious group, the personage whose
life and career would most have tempted him, he that he would have
wished to be, if a man could choose his time and order his destiny, was
the wise and learned Laelius.[38] To unite, like him, a high political
situation to the cultivation of literature, to add to the supreme
authority of eloquence some military successes, which the greatest
preachers of pacific triumphs do not disdain, to reach the highest
dignities of the republic in quiet and orderly times, and after an
honourable life to enjoy a respected old age—this was Cicero’s ideal.
What regrets and sadness does he not experience, when he wakes from this
fine dream to the disappointments of reality, and instead of living in a
tranquil republic, and in free intercourse with the Scipios, he must be
the rival of Catiline, the victim of Clodius, and the subject of Caesar.

Cicero’s temperament, I think, had still more to do with his political
preferences than his birth or his reflections. There is no more to learn
about the weaknesses of his character; they have been laid bare with
delight, they have even been wilfully exaggerated, and since Montaigne
it is the usual thing to laugh at them. I need not repeat, then, what
has been said so often, that he was timid, hesitating, and irresolute. I
admit with everybody that nature made him a man of letters rather than a
politician, but I do not think that this admission does him so much harm
as might be thought. The mind of the man of letters is often more
perfect, more comprehensive, broader than that of the politician, and it
is precisely this breadth that cramps and thwarts him when he undertakes
public affairs. We ask ourselves what qualities are necessary for a
statesman; would it not be wiser to seek those it is good for him to
lack, and does not political capacity show itself sometimes in its
limitations and exclusions? A man of action who ought to decide quickly
may be hampered by the number of contradictory reasons a too close and
penetrating view of things may present to him. A too vivid imagination,
showing him many plans at once, prevents him fixing on any.
Determination often comes from narrowness of mind, and is one of the
greatest virtues in a politician. A very sensitive conscience, by making
him too particular in the choice of his allies, would deprive him of
powerful support. He must distrust those generous impulses which lead
him to do justice even to his enemies: in the furious struggle for power
a man runs the risk of disarming himself and allowing an advantage to be
taken if he has the misfortune to be just and tolerant. There is nothing
that may not become a danger for him, even to that natural uprightness,
the first quality of a statesman. If he is too sensitive to the excesses
and acts of injustice of his party he will serve it feebly, if his
fidelity is to be unshaken he must not only excuse, he should be able to
shut his eyes to them. These are some of the imperfections of heart and
mind by which he gains his successes. If it be true, as I believe it is,
that the politician often succeeds in the government of a state through
his defects, and that the literary man fails by his very qualities, it
is paying the latter almost a compliment to say he is not fit for the
management of affairs.

We may say then without discrediting Cicero, that he was not altogether
fit for public life. The causes which made him an incomparable writer
did not allow him to be a good politician. That openness to impressions,
that delicate and irritable sensitiveness, the principal sources of his
literary talent, did not leave him sufficiently master of his will.
Particular events had too great a hold on him, and a man must be able to
detach himself from these in order to control them. His versatile and
fertile imagination, by drawing his attention to all sides at once,
rather incapacitated him for forming well-connected plans. He could not
delude himself enough about men or enterprises, and thus he was subject
to sudden fits of irresolution. He often boasted of having foreseen and
predicted the future. It was certainly not in his position of augur, but
by a kind of troublesome perspicacity, that showed him the consequences
of events, and the bad ones rather than the good. On the nones of
December, when he executed Catiline’s accomplices, he did not forget the
vengeance to which he exposed himself, and he foresaw his exile: that
day then, notwithstanding the irresolution he has been reproached with,
he had more courage than another who in a moment of excitement would not
have seen the danger. One cause of his inferiority and weakness was that
he was moderate, moderate by constitution rather than principle, that is
to say, with that nervous and irritable impatience which at last employs
violence to defend moderation. In political struggles all excess can
seldom be avoided. Usually parties are unjust in their complaints when
they are beaten, cruel in their reprisals when they conquer, and ready
to do without scruple, as soon as they are able, what they blame in
their enemies. If any in the victorious party perceive they are going
too far and dare to say so, they inevitably irritate everybody against
them. They are accused of timidity and vacillation, they are called weak
and changeable; but is this reproach well deserved? Did Cicero
contradict himself when, after defending the unfortunate men whom the
aristocracy oppressed under Sulla, he defended, thirty years later, the
victims of the democracy under Caesar? Was he not, on the contrary, more
consistent than those who, after bitterly complaining of being exiled,
exiled their enemies as soon as they had the power? We must, however,
admit that if this lively sense of justice is honourable in a private
man it may become dangerous in a politician. Parties do not like those
who refuse to join in their excesses, and in the midst of general
licence set up the claim of alone remaining within bounds. It was
Cicero’s misfortune not to have that firm resolution which fixes a man
in his opinions, and to pass from one opinion to another, because he saw
clearly the good and evil of all. A man must be very self-reliant to try
and do without others. This isolation takes for granted a decision and
energy that were wanting in Cicero. If he had resolutely attached
himself to one party he would have found in it traditions and fixed
principles, firm friends and steady leading, and need only have allowed
himself to be led. On the other hand, by endeavouring to walk alone he
risked making all the rest his enemies while he himself had no clearly
marked out line of conduct. A glance at the chief events of his
political life is sufficient to show that this was the origin of a part
of his misfortunes and his faults.

                                  II.

What I have just said of Cicero’s character explains his early political
opinions. He first appeared in the Forum under the government of Sulla.
The aristocracy was then all-powerful, and strangely abused its power.
Having been conquered for a moment by Marius its reprisals had been
terrible. Tumultuous and indiscriminate massacres could not appease its
rage. Applying its cold and orderly spirit to murder itself, it had
invented proscription, which was only another way of organizing
assassination. After having thus satisfied its vengeance it began to
strengthen its authority. It had dispossessed the richest municipia of
Italy of their property, excluded the knights from the tribunals,
lessened the privileges of the popular comitia, deprived the tribunes of
the right of intervention, that is, it had levelled everything around
itself. When it had broken down all resistance by the death of its
enemies, and concentrated all power in itself, it solemnly declared that
the revolution was ended, that legal government would recommence, and
that “killing would cease after the kalends of June.” Notwithstanding
these pompous declarations, massacres still continued for a long time.
Assassins, protected by the freedmen of Sulla, who shared the profits
with them, went out by night into the dark and crooked streets of the
old city, even to the foot of the Palatine. They murdered rich men
returning home, and under some pretext or other obtained their property
from the courts of justice, no one daring to complain. Such was the
government under which men lived at Rome when Cicero pleaded his first
causes. A moderate man like him, to whom excess was distasteful, must
have had a horror of this violence. An aristocratic tyranny did not suit
him better than a popular tyranny. Before this abuse of authority that
the nobility allowed itself he felt himself naturally drawn to aid the
democracy, and he began his career in the ranks of its defenders.

He made a bold and splendid beginning. In the midst of that silent
terror that the memory of the proscriptions kept up, he dared to speak
out, and the universal silence gave a louder echo to his words. His
political importance dates from the defence of Roscius. This unfortunate
man, whose property had been first taken, and who had then been accused
of murdering his father, could find no defender. Cicero undertook his
defence. He was young and unknown, two great advantages in undertaking
these bold strokes, for obscurity diminishes the danger which a man
runs, and youth prevents the seeing it. He had no trouble in proving the
innocence of his client, who was accused without evidence; but this
success was not enough for him. It was known that one of the most
powerful freedmen of Sulla, the rich and voluptuous Chrysogonus, was the
hidden mover of the accusation. No doubt he thought the dread his name
inspired was a sufficient protection against the boldness of the
defence. Cicero dragged him into the case. Traces of the dismay that
seized the audience when they heard this dreaded name are perceptible in
his speech. The accusers were dumfoundered, the multitude remained
silent. The young orator alone seemed tranquil and self-possessed. He
smiled, he joked, he dared to jeer at those terrible men whom no one
else dared look in the face, because in doing so they thought of the two
thousand heads of knights and senators they had cut off. He does not
altogether respect the master himself. That surname, “the happy,” that
his flatterers had given him gave rise to a pun. “What man is _happy_
enough,” says he, “not to have some rascal in his train?”[39] This
rascal is no other than the all-powerful Chrysogonus. Cicero does not
spare him. He depicts his vulgar luxury and arrogance. He shows him
heaping up in his house on the Palatine all the precious objects that he
had taken from his victims, annoying the neighbourhood with the noise of
his singers and musicians, “or hovering about the Forum with his hair
well combed and shining with unguents.”[40] More serious accusations are
mingled with these jests. The word proscriptions is sometimes pronounced
in this speech, the memory and impression they have left is found
everywhere. We feel that the speaker, who has seen them, has his mind
full of the subject, and that the horror that he feels and that he
cannot master prevents him keeping silence whatever danger there may be
in speaking. This generous emotion shows itself every moment, in spite
of the reticence the neighbourhood of the proscribers imposes. Speaking
of their victims, he dares to say that they have been cruelly murdered,
though it was usual to attribute to them every kind of crime. He holds
up to public scorn and hatred the wretches who have enriched themselves
by these massacres, and with a successful pun calls them “cut-heads and
cut-purses.”[41] He then demands formally that an end should be put to
these proceedings, of which humanity was ashamed; “otherwise,” he adds,
“it would be better to go and live among wild beasts than to remain in
Rome.”[42]

Cicero spoke thus at a few paces from the man who had ordered the
proscriptions, and in the presence of those who had carried them out and
profited by them. We can imagine the effect his words must have
produced. They expressed the secret feelings of all, they relieved the
public conscience, forced to keep silence, and humiliated by its
silence. Thus the democratic party showed the most lively sympathy, from
that time, for the eloquent young man who protested so courageously
against a hateful rule. The remembrance of this preserved the popular
favour for him so faithfully even to the time of his consulship. Every
time he sought an office the citizens hastened in crowds to the Campus
Martius to record their votes for him. No politician of that time, and
there were many more eminent than he, so easily reached the highest
dignities. Cato suffered more than one check, Caesar and Pompey needed
coalitions and intrigues to succeed. Cicero is almost the only one whose
candidatures succeeded the first time, and who never had to recur to the
means usually required for success. In the midst of those scandalous
bargains which gave honours to the richest, notwithstanding those
deeprooted traditions which seemed to reserve them for the noblest,
Cicero, who had no claims of birth and but a small fortune, always
defeated all the rest. He was appointed quaestor, aedile; he obtained
the urban praetorship, which was the most honourable; he attained the
consulship the first time he sought for it, as soon as the law permitted
him to aspire to it, and none of these dignities cost anything either to
his honour or his fortune.

It is worthy of remark, that when he was appointed praetor he had not
delivered any political speech. Up to the age of forty years he was only
what we call an advocate, and had not felt the need of being anything
else. Forensic eloquence then led to everything; a few brilliant
successes before the tribunals were sufficient to carry a man to public
dignities, and nobody thought of asking Cicero for any other proof of
his capacity for public business, when they were about to commit the
highest interests of his country to his charge, and to invest him with
the supreme authority. However, if this long time passed at the bar was
not detrimental to his political career, I think it caused some injury
to his talents. All the reproaches we may address to the advocate of
to-day, wrongly, no doubt, were well deserved by the advocate of those
times. It may be said of him with truth, that he took all cases
indifferently, that he changed his opinion with each suit, that he used
all his art in and made his fame by finding good reasons for supporting
every sophism. The young man who devoted himself to oratory in the
ancient schools, never heard it said that it was necessary to be
convinced, and proper only to speak conscientiously. He was taught that
there are different kinds of cases, those which are honest and those
which are not so (_genera causarum sunt honestum, turpe_, etc.).[43] It
was not thought necessary to add that the latter were to be avoided. On
the contrary, by exaggerating the merit of success in these, he acquired
the taste for undertaking them by preference. After he had been taught
how to defend and save the guilty, he was, without hesitation, also
taught how to bring discredit on an honest man. Such was the education
received by the pupil of the rhetoricians, and when he had quitted their
schools he did not lack opportunity of applying their precepts. For
instance, he did not make the mistake of being moderate and restrained
in his attacks. By constraining himself to be just he would have
deprived himself of an element of success with that fickle and
passionate mob which applauded satirical portraits and violent
invective. He was not more prejudiced in favour of truth than of
justice. It was a precept of the schools to invent, even in criminal
causes, racy and imaginary details that diverted the audience (_causam
mendaciunculis adspergere_).[44] Cicero quotes with great commendation
some of these agreeable little lies which perhaps cost the honour or the
life of some unfortunate people who were unlucky enough to have too
witty opponents, and as he had himself a fertile imagination in this
way, he did not stint himself in having recourse to this easy means of
success. Nothing was more indifferent to the ancient advocate than being
inconsistent with himself. It was said that the orator Antonius never
would write any of his speeches, lest some one should take it into his
head to compare his late with his present opinion. Cicero had not these
scruples. He contradicted himself all his life, and was never uneasy
about it. One day, when he too openly stated the contrary to what he had
formerly upheld, as he was pressed to explain these sudden changes, he
answered without perturbation: “You are mistaken if you think that you
find the expression of our personal opinions in our speeches; they are
the language of the cause and the case, and not that of the man and the
orator.”[45] This at least is a sincere avowal; but how much do the
orator and the man not lose by thus suiting their language to
circumstances! They learnt to be careless of putting order and
consistency in their lives, to dispense with sincerity in their
opinions, and conviction in their speech, to make the same expenditure
of talent for untruth as for truth, to consider only the needs of the
moment, and the success of the case in hand. These are the lessons that
the bar of that age taught Cicero. He remained at it too long, and when
he quitted it at forty to make his first essay in political oratory, he
could not shake off the bad habits acquired there.

Does this mean that Cicero should be struck off the list of political
orators? If this name is given to every man whose speech has some
influence on the affairs of his country, who sways the mob, or convinces
honest people, it seems difficult to refuse it to Cicero. He knew how to
talk to the multitude and make himself listened to. At times he mastered
it in its most furious outbursts. He made it accept and even applaud
opinions contrary to its preferences. He seemed to drag it out of its
apathy, and to call up in it for a short time an appearance of energy
and patriotism. He is not to blame if his successes were not followed
up, if after these grand triumphs of eloquence brute force remained
master. At least he did with his words all that words could then do. I
admit, however, that what was wanting in his character was wanting also
in his political eloquence. It is nowhere sufficiently resolute,
decided, practical. It is too much taken up with itself, and not enough
with the questions it is treating. It does not attack them boldly on
their salient points. It is involved in pompous phrases, instead of
trying to speak that clear and precise language which is the language of
public business. When we examine it closely, and begin to analyze it, we
find that it is chiefly composed of a good deal of rhetoric and a little
philosophy. All those agreeable and smart arguments, all those artifices
of debate, and also all that ostentation of pathos that we find in it,
come from rhetoric. Philosophy has furnished those grand commonplaces
developed with talent, but not always germane to the subject. There is
too much artifice and method about it. A concise and simple statement
would be more suitable to the discussion of affairs than these
subtleties and emotions; these long philosophical tirades would be
advantageously replaced by a clear and judicious exposition of the
orator’s principles and of the general ideas that regulate his conduct.
Unfortunately, as I have said, Cicero preserved, on reaching the
rostrum, the habits he had acquired at the bar. He attacks, with the
arguments of an advocate, that agrarian law, so honest, moderate, and
wise, which was proposed by the tribune Rullus. In the fourth
Catilinarian Oration he had to discuss this question, one of the gravest
that can be placed before a deliberative assembly, namely, how far is it
permitted to deviate from legality in order to save one’s country? He
has not even approached it. It is painful to see how he hangs back from
it, how he flies from and avoids it, to develop small reasons and lose
himself in a vulgar pathos. The grave and serious kind of eloquence
evidently was not that which Cicero preferred, and in which he felt most
at ease. If you wish to know the real tendency of his talents, read,
immediately after the fourth Catilinarian Oration, the speech for
Muraena, delivered at the same time. There is none more agreeable in the
collection of his speeches, and we wonder how a man who was consul, and
who had then so many affairs on his hands, found his mind sufficiently
free to joke with so much ease and point; the truth is, there he was in
his element. Accordingly, although he was consul or consular, he
returned to the bar as often as he could. It was to oblige his friends,
he said. I think that he wished still more to please himself; he appears
happy, and his animation and wit expand so freely, when he has some
agreeable and lively case to plead. Not only did he never miss an
opportunity of appearing before the judges, but as much as possible he
threw his political discourses into the form of ordinary pleadings.
Everything turned into personal questions with him. The discussion of
ideas usually leaves him cold. He had to contend against some one in
order to let us see him at his best. The finest speeches he delivered in
the Forum or the senate are eulogies or invectives. In them he is
unrivalled; in them, according to one of his expressions, his eloquence
rises and triumphs; but however fine invectives and eulogies may be,
they are not altogether our ideal of political eloquence, and we demand
something else of it now-a-days. All that can be said in justification
of Cicero’s speeches is, that they were perfectly appropriate to his
time, and that their character is explained by the circumstances in
which they were delivered. Eloquence did not then guide the state as in
the best times of the republic. Other influences had replaced it; in the
elections, money and the intrigues of the candidates, in out-door
discussions, the occult and terrible power of the popular societies, and
above all the army, which, since Sulla, raised or overthrew every
government. Eloquence feels itself powerless in the midst of these
forces which overpower it. How can it still preserve the commanding
accent, the imperious and resolute tone of one who knows his power? Need
it appeal to reason and logic, and try and force itself upon men’s
convictions by a close and forcible argument, when it knows that the
questions it is treating are decided otherwise? M. Mommsen maliciously
remarks, that in most of his great political speeches Cicero pleads
causes already victorious. When he published the Verrine Orations, the
laws of Sulla on the composition of the tribunals had just been
abolished. He well knew that Catiline had decided to leave Rome when he
pronounced the first Catilinarian Oration, in which he so feelingly
adjures him to go away. The second Philippic, which seems so bold when
we think of it as spoken to the face of the all-powerful Antony, was
only made public at the moment when Antony was flying to Cisalpine Gaul.
Of what use then were all these fine speeches? They did not cause
decisions to be taken, since these decisions were already taken; but
they caused them to be accepted by the multitude, they stirred public
opinion and excited it in their favour: this was something. It was
necessary to accept the facts of the situation; speech no longer
governed, eloquence could no longer hope to direct events, but it acted
on them indirectly, it tried to produce those great movements of opinion
that prepare or complete them; “it does not secure votes and acts, it
arouses the emotions.”[46] If this moral effect is the only end it had
in view at the time, Cicero’s eloquence, by its copiousness and
splendour, by its brilliancy and pathos, was well calculated to attain
it.

At first he had put his eloquence at the service of the popular party;
we have seen that it was in the ranks of this party that he made his
first political appearance; but although he faithfully served it for
seventeen years, I am inclined to think that he did not always do so
heartily. The excesses of the aristocratic government threw him towards
democracy, but he must have found democracy not much wiser, especially
when it was victorious. It sometimes gave him terrible clients to
defend. He had to plead the cause of factious and seditious persons who
were always troubling the public peace. One day he even pleaded, or was
on the point of pleading, for Catiline. It is probable that all this was
painful to him, and that the violent excesses of democracy tempted him
more than once to separate from it. Unfortunately he did not know where
to go if he left it, and if the plebeians offended him by their
violence, the aristocracy, by its arrogance and prejudices, did not any
more attract him. Since in existing parties he did not find any which
exactly corresponded to his convictions, and which altogether suited his
disposition, he had no other resource than to form one for himself. This
is what he tried to do. When he felt that the brilliancy of his
eloquence, the offices he had filled, the popularity that surrounded
him, made him an important person, in order to assure his future, to
take a higher and more permanent position in the republic, to free
himself from the requirements of his former protectors, in order not to
be forced to stretch out his hand to his old enemies, he sought to
create a new party, composed of the moderate men of all parties, and of
which he was to be the head. But he very well understood that he could
not create this party in a moment and produce it from nothing. It was
necessary first to find a nucleus around which the new recruits that he
expected should group themselves. He thought he had found it in that
class of citizens to which he belonged by his birth, and who were called
the knights.

Rome always lacked what we now call the middle and citizen class. In
proportion as the small farmers left their friends to go and live in the
city, and “as those hands which had worked at the corn and the vine were
only occupied in applauding at the theatre and the circus,”[47] the gap
became greater between the opulent aristocracy which possessed almost
all the public wealth, and that indigent and famished people that was
continually recruited from the slaves. The sole intermediaries were the
knights. This name, at the time we are considering, was not only used to
describe the citizens to whom the state gave a horse (_equites equo
publico_), and who voted separately in the elections; it was also given
to all those who possessed the equestrian income qualification, that is
to say, those whose fortune exceeded 400,000 sesterces (£3200). We may
well believe that the nobility behaved haughtily to these obscure
plebeians whom chance or economy had enriched; it kept these parvenus at
a distance; dealt out its disdain to them as liberally as to the poor
people of the plebs, and obstinately closed the entrance to public
dignities to them. When Cicero was appointed consul it was thirty years
since a new man, whether knight or plebeian, had attained the
consulship. Removed from political life by the jealousy of the great
nobles, the knights were obliged to turn their energies elsewhere.
Instead of wasting time in useless candidatures, they busied themselves
in making their fortunes. When Rome had conquered the world, it was the
knights especially who profited by these conquests. They formed an
industrious and enlightened class, they were already in easy
circumstances, and able to make loans, and thought they could speculate
in the conquered countries for their own profit. Penetrating wherever
the Roman arms were carried, they became merchants, bankers, farmers of
the taxes, and amassed immense riches. As Rome was no longer the Rome of
the Curii and the Cincinnati, and dictators were no longer taken from
the plough, their wealth gave them consideration and importance. From
that time they were spoken of with more respect. The Gracchi, who wished
to make them allies in the struggle they were waging with the
aristocracy, caused it to be decided that the judges should be taken
from their ranks. Cicero went further; he tried to make them the
foundation of the great moderate party he wished to create. He knew that
he could count on their devotedness. He belonged to them by birth; he
had shed over them the splendour that surrounded his name; he had never
neglected to defend their interests before the tribunals or in the
senate. He also reckoned that they would be grateful to him for wishing
to augment their importance and call them to a great political future.

All these combinations of Cicero seemed at first to succeed very
happily; but, to tell the truth, the merit of this success was chiefly
due to circumstances. This great coalition of the moderates upon which
he congratulated himself as his finest work, almost succeeded under the
influence of fear. A social revolution seemed imminent. The dregs of all
the old parties, wretched plebeians and ruined nobles, old soldiers of
Marius, and proscribers of Sulla, had united under the leadership of a
bold and able chief, who promised them a new distribution of public
wealth. The existence of this party compelled those whom it threatened
to unite also in order to defend themselves. Fear was more efficacious
than the finest speeches would have been, and in this sense we may say
that Cicero was perhaps more indebted for this union which he regarded
as the main point of his policy to Catiline rather than to himself.
Community of interests, then, brought about, at least for a time, a
reconciliation of the aims of various classes. The richest, and
consequently the most seriously endangered, namely the knights, were
naturally the soul of the new party. By their side the honest plebeians
who did not wish political reforms to be exaggerated took their stand,
as well as those nobles whose threatened pleasures drew them from their
apathy, who would have allowed the republic to perish without defending
it, but who did not wish their lampreys and fish-ponds touched. The new
party had not to look about long for a head. Pompey was in Asia, Caesar
and Crassus secretly favoured the conspiracy. Besides these there was no
greater name than Cicero’s. This explains that great wave of public
opinion which carried him into the consulship. His election was almost a
triumph. I shall say nothing of his consulship, of which he has had the
misfortune to speak too much himself. I do not wish to underrate the
victory that he gained over Catiline and his accomplices. The danger was
serious; even his enemy Sallust affirms it. Behind the plot were hidden
ambitious politicians ready to profit by events. Caesar knew well that
the reign of anarchy could not last long. After some pillaging and
massacres, Rome would have recovered from her surprise, and honest
folks, being driven to activity by despair, would have again got the
upper hand. Only it is probable that then one of those reactions that
usually follow great anarchy would have taken place. The remembrance of
the ills from which they had escaped with such difficulty would have
disposed many people to sacrifice the liberty which exposed them to so
many perils, and Caesar held himself ready to offer them the sovereign
remedy of absolute power. By cutting the evil at the root, by surprising
and punishing the conspiracy before it broke out, Cicero perhaps delayed
the advent of monarchical government at Rome for fifteen years. He was
not wrong, then, in boasting of the services he rendered at that time to
his country’s liberty, and we must acknowledge, with Seneca, that if he
has praised his consulship without measure he has not done so without
reason.[48]

Coalitions of this kind, unfortunately, seldom long survive the
circumstances that give rise to them. When the interests that a common
danger had united began to feel themselves secure, they recommenced
their old quarrels. The plebeians, who were no longer afraid, felt their
old animosity against the nobility revive. The nobles began again to
envy the wealth of the knights. As to the knights, they had none of
those qualities that were necessary to make them the soul of a political
party, as Cicero had hoped. They were more occupied with their private
affairs than with those of the republic. They had not the strength of
numbers, like the plebeians, and were wanting in those great traditions
of government that maintained so long the authority of the nobility.
Their only guiding principle was that instinct usual with men of large
fortunes, which led them to prefer order to liberty. They sought, before
all things, a strong power which could defend them, and Caesar had in
the end no more devoted followers than they. In this break-up of his
party, Cicero, who could not stand alone, asked himself on which side he
ought to place himself. The fright that Catiline had given him, the
presence of Caesar and Crassus in the ranks of the democracy, prevented
his return to that party, and he finally attached himself to the
nobility, notwithstanding his repugnance. From the date of his
consulship he resolutely turned towards this party. We know how the
democracy avenged itself for what it considered a betrayal. Three years
after it condemned its old head, now become its enemy, to exile, and
only consented to recall him to cast him at the feet of Caesar and
Pompey, whose union had made them masters of Rome.[49]

                                  III.

The gravest political crisis that Cicero passed through, after the great
struggles of his consulship, was certainly that which terminated in the
fall of the Roman republic at Pharsalia. We know that he did not
willingly engage in this terrible conflict, of which he foresaw the
issue, and that he hesitated for nearly a year before deciding on his
course. It is not surprising that he hesitated so long. He was no longer
young and obscure as when he pleaded for Roscius. He had a high position
and an illustrious name that he did not wish to compromise, and a man
may be allowed to reflect before he risks fortune, glory, and perchance
life on a single cast. Besides, the question was not so simple nor the
right so clear as they seem at first sight. Lucan, whose sympathies are
not doubtful, yet said that it could not be known on which side justice
lay, and this obscurity does not seem to be altogether dissipated,
since, after eighteen centuries of discussion, posterity has not yet
succeeded in coming to an agreement. It is curious that, among us, in
the seventeenth century, at the height of monarchical government, the
learned all pronounced against Caesar without hesitation. Magistrates of
the high courts, men cautious and moderate by their offices and
character, who approached the king and were not sparing of flattery,
took the liberty of being Pompeians and even furious Pompeians in
private. “The First President,” says Guy-Patin, “is so much on Pompey’s
side, that one day he expressed his joy that I was so, I having said to
him, in his fine garden at Bâville, that if I had been in the senate
when Julius Caesar was killed, I would have given him the twenty-fourth
stab.” On the contrary, it is in our own days, in a democratic epoch,
after the French Revolution, and in the name of the revolution and the
democracy, that the side of Caesar has been upheld with the greatest
success, and that the benefit humanity has reaped from his victory has
been set in its clearest light.

I have no intention to re-open this debate, it is too fertile in stormy
discussions. I only wish here to deal with so much of it as is
indispensable to explain Cicero’s political life. There are, I think,
two very different ways of looking at the question: our own first,
namely, that of people unconcerned in these quarrels of a former age,
who approach them as historians or philosophers, after time has cooled
them, who judge them less by their causes than by their results, and who
ask themselves, above all, what good or evil they have done in the
world; then that of contemporaries, who judge of them with their
passions and prejudices, according to the ideas of their time, in their
relation to themselves, and without knowing their remote consequences. I
am going to place myself solely at this latter point of view, although
the other seems to me grander and more profitable; but as my only design
is to ask from Cicero an explanation of his political actions, and as
one cannot reasonably require of him that he should have divined the
future, I shall confine myself to showing how the question was stated in
his time, what reasons were alleged on both sides, and in what manner it
was natural for a wise man who loved his country to appreciate those
reasons. Let us forget, then, the eighteen centuries that separate us
from these events, let us suppose ourselves at Formiae or Tusculum
during those long days of anxiety and uncertainty that Cicero passed
there, and let us hear him discuss, with Atticus or Curio, the reasons
that the two parties urged to draw him into their ranks.

What shows plainly that the judgment of contemporaries on the events
which pass before them is not the same as that of posterity is, that the
friends of Caesar, when they wished to gain over Cicero, did not employ
the argument that seems the best to us. The chief reason that is
appealed to now to justify Caesar’s victory is that, on the whole, if by
it Rome lost some of her privileges, it was for the advantage of the
rest of the world that she was despoiled. What does it matter that a few
thousand men, who did not make a very good use of their political
liberty, were deprived of it, if by the same stroke almost the entire
world was rescued from pillage, slavery, and ruin? It is certain that
the provinces and their inhabitants, so roughly treated by the
proconsuls of the republic, found themselves better off under the
_régime_ inaugurated by Caesar. His army was open to all foreigners; he
had with him Germans, Gauls, and Spaniards. They helped him to conquer,
and naturally profited by his victory: and this was, without his wishing
it perhaps, the revenge of the conquered nations. These nations were not
anxious to recover their independence; they had lost the taste for it
with their defeat. Their ambition was quite the reverse: they wished to
be allowed to become Romans. Up till then, however, that proud and
greedy aristocracy, who held power, and who meant to use the human race
for the benefit of their pleasures or their grandeur, had obstinately
refused to raise them to a level with themselves, no doubt in order to
preserve the right of treating them according to their caprice. In
overthrowing the aristocracy, Caesar overthrew the barrier that closed
Rome to the rest of the nations. The empire made the entire world Roman;
it reconciled, says a poet, and blended under one name, all the nations
of the universe. These are surely great things, and it does not become
us to forget them, us the sons of the vanquished, called by Caesar to
partake in his victory. But who, in Cicero’s time, thought it would be
thus? who could foresee and indicate these remote consequences? The
question did not present itself then as it does to us who study it from
a distance. Caesar does not anywhere allege the interest of the
conquered among the reasons he gives for his enterprise. The senate
never claimed to be the representative of the Roman nationality,
threatened by an invasion of the barbarians, and it does not appear that
the provinces rose in favour of him who came to defend them; on the
contrary, they were almost equally divided between the two rivals. If
the West fought on Caesar’s side, all the East repaired to Pompey’s
camp, which proves that when the struggle commenced its consequences
were unknown even to those who were to profit by them, and whose
interest should have made them clear-sighted. Besides, even if Cicero
had suspected the benefits that the world was going to draw from
Caesar’s triumph, can we think that this reason would have sufficed to
decide him? He was not one of those whose love for the whole of humanity
excuses them from serving their country. He would have resigned himself
with difficulty to the sacrifice of his liberty, under the pretence that
this sacrifice would profit the Gauls, the Britons, and the Sarmatians.
No doubt he was not indifferent to the interest of the world, but that
of Rome touched him closer. His temper was gentle and humane, he had
written in beautiful works that all nations are only one and the same
family, he had made himself loved in the province he had governed;
nevertheless, when Caesar opened the city and even the senate to the
strangers who accompanied him, he showed himself very discontented, and
attacked these barbarians with his most cruel raillery. He saw plainly
that those Spaniards and Gauls who were walking proudly about the Forum
were triumphing over Rome. His Roman pride revolted at this sight, and I
see no reason to blame him for it. If he could divine or even catch a
glimpse of the general emancipation of the conquered nations which was
preparing, he understood also that this emancipation would bring with it
the loss of the original, distinct, and independent existence of his
country. It was natural that a Roman should not wish to pay this price
even for the prosperity of the world.

Putting aside this reason, another, specious if not true, was much used
to entice the irresolute. They were told that the republic and liberty
were not interested in the war, that it was simply a struggle between
two ambitious men who were contending for power. In this assertion there
was a certain amount of truth capable of misleading thoughtless minds.
Personal questions certainly held a large place in this contest. The
soldiers of Caesar fought solely for him, and Pompey had in his suite
many friends and creatures whom thirty years of prosperity and power had
gained for him. Cicero himself gives us to understand, several times,
that it was his old friendship for Pompey that led him into his camp.
“It is to him and to him alone that I sacrifice myself,” said he, when
he was preparing to leave Italy.[50] There are moments in which he seems
to take pleasure in limiting the subject of this quarrel he is about to
engage in, and when, writing to his friends, he repeats to them what
Caesar’s partisans said—“It is a conflict of ambition, _regnandi
contentio est_.”[51] But we must be careful when reading his
correspondence of this period, and must read it with caution. Never was
he more irresolute. He changes his opinion every day, he attacks and
defends all parties, so that by skilfully putting together all the words
let fall in this discontent and uncertainty, one may find in his letters
grounds for charges against everybody. These are only the sallies of a
restless and frightened mind, of which we must not make too much use
either against others or against himself. Here, for instance, when he
asserts that the republic has nothing to do in the contest, he does not
say what he really thinks. It is only one of those pretexts that he
invents to justify his hesitation in his friends’ eyes and his own. So
rare is it to be quite sincere, I do not say with others only but with
oneself! We are so ingenious in proving to ourselves that we have a
thousand reasons for doing what we do without reason, or through
interest or caprice! But when Cicero wishes to be frank, when he has no
motive to delude himself or deceive others, he speaks in another manner.
Then the cause of Pompey becomes really that of justice and right, that
of honest men and of liberty. Without doubt, Pompey had rendered very
indifferent services to the republic before being led by circumstances
to defend it. He could not be trusted entirely, and his ambition was to
be feared. In his camp he affected the airs of a sovereign; he had his
flatterers and his ministers. “He is a little Sulla,” said Cicero, “who
dreams also of proscriptions, _sullaturit, proscripturit_.”[52] The
republican party would certainly have taken another defender if it had
been free to choose; but at the time when Caesar assembled his troops,
this party, which had neither soldiers nor generals, was really forced
to accept Pompey’s aid. It accepted it as that of an ally whom one
distrusts and watches, who, perhaps, will become an enemy after the
victory, but with whom one cannot dispense during the fight. Besides,
although Pompey might not altogether secure liberty, it was known that
it ran fewer risks with him than with Caesar. He was ambitious
doubtless, but more ambitious of honours than of power. Twice he had
been seen to arrive at the gates of Rome with an army. The democracy
called him, to make himself king, he had only to will it, and twice he
had disbanded his troops and laid down the fasces. He had been made sole
consul, that is to say, almost dictator, and at the end of six months he
had voluntarily taken a colleague. These precedents made sincere
republicans believe that after the victory he would content himself with
sonorous titles and pompous eulogies, and that his services would be
repaid, without danger to any one, with laurels and the purple. In any
case, if he had demanded something else, we may be certain that he would
have been refused, and that he would have found adversaries in the
greater number of those who had become his allies. There were in his
camp many persons who were not his friends, and who cannot be suspected
of having taken arms to win a throne for him. Cato distrusted him, and
had always opposed him. Brutus, whose father he had killed, hated him.
The aristocracy did not pardon him for having restored the power of the
tribunes, and for having united with Caesar against it. Is it likely
that all these eminent persons, experienced in affairs, were the dupes
of this indifferent politician who never deceived anybody, and that,
without knowing it, they worked for him alone? or must we admit, which
is still less likely, that they knew it, and that they voluntarily
abandoned their country, risked their fortunes, and gave their lives to
serve the interests and the ambition of a man whom they did not love?
Assuredly, for them, something else was in question. When they went over
sea, when they decided, notwithstanding their repugnance, to begin a
civil war, when they came to put themselves under the orders of a
general against whom they had so many reasons for ill-will, they did not
intend to intervene solely in a personal quarrel, but to come to the
help of the republic and of that liberty which were threatened. “But
here,” people say, “you are deceived again. These names, liberty and
republic, delude you. It was not liberty that was defended in Pompey’s
camp, it was the oppression of the people by a caste. They wished to
maintain the privileges of a burdensome and unjust aristocracy. They
fought to preserve for it the right to oppress the plebs, and to crush
the world.” At that rate the friends of liberty ought to keep for Caesar
the sympathies they generally accord to Pompey, for he is the liberal
and the democrat, the man of the people, the successor of the Gracchi
and of Marius. This is indeed the part he assumed from the day when,
almost a child, he had braved Sulla. Praetor and consul, he had appeared
to serve the popular cause with devotion, and at the moment when he
marched on Rome, abandoned by the senate, he still said, “I come to
deliver the Roman people from a faction that oppresses it.”[53]

How much truth is there in this pretence that he makes of being the
defender of the democracy? What ought to be thought of it, I do not say
by a patrician, who naturally thought much ill of the people, but by an
enemy of the nobility, by a new man like Cicero? Whatever anger the
disdain of the aristocracy had caused to Cicero, whatever impatience he
had felt at always finding in his way, in his candidatures, one of those
nobles to whom “_honours came while they slept_,” I do not find that his
ill-humour had ever led him to pretend that the people was
oppressed;[54] and I suppose that when it was asserted before him that
Caesar took up arms to restore him his liberty, he asked how long it was
since he had lost it, and what new privileges they wished to add to
those he already possessed? He called to mind that the people possessed
a legal organization, had their own magistrates to whom they appealed
from the decisions of others, magistrates inviolable and sacred, whom
the law armed with the enormous power of staying the action of the
government by their interference, and of interrupting political life;
that they had the liberty of speech and of the rostrum, the right of
voting, in which they trafficked for a living, and finally, free access
to all grades of the magistracy, and he had only to cite his own case to
demonstrate that it was possible for a man without birth and almost
without fortune to attain even the consulship. Such success in truth was
rare. The equality laid down in the law disappeared in practice. The
consular records of that period contain scarcely any but illustrious
names. A few great families seem to have established themselves in the
highest dignities of the state; they guarded the avenues to them, and
allowed no one to approach; but was it necessary, in order to break down
the obstacles that the cleverness of a few ambitious men opposed to the
regular working of the institutions, to destroy these institutions
themselves? was the evil so great that it was necessary to have recourse
to the radical remedy of absolute power? Was it impossible to think that
it would be more surely cured by liberty than by despotism? Had it not
been seen by recent examples that a strong current of popular opinion
was sufficient to overturn all this aristocratic resistance? The laws
gave the people the means of recovering their influence if they willed
it energetically. With the liberty of voting and of speaking in the
public assembly, with the intervention of the tribunes and the
invincible strength of numbers, they must always end in being masters.
It was their own fault if they left the power to others, and they
deserved the degradation in which the nobility held them, since they
made no effort to free themselves. Cicero had small esteem for the
common people of his time; he thought them careless and apathetic by
nature. “They demand nothing,” said he, “they desire nothing”;[55] and
every time he saw them stirring in the Forum he suspected that the
liberality of some ambitious men had worked this miracle. He was not,
therefore, led to think it necessary to accord them new rights when he
saw them use their ancient rights so little or so ill, and so he did not
regard the pretext put forth by Caesar for taking up arms as serious. He
never consented to look upon him as the successor of the Gracchi coming
to emancipate the oppressed plebs; the war which was preparing never
seemed to him to be the renewal of the ancient struggles between the
people and the aristocracy, of which Roman history is full. In fact, an
assembly of ruined nobles, like Dolabella, Antony, and Curio, marching
under the leadership of him who boasted of being the son of the gods and
of kings, little deserved the name of the popular party, and there was
something else at stake than the defence of the privileges of birth in a
camp to which so many knights and plebeians had repaired, and which
reckoned among its chiefs Varro, Cicero, and Cato, that is to say, two
burgesses of small fortune of Arpinum and Reate, and the descendant of
the peasant of Tusculum.

Caesar, however, does not seem to have been very much prepossessed with
this part of champion of the democracy. We do not find, on reading his
memoirs, that he speaks very much of the people’s interests. The phrase
just quoted is almost the only one in which they are mentioned.
Elsewhere he is more frank. At the beginning of the civil war, when he
set forth his reasons for commencing it, he complained that he was
refused the consulship, that his province was taken from him, that he
was torn from his army; he says not a word of the people, of their
unrecognized rights, of their crushed liberty. This was, however, the
moment to speak of them in order to justify an enterprise that so many
people, and those the most honest, condemned. What did he demand in the
final conditions he laid before the senate before marching on Rome? His
consulship, his army, his province; he defended his personal interests,
he bargained for himself, it never came into his mind to demand any
guarantee for that people whose defender he called himself. Around him,
in his camp, one thought no more of the people than they did of
themselves. His best friends, his bravest generals, had no pretension to
be reformers or democrats. They did not think, in following him, that
they were going to give liberty to their fellow-citizens; they wished to
avenge their outraged chief, and to win power for him. “We are the
soldiers of Caesar,” said they with Curio.[56] They had no other title,
they knew no other name. When some one came to speak to those old
centurions who had seen Germany and Britain, who had taken Alesia and
Gergovia, of abandoning Caesar and passing over to the side of the laws
and the republic, they did not reply that they were defending the people
and their rights. “We,” said they, “shall we quit our general who has
given all of us our ranks, shall we take arms against an army in which
we have served and been victorious for thirty-six years? We will never
do it!”[57] These men were no longer citizens but soldiers. After
thirty-six years of victories, they had lost the traditions of civil
life and the taste for it; the rights of the people had become
indifferent to them, and for them glory took the place of liberty.
Cicero and his friends thought that these surroundings were not those of
a popular chief who came to restore liberty to his fellow-citizens, but
those of an ambitious man who came to establish absolute power by arms,
and they were not mistaken. Caesar’s conduct after the war proves this
more than all the rest. How did he use his victory? What benefits did he
confer on the people whose interests he pretended to defend? I do not
speak of what he was able to do for their comfort and their pleasures,
the sumptuous feasts, the public meals that he gave, the corn and oil
that he so generously distributed to the poorest, the 400 sesterces (£3
4_s._) that he paid each citizen on the day of his triumph: if these
alms satisfied the plebeians of that time, if they consented to
sacrifice their liberty at that price, I pardon Cicero for not having
more esteem for them, and for not putting himself on their side; but if
they demanded something else, if they wished for a more complete
independence, for a larger share in the affairs of their country, for
new political rights, they did not obtain them, and Caesar’s victory,
notwithstanding his promises, rendered them neither freer nor more
powerful. Caesar humiliated the aristocracy, but only for his own
advantage. He took the executive power out of the hands of the senate,
but only to put it in his own. He established equality between all the
orders, but it was an equality of servitude, and all were henceforth
reduced to the same level of obedience.

I know that after he had silenced the public speakers, deprived the
people of the right of voting, and united in himself all public
authority, the senate that he had appointed, having exhausted flattery,
solemnly awarded to him the name of Liberator, and voted the erection of
a Temple of Liberty. If it is against this liberty that Cicero and his
friends are accused of having taken up arms, I do not think it is worth
the trouble to defend them from this charge.

Let us call things by their real name. It was for himself and not for
the people that Caesar worked, and Cicero, in opposing him, thought he
was defending the republic and not the privileges of the aristocracy.

But did this republic deserve to be defended? Was there any hope of
preserving it? Was it not manifest that its ruin was inevitable? This is
the greatest charge that is made against those who followed Pompey’s
party. I admit it is not easy to answer it. The evil that Rome suffered,
and which showed itself in those disorders and that violence of which
Cicero’s letters give us such a sad picture, was not of a kind to be
averted by a few wise reforms. It was ancient and profound. It became
worse every day without any law being able to prevent or arrest it.
Could one hope to cure it with those slight changes that the boldest
proposed? Of what use was it to diminish, as was wished, the privileges
of the aristocracy and to augment the rights of the plebeians? The
sources of public life themselves were seriously impaired. The evil came
from the way in which the citizenship was acquired.

For a long time Rome had drawn her strength from the country people. It
was from the rustic tribes, the most honoured of all, that those valiant
soldiers who had conquered Italy and subdued Carthage had come; but this
agricultural and warlike people, who had so well defended the republic,
could not defend themselves against the encroachments of the great
estates. Enclosed little by little by those immense domains where
cultivation is easiest, the poor peasant had for a long time struggled
against misery and the usurers; then, discouraged in the struggle, he
had ended by selling his field to his rich neighbour, who coveted it to
round off his estate. He had tried then to become a tenant farmer, a
metayer, a hired labourer on the property where he had been for so long
the master, but there he met with the competition of the slave, a more
frugal worker, who did not stand out for his wages, who did not make
terms, who might be treated as one liked.[58] Thus, driven twice from
his fields, both as owner and as tenant farmer, without work or
resources, he had been forced to migrate to the city. At Rome, however,
life was not more easy for him. What could he do there? There was little
trade, and usually it was not in the hands of the free men. In countries
where slavery flourishes, work is looked down upon. To die of hunger
without doing anything, is regarded by the free man as a privilege and
an honour. Besides, each noble had men of all trades among his slaves,
and as such a number of workmen were too many for himself alone, he
hired them out to those who had none, or made them keep shop in a corner
of his house for his own profit. Here again slave competition killed
free labour. Happily at this time Marius opened the ranks of the army to
the poorest citizens (_capite censi_). These unfortunate men, finding no
other resource, became soldiers. For lack of something better to do,
they achieved the conquest of the world, subjugated Africa, Gaul, and
the East, visited Britain and Germany, and the greater number of them,
the bravest and best, were killed in these distant expeditions. During
this time, the vacancies left in the city by those who departed and did
not return were ill filled. Since Rome had become powerful, people from
all parts of the world came to her, and we may well suppose they were
not always the most respectable.

Several times she had endeavoured to defend herself against these
invasions of foreigners; but it was useless to make severe laws to
remove them, they always returned to hide themselves in that immense
city without a police, and, once settled there, the more prosperous, by
means of their money, the others by means of base services or cunning,
succeeded in obtaining the title of citizens. Those who received it more
naturally, and without needing to demand it, were the freedmen. No doubt
the law did not grant them all political rights at once; but after one
or two generations all these reservations disappeared, and the grandson
of him who had ground at the mill and who had been sold in the
slave-market voted the laws and elected the consuls like a Roman of the
old stock. It was of this mixture of freedmen and foreigners, that was
formed what at this time was called the Roman people, a wretched people
who lived on the bounty of private persons or the alms of the state, who
had neither memories nor traditions, nor political capacity, nor
national character, nor even morality, for they were ignorant of that
which makes up the honour and dignity of life in the lower classes,
namely, work. With such a people a republic was no longer possible. This
is, of all governments, that which demands the greatest integrity and
political judgment in those who enjoy it. The more privileges it confers
the more devotedness and intelligence it demands. People who did not use
their rights, or only used them to sell them, were not worthy to
preserve them. That absolute power which they had invited by their
votes, which they had received with applause, was made for them; and one
understands that the historian who studies from afar the events of the
past, when he sees liberty disappear from Rome, consoles himself for its
fall by saying that it was deserved and inevitable, and that he pardons
or even applauds the man who, in overturning it, was only an instrument
of necessity or justice.

But the men who lived then, who were attached to the republican
government by tradition and memories, who recalled the great things it
had done, who owed to it their dignities, position, and renown, could
they think like us and resign themselves as easily to its fall? Firstly,
this government existed. They were familiarized to its defects, since
they had lived with them so long. They suffered less from them, through
the long habit of enduring them. On the other hand, they did not know
what this new power that wished to replace the republic would be.
Royalty inspired the Romans with an instinctive repugnance, especially
since they had conquered the East. They had found there, under this
name, the most odious of governments, the most complete slavery in the
midst of the most refined civilization, all the pleasures of luxury and
the arts, the finest expansion of intellect with the heaviest and basest
tyranny; princes accustomed to play with the fortune, honour, and life
of men, a species of cruel spoilt children, such as are only now to be
found in the African deserts. This picture did not attract them, and
whatever disadvantages the republic had, they asked themselves if it was
worth while to exchange them for those that royalty might have. Besides,
it was natural that the fall of the republic should not appear to them
so near and so sure as it does to us. It is with states as with men, for
whom we find, after their death, a thousand causes of death which nobody
suspected during their life-time. While the machinery of this ancient
government was still working it could not be seen how disorganized it
was. Cicero has, sometimes, moments of profound despair, in which he
announces to his friends that all is lost; but these moments do not
last, and he quickly regains his courage. It seems to him that a firm
hand, an eloquent voice, and the agreement of good citizens can repair
all, and that liberty will easily remedy the abuses and faults of
liberty. He never perceives the whole gravity of danger. In the worst
days, his thoughts never go beyond the schemers and the ambitious men
who disturb the public repose; it is always Catiline, Caesar, or Clodius
whom he accuses, and he thinks that all will be saved if one can succeed
in overcoming them. He was mistaken, Catiline and Clodius were only the
symptoms of a deeper evil that could not be cured; but is he to be
blamed for entertaining this hope, chimerical as it was? Is he to be
blamed for having thought that there were other means of saving the
republic than the sacrifice of liberty? An honest man and a good citizen
ought not to accept these counsels of despair at first. It is useless to
tell him that the decrees of destiny condemn to perish the constitution
that he prefers and that he has promised to defend, he does well not to
believe it entirely lost until it is actually overthrown. We may call
such men, if we like, blind or dupes; it is honourable in them not to be
too perspicacious, and there are errors and illusions that are worth
more than a too easy resignation. Real liberty existed no longer at
Rome, as I believe, the shadow only remained, but the shadow was still
something. One cannot bear a grudge against those who attached
themselves to it and made desperate efforts not to allow it to perish,
for this shadow, this semblance, consoled them for lost liberty and gave
them some hope of regaining it. This is what honest men like Cicero
thought, who, after mature reflection, without enthusiasm, without
passion, and even without hope, went to find Pompey again; this is what
Lucan makes Cato say in those admirable lines which seem to me to
express the feelings of all those who, without concealing from
themselves the sad state of the republic, persisted in defending it to
the last: “As a father who has just lost his child takes pleasure in
conducting his obsequies, lights with his own hands the funeral pyre,
leaves it with regret, as tardily as he can; so, Rome, I will not
forsake thee until that I have held thee dead in my arms. I will follow