Life of Cicero by Anthony Trollope

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"To those budge doctors of the stoic fur."

Cicero was a man thoroughly human in all his strength and all his
weakness. To sit apart from the world and be happy amid scorn,
poverty, and obscurity, with a mess of cabbage and a crust, absolutely
contented with abstract virtue, has probably been given to no man;
but of none has it been less within the reach than of Cicero. To
him ginger was always hot in the mouth, whether it was the spice of
politics, or of social delight, or of intellectual enterprise. When
in his deep sorrow at the death of his daughter, when for a time the
Republic was dead to him, and public and private life were equally
black, he craved employment. Then he took down his Greek manuscripts
and amused himself as best he might by writing this way or that. It
was a matter on which his intellect could work and his energies be
employed, though the theory of his life was in no way concerned in it.
Such was one class of his Philosophy. The other consisted of a code of
morals which he created for himself by his own convictions, formed on
the world around him, and which displayed itself in essays, such
as those De Officiis--on the duties of life; De Senectute, De
Amicitia--on old age and friendship, and the like, which were not only
intended for use, but are of use to any man or woman who will study
them up to this day. There are others, treatises on law and on
government and religion, which have all been lumped together, for the
misguidance of school-boys, under the name of Cicero's Philosophy. But
they, be they of one class or the other, require an understanding of
the man's character before they can be enjoyed.

For these reasons I think that there are incidents in the life, the
character, and the work of Cicero which ought to make his biography
interesting. His story is fraught with energy, with success, with
pathos, and with tragedy. And then it is the story of a man human as
men are now. No child of Rome ever better loved his country, but no
child of Rome was ever so little like a Roman. Arms and battles were
to him abominable, as they are to us. But arms and battles were the
delight of Romans. He was ridiculed in his own time, and has been
ridiculed ever since, for the alliterating twang of the line in which
he declared his feeling:

"Cedant arma togas; concedat laurea linguae."

But the thing said was thoroughly good, and the better because the
opinion was addressed to men among whom the glory of arms was still
in ascendant over the achievements of intellectual enterprise. The
greatest men have been those who have stepped out from the mass, and
gone beyond their time--seeing things, with eyesight almost divine,
which have hitherto been hidden from the crowd. Such was Columbus when
he made his way across the Western Ocean; such were Galileo and Bacon;
such was Pythagoras, if the ideas we have of him be at all true. Such
also was Cicero. It is not given to the age in which such men live
to know them. Could their age even recognize them, they would not
overstep their age as they do. Looking back at him now, we can see
how like a Christian was the man--so like, that in essentials we can
hardly see the difference. He could love another as himself--as nearly
as a man may do; and he taught such love as a doctrine.[28]

He believed in the existence of one supreme God.[29] He believed
that man would rise again and live forever in some heaven.[30] I am
conscious that I cannot much promote this view of Cicero's character
by quoting isolated passages from his works--words which taken alone
may be interpreted in one sense or another, and which should be read,
each with its context, before their due meaning can be understood. But
I may perhaps succeed in explaining to a reader what it is that I hope
to do in the following pages, and why it is that I undertake a work
which must be laborious, and for which many will think that there is
no remaining need.

I would not have it thought that, because I have so spoken of Cicero's
aspirations and convictions, I intend to put him forth as a faultless
personage in history. He was much too human to be perfect. Those who
love the cold attitude of indifference may sing of Cato as perfect.
Cicero was ambitious, and often unscrupulous in his ambition. He was
a loving husband and a loving father; but at the end of his life he
could quarrel with his old wife irrecoverably, and could idolize
his daughter, while he ruined his son by indulgence. He was very great
while he spoke of his country, which he did so often; but he was
almost as little when he spoke of himself--which he did as often.
In money-matters he was honest--for the times in which he lived,
wonderfully honest; but in words he was not always equally
trustworthy. He could flatter where he did not love. I admit that
it was so, though I will not admit without a protest that the word
insincere should be applied to him as describing his character
generally. He was so much more sincere than others that the protest is
needed. If a man stand but five feet eleven inches in his shoes, shall
he be called a pygmy? And yet to declare that he measures full six
feet would be untrue.

Cicero was a busybody. Were there anything to do, he wished to do it,
let it be what it might. "Cedant arma togae." If anything was written
on his heart, it was that. Yet he loved the idea of leading an army,
and panted for a military triumph. Letters and literary life were dear
to him, and yet he liked to think that he could live on equal terms
with the young bloods of Rome, such as Coelius. As far as I can judge,
he cared nothing for luxurious eating and drinking, and yet he wished
to be reckoned among the gormands and gourmets of his times. He was so
little like the "budge doctors of the stoic fur," of whom it was his
delight to write when he had nothing else to do, that he could not
bear any touch of adversity with equanimity. The stoic requires to be
hardened against "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." It is
his profession to be indifferent to the "whips and scorns of time." No
man was less hardened, or more subject to suffering from scorns
and whips. There be those who think proneness to such suffering is
unmanly, or that the sufferer should at any rate hide his agony.
Cicero did not. Whether of his glory or of his shame, whether of his
joy or of his sorrow, whether of his love or of his hatred, whether of
his hopes or of his despair, he spoke openly, as he did of all things.
It has not been the way of heroes, as we read of them; but it is the
way with men as we live with them.

What a man he would have been for London life! How he would have
enjoyed his club, picking up the news of the day from all lips, while
he seemed to give it to all ears! How popular he would have been at
the Carlton, and how men would have listened to him while every great
or little crisis was discussed! How supreme he would have sat on the
Treasury bench, or how unanswerable, how fatal, how joyous, when
attacking the Government from the opposite seats! How crowded would
have been his rack with invitations to dinner! How delighted would
have been the middle-aged countesses of the time to hold with him mild
intellectual flirtations--and the girls of the period, how proud to
get his autograph, how much prouder to have touched the lips of the
great orator with theirs! How the pages of the magazines would have
run over with little essays from his pen! "Have you seen our Cicero's
paper on agriculture? That lucky fellow, Editor--, got him to do it
last month!" "Of course you have read Cicero's article on the soul.
The bishops don't know which way to turn." "So the political article
in the _Quarterly_ is Cicero's?" "Of course you know the art-criticism
in the _Times_ this year is Tully's doing?" But that would probably be
a bounce. And then what letters he would write! With the penny-post
instead of travelling messengers at his command, and pen instead of
wax and sticks, or perhaps with an instrument-writer and a private
secretary, he would have answered all questions and solved all
difficulties. He would have so abounded with intellectual fertility
that men would not have known whether most to admire his powers of
expression or to deprecate his want of reticence.

There will necessarily be much to be said of Cicero's writings in the
following pages, as it is my object to delineate the literary man as
well as the politician. In doing this, there arises a difficulty as to
the sequence in which his works should be taken. It will hardly suit
the purpose in view to speak of them all either chronologically or
separately as to their subjects. The speeches and the letters clearly
require the former treatment as applying each to the very moment of
time at which they were either spoken or written. His treatises,
whether on rhetoric or on the Greek philosophy, or on government,
or on morals, can best be taken apart as belonging in a very small
degree, if at all, to the period in which they were written. I will
therefore endeavor to introduce the orations and letters as the
periods may suit, and to treat of his essays afterward by themselves.

A few words I must say as to the Roman names I have used in my
narrative. There is a difficulty in this respect, because the practice
of my boyhood has partially changed itself. Pompey used to be Pompey
without a blush. Now with an erudite English writer he is generally
Pompeius. The denizens of Africa--the "nigger" world--have had, I
think, something to do with this. But with no erudite English writer
is Terence Terentius, or Virgil Virgilius, or Horace Horatius. Were I
to speak of Livius, the erudite English listener would think that I
alluded to an old author long prior to our dear historian. And though
we now talk of Sulla instead of Sylla, we hardly venture on Antonius
instead of Antony. Considering all this, I have thought it better to
cling to the sounds which have ever been familiar to myself; and as
I talk of Virgil and of Horace and Ovid freely and without fear, so
shall I speak also of Pompey and of Antony and of Catiline. In regard
to Sulla, the change has been so complete that I must allow the old
name to have re-established itself altogether.

It has been customary to notify the division of years in the period of
which I am about to write by dating from two different eras, counting
down from the building of Rome, A.U.C., or "anno urbis conditae," and
back from the birth of Christ, which we English mark by the letters
B.C., before Christ. In dealing with Cicero, writers (both French and
English) have not uncommonly added a third mode of dating, assigning
his doings or sayings to the year of his age. There is again a fourth
mode, common among the Romans, of indicating the special years by
naming the Consuls, or one of them. "O nata mecum consule Manlio,"
Horace says, when addressing his cask of wine. That was, indeed, the
official mode of indicating a date, and may probably be taken as
showing how strong the impression in the Roman mind was of the
succession of their Consuls. In the following pages I will use
generally the date B.C., which, though perhaps less simple than the
A.U.C., gives to the mind of the modern reader a clearer idea of the
juxtaposition of events. The reader will surely know that Christ was
born in the reign of Augustus, and crucified in that of Tiberius; but
he will not perhaps know, without the trouble of some calculation,
how far removed from the period of Christ was the year 648 A.U.C., in
which Cicero was born. To this I will add on the margin the year
of Cicero's life. He was nearly sixty-four when he died. I shall,
therefore, call that year his sixty-third year.

NOTES:

[1] Froude's Caesar, p.444.

[2] Ibid., p.428.

[3] Ad Att., lib.xiii., 28.

[4] Ad Att., lib.ix., 10.

[5] Froude, p.365.

[6] Ad Att., lib.ii., 5: "Quo quidem uno ego ab istis capi possum."

[7] The Cincian law, of which I shall have to speak again, forbade
Roman advocates to take any payment for their services. Cicero
expressly declares that he has always obeyed that law. He accused
others of disobeying it, as, for instance, Hortensius. But no
contemporary has accused him. Mr. Collins refers to some books which
had been given to Cicero by his friend Poetus. They are mentioned in a
letter to Atticus, lib. i., 20; and Cicero, joking, says that he has
consulted Cincius--perhaps some descendant of him who made the law 145
years before--as to the legality of accepting the present. But we have
no reason for supposing that he had ever acted as an advocate for
Poetus.

[8] Virgil, Aeneid, i., 150:

"Ac, veluti magno in populo quum saepe coorta est
Seditio, saevitque animis ignobile vulgus;
Jamque faces, et saxa volant; furor arma ministrat:
Tum, pietate gravem ac meritis si forte virum quem
Conspexere, silent, arrectisque auribus adstant;
Iste regit dictis animos, et pectora mulcet."

[9] The author is saying that a history from Cicero would have been
invaluable, and the words are "interitu ejus utrum respublica an
historia magis dolcat".

[10] Quintilian tells us this, lib. ii., c. 5. The passage of Livy
is not extant. The commentators suppose it to have been taken from a
letter to his son.

[11] Velleius Paterculus, lib.ii., c.34.

[12] Valerius Maximus, lib.iv., c.2; 4.

[13] Pliny, Hist. Nat., lib.vii., xxxi., 30.

[14] Martial, lib xiv., 188.

[15] Lucan, lib.vii., 62:

"Cunctorum voces Romani maximus auctor
Tullius eloquii, cujus sub jure togaque
Pacificas saevus tremuit Catilina secures,
Pertulit iratus bellis, cum rostra forumque
Optaret passus tam longa silentia miles
Addidit invalidae robur facundia causae"

[16] Tacitus, De Oratoribus, xxx.

[17] Juvenal, viii., 243.

[18] Demosthenes and Cicero compared.

[19] Quintilian, xii., 1.

[20] "Repudiatus vigintiviratus." He refused a position of official
value rendered vacant by the death of one Cosconius. See Letters to
Atticus, 2,19.

[21] Florus, lib.iv, 1. In a letter from Essex to Foulke Greville,
the writing of which has been attributed to Bacon by Mr. Spedding,
Florus is said simply to have epitomized Livy (Life, vol. ii, p.23).
In this I think that Bacon has shorn him of his honors.

[22] Florus, lib.iv., 1.

[23] Sallust, Catilinaria, xxiii.

[24] I will add the concluding passage from the pseudo declamation, in
order that the reader may see the nature of the words which were put
into Sallust's mouth: "Quos tyrannos appellabas, eorum nune potentiae
faves; qui tibi ante optumates videbantur, eosdem nune dementes ac
furiosos vocas; Vatinii caussam agis, de Sextio male existumas;
Bibulum petulantissumis verbis laedis, laudas Caesarem; quern maxume
odisti, ei maxume obsequeris. Aliud stans, aliud sedens, de republica
sentis; his maledicis, illos odisti; levissume transfuga, neque in
hac, neque illa parte fidem habes." Hence Dio Cassius declared
that Cicero had been called a turncoat. [Greek text: kai automalos
onomazeto.]

[25] Dio Cassius, lib.xlvi., 18: [Greek text: pros haen kai autaen
toiautas epistolas grapheis oias an grapseien anaer skoptolaes
athuroglorros ... kai proseti kai to stoma auton diaballein
epecheiraese tosautae aselgeia kai akatharsia para panta ton bion
choomenos oste maede ton suggenestuton apechesthai, alla taen te
gunaika proagogeuein kai taen thugatera moicheuein.]

[26] As it happens, De Quincey specially calls Cicero a man of
conscience "Cicero is one of the very few pagan statesmen who can be
described as a thoroughly conscientious man," he says. The purport of
his illogical essay on Cicero is no doubt thoroughly hostile to the
man. It is chiefly worth reading on account of the amusing virulence
with which Middleton, the biographer, is attacked.

[27] Quintilian, lib.ii, c.5.

[28] De Finibus, lib.v., ca.xxii.: "Nemo est igitur, qui non hanc
affectionem animi probet atque laudet."

[29] De Rep., lib.vi., ca.vii: "Nihil est enim illi principi deo,
qui omnem hunc mundum regit, quod quidem in terris fiat acceptius."
Tusc. Quest., lib., ca.xxx.: "Vetat enim dominans ille in nobis
deus."

[30] De Rep., lib.vi., ca.vii.: "Certum esse in coelo definitum
locum, ubi beati aevo sempiterno fruantur."

CHAPTER II.

HIS EDUCATION.

At Arpinum, on the river Liris, a little stream which has been made to
sound sweetly in our ears by Horace,[31] in a villa residence near the
town, Marcus Tullius Cicero was born, 106 years before Christ, on the
3d of January, according to the calendar then in use. Pompey the Great
was born in the same year. Arpinum was a State which had been admitted
into Roman citizenship, lying between Rome and Capua, just within that
portion of Italy which was till the other day called the Kingdom of
Naples. The district from which he came is noted, also, as having
given birth to Marius. Cicero was of an equestrian family, which means
as much as though we were to say among ourselves that a man had been
born a gentleman and nothing more. An "eques" or knight in Cicero's
time became so, or might become so, by being in possession of a
certain income. The title conferred no nobility. The plebeian, it will
be understood, could not become patrician, though he might become
noble--as Cicero did. The patrician must have been born so--must have
sprung from the purple of certain fixed families.[32] Cicero was born
a plebeian, of equestrian rank and became ennobled when he was ranked
among the senators because of his service among the high magistrates
of the Republic. As none of his family had served before him, he was
"novus homo," a new man, and therefore not noble till he had achieved
nobility himself. A man was noble who could reckon a Consul, a
Praetor, or an Aedile among his ancestors. Such was not the case with
Cicero. As he filled all these offices, his son was noble--as were his
son's sons and grandsons, if such there were.

It was common to Romans to have three names, and our Cicero had three.
Marcus, which was similar in its use to the Christian name of one of
us, had been that of his grandfather and father, and was handed on to
his son. This, called the praenomen, was conferred on the child when a
babe with a ceremony not unlike that of our baptism. There was but
a limited choice of such names among the Romans, so that an initial
letter will generally declare to those accustomed to the literature
that intended. A. stands for Aulus, P. for Publius, M. generally
for Marcus, C. for Caius, though there was a Cneus also. The nomen,
Tullius, was that of the family. Of this family of Tullius to which
Cicero belonged we know no details. Plutarch tells us that of his
father nothing was said but in extremes, some declaring that he had
been a fuller, and others that he had been descended from a prince who
had governed the Volsci. We do not see why he may not have sprung from
the prince, and also have been a fuller. There can, however, be no
doubt that he was a gentleman, not uneducated himself, with means
and the desire to give his children the best education which Rome or
Greece afforded. The third name or cognomen, that of Cicero, belonged
to a branch of the family of Tullius. This third name had generally
its origin, as do so many of our surnames, in some specialty of place,
or trade, or chance circumstance. It was said that an attestor had
been called Cicero from "cicer," a vetch, because his nose was marked
with the figure of that vegetable. It is more probable that the family
prospered by the growing and sale of vetches. Be that as it may, the
name had been well established before the orator's time. Cicero's
mother was one Helvia, of whom we are told that she was well-born and
rich. Cicero himself never alludes to her--as neither, if I remember
rightly, did Horace to his mother, though he speaks so frequently of
his father. Helvia's younger son, Quintus, tells a story of his mother
in a letter, which has been, by chance, preserved among those written
by our Cicero. She was in the habit of sealing up the empty wine-jars,
as well as those which were full, so that a jar emptied on the sly by
a guzzling slave might be at once known. This is told in a letter to
Tiro, a favorite slave belonging to Marcus, of whom we shall hear
often in the course of our work. As the old lady sealed up the jars,
though they contained no wine, so must Tiro write letters, though he
has nothing to say in them. This kind of argument, taken from the old
familiar stories of one's childhood and one's parents, could be only
used to a dear and familiar friend. Such was Tiro, though still a
slave, to the two brothers. Roman life admitted of such friendships,
though the slave was so completely the creature of the master that his
life and death were at the master's disposal.

This is nearly all that is known of Cicero's father and mother, or of
his old home.

There is, however, sufficient evidence that the father paid great
attention to the education of his sons--if, in the case of Marcus, any
evidence were wanting where the result is so manifest by the work of
his life. At a very early age, probably when he was eight--in the
year which produced Julius Caasar--he was sent to Rome, and there was
devoted to studies which from the first were intended to fit him for
public life. Middleton says that the father lived in Rome with his
son, and argues from this that he was a man of large means. But Cicero
gives no authority for this. It is more probable that he lived at the
house of one Acaleo, who had married his mother's sister, and had sons
with whom Cicero was educated. Stories are told of his precocious
talents and performances such as we are accustomed to hear of many
remarkable men--not unfrequently from their own mouths. It is said of
him that he was intimate with the two great advocates of the time,
Lucius Crassus and Marcus Antonius the orator, the grandfather of
Cicero's future enemy, whom we know as Marc Antony. Cicero speaks of
them both as though he had seen them and talked much of them in
his youth. He tells us anecdotes of them;[33] how they were both
accustomed to conceal their knowledge of Greek, fancying that the
people in whose eyes they were anxious to shine would think more of
them if they seemed to have contented themselves simply with Roman
words and Roman thoughts. But the intimacy was probably that which a
lad now is apt to feel that he has enjoyed with a great man, if he has
seen and heard him, and perhaps been taken by the hand. He himself
gives in very plain language an account of his own studies when he was
seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen. He speaks of the orators of that
day[34]: "When I was above all things anxious to listen to these men,
the banishment of Cotta was a great sorrow to me. I was passionately
intent on hearing those who were left, daily writing, reading, and
making notes. Nor was I content only with practice in the art of
speaking. In the following year Varius had to go, condemned by his own
enactment; and at this time, in working at the civil law, I gave much
of my time to Quintus Scaevola, the son of Publius, who, though he
took no pupils, by explaining points to those who consulted him, gave
great assistance to students. The year after, when Sulla and Pompey
were Consuls, I learned what oratory really means by listening to
Publius Sulpicius, who as tribune was daily making harangues. It
was then that Philo, the Chief of the Academy, with other leading
philosophers of Athens, had been put to flight by the war with
Mithridates, and had come to Rome. To him I devoted myself entirety,
stirred up by a wonderful appetite for acquiring the Greek philosophy.
But in that, though the variety of the pursuit and its greatness
charmed me altogether, yet it seemed to me that the very essence of
judicial conclusion was altogether suppressed. In that year Sulpicius
perished, and in the next, three of our greatest orators,

Quintus Catulus, Marcus Antonius, and Caius Julius, were cruelly
killed." This was the time of the civil war between Marius and Sulla.
"In the same year I took lessons from Molo the Rhodian, a great
pleader and master of the art." In the next chapter he tells us that
he passed his time also with Diodatus the Stoic, who afterward lived
with him, and died in his house. Here we have an authentic description
of the manner in which Cicero passed his time as a youth at Rome,
and one we can reduce probably to absolute truth by lessening the
superlatives. Nothing in it, however, is more remarkable than the
confession that, while his young intellect rejoiced in the subtle
argumentation of the Greek philosophers, his clear common sense
quarrelled with their inability to reach any positive conclusion.

But before these days of real study had come upon him he had given
himself up to juvenile poetry. He is said to have written a poem
called Pontius Glaucus when he was fourteen years old. This was no
doubt a translation from the Greek, as were most of the poems that he
wrote, and many portions of his prose treatises.[35] Plutarch tells us
that the poem was extant in his time, and declares that, "in process
of time, when he had studied this art with greater application, he was
looked upon as the best poet, as well as the greatest orator in Rome.
"The English translators of Plutarch tell us that their author was an
indifferent judge of Latin poetry, and allege as proof of this that
he praised Cicero as a poet, a praise which he gave "contrary to the
opinion of Juvenal." But Juvenal has given no opinion of Cicero's
poetry, having simply quoted one unfortunate line noted for its
egotism, and declared that Cicero would never have had his head cut
off had his philippics been of the same nature.[36] The evidence of
Quintus Mucius Scaevola as to Cicero's poetry was perhaps better, as
he had the means, at any rate, of reading it. He believed that
the Marius, a poem written by Cicero in praise of his great
fellow-townsman, would live to posterity forever. The story of the old
man's prophecy comes to us, no doubt, from Cicero himself, and is put
into the mouth of his brother;[37] but had it been untrue it would
have been contradicted.

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