Chapter XV: Introduction: Cicero’s Letters (12)

Atticus, the friend of everybody, brought them together. It was about the year 700, a short time after Cicero’s return from exile, and in the midst of the troubles stirred up by Clodius, one of those vulgar agitators like Catiline, by whose means Caesar exhausted the strength of the Roman aristocracy that he might one day overcome it more easily. Cicero and Brutus occupied at that time very different positions in the republic. Cicero had filled the highest offices, and in them had rendered eminent services. His talents and his probity made him a valuable auxiliary for the aristocratical party to which he was attached; he was not without influence with the people whom his eloquence charmed; the provinces loved him, as they had seen him more than once defend their interests against greedy governors, and still more recently Italy had shown her affection by carrying him in triumph from Brundusium to Rome. Brutus was only thirty-one; a great part of his life had been passed away from Rome, at Athens, where we know that he devoted himself earnestly to the study of Greek philosophy, in Cyprus, and in the East, where he had followed Cato. He had not yet filled any of those offices which gave political importance, and he had to wait more than ten years before thinking of the consulship. Nevertheless Brutus was already an important person. In his early relations with Cicero, notwithstanding the distance that age and official position set between them, it is Cicero who makes the advances, who treats Brutus with consideration, and who seeks his friendship. One would say that this young man had given rise to singular expectations, and that it was already vaguely felt that he was destined for great things. While Cicero was in Cilicia, Atticus, pressing him to do justice to certain claims of Brutus, said: “It would be something if you only brought back his friendship from that province.”[321] And Cicero wrote of him at the same period: “He is already the first among the young men; he will soon be, I hope, the first in the city.”[322]

Everything in fact seemed to promise a splendid future for Brutus. A descendant of one of the most illustrious families of Rome, the nephew of Cato, the brother-in-law of Cassius and Lepidus, he had just married one of the daughters of Appius Claudius; another was already married to Pompey’s eldest son. By these alliances he was connected on all sides with the most influential families; but his character and manners distinguished him even more than his birth. His youth had been austere: he had studied philosophy, not merely as a _dilettante_ and as being a most useful discipline for the mind, but like a wise man who wishes to apply the lessons that it gives. He had returned from Athens with a great reputation for wisdom, which his virtuous and regular life confirmed. The admiration that his virtue excited was redoubled when his surroundings and the detestable examples he had resisted were considered. His mother Servilia had been the object of one of the most violent passions of Caesar, perhaps his first love. She always held a great sway over him, and took advantage of it to enrich herself after Pharsalia by getting the property of the conquered awarded to her. When she became old, and felt the powerful dictator slipping from her, in order to continue to rule him, she favoured, it is said, his amours with one of her daughters, the wife of Cassius. The daughter who had married Lepidus, had no better reputation, and Cicero tells a merry tale about her. A young Roman fop, C. Vedius, going through Cilicia with a great train, found it convenient to leave part of his baggage with one of his hosts. Unfortunately this host died; seals were put on the traveller’s baggage along with the rest, and to begin with, the portraits of five great ladies were found in it, and among them that of Brutus’ sister. “It must be admitted,” said Cicero, who did not lose an opportunity for a joke, “that the brother and the husband well deserve their names. The brother is very stupid (_brutus_) who perceives nothing, and the husband very easy-going (_lepidus_) who endures all without complaint.”[323] Such was the family of Brutus. As to his friends, there is no need to say much about them. We know how the rich young men of Rome lived at that time, and what Caelius, Curio, and Dolabella were. Among all this dissipation the rigid integrity of Brutus, his application to business, that disdain for pleasures, that taste for study to which his pale and serious countenance bore witness, stood out in higher relief by the contrast. Accordingly all eyes were fixed on this grave young man who resembled the others so little. In approaching him men could not help a feeling that seemed ill suited to his age: he inspired respect. Even those who were his elders and his superiors, Cicero and Caesar, notwithstanding their glory, Antony who resembled him so little, his opponents and his enemies, could not escape this impression in his presence. What is most surprising is, that it has survived him. It has been felt in presence of his memory as it was before his person; living and dead he has commanded respect. The official historians of the empire, Dio, who has so roughly handled Cicero, Velleius, the flatterer of Tiberius, all have respected Brutus. It seems that political rancour, the wish to flatter, and the violence of party have felt themselves disarmed before this austere figure.

While respecting him, they loved him. These are sentiments which do not always go together. Aristotle forbids us to represent heroes perfect in all points in the drama, lest they should not interest the public. Things go in ordinary life very much as they do on the stage; a sort of instinctive dread holds us aloof from irreproachable characters, and as it is usually by our common failings that we are drawn together, we feel very little attraction towards a man who has no failings, and are content to respect perfection at a distance. Yet it was not so in the case of Brutus, and Cicero could say of him with truth in one of the works that he addresses to him: “Who was ever more respected and loved than you?”[324] And yet this man without weaknesses was weak for those he loved. His mother and sisters had great influence over him, and made him commit more than one fault. He had many friends, and Cicero blames him for listening too readily to their advice; they were worthy men who understood nothing of public affairs; but Brutus was so much attached to them that he could not protect himself against them. His last sorrow at Philippi was to learn of the death of Flavius, his overseer of works, and that of Labeo, his lieutenant; he forgot his own self to weep for them. His last words before his death were to congratulate himself that none of his friends had betrayed him: this fidelity, so rare at that time, consoled his last moments. His legions also, although they were partly composed of old soldiers of Caesar, and he kept them tightly in hand, punishing plunderers and marauders, his very legions loved him and remained faithful to him. Even the people of Rome themselves, who were in general enemies of the cause he defended, showed their sympathy for him more than once. When Octavius proclaimed the assassins of Caesar public enemies, every one sadly bowed their heads when they heard the name of Brutus pronounced from the rostrum, and in the midst of the terrified senate which foresaw the proscriptions, a voice dared to declare that it would never condemn Brutus.

Cicero fell under the charm like the rest, but not without resistance. His friendship with Brutus was troubled and stormy, and, notwithstanding the general agreement of their opinions, violent dissensions arose between them more than once. Their disagreements are explained by the diversity of their characters. Never did two friends resemble each other less. There never was a man who seemed made for society more than Cicero; he brought into it all the qualities that are necessary for success, great flexibility of opinion, much toleration for others, allowance enough for himself, the talent of steering with ease between all parties, and a certain natural indulgence that made him understand and almost accept everything. Although he made bad verses, he had the temperament of a poet, a strange mobility of impression, an irritable sensitiveness, a supple, broad, and quick intellect which conceived promptly, but quickly abandoned its ideas, and passed from one extreme to another at a bound. He did not make a single serious resolution of which he did not repent the next day. Whenever he joined a party he was only quick and decided at the beginning, and gradually cooled down. Brutus, on the contrary, had not a quick intelligence: he usually hesitated at the commencement of an enterprise and did not decide at once. Slow and serious, he advanced step by step in everything, but, once resolved, he was so absorbed in his conviction that nothing could divert him: he isolated and concentrated himself in it, he excited and inflamed himself for it by reflection, and at last listened only to that inflexible logic that drove him to realize his purpose. He was one of those minds of which Saint-Simon says that they have an almost ferocious consistency. His obstinacy was the real source of his strength, and Caesar well understood it when he said of him: “All that he wills he means.”[325]

Two friends who resembled each other so little must naturally have clashed at every opportunity. Their first differences were literary. It was a custom then at the bar to divide an important case among several orators; each took the part best suited to his talents. Cicero, obliged to appear often before the judges, went with his friends and pupils, and gave out to them part of his work in order to be able to get through it. He was often satisfied with keeping the peroration for himself, in which his copious and impassioned eloquence was at home, and left them the rest. It was thus that Brutus pleaded at his side and under his direction. Brutus, however, was not of his school: a fanatical admirer of Demosthenes, whose statue he had placed among those of his ancestors, and nurtured on the study of the Attic masters, he sought to reproduce their graceful severity and vigorous strength. Tacitus says that his efforts were not always happy: by dint of avoiding ornament and pathos he was dull and cold, and by too eagerly seeking precision and strength he became dry and stiff. These faults were repugnant to Cicero, who always saw in this type of eloquence, which was founding a school, a criticism of his own, and tried by every means to convert Brutus; but he did not succeed, and on this point they never agreed. After the death of Caesar, and when something else than literary discussions was in question, Brutus sent his friend the speech he had just delivered in the Capitol, and begged him to correct it. Cicero took good care not to do so: he knew too well by experience the self-esteem of the literary man to run the risk of offending Brutus by trying to do better than he. Besides, the speech seemed to him very fine, and he wrote to Atticus that nothing could have been more graceful or better written. “Yet,” added he, “if I had had to make it I should have put more passion in it.”[326] Assuredly Brutus did not lack passion, but it was in him a secret and repressed flame that only touched the nearest, and he disliked to give the rein to those powerful emotions and that fiery pathos without which one cannot carry away the multitude.

He was not then a docile follower of Cicero, and we may add that neither was he an accommodating friend. He lacked pliancy in his relations with others, and his tone was always rough and abrupt. At the commencement of their intercourse, Cicero, accustomed to be treated with great respect even by the highest personages, thought the letters of this young man were curt and haughty, and felt hurt. This was not the only complaint he had to make of him. We know the great consular’s irritable, suspicious and exacting vanity; we know to what a degree he loved praise; he gave it to himself liberally and he expected it from others, and if they were slow in giving it he was not ashamed to ask for it. His friends were generally indulgent to this harmless failing, and did not wait to be invited by him to praise him. Brutus alone resisted; he prided himself on his candour, and spoke out what he thought. Accordingly Cicero often complains that he was chary of his praises; one day indeed he was seriously angry with him. It was a question of the great consulship, and of the discussion in consequence of which Lentulus and the accomplices of Catiline were executed. This was the most vigorous action of Cicero’s life, and he had a right to be proud of it, since he had paid for it with exile. In the narrative that Brutus gave of the events of this day he depreciated the part that Cicero had played in them to the advantage of his uncle Cato. He only praised him for having punished the conspiracy, without saying that he had discovered it, and contented himself with calling him an _excellent consul_. “Poor praise!” said Cicero angrily; “one would think it came from an enemy.”[327] But those were only small differences arising from wounded self-esteem, which might easily be made up; we must now mention a graver disagreement that deserves to be dwelt upon, for it suggests some serious reflections on the Roman society of that period.

In 702, that is to say, a short time after the commencement of his relations with Brutus, Cicero went out as proconsul to Cilicia. He had not sought this office, for he knew what difficulties he should find in it. He set out decided to do his duty, and he could not do it without bringing on his hands at the same time the patricians, his protectors, and the knights, his _protégés_ and clients. In fact, patricians and knights, usually enemies, agreed, with a singular unanimity, in plundering the provinces. The knights, farmers of the public revenue, had only one thought: to make a fortune in five years, the usual duration of their contract. Consequently they exacted without mercy the tax of a tenth on the productions of the soil, a twentieth on merchandise at the ports, the harbour dues, the tax on pasture-lands in the interior; in fact, all the tribute that Rome had imposed on the conquered nations. Their greed respected nothing. Livy wrote this terrible sentence about them: “Wherever the ‘publican’ penetrates, there is no more justice or liberty for any one.”[328] It was very difficult for the wretched cities to satisfy these insatiable financiers; almost everywhere the municipal coffers, ill administered by incompetent, or pillaged by dishonest magistrates, were empty. Money, however, had to be found at any price. Now, of whom could they borrow it, except of the bankers of Rome, who had been for a century the bankers of the whole world? It was to them therefore that they applied. Some were rich enough to draw from their private fortune money to lend to foreign cities, or sovereigns, like that Rabirius Postumus, for whom Cicero had pleaded, who furnished the king of Egypt with the money necessary to reconquer his kingdom. Others, in order to run less risk, formed financial companies, in which the most illustrious Romans invested their funds. Thus, Pompey had a share for a considerable sum in one of those joint-stock companies founded by Cluvius of Puteoli. All these money-lenders, whether private individuals or companies, knights or patricians, were very unscrupulous, and only advanced their money at enormous interest, generally 4 or 5 per cent. per month. Their difficulty consisted in getting paid. As it is only men who are quite ruined who accept these hard terms, the money lent on such high interest is always subject to risk. When the date of payment arrived the poor city was less than ever in a position to pay: it employed a thousand pettifogging tricks, spoke of complaining to the senate, and began by appealing to the proconsul. Unfortunately for it, the proconsul was usually an accomplice of its enemies, and took his share of their profits. The creditors who had secured his co-operation by paying him well, had then only to send into the province some freedman or agent who represented them; the proconsul placed the public forces at the service of private interests, gave this agent the title of his lieutenant, some soldiers, and full powers, and if the insolvent town did not quickly come to some satisfactory arrangement, it suffered the horrors of a siege and of official pillage in time of peace. The proconsul who refused to lend himself to these abuses, and who intended, according to Cicero’s expression, to prevent the provinces perishing, naturally aroused the anger of all those who lived by the ruin of the provinces. The knights, the nobles, who no longer got their money, became his deadly enemies. It is true he had the gratitude of his province, but this did not amount to much. It had been remarked that, in those Eastern countries “trained by a long servitude to loathsome flattery,”[329] the governors who received most adulation, and to whom they raised most statues were precisely those who had robbed the most, because they were the most dreaded. Cicero’s predecessor had completely ruined Cilicia: consequently they thought of building him a temple. These were some of the difficulties to which an upright governor exposed himself. Cicero extricated himself with honour. Seldom was a province so well administered as his under the Roman republic; but he only brought back from it some gratitude, little money, and many enemies, and very nearly quarrelled with Brutus.

Brutus, though we can scarcely believe it, had a hand in this traffic. He had lent money to Ariobarzanes, king of Armenia, one of those small princes that Rome charitably allowed to live, and to the town of Salamis in the island of Cyprus. At the moment of Cicero’s departure for his province, Atticus, who himself, as we know, did not despise this species of gain, recommended these two affairs to him very warmly; but Brutus had invested his money badly, and it was not possible for Cicero to get him repaid. Ariobarzanes had many creditors and paid none. “I cannot imagine,” said Cicero, “any one poorer than this king, and anything more miserable than this kingdom.”[330] Nothing could be got from him. As to the business of Salamis, it was from the first still graver. Brutus had not dared, at the beginning, to acknowledge that he was directly interested in it, the usury was so enormous and the circumstances so scandalous. A certain Scaptius, a friend of Brutus, had lent a large sum to the inhabitants of Salamis at 4 per cent. per month. As they could not repay it he had, according to custom, obtained from Appius, Cicero’s predecessor, a company of cavalry, with which he held the senate of Salamis so closely besieged that five senators had died of hunger. On learning of this conduct Cicero was shocked, and hastened to recall the soldiers of whom such bad use had been made. He only thought he was hurting a _protégé_ of Brutus; but as the affair took a more serious turn, Brutus showed his hand more openly, so that Cicero might show himself more accommodating in arranging matters. As he saw that he had no hope of being paid, except at a great reduction, he became quite offended, and decided to let it be known that Scaptius was only a man of straw, and that he himself was the real creditor of the Salaminians. Cicero’s astonishment when he learnt this will be shared by everybody, so much does Brutus’ action seem at variance with his whole conduct. Certainly no one could doubt his disinterestedness and honesty. Some years before, Cato had paid them a splendid tribute, when, not knowing whom to trust, so rare were men of honour, he had appointed him to collect the treasure of the king of Cyprus, and to carry it to Rome. Let us be assured then, that if Brutus conducted himself as he had done towards the Salaminians, it was because he thought he might legitimately do so. He followed the example of others, he yielded to an opinion that was universal around him. The provinces were still considered as conquered countries by the Romans of that time. They had been conquered too short a time for the remembrance of their defeat to be obliterated. It was supposed that they also had not forgotten it, which led to distrust of them; in any case it was remembered, and the conquerors always thought themselves armed with those terrible laws of war against which no one in antiquity had protested. The property of the vanquished belonging to the victor, far from blaming themselves for taking what they took, they thought they gave whatever they did not take, and perhaps at the bottom of their heart they thought they were generous in leaving them anything. The provinces were regarded as the domains and property of the Roman people (_praedia, agri fructuarii populi Romani_), and they were treated accordingly. When they consented to spare them it was not through pity or affection, but through prudence, and in imitation of good landowners who take care not to exhaust their fields by over-cultivation. This was the meaning of the laws made under the republic to protect the provinces; humanity had a smaller share in them than well-considered interest, which, in exercising a certain restraint on the present, is mindful of the future. Evidently Brutus fully accepted this way of looking at the rights of the conqueror and the condition of the vanquished. In this we touch one of the greatest failings of this upright but narrow soul. Brought up in the selfish ideas of the Roman aristocracy, he had not sufficient breadth or elevation of mind to perceive their iniquity; he followed them without hesitation till the time that his natural mildness and humanity got the better of the recollections of his education, and the traditions of his class. The mode in which he behaved in the provinces that he governed shows that all his life there was a struggle between the integrity of his nature and these imperious prejudices. After having ruined the Salaminians by his usury, he governed Cisalpine Gaul with a disinterestedness that did him honour, and while he had made himself detested in the island of Cyprus, the remembrance of his beneficent administration was preserved in Milan even to the time of Augustus. The same contrast is found in the last campaign; he wept with grief at seeing the inhabitants of Xanthus persist in destroying their city, and on the eve of Philippi he promised his soldiers the pillage of Thessalonica and Lacedaemon. This is the single grave fault that Plutarch finds to censure in his whole life; it was the last awakening of an inveterate prejudice of which he could never get rid notwithstanding his uprightness of mind, and which shows the sway that the society in which his birth had placed him, exercised over him to the last.

Yet this influence was not felt then by everybody. Cicero, who, being a “new man,” could more easily protect himself against the tyranny of tradition, had always shown more humanity towards the provinces, and blamed the scandalous gains that were drawn from them. In a letter to his brother he boldly proclaimed this principle,[331] then altogether new, that they must not be governed in the exclusive interest of the Roman people, but also in their own interest, and in such a manner as to give them the greatest amount of happiness and well-being that was possible. This is what he tried to do in Cilicia: accordingly he was very much hurt by the action of Brutus, and flatly refused to have anything to do with it, although Atticus, whose conscience was more elastic, warmly begged him to do so. “I am sorry,” he replied, “that I am not able to please Brutus, and still more so to find him so different from what I had thought him.”[332] “If he condemns me,” he said elsewhere, “I do not want such friends. At least I am certain that his uncle Cato will not condemn me.”[333]

These were bitter words, and their friendship would no doubt have suffered much from these disputes if the grave events which supervened had not drawn them together again. Cicero had scarcely returned to Italy when the civil war, so long foreseen, broke out. Private differences had to disappear before this great conflict. Besides, Cicero and Brutus were united by a singular community of feelings. Both had gone to Pompey’s camp, but both had done so without enthusiasm or eagerness, as a sacrifice demanded by duty. Brutus loved Caesar, who showed him a paternal affection on all occasions, and moreover he detested Pompey. Besides the fact that his pompous vanity displeased him, he could not forgive the death of his father, killed during the civil wars of Sulla. Yet, in this public danger, he forgot his personal likings and hatreds, and went to Thessaly, where the consuls and senate were already. We know that he made himself remarked for his zeal in Pompey’s camp;[334] many things however happened there which must have displeased him, and no doubt he thought that too many personal rancours and ambitions were mixed up with the cause of liberty which alone he wished to defend. This also displeased his friend Cicero and his brother-in-law Cassius, and these two last, indignant at the language of those madmen who surrounded Pompey, resolved not to pursue the war to extremes as others wished to do. “I still remember,” Cicero wrote later to Cassius, “those familiar conversations in which, after long deliberation, we made up our minds to allow our action, if not the abstract justice of our cause, to be determined by the result of a single battle.”[335] We do not know whether Brutus was present at these conversations of his two friends; but it is certain that all three behaved in the same manner. Cicero, on the day after Pharsalia, refused the command of the republican army; Cassius hastened to hand over the fleet he commanded to Caesar; as to Brutus, he did his duty as a brave man during the battle; but, the battle over, he thought he had done enough, and went over to the conqueror, who welcomed him joyfully, took him apart in confidential conversation, and succeeded in obtaining some information about Pompey’s retreat. After this conversation Brutus was completely gained over; not only did he not go and rejoin the republicans who were fighting in Africa, but he followed Caesar to the conquest of Egypt and of Asia.

II.

Brutus was thirty-seven years old at the battle of Pharsalia. This was the age of political activity among the Romans. Usually a man had then just been quaestor or aedile; he might look forward to the praetorship and the consulship, and acquired a right to gain them by courageously contending in the Forum or the Curia. The brightest hope of every young man on entering public life was to obtain these high honours at the age appointed by law, the praetorship at forty and the consulship at forty-three, and nothing was thought to give greater distinction than to be able to say, “I was praetor or consul as soon as I had the right to be so (_meo anno_).” If by good luck, while a man held these offices, fortune favoured him by some considerable war that gave an opportunity of killing five thousand enemies, he obtained a triumph and had nothing more to wish for.

There is no doubt that Brutus had conceived this hope like the rest, and it is certain that his birth and his talents would have permitted him to realize it; Pharsalia upset all these projects. He was not precluded from honours, for he was the friend of him who distributed them; but these honours were now only empty titles, since one man had seized all real power. This man really aimed at being sole master, and admitted no one to share his authority. “He does not even consult his own friends,” says Cicero, “and only takes counsel of himself.”[336] Political life did not exist for the rest, and even those whom the new government employed felt time hang heavy on their hands, especially after the violent agitations of the preceding years. God, according to Virgil’s expression, gave leisure to everybody. Brutus employed this leisure by returning to the studies of his youth, which he had rather interrupted than forsaken. To return to them was to draw still nearer to Cicero.

He had not indeed forgotten him; while following Caesar in Asia he had learnt that his friend, having retired to Brundusium, suffered at once from the threats of the Caesarians, who did not forgive his going to Pharsalia, and from the ill-will of the Pompeians, who blamed him for having returned too quickly. Amidst all this irritation, Cicero, who, as we know, had not much energy, was very downcast. Brutus wrote to him to encourage him. “You have performed actions,” said he, “which will speak of you, notwithstanding your silence, which will live after your death, and which, by the safety of the state, if the state is saved, by its loss, if it is not saved, will for ever bear witness in favour of your political conduct.”[337] Cicero says that in reading this letter he seemed to recover from a long illness, and to open his eyes to the light. When Brutus returned to Rome, their intercourse became more frequent. Knowing each other better they appreciated each other more. Cicero, whose imagination was so lively, whose heart was so youthful, in spite of his sixty years, became entirely enamoured of Brutus. This constant communication with a mind so inquiring and a soul so upright, reanimated and revived his talents. His friend always holds a large place in the fine works that he published at that time, which succeeded each other so rapidly. We see that his heart is full of him, he speaks of him as often as he can, he is never weary of praising him, he wishes to please him before everything; one would almost say that he cares only for the praises and friendship of Brutus.

It was the study of philosophy that united them above all. Both loved and cultivated it from their youth, both seemed to love it more and to cultivate it more ardently when the concentration of the government in one hand had removed them from public life. Cicero, who could not accustom himself to repose, turned all his activity towards it. “Greece is getting old,” he said to his pupils and friends, “let us snatch from her her philosophical glory;”[338] and he at once set about the work. He groped about for some time, and did not immediately hit upon the philosophy that was suitable to his fellow-countrymen. He had been tempted for a moment to direct their attention towards those subtle metaphysical questions that were repugnant to the practical good sense of the Romans. He had translated the _Timaeus_, that is to say, the most obscure thing in Plato’s philosophy; but he quickly perceived that he was mistaken, and hastened to quit that path in which he would have walked alone. In the Tusculan Disputations he returned to questions of applied morality and did not leave them again. The diverse characters of the passions, the real nature of virtue, the relative rank of duties, all those problems that a virtuous man proposes to himself during his life; above all, that before which he so often draws back, but which always returns with a terrible persistency and troubles at times the most gross and earthly souls, the future after death; this is what he studies without tricks of dialectical skill, without the prejudices of a school, without a preconceived system, and with less anxiety to discover new ideas than to accept practical and sensible principles wherever he found them. Such is the character of Roman philosophy, of which we must be careful not to speak ill, for it has played a great part in the world, and it is through it that the wisdom of the Greeks, rendered at once more solid and yet more clear, has come down to the nations of the West. This philosophy dates from Pharsalia, like the empire, and owes much to the victory of Caesar, who, by suppressing political life, forced inquiring minds to seek other subjects for their activity. Welcomed at first, with enthusiasm, by all minds unoccupied and ill at ease, it became more and more popular in proportion as the authority of the emperors became more oppressive. To the absolute authority that the government exercised over external actions they were glad to oppose the entire self-possession that philosophy gives; to study oneself, to withdraw into oneself was to escape on one side from the tyranny of the master, and in seeking to know oneself the ground to which his power had no access seemed to be enlarged. The emperors understood this well; and were the mortal enemies of a science that was so bold as to limit their authority. Along with history, which recalled disagreeable memories, it soon fell under their suspicion; they were two names, said Tacitus, unpleasing to princes, _ingrata principibus nomina_.

I have not here to show why all the philosophical works composed at the end of the republic or under the empire have a much greater importance than the books we write now on the same subjects: this has been too well told already for me to have need to return to it.[339] It is certain that during that time when religion was confined to ritual, when its books only contained collections of formulae and the minute regulations of observances, and when it did not go beyond teaching its adepts the science of sacrificing according to the rites, philosophy alone could give to all virtuous and troubled souls which were tossed about without definite aim and were desirous of finding one, that teaching of which they had need. We must not forget, then, when we read an ethical treatise of that time, that it was written not only for lettered idlers who are delighted with fine discourses, but for those whom Lucretius represents as groping after the way of life; we must remind ourselves that these precepts have been practised, that theories became rules of conduct, and that, so to say, all this ethical theory was once alive. Let us take for example the first Tusculan Disputation: Cicero wishes to prove in it that death is not an evil. What a trite remark in appearance, and how difficult it is not to regard all this elaborated treatment as an oratorical exercise and an essay for the schools! It is nothing of the kind however, and the generation for whom it was written found something else in it. Men read it on the eve of the proscriptions to renew their strength, and came from their reading firmer, more resolute, better prepared to support the great misfortunes that they foresaw. Atticus himself, the egotist Atticus, so far removed from risking his life for anybody, found in them the source of an unusual energy. “You tell me,” Cicero writes to him, “that my Tusculans give you courage: so much the better. There is no surer and speedier resource against circumstances than that which I indicate.”[340] This resource was death. How many people accordingly availed themselves of it! Never has a more incredible contempt of life been seen, never has death caused less fear. Since Cato, suicide became a contagion, a frenzy. The vanquished, Juba, Petreius, Scipio, know no other way of escaping the conqueror. Laterensis kills himself through regret when he sees his friend Lepidus betray the republic; Scapula, who can no longer hold out in Cordova, has a funeral pyre constructed, and burns himself alive; when Decimus Brutus, a fugitive, hesitates to choose this heroic remedy, his friend Blasius kills himself before him in order to set him an example. It was a veritable delirium at Philippi. Even those who might have escaped did not seek to survive their defeat. Quintilius Varus put on the insignia of his rank, and had himself killed by a slave; Labeo dug his own grave and killed himself on its brink; Cato the younger, for fear of being spared, threw away his helmet and shouted his name; Cassius was impatient, and killed himself too soon; Brutus closes the list by a suicide, astonishing by its calmness and dignity. What a strange and frightful commentary on the Tusculans, and how clearly this general truth, thus put in practice by so many men of spirit, ceases to be a mere platitude!

We must study in the same spirit the very short fragments that remain of the philosophical works of Brutus. The general thoughts that we find in them will no longer appear insignificant and vague when we think that he who formulated them also intended to put them in practice in his life. The most celebrated of all these writings of Brutus, the treatise _On Virtue_, was addressed to Cicero, and is worthy of them both. It was a fine work that was especially pleasing because it was felt that the writer was thoroughly convinced of all that he said.[341] An important passage preserved by Seneca survives. In this passage Brutus relates that he had just seen M. Marcellus at Mitylene, the same whom Caesar pardoned later at the request of Cicero. He found him employed in serious studies, easily forgetting Rome and its pleasures, and enjoying in this tranquillity and leisure a happiness that he had never known before. “When I had to leave him,” says he, “and saw that I was going away without him, it seemed to me that it was I who was going into exile, and not Marcellus, who remained there.”[342] From this example he concludes that a man must not complain of being exiled since he can carry all his virtue with him. The moral of the book was that to live happily one need not go outside of oneself. This is another truism, if you like; but, in trying to conform his whole life to this maxim, Brutus made it a living truth. It was not a philosophical thesis that he developed, but a rule of conduct that he proposed to others and took for himself. He was early accustomed to commune with his own thoughts, and to place in this his pleasures and pains. Thence came that freedom of mind that he preserved in the gravest affairs, that contempt for outward things that all his contemporaries remarked, and the ease with which he detached himself from them. On the eve of Pharsalia, when every one was restless and uneasy, he was tranquilly reading Polybius and taking notes while awaiting the moment of combat. After the Ides of March, in the midst of the excitement and fears of his friends, he alone preserved a constant serenity that rather annoyed Cicero. Driven away from Rome and threatened by Caesar’s veterans, he consoled himself for everything by saying: “There is nothing better than to rest upon the memory of one’s good actions, and not to busy oneself with events or men.”[343] This capacity for abstraction from outward things and this self-sufficingness are certainly valuable qualities in a man of reflection and study: it is the ideal that a philosopher proposes to himself; but is it not a danger and a fault in a man of action and a politician? Is it right for a man to hold himself aloof from the opinions of others when the success of the things he undertakes depends upon their opinions? Under pretence of listening to one’s conscience, and resolutely following it, ought a man to take no account of circumstances, and risk himself heedlessly in useless adventures? Indeed, by wishing to keep aloof from the multitude, and preserve himself entirely from its passions, does he not risk the loss of the tie that binds him to it and becoming incapable of leading it? Appian, in the narrative that he gives of the last campaign of the Republican army, relates that Brutus was always self-possessed, and that he kept himself almost aloof from the grave affairs that were discussed. He liked conversation and reading; he visited as a connoisseur the places they passed through, and made the people of the country talk to him: he was a philosopher in the midst of camps. Cassius, on the contrary, occupied solely with the war, never allowing himself to be turned aside, and, so to say, wholly intent upon that end, resembled a fighting gladiator.[344] I suspect that Brutus must have rather disdained that feverish activity entirely confined to ordinary duties, and that this _rôle_ of gladiator made him smile. He was wrong; success in human things belongs to the gladiator, and a man only succeeds by throwing his whole soul into them. As to those speculative men, wrapped up in themselves, who wish to keep outside of and above the passions of the day, they astonish the multitude but do not lead it; they may be sages, they make very bad party leaders.

And further, it is very possible that Brutus, if left to himself, would not have thought of becoming a party leader. He was not hostile to the new government, and Caesar had neglected no opportunity of attaching him to himself by granting him the pardon of some of the very much compromised Pompeians. On his return to Rome he confided to him the government of one of the finest provinces of the empire, Cisalpine Gaul. About the same time the news came of the defeat of the republican army at Thapsus, and the death of Cato. No doubt Brutus felt it very much. He himself wrote and persuaded Cicero to compose the eulogy of his uncle; but we know from Plutarch that he blamed him for refusing Caesar’s clemency. When Marcellus, who had just obtained his pardon, was assassinated near Athens, some persons affected to believe and to say that Caesar might well have been an accomplice in this crime. Brutus hastened to write, with a warmth that surprised Cicero, to exculpate him. He was at that time, then, quite under the spell of Caesar. We may add that he had taken a horror of civil war in Pompey’s camp. It had carried off some of his dearest friends, for instance Torquatus and Triarius, two young men of great promise, whose loss he bitterly regretted. In thinking of the disorders it had caused, and of the victims it had made, he no doubt said with his friend, the philosopher Favonius: “It is better to endure arbitrary power than to revive impious wars.”[345] How, then, did he allow himself to be drawn on to recommence them? By what clever conspiracy did his friends succeed in overcoming his repugnance, in arming him against a man he loved, in involving him in an enterprise that was to throw the world into confusion? This deserves to be related, and Cicero’s letters allow us to catch a glimpse of it.

III.

After Pharsalia, there was no want of malcontents. That great aristocracy that had governed the world so long, could not consider itself beaten after a single defeat. It was so much the more natural that it should wish to make a last effort, as it was well aware that, the first time, it had not fought under favourable conditions, and that, in uniting its cause to Pompey’s, it had placed itself in a bad position. Pompey inspired little more confidence in those who desired liberty than Caesar. It was known that he had a taste for extraordinary powers, and that he liked to concentrate all public authority in his hands. At the commencement of the civil war he had rejected the most just proposals with so much haughtiness, and shown so much ardour in precipitating the crisis, that he seemed rather to wish to get rid of a rival who hampered him than to come to the aid of the threatened republic. His friend Cicero tells us that when the insolence of his associates, and his own persistency in not taking advice from any one, were seen in his camp, it was suspected that a man who took counsel so ill before the battle would wish to make himself master after the victory. That is why so many good citizens, and Cicero among the chief, had hesitated so long to take his part; that is, above all, why intrepid men like Brutus had hastened to lay down their arms after the first defeat. It must be added that, if they were not perfectly satisfied about Pompey’s intentions, it was also possible they might be mistaken about Caesar’s projects. No one was ignorant that he wished for power; but what kind of power? Was it only one of those temporary dictatorships, necessary in free states after a period of anarchy, which suspend liberty but do not annihilate it? Was it a question of repeating the history of Marius and Sulla, whom the republic had survived? In strictness it might be thought so, and nothing prevents us supposing that several of Caesar’s officers, those especially who, when undeceived later, conspired against him, did not think so then.

But after Pharsalia there was no longer any means of preserving this illusion. Caesar did not demand an exceptional authority; he aspired to found a new government. Had he not been heard to say that “republic” was a word void of meaning, and that Sulla was a fool to have abdicated the dictatorship? His measures for regulating the exercise of the popular suffrage in his own interest, the choice that he had made in advance of consuls and praetors for several years running, the delivery of the public treasure and the administration of the revenue of the state by his freedmen and slaves, the union of all dignities in his own person, the censorship under the name of praefecture of morals, the perpetual dictatorship, which did not prevent him getting himself appointed consul every year; everything, in fine, in his laws and in his conduct indicated a definitive taking possession of power. Far from taking any of those precautions to hide the extent of his authority that Augustus employed later, he seemed to exhibit it with complacency, and without concerning himself about the enemies that his frankness might make him. On the contrary, by a sort of ironical scepticism and bold impertinence, that betrayed the great nobleman, he loved to shock the fanatical partisans of ancient usages. He smiled at seeing pontifs and augurs scared when he dared to deny the gods in full senate, and it was his amusement to disconcert those ceremonious old men, the superstitious guardians of ancient practices. Further, as he was a man of pleasure before all things, he loved power not only for the sake of exercising it, but also to enjoy its fruits; he was not contented with the reality of sovereign authority, he wished also for its outward signs, the splendour that surrounds it, the homage it exacts, the pomp that sets it off, and even the name that designates it. He knew well how much that title of king that he so ardently desired frightened the Romans; but his hardihood took pleasure in braving old prejudices at the same time that his candour no doubt thought it more honourable to give its real name to the power he exercised. The result of this conduct of Caesar was to dissipate all doubts. Thanks to it, illusion or misunderstanding was no longer possible. The question was now, not between two ambitious rivals, as at the time of Pharsalia, but between two opposite forms of government. Opinions, as sometimes happens, became clearly defined one by the other, and the intention of founding a monarchy, which Caesar openly avowed, brought about the creation of a great republican party.

How was it that in this party the boldest and most violent men formed the idea of uniting and organizing themselves? How, with growing confidence, did they come to form a plot against the life of the dictator? It is impossible to find this out exactly. All that we know is that the first idea of the plot had been formed at the same time in two quite opposite parties, among the vanquished of Pharsalia, and, what is more surprising, among Caesar’s generals themselves. These two conspiracies were probably distinct in origin, and each acted on its own account: while Cassius was thinking of killing Caesar on the banks of the Cydnus, Trebonius had been on the point of assassinating him at Narbonne. They finally united.

Every party begins by seeking a leader. If they had wished to continue the traditions of the preceding war, this leader was already at hand. Sextus, a son of Pompey, remained. He had escaped by a miracle from Pharsalia and Munda, and had survived all his family. Conquered, but not discouraged, he wandered in the mountains or along the shores, by turns an able partisan or a bold pirate, and the obstinate Pompeians united around him. But men no longer desired to be of a Pompeian party. They wished to have some one for chief who represented not merely a name but a principle, one who should represent the republic and liberty without any personal reservations. It was necessary that he should be in complete opposition to the government they were going to attack, by his life, his manners, and his character. He must be upright, because the power was corrupt, disinterested, in order to protest against the insatiable greed that surrounded Caesar, already illustrious, in order that the different elements of which the party was composed should give way to him, and still young, for they had need of a bold stroke. Now, there was only one man who united all these qualities, namely Brutus. Consequently, the eyes of every one were fixed on him. The public voice marked him out as the chief of the republican party while he was still the friend of Caesar. When the first conspirators went to all quarters seeking accomplices, they always received the same answer: “We will join you if Brutus will lead us.” Caesar himself, notwithstanding his confidence and his friendship, seemed sometimes to have a presentiment whence the danger would come to him. One day when they were trying to alarm him with the discontent and threats of Antony and Dolabella: “No,” he replied, “those debauchees are not to be feared; it is the thin and pale men.” He meant chiefly to indicate Brutus.