Chapter V: Introduction: Cicero’s Letters (2)

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

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

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

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

II.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III.

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

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

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