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Life of Cicero by Anthony Trollope

A >> Anthony Trollope >> Life of Cicero




The reader must bear in mind that I am now telling the story of
Catiline, and going back to a period of two years before Cicero's
Consulship, which was B.C. 63. How during that year Cicero
successfully defended Murena when Cato endeavored to rob him of his
coming Consulship, has been already told. It may be that Murena's
hands were no cleaner than those of Sulla and Autronius, and that
they lacked only the consular authority and forensic eloquence of the
advocate who defended Murena. At this time, when the two appointed
Consuls were rejected, Cicero had hardly as yet taken any part in
public politics. He had been Quaestor, Aedile, and Praetor, filling
those administrative offices to the best of his ability. He had, he
says, hardly heard of the first conspiracy.[189] That what he says is
true, is, I think, proved by the absence of all allusion to it in his
early letters, or in the speeches or fragments of speeches that are
extant. But that there was such a conspiracy we cannot doubt, nor that
the three men named, Catiline, Sulla, and Autronius, were leaders
in it. What would interest us, if only we could have the truth, is
whether Caesar and Crassus were joined in it.

It is necessary again to consider the condition of the Republic. To us
a conspiracy to subvert the government under which the conspirer lives
seems either a very terrible remedy for great evils, or an attempt to
do evil which all good men should oppose. We have the happy conspiracy
in which Washington became the military leader, and the French
Revolution, which, bloody as it was, succeeded in rescuing Frenchmen
from the condition of serfdom. At home we have our own conspiracy
against the Stuart royalty, which had also noble results. The Gracchi
had attempted to effect something of the same kind at Rome; but the
moral condition of the people had become so low that no real love of
liberty remained. Conspiracy! oh yes. As long as there was anything to
get, of course he who had not got it would conspire against him who
had. There had been conspiracies for and against Marius, for and
against Cinna, for and against Sulla. There was a grasping for
plunder, a thirst for power which meant luxury, a greed for blood
which grew from the hatred which such rivalry produced. These were the
motive causes for conspiracies; not whether Romans should be free
but whether a Sulla or a Cotta should be allowed to run riot in a
province.

Caesar at this time had not done much in the Roman world except
fall greatly into debt. Knowing, as we do know now, his immense
intellectual capacity, we cannot doubt but at the age he had now
reached, thirty-five, B.C. 65, he had considered deeply his prospects
in life. There is no reason for supposing that he had conceived the
idea of being a great soldier. That came to him by pure accident, some
years afterward. To be Quaestor, Praetor, and Consul, and catch what
was going, seems to have been the cause to him of having encountered
extraordinary debt. That he would have been a Verres, or a Fonteius,
or a Catiline, we certainly are not entitled to think. Over whatever
people he might have come to reign, and in whatever way he might have
procured his kingdom, he would have reigned with a far-seeing eye,
fixed upon future results. At this period he was looking out for a
way to advance himself. There were three men, all just six years his
senior, who had risen or were rising into great repute; they were
Pompey, Cicero, and Catiline. There were two who were noted for
having clean hands in the midst of all the dirt around; and they were
undoubtedly the first Romans of the day. Catiline was determined that
he too would be among the first Romans of the day; but his hands had
never been clean. Which was the better way for such a one as Caesar to
go?

To have had Pompey under his feet, or Cicero, must have then seemed
to Caesar to be impracticable, though the time came when he did, in
different ways, have his feet on both. With Catiline the chance of
success might be better. Crassus he had already compassed. Crassus
was like M. Poirier in the play--a man who, having become rich, then
allowed himself the luxury of an ambition. If Caesar joined the plot
we can well understand that Crassus should have gone with him. We have
all but sufficient authority for saying that it was so, but authority
insufficient for declaring it. That Sallust, in his short account of
the first conspiracy, should not have implicated Caesar was a matter
of course,[190] as he wrote altogether in Caesar's interest. That
Cicero should not have mentioned it is also quite intelligible. He
did not wish to pull down upon his ears the whole house of the
aristocracy. Throughout his career it was his object to maintain the
tenor of the law with what smallest breach of it might be possible;
but he was wise enough to know that when the laws were being broken on
every side he could not catch in his nets all those who broke them. He
had to pass over much; to make the best of the state of things as he
found them. It is not to be supposed that a conspirator against the
Republic would be horrible to him, as would be to us a traitor against
the Crown: there were too many of them for horror. If Caesar and
Crassus could be got to keep themselves quiet, he would be willing
enough not to have to add them to his list of enemies. Livy is
presumed to have told us that this conspiracy intended to restore the
ejected Consuls, and to kill the Consuls who had been established in
their place. But the book in which this was written is lost, and we
have only the Epitome, or heading of the book, of which we know that
it was not written by Livy.[191] Suetonius, who got his story not
improbably from Livy, tells us that Caesar was suspected of having
joined this conspiracy with Crassus;[192] and he goes on to say that
Cicero, writing subsequently to one Axius, declared that "Caesar had
attempted in his Consulship to accomplish the dominion which he had
intended to grasp in his Aedile-ship" the year in question. There is,
however, no such letter extant. Asconius, who, as I have said before,
wrote in the time of Tiberius, declares that Cicero in his lost
oration, "In toga candida," accused Crassus of having been the author
of the conspiracy. Such is the information we have; and if we elect to
believe that Caesar was then joined with Catiline, we must be guided
by our ideas of probability rather than by evidence.[193]

As I have said before, conspiracies had been very rife. To Caesar it
was no doubt becoming manifest that the Republic, with its oligarchs,
must fall. Subsequently it did fall, and he was--I will not say the
conspirator, nor will I judge the question by saying that he was the
traitor; but the man of power who, having the legions of the Republic
in his hands, used them against the Republic. I can well understand
that he should have joined such a conspiracy as this first of
Catiline, and then have backed out of it when he found he could not
trust those who were joined with him.

This conspiracy failed. One man omitted to give a signal at one time,
and another at another. The Senate was to have been slaughtered; the
two Consuls, Cotta and Torquatus, murdered, and the two ex-Consuls,
Sulla and Autronius, replaced. Though all the details seem to have
been known to the Consuls, Catiline was allowed to go free, nor were
any steps taken for the punishment of the conspirators.

The second conspiracy was attempted in the Consulship of Cicero,
B.C. 63, two years after the first. Catiline had struggled for the
Consulship, and had failed. Again there would be no province, no
plunder, no power. This interference, as it must have seemed to him,
with his peculiar privileges, had all come from Cicero. Cicero was the
busybody who was attempting to stop the order of things which had,
to his thinking, been specially ordained by all the gods for the
sustenance of one so well born, and at the same time so poor, as
himself. There was a vulgar meddling about it--all coming from
the violent virtue of a Consul whose father had been a nobody at
Arpinum--which was well calculated to drive Catiline into madness. So
he went to work and got together in Rome a body of men as discontented
and almost as nobly born as himself, and in the country north of Rome
an army of rebels, and began his operations with very little secrecy.
In all the story the most remarkable feature is the openness with
which many of the details of the conspiracy were carried on. The
existence of the rebel army was known; it was known that Catiline was
the leader; the causes of his disaffection were known; his comrades in
guilt were known When any special act was intended, such as might be
the murder of the Consul or the firing of the city, secret plots were
concocted in abundance. But the grand fact of a wide-spread conspiracy
could go naked in Rome, and not even a Cicero dare to meddle with it.

[Sidenote: B.C. 63, aetat. 44]

As to this second conspiracy, the conspiracy with which Sallust and
Cicero have made us so well acquainted, there is no sufficient ground
for asserting that Caesar was concerned in it.[194]

That he was greatly concerned in the treatment of the conspirators
there is no doubt. He had probably learned to appreciate the rage, the
madness, the impotence of Catiline at then propel worth. He too, I
think, must have looked upon Cicero as a meddling, over-virtuous
busybody; as did even Pompey when he returned from the East. What
practical use could there be in such a man at such a time--in one who
really believed in honesty, who thought of liberty and the Republic,
and imagined that he could set the world right by talking? Such must
have been the feeling of Caesar, who had both experience and foresight
to tell him that Rome wanted and must have a master. He probably had
patriotism enough to feel that he, if he could acquire the mastership,
would do something beyond robbery--would not satisfy himself with
cutting the throats of all his enemies, and feeding his
supporters with the property of his opponents. But Cicero was
impracticable--unless, indeed, he could be so flattered as to be made
useful. It was thus, I think, that Caesar regarded Cicero, and thus
that he induced Pompey to regard him. But now, in the year of his
Consulship, Cicero had really talked himself into power, and for this
year his virtue must be allowed to have its full way.

He did so much in this year, was so really efficacious in restraining
for a time the greed and violence of the aristocracy, that it is not
surprising that he was taught to believe in himself. There were, too,
enough of others anxious for the Republic to bolster him up in his own
belief. There was that Cornelius in whose defence Cicero made the two
great speeches which have been unfortunately lost, and there was Cato,
and up to this tune there was Pompey, as Cicero thought. Cicero, till
he found himself candidate for the Consulship, had contented himself
with undertaking separate cases, in which, no doubt, politics were
concerned, but which were not exclusively political. He had advocated
the employment of Pompey in the East, and had defended Cornelius.
He was well acquainted with the history of the Republic; but he had
probably never asked himself the question whether it was in mortal
peril, and if so, whether it might possibly be saved. In his
Consulship he did do so; and, seeing less of the Republic than we can
see now, told himself that it was possible.

The stories told to us of Catiline's conspiracy by Sallust and by
Cicero are so little conflicting that we can trust them both. Trusting
them both, we are justified in believing that we know the truth. We
are here concerned only with the part which Cicero took. Nothing, I
think, which Cicero says is contradicted by Sallust, though of much
that Cicero certainly did Sallust is silent. Sallust damns him, but
only by faint praise. We may, therefore, take the account of the plot
as given by Cicero himself as verified: indeed, I am not aware that
any of Cicero's facts have been questioned.

Sallust declares that Catiline's attempt was popular in Rome
generally.[195] This, I think, must be taken as showing simply that
revolution and conspiracy were in themselves popular: that, as a
condition of things around him such as existed in Rome, a plotter of
state plots should be able to collect a body of followers, was a thing
of course; that there were many citizens who would not work, and who
expected to live in luxury on public or private plunder, is certain.
When the conspiracy was first announced in the Senate, Catiline had
an army collected; but we have no proof that the hearts of the
inhabitants of Rome generally were with the conspirators. On the
other hand, we have proof, in the unparalleled devotion shown by the
citizens to Cicero after the conspiracy was quelled, that their hearts
were with him. The populace, fond of change, liked a disturbance; but
there is nothing to show that Catiline was ever beloved as had been
the Gracchi, and other tribunes of the people who came after them.

Catiline, in the autumn of the year B.C. 63, had arranged the outside
circumstances of his conspiracy, knowing that he would, for the third
time, be unsuccessful in his canvass for the Consulship. That Cicero
with other Senators should be murdered seems to have been their first
object, and that then the Consulship should be seized by force. On the
21st of October Cicero made his first report to the Senate as to the
conspiracy, and called upon Catiline for his answer. It was then that
Catiline made his famous reply: "That the Republic had two bodies, of
which one was weak and had a bad head"--meaning the aristocracy, with
Cicero as its chief--"and the other strong, but without any head,"
meaning the people; "but that as for himself, so well had the
people deserved of him, that as long as he lived a head should be
forth-coming."[196] Then, at that sitting, the Senate decreed, in the
usual formula, "That the Consuls were to take care that the Republic
did not suffer.[197] On the 22d of October, the new Consuls, Silanus
and Murena, were elected. On the 23d, Catiline was regularly accused
of conspiracy by Paulus Lepidus, a young nobleman, in conformity
with a law which had been enacted fifty-five years earlier, "de vi
publica," as to violence applied to the State. Two days afterward it
was officially reported that Manlius--or Mallius, as he seems to have
been generally called--Catiline's lieutenant, had openly taken up arms
in Etruria. The 27th had been fixed by the conspirators for the murder
of Cicero and the other Senators. That all this was to be, and was
so arranged by Catiline, had been declared in the Senate by Cicero
himself on that day when Catiline told them of the two bodies and the
two heads. Cicero, with his intelligence, ingenuity, and industry, had
learned every detail. There was one Curius among the conspirators, a
fair specimen of the young Roman nobleman of the day, who told it all
to his mistress Fulvia, and she carried the information to the Consul.
It is all narrated with fair dramatic accuracy in Ben Jonson's dull
play, though he has attributed to Caesar a share in the plot, for
doing which he had no authority. Cicero, on that sitting in the
Senate, had been specially anxious to make Catiline understand that he
knew privately every circumstance of the plot. Throughout the whole
conspiracy his object was not to take Catiline, but to drive him out
of Rome. If the people could be stirred up to kill him in their wrath,
that might be well; in that way there might be an end of all the
trouble. But if that did not come to pass, then it would be best to
make the city unbearable to the conspirators. If they could be
driven out, they must either take themselves to foreign parts and
be dispersed, or must else fight and assuredly be conquered. Cicero
himself was never blood-thirsty, but the necessity was strong upon him
of ridding the Republic from these blood-thirsty men.

The scheme for destroying Cicero and the Senators on the 27th of
October had proved abortive. On the 6th of the next month a meeting
was held in the house of one Marcus Porcius Laeca, at which a plot was
arranged for the killing of Cicero the next day--for the killing of
Cicero alone--he having been by this time found to be the one great
obstacle in their path. Two knights were told off for the service,
named Vargunteius and Cornelius. These, after the Roman fashion, were
to make their way early on the following morning into the Consul's
bedroom for the ostensible purpose of paying him their morning
compliments, but, when there, they were to slay him. All this,
however, was told to Cicero, and the two knights, when they came, were
refused admittance. If Cicero had been a man given to fear, as has
been said of him, he must have passed a wretched life at this period.
As far as I can judge of his words and doings throughout his life, he
was not harassed by constitutional timidity. He feared to disgrace his
name, to lower his authority, to become small in the eyes of men, to
make political mistakes, to do that which might turn against him. In
much of this there was a falling off from that dignity which, if we do
not often find it in a man, we can all of us imagine; but of personal
dread as to his own skin, as to his own life, there was very little.
At this time, when, as he knew well, many men with many weapons in
their hands, men who were altogether unscrupulous, were in search for
his blood he never seems to have trembled.

But all Rome trembled--even according to Sallust. I have already shown
how he declares in one part of his narrative that the common people
as a body were with Catiline, and have attempted to explain what was
meant by that expression. In another, in an earlier chapter, he says
"that the State," meaning the city, "was disturbed by all this, and
its appearance changed.[198] Instead of the joy and ease which had
lately prevailed, the effect of the long peace, a sudden sadness fell
upon every one." I quote the passage because that other passage has
been taken as proving the popularity of Catiline. There can, I think,
be no doubt that the population of Rome was, as a body, afraid of
Catiline. The city was to be burnt down, the Consuls and the Senate
were to be murdered, debts were to be wiped out, slaves were probably
to be encouraged against their masters. The "permota civitas" and
the "cuncta plebes," of which Sallust speaks, mean that all the
"householders" were disturbed, and that all the "roughs" were eager
with revolutionary hopes.

On the 8th of November, the day after that on which the Consul was to
have been murdered in his own house, he called a special meeting of
the Senate in the temple of Jupiter Stator. The Senate in Cicero's
time was convened according to expedience, or perhaps as to the
dignity of the occasion, in various temples. Of these none had a
higher reputation than that of the special Jupiter who is held to have
befriended Romulus in his fight with the Sabines. Here was launched
that thunderbolt of eloquence which all English school-boys have known
for its "Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra." Whether
it be from the awe which has come down to me from my earliest years,
mixed perhaps with something of dread for the great pedagogue who
first made the words to sound grandly in my ears, or whether true
critical judgment has since approved to me the real weight of the
words, they certainly do contain for my intelligence an expression of
almost divine indignation. Then there follows a string of questions,
which to translate would be vain, which to quote, for those who read
the language, is surely unnecessary. It is said to have been a fault
with Cicero that in his speeches he runs too much into that vein of
wrathful interrogation which undoubtedly palls upon us in English
oratory when frequent resort is made to it. It seems to be too easy,
and to contain too little of argument. It was this, probably, of which
his contemporaries complained when they declared him to be florid,
redundant, and Asiatic in his style.[199] This questioning runs
through nearly the whole speech, but the reader cannot fail to
acknowledge its efficacy in reference to the matter in hand. Catiline
was sitting there himself in the Senate, and the questions were for
the most part addressed to him. We can see him now, a man of large
frame, with bold, glaring eyes, looking in his wrath as though he were
hardly able to keep his hands from the Consul's throat, even there in
the Senate. Though he knew that this attack was to be made on him, he
had stalked into the temple and seated himself in a place of honor,
among the benches intended for those who had been Consuls. When there,
no one spoke to him, no one saluted him. The consular Senators shrunk
away, leaving their places of privilege. Even his brother-conspirators,
of whom many were present, did not dare to recognize him. Lentulus was
no doubt there, and Cethegus, and two of the Sullan family, and Cassius
Longinus, and Autronius, and Laeca, and Curins. All of them were or had
been conspirators in the same cause. Caesar was there too, and Crassus.
A fellow conspirator with Catiline would probably be a Senator. Cicero
knew them all. We cannot say that in this matter Caesar was guilty, but
Cicero, no doubt, felt that Caesar's heart was with Catiline. It was
his present task so to thunder with his eloquence that he should turn
these bitter enemies into seeming friends--to drive Catiline from out
of the midst of them, so that it should seem that he had been expelled
by those who were in truth his brother-conspirators; and this it was
that he did.

He declared the nature of the plot, and boldly said that, such being
the facts, Catiline deserved death. "If," he says, "I should order you
to be taken and killed, believe me I should be blamed rather for my
delay in doing so than for my cruelty."

He spoke throughout as though all the power were in his own hands,
either to strike or to forbear. But it was his object to drive him out
and not to kill him. "Go," he said; "that camp of yours and Mallius,
your lieutenant, are too long without you. Take your friends with you.
Take them all. Cleanse the city of your presence. When its walls are
between you and me then I shall feel myself secure. Among us here you
may no longer stir yourself. I will not have it--I will not endure it.
If I were to suffer you to be killed, your followers in the conspiracy
would remain here; but if you go out, as I desire you, this cesspool
of filth will drain itself off from out the city. Do you hesitate to
do at my command that which you would fain do yourself? The Consul
requires an enemy to depart from the city. Do you ask me whether you
are to go into exile? I do not order it; but if you ask my counsel, I
advise it." Exile was the severest punishment known by the Roman law,
as applicable to a citizen, and such a punishment it was in the power
of no Consul or other officer of state to inflict. Though he had taken
upon himself the duty of protecting the Republic, still he could not
condemn a citizen. It was to the moral effect of his words that he
must trust: "Non jubeo, sed si me consulis, suadeo." Catiline heard
him to the end, and then, muttering a curse, left the Senate, and went
out of the city. Sallust tells us that he threatened to extinguish, in
the midst of the general ruin he would create, the flames prepared
for his own destruction. Sallust, however, was not present on the
occasion, and the threat probably had been uttered at an earlier
period of Catiline's career. Cicero tells us expressly, in one of his
subsequent works, that Catiline was struck dumb.[200] Of this first
Catiline oration Sallust says, that "Marcus Tullius the Consul, either
fearing the presence of the man, or stirred to anger, made a brilliant
speech, very useful to the Republic."[201] This, coming from an enemy,
is stronger testimony to the truth of the story told by Cicero, than
would have been any vehement praise from the pen of a friend.

Catiline met some of his colleagues the same night. They were the very
men who as Senators had been present at his confusion, and to them he
declared his purpose of going. There was nothing to be done in the
city by him. The Consul was not to be reached. Catiline himself was
too closely watched for personal action. He would join the army at
Faesulae and then return and burn the city. His friends, Lentulus,
Cethegus, and the others, were to remain and be ready for fire and
slaughter as soon as Catiline with his army should appear before the
walls. He went, and Cicero had been so far successful.

But these men, Lentulus, Cethegus, and the other Senators, though they
had not dared to sit near Catiline in the Senate, or to speak a word
to him, went about their work zealously when evening had come. A
report was spread among the people that the Consul had taken upon
himself to drive a citizen into exile. Catiline, the ill-used
Catiline--Catiline, the friend of the people, had, they said, gone
to Marseilles in order that he might escape the fury of the tyrant
Consul. In this we see the jealousy of Romans as to the infliction of
any punishment by an individual officer on a citizen. It was with a
full knowledge of what was likely to come that Cicero had ironically
declared that he only advised the conspirator to go. The feeling was
so strong that on the next morning he found himself compelled to
address the people on the subject. Then was uttered the second
Catiline oration, which was spoken in the open air to the citizens at
large. Here too there are words, among those with which he began his
speech, almost as familiar to us as the "Quousque tandem"--"Abiit;
excessit; evasit; erupit!" This Catiline, says Cicero, this pest of
his country, raging in his madness, I have turned out of the city.
If you like it better, I have expelled him by my very words. "He has
departed. He has fled. He has gone out from among us. He has broken
away!" "I have made this conspiracy plain to you all, as I said I
would, unless indeed there may be some one here who does not believe
that the friends of Catiline will do the same as Catiline would have
done. But there is no time now for soft measures. We have to be
strong-handed. There is one thing I will do for these men. Let them
too go out, so that Catiline shall not pine for them. I will show them
the road. He has gone by the Via Aurelia. If they will hurry they
may catch him before night." He implies by this that the story about
Marseilles was false. Then he speaks with irony of himself as that
violent Consul who could drive citizens into exile by the very breath
of his mouth. "Ego vehemens ille consul qui verbo cives in exsilium
ejicio." So he goes on, in truth defending himself, but leading them
with him to take part in the accusation which he intends to bring
against the chief conspirators who remain in the city. If they too
will go, they may go unscathed; if they choose to remain, let them
look to themselves.

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Stephen King fan publishes Shining's Jack Torrance's novel
Three Women was first heard as a radio drama and then published as a poem. Robert Shaw explains his desire to stage the piece as it was intended

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A Stephen King fan has published an 80-page version of the book which novelist Jack Torrance obsessively writes during King's The Shining, where his descent into madness is revealed when his wife discovers that his work consists of just one phrase, endlessly repeated.

Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson in terrifying form in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film, is a frustrated writer who goes with his wife and son to spend the winter in the isolated Overlook Hotel in an attempt to get the novel he has always wanted to write started. But the hotel's grisly past and unquiet ghosts have their way with him, and his wife Wendy eventually finds that the manuscript he has been working on actually only contains the phrase "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy", typed over and over again.

Now New York artist Phil Buehler, who describes himself as "a big fan of Stanley Kubrick and Stephen King", has self-published a book credited to Torrance, repeating the phrase throughout but formatting each page differently, using the words to create different shapes from zigzags to spirals.

"The idea has probably been marinating for years, because I loved the movie and the Stephen King book," said Buehler. "I'd just finished my own obsessive art project [and] it was an idea I had over the Christmas holidays."

He said he decided to stick to type and formatting that could have been created on a typewriter, with the first ten pages duplicating shots of Torrance's work from the film. "I thought 'if he continues to get crazier, what would those pages look like?'" he said. "I hit writer's block about 60 pages in, and I had to get to 80 - that went on for about a week." His fiancée, who had neither read the book nor seen the film, became a little concerned about his actions. "I finally showed her the movie, and she realised I wasn't really losing it," said Buehler.

He's included a spoof review from the blog OverThinkingIt.com on the book's back jacket, which compares it to "the best of Beckett" in its "lack of forward momentum", and considers the struggles of the author, "heroically pitting himself against the Sisyphusean sentence". "It's that metatextual struggle of Man vs. Typewriter that gives this book its spellbinding power," the review says. "Some will dismiss it as simplistic; that's like dismissing a Pollack canvas as mere splatters of paint."

So far, Buehler says that around 1,000 people have viewed the book, for sale on Blurb.com for $8.95 in paperback, or $22.95 in hardback, and he's sold "a few" copies, with sales now starting to pick up steam. "A few people have asked me to sign it - they're looking it as a piece of art rather than a funny thing to give to a Kubrick fan," he said. "If you're not a Kubrick or King fan, you might not even get it."

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