Life of Cicero by Anthony Trollope

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In discussing the character of a man, there is no course of error so
fertile as the drawing of a hard and fast line. We are attracted by
salient points, and, seeing them clearly, we jump to conclusions, as
though there were a light-house on every point by which the nature of
the coast would certainly be shown to us. And so it will, if we accept
the light only for so much of the shore as it illumines. But to say
that a man is insincere because he has vacillated in this or the other
difficulty, that he is a coward because he has feared certain dangers,
that he is dishonest because he has swerved, that he is a liar because
an untrue word has been traced to him, is to suppose that you know all
the coast because one jutting headland has been defined to you. He who
so expresses himself on a man's character is either ignorant of human
nature, or is in search of stones with which to pelt his enemy. "He
has lied! He has lied!" How often in our own political contests do we
hear the cry with a note of triumph! And if he have, how often has
he told the truth? And if he have, how many are entitled by pure
innocence in that matter to throw a stone at him? And if he have, do
we not know how lies will come to the tongue of a man without thought
of lying? In his stoutest efforts after the truth a man may so express
himself that when afterward he is driven to compare his recent and his
former words, he shall hardly be able to say even to himself that he
has not lied. It is by the tenor of a man's whole life that we must
judge him, whether he be a liar or no.

To expect a man to be the same at sixty as he was at thirty, is to
suppose that the sun at noon shall be graced with the colors which
adorn its setting. And there are men whose intellects are set on so
fine a pivot that a variation in the breeze of the moment, which
coarser minds shall not feel, will carry them round with a rapidity
which baffles the common eye. The man who saw his duty clearly on this
side in the morning shall, before the evening come, recognize it on
the other; and then again, and again, and yet again the vane shall go
round. It may be that an instrument shall be too fine for our daily
uses. We do not want a clock to strike the minutes, or a glass to tell
the momentary changes in the atmosphere. It may be found that for the
work of the world, the coarse work--and no work is so coarse, though
none is so important, as that which falls commonly into the hands of
statesmen--instruments strong in texture, and by reason of their
rudeness not liable to sudden impressions, may be the best. That it is
which we mean when we declare that a scrupulous man is impractical in
politics. But the same man may, at various periods of his life, and
on various days at the same period, be scrupulous and unscrupulous,
impractical and practical, as the circumstances of the occasion may
affect him. At one moment the rale of simple honesty will prevail
with him. "Fiat justitia, ruat coelum." "Si fractus illabatur orbis
Impavidum ferient ruinae." At another he will see the necessity of a
compromise for the good of the many. He will tell himself that if the
best cannot be done, he must content himself with the next best.
He must shake hands with the imperfect, as the best way of lifting
himself up from a bad way toward a better. In obedience to his very
conscience he will temporize, and, finding no other way of achieving
good, will do even evil that good may come of it. "Rem si possis
recte; si non, quocunque modo rem." In judging of such a character as
this, a hard and fast line will certainly lead us astray. In judging
of Cicero, such a hard and fast line has too generally been used. He
was a man singularly sensitive to all influences. It must be admitted
that he was a vane, turning on a pivot finer than those on which
statesmen have generally been made to work. He had none of the fixed
purpose of Caesar, or the unflinching principle of Cato. They were men
cased in brass, whose feelings nothing could hurt. They suffered from
none of those inward flutterings of the heart, doubtful aspirations,
human longings, sharp sympathies, dreams of something better than
this world, fears of something worse, which make Cicero so like a
well-bred, polished gentleman of the present day. It is because he
has so little like a Roman that he is of all the Romans the most
attractive.

Still there may be doubt whether, with all the intricacies of his
character, his career was such as to justify a further biography at
this distance of time. "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?" asks
Hamlet, when he finds himself stirred by the passion thrown into the
bare recital of an old story by an itinerant player. What is Cicero to
us of the nineteenth century that we should care so much for him as to
read yet another book? Nevertheless, Hamlet was moved because the tale
was well told. There is matter in the earnestness, the pleasantness,
the patriotism, and the tragedy of the man's life to move a reader
still--if the story could only be written of him as it is felt! The
difficulty lies in that, and not in the nature of the story.

The period of Cicero's life was the very turning-point of civilization
and government in the history of the world. At that period of time the
world, as we know it, was Rome. Greece had sunk. The Macedonian Empire
had been destroyed. The kingdoms of the East--whether conquered,
or even when conquering, as was Parthia for awhile--were barbaric,
outside the circle of cultivation, and to be brought into it only
by the arms and influence of Rome. During Caesar's career Gaul was
conquered; and Britain, with what was known of Germany, supposed to
be partly conquered. The subjugation of Africa and Spain was all but
completed. Letters, too, had been or were being introduced. Cicero's
use of language was so perfect that it seems to us to have been almost
necessarily the result of a long established art of Latin literature.
But, in truth, he is the earliest of the prose writers of his country
with whose works we are familiar. Excepting Varro, who was born but
ten years before him, no earlier Latin prose writer has left more than
a name to us; and the one work by which Varro is at all known, the
De Re Rustica, was written after Cicero's death. Lucretius, whose
language we regard as almost archaic, so unlike is it to that of
Virgil or Horace, was born eight years after Cicero. In a great degree
Cicero formed the Latin language--or produced that manipulation of it
which has made it so graceful in prose, and so powerful a vehicle
of thought. That which he took from any Latin writer he took from
Terence.

And it was then, just then, that there arose in Rome that
unpremeditated change in its form of government which resulted in the
self-assumed dictatorship of Caesar, and the usurpation of the Empire
by Augustus. The old Rome had had kings. Then the name and the power
became odious--the name to all the citizens, no doubt, but the power
simply to the nobility, who grudged the supremacy of one man. The
kings were abolished, and an oligarchy was established under the name
of a Republic, with its annual magistrates--at first its two Consuls,
then its Praetors and others, and occasionally a Dictator, as some
current event demanded a concentration of temporary power in a single
hand for a certain purpose.

The Republic was no republic, as we understand the word; nor did it
ever become so, though their was always going on a perpetual struggle
to transfer the power from the nobles to the people, in which
something was always being given or pretended to be given to the
outside class. But so little was as yet understood of liberty that, as
each plebeian made his way up into high place and became one of the
magistrates of the State, he became also one of the oligarchical
faction. There was a continued contest, with a certain amount of good
faith on each side, on behalf of the so-called Republic--but still a
contest for power. This became so continued that a foreign war was at
times regarded as a blessing, because it concentrated the energies of
the State, which had been split and used by the two sections--by each
against the other. It is probably the case that the invasion of
the Gauls in earlier days, and, later on, the second Punic war,
threatening as they were in their incidents to the power of Rome,
provided the Republic with that vitality which kept it so long in
existence. Then came Marius, dominant on one side as a tribune of the
people, and Sylla, as aristocrat on the other, and the civil wars
between them, in which, as one prevailed or the other, Rome was
mastered. How Marius died, and Sylla reigned for three bloody, fatal
years, is outside the scope of our purpose--except in this, that
Cicero saw Sylla's proscriptions, and made his first essay into public
life hot with anger at the Dictator's tyranny.

It occurs to us as we read the history of Rome, beginning with the
early Consuls and going to the death of Caesar and of Cicero, and the
accomplished despotism of Augustus, that the Republic could not have
been saved by any efforts, and was in truth not worth the saving. We
are apt to think, judging from our own idea of liberty, that there was
so much of tyranny, so little of real freedom in the Roman form of
government, that it was not good enough to deserve our sympathies. But
it had been successful. It had made a great people, and had produced a
wide-spread civilization. Roman citizenship was to those outside the
one thing the most worthy to be obtained. That career which led the
great Romans up from the state of Quaestor to the Aedile's, Praetor's,
and Consul's chair, and thence to the rich reward of provincial
government, was held to be the highest then open to the ambition of
man. The Kings of Greece, and of the East, and of Africa were supposed
to be inferior in their very rank to a Roman Proconsul, and this
greatness was carried on with a semblance of liberty, and was
compatible with a belief in the majesty of the Roman citizen. When
Cicero began his work, Consuls, Praetors, Aediles, and Quaestors were
still chosen by the votes of the citizens. There was bribery,
no doubt, and intimidation, and a resort to those dirty arts of
canvassing with which we English have been so familiar; but in
Cicero's time the male free inhabitants of Rome did generally carry
the candidates to whom they attached themselves. The salt of their
republican theory was not as yet altogether washed out from their
practice.

The love of absolute liberty as it has been cultivated among modern
races did not exist in the time of Cicero. The idea never seems to
have reached even his bosom, human and humanitarian as were his
sympathies, that a man, as man, should be free. Half the inhabitants
of Rome were slaves, and the institution was so grafted in the life
of the time that it never occurred to a Roman that slaves, as a body,
should be manumitted. The slaves themselves, though they were not,
as have been the slaves whom we have seen, of a different color and
presumed inferior race, do not themselves seem to have entertained any
such idea. They were instigated now and again to servile wars,
but there was no rising in quest of freedom generally. Nor was it
repugnant to the Roman theory of liberty that the people whom they
dominated, though not subjected to slavery, should still be outside
the pale of civil freedom. That boon was to be reserved for the
Roman citizen, and for him only. It had become common to admit to
citizenship the inhabitants of other towns and further territories.
The glory was kept not altogether for Rome, but for Romans.

Thus, though the government was oligarchical, and the very essence
of freedom ignored, there was a something which stood in the name
of liberty, and could endear itself to a real patriot. With genuine
patriotism Cicero loved his country, and beginning his public life as
he did at the close of Sylla's tyranny, he was able to entertain
a dream that the old state of things might be restored and the
republican form of government maintained. There should still be two
Consuls in Rome, whose annual election would guard the State against
regal dominion. And there should, at the same time, be such
a continuance of power in the hands of the better class--the
"optimates," as he called them--as would preserve the city from
democracy and revolution. No man ever trusted more entirely to popular
opinion than Cicero, or was more anxious for aristocratic authority.
But neither in one direction nor the other did he look for personal
aggrandizement, beyond that which might come to him in accordance with
the law and in subjection to the old form of government.

It is because he was in truth patriotic, because his dreams of a
Republic were noble dreams, because he was intent on doing good in
public affairs, because he was anxious for the honor of Rome and of
Romans, not because he was or was not a "real power in the State" that
his memory is still worth recording. Added to this was the intellect
and the wit and erudition of the man, which were at any rate supreme.
And then, though we can now see that his efforts were doomed to
failure by the nature of the circumstances surrounding him, he was
so nearly successful, so often on the verge of success, that we are
exalted by the romance of his story into the region of personal
sympathy. As we are moved by the aspirations and sufferings of a hero
in a tragedy, so are we stirred by the efforts, the fortune, and at
last the fall of this man. There is a picturesqueness about the life
of Cicero which is wanting in the stories of Marius or Sylla, of
Pompey, or even of Caesar--a picturesqueness which is produced in
great part by these very doubtings which have been counted against him
as insincerity.

His hands were clean when the hands of all around him were defiled by
greed. How infinitely Cicero must have risen above his time when he
could have clean hands! A man in our days will keep himself clean from
leprosy because to be a leper is to be despised by those around him.
Advancing wisdom has taught us that such leprosy is bad, and public
opinion coerces us. There is something too, we must suppose, in the
lessons of Christianity. Or it may be that the man of our day, with
all these advantages, does not keep himself clean--that so many
go astray that public opinion shall almost seem to tremble in the
balance. Even with us this and that abomination becomes allowable
because so many do it. With the Romans, in the time of Cicero, greed,
feeding itself on usury, rapine, and dishonesty, was so fully the
recognized condition of life that its indulgence entailed no disgrace.
But Cicero, with eyes within him which saw farther than the eyes of
other men, perceived the baseness of the stain. It has been said also
of him that he was not altogether free from reproach. It has been
suggested that he accepted payment for his services as an advocate,
any such payment being illegal. The accusation is founded on the
knowledge that other advocates allowed themselves to be paid, and
on the belief that Cicero could not have lived as he did without an
income from that source. And then there is a story told of him that,
though he did much at a certain period of his life to repress the
usury, and to excite at the same time the enmity of a powerful friend,
he might have done more. As we go on, the stories of these things will
be told; but the very nature of the allegations against him prove how
high he soared in honesty above the manners of his day. In discussing
the character of the men, little is thought of the robberies of
Sylla, the borrowings of Caesar, the money-lending of Brutus, or the
accumulated wealth of Crassus. To plunder a province, to drive usury
to the verge of personal slavery, to accept bribes for perjured
judgment, to take illegal fees for services supposed to be gratuitous,
was so much the custom of the noble Romans that we hardly hate his
dishonest greed when displayed in its ordinary course. But because
Cicero's honesty was abnormal, we are first surprised, and then,
suspecting little deviations, rise up in wrath against him, because in
the midst of Roman profligacy he was not altogether a Puritan in his
money matters.

Cicero is known to us in three great capacities: as a statesman, an
advocate, and a man of letters. As the combination of such pursuits is
common in our own days, so also was it in his. Caesar added them all
to the great work of his life as a soldier. But it was given to Cicero
to take a part in all those political struggles, from the resignation
of Sylla to the first rising of the young Octavius, which were made on
behalf of the Republic, and were ended by its downfall. His political
life contains the story of the conversion of Rome from republican to
imperial rule; and Rome was then the world. Could there have been no
Augustus, no Nero, and then no Trajan, all Europe would have been
different. Cicero's efforts were put forth to prevent the coming of an
Augustus or a Nero, or the need of a Trajan; and as we read of them we
feel that, had success been possible, he would have succeeded.

As an advocate he was unsurpassed. From him came the feeling--whether
it be right or wrong--that a lawyer, in pleading for his client,
should give to that client's cause not only all his learning and
all his wit, but also all his sympathy. To me it is marvellous, and
interesting rather than beautiful, to see how completely Cicero can
put off his own identity and assume another's in any cause, whatever
it be, of which he has taken the charge. It must, however, be borne
in mind that in old Rome the distinction between speeches made in
political and in civil or criminal cases was not equally well marked
as with us, and also that the reader having the speeches which have
come down to us, whether of one nature or the other, presented to him
in the same volume, is apt to confuse the public and that which may,
perhaps, be called the private work of the man. In the speeches best
known to us Cicero was working as a public man for public objects, and
the ardor, I may say the fury, of his energy in the cause which he was
advocating was due to his public aspirations. The orations which
have come to us in three sets, some of them published only but never
spoken--those against Verres, against Catiline, and the Philippics
against Antony--were all of this nature, though the first concerned
the conduct of a criminal charge against one individual. Of these I
will speak in their turn; but I mention them here in order that I may,
if possible, induce the reader to begin his inquiry into Cicero's
character as an advocate with a just conception of the objects of the
man. He wished, no doubt, to shine, as does the barrister of to-day:
he wished to rise; he wished, if you will, to make his fortune, not by
the taking of fees, but by extending himself into higher influence by
the authority of his name. No doubt he undertook this and the other
case without reference to the truth or honesty of the cause, and, when
he did so, used all his energy for the bad, as he did for the good
cause. There seems to be special accusation made against him on his
head, as though, the very fact that he undertook his work without pay
threw upon him the additional obligation of undertaking no cause that
was not in itself upright. With us the advocate does this notoriously
for his fee. Cicero did it as notoriously in furtherance of some
political object of the moment, or in maintenance of a friendship
which was politically important. I say nothing against the modern
practice. This would not be the place for such an argument. Nor do I
say that, by rules of absolute right and wrong, Cicero was right; but
he was as right, at any rate, as the modern barrister. And in reaching
the high-minded conditions under which he worked, he had only the
light of his own genius to guide him. When compare the clothing of the
savage race with our own, their beads and woad and straw and fibres
with our own petticoats and pantaloons, we acknowledge the progress of
civilization and the growth of machinery. It is not a wonderful thing
to us that an African prince should not be as perfectly dressed as
a young man in Piccadilly. But, when we make a comparison of morals
between our own time and a period before Christ, we seem to forget
that more should be expected from us than from those who lived two
thousand years ago.

There are some of those pleadings, speeches made by Cicero on behalf
of or against an accused party, from which we may learn more of Roman
life than from any other source left to us. Much we may gather from
Terence, much from Horace, something from Juvenal. There is hardly,
indeed, a Latin author from which an attentive reader may not pick up
some detail of Roman customs. Cicero's letters are themselves very
prolific. But the pretty things of the poets are not quite facts, nor
are the bitter things of the satirist; and though a man's letters to
his friend may be true, such letters as come to us will have been the
products of the greater minds, and will have come from a small and
special class. I fear that the Newgate Calendar of the day would tell
us more of the ways of living then prevailing than the letters of Lady
Mary W. Montagu or of Horace Walpole. From the orations against
Verres we learn how the people of a province lived under the tyranny
inflicted upon them; and from those spoken in defence of Sextus
Amerinus and Aulus Cluentius, we gather something of the horrors
of Roman life--not in Rome, indeed, but within the limits of Roman
citizenship.

It is, however, as a man of letters that Cicero will be held in the
highest esteem. It has been his good-fortune to have a great part of
what he wrote preserved for future ages. His works have not perished,
as have those of his contemporaries, Varro and Hortensius. But this
has been due to two causes, which were independent of Fortune.
He himself believed in their value, and took measures for their
protection; and those who lived in his own time, and in the
immediately succeeding ages, entertained the same belief and took the
same care. Livy said that, to write Latin well, the writer should
write it like Cicero; and Quintilian, the first of Latin critics,
repeated to us what Livy had asserted.[27] There is a sweetness of
language about Cicero which runs into the very sound; so that passages
read aright would, by their very cadences, charm the ear of listeners
ignorant of the language. Eulogy never was so happy as his. Eulogy,
however, is tasteless in comparison with invective. Cicero's abuse is
awful. Let the reader curious in such matters turn to the diatribes
against Vatinius, one of Caesar's creatures, and to that against the
unfortunate Proconsul Piso; or to his attacks on Gabinius, who was
Consul together with Piso in the year of Cicero's banishment. There
are wonderful morsels in the philippics dealing with Antony's private
character; but the words which he uses against Gabinius and Piso beat
all that I know elsewhere in the science of invective. Junius could
not approach him; and even Macaulay, though he has, in certain
passages, been very bitter, has not allowed himself the latitude which
Roman taste and Roman manners permitted to Cicero.

It may, however, be said that the need of biographical memoirs as to a
man of letters is by no means in proportion to the excellence of
the work that he has achieved. Alexander is known but little to us,
because we know so little of the details of his life. Caesar is much
to us, because we have in truth been made acquainted with him. But
Shakspeare, of whose absolute doings we know almost nothing, would
not be nearer or dearer had he even had a Boswell to paint his daily
portrait. The man of letters is, in truth, ever writing his own
biography. What there is in his mind is being declared to the world at
large by himself; and if he can so write that the world at large
shall care to read what is written, no other memoir will, perhaps,
be necessary. For myself I have never regretted those details of
Shakspeare's life which a Boswell of the time might have given us. But
Cicero's personality as a man of letters seems especially to require
elucidation. His letters lose their chief charm if the character of
the man be not known, and the incidents of his life. His essays
on rhetoric--the written lessons which he has left on the art of
oratory--are a running commentary on his own career as an orator. Most
of his speeches require for their understanding a knowledge of
the circumstances of his life. The treatises which we know as his
Philosophy--works which have been most wrongly represented by being
grouped under that name--can only be read with advantage by the light
of his own experience. There are two separate classes of his so-called
Philosophy, in describing which the word philosophy, if it be used at
all, must be made to bear two different senses. He handles in one set
of treatises, not, I think, with his happiest efforts, the teaching
of the old Greek schools. Such are the Tusculan Disquisitions, the
Academics, and the De Finibus. From reading these, without reference
to the idiosyncrasies of the writer, the student would be led to
believe that Cicero himself was a philosopher after that sort. But he
was, in truth, the last of men to lend his ears

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