most celebrated lawyer of his time. Cicero gives him this great praise,
namely, that he was the first to bring philosophy into the law, that is
to say, that he bound together all those minute rules and precise
formulas of which this science is composed, by general principles and
comprehensive views.[308] Accordingly he does not hesitate to place him
much above his predecessors, and more especially, over that great family
of the Scaevolas, in which as it seemed Roman jurisprudence had been up
to that time incarnate. There was, however, a difference between them
and Sulpicius, which it is important to notice: the Scaevolas had given
to Rome, lawyers, augurs, pontifs, that is to say, they excelled in the
arts that are friendly to tranquillity and peace; but they were also
very active citizens, resolute politicians, valiant soldiers who
courageously defended their country against conspirators and against the
foreigner. They showed themselves, in their busy life, competent for all
affairs and equal to all situations. Scaevola the augur, when Cicero
knew him, was still, notwithstanding his age, a vigorous old man, who
rose at daybreak to meet his country clients. He was the first to arrive
at the Curia, and he had always some book with him, that he read so as
not to remain idle while waiting for his colleagues; but the day that
Saturninus threatened the public tranquillity, this learned man who
loved study so much, this infirm old man who supported himself with
difficulty, and could only use one arm, seized a javelin with that arm,
and marched at the head of the people to the assault of the
Capitol.[309] Scaevola the pontif was not only an able lawyer, he was
also an upright administrator whose memory Asia never forgot. When the
farmers of the taxes attacked his quaestor Rutilius, guilty of having
wished to prevent them ruining the province, he defended him with an
admirable eloquence and vigour that no threat could shake. He refused to
leave Rome at the time of the first proscriptions, and abandon his
clients and their business, although he knew the fate that was awaiting
him. Wounded at the funeral of Marius, he was dispatched a few days
later near the temple of Vesta.[310] However, such men were not
exceptional at Rome. In the best times of the republic, the complete
citizen had to be at once agriculturist, soldier, administrator,
financier, advocate, and even jurist. There were no specialists then,
and we should be forced to make now-a-days four or five different
persons out of one ancient Roman; but in the period of which we are now
speaking, these diverse aptitudes that were then required in a single
man were separated: each man gave himself to a special science, and we
can begin to divide men of study from men of action. It is difficult to
say whether the reason of this was that men had lost the energy of their
character; or perhaps we should think that since the masterpieces of
Greece had been made known, and each science had become more
complicated, one man could not any longer bear the burden of all united?
However this may be, if Sulpicius was above the Scaevolas as a lawyer,
he was far from having their firmness as a citizen. Praetor or consul,
he was never anything more than a man of learning and chamber practice.
In circumstances that require resolution, every time it was necessary to
decide and to act, he was ill at ease. We feel that this honest and
gentle soul was not made to be the first magistrate of a republic in a
period of revolution. His fondness for always playing the part of
conciliator and arbitrator in that time of violence ended by exciting
laughter. Cicero himself, although he was his friend, quizzes him a
little, when he shows us this great peacemaker starting off with his
little secretary, after having looked over all his lawyers’ rules, to
intervene between the parties at the time these parties only desired to
destroy one another.
Caesar had always thought that Sulpicius was not of a character to
oppose him vigorously, and had early worked to attach him to himself. He
began by making an ally in his house, and a powerful ally. It was a
matter of common talk at Rome, that the worthy Sulpicius allowed himself
to be led by his wife Postumia; Cicero, who likes to repeat scandals,
several times tells us this. Now, Postumia’s reputation was not
spotless, and Suetonius places her name on the list of those women who
were loved by Caesar. She is one of a very numerous company; but this
fickle man, who passed so quickly from one mistress to another, had this
singular privilege, that all the women whom he abandoned, remained none
the less his devoted friends. They forgave his infidelities, they
continued to take an interest in all his successes, they put those
immense resources of ingenuity and persistency which belong only to a
woman who is in love, at the service of his policy. It was no doubt
Postumia who decided Sulpicius to work for Caesar during the whole time
that he was consul, and to oppose the vehemence of his colleague
Marcellus who wished another governor of Gaul to be appointed. However,
notwithstanding all his weaknesses, Sulpicius was none the less a
sincere republican, and when the war had broken out, he declared against
Caesar, and left Italy. After the defeat, he submitted like the rest,
and he had resumed his usual occupations, when Caesar sought him out in
his retreat in order to appoint him governor of Greece. It was certainly
impossible to find a government that suited him better. A residence in
Athens, at all times agreeable to the rich Romans, must have been
especially so at this time when that city was the asylum of so many
illustrious exiles. Sulpicius could at the same time have the pleasure
of hearing the most celebrated rhetoricians and philosophers of the
world, and could talk of Rome and the republic with eminent persons like
Marcellus and Torquatus, and thus satisfy all his tastes at once.
Nothing could have been more pleasing, we should have thought, to this
scholar and man of letters, whom chance had made a statesman, than the
exercise of extensive power, without danger, combined with the most
refined intellectual pleasures in one of the grandest and most beautiful
countries in the world. We should, therefore, have thought that Caesar
had done the most agreeable thing for him, in sending him on duty to
that city where the Romans usually went for pleasure. Yet it does not
seem that Sulpicius appreciated these advantages. He had scarcely
arrived in Greece, when he was discontented at having gone, and longed
to depart. Evidently it was not the country that displeased him, he
would not have thought himself better off anywhere else; but he
regretted the republic. After having so timidly defended it, he could
not console himself for its fall, and blamed himself for serving him who
had overturned it. These feelings are clearly expressed in a letter that
he wrote to Cicero from Greece. “Fortune,” he tells him, “has taken from
us our most precious possessions; we have lost our honour, our dignity,
and our country.... In the times in which we live, those are most happy
who are dead.”[311]
When a timid and moderate man like Sulpicius dared speak thus, what must
others not have said and thought! We can guess this when we see how
Cicero writes to the greater number of them. Although he is addressing
officials of the new government, he does not take the trouble to hide
his opinions; he freely expresses his regrets, because he well knows
they are shared by those to whom he is writing. He speaks to Servilius
Isauricus, the proconsul of Asia, as to a man whom the absolute power of
one does not satisfy, and who wishes some restraints to be put on
it.[312] He tells Cornificius, the governor of Africa, that affairs are
going ill at Rome, and that many things happen there which would pain
him.[313] “I know what you think of the lot of honest people, and of the
misfortunes of the republic,” he writes to Furfanius, the proconsul of
Sicily, in recommending an exile to him.[314] These persons, however,
had accepted important offices from Caesar: they shared his power, they
passed for his friends; but all the favours they had received from him
had not thoroughly attached them to his cause. They made their
reservations while serving him, and only half gave themselves up to him.
Whence could this opposition come, that the new government met with
among men who had at first agreed to take a share in it? It proceeded
from different motives which it is easy to point out. The first, perhaps
the most important, was that this government, even while loading them
with honours, could not give them what the old republic would have given
them. With the establishment of the monarchy an important change in all
public employments was accomplished: the magistrates became subordinate
officials. Formerly, those elected by the popular vote had the right to
act as they pleased within the sphere of their functions. A fertile
power of initiative inspired every rank of this hierarchy of republican
dignitaries. From the aedile to the consul all were supreme within their
own limits. They could not be so under an absolute government. Instead
of governing on their own account, they were only the channels, so to
say, by which the will of a single man acted to the ends of the earth.
Certainly public security gained much by the cessation of those
conflicts of authorities, which had continually troubled it, and it was
a great advantage for the provinces that absolute power had been taken
away from their greedy governors. Nevertheless, if the governed profited
by these reforms, it was natural that the governors should be
discontented with them. From the moment that they were only entrusted
with the execution of the orders of another man the importance of their
functions diminished, and this sovereign and absolute authority whose
weight they always felt, finally vexed even the most submissive. If
ambitious men complained of the diminution of their power, honest people
did not get accustomed so easily as might have been expected to the loss
of their liberty. In proportion as they left Pharsalia behind, their
regrets became more lively. They began to get over the surprise of the
defeat, and gradually recovered from the fear it had caused them. During
the moments that immediately follow those great disasters in which men
have expected to perish, they give themselves up entirely to the
pleasure of living, but this pleasure is one of those to which men
accustom themselves so quickly, and which are taken so much as a matter
of course, that they soon cease to be sensible of it. All those
terrified people who on the morrow of Pharsalia desired only
tranquillity, when it had been given them, wished for something else. As
long as men are uncertain of their life, they do not trouble themselves
to know if they shall live free, but when once life is assured, the
desire for liberty returns to all hearts, and those who served Caesar
felt it like the rest. Caesar, we know, partly satisfied this desire,
but this satisfaction did not last long. It is as difficult to halt on
the road to liberty as on that to absolutism. One favour granted makes
men desire another, and men think less of enjoying what they have
obtained than of lamenting what they lack. It was thus that Cicero, who
had welcomed Caesar’s clemency with transports of joy, and who saluted
the return of Marcellus as a sort of restoration of the republic, soon
changed his opinion and language. As we get on further in his
correspondence, he becomes more bitter and more revolutionary. He who
had so severely condemned those who “after having disarmed their hands
did not disarm their hearts,”[315] had his own heart filled with the
bitterest resentment. He said on every opportunity that all was lost,
that he blushed to be a slave, that he was ashamed to live. He attacked
with his pitiless raillery the most useful measures and the most just
acts. He laughed at the reform of the calendar, and pretended to appear
scandalized at the enlargement of Rome. He went further. On the day that
the senate ordered Caesar’s statue to be placed beside those of the
ancient kings, he could not avoid making a cruel allusion to the manner
in which the first of these kings had perished. “I am very glad,” said
he, “to see Caesar so near to Romulus!”[316] And yet it was scarcely a
year since, in his speech for Marcellus, he had implored him in the name
of the country to watch over his life, and had said with much feeling,
“Your safety is ours!”
Caesar, then, had only malcontents around him. The moderate republicans,
on whom he reckoned to aid him in his work, could not resign themselves
to the loss of the republic. The exiles whom he had recalled to Rome
were more humiliated by his clemency than grateful for it, and did not
give up their resentment. His own generals, whom he loaded with riches
and honours, without being able to satisfy their cupidity, reproached
him for his ingratitude, and even plotted his death. The common people,
at last, of whom he was the idol, and who had so cheerfully granted all
his demands, the people themselves began to withdraw from him; they no
longer welcomed his victories with the same applause as formerly, and
seemed to be afraid that they had made him too great. When his statue
was placed beside those of the kings, the multitude, who saw it pass,
remained mute, and we know that the news of this unusual silence was
spread by the messengers of the allied kings and nations in all the
countries of the world, and caused it to be believed everywhere that a
revolution was at hand.[317] In the provinces of the East, where the
last soldiers of Pompey were hiding, the fire of civil war, which was
smouldering rather than extinct, constantly revived, and these perpetual
alarms, without leading to serious danger, prevented the public
tranquillity becoming settled. At Rome, Cicero’s works, in which he
celebrated the glories of the republic, were read with enthusiasm;
anonymous pamphlets, which had never been more violent or more numerous,
were eagerly sought. As happens on the eve of great crises, every one
was discontented with the present, unquiet about the future, and
prepared for the unforeseen. We know in how tragical a manner this
strained situation terminated. The stab of Brutus’ dagger was not
altogether, as has been said, an unpremeditated incident and a chance;
it was the general uneasiness of men’s minds which led to and which
explains such a terrible catastrophe. The conspirators were but little
over sixty in number, but they had all Rome for their accomplice.[318]
All this disquietude and rancour, those bitter regrets for the past,
those disappointed ambitions, this baffled cupidity, this open or secret
hatred, those bad or generous passions of which men’s hearts were full,
armed their hands, and the Ides of March were only the deadly explosion
of so much stored-up anger. Thus events frustrated all Caesar’s
projects. He did not find safety in his clemency, as he thought; he
failed in that work of conciliation that he had attempted with the
applause of the world: he did not succeed in disarming parties. This
glory was reserved for a man who had neither his breadth of genius, nor
his generosity of character—for the crafty and cruel Octavius. This is
not the only time that history shows us the sad spectacle of the success
of ordinary men where the greatest have failed; but in enterprises of
this nature success depends above all on circumstances, and it must be
admitted that they singularly favoured Augustus. Tacitus tells us the
principal cause of his good fortune, when he says, speaking of the
establishment of the empire: “There was almost no one left who had seen
the republic.”[319] The men over whom Caesar aspired to reign, on the
contrary, had all seen it. Many cursed it when it troubled the
tranquillity of their lives by its storms and agitations; almost all
regretted it as soon as they had lost it. There is, notwithstanding the
perils to which it exposes men, a singular charm and attraction in the
habit and exercise of liberty which cannot be forgotten when once it has
been known. It was against this inextinguishable memory that the genius
of Caesar was shattered. But after the battle of Actium, the men who had
looked upon the grand scenes of liberty, and who had seen the republic,
no longer existed. A civil war of twenty years, the most murderous of
all those that have ever depopulated the world, had destroyed them
almost all. The recollections of the new generation did not go further
back than Caesar. The first sounds it had heard were the acclamations
that saluted the conqueror of Pharsalia, of Thapsus, and of Munda; the
first spectacle that had struck its eyes was that of the proscriptions.
It had grown up among pillage and massacres. During twenty years it had
daily trembled for its property or its life. It thirsted for security,
and was ready to sacrifice everything for repose. Nothing attracted it
towards the past, as the contemporaries of Caesar had been attracted. On
the contrary, all the memories of the past which survived only attached
it more to the government under which it lived, and when by chance it
turned its eyes backwards it found many subjects for fear without any
subject for regret. It was only under these circumstances that absolute
power could peaceably succeed the republic.
BRUTUS
HIS RELATIONS WITH CICERO
We should not know Brutus without Cicero’s letters. As he has never been
spoken of with composure, and as political parties have been accustomed
to screen their hatred or their hopes under his name, the true features
of his character were early effaced. Amid the heated discussions that
his mere name raises, while some, like Lucan, exalt him almost to
heaven, and others, like Dante, resolutely place him in hell, it was not
long before he became a sort of legendary personage. To read Cicero
brings us back to the reality. Thanks to him, this striking but
indistinct figure, that admiration or terror have immoderately enlarged,
becomes more defined and takes human proportions. If it loses in
grandeur by being viewed so close, at least it gains something by
becoming true and living.
The connection between Cicero and Brutus lasted ten years. The
collection of letters they wrote to each other during this interval must
have been voluminous, since a grammarian quotes the ninth book of them.
They are all lost, with the exception of twenty-five which were written
after the death of Caesar.[320] Notwithstanding the loss of the rest,
Brutus still holds such a large place in the surviving works of Cicero,
and especially in his correspondence, that we find in it all the
elements necessary for becoming well acquainted with him. I am going to
collect these references, and to re-write, not the narrative of Brutus’
entire life, which would oblige me to dwell upon very well-known events,
but only the history of his relations with Cicero.
I.
Atticus, the friend of everybody, brought them together. It was about
the year 700, a short time after Cicero’s return from exile, and in the
midst of the troubles stirred up by Clodius, one of those vulgar
agitators like Catiline, by whose means Caesar exhausted the strength of
the Roman aristocracy that he might one day overcome it more easily.
Cicero and Brutus occupied at that time very different positions in the
republic. Cicero had filled the highest offices, and in them had
rendered eminent services. His talents and his probity made him a
valuable auxiliary for the aristocratical party to which he was
attached; he was not without influence with the people whom his
eloquence charmed; the provinces loved him, as they had seen him more
than once defend their interests against greedy governors, and still
more recently Italy had shown her affection by carrying him in triumph
from Brundusium to Rome. Brutus was only thirty-one; a great part of his
life had been passed away from Rome, at Athens, where we know that he
devoted himself earnestly to the study of Greek philosophy, in Cyprus,
and in the East, where he had followed Cato. He had not yet filled any
of those offices which gave political importance, and he had to wait
more than ten years before thinking of the consulship. Nevertheless
Brutus was already an important person. In his early relations with
Cicero, notwithstanding the distance that age and official position set
between them, it is Cicero who makes the advances, who treats Brutus
with consideration, and who seeks his friendship. One would say that
this young man had given rise to singular expectations, and that it was
already vaguely felt that he was destined for great things. While Cicero
was in Cilicia, Atticus, pressing him to do justice to certain claims of
Brutus, said: “It would be something if you only brought back his
friendship from that province.”[321] And Cicero wrote of him at the same
period: “He is already the first among the young men; he will soon be, I
hope, the first in the city.”[322]
Everything in fact seemed to promise a splendid future for Brutus. A
descendant of one of the most illustrious families of Rome, the nephew
of Cato, the brother-in-law of Cassius and Lepidus, he had just married
one of the daughters of Appius Claudius; another was already married to
Pompey’s eldest son. By these alliances he was connected on all sides
with the most influential families; but his character and manners
distinguished him even more than his birth. His youth had been austere:
he had studied philosophy, not merely as a _dilettante_ and as being a
most useful discipline for the mind, but like a wise man who wishes to
apply the lessons that it gives. He had returned from Athens with a
great reputation for wisdom, which his virtuous and regular life
confirmed. The admiration that his virtue excited was redoubled when his
surroundings and the detestable examples he had resisted were
considered. His mother Servilia had been the object of one of the most
violent passions of Caesar, perhaps his first love. She always held a
great sway over him, and took advantage of it to enrich herself after
Pharsalia by getting the property of the conquered awarded to her. When
she became old, and felt the powerful dictator slipping from her, in
order to continue to rule him, she favoured, it is said, his amours with
one of her daughters, the wife of Cassius. The daughter who had married
Lepidus, had no better reputation, and Cicero tells a merry tale about
her. A young Roman fop, C. Vedius, going through Cilicia with a great
train, found it convenient to leave part of his baggage with one of his
hosts. Unfortunately this host died; seals were put on the traveller’s
baggage along with the rest, and to begin with, the portraits of five
great ladies were found in it, and among them that of Brutus’ sister.
“It must be admitted,” said Cicero, who did not lose an opportunity for
a joke, “that the brother and the husband well deserve their names. The
brother is very stupid (_brutus_) who perceives nothing, and the husband
very easy-going (_lepidus_) who endures all without complaint.”[323]
Such was the family of Brutus. As to his friends, there is no need to
say much about them. We know how the rich young men of Rome lived at
that time, and what Caelius, Curio, and Dolabella were. Among all this
dissipation the rigid integrity of Brutus, his application to business,
that disdain for pleasures, that taste for study to which his pale and
serious countenance bore witness, stood out in higher relief by the
contrast. Accordingly all eyes were fixed on this grave young man who
resembled the others so little. In approaching him men could not help a
feeling that seemed ill suited to his age: he inspired respect. Even
those who were his elders and his superiors, Cicero and Caesar,
notwithstanding their glory, Antony who resembled him so little, his
opponents and his enemies, could not escape this impression in his
presence. What is most surprising is, that it has survived him. It has
been felt in presence of his memory as it was before his person; living
and dead he has commanded respect. The official historians of the
empire, Dio, who has so roughly handled Cicero, Velleius, the flatterer
of Tiberius, all have respected Brutus. It seems that political rancour,
the wish to flatter, and the violence of party have felt themselves
disarmed before this austere figure.