CICERO
AND HIS FRIENDS
_A STUDY OF ROMAN SOCIETY IN THE TIME OF CAESAR_
BY
GASTON BOISSIER
OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY
TRANSLATED, WITH AN INDEX AND TABLE OF CONTENTS, BY
ADNAH DAVID JONES
_THIRD EDITION_
LONDON
WARD, LOCK & CO., LIMITED
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION:
CICERO’S LETTERS 1
Importance of private correspondence in ancient times.
Characteristics of Cicero’s letters, 1
CICERO IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LIFE:
I. PUBLIC LIFE 22
Severe judgments on Cicero in modern times, 22
i. Circumstances which determined Cicero’s political
attitude. Birth, philosophical ideas, character, 24
ii. Cicero’s political career. An opponent at first of the
aristocracy, 36. Attempts to form a middle party, 46.
The knights, 47. Finally joins the aristocratic party,
51
iii. Judgment on Cicero should be from the point of view of
his contemporaries, 51. Corrupt state of the Roman
people, 64
iv. Cicero’s work for the Republican party after the death
of Caesar, 69. His death, 77
II. PRIVATE LIFE 79
i. Sources of his wealth, 79
ii. His married life, 89
iii. His children, 100
iv. His relations to his slaves, 108. His clients, 113.
Rabirius, 116
ATTICUS 123
i. His reasons for not entering public life, 124. His life
at Athens, 127. His life in Rome, 132
ii. His character in private life, 134
iii. His character in public life, 147
CAELIUS:
THE ROMAN YOUTH IN THE TIME OF CAESAR 159
i. Family and education of Caelius, 160. Influence of women
at Rome, 163. Clodia, 166
ii. Character of Caelius, 176. Joins Caesar’s party, 184
iii. Caesar had no genuine friends, 191. Reasons of Caelius’
enmity to him, 197. His death, 206
CAESAR AND CICERO:
I. CICERO AND THE CAMP OF CAESAR IN GAUL 209
i. Cicero’s return to Rome, 210. State of the city, 211.
Leaves the aristocratic party and joins the triumvirs,
216
ii. Renews his intimacy with Caesar, 224. Pompey and Caesar
compared, 226. Caesar in Gaul, 230
iii. Cicero’s letters to his brother and to Trebatius
supplement the _Commentaries_, 241. Effect produced in
Rome by Caesar’s victories, 251
II. THE VICTOR AND THE VANQUISHED 257
Cicero’s intention to retire from political life, 257
i. Resumes intercourse with Caesar, 260. The exiles
recalled through his influence, 268. The _Pro
Marcello_, 271
ii. Discussion between Cicero and Caesar as to Cato. Cato
not so hard as he is usually considered, his rectitude
made him unpractical, 277. Unfitted to lead a party,
284. Becomes more moderate, 285. His death, 287.
Contrasted with Caesar, 288
iii. Caesar wishes to conciliate the Republican party, 291.
Appoints members of it to public offices, 293. In
spite of this there was a profound discontent with the
new government, 297
BRUTUS:
HIS RELATIONS WITH CICERO 303
i. His family, education, and character, 304. His
friendship with Cicero, 308. Roman ideas of governing
the provinces, 311. Joins Pompey, 317
ii. Brutus’s prospects of high office destroyed by the
battle of Pharsalia. Turns to philosophy. Cicero does
the same and produces his philosophical works, 318
iii. Formation of a new Republican party, 329. Influences
brought to bear on Brutus in order to implicate him in
the conspiracy against Caesar, 330
iv. Causes of the failure of Brutus and his party, 339
OCTAVIUS:
THE POLITICAL TESTAMENT OF AUGUSTUS 359
The Ancyran Inscription, 361
i. The narrative intentionally incomplete, 364. Light
thrown by it on the internal government of Augustus,
368. Relations of Augustus with his soldiers, 369.
With the people, 372. With the senate, 373. His policy
in reconstructing public buildings, 377
ii. The preamble of the Edict of proscription and the
Ancyran Inscription, together, contain the political
life of Augustus, 381. Permanent effect of his policy
on the government of the empire, 386
iii. Publication of Cicero’s letters, 388
CICERO AND HIS FRIENDS
INTRODUCTION
CICERO’S LETTERS
No history is more readily studied now-a-days than that of the last
years of the Roman Republic. Learned works have recently been published
upon this subject in France, England, and Germany,[1] and the public has
read them with avidity. The importance of the subjects which were then
debated, the dramatic character of the events, and the grandeur of the
characters warrant this interest; but the attraction we feel for this
singular epoch is better explained by the fact that it is narrated for
us in Cicero’s letters.
A contemporary said that he who read these letters would not be tempted
to seek the history of that time[2] elsewhere, and in fact we find it
much more living and true in them than in regular works composed
expressly to teach it to us. What more would Asinius Pollio, Livy, or
Cremutius Cordus teach us if we had them preserved? They would give us
their personal opinion; but this opinion is for the most part open to
suspicion because it comes from persons who could not tell the whole
truth, from men like Livy, who wrote at the court of the emperors, or
who hoped, like Pollio, to get their treason pardoned, by blackening the
character of those whom they had betrayed. Instead of receiving a
ready-made opinion it is better to make one for ourselves, and the
perusal of Cicero’s letters enables us to do this. It throws us into the
midst of the events, and lets us follow them day by day. We seem to see
them pass before our eyes, notwithstanding the eighteen centuries that
intervene, and we find ourselves in the unique position of being
sufficiently near the facts to see their real character, and
sufficiently distant to judge them dispassionately.
The importance of these letters is easily explained. The politicians of
those times had more need of correspondence with each other than those
of the present day. The proconsul starting from Rome to govern some
distant province felt that he was withdrawing altogether from political
life. To pass several years in those out-of-the-way countries which the
public rumour of Rome did not reach, was very irksome to men accustomed
to the stir of business, the agitations of parties, or, as they said,
the broad daylight of the Forum. They did indeed receive a sort of
official gazette, the _Acta diurna_, the venerable ancestor of our
_Moniteur_. But it appears as though every official journal is condemned
by its nature to be somewhat insignificant. The Roman journal contained
a rather tame official report of public meetings, a short summary of
important cases tried in the Forum, besides an account of public
ceremonies and accurate notice of atmospheric phenomena or prodigies
occurring in Rome or its neighbourhood. This is not precisely the sort
of news that a praetor or proconsul wished to know, and therefore, in
order to fill up the gaps in the official journal, he had recourse to
paid correspondents, who made “news-letters” for the use of inquisitive
provincials, as was the fashion among ourselves in the last century; but
while, in the eighteenth century, literary men of reputation, intimate
with the nobles and well received by ministers, undertook this duty, the
Roman correspondents were only obscure compilers, workmen as Caelius
calls them, usually chosen among those hungry Greeks whom want made
ready for anything. They had no admittance into the great houses, nor
could they approach the politicians. Their part simply consisted in
running over the town and picking up what they heard or saw in the
streets. They carefully noted theatrical chit-chat, inquired about
actors who had been hissed and gladiators who had been beaten, described
minutely handsome funerals, noted the rumours and ill-natured gossip,
and especially the scandalous tales they could catch.[3] All this
chatter amused for a moment, but did not satisfy those political
personages who wished above all to be kept abreast of affairs, and, in
order to become acquainted with them, they naturally applied to some one
who was in a position to know them. They chose a few trustworthy and
well-informed friends of good position, and through them learnt the
reason and the real character of the facts reported dryly and without
comment by the journals; and while their paid correspondents gave them
only the talk of the town, the others introduced them into the cabinets
of the high politicians, and made them listen to their most private
conversations.
No one felt this need of being kept informed of everything, and, so to
say, of living in the midst of Rome after he had left it, more than
Cicero. No one liked that excitement of public life which statesmen
complain of when they possess it, and never cease to regret when they
have lost it, more than he. We must not believe him too readily when he
says that he is tired of the stormy discussions of the senate; that he
seeks a country where they have not heard of Vatinius or Caesar, and
where they do not trouble themselves about agrarian laws; that he has an
anxious craving to go and forget Rome under the agreeable shades of
Arpinum, or in the delightful neighbourhood of Formiae. As soon as he is
settled down at Formiae or Arpinum, or in some other of those handsome
villas which he proudly calls the gems of Italy, _ocellos Italiae_, his
thoughts naturally return to Rome, and couriers are constantly starting
to go and learn what people are thinking and doing there. He could never
take his eyes off the Forum, whatever he may say. Far or near he must
have what Saint-Simon calls “that smack of business that politicians
cannot do without.” He wished by all means to know the position of
parties, their secret agreements, their internal discords, all those
hidden intrigues that lead up to events and explain them. This is what
he was continually demanding of Atticus, Curio, Caelius, and so many
other great men mixed up in these intrigues either as actors or
spectators, and what he himself narrates to his absent friends in the
most lively manner, and thus the letters that he received or sent
contain, without his intending it, all the history of his time.[4]
The correspondence of political men of our time, when it is published,
is far from having the same importance, because the exchange of
sentiment and thought is not made so much by means of letters now as it
was then. We have invented new methods. The immense publicity of the
press has advantageously replaced those cautious communications which
could not reach beyond a few persons. Now-a-days the newspapers keep a
man informed of what is doing in the world, whatever unfrequented place
he may have retired to. As he learns events almost as soon as they
happen, he receives the excitement as well as the news of them, and has
no need of a well-informed friend to apprise him of them. To seek for
all that the newspapers have destroyed and replaced among us would be an
interesting study. In Cicero’s time letters often took their place and
rendered the same services. They were passed from hand to hand when they
contained news men had an interest in knowing; and those of important
persons which made known their sentiments were read, commented on, and
copied. A politician, who was attacked, defended himself by them before
people whose esteem he desired to preserve, and through them men tried
to form a sort of public opinion in a limited public when the Forum was
silent, as in Caesar’s time. The newspapers have taken up this duty now
and make a business of politics, and as they are incomparably more
convenient, rapid, and diffused, they have taken from correspondence one
of its principal subjects.
It is true that private affairs remain for it, and we are tempted to
think at first that this subject is inexhaustible, and that with the
sentiments and affections of so many kinds that fill our home life it
would always be rich enough. Nevertheless, I think that private
correspondence becomes every day shorter and less interesting, where it
is only a question of feeling and affection. That constant and agreeable
intercourse which filled so large a place in the life of former times,
tends almost to disappear, and one would say that by a strange chance
the facility and rapidity of intercourse, which ought to give it more
animation, have been injurious to it. Formerly, when there was no post,
or when it was reserved for the emperor’s use, as with the Romans, men
were obliged to take advantage of any opportunity that occurred, or to
send their letters by a slave. Then writing was a serious affair. They
did not want the messenger to make a useless journey; letters were made
longer and more complete to avoid the necessity of beginning again too
often; unconsciously they were more carefully finished, by the thought
we naturally give to things that cost trouble and are not very easy.
Even in the time of Madame de Sévigné, when the mails started only once
or twice a week, writing was still a serious business to which every
care was given. The mother, far from her daughter, had no sooner sent
off her letter than she was thinking of the one she would send a few
days later. Thoughts, memories, regrets gathered in her mind during this
interval, and when she took up her pen “she could no longer govern this
torrent.” Now, when we know that we can write when we will, we do not
collect material as Madame de Sévigné did, we do not write a little
every day, we no longer seek to “empty our budget,” or torment ourselves
in order to forget nothing, lest forgetfulness should make the news
stale by coming too late. While the periodical return of the post
formerly brought more order and regularity into correspondence, the
facility we have now for writing when we will causes us to write less
often. We wait to have something to say, which is seldomer than one
thinks. We write no more than is necessary; and this is very little for
a correspondence whose chief pleasure lies in the superfluous, and we
are threatened with a reduction of that little. Soon, no doubt, the
telegraph will have replaced the post; we shall only communicate by this
breathless instrument, the image of a matter-of-fact and hurried
society, which, even in the style it employs, tries to use a little less
than what is necessary. With this new progress the pleasure of private
correspondence, already much impaired, will have disappeared for ever.
But when people had more opportunities for writing letters, and wrote
them better, all did not succeed equally. Some dispositions are fitter
for this work than others. People whose minds move slowly, and who have
need of much reflection before writing, make memoirs and not letters.
The sober-minded write in a regular and methodical manner, but they lack
grace and warmth. Logicians and reasoners have the habit of following up
their thoughts too closely; now, one ought to know how to pass lightly
from one subject to another, in order that the interest may be
sustained, and to leave them all before they are exhausted. Those who
are solely occupied with one idea, who concentrate themselves on it, and
will not leave it, are only eloquent when they speak of it, which is not
enough. To be always agreeable, and on all subjects, as a regular
correspondence demands, one must have a lively and active imagination
which receives the impressions of the moment and changes abruptly with
them. This is the first quality of good letter writers; I will add to
it, if you like, a little artifice. Writing always requires a certain
effort. To succeed in writing we must aim at success, and the
disposition to please must precede the wish to do so. It is natural
enough to wish to please that great public for whom books are written,
but it is the mark of a more exacting vanity to exert one’s powers for a
single person. It has often been asked since La Bruyère, why women
succeed better than men in this kind of writing? Is it not because they
have a greater desire to please and a natural vanity which is, so to
say, always under arms, which neglects no conquest, and feels the need
of making efforts to please everybody?
I think nobody ever possessed these qualities in the same degree as
Cicero. That insatiable vanity, that openness to impressions, that
easiness in letting himself be seized and mastered by events, are found
in his whole life and in all his works. It seems, at first sight, that
there is a great difference between his letters and his speeches, and we
are tempted to ask ourselves how the same man has been able to succeed
in styles so opposed; but astonishment ceases as soon as we look a
little closer. When we seek the really original qualities of his
speeches they are found to be altogether the same that charm us in his
letters. His commonplaces have got rather old, his pathos leaves us
cold, and we often find that there is too much artifice in his rhetoric,
but his narrations and portraits remain living in his speeches. It would
be difficult to find a greater talent than his for narrative and
description, and for representing to the life as he does both events and
men. If he shows them to us so clearly, it is because he has them
himself before his eyes. When he shows us the trader Cherea “with his
eyebrows shaved, and that head which smells of tricks, and in which
malignity breathes,”[5] or the praetor Verres taking an airing in a
litter with eight bearers, like a king of Bithynia, softly lying on
Malta roses,[6] or Vatinius rushing forth to speak, “his eyes starting,
his neck swollen, his muscles stretched,”[7] or the Gallic witnesses,
who walk about the Forum with an air of triumph and head erect,[8] or
the Greek witnesses who chatter without ceasing and gesticulate with the
shoulders,[9] all those characters, in fine, that when once they have
been met with in his works are never forgotten, his powerful and mobile
imagination sees them before painting them. He possesses in a wonderful
degree the faculty of making himself the spectator of what he narrates.
Things strike him, persons attract or repel him with an incredible
vivacity, and he throws himself entirely into the pictures he makes of
them. What passion there is in his narratives! What furious bursts of
anger in his attacks! What frenzy of joy when he describes some ill
fortune of his enemies! How one feels that he is penetrated and
overwhelmed with it, that he enjoys it, that he delights in it and
gloats over it, according to his energetic expressions: _his ego rebus
pascor, his delector, his perfruor!_[10] Saint-Simon, intoxicated with
hatred and joy, expresses himself almost in the same terms in the famous
scene of the “bed of justice,” when he sees the Duke of Maine struck
down and the bastards discrowned. “I, however,” says he, “was dying with
joy, I was even fearing a swoon. My heart, swelled to excess, found no
room to expand.... I triumphed, I avenged myself, I swam in my
vengeance.” Saint-Simon earnestly desired power, and twice he thought he
held it; “but the waters, as with Tantalus, retired from his lips every
time he thought to touch them.” I do not think, however, that we ought
to pity him. He would have ill filled the place of Colbert and Louvois,
and even his good qualities perhaps would have been hurtful to him.
Passionate and irritable, he feels warmly the slightest injury, and
flies into a passion at every turn. The smallest incidents excite him,
and we feel that when he relates them he does so with all his heart.
This ardent sensitiveness which warms all his narratives has made him an
incomparable painter, but as it would always have confused his judgment
it would have made him an indifferent politician. Cicero’s example shows
this well.
We are right then in saying that we find the same qualities in Cicero’s
speeches as in his letters, but they are more evident in his letters,
because he is freer and gives more play to his feelings. When he writes
to any of his friends, he does not reflect so long as when he is to
address the people; he gives his first impressions, and gives them with
life and passion as they rise in him. He does not take the trouble to
polish his style; all that he writes has usually such a graceful air,
something so easy and simple that we cannot suspect preparation or
artifice. A correspondent who wished to please him, having spoken to him
one day of the thunders of his utterance, _fulmina verborum_, he
answered: “What do you think then of my letters? Do you not think that I
write to you in the ordinary style? One must not always keep the same
tone. A letter cannot resemble a pleading or a political speech ... one
uses every-day expressions in it.”[11] Even if he had wished to give
more care to them he could not have found leisure. He had so many to
write to content everybody! Atticus alone sometimes received three in
the same day. So he wrote them where he could—during the sitting of the
senate, in his garden, when he is out walking, on the high-road when he
is travelling. Sometimes he dates them from his dining-room, where he
dictates them to his secretaries between two courses. When he writes
them with his own hand he does not give himself time to reflect any the
more. “I take the first pen I find,” he tells his brother, “and use it
as if it were good.”[12] Thus it was not always easy to decipher him.
When any one complains he does not lack excuses. It is the fault of his
friends’ messengers, who will not wait. “They come all ready to start,
with their travelling caps on, saying that their companions are waiting
for them at the door.”[13] Not to keep them waiting, he must write at
random all that comes into his mind.
Let us thank these impatient friends, these hurried messengers who did
not give Cicero time to make eloquent essays. His letters please us
precisely because they contain the first flow of his emotions, because
they are full of graceful negligence and naturalness. As he does not
take time to disguise himself we see him as he is. His brother said to
him one day, “I saw your own self in your letter.”[14] We are inclined
to say the same thing ourselves every time we read him. If he is so
lively, earnest, and animated when he addresses his friends, it is
because he so easily transports himself in imagination to the places
where they are. “I feel as though I were talking to you,”[15] he writes
to one of them. “I don’t know how it happens,” he says to another, “that
I think I am near you while writing to you.”[16] He gives way to his
passing emotions in his letters even more than in his speeches. When he
arrives at one of his fine country houses that he likes so much, he
gives himself up to the pleasure of seeing it again; it has never seemed
to him so fine. He visits his porticoes, his gymnasia, his garden seats;
he runs to his books, ashamed of having left them. Love of solitude
seizes him so strongly that he never finds himself sufficiently alone.
He ends by disliking his house at Formiae because there are so many
intruders. “It is not a villa,” he says, “it is a public lounge.”[17]
There he finds again the greatest bores in the world, his friend Sebosus
and his friend Arrius, who persists in not returning to Rome, however
much he may entreat him, in order to keep him company and philosophize
with him all day long. “While I am writing to you,” he says to Atticus,
“Sebosus is announced. I have not finished lamenting this when I hear
Arrius saluting me. Is this leaving Rome? What is the use of flying from
others to fall into the hands of these?” I wish, he adds, quoting a fine
verse very likely borrowed from his own works, “I wish to fly to the
mountains of my birthplace, the cradle of my infancy. _In montes patrios
et ad incunabula nostra._”[18] He goes in fact to Arpinum; he extends
his journey to Antium, the wild Antium, where he passes the time
counting the waves. This obscure tranquillity pleases him so much that
he regrets he was not duumvir in this little town rather than consul at
Rome. He has no higher ambition than to be rejoined by his friend
Atticus, to walk with him in the sun, or to talk philosophy “seated on
the little bench beneath the statue of Aristotle.” At this moment he
seems disgusted with public life, he will not hear speak of it. “I am
resolved to think no more about it,”[19] he says. But we know how he
kept this sort of promise. As soon as he is back in Rome he plunges into
the thick of politics; the country and its pleasures are forgotten. We
only detect from time to time a few passing regrets for a calmer life.
“When shall we live then?” _quando vivemus?_ says he sadly in this
whirlwind of business that hurries him on.[20] But these timorous
complaints are soon stifled by the noise and movement of the combat. He
enters and takes part in it with more ardour than anybody. He is still
excited by it when he writes to Atticus, its agitation is shown by his
letters which communicate it to us. We imagine ourselves looking on at
those incredible scenes that take place in the senate when he attacks
Clodius, sometimes by set speeches, sometimes by impetuous questions,
employing against him by turns the heaviest arms of rhetoric and the
lightest shafts of raillery. He is still more sprightly when he
describes the popular assemblies and recounts the scandals of the
elections. “Follow me to the Campus Martius, corruption is rampant,
_sequere me in Campum; ardet ambitus_.”[21] And he shows us the
candidates at work, purse in hand, or the judges in the Forum
shamelessly selling themselves to whoever will pay them, _judices quos
fames magis quam fama commovit_.
As he has the habit of giving way to his impressions and changing with
them, his tone varies from letter to letter. Nothing is more desponding
than those he writes in exile; they are a continual moan; but his
sentences suddenly become majestic and triumphant immediately after his
return from exile. They are full of those flattering superlatives that
he distributes so liberally to those who have served him, _fortissimus_,
_prudentissimus_, _exoptatissimus_, etc., he extols in magnificent terms
the marks of esteem given him by people of position, the authority he
enjoys in the Curia, the credit he has so gloriously reconquered in the
Forum, _splendorem ilium forensem, et in senatu auctoritatem et apud
viros bonos gratiam_.[22] Although he is only addressing his faithful
Atticus, we think we hear an echo of the set orations he has just
pronounced in the senate and before the people. It sometimes happens
that on the gravest occasions he smiles and jokes with a friend who
amuses him. In the thick of his conflict with Antony he writes that
charming letter to Papirius Poetus, in which he advises him in such a
diverting manner to frequent again the good tables, and to give good
dinners to his friends.[23] He does not defy dangers, he forgets them;
but let him meet some timorous person, he soon partakes his fear, his
tone changes at once; he becomes animated, heated; sadness, fear,
emotion carry him without effort to the highest flights of eloquence.
When Caesar threatens Rome, and insolently places his final conditions
before the senate, Cicero’s courage rises, and he uses, when writing to
a single person, those energetic figures of speech which would not be
out of place in a public oration. “What a fate is ours! Must we then
give way to his impudent demands! for so Pompey calls them. In fact has
a more shameless audacity ever been seen?—You have occupied for ten
years a province that the senate has not given you, but which you have
seized yourself by intrigue and violence. The term has arrived which
your caprice alone and not the law has fixed for your power.—But let us
suppose it was the law—the term having arrived, we name your successor,
but you resist and say, ‘Respect my rights.’ And you, what do you do to
ours? What pretext have you for keeping your army beyond the term fixed
by the people, in spite of the senate?—You must give way to me or
fight.—Well then! let us fight, answers Pompey, at least we have the
chance of conquering or of dying free men.”[24]
If I wished to find another example of this agreeable variety and these
rapid changes, I should not turn to Pliny or to those who, like him,
wrote their letters for the public, I should come down to Madame de
Sévigné. She, like Cicero, has a very lively and versatile imagination;
she gives way to her first emotions without reflection; she is caught by
things present, and the pleasure she is enjoying always seems the
highest. It has been remarked that she took pleasure everywhere, not
through that indolence of mind that attaches us to the place where we
are, to avoid the trouble of changing, but by the vivacity of her
character which gave her up entirely to the pleasures of the moment.
Paris does not charm her so much as to prevent her liking the country,
and no one of that age has spoken about nature better than this woman of
fashion who was so much at ease in drawing-rooms, and seemed made for
them. She escapes to Livry the first fine day to enjoy “the triumph of
May,” to “the nightingale, the cuckoo, and the warbler that begin the
spring in the woods.” But Livry is still too fashionable, she must have
a more complete solitude, and she cheerfully retires under her great
trees in Brittany. This time her Paris friends think she will be wearied
to death, having no news to repeat or fine wits to converse with. But
she has taken some serious moral treatise by Nicole with her; she has
found among those neglected books whose last refuge, like that of old
furniture, is the country, some romance of her young days which she
reads again secretly, and in which she is astonished still to find
pleasure. She chats with her tenants, and just as Cicero preferred the
society of the country people to that of the provincial fashionables,
she likes better to talk with her gardener Pilois than with “several who
have preserved the title of esquire in the parliament of Rennes.” She
walks in her Mall, in those solitary alleys where the trees covered with
fine-sounding mottoes almost seem as though they were speaking to each
other; she finds, in fact, so much pleasure in her desert that she
cannot make up her mind to leave it; nevertheless no woman likes Paris
better. Once back there she surrenders herself wholly to the pleasures
of fashionable life. Her letters are full of it. She takes impressions
so readily that we might almost tell in perusing them what books she has
just been reading, at what conversations she has been present, what
drawing-rooms she has just left. When she repeats so pleasantly to her
daughter the gossip of the court we perceive that she has just been
conversing with the graceful and witty Madame de Coulanges, who has
repeated it to her. When she speaks so touchingly of Turenne she has
just left the Hôtel de Bouillon, where the prince’s family are lamenting
his broken fortunes as well as his death. She lectures, she sermonizes
herself with Nicole, but not for long. Let her son come in and tell her
some of those gay adventures of which he has been the hero or the
victim, she recounts boldly the most risky tales on condition of saying
a little later, “Pardon us, Monsieur Nicole!” When she has been visiting
La Rochefoucauld everything turns to morality; she draws lessons from
everything, everywhere she sees some image of life and of the human
heart, even in the viper broth that they are going to give Madame de la
Fayette who is ill. Is not this viper, which though opened and skinned
still writhes, like our old passions? “What do we not do to them? We
treat them with insult, harshness, cruelty, disdain; we wrangle, lament,
and storm, and yet they move. We cannot overcome them. We think, when we
have plucked out their heart, that they are done with and we shall hear
no more of them. But no; they are always alive, they are always moving.”
This ease with which she receives impressions, and which causes her to
adopt so quickly the sentiments of the people she visits, makes her also
feel the shock of the great events she looks on at. The style of her
letters rises when she narrates them, and, like Cicero, she becomes
eloquent unconsciously. Whatever admiration the greatness of the
thoughts and the liveliness of expression in that fine piece of Cicero
upon Caesar that I quoted just now may cause me, I am still more
touched, I admit, by the letter of Madame de Sévigné on the death of
Louvois, and I find more boldness and brilliancy in that terrible
dialogue which she imagines between the minister who demands pardon and
God who refuses it.
These are admirable qualities, but they bring with them certain
disadvantages. Such hasty impressions are often rather fleeting. When
people are carried away by a too vivid imagination, they do not take
time to reflect before speaking, and run the risk of often having to
change their opinion. Thus Madame de Sévigné has contradicted herself
more than once. But being only a woman of fashion, her inconsistency has
not much weight, and we do not look on it as a crime. What does it
matter to us that her opinions on Fléchier and Mascaron have varied,
that after having unreservedly admired the _Princesse de Clèves_ when
she read it alone, she hastened to find a thousand faults in it when her
cousin Bussy condemned it? But Cicero is a politician, and he is
expected to be more serious. We demand that his opinions should have
more coherency; now, this is precisely what the liveliness of his
imagination least permits. He never boasted of being consistent. When he
judges events or men he sometimes passes without scruple, in a few days,
from one extreme to the other. In a letter of the end of October Cato is
called an excellent friend (_amicissimus_), and the way in which he has
acted is declared to be satisfactory; at the beginning of November he is
accused of having been shamefully malevolent in the same affair,[25]
because Cicero seldom judges but by his impressions, and in a mobile
spirit like his, very different but equally vivid impressions follow
each other very quickly.
Another danger, and one still greater, of this excess of imagination
which cannot control itself is that it may give us the lowest and most
false opinion of those who yield to it. Perfect characters are only
found in novels. Good and evil are so intermingled in our nature that
the one is seldom found without the other. The strongest characters have
their weaknesses, and the finest actions do not spring only from the
most honourable motives. Our best affections are not entirely exempt
from selfishness; doubts and wrongful suspicions sometimes trouble the
firmest friendships, and it may happen at certain moments that cupidity
and jealousy, of which one is ashamed the next day, flit rapidly through
the mind of the most honourable persons. The prudent and clever
carefully conceal all those feelings which cannot bear the light; those
whose quick impressions carry them away, like Cicero, speak out, and
they are very much blamed. The spoken or written word gives more
strength and permanence to these fugitive thoughts; they were only
flashes; they are fixed and accentuated by writing; they acquire a
clearness, a relief and importance that they had not in reality. Those
momentary weaknesses, those ridiculous suspicions which spring from
wounded self-esteem, those short bursts of anger, quieted as soon as
reflected on, those unjust thoughts that vexation produces, those
ambitious fits that reason hastens to disavow, never perish when once
they have been confided to a friend. One of these days a prying
commentator will study these too unreserved disclosures, and will use
them, to draw a portrait of the indiscrete person who made them, to
frighten posterity. He will prove by exact and irrefutable quotations
that he was a bad citizen and a bad friend, that he loved neither his
country nor his family, that he was jealous of honest people, and that
he betrayed all parties. It is not so, however, and a wise man will not
be deceived by the artifice of misleading quotations. Such a man well
knows that we must not take these impetuous people literally or give too
much credence to what they say. We must save them from themselves,
refuse to listen to them when they are led astray by passion, and
especially must we distinguish their real and lasting feelings from all
those exaggerations which are merely passing. For these reasons every
one is not fitted to thoroughly understand these letters, every one
cannot read them as they should be read. I mistrust those learned men
who, without any acquaintance with men or experience of life, pretend to
judge Cicero from his correspondence. Most frequently they judge him
ill. They search for the expression of his thought in that commonplace
politeness which society demands, and which no more binds those who use
it than it deceives those who accept it. Those concessions that must be
made if we wish to live together they call cowardly compromises. They
see manifest contradictions in those different shades a man gives to his
opinions, according to the persons he is talking with. They triumph over
the imprudence of certain admissions, or the fatuity of certain praises,
because they do not perceive the fine irony that tempers them. To
appreciate all these shades, to give things their real importance, to be
a good judge of the drift of those phrases which are said with half a
smile, and do not always mean what they seem to say, requires more
acquaintance with life than one usually gets in a German university. If
I must say what I think, I would rather trust a man of the world than a
scholar in this matter, for a delicate appreciation.
Cicero is not the only person whom this correspondence shows us. It is
full of curious details about all those who had friendly or business
relations with him. They were the most illustrious persons of the time,
and they played the chief parts in the revolution that put an end to the
Roman Republic. No one deserves to be studied more than they. It must be
remarked here, that one of Cicero’s failings has greatly benefited
posterity. If it were a question of some one else, of Cato for instance,
how many people’s letters would be missing in this correspondence! The
virtuous alone would find a place in it, and Heaven knows their number
was not then very great. But, happily, Cicero was much more tractable,
and did not bring Cato’s rigorous scruples into the choice of his
friends. A sort of good-nature made him accessible to people of every
opinion; his vanity made him seek praise everywhere. He had dealings
with all parties, a great fault in a politician, for which the shrewd
people of his time have bitterly reproached him, but a fault that we
profit by; hence it happens that all parties are represented in his
correspondence. This obliging humour sometimes brought him into contact
with people whose opinions were the most opposite to his, and he found
himself at certain times in close relations with the worst citizens whom
he has at other times lashed with his invectives. Letters that he had
received from Antony, Dolabella, and Curio still remain, and these
letters are full of expressions of respect and friendship. If the
correspondence went further back we should probably have some of
Catiline’s, and, frankly, I regret the want of them; for if we wish to
judge of the state of a society as of the constitution of a man, it is
not enough to examine the sound parts, we must handle and probe to the
bottom the unsound parts. Thus, all the important men of that time,
whatever their conduct may have been, or to whatever party they may have
belonged, had dealings with Cicero. Memorials of all are found in his
correspondence. A few of their letters still exist, and we have a large
number of those that Cicero wrote to them. The private details he gives
us about them, what he tells us of their opinions, their habits, and
character, allows us to enter freely into their life. Thanks to him, all
those persons indistinctly depicted by history resume their original
appearance; he seems to bring them nearer to us and to make us
acquainted with them; and when we have read his correspondence we can
say that we have just visited the whole Roman society of his time.
The end we have in view in this book is to study closely a few of these
personages, especially those who were most involved in the great
political events of that period. But before beginning this study it is
necessary to make a firm resolution not to bring to it considerations
which belong to our own time. It is too much the custom now-a-days to
seek arms for our present struggles in the history of the past. Smart
allusions and ingenious parallels are most successful. Perhaps Roman
antiquity is so much in fashion only because it gives political parties
a convenient and less dangerous battle-field where, under ancient
costumes, present-day passions may struggle. If the names of Caesar,
Pompey, Cato, and Brutus are quoted on all occasions, these great men
must not be too proud of the honour. The curiosity they excite is not
altogether disinterested, and when they are spoken of it is almost
always to point an epigram or set off a flattery. I wish to avoid this
mistake. These illustrious dead seem to me to deserve something better
than to serve as instruments in the quarrels that divide us, and I have
sufficient respect for their memory and their repose not to drag them
into the arena of our every-day disputes. It should never be forgotten
that it is an outrage to history to subject it to the changing interest
of parties, and that it should be, according to the fine expression of
Thucydides, a work made for eternity.
These precautions being taken, let us penetrate with Cicero’s letters
into the Roman society of that great period, and let us begin by
studying him who offers himself so gracefully to do us the honours.
CICERO IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LIFE
I
CICERO’S PUBLIC LIFE
Cicero’s public life is usually severely judged by the historians of our
time. He pays the penalty of his moderation. As this period is only
studied now with political intentions, a man like him who tried to avoid
extremes fully satisfies nobody. All parties agree in attacking him; on
all sides he is laughed at or insulted. The fanatical partisans of
Brutus accuse him of timidity, the warmest friends of Caesar call him a
fool. It is in England and amongst us[26] that he has been least abused,
and that classical traditions have been more respected than elsewhere;
the learned still persist in their old habits and their old admirations,
and in the midst of so many convulsions criticism at least has remained
conservative. Perhaps also the indulgence shown to Cicero in both
countries comes from the experience they have of political life. When a
man has lived in the practice of affairs and in the midst of the working
of parties, he can better understand the sacrifices that the necessities
of the moment, the interest of his friends and the safety of his cause
may demand of a statesman, but he who only judges his conduct by
inflexible theories thought out in solitude and not submitted to the
test of experience becomes more severe towards him. This, no doubt, is
the reason why the German scholars use him so roughly. With the
exception of M. Abeken,[27] who treats him humanely, they are without
pity. Drumann[28] especially overlooks nothing. He has scrutinized his
works and his life with the minuteness and sagacity of a lawyer seeking
the grounds of a lawsuit. He has laid bare all his correspondence in a
spirit of conscientious malevolence. He has courageously resisted the
charm of those confidential disclosures which makes us admire the writer
and love the man in spite of his weaknesses, and by opposing to each
other detached fragments of his letters and discourses he has succeeded
in drawing up a formal indictment, in which nothing is omitted and which
almost fills a volume. M. Mommsen[29] is scarcely more gentle, he is
only less long. Taking a general view of things he does not lose himself
in the details. In two of those compact pages full of facts, such as he
knows how to write, he has found means to heap on Cicero more insults
than Drumann’s whole volume contains. We see particularly that this
pretended statesman was only an egotist and a short-sighted politician,
and that this great writer is only made up of a newspaper novelist and a
special-pleader. Here we perceive the same pen that has just written
down Cato a Don Quixote and Pompey a corporal. As in his studies of the
past he always has the present in his mind, one would say that he looks
for the squireens of Prussia in the Roman aristocracy, and that in
Caesar he salutes in advance that popular despot whose firm hand can
alone give unity to Germany.
How much truth is there in these fierce attacks? What confidence can we
place in this boldness of revolutionary criticism? What judgment must we
pronounce on Cicero’s political conduct? The study of the facts will
teach us.
I.
Three causes generally contribute to form a man’s political opinions—his
birth, his personal reflections, and his temperament. If I were not
speaking here of sincere convictions only, I would readily add a fourth,
which causes more conversions than the others, namely interest, that is
to say, that leaning one has almost in spite of oneself to think that
the most advantageous course is also the most just, and to conform one’s
opinion to the position one holds or wishes for. Let us try and discover
what influence these causes had upon Cicero’s conduct and political
preferences.