 Chapter 11, Part 1 of The Life of Cicero, Volume 1. I know of no great fact in history so impalpable, so shadowy, so unreal as the first triumvirate. Every schoolboy—almost every schoolgirl—knows that there was a first triumvirate, and that it was a political combination made by three great Romans of the day, Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great, and Crassus the Rich, for managing Rome among them. And this, they know little, because there is little to know. That it was a conspiracy against the ordained government of the day, as much so as that of Catiline or Guy Fawkes or Napoleon III, they do not know generally, because Caesar, who, though the youngest of the three was the mainspring of it, rose by means of it to such a galaxy of glory, that all the steps by which he rose to it have been supposed to be magnificent and heroic. But of the method in which this triumvirate was constructed, who has an idea? How was it first suggested, where, and by whom? What was it that the conspirators combined to do? There was no purpose of wholesale murder like that of Catiline for destroying the Senate and of Guy Fawkes for blowing up the House of Lords. There was no plot arranged for silencing a body of legislators like that of Napoleon. In these scrambles that are going on every year for place and power, for provinces and plunder, let us help each other. If we can manage to stick fast by each other we can get all the power and nearly all the plunder. That, said with a wink by one of the triumvirate, Caesar, let us say, and assented to with a nod by Pompey and Crassus, was sufficient for the construction of such a conspiracy as that which I presume to have been hatched when the first triumvirate was formed. Momson, who never speaks of a triumvirate under that name, except in his index where he has permitted the word to appear for the guidance of persons less well instructed than himself, connects the transaction which we call the first triumvirate with a former coalition, which he describes as having been made in B.C. 71, the year before the consulship of Pompey and Crassus. With that we need not concern ourselves as we are dealing with the life of Cicero rather than with Roman history, except to say that Caesar, who was the motive power of the second coalition, could have had no personal hand in that of 71. Though he had spent his early years in harassing the aristocracy, as Dean Merrivale tells us, he had not been of sufficient standing in men's minds to be put in a power with Pompey and Crassus. When this first triumvirate was formed, as the modern world generally calls it, or the second coalition between the democracy and the great military leaders, as Momson with greater but not with perfect accuracy describes it, Caesar no doubt had at his fingers ends the history of past years. "'The idea naturally occurred,' says Momson, whether an alliance firmly based on mutual advantage might not be established between the Democrats, with their ally Crassus on the one side, and Pompeius and the great capitalists on the other. For Pompeius such a coalition was certainly a political suicide. The democracy here means Caesar. Caesar during his whole life had been learning that no good could come to anyone from an effete Senate, or from Republican forms which had lost all their salt. Democracy was in vogue with him, not, as I think from any philanthropic desire for equality, not from any far-seeing view of paternal citizenship under one great paternal lord, the study of politics had never then reached that height. But because it was necessary that some one, or perhaps some two or three, should prevail in the coming struggle, and because he felt himself to be more worthy than others. He had no conscience in the matter. Money was nothing to him. Another man's money was the same as his own, or better, if he could get hold of it. That doctrine taught by Cicero that men are ad justitiam natus must have been to him simply absurd. Blood was to him nothing, a friend was better than a foe, and a live man than a dead. Blood-firstiness was a passion unknown to him, but that tenderness which with us creates a horror of blood was equally unknown. Pleasure was sweet to him, but he was man enough to feel that a life of pleasure was contemptible. To pillage a city, to pilfer his all from a rich man, to debauch a friend's wife, to give over a multitude of women and children to slaughter was as easy to him as to forgive an enemy. But nothing rankled with him, and he could forgive an enemy. Of courage he had that better sort which can appreciate and calculate danger, and then act as though there were none. Nothing was wrong to him but what was injudicious. He could flatter, cajole, lie, deceive, and rob. Nay would think it folly not to do so if to do so were expedient. In this coalition he appears as supporting and supported by the people. Therefore Momson speaks of him as the Democrat. Crassus is called the ally of the Democrats. It will be enough for us here to know that Crassus had achieved his position in the Senate by his enormous wealth, and that it was because of his wealth which was essential to Caesar that he was admitted into the League. By means of his wealth he had risen to power and had conquered and killed Spartacus of the honour and glory of which Pompey robbed him. Then he had been made consul. When Caesar had gone as proprietor to Spain, Crassus had found the money. Now Caesar had come back and was hand in glove with Crassus. When the division of spoil came, some years afterward, the spoil won by the triumvirate, when Caesar had half-perfected his grand achievements in Gaul, and Crassus had as yet been only a second-time consul, he got himself to be sent into Syria, that by conquering the Parthians he might make himself equal to Caesar. We know how he and his son perished there, each of them probably avoiding the last extremity of misery to a Roman that had fallen into the hands of a barbarian enemy by destroying himself. Then the life of Crassus nothing could be more contemptible, than the death nothing more pitiable. For Pompeius, says Momson, such a coalition was certainly a political suicide. As events turned out it became so, because Caesar was the stronger man of the two, but it is intelligible that at the time Pompey should have felt that he could not lord it over the senate, as he wished to do, without aid from the democratic party. He had no well-defined views, but he wished to be the first man in Rome. He regarded himself as still greatly superior to Caesar, who as yet had been no more than Praetor, and at this time was being balked of his triumph, because he could not at one and the same moment be in the city as candidate for the consulship, and out of the city waiting for his triumph. Pompey had triumphed three times, had been consul at an unnaturally early aid with abnormal honours, had been victorious east and west, and was called Magnus. He did not as yet fear to be overshadowed by Caesar. Cicero was his bugbear. Momsson I believe to be right in eschewing the word triumvirate. I know no mention of it by any Roman writer as applied to this conspiracy, though Tacitus, Suetonius and Florus call by that name the later coalition of Octavius, Antony and Lepidus. The Langhorns in translating Plutarch's life of Crassus speak of the triumvirate, but Plutarch himself says that Caesar combined an impregnable stronghold by joining the three men. Perturculus and Suetonius explained very clearly the nature of the compact, but did not use the term. There was nothing in the conspiracy entitling it to any official appellation, though as there were three leading conspirators that which has been used has been so far appropriate. Side note, BC 60, Eidt at forty-seven. Cicero was the bugbear to them all. That he might have been one of them if ready to share the plunder and the power no reader of the history of the time can doubt. Had he so chosen he might again have been a real power in the state. But to become so in the way proposed to him it was necessary that he should join others in a conspiracy against the Republic. I do not wish it to be supposed that Cicero received the overtures made to him with horror. Conspirators were too common for horror, and these conspirators were all our Cicero's friends in one sense, though in another they might be his opponents. We may imagine that at first Crassus had nothing to do with the matter, and that Pompey would feign have stood aloof in his jealousy. But Caesar knew that it was well to have Cicero if Cicero was to be had. It was not only his eloquence which was marvellously powerful, or his energy which had been shown to be indomitable. There was his character, surpassed by that of no Roman living. If only in giving them the use of his character he could be got to disregard the honour and the justice and the patriotism on which his character had been founded. How valuable may character be made if it can be employed under such conditions. But to be believed because of your truth, and yet to lie, to be trusted for your honesty, and yet to cheat, to have credit for patriotism and yet to sell your country. The temptations to do this are rarely put before a man plainly in all their naked ugliness. They certainly were not so presented to Cicero by Caesar and his associates. The bait was held out to him, as it is daily to others, in a form not repellent, with words fitted to deceive, and powerful almost to persuade. Give us the advantage of your character, and then by your means we shall be able to save our country. Though our line of action may not be strictly constitutional, if you will look into it you will see that it is expedient. What other course is there? How else shall any wreck of the Republic be preserved? Would you be another Cato useless and impractical? Join us and save Rome to some purpose. We can understand that in such a way was the lure held out to Cicero, as it has been to many a politician since. But when the politician takes the office offered to him, and the pay, though it be but that of the Lord of the Treasury, he must vote with his party. That Cicero doubted much whether he would or would not at this time throw in his lot with Caesar and Pompey is certain. To be of real use, not to be impractical as was Cato, to save his country and rise honestly in power and glory, not to be too straight-laced, not overscrupulous, giving and taking a little so that he might work to good purpose with others in harness, this was his idea of duty as a Roman. To serve in accord with Pompey was the first dream of his political life, and now Pompey was in accord with Caesar. It was natural that he should doubt, natural that he should express his doubts. Who should receive them but Atticus, that alter ego? Cicero doubted whether he should cling to Pompey, as he did in every phase of his political life till Pompey had perished at the mouth of the Nile. But at last he saw his way clear to honesty, as I think he always did. He tells his friend that Caesar had sent his confidential messenger, Balbus, to sound him. The present question is whether he shall resist a certain agrarian law of which he does not approve, but which is supported by both Pompey and Caesar, or retire from the contest and enjoy himself at his country-villas, or boldly stay at Rome and oppose the law. Caesar assures him that if he will come over to them Caesar will be always true to him and Pompey, and will do his best to bring Crassus into the same frame of mind. Then he reckons up all the good things which would accrue to him. Closest friendship with Pompey, with Caesar also, should he wish it. The making up of all quarrels with his enemies, popularity with the people, ease for his old age which was coming on him. But that conclusion moves me to which I came in my third book. Footnote. Add Atticum. Book two, three. And a footnote. in Libro tertio, interia cursus cos prima a parte juventae cos che adeo consulvir tutte animo che petisti cos retinaat co auge fama am laudesque bonorum. Homer, Iliad, book twelve, two-four-three, Heis, oyonos, arrestos, amnestai peripatres. End of footnote. Then he repeats the lines given in the note below, which he has written, probably this very year, in a poem composed in honour of his own consulship. The lines are not in themselves grand, but the spirit of them is magnificent. Pick to the good cause which in your early youth you chose for yourself, and be true to the party you have made your own. Should I doubt when the muse herself has so written, he says, alluding to the name of Calliope, given to this third book of his. Then he adds a line of Homer, very excellent for the occasion, no augury for the future can be better for you than that which bids you serve your country. But he says, we will talk of all that when you come to me for the holidays. Your bath shall be ready for you, your sister and mother shall be of the party. And so the doubts are settled. Now came on the question of the tribunship of Claudius, in reference to which I will quote a passage out of Middleton, because the phrase which he uses exactly explains the purposes of Caesar and Pompey. Let note, B.C. 60, I.T. 47. Claudius, who had been contriving all this while, how to revenge himself on Cicero, began now to give an opening to the scheme which had been formed for that purpose. His project was to get himself chosen tribune, and in that office to drive him out of the city, by the publication of a law which by some stratagem or other he hoped to obtrude on the people. That as all patricians were incapable of the tribunate by its original institution, so his first step was to make himself a plebeian, by the pretense of an adoption into a plebeian house, which could not yet be done without the suffrage of the people. This case was wholly new, and contrary to all the forms, wanting every condition and serving none of the ends which were required in regular adoptions, so that on the first proposal it seemed too extravagant to be treated seriously, and would soon have been hissed off with scorn, had it not been concertedly and privately supported by persons of much more weight than Claudius. Caesar was at the bottom of it, and Pompey secretly favoured it, not that they intended to ruin Cicero, but to keep him only under the lash, and if they could not draw him into their measures to make him at least sit quiet, and let Claudius loose upon him. This no doubt was the intention of the political leaders in Rome at this conjunction of affairs. It had been found impossible to draw Cicero gently into the net, so that he should become one of them. If he would live quietly at his Antion or Tuscalan villa, amid his books and writings, he should be treated with all respect, he should be born with, even though he talked so much of his own consulate. But if he would interfere with the politics of the day, and would not come into the net, then he must be dealt with. Caesar seems to have respected Cicero always, and even to have liked him, but he was not minded to put up with a friend in Rome who from day to day abused all his projects. In defending Antony, the Macedonian proconsul who was condemned, Cicero made some unpleasant remarks on the then condition of things. Caesar, we are told, when he heard of this, on the very spur of the moment, caused Claudius to be accepted as a plebeian. In all this we are reminded of the absolute truth of Momson's verdict on Rome, which I have already quoted more than once. On the Roman oligarchy of this period, no judgment can be passed save one of inexorable and remorseless condemnation. How had it come to pass that Caesar had the power of suddenly causing an edict to become law, whether for good or for evil? About the sixth hour of the day, when I was defending my colleague Antony in court, I took occasion to complain of certain things which were being done in the republic, and which I thought to be injurious to my poor client. Some dishonest persons carried my words to men in power, meaning Caesar and Pompey—not, indeed, my own words, but words very different from mine. But the ninth hour on that very same day, you, Claudius, were accepted as a plebeian. Caesar having been given to understand that Cicero had been making himself disagreeable, was determined not to put up with it. Suetonius tells the same story with admirable simplicity. Of Suetonius it must be said that if he had no sympathy for a patriot such as Cicero, neither had he any desire to represent in rosy colours the despotism of a Caesar. He tells his stories simply as he has heard them. Cicero, says Suetonius, having at some trial complained of the state of the times, Caesar, on the very same day, the ninth hour, passed Claudius over from the patrician to the plebeian rank, in accordance with his own desire. How did it come to pass that Caesar, who though consul at the time, had no recognised power of that nature, was efficacious for any such work as this? Because the republic had come to the condition which the German historian has described, the conspiracy between Caesar and his subordinates had not been made for nothing. The reader will require to know why Claudius should have desired degradation, and how it came to pass that this degradation should have been satal to Cicero. The story has been partly told in the passage from Middleton. A patrician, in accordance with the constitution, could not be a tribune of the people. From the commencement of the tribunate that office had been reserved for the plebeians. But a tribune had a power of introducing laws which exceeded that of any senator or any other official. They had acquired the right, we are told, in Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, of proposing to the Commitia Tributa, or to the Senate, measures on nearly all the important affairs of the state. And as matters stood at this time, no one tribune could veto or put an arbitrary stop to a proposition from another. When such proposition was made, it was simply for the people to decide by their votes whether it should or should not be law. The present object was to have a proposition made and carried suddenly in reference to Cicero, which should have, at any rate, the effect of stopping his mouth. This could be best done by a tribune of the people. No other adequate tribune could be found, no plebeians so incensed against Cicero as to be willing to do this, possessing at the same time power enough to be elected. Therefore it was that Claudius was so anxious to be degraded. No patrician could become a tribune of the people. But a patrician might be adopted by a plebeian, and the adopted child would take the rank of the father, would in fact for all legal purposes be the same as a son. For doing this in any case a law had to be passed, or in other words the ascent of the people must be obtained and registered. But many conditions were necessary. The father intending to adopt must have no living son of his own, and must be passed the time of life at which he might naturally hope to have one. And the adopted son must be of a sitting age to personate a son, at any rate must be younger than the father. Nothing must be done injurious to either family. There must be no trick in it, no looking after other results than that plainly intended. All these conditions were broken. The pretended father, Phonteus, had a family of his own, and was younger than Claudius. The great Claudian family was desecrated, and there was no one so ignorant as not to know that the purpose intended was that of entering the tribunate by a fraud. It was required by the general law that the sacred college should report, as to the proper observances of the prescribed regulations. But no priest was ever consulted. Yet Claudius was adopted, made a plebeian, and in the course of the year elected as tribune. In reading all this the reader is mainly struck by the wonderful admixture of lawlessness and law-abiding steadfastness. If Caesar, who was already becoming a tyrant in his consulship, chose to make use of this means of silencing Cicero, why not force Claudius into the tribunate without so false and degrading a ceremony? But if, as was no doubt the case, he was not yet strong enough to ignore the old popular feelings on the subject, how was it that he was able to laugh in his sleeve at the laws, and to come forth at a moment's notice and cause the people to vote legally or illegally, just as he pleased? It requires no conjure, as to tell us the reason. The outside hulls and husks remain when the rich fruit has gone. It was in seeing this, and yet not quite believing that it must be so, that the agony of Cicero's life consisted. There could have been no hope for freedom, no hope for the Republic, when Rome had been governed as it was during the consulship of Caesar. But Cicero could still hope, though faintly, and still boy himself up with remembrances of his own year of office. In carrying on the story of the newly adopted child to his election as tribune, I have gone beyond the time of my narration, so that the reader may understand the cause and nature and effect of the anger which Claudius entertained for Cicero. This originated in the bitter words spoken as to the profanation of the Bonadere, and led to the means for achieving Cicero's exile, and other underwalled passages of his life. In the year 60 B.C., when Metellus Calle and Afranius were consuls, Claudius was tried for insulting the Bonadere, and the since so-called triumvirate was instituted. It has already been shown that Cicero, not without many doubts, rejected the first offers which were made to him to join the forces that were so united. He seems to have passed the greater portion of this year in Rome. One letter only was written from the country to Atticus from his Tusculin villa, and that is of no special moment. He spent his time in the city, still engaged in the politics of the day, as to which, though he dreaded the coming together of Caesar and Pompey and Crassus, those graues prankibum amichitias, which were to become so detrimental to all who were concerned in them. He foresaw as yet but little of the evil which was to fall upon his own head. He was by no means idle as to literature, though we have but little of what he wrote, and do not regret what we have lost. He composed a memoir of his consulate in Greek, which he sent to Atticus with an allusion to his own use of the foreign language, intended to show that he has quite at ease in that matter. Atticus had sent him a memoir also written in Greek on the same subject, and the two packets had crossed each other on the road. He candidly tells Atticus that his attempt seems to be horridulat quencompta, rough and unpolished, whereas Posidonius, the great Greek critic of roads who had been invited by him, Cicero, to read the memoir, and then himself to treat the same subject, had replied that he was altogether debarred from such an attempt by the excellence of his correspondence performance. He also wrote three books of a poem on his consulate, and sent them to Atticus, of which we have a fragment of seventy-five lines, coded by himself, and four or five other lines, including that unfortunate verse, handed down by Quintelium, or fortunatum nata me consule romam. Unless indeed it be spurious, as is suggested by that excellent critic and wholehearted friend of the orators, Cicero. Previous to these he had produced in hexameters also a translation of the prognostics of Aratus. This is the second part of a poem on the heavenly bodies, the first part, the phenomena, having been turned into Latin verse by him when he was eighteen. Of the prognostics we have only a few lines preserved by Priscian, and a passage repeated by the author, also in his De Divinatione. I think that Cicero was capable of producing a poem quite worthy of preservation, but in the work of this year the subjects chosen were not alluring. Sidenote B.C. 60, I. Tat. 47. Among his epistles of the year there is one which might of itself have sufficed to bring down his named posterity. This is a long letter, full of advice, to his brother Quintus, who had gone out in the previous year to govern the province of Asia as proprator. We may say that good advice could never have been more wanted, and that better advice could not have been given. It has been suggested that it was written as a companion to that treatise on the duties of a candidate which Quintus composed for his brother's service when standing for his consulship. But I cannot admit the analogy. The composition attributed to Quintus contained lessons of advice, equally suitable to any candidate, sprung from the people, striving to rise to high honours in the state. This letter is adapted not only to the special position of Quintus, but to the peculiarities of his character, and its strength lies in this, that while the one brother praises the other justly praises him, as I believe, for many virtues, so as to make the receipt of it acceptable, it points out faults, faults which will become fatal if not amended, in language which is not only strong, but unanswerable. The style of this letter is undoubtedly very different from that of Cicero's letters generally, so as to suggest to the reader that it must have been composed expressly for publication, whereas the daily correspondence is written currente calamo, with no other than the immediate idea of amusing, instructing, or perhaps comforting the correspondent. Hence has come the comparison between this and the treatise Depitizione Consulatus. I think that the gravity of the occasion, rather than any regard for posterity, produced the change of style. Cicero found it essential to induce his brother to remain at his post, not to throw up his government in disgust, and so to bear himself that he should not make himself absolutely odious to his own staff and to other Romans around him. For Quintus Cicero, though he had been proud and arrogant and ill-tempered, had not made himself notorious by the ordinary Roman propensity to plunder his province. What is it that is required of you as a governor? asked Cicero. That men should not be frightened by your journeys hither and thither, that they should not be eaten up by your extravagance, that they should not be disturbed by your coming among them, that they should be joy at your approach. When each city should think that its guardian angel, not a cruel master, had come upon it, when each house should feel that it entertained not a robber, but a friend. Practice has made you perfect in this. But it is not enough that you should exercise those good offices yourself, but that you should take care that every one of those who come with you should seem to do his best for the inhabitants of the province, for the citizen of Rome, and for the Republic. I wish that I could give the letter entire, both in English, and all readers might know how grand are the precepts taught, and in Latin, that they who understand the language might appreciate the beauty of the words. But I do not dare to fill my pages at such length. A little farther on he gives his idea of the duty of all those who have power over others, even over dumb animals. To me it seems that the duty of those in authority over others consists in making those who are under them as happy as the nature of things will allow. But everyone knows that you have acted on this principle since you first went to Asia. This I fear must be taken as flattery intended to gild the pill which comes afterward. This is not only his duty who has under him allies and citizens, but is also that of the man who has slaves under his control, and even dumb cattle, that he should study the welfare of all over whom he stands in the position of master. Let the reader look into this, and ask himself what precepts of Christianity have ever surpassed it. Then he points out that which he describes as the one great difficulty in the career of a Roman provincial governor. The collectors of taxes, or pubicani, were of the equestrian order. This business of farming the taxes had been their rich privilege for at any rate more than a century, and as Cicero says farther on in his letter, it was impossible not to know with what hardships the Greek allies would be treated by them when so many stories were current of their cruelty even in Italy. Were Quintus to take apart against these tax-gatherers, he would make them hostile not only to the republic, but to himself also, and also to his brother Marcus, for they were of the equestrian order and specially connected with these pubicani by family ties. He implies, as he goes on, that it will be easier to teach the Greeks to be submissive than the tax-gatherers to be moderate. After all, where would the Greeks of Asia be if they had no Roman master to afford them protection? He leaves the matter in the hands of his brother, with advice that he should do the best he can on one side and on the other. If possible, let the greed of the pubicani be restrained, but let the ally be taught to understand that there may be usage in the world worse even than Roman taxation. It would be hardly worth our while to allude to this part of Cicero's advice did it not give an insight into the mode in which Rome taxed her subject people. After this he commences that portion of the letter for the sake of which we cannot but believe that the whole was written. There is one thing, he says, which I shall never cease to din into your ears, because I could not endure to think that amid the praises which are lavished on you there should be any matter in which you should be found wanting. All who come to us here, all who come to Rome from Asia that is, when they tell us of your honesty and goodness of heart, tell us also that you fail in temper. It is a vice which in the daily affairs of private life betokens a weak and unmanly spirit, but there can be nothing so poor as the exhibition of the littleness of nature in those who have risen to the dignity of command. He will not, he goes on to say, trouble his brother with repeating all that the wise men have said on the subject of anger. He is sure that Quintus is well acquainted with all that. But is it not a pity when all men say that nothing could be pleasanter than Quintus Cicero when in a good humour? The same Quintus should allow himself to be so provoked that his want of kindly manners should be regretted by all around him. I cannot assert, he goes on to say, that when nature has produced a certain condition of mind, and that years as they run on have strengthened it, a man can change all that and pluck out from his very self the habits that have grown within him. Yet I must tell you that if you cannot eschew this evil altogether, if you cannot protect yourself against the feeling of anger, yet you should prepare yourself to be ready for it when it comes, so that when your very soul within you is hot with it, your tongue at any rate may be restrained. Then toward the end of the letter there is a fraternal exhortation which is surely very fine. Since chants have thrown into my way the duties of official life in Rome, and into yours that of administering provincial government, if I in the performance of my work have been second to none, do you see that you in yours may be equally efficient? Now grand from an elder brother to a younger. And remember this that you and I have not to strive after some excellence still unattained, but have to be on our watch to guard that which has been already won. If I should find myself in anything divided from you, I should desire no further advance in life. Unless your deeds and your words go on all fours with mine, I should feel that I had achieved nothing by all the work and all the dangers which you and I have encountered together. The brother at last was found to be a poor, envious, ill-conditioned creature, intellectually gifted and capable of borrowing something from his brother's nobler nature, but when struggles came and political feuds, and the need of looking about to see on which side safety lay, ready to sacrifice his brother for the sake of safety. But up to this time Marcus was prepared to believe all good of Quintus, and having made for himself and for the family a great name was desirous of sharing it with his brother, and, as we shall afterward see, with his brother's son and with his own. In this he failed. He lived to know that he had failed as regarded his brother and his nephew. It was not, however, added to his misery to live and to learn how little his son was to do to maintain the honor of his family. I find a note scribbled by myself some years ago in a volume in which I had read this epistle. Probably the most beautiful letter ever written. Reading it again subsequently, I added another note. The language altogether different from that of his ordinary letters. I do not dissent now from either the enthusiastic praise or the more careful criticism. The letter was from the man's heart, true, affectionate, and full of anxious, brotherly duty, but written in studied language befitting a scissor of thought, the need, and the dignity of the occasion. Chapter 11 Part 2 of The Life of Cicero Volume 1 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Philippa Jevons. The Life of Cicero Volume 1 by Anthony Trollope. Chapter 11 The Triumvirate. Part 2. Side-note. B.C. 59. I. At. 48. The year following was that of Caesar's first consulship, which he held in conjunction with Bibulus, a man who was altogether opposed to him in thought, in character, and in action. So hostile were these two great officers to each other that the one attempted to undo whatever the other did. Bibulus was elected by bribery on behalf of the Senate in order that he might be a counterpoise to Caesar. But Caesar now was not only Caesar. He was Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus united, with all the dependents, all their clients, all their greedy hangers on. To give this compact something of the strength of family union, Pompey, who was now nearly fifty years of age, took in marriage Caesar's daughter Julia, who was a quarter of a century his junior. But Pompey was a man who could endear himself to women, and the opinion seems to be general that had not Julia died in childbirth, the friendship between the men would have been more lasting. But for Caesar's purposes the duration of this year and the next was enough. Bibulus was a laughingstock, the mere shadow of a consul, when opposed to such an enemy. He tried to use all the old forms of the Republic with the object of stopping Caesar in his career, but Caesar only ridiculed him. And Pompey, though we can imagine that he did not laugh much, did as Caesar would have him. Bibulus was an auger, and observed the heavens when political manoeuvres were going on which he wished to stop. This was the old Roman system for using religion as a drag upon progressive movements. No work of state could be carried on if the heavens were declared to be un-propitious, and an auger could always say that the heavens were un-propitious if he pleased. This was the recognized constitutional mode of obstruction, and was quite in accord with the feelings of the people. Pompey alone, or crosses with him, would certainly have submitted to an auger. But Caesar was above augers. Whatever he chose to have carried he carried, with what approach he could to constitutional usage, but with whatever departure from constitutional usage he found to be necessary. What was the condition of the people of Rome at that time, it is difficult to learn from the conflicting statements of historians, that Cicero had till lately been popular we know. We are told that Bibulus was popular when he opposed Caesar. Of personal popularity up to this time I doubt whether Caesar had achieved much. Yet we learn that when Bibulus, with Cato and Luculus, endeavored to carry out their constitutional threats, they were dragged and knocked about, and one of them nearly killed. Of the illegality of Caesar's proceedings there can be no doubt. The tribunition veto was interposed, Caesar contended himself with disregarding it. This is quoted from the German historian who intends to leave an impression that Caesar was great and wise in all that he did, and who tells us also of the obstinate weak creature Bibulus, and of the dogmatical fool Cato. I doubt whether there was anything of true popular ferment, or that there was any commotion except that which was made by the roughs who had attached themselves for pay to Caesar or to Pompey or to Crassus, or as it might be to Bibulus and the other leaders. The violence did not amount to more than nearly killing this man or the other. Some Roman street fights were no doubt more bloody, as for instance that in which seven years afterwards Claudius was slaughtered by Milo. But the blood was made to flow not by the people, but by hired bravos. The Roman citizens of the day were, I think, very quiescent. Neither pride nor misery stirred them much. Caesar perceiving this was aware that he might disregard Bibulus and his auguries so long as he had a band of ruffians about him sufficient for the purposes of the hour. It was in order that he might thus prevail that the coalition had been made with Pompey and Crassus. His colleague Bibulus, seeing how matters were going, retired to his own house, and there went through a fuss of consular enactments. Caesar carried all his purposes, and the people were content to laugh, dividing him into two personages, and talking of Julius and Caesar as the two consuls of the year. It was in this way that he procured to be allotted to him by the people his irregular command in Gaul. He was to be proconsul not for one year, with perhaps a prolongation for two or three, but for an established period of five. He was to have the great province of Cisalpine Gaul, that is to say the whole of what we now call Italy, from the foot of the Alps down to a line running from sea to sea just north of Florence. To this Transalpine Gaul was afterward added. The province so named, possessed at that time by the Romans, was called Narbonensis, a country comparatively insignificant, running from the Alps to the Pyrenees along the Mediterranean. The Gaul or Gallia, of which Caesar speaks when in the opening words of his commentary he tells us that it was divided into three parts, was altogether beyond the Roman province which was assigned to him. Caesar when he undertook his government can hardly have dreamed of subjecting to Roman rule the vast territories which were then known as Gallia, beyond the frontiers of the Empire, and which we now call France. But he caused himself to be supported by an enormous army. There were stationed three legions on the Italian side of the Alps, and one on the other. These were all to be under his command for five years certain, and amounted to a force of not less than thirty thousand men. As no troops could constitutionally be stationed in Italy proper, the commander of the legions of northern Italy and Gaul, says Momsen, dominated at the same time Italy and Rome for the next five years, and he who was master for five years was master for life. Such was the condition of Rome during the second year of the triumvirate, in which Caesar was consul, and prepared the way for the powers which he afterward exercised. Cicero would not come to his call, and therefore, as we are told, Claudius was let loose upon him. As he would not come to Caesar's call it was necessary that he should be suppressed, and Claudius, notwithstanding all constitutional difficulties, nay impossibilities, was made tribune of the people. Things had now so far advanced with the Caesar that a Cicero who would not come to his call must be disposed of after some fashion. Till we have thought much of it, often of it, till we have looked thoroughly into it, we find ourselves tempted to marvel at Cicero's blindness. Surely a man so gifted must have known enough of the State of Rome to have been aware that there was no room left for one honest, patriotic, constitutional politician. Was it not plain to him that if, Natus ad Eustitiam, he could not bring himself to serve with those who were intent on discarding the republic, he had better retire among his books, his busts, and his literary luxuries, and leave the government of the country to those who understood its people. And we are the more prone to say and think all this because the man himself continually said it, and continually thought it. In one of the letters written early in the year to Atticus from his villa at Antium he declares very plainly how it is with him, and this too in a letter written in good humour, not in a despondent frame of mind, in which he is able pleasantly to ridicule his enemy, Claudius, who it seems had expressed a wish to go on an embassy to Tigranes, King of Armenia. Do not think, he says, that I am complaining of all this because I myself am desirous of being engaged in public affairs. Even while it was mine to sit at the helm, I was tired of the work. But now when I am in truth driven out of the ship, when the rudder has not been thrown down but seized out of my hands, how should I take a pleasure in looking from the shore at the wrecks which these other pilots have made? But the study of human nature tells us, and all experience, that men are unable to fathom their own desires, and fail to govern themselves by the wisdom which is at their fingers' ends. The retiring Prime Minister cannot but hanker after the seals and the ribbons and the titles of office, even though his soul be able to rise above considerations of emolument, and there will creep into a man's mind an idea that, though reform of abuses from other sources may be impossible, if he were there once more the evil could at least be mitigated, might possibly be cured. So it was during this period of his life with Cicero. He did believe that political justice exercised by himself with such assistance as his eloquence would obtain for it, might be efficacious for preserving the republic, in spite of Caesar, and of Pompey, and of Crassus. He did not yet believe that these men would consent to such an outrage as his banishment. It must have been incredible to him that Pompey should have sent to it. When the blow came it crushed him for the time. But he re-tricked his beams and struggled on to the end, as we shall see if we follow his life to the close. Such was the intended purpose of the degradation of Claudius. This, however, was not at once declared. It was said that Claudius as Tribune intended rather to oppose Caesar than to assist him. He at any rate chose that Cicero should so believe, and sent Curio, a young man to whom Cicero was attached, to visit the orator at his villa at Antium, and to declare these friendly purposes. According to the story told by Cicero, Claudius was prepared to oppose the tram for it, and the other young men of Rome, the genus d'oree of which both Curio and Claudius were members, were said to be equally hostile to Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus, whose doings in opposition to the constitution were already evident enough, so that it suited Cicero to believe that the rising aristocracy of Rome would oppose them. But the aristocracy of Rome was old or young, cared for nothing but its fishponds and its amusements. Cicero spent the earlier part of the year out of Rome among his various villas, at Tusculanum, at Antium, and at Formii. The purport of all his letters at this period is the same, to complain of the condition of the Republic, and especially of the treachery of his friend Pompey. Though there be much of despondency in his tone, there is enough also of high spirit to make us feel that his literary aspirations are not out of place, though mingled with his political wailing. The time will soon come when his trust, even in literature, will fail him for a while. Early in the year he declares that he would like to accept a mission to Egypt, offered to him by Caesar and Pompey, partly in order that he might for a while be quit of Rome, and partly that Romans might feel how ill they could do without him. He then uses for the first time, as far as I am aware, a line from the Iliad, which is repeated by him again and again in part or in whole, to signify the restraint which is placed on him by his own high character among his fellow-citizens. I would go to Egypt on this pleasant excursion, but that I fear what the men of Troy and the Trojan women with their wide sweeping robes would say of me. And what, he asks, would the men of our party, the optimates say? And what would Cato say, whose opinion is more to me than that of them all? And how would his to retell the story in future ages? But he would like to go to Egypt, and he will wait and see. Then after various questions to Atticus comes that great one as to the augurship, of which so much has been made by Cicero's enemies, Qualquidem uno ego abistis capi possim. A few lines above he had been speaking of another lure that of the mission to Egypt. He discusses that with his friend, and then goes on, in his half-joking phrase, but this would have been the real thing to catch me. Nothing caught him. He was steadfast all through, accepting no offer of place from the conspirators by which his integrity or his honour could be soiled. That it was so was well known to history in the time of Quintilian, whose testimony as to the Repudiatus Swigintiuratus, his refusal of a place among the twenty commissioners, has already been quoted. And yet biographers have written of him as of one willing to sell his honour, his opinions, and the Commonwealth, for a pitiful bribe. Not that he did do so, not that he attempted to do it. But because in a half-joking letter to the friend of his bosom, he tells his friend which way his tastes lay. He had been thinking of writing a book on geography, and consulted Atticus on the subject. But in one of his letters he tells his friend that he had abandoned the idea. The subject was too dull, and if he took one side in a dispute that was existing, he would be sure to fall under the lash of the critics on the other. He's enjoying his leisure as Antium, and thinks it's a much better place than Rome. If the weather will not let him catch fish at any rate he can count the waves. In all these letters, Cicero asks questions about his money and his private affairs, about the mending of a wall perhaps, and adds something about his wife or daughter or son. He is going from Antium to Formii, but must return to Antium by a certain date because Tullio wants to see the games. Then again he alludes to Claudius. Pompey had made a compact with Claudius, so at least Cicero had heard, that he, Claudius, if elected for the tribunate, would do nothing to injure Cicero. The assurance of such a compact had no doubt been spread about for the quieting of Cicero. But no such compact had been intended to be kept, unless Cicero would be amenable, would take some of the good things offered to him, or at any rate, hold his peace. But Cicero affects to hope that no such agreement may be kept. He is always nicknaming Pompey, who during his eastern campaign had taken Jerusalem, and who now parodies the Africanus, the Asiaticus, and the Macedonicus of the Scipios and Metelluses. If that Herosulimarian candidate for popularity does not keep his word with me, I shall be delighted. If that be his return for my speeches on his behalf, the Antepenator Omnibus Pompeius, for instance, I will play him such turn of another kind that he shall remember it. He begins to know what the triumvirate is doing with the republic, but has not yet brought himself to suspect the blow that is to fall on himself. They are going along very gaily, he says, and do not make as much noise as one would have expected. If Cato had been more on the alert, things would not have gone so quickly, but the dishonesty of others who have allowed all the laws to be ignored has been worse than Cato. If we used to feel that the senate took too much on itself, what shall we say when that power has been transferred not to the people, but to three utterly unscrupulous men? They can make whom they will consuls, whom they will tribunes, so that they may hide the very goiter of Vatinius under a priest's robe. For himself, Cicero says, he will be contented to remain with his books, if only Claudius will allow him, if not he will defend himself. As for his country, he has done more for his country than has even been desired of him, and he thinks it to be better to leave the helm in the hands of pilots, however incompetent, than himself to steer when passengers are so thankless. Then we find that he robs Portulia of her promised pleasure at the games, because it will be beneath his dignity to appear at them. He is always very anxious for his friends' letters, depending on them for news and for amusement. "'My messenger will return at once,' he says in one, "'therefore, though you are coming yourself very soon, send me a heavy letter, full not only of news, but of your own ideas.' In another, Cicero the little sends greeting, he says in Greek, to Titus the Athenian, that is, to Titus Pomponius Atticus. The Greek letters were probably traced by the child at his father's knee, as Cicero held the pen of the stylus. In another letter he declares that there, at Formii, Pompey's name of Magnus is no more esteemed than that of Deve's belonging to Crassus. In the next he calls Pompey Samcichoramus. We learn from Josephus that there was a lady afterward in the east in the time of Vitellius, who was daughter of Samcichoramus, king of the Amici. It may probably be a royal family name. In choosing the absurd title he is again laughing at his party leader. Pompey had probably boasted of his doings with the Samcichoramus of the day and the priests of Jerusalem. When this Samcichoramus of ours finds how ill he has spoken of, he will rush headlong into revolution. He complains that he can do nothing at Formii because of the visitors. No English poet was ever so interviewed by American admirers. They came at all hours in numbers sufficient to fill a temple at alone a gentleman's house. How can he write anything requiring leisure in such a condition as this? Nevertheless he will attempt something. He goes on criticising all that is done in Rome, especially what is done by Pompey, who no doubt was vacillating sadly between Caesar to whom he was bound, and Bibulus, the other consul to whom he ought to have been bound, as being naturally on the aristocratic side. He cannot for a moment keep his pen from public matters, nor on the other hand can he refrain from declaring that he will apply himself wholly, undividedly to his literature. Therefore, O my Titus, let me settle down to these glorious occupations, and return to that which, if I had been wise, I never should have left. A day or two afterward, writing from the same place, he asks what Arobarches is saying of him. Arobarches is another name for Pompey, this Arabian chieftain. In the early summer of this year, Cicero returned to Rome, probably in time to see Atticus who was then about to leave the city for his estates in Epirus. We have a letter written by him to his friend on the journey, telling us that Caesar had made him two distinct authors, evidently with the view of getting rid of him, but in such a manner as would be gratifying to Cicero himself. Caesar asks him to go with him to Gaul as his lieutenant, or, if that will not suit him, to accept a free legation for the sake of paying a vow. This latter was a kind of job by which Roman senators got themselves sent forth on their private travels, with all the appanages of a senator travelling on public business. We have his argument as to both, elsewhere he objectes to a libera legatio as being a job. Here he only points out that, though it enforces his absence from Rome at a time disagreeable to him, just when his brother Quintus would return, it would not give him the protection which he needs. Though he were travelling about the world as a senator on some pretended embassy, he would still be open to the attacks of Claudius. He would necessarily be absent, or he would not be an enjoyment of his privilege, but by his very absence he would find his position weakened, whereas, as Caesar's appointed lieutenant, he need not leave the city at once, and in that position he would be quite safe against all that Claudius or other enemies could do to him. No indictment could be made against a Roman while he was in the employment of the state. It must be remembered, too, on judging of these overtures, that both the one and the other, and indeed all the offers then made to him, were deemed to be highly honourable as Rome then existed. The free legation, the libera legatio vulticausa, had no reference to parties. It was a job, no doubt, and in the hands of the ordinary Roman aristocrat likely to be very onerous to the provincials among whom the privileged senator might travel. But it entailed no party adhesion. In this case it was intended only to guarantee the absence of a man who might be troublesome in Rome. The other was the offer of genuine work in which politics were not at all concerned. Such a position was accepted by Quintus, our Cicero's brother, and in performance of the duties which fell to him he incurred terrible danger, having been nearly destroyed by the Gauls in his winter quarters among the Nervi. Labienus, who was Caesar's right-hand man in Gaul, was of the same politics as Cicero, so much so that when Caesar rebelled against the Republic, Labienus, true to the Republic, would no longer fight on Caesar's side. It was open to Cicero without disloyalty to accept the offer made to him, but with an insight into what was coming, of which he himself was hardly conscious, he could not bring himself to accept offers which in themselves were alluring, but which would seem in future times to have implied on his part an ascent to the breaking-up of the Republic. I dare my Troas, Caetroyas, Helques y Peplus, what will be said of me in history by my citizens, if I now do simply that which may best suit my own happiness. Had he done so, Pliny and the others would not have spoken of him as they have spoken, and it would not have been worth the while of modern lovers of Caesarism to write books against the one patriot of his age. During the remainder of this year, B.C. 59, Cicero was at Rome, and seems gradually to have become aware that a personal attack was to be made upon him. At the close of a long and remarkable letter written to his brother Quintus in November, he explains the state of his own mind, showing us, who have now before us the future which was hidden from him, how greatly mistaken he was as to the results which were to be expected. He had been telling his brother how nearly Cato had been murdered for calling Pompey in public a dictator. Then he goes on to describe his own condition. You may see from this what is the state of the Republic. As far as I am concerned it seems that friends will not be wanting to defend me. They offer themselves in a wonderful way and promise assistance. I feel great hope and still greater spirit, hope which tells me that we shall be victors in the struggle, spirit which bids me fear no casualty in the present state of public affairs. But the matter stands in this way. If he—that is, Claudius—should indict me in the court, all Italy would come to my defence, so that I should be acquitted with honour. Should he attack me with open violence, I should have, I think, not only my own party but the world at large to stand by me. All men promise me their friends, their clients, their freedmen, their slaves, and even their money. Our old body of aristocrats—Cato, Bibulus, and the makers of fishponds generally—are wonderfully warm in my cause. If any of these have here to fall been remiss, now they join our party from sheer hatred of these kings—the Triomphiers. Pompey promises everything, and so does Caesar, whom I only trust so far as I can see them. In the Triomphiers promise him that he will be safe, but his belief in Pompey's honesty is all but gone. The coming tribunes are my friends. The consuls of next year promise well. He was woefully mistaken. We have excellent praetors, citizens alive to their duty. Demitius, Nygidius, Memius, and Lentilus are specially trustworthy. The others are good men. You may therefore pluck up your courage and be confident. From this we perceive that he had already formed the idea that he might perhaps be required to fight for his position as a Roman citizen, and it seems also that he understood the cause of the coming conflict. The intention was that he should be driven out of Rome by personal enmity. Nothing is said in any of these letters of the excuse to be used, though he knew well what that excuse was to be. He was to be charged by the patrician Tribune with having put Roman citizens to death in opposition to the law. But there arises at this time no question whether he had or had not been justified in what he as consul had done to Lentilus and the others. Would Claudius be able to rouse a mob against him? And if so, would Caesar assist Claudius, or would Pompey, who still loomed to his eyes as the larger of the two men? He had ever been the friend of Pompey, and Pompey had promised him all manner of assistance, but he knew already that Pompey would turn upon him. That Rome should turn upon him—Rome which he had preserved from the torches of Catiline's conspirators—that he could not bring himself to believe. We must not pass over this long letter to Quintus without observing that through it all the evil condition of the younger brother's mind becomes apparent. The severity of his administration had given offence, his punishments had been cruel, his letters had been rash, and his language violent. In short, we gather from the brother's testimony that Quintus Cicero was very ill-fitted to be the civil governor of a province. The only work which we have from Cicero belonging to this year except his letters is the speech, or part of the speech, he made for Lucius Valerius Flaccus. Flaccus had been prior to or when Cicero was consul, and had done good service in the eyes of his superior officers in the matter of the Catiline conspiracy. He had then gone to Asia as a governor, and after the Roman manor had fleeced the province. That this was so there is no doubt. After his return he was accused, was defended by Cicero, and was acquitted. Macrobius tells us that Cicero, by the happiness of a bon mot, brought the accused off safely though he was manifestly guilty. He adds that Cicero took care not to allow the joke to appear in the published edition of his speech. There are parts of the speech which have been preserved, and are sufficiently amusing even to us. He is very hard upon the Greeks of Asia, the class from which the witnesses against Flaccus were taken. We know here in England that a spaniel, a wife, and a walnut tree may be beaten with advantage. Cicero says that in Asia there is the proverb that a frigion may be improved in the same way. Fiat experimentum in corpore vili. It is declared through Asia that you should take a carrion for your experiment. The last of the Missions is the well-known Asiatic term for the lowest type of humanity. Look through all the comedies you will find the leading slave as a Lydian. Then he turns to these poor Asiatics, and asks them whether anyone can be expected to think well of them, when such is their own testimony of themselves. He attacks the Jew, and speaks of the Jewish religion as a superstition worthy in itself of no consideration. Pompey had spared the gold in the temple of Jerusalem because he thought it wise to respect the religious prejudices of the people, but the gods themselves had shown, by subjecting the Jews to the Romans, how little the gods had regarded these idolatrous worshipers. Such were the arguments used, and they prevailed with the judges, or jury we should rather call them, to whom they were addressed. We now come to that period of Cicero's life in which, by common consent of all who have hitherto written of him, he is supposed to have shown himself as least worthy of his high name. Middleton, who certainly loved his hero's memory and was always anxious to do him justice, condemns him. It cannot be denied that in this calamity of his exile he did not behave himself with that firmness which might reasonably be expected from one who had borne so glorious apart in the Republic. Moribin, the French biographer, speaks of the wailings of his grief, of its injustice and its follies. Cicero is too full of his misfortune to give a new hope, he says. He had supported this misfortune with little courage, says another Frenchman, M. de Rozoire, in introducing us to the speeches which Cicero made on his return. M. Merevale declares that he marred the grace of the concession in the eyes of posterity, alluding to the concession made to the popular feeling by his voluntary departure from Rome, as will her after be described, by the unmanly lamentations with which he accompanied it. Momsson, with a want of insight into character wonderful in an author who has so closely studied the history of the period, speaks of his exile as a punishment inflicted on a man notoriously timid and belonging to the class of political weathercocks. We now come, says M. Forsythe, to the most melancholy period of Cicero's life, melancholy not so much from its nature and the extent of the misfortunes which overtook him as from the abject prostration of mind into which he was thrown. M. Frude, as might be expected, uses language stronger than that of others, and tells us that he retired to Macedonia to pour out his sorrows and his resentments in lamentations unworthy of a woman. We have to admit that modern historians and biographers have been united in accusing Cicero of want of manliness during his exile. I propose not, indeed, to wash the black and more white, but to show if I can that he was as white as others might be expected to have been in similar circumstances. We are, I think, somewhat proud of the courage shown by public men of our country who have suffered either justly or unjustly under the laws. Our annals are bloody, and many such have had to meet their death. They have done so generally with becoming manliness. Even though there may have been rebels against the powers of the day, their memories have been made green because they have fallen like brave men. Sir Thomas Moore, who was no rebel, died well and crowned a good life by his manner of leaving it. Thomas Cromwell submitted to the Acts without a complaint. Lady Jane Gray, when on the scaffold yielded nothing in manliness to the others. Cranmer and the martyr-bishops perished nobly. The Earl of Essex and Raleigh and Straford and Straford's master showed no fear when the fatal moment came. In regarding the fate of each, we sympathise with the victim because of a certain dignity at the moment of death. But there is, I think, no crisis of life in which it is so easy for a man to carry himself honourably as that in which he has to leave it. When it summa dies et inna luctabile tempus, no doubting now can be of avail. No moment is left for the display of conduct beyond this which requires only decorum and a free use of the pulses to become, in some degree, glorious. The wretch from the lowest dregs of the people can achieve it with a halter round his neck. Cicero had that moment also to face, and when it came he was as brave as the best Englishmen of them all. But of those I have named, no one had an Atticus to whom it had been the privilege of his life to open his very soul in language so charming as to make it worth posterity's while to read it, to study it, to sift it, and to criticise it. Many made many plaints in his misery, but they have reached us in such forms of grace that they did not disparage him. But then he too had no Atticus. Shaftesbury and Bollingbrook were dismissed ministers and doomed to live in exile the latter for many years, and felt no doubt strongly their removal from the glare of public life to obscurity. We hear no complaint from them which can justify some future critic in saying that their whales were unworthy of a woman, but neither of them was capable of telling an Atticus the thoughts of his mind as they rose. What other public man ever had an Atticus to whom in the sorrows which the ingratitude of friends had brought upon him he could disclose every throb of his heart. I think that we are often at a loss in our efforts at appreciation of character and in the expressions of our opinion respecting it, to realise the meaning of courage and manliness. That sententious Swedish queen, one of whose foolish maxims I have quoted, has said that Cicero, though a coward, was capable of great actions, because she did not know what a coward was. To doubt, to tremble with anxiety, to vacillate hither and thither between this cause and the other as to which may be the better, to complain within one's own breast that this or that thing has been an injustice, to hesitate within oneself not quite knowing which way honour may require us to go, to be indignant even at fancied wrongs, to rise in wrath against another and then before the hour has passed to turn that wrath against oneself, that is not to be a coward. To know what duty requires, and then to be deterred by fear of results, that is to be a coward. But the man of many scruples may be the greatest hero of them all. Let the law of things be declared clearly, so that the doubting mind shall no longer doubt, so that scruples may be laid at rest, so that the sense of justice may be satisfied, and he of whom I speak shall be ready to meet the world in arms against him. There are men very useful in their way who shall never doubt at all, but shall be ready, as the bull is ready, to encounter any obstacles that there may be before them. I will not say but that for the coarse purposes of the world they may not be the most efficacious, but I will not admit that they are therefore the bravest. The bull who has no imagination to tell him what the obstacle may do to him is not brave. He is brave, who fully understanding the potentiality of the obstacle shall, for a sufficient purpose, move against it. This Cicero always did. He braved the murderous anger of Sulla, when as a young man he thought it well to stop the greed of Sulla's minions. He trusted himself amid the dangers prepared for him, when it was necessary that with extraordinary speed he should get together the evidence needed to the prosecution of Veriz. He was firm against all that Catiline attempted for his destruction, and had courage enough for the responsibility when he thought it expedient to doom the friends of Catiline to death. In defending Milo, whether the calls were good or bad, he did not blench. He joined the Republican army in Macedonia, though he distrusted Pompey and his companions. When he thought that there was a hope for the Republic, he sprung at Antony with all the courage of a Tigress protecting her young, and when all had failed and was rotten around him, when the Republic had so fallen that he knew it to be gone, then he was able to give his neck to the swordsman, with all the apparent indifference of life which was displayed by those countrymen of our own whom I have named. But why did he write so piteously when he was driven into exile? Why at any rate did he turn upon his chosen friend, and scold him as though that friend had not done enough for friendship? Why did he talk of suicide as though by that he might find the easiest way of escape? I hold it to be natural that a man should wail to himself under a sense not simply of misfortune, but of misfortune coming to him from the injustice of others, and specially from the ingratitude of friends. Afflictions which come to us from natural causes, such as sickness and physical pain, or from some chance, such as the loss of our money by the breaking of a bank, an heroic man will bear without even inward complainings. But a sense of wrong done to him by friends will stir him, not by the misery inflicted but because of the injustice, and that which he says to himself he will say to his wife, if his wife be to him a second self, or to his friend, if he have one so dear to him. The testimony by which the writers I have named have been led to treat Cicero so severely has been found in the letters which he wrote during his exile, and of these letters all but one were addressed either to Atticus, or to his wife, or to his brother—twenty-seven of them were to Atticus. Before he accepted a voluntary exile as the best solution of the difficulty in which he was placed, for it was voluntary at first, as will be seen, he applied to the consul Piso for aid, and for the same purpose visited Pompey. So far he was a suppliant, but this he did in conformity was Roman usage. In asking favour of a man in power there was held to be no disgrace, even though the favour asked were one improper to be granted, which was not the case with Cicero. And he went about the forum in mourning, so did Attus, as was the custom with men on their trial. We cannot doubt that in each of these cases he acted with the advice of his friends. His conduct and his words, after his return from exile, betray exultation, rather than despondency. It is from the letters which he wrote to Atticus that he has been judged, from words boiling with indignation that such a one as he should have been surrendered by the Rome that he had saved by those friends to whom he had been so true to be trampled on by such a one as Claudius. When a man has written words intended for the public ear, it is fair that he should bear the brunt of them, be it what it may. He has intended them for public effect, and if they are used against him he should not complain. But here the secret murmurings of the man's soul were sent forth to his choicest friend with no idea that from them would he be judged by the historians to come in six hundred years of whose good word he thought so much. With whereo his storiai de nobis ad anos seschenti predicarente, he says to Atticus. How is it that from them after two thousand years the merry veils, momsons, and fruits condemn their great brother in letters, whose lightest utterances have been found worthy of so long a life? Is there not an injustice in falling upon a man's private words, words when written intended only for privacy, and making them the basis of an accusation in which an illustrious man shall be arraigned forever as a coward? It is said that he was unjust even to Atticus, accusing even Atticus of lukewarmness. What if he did so for an hour? Is that an affair of ours? Did Atticus quarrel with him? Let any reader of these words, who has lived long enough to have an old friend, ask himself whether there has never been a moment of anger in his heart, of anger of which he has soon learned to recognize the injustice. He may not have written his angel, but then perhaps he has not had the pen of a Cicero. Let those who rebuke the unmanliness of Cicero's wailings remember what were his sufferings. The story has yet to be told, but I may in rough words describe their nature. Everything was to be taken from him. All that he had, his houses, his books, his pleasant gardens, his busts and pictures, his wide retinue of slaves, and possessions lordly as are those of our dukes and earls, he was driven out from Italy and so driven that no place of delight could be open to him. Sicily where he had friends, and Athens where he might have lived, were closed against him. He had to look where to live, and did live for a while on money borrowed from his friends. All the cherished occupations of his life were over for him, the law courts, the forum, the senate, and the crowded meetings of Roman citizens hanging on his words. The circumstances of his exile separated him from his wife and children so that he was alone. All this was assured to him for life as far as Roman law could assure it. Let us think of the condition of some great and serviceable Englishman in similar circumstances. Let us suppose that Sir Robert Peale had been impeached and forced by some iniquitous sentence to live beyond the pale of civilisation, that the houses at Whitehall Gardens and at Drayton had been confiscated, dismantled, and levelled as ground, and his rents and revenues made over to his enemies, that everything should have been done to destroy him by the country he had served, except the act of taking away that life which would thus have been made a burden to him. Would not his case have been more piteous, a source of more righteous indignation than that even of the Moors or Ralees? He suffered under invectives in the House of Commons, and we sympathise with him. But if some Claudius of the day could have done this to him, should we have thought the worse of him had he opened his wounds to his wife, or to his brother, or to his friend of friends? Had Sir Robert an end to his life in his exile, as he thought of doing, he would have been a second Cato to admiring posterity, and some Lucan with rolling verses would have told us narratives of his valour. The judges of to-day look back to his half-formed purposes in this direction as being an added evidence of the weakness of the man. But had he let himself blood and have perished in his bath, he would have been thought to have escaped from life as honourably as did Junius Brutus. It is because he dared to live on that we are taught to think so little of him, because he had anti-dated Christianity so far as to feel when the moment came that such an escape was in truth unmanly. He doubted, and when the deed had not been done he expressed regret that he had allowed himself to live. But he did not do it, as Cato would have done, or Brutus. It may be as well here to combat in as few words as possible the assertions which have been made that Cicero, having begun life as a Democrat, discarded his colours as soon as he had received from the people those honours for which he had sought popularity. They who have said so have taken their idea from the fact that, in much of his early forensic work, he spoke against the aristocratic party, he attacked Sulla through his favourite chrysognus in his defence of Roschus Amorinas. He afterward defended a woman of a riteum in the spirit of antagonism to Sulla. His accusation of Veres was made on the same side in politics, and was carried on in opposition to Hortensius and the oligarchs. He defended the tribune Caesconelius. Then when he became consul, he devoted himself to the destruction of Catiline, who was joined with many, perhaps with Caesar's sympathy, in the conspiracy for the overthrow of the Republic. Caesar soon became the leader of the democracy, became rather what Monson describes as democracy itself. And as Cicero had defended the senate from Catiline, and had refused to attach himself to Caesar, he is supposed to have turned from the political ideas of his youth, and to have become a conservative, when conservative ideas suited his ambition. I will not accept the excuse put forward on his behalf, that the early speeches were made on the side of democracy, because the exogences of the occasion required him to so devote his energies as an advocate. No doubt he was an advocate, as are our barristers of today, and as an advocate supported this side or that. But we shall be wrong, if we suppose, that the Roman patronus supplied his services under such inducements. With us a man goes into the profession of the law with the intention of making money, and takes the cases right and left, unless there be special circumstances which may debar him from doing so with honour. It is a point of etiquette with him to give his assistance in turn as he may be called on, so much so that leading men are not unfrequently employed on one side, simply that they may not be employed on the other side. It should not be urged on the part of Cicero that so actuated he defended Amorinas, a case in which he took part against the aristocrats, or defended Publius Sulla, in doing which he appeared on the side of the aristocracy. Such a defence of his conduct would be misleading and might be confuted. It would be confuted by those who suppose him to have been notoriously a political trimmer, as Momsen has called him, or a deserter, as he was described by Diocasius and by the pseudo-salist, by showing that, in fact, he took up causes under the influence of strong personal motives such as rarely govern an English barrister. These motives were in many cases partly political, but they operated in such a manner as to give no guide to his political views. In defending Sulla's nephew he was moved, as far as we know, solely by private motives. In defending Amorinas he may be said to have attacked Sulla. His object was to stamp out the still-burning embers of Sulla's cruelty, but not the less was he wedded to Sulla's general views as to the restoration of the authority of the Senate. In his early speeches, especially in that spoken against Veres, he denounces the corruption of the senatorial judges, but at that very period of his life he again and again expresses his own belief in the glory and majesty of the Senate. In accusing Veres he accused the general corruption of Rome's provincial governors, and as they were always past consuls or past praetors, and had been the elite of the aristocracy, he may be said so far to have taken the part of a Democrat. But he had done so only so far as he had found himself bound by a sense of duty but a stop to corruption. The venality of the judges and the rapacity of governors had been fit objects for his eloquence. But I deny that he can be fairly charged with having tampered with democracy because he had thus used his eloquence on behalf of the people. He was no doubt stirred by other political motives less praiseworthy, though submitted to in accordance with the practice and the known usages of Rome. He had undertaken to speak for Catiline when Catiline was accused of corruption on his return from Africa knowing that Catiline had been guilty. He did not do so, but the intention for our present purpose is the same as the doing. To have defended Catiline would have assisted him in his operations as a candidate for the consulship. Catiline was a bad subject for defense, as was Fonteus, whom he certainly did defend, and Catiline was a Democrat. But Cicero, had he defended Catiline, would not have done so as holding out his hand to democracy. Cicero, when, in the Prolegue Manilia, he for the first time addressed the people, certainly spoke in opposition to the wishes of the Senate in proposing that Pompey should have the command of the Mithridatic War, but his views were not democratic. It has been said that this was done because Pompey could help him to the consulship. To me it seems that he had already declared to himself that among leading men in Rome Pompey was the one to whom the Republic would look with the most security as a bulwark, and that on that account he had resolved to bind himself to Pompey in some political marriage. Be that as it may, there was no tampering with democracy in the speech Prolegue Manilia. Of all the extanturations made by him before his consulship, the attentive reader will sympathize the least with that of Fontais. After his scathing onslaught on veris for provincial plunder, he defended the plunder of the Gauls, and held up the suffering allies of Rome to ridicule as being hardly entitled to good government. This he did simply as an advocate, without political motive of any kind, in the days in which he was supposed to be currying favour with democracy. And by private friendship, looking forward probably to some friendly office in return, as was customary. It was thus that afterward he defended Antony, his colleague in the consulship, whom he knew to have been a corrupt governor. Outronius had been a party to catalyne conspiracy, and Outronius had been Cicero's school-fellow. But Cicero, for some reserved reason with which we are not acquainted, refused to plead for Outronius. There is, I maintain, no ground for suggesting that Cicero had shown by his speeches before his consulship any party adherence. The declaration which he had made after his consulship, in the speech for Sulla, that up to the time of catalyne's first conspiracy forensic duties had not allowed him to devote himself to party politics, is entitled to belief. We know, indeed, that it was so. As quaistor, as edile, and as praetor, he did not interfere in the political questions of Rome except in demanding justice from judges and purity from governors. When he became consul, then he became a politician, and after that there was certainly no vacillation in his views. Critics say that he surrendered himself to Caesar when Caesar became master. We shall come to that hereafter, but the accusation with which I am dealing now is that which charges him with having abandoned the democratic memories of his youth as soon as he had enveloped himself with the consular purple. There had been no democratic promises, and there was no change when he became consul. In truth Cicero's political convictions were the same from the beginning to the end of his career, with the consistency which is by no means usual in politicians. For though before his consulship he had not taken up politics as a business, he had entertained certain political views as do all men who live in public. From the first to the last we may best describe him by the word we now have in use as a conservative. The government of Rome had been an oligarchy for many years, though much had been done by the citizens to reduce the thralldom which an oligarchy is sure to exact. To that oligarchy Cicero was bound by all the convictions, by all the practices, and by all the prejudices of his life. When he speaks of a republic, he speaks of a people, and of an empire governed by an oligarchy. He speaks of a power to be kept in the hands of a few, for the benefit of the few and of the many if it might be, but at any rate in the hands of a few. That those few should be so select as to admit of no newcomers among them would probably have been a portion of his political creed had he not been himself a noble somo. As he was the first of his family to storm the barrier of the fortress, he had been forced to depend much on popular opinion, but not on that account had there been any dealings between him and democracy. That the empire should be governed according to the old oligarchical forms which had been in use for more than four centuries and had created the power of Rome, that was his political creed. That consuls, censors, and senators might go on to the end of time with no diminution of their dignity, but with great increase of justice and honour and truth among them, that was his political aspiration. They had made Rome what it was, and he knew and could imagine nothing better. And odious as an oligarchy is seen to be under the strong light of experience to which prolonged ages has subjected it, the aspiration on his part was noble. He has been wrongly accused of deserting that democracy with which he had flirted in his youth. There had been no democracy in his youth, though there had existed such a condition in the time of the Gracchi. There was none in his youth, and none in his age. That which has been wrongly called democracy was conspiracy. Not a conspiracy of Democrats, such as led to our Commonwealth, or to the American independence, or to the French Revolution, but conspiracy of a few nobles for the better assurance of the plunder and the power and the high places of the empire. Of any tendency toward democracy no man has been less justly accused than Cicero, unless it might be Caesar. To Caesar we must accord the merit of having seen that a continuation of the old oligarchical forms was impracticable. This Cicero did not see. He thought that the wounds inflicted by the degeneracy and profligacy of individuals were curable. It is attributed to Caesar that he conceived the grand idea of establishing general liberty under the sole dominion of one great and therefore beneficent ruler. I think he saw no farther than that he, by strategy, management, and courage, might become this ruler, whether beneficent or the reverse. But here I think that it becomes the writer, whether he be historian, biographer, or fill whatever meaner position he may in literature, to declare that no beneficence can accompany such a form of government. For all temporary sleekness, for metropolitan comfort and fatness, the bill has to be paid sooner or later in ignorance, poverty, and oppression. With an oligarchy there will be other, perhaps graver, faults, but with an oligarchy there will be salt, although it be among a few. There will be a Cicero, now and again, or at least a Cato. From the dead stagnant level of personal despotism there can be no rising to life till corruption paralyzes the hands of power and the fabric falls by its own decay. Of this no proof can be found in the world's history so manifest as that taught by the Roman Empire. I think it is made clear by a study of Cicero's life and works up to the period of his exile that an adhesion to the old forms of the Roman government was his guiding principle. I am sure that they who follow me to the close of his career will acknowledge that after his exile he lived for this principle and that he died for it. Res publica, the Republic, was the one word which to his ear contained a political charm. It was the chivaleth by which men were to be conjured into well-being. The word constitution is nearly as potent with us, but it is essential that the reader of Roman history and Roman biography should understand that the appellation had in it for old Roman ears a thoroughly conservative meaning. Among those who at Cicero's period dealt with politics in Rome, all of whom no doubt spoke of the Republic as the vessel of state which was to be defended by all persons, there were four classes. There were they who simply desired the plunder of the state, the Catilines, the Sulas of the day and the Antony's, men such as various had been and Fontaeus and Artronius. The other three can best be typified each by one man. There was Caesar, who knew that the Republic was gone past all hope. There was Cato, the dogmatical fool Cato, as Momsen calls him, perhaps with some lack of the historian's dignity, who was true to the Republic, who could not bend an inch and was thus as detrimental to any hope of reconstruction as a Catiline or a Caesar. Cicero was of the fourth class. Believing in the Republic intent on saving it imbued amid all his doubts with a conviction that if the Optimates or Bonny, the leading men of the party would be true to themselves, consuls, censors, and the Senate would still suffice to rule the world, but prepared to give and take with those who were opposed to him. It was his idea that political integrity should keep its own hands clean, but should wink at much dirt in the world at large. Nothing he saw could be done by catonic rigor. We can see now that Ciceroic compromises were and must have been equally ineffective. The patient was past cure. But in seeking the truth as to Cicero, we have to perceive that amid all his doubts, frequently in despondency, sometimes overwhelmed by the misery and hopelessness of his condition, he did hold fast by this idea to the end. The frequent expressions made to Atticus in opposition to this belief are to be taken as the murmurs of his mind at the moment, as you shall hear a man swear that all is gone and see him tear his hair, and shall yet know that there is a deep fund of hope within his bosom. It was the ingratitude of his political friends, his bonnie and his optimates, of Pompey as their head, which tried him the saurist. But he was always forgiving them, forgiving Pompey as the head of them, because he knew that were he to be severed from them, then the political world must be close to him altogether. Of Cicero's strength or Cicero's weakness, Pompey seems to have known nothing. He was no judge of men. Caesar measured him with a great approach to accuracy. Caesar knew him to be the best Roman of his day, one who, if he could be brought over to serve in Caesarean ranks, would be invaluable, because of his honesty, his eloquence, and his capability. But he knew him as one who must be silenced if he were not brought to serve on the Caesarean side. Such a man, however, might be silenced for a while, taught to perceive that his efforts were vain, and then brought into favour by further overtures and made of use. Personally he was pleasant to Caesar, who had taste enough to know that he was a man worthy of all personal dignity. But Caesar was not, I think, quite accurate in his estimation, having allowed himself to believe at the last that Cicero's energy on behalf of the Republic had been quelled.