Of none of the men of his own time do we know so much as of Marcus
Tullius Cicero. His contemporaries we know from the accounts given and
judgements passed by others: Cicero we know from his own. He was the
first speaker of his age, and his speeches deal largely with the
politics and people of his time, as he defended or attacked the men and
their acts. Cicero was anything but impartial; yet it is from what he
says that much of our picture of Caesar and Crassus, Pompeius, Antonius,
Catiline, Clodius, Cato, Brutus and a host of others are drawn. In all
the long gallery of portraits he has painted none is so sharp and vivid
as his own. It comes to us not only through his speeches but through all
his writings--and he wrote admirably on many philosophical and
semi-philosophical subjects--and above all through his letters. These
letters are addressed for the most part to his intimate friend the
banker Pomponius Atticus, but also to others including most of the
prominent men of his time, and to his daughter Tullia, to whom he was
devotedly attached. They give a day-to-day picture of the life of Rome
and also of the man who wrote them. Cicero was immersed, like most men
of his time, in politics. He rose, to his own ineffable delight
(a delight which he expresses again and again with childlike
complacency), to be consul. But the explanation of a character that at
times amused and at times exasperated his contemporaries, and has caused
the same mixture of feelings to much later admirers, is that he was, in
his essence, an artist. He wanted, as do many artists, to be and do
other things. He was more vain of his dubious success in politics than
of the splendour of his oratory or the beauty of his writing. In action
he was timid, uncertain, and quite unable to cope with the great
currents of his time, snobbish and constantly mistaken in his judgements
of people, and alternately elated and despairing in his view of public
events. When he takes up his pen he is a master.
[Illustration: CICERO]
Cicero was in some ways typical of the new men in Rome. He was born at
Arpinum, where his family belonged to the Italian middle class. His
parents were sufficiently well-to-do for the young man to receive an
excellent education, completed, like that of other well-bred young men
of the time, by attending lectures in Athens on literature and
philosophy. His father's death brought him a fortune that though not
large was sufficient, together with a small estate at Arpinum and a
house in Rome.
[Illustration: ARPINUM.
Cicero's birthplace]
But Cicero had no mind for a life of fashionable idleness. For a
middle-class provincial there was little chance in politics, so long as
Sulla's laws stood. He therefore turned to the law courts. There he soon
made himself a great name, the more distinguished since he kept up the
old custom of refusing fees. A wealthy marriage increased his
consequence. His honesty and ability made him respected by all sorts of
people. Cicero used his gifts in the most honourable way by defending
the people of the provinces, who before his time had hardly ever got a
hearing, against the rapacity of some of the Roman tax collectors.
A case which made his name known throughout the Roman world was the
prosecution of Caius Verres which he undertook on behalf of the people
of Sicily. Verres, once an officer in Marius's army, was a man of
notoriously bad character. Like other praetors he looked on his
governorship simply as an opportunity to make money for himself and his
friends; it was freely said, even in Rome, that his misrule was ruining
Sicily. And Sicily was one of the chief granaries of Rome. The greatest
excitement was aroused over the case because the Democratic party took
it up as a means of discrediting the Government; and at the same time
brought in a Bill for the reform of the law courts by making the jurors
not senators only, but, as before Sulla's time, men belonging to the
Equestrian Order. This frightened the Conservatives: they saw that much
hung on the case of Verres. Quintus Hortensius, the most famous advocate
of his time, agreed to defend him.
Cicero went to Sicily to collect evidence. He was quick to feel, in all
his sensitive nerves, the tense atmosphere of excitement gathering round
the case. It was to make or mar him. His genius rose delighted to the
great occasion. He understood, as the Conservatives did not, the
feelings that were dumbly stirring the mind of the ordinary decent
Roman, and could give them voice. As the evidence he had collected was
unrolled the story of the greed of Verres and the suffering of the
people of Sicily was laid bare step by step. Excitement and anger
against the class in power who did and defended such things grew and
grew. Each day an enormous crowd thronged the Forum and at times its
feelings made it positively dangerous. One witness told how a Roman
citizen had been crucified: his appeal, 'Civis Romanus sum--I am a Roman
citizen', had fallen on deaf ears. At this the hearers were stirred to
such rage that Verres was only saved from being torn to pieces by the
adjournment of the hearing. After fourteen days the defendants realized
that their case was lost; no judge dared acquit Verres. He fled the city
and was never heard of again. Cicero was the hero of the hour.
The man who appears and feels himself a hero when addressing a great
crowd, who can work their feelings and his own into tempestuous
enthusiasm, is often a weak reed, swayed by every impulse and incapable
of the long slow effort required to carry a purpose into action. This
was the case with Cicero. When speaking he was carried away by his own
passion. Then he appeared to know exactly what he thought. Alone,
however, he was moody, a prey to fearful doubt and depression, one day
full of enthusiasm, the next despairing. He was at once vain and timid;
uncertain of himself and turned this way and that by the praise or blame
of others. His great desire was to be admired by every one. His
comparatively humble origin made him feel any attention from the nobles
far more flattering than it was.
In a good sense as well as in a bad he was a Conservative. His study of
history made him feel full of respect for any institution that had
lasted a long time, and for men belonging to ancient families. He felt
this even at a time when his writings and speeches were making him known
throughout Italy and admired by men whose praise was worth having. The
rich men and many of the aristocrats were far inferior to Cicero in
brains and character; yet he longed and strove to get into 'society'.
Society at the time was extravagant, frivolous, vicious, and
hard-hearted. Cicero was modest and frugal in his personal habits,
serious in the bent of his mind, a man of high moral principle and
tender domestic affections. Yet nothing pleased him more than an
invitation to one of the houses of the smart set; nothing vexed him more
than to be thought old-fashioned or middle-class in his ideas.
All these feelings made him regard his own election to the consulship,
and the support he received as candidate from the noble Conservatives,
as the most wonderful affair. Yet the real reason why the Conservatives
supported him was not that they loved Cicero but that they loathed
Catiline, the third strong candidate, and were prepared to go to great
lengths to keep him out. Antonius, who was elected as Cicero's
colleague, though a friend of Crassus, was considered to be harmless.
This consulship was the turning point in Cicero's life. He had always
wanted to stand well with all parties. Now he was compelled to take his
place definitely on the Conservative side. More than that, it finally
caused him to lose his sense of balance altogether and to think of
himself as a statesman: a part for which he was ill fitted. He was so
much impressed with his own importance that he bought a vast house on
the Palatine. To do so he had to borrow money and thus got into debt.
Before he had been free, after his consulship he became entangled and
embarrassed.
This was the case with many of the leading politicians and men of all
parties, and hampered their actions in countless ways. In order to win
popular favour they spent huge sums on shows and gave feasts and
presents to the populace. They lived altogether in a way expensive and
showy beyond their means. To do this they had to borrow money at
exorbitant terms, and were thus helplessly in the power of the rich men
who lent to them. Caesar at this time was fearfully in debt and
constantly in difficulties on this account. So were innumerable
fashionable young aristocrats. The Roman laws of debt were still
extremely harsh and all acted against the unfortunate debtor. Prices
were steadily rising: the vast wealth of the few made the lot of the
many increasingly hard. While Lucullus was in the East there had been a
serious financial crisis in Rome, and the effects of this lasted for a
long time.
As a consequence of this state of things a vast number of people of all
classes were stirred to wild excitement and enthusiasm when Catiline,
who was determined to be consul and by no means inclined to sit down
under one rebuff, set out a programme of which the chief item was a
wiping off of a large part of all outstanding debts. The poorer people
were on his side in this almost to a man. So were a great many needy
aristocrats, especially among the younger men. The rich, on the other
hand, especially the class of Knights, to which most of the big
financiers and trading houses belonged, were furious. They were ready to
throw all their influence and the great power of the purse on to the
side of the Conservatives, who cried that Catiline's programme meant
revolution. On both sides the wildest excitement and the most extreme
bitterness of feeling was stirred up.
Catiline was a man of low character, and of very bad record, quite
reckless. But he was by no means without ability. There was something to
be said for his programme if nothing for the man who proposed it.
Certainly the law of debt needed to be reformed. The rich did not argue
against it: they fell into a panic. They saw that popular feeling and
popular votes would be on Catiline's side. But they had money and could
bribe. They did bribe so effectively that when it came to the election
he was beaten again.
The alarm of the propertied classes did not, however, die down, or the
excitement of the disappointed. People had talked of revolution and
civil war so loud and long during the elections that they began to
believe in it. Cicero had been going about for days with a cuirass under
his toga. He really believed that grave plots were on foot. He spent his
time listening to spies and informers. One day he came down to the
Senate with a very long face declaring that he 'knew all'. He produced
no proofs, but most people were too much excited to ask for proofs. The
word plot was enough. A state of siege was proclaimed in the city.
Soon afterwards news came that a follower of Catiline had actually got
some soldiers together in Etruria. Catiline, however, was still in Rome.
He attended a meeting of the Senate. On his bench he sat alone, shunned
by all the other senators, who applauded loudly while Cicero thundered
against him. At last Catiline, unable to bear it any longer, got up,
marched out of the Senate House, and left Rome. Cicero did not dare to
have him arrested. There were as yet no solid proofs against him. A few
days later proofs came. Catiline's supporters in Rome lost their heads
without him. They were foolish enough to ask some ambassadors of the
Allobroges--a tribe of Gauls, then in the city with a petition to the
Senate--whether their people would send soldiers to assist a rising.
Cicero now seemed to have the Catilinarians in his hand. They were
ready, some of them, to bring the Gauls into Italy! That was enough.
There was a wild outburst of feeling. All sorts of prominent people,
including Caesar, were said to be implicated. Catiline had escaped, but
all his close associates were arrested and brought up for trial by the
Senate. Cicero hurried on the proceedings. He was terrified by the wild
passion that swept all classes, the senators no less than the howling
mobs outside. After two days' debate the question of what should be done
to the conspirators was put to the vote. The first senator voted for
death. All the others who followed voted for death until it came to
Caesar. Caesar knew of the rumours going about and the risk of his own
position as leader of the party to which Catiline had belonged.
Nevertheless with great courage he voted against the death penalty.
Every Roman citizen, he urged, had the right to appeal to his fellows.
To put men to death without trial was illegal. Cato, however, made a
powerful plea on the other side. Death was decreed. As Caesar left the
Senate House a group of knights threatened him with swords.
Next day Cicero, accompanied by a solemn procession of senators, saw the
executions carried out. Caesar was not in the procession. A huge crowd
escorted Cicero back to his home. They declared, and he proudly
believed, that he had saved the country. Plutarch thus describes
_Cicero's Day of Triumph_
Cicero passed through the Forum and, reaching the prison, handed
over Lentulus to the officer with orders to put him to death; then
he brought down Cethegus and the rest separately for execution.
And when he saw many of the conspirators still standing together
in the Forum, ignorant of what had happened and waiting for
darkness in the belief that the men were alive and could be
rescued, he cried to them with a loud voice, 'They lived,' Thus
Romans signify death if they wish to avoid words of ill omen.
Evening had already come when he returned through the Forum to his
house on the Palatine, no longer attended by the citizens with
silence or even with restraint, but received everywhere with
shouts and clapping of hands, and saluted as saviour and founder
of his country. The streets were bright with the gleam of all the
torches and links that were placed at the doors, and the women
displayed lights from the roofs that they might see the hero and
do him honour, as he made his stately progress escorted by the
noblest in Rome; most of whom had conducted great wars and entered
the city in triumphal processions and added whole tracts of sea
and land to the empire, and who now agreed as they marched along
that the Roman people was indebted to many leaders and generals of
their day for wealth and spoil and power, but to Cicero alone for
safety and life, because he had freed it from so vast and terrible
a danger. For it was not thought so wonderful that he had crushed
the conspiracy and punished the conspirators, but that he had
quenched the most serious insurrection ever known with very little
suffering, and without domestic strife and disturbance.
Plutarch, lvii. 22. §§ 2-5.
The circumstances of Cicero's exile and return are described by Plutarch
in passages that give a lively picture of the life of the time:
Cicero, convinced that he must go into exile or leave the question
to be decided by armed conflict with Clodius, determined to ask
Pompeius for help; but he had purposely gone away and was now
staying at his villa in the Alban hills. Accordingly, Cicero first
sent Piso, his son-in-law, to make an appeal, and afterwards went
himself. When Pompeius knew that he had come, he did not wait to
see him (for he was terribly ashamed to face the man who had
engaged in hard struggles on his behalf and often shaped his
policy to please him), but at the request of Caesar, whose
daughter he had married, he was false to those obsolete services,
and, slipping out by a back door, managed to evade the interview.
Thus betrayed by Pompeius and left without support, Cicero put
himself in the hands of the consuls. Gabinius was harsh and
unrelenting, but Piso spoke more gently to him, bidding him
withdraw and let Clodius have his day, endure the changed times,
and become once more the saviour of his country, which his enemy
had filled with strife and suffering. After this answer Cicero
consulted his friends, and Lucullus urged him to remain in the
assurance that he would prevail, but others advised him to go into
exile; for the people would feel his loss when it had enough of
the mad recklessness of Clodius. He accepted this council, and
taking to the Capitol the image of Minerva, a prized possession
which had long stood in his house, he dedicated it with the
inscription, 'To Minerva, guardian of Rome,' Then, having got an
escort from his friends, he left the city secretly at night, and
journeyed by land through Lucania, wishing to reach Sicily.
31. §§ 2-5.
As a matter of fact the immediate danger from Catiline had been
exaggerated. People came to see this in a very few months. Catiline
raised a few hundred men and was killed fighting. The real danger lay
not in him but in the economic and political condition of Rome and
Italy. Its causes were the mismanagement, corruption, and feebleness of
the Government; the flaunting vulgarity and profiteering of the rich;
the misery of the poor. Cicero had done nothing to meet these evils: he
had no plan for doing so; he hardly realized that they were there. Men
had called him 'Father of his country'. That great day was ever in his
mind. As he thought of it his vanity swelled and swelled until the year
of his consulship seemed to him the greatest in the annals of Rome. He
bored every one by talking incessantly of it on all occasions. He
dreamed of this and saw nothing of the dark tides rising round. He
watched helplessly the growing power of Pompeius, Crassus, and Caesar,
and did not understand what Rome was coming to. Caesar was always
friendly and gracious to him, for he had a mind which could appreciate
Cicero's genius as a writer: but Cicero distrusted Caesar.
He had meantime made a deadly enemy of Clodius who, by playing on
disorder, was making himself more and more dangerous in Rome. Clodius
was charged with sacrilege. He defended himself by saying that on the
day on which he was said to have been present, in female clothes, at the
Women's Festival being celebrated in the house of Caesar's wife, he was
in fact not in the city. Cicero swore that he had seen him. Thanks to
bribery Clodius was acquitted. He never forgave Cicero. Soon after this,
in the first year of the Triumvirate (59), he secured his banishment
from the city for a year.
Cicero, after a visit to Greece, retired to his villa at Tusculum. He
would have been wiser had he settled down there and devoted himself to
the writing of which he was a consummate master. But after sixteen
months in the country he returned to Rome.
_The Return_
It is said that the people never passed a measure with such
unanimity, and the Senate rivalled it by proposing a vote of
thanks to those cities that had given help to Cicero in exile, and
by restoring at the public expense his house, with the villa and
buildings, which Clodius had destroyed. Thus Cicero returned in
the sixteenth month after his banishment, and so great was the
rejoicing in cities and the general enthusiasm in greeting him
that he fell short of the truth when he declared afterwards that
he was brought to Rome on the shoulders of Italy. Crassus, too,
who had been his enemy before his exile, was glad to meet him and
make proposals for reconciliation, saying that he did it to please
his son Publius, who was an admirer of Cicero.
33. §§ 4-5.
When Clodius was murdered in the streets by Milo, Cicero undertook the
latter's defence in a very famous speech, which we still possess. Milo,
however, was condemned. In the province of Cilicia to which he was soon
afterwards appointed governor, Cicero showed himself an honest and
upright administrator. When he returned to Rome, however, his conduct
showed a helpless weakness. Between Pompeius and Caesar he for long did
not know how to choose. Both seemed to him in a measure wrong. In his
own letters he said to one of his friends at this time, 'Whither shall I
turn? Pompeius has the more honourable cause, but Caesar manages his
affairs with the greatest address and is most able to save himself and
his friends. In short, I know whom to avoid but not whom to seek.' In
the end, since he thought that Caesar failed, when he entered Rome, to
treat him with proper distinction and courtesy, he joined Pompeius at
Dyrrachium.
There, however, he made himself very unpopular by criticism of
everything done or left undone. He took no part in the battle of
Pharsalia, being in poor health: after it, instead of joining Cato, who
was carrying on the war in Africa, he sailed to Brundisium. When Caesar
returned from Egypt he set out to join him. Caesar hailed him with the
greatest kindness and respect. Cicero, however, soon withdrew to
Tusculum, where he busied himself with writing. His private affairs
vexed him, however. He divorced his wife Terentia and married a rich
young woman whose fortune paid off some of his debts. But his days were
clouded by a heavy grief: his beloved daughter Tullia died.
After Caesar's murder Octavius treated him graciously. Marcus Antonius,
however, who divided the power of the State with Octavius, was detested
by Cicero, who did all in his power to increase the growing dissensions
between the two. Against Antonius he wrote a series of most envenomed
speeches which he called Philippics in imitation of those of Demosthenes
against Philip of Macedon. In this, however, he paved the way to his own
doom. Antonius and Octavius patched up their quarrels, formed the Second
Triumvirate with Lepidus, and carried through a terrible proscription.
Cicero's was one of the names on Antonius's list, placed there mainly by
the wish of his wife Fulvia, who hated the man who had spoken evil of
her husband. Cicero was killed in his own villa at the age of
sixty-four, and his head set up in Rome above the rostrum from which he
had so often delivered passionate speeches.