discussions. I only wish here to deal with so much of it as is
indispensable to explain Cicero’s political life. There are, I think,
two very different ways of looking at the question: our own first,
namely, that of people unconcerned in these quarrels of a former age,
who approach them as historians or philosophers, after time has cooled
them, who judge them less by their causes than by their results, and who
ask themselves, above all, what good or evil they have done in the
world; then that of contemporaries, who judge of them with their
passions and prejudices, according to the ideas of their time, in their
relation to themselves, and without knowing their remote consequences. I
am going to place myself solely at this latter point of view, although
the other seems to me grander and more profitable; but as my only design
is to ask from Cicero an explanation of his political actions, and as
one cannot reasonably require of him that he should have divined the
future, I shall confine myself to showing how the question was stated in
his time, what reasons were alleged on both sides, and in what manner it
was natural for a wise man who loved his country to appreciate those
reasons. Let us forget, then, the eighteen centuries that separate us
from these events, let us suppose ourselves at Formiae or Tusculum
during those long days of anxiety and uncertainty that Cicero passed
there, and let us hear him discuss, with Atticus or Curio, the reasons
that the two parties urged to draw him into their ranks.
What shows plainly that the judgment of contemporaries on the events
which pass before them is not the same as that of posterity is, that the
friends of Caesar, when they wished to gain over Cicero, did not employ
the argument that seems the best to us. The chief reason that is
appealed to now to justify Caesar’s victory is that, on the whole, if by
it Rome lost some of her privileges, it was for the advantage of the
rest of the world that she was despoiled. What does it matter that a few
thousand men, who did not make a very good use of their political
liberty, were deprived of it, if by the same stroke almost the entire
world was rescued from pillage, slavery, and ruin? It is certain that
the provinces and their inhabitants, so roughly treated by the
proconsuls of the republic, found themselves better off under the
_régime_ inaugurated by Caesar. His army was open to all foreigners; he
had with him Germans, Gauls, and Spaniards. They helped him to conquer,
and naturally profited by his victory: and this was, without his wishing
it perhaps, the revenge of the conquered nations. These nations were not
anxious to recover their independence; they had lost the taste for it
with their defeat. Their ambition was quite the reverse: they wished to
be allowed to become Romans. Up till then, however, that proud and
greedy aristocracy, who held power, and who meant to use the human race
for the benefit of their pleasures or their grandeur, had obstinately
refused to raise them to a level with themselves, no doubt in order to
preserve the right of treating them according to their caprice. In
overthrowing the aristocracy, Caesar overthrew the barrier that closed
Rome to the rest of the nations. The empire made the entire world Roman;
it reconciled, says a poet, and blended under one name, all the nations
of the universe. These are surely great things, and it does not become
us to forget them, us the sons of the vanquished, called by Caesar to
partake in his victory. But who, in Cicero’s time, thought it would be
thus? who could foresee and indicate these remote consequences? The
question did not present itself then as it does to us who study it from
a distance. Caesar does not anywhere allege the interest of the
conquered among the reasons he gives for his enterprise. The senate
never claimed to be the representative of the Roman nationality,
threatened by an invasion of the barbarians, and it does not appear that
the provinces rose in favour of him who came to defend them; on the
contrary, they were almost equally divided between the two rivals. If
the West fought on Caesar’s side, all the East repaired to Pompey’s
camp, which proves that when the struggle commenced its consequences
were unknown even to those who were to profit by them, and whose
interest should have made them clear-sighted. Besides, even if Cicero
had suspected the benefits that the world was going to draw from
Caesar’s triumph, can we think that this reason would have sufficed to
decide him? He was not one of those whose love for the whole of humanity
excuses them from serving their country. He would have resigned himself
with difficulty to the sacrifice of his liberty, under the pretence that
this sacrifice would profit the Gauls, the Britons, and the Sarmatians.
No doubt he was not indifferent to the interest of the world, but that
of Rome touched him closer. His temper was gentle and humane, he had
written in beautiful works that all nations are only one and the same
family, he had made himself loved in the province he had governed;
nevertheless, when Caesar opened the city and even the senate to the
strangers who accompanied him, he showed himself very discontented, and
attacked these barbarians with his most cruel raillery. He saw plainly
that those Spaniards and Gauls who were walking proudly about the Forum
were triumphing over Rome. His Roman pride revolted at this sight, and I
see no reason to blame him for it. If he could divine or even catch a
glimpse of the general emancipation of the conquered nations which was
preparing, he understood also that this emancipation would bring with it
the loss of the original, distinct, and independent existence of his
country. It was natural that a Roman should not wish to pay this price
even for the prosperity of the world.
Putting aside this reason, another, specious if not true, was much used
to entice the irresolute. They were told that the republic and liberty
were not interested in the war, that it was simply a struggle between
two ambitious men who were contending for power. In this assertion there
was a certain amount of truth capable of misleading thoughtless minds.
Personal questions certainly held a large place in this contest. The
soldiers of Caesar fought solely for him, and Pompey had in his suite
many friends and creatures whom thirty years of prosperity and power had
gained for him. Cicero himself gives us to understand, several times,
that it was his old friendship for Pompey that led him into his camp.
“It is to him and to him alone that I sacrifice myself,” said he, when
he was preparing to leave Italy.[50] There are moments in which he seems
to take pleasure in limiting the subject of this quarrel he is about to
engage in, and when, writing to his friends, he repeats to them what
Caesar’s partisans said—“It is a conflict of ambition, _regnandi
contentio est_.”[51] But we must be careful when reading his
correspondence of this period, and must read it with caution. Never was
he more irresolute. He changes his opinion every day, he attacks and
defends all parties, so that by skilfully putting together all the words
let fall in this discontent and uncertainty, one may find in his letters
grounds for charges against everybody. These are only the sallies of a
restless and frightened mind, of which we must not make too much use
either against others or against himself. Here, for instance, when he
asserts that the republic has nothing to do in the contest, he does not
say what he really thinks. It is only one of those pretexts that he
invents to justify his hesitation in his friends’ eyes and his own. So
rare is it to be quite sincere, I do not say with others only but with
oneself! We are so ingenious in proving to ourselves that we have a
thousand reasons for doing what we do without reason, or through
interest or caprice! But when Cicero wishes to be frank, when he has no
motive to delude himself or deceive others, he speaks in another manner.
Then the cause of Pompey becomes really that of justice and right, that
of honest men and of liberty. Without doubt, Pompey had rendered very
indifferent services to the republic before being led by circumstances
to defend it. He could not be trusted entirely, and his ambition was to
be feared. In his camp he affected the airs of a sovereign; he had his
flatterers and his ministers. “He is a little Sulla,” said Cicero, “who
dreams also of proscriptions, _sullaturit, proscripturit_.”[52] The
republican party would certainly have taken another defender if it had
been free to choose; but at the time when Caesar assembled his troops,
this party, which had neither soldiers nor generals, was really forced
to accept Pompey’s aid. It accepted it as that of an ally whom one
distrusts and watches, who, perhaps, will become an enemy after the
victory, but with whom one cannot dispense during the fight. Besides,
although Pompey might not altogether secure liberty, it was known that
it ran fewer risks with him than with Caesar. He was ambitious
doubtless, but more ambitious of honours than of power. Twice he had
been seen to arrive at the gates of Rome with an army. The democracy
called him, to make himself king, he had only to will it, and twice he
had disbanded his troops and laid down the fasces. He had been made sole
consul, that is to say, almost dictator, and at the end of six months he
had voluntarily taken a colleague. These precedents made sincere
republicans believe that after the victory he would content himself with
sonorous titles and pompous eulogies, and that his services would be
repaid, without danger to any one, with laurels and the purple. In any
case, if he had demanded something else, we may be certain that he would
have been refused, and that he would have found adversaries in the
greater number of those who had become his allies. There were in his
camp many persons who were not his friends, and who cannot be suspected
of having taken arms to win a throne for him. Cato distrusted him, and
had always opposed him. Brutus, whose father he had killed, hated him.
The aristocracy did not pardon him for having restored the power of the
tribunes, and for having united with Caesar against it. Is it likely
that all these eminent persons, experienced in affairs, were the dupes
of this indifferent politician who never deceived anybody, and that,
without knowing it, they worked for him alone? or must we admit, which
is still less likely, that they knew it, and that they voluntarily
abandoned their country, risked their fortunes, and gave their lives to
serve the interests and the ambition of a man whom they did not love?
Assuredly, for them, something else was in question. When they went over
sea, when they decided, notwithstanding their repugnance, to begin a
civil war, when they came to put themselves under the orders of a
general against whom they had so many reasons for ill-will, they did not
intend to intervene solely in a personal quarrel, but to come to the
help of the republic and of that liberty which were threatened. “But
here,” people say, “you are deceived again. These names, liberty and
republic, delude you. It was not liberty that was defended in Pompey’s
camp, it was the oppression of the people by a caste. They wished to
maintain the privileges of a burdensome and unjust aristocracy. They
fought to preserve for it the right to oppress the plebs, and to crush
the world.” At that rate the friends of liberty ought to keep for Caesar
the sympathies they generally accord to Pompey, for he is the liberal
and the democrat, the man of the people, the successor of the Gracchi
and of Marius. This is indeed the part he assumed from the day when,
almost a child, he had braved Sulla. Praetor and consul, he had appeared
to serve the popular cause with devotion, and at the moment when he
marched on Rome, abandoned by the senate, he still said, “I come to
deliver the Roman people from a faction that oppresses it.”[53]
How much truth is there in this pretence that he makes of being the
defender of the democracy? What ought to be thought of it, I do not say
by a patrician, who naturally thought much ill of the people, but by an
enemy of the nobility, by a new man like Cicero? Whatever anger the
disdain of the aristocracy had caused to Cicero, whatever impatience he
had felt at always finding in his way, in his candidatures, one of those
nobles to whom “_honours came while they slept_,” I do not find that his
ill-humour had ever led him to pretend that the people was
oppressed;[54] and I suppose that when it was asserted before him that
Caesar took up arms to restore him his liberty, he asked how long it was
since he had lost it, and what new privileges they wished to add to
those he already possessed? He called to mind that the people possessed
a legal organization, had their own magistrates to whom they appealed
from the decisions of others, magistrates inviolable and sacred, whom
the law armed with the enormous power of staying the action of the
government by their interference, and of interrupting political life;
that they had the liberty of speech and of the rostrum, the right of
voting, in which they trafficked for a living, and finally, free access
to all grades of the magistracy, and he had only to cite his own case to
demonstrate that it was possible for a man without birth and almost
without fortune to attain even the consulship. Such success in truth was
rare. The equality laid down in the law disappeared in practice. The
consular records of that period contain scarcely any but illustrious
names. A few great families seem to have established themselves in the
highest dignities of the state; they guarded the avenues to them, and
allowed no one to approach; but was it necessary, in order to break down
the obstacles that the cleverness of a few ambitious men opposed to the
regular working of the institutions, to destroy these institutions
themselves? was the evil so great that it was necessary to have recourse
to the radical remedy of absolute power? Was it impossible to think that
it would be more surely cured by liberty than by despotism? Had it not
been seen by recent examples that a strong current of popular opinion
was sufficient to overturn all this aristocratic resistance? The laws
gave the people the means of recovering their influence if they willed
it energetically. With the liberty of voting and of speaking in the
public assembly, with the intervention of the tribunes and the
invincible strength of numbers, they must always end in being masters.
It was their own fault if they left the power to others, and they
deserved the degradation in which the nobility held them, since they
made no effort to free themselves. Cicero had small esteem for the
common people of his time; he thought them careless and apathetic by
nature. “They demand nothing,” said he, “they desire nothing”;[55] and
every time he saw them stirring in the Forum he suspected that the
liberality of some ambitious men had worked this miracle. He was not,
therefore, led to think it necessary to accord them new rights when he
saw them use their ancient rights so little or so ill, and so he did not
regard the pretext put forth by Caesar for taking up arms as serious. He
never consented to look upon him as the successor of the Gracchi coming
to emancipate the oppressed plebs; the war which was preparing never
seemed to him to be the renewal of the ancient struggles between the
people and the aristocracy, of which Roman history is full. In fact, an
assembly of ruined nobles, like Dolabella, Antony, and Curio, marching
under the leadership of him who boasted of being the son of the gods and
of kings, little deserved the name of the popular party, and there was
something else at stake than the defence of the privileges of birth in a
camp to which so many knights and plebeians had repaired, and which
reckoned among its chiefs Varro, Cicero, and Cato, that is to say, two
burgesses of small fortune of Arpinum and Reate, and the descendant of
the peasant of Tusculum.
Caesar, however, does not seem to have been very much prepossessed with
this part of champion of the democracy. We do not find, on reading his
memoirs, that he speaks very much of the people’s interests. The phrase
just quoted is almost the only one in which they are mentioned.
Elsewhere he is more frank. At the beginning of the civil war, when he
set forth his reasons for commencing it, he complained that he was
refused the consulship, that his province was taken from him, that he
was torn from his army; he says not a word of the people, of their
unrecognized rights, of their crushed liberty. This was, however, the
moment to speak of them in order to justify an enterprise that so many
people, and those the most honest, condemned. What did he demand in the
final conditions he laid before the senate before marching on Rome? His
consulship, his army, his province; he defended his personal interests,
he bargained for himself, it never came into his mind to demand any
guarantee for that people whose defender he called himself. Around him,
in his camp, one thought no more of the people than they did of
themselves. His best friends, his bravest generals, had no pretension to
be reformers or democrats. They did not think, in following him, that
they were going to give liberty to their fellow-citizens; they wished to
avenge their outraged chief, and to win power for him. “We are the
soldiers of Caesar,” said they with Curio.[56] They had no other title,
they knew no other name. When some one came to speak to those old
centurions who had seen Germany and Britain, who had taken Alesia and
Gergovia, of abandoning Caesar and passing over to the side of the laws
and the republic, they did not reply that they were defending the people
and their rights. “We,” said they, “shall we quit our general who has
given all of us our ranks, shall we take arms against an army in which
we have served and been victorious for thirty-six years? We will never
do it!”[57] These men were no longer citizens but soldiers. After
thirty-six years of victories, they had lost the traditions of civil
life and the taste for it; the rights of the people had become
indifferent to them, and for them glory took the place of liberty.
Cicero and his friends thought that these surroundings were not those of
a popular chief who came to restore liberty to his fellow-citizens, but
those of an ambitious man who came to establish absolute power by arms,
and they were not mistaken. Caesar’s conduct after the war proves this
more than all the rest. How did he use his victory? What benefits did he
confer on the people whose interests he pretended to defend? I do not
speak of what he was able to do for their comfort and their pleasures,
the sumptuous feasts, the public meals that he gave, the corn and oil
that he so generously distributed to the poorest, the 400 sesterces (£3
4_s._) that he paid each citizen on the day of his triumph: if these
alms satisfied the plebeians of that time, if they consented to
sacrifice their liberty at that price, I pardon Cicero for not having
more esteem for them, and for not putting himself on their side; but if
they demanded something else, if they wished for a more complete
independence, for a larger share in the affairs of their country, for
new political rights, they did not obtain them, and Caesar’s victory,
notwithstanding his promises, rendered them neither freer nor more
powerful. Caesar humiliated the aristocracy, but only for his own
advantage. He took the executive power out of the hands of the senate,
but only to put it in his own. He established equality between all the
orders, but it was an equality of servitude, and all were henceforth
reduced to the same level of obedience.
I know that after he had silenced the public speakers, deprived the
people of the right of voting, and united in himself all public
authority, the senate that he had appointed, having exhausted flattery,
solemnly awarded to him the name of Liberator, and voted the erection of
a Temple of Liberty. If it is against this liberty that Cicero and his
friends are accused of having taken up arms, I do not think it is worth
the trouble to defend them from this charge.
Let us call things by their real name. It was for himself and not for
the people that Caesar worked, and Cicero, in opposing him, thought he
was defending the republic and not the privileges of the aristocracy.
But did this republic deserve to be defended? Was there any hope of
preserving it? Was it not manifest that its ruin was inevitable? This is
the greatest charge that is made against those who followed Pompey’s
party. I admit it is not easy to answer it. The evil that Rome suffered,
and which showed itself in those disorders and that violence of which
Cicero’s letters give us such a sad picture, was not of a kind to be
averted by a few wise reforms. It was ancient and profound. It became
worse every day without any law being able to prevent or arrest it.
Could one hope to cure it with those slight changes that the boldest
proposed? Of what use was it to diminish, as was wished, the privileges
of the aristocracy and to augment the rights of the plebeians? The
sources of public life themselves were seriously impaired. The evil came
from the way in which the citizenship was acquired.
For a long time Rome had drawn her strength from the country people. It
was from the rustic tribes, the most honoured of all, that those valiant
soldiers who had conquered Italy and subdued Carthage had come; but this
agricultural and warlike people, who had so well defended the republic,
could not defend themselves against the encroachments of the great
estates. Enclosed little by little by those immense domains where
cultivation is easiest, the poor peasant had for a long time struggled
against misery and the usurers; then, discouraged in the struggle, he
had ended by selling his field to his rich neighbour, who coveted it to
round off his estate. He had tried then to become a tenant farmer, a
metayer, a hired labourer on the property where he had been for so long
the master, but there he met with the competition of the slave, a more
frugal worker, who did not stand out for his wages, who did not make
terms, who might be treated as one liked.[58] Thus, driven twice from
his fields, both as owner and as tenant farmer, without work or
resources, he had been forced to migrate to the city. At Rome, however,
life was not more easy for him. What could he do there? There was little
trade, and usually it was not in the hands of the free men. In countries
where slavery flourishes, work is looked down upon. To die of hunger
without doing anything, is regarded by the free man as a privilege and
an honour. Besides, each noble had men of all trades among his slaves,
and as such a number of workmen were too many for himself alone, he
hired them out to those who had none, or made them keep shop in a corner
of his house for his own profit. Here again slave competition killed
free labour. Happily at this time Marius opened the ranks of the army to
the poorest citizens (_capite censi_). These unfortunate men, finding no
other resource, became soldiers. For lack of something better to do,
they achieved the conquest of the world, subjugated Africa, Gaul, and
the East, visited Britain and Germany, and the greater number of them,
the bravest and best, were killed in these distant expeditions. During
this time, the vacancies left in the city by those who departed and did
not return were ill filled. Since Rome had become powerful, people from
all parts of the world came to her, and we may well suppose they were
not always the most respectable.