and cultivated it from their youth, both seemed to love it more and to
cultivate it more ardently when the concentration of the government in
one hand had removed them from public life. Cicero, who could not
accustom himself to repose, turned all his activity towards it. “Greece
is getting old,” he said to his pupils and friends, “let us snatch from
her her philosophical glory;”[338] and he at once set about the work. He
groped about for some time, and did not immediately hit upon the
philosophy that was suitable to his fellow-countrymen. He had been
tempted for a moment to direct their attention towards those subtle
metaphysical questions that were repugnant to the practical good sense
of the Romans. He had translated the _Timaeus_, that is to say, the most
obscure thing in Plato’s philosophy; but he quickly perceived that he
was mistaken, and hastened to quit that path in which he would have
walked alone. In the Tusculan Disputations he returned to questions of
applied morality and did not leave them again. The diverse characters of
the passions, the real nature of virtue, the relative rank of duties,
all those problems that a virtuous man proposes to himself during his
life; above all, that before which he so often draws back, but which
always returns with a terrible persistency and troubles at times the
most gross and earthly souls, the future after death; this is what he
studies without tricks of dialectical skill, without the prejudices of a
school, without a preconceived system, and with less anxiety to discover
new ideas than to accept practical and sensible principles wherever he
found them. Such is the character of Roman philosophy, of which we must
be careful not to speak ill, for it has played a great part in the
world, and it is through it that the wisdom of the Greeks, rendered at
once more solid and yet more clear, has come down to the nations of the
West. This philosophy dates from Pharsalia, like the empire, and owes
much to the victory of Caesar, who, by suppressing political life,
forced inquiring minds to seek other subjects for their activity.
Welcomed at first, with enthusiasm, by all minds unoccupied and ill at
ease, it became more and more popular in proportion as the authority of
the emperors became more oppressive. To the absolute authority that the
government exercised over external actions they were glad to oppose the
entire self-possession that philosophy gives; to study oneself, to
withdraw into oneself was to escape on one side from the tyranny of the
master, and in seeking to know oneself the ground to which his power had
no access seemed to be enlarged. The emperors understood this well; and
were the mortal enemies of a science that was so bold as to limit their
authority. Along with history, which recalled disagreeable memories, it
soon fell under their suspicion; they were two names, said Tacitus,
unpleasing to princes, _ingrata principibus nomina_.
I have not here to show why all the philosophical works composed at the
end of the republic or under the empire have a much greater importance
than the books we write now on the same subjects: this has been too well
told already for me to have need to return to it.[339] It is certain
that during that time when religion was confined to ritual, when its
books only contained collections of formulae and the minute regulations
of observances, and when it did not go beyond teaching its adepts the
science of sacrificing according to the rites, philosophy alone could
give to all virtuous and troubled souls which were tossed about without
definite aim and were desirous of finding one, that teaching of which
they had need. We must not forget, then, when we read an ethical
treatise of that time, that it was written not only for lettered idlers
who are delighted with fine discourses, but for those whom Lucretius
represents as groping after the way of life; we must remind ourselves
that these precepts have been practised, that theories became rules of
conduct, and that, so to say, all this ethical theory was once alive.
Let us take for example the first Tusculan Disputation: Cicero wishes to
prove in it that death is not an evil. What a trite remark in
appearance, and how difficult it is not to regard all this elaborated
treatment as an oratorical exercise and an essay for the schools! It is
nothing of the kind however, and the generation for whom it was written
found something else in it. Men read it on the eve of the proscriptions
to renew their strength, and came from their reading firmer, more
resolute, better prepared to support the great misfortunes that they
foresaw. Atticus himself, the egotist Atticus, so far removed from
risking his life for anybody, found in them the source of an unusual
energy. “You tell me,” Cicero writes to him, “that my Tusculans give you
courage: so much the better. There is no surer and speedier resource
against circumstances than that which I indicate.”[340] This resource
was death. How many people accordingly availed themselves of it! Never
has a more incredible contempt of life been seen, never has death caused
less fear. Since Cato, suicide became a contagion, a frenzy. The
vanquished, Juba, Petreius, Scipio, know no other way of escaping the
conqueror. Laterensis kills himself through regret when he sees his
friend Lepidus betray the republic; Scapula, who can no longer hold out
in Cordova, has a funeral pyre constructed, and burns himself alive;
when Decimus Brutus, a fugitive, hesitates to choose this heroic remedy,
his friend Blasius kills himself before him in order to set him an
example. It was a veritable delirium at Philippi. Even those who might
have escaped did not seek to survive their defeat. Quintilius Varus put
on the insignia of his rank, and had himself killed by a slave; Labeo
dug his own grave and killed himself on its brink; Cato the younger, for
fear of being spared, threw away his helmet and shouted his name;
Cassius was impatient, and killed himself too soon; Brutus closes the
list by a suicide, astonishing by its calmness and dignity. What a
strange and frightful commentary on the Tusculans, and how clearly this
general truth, thus put in practice by so many men of spirit, ceases to
be a mere platitude!
We must study in the same spirit the very short fragments that remain of
the philosophical works of Brutus. The general thoughts that we find in
them will no longer appear insignificant and vague when we think that he
who formulated them also intended to put them in practice in his life.
The most celebrated of all these writings of Brutus, the treatise _On
Virtue_, was addressed to Cicero, and is worthy of them both. It was a
fine work that was especially pleasing because it was felt that the
writer was thoroughly convinced of all that he said.[341] An important
passage preserved by Seneca survives. In this passage Brutus relates
that he had just seen M. Marcellus at Mitylene, the same whom Caesar
pardoned later at the request of Cicero. He found him employed in
serious studies, easily forgetting Rome and its pleasures, and enjoying
in this tranquillity and leisure a happiness that he had never known
before. “When I had to leave him,” says he, “and saw that I was going
away without him, it seemed to me that it was I who was going into
exile, and not Marcellus, who remained there.”[342] From this example he
concludes that a man must not complain of being exiled since he can
carry all his virtue with him. The moral of the book was that to live
happily one need not go outside of oneself. This is another truism, if
you like; but, in trying to conform his whole life to this maxim, Brutus
made it a living truth. It was not a philosophical thesis that he
developed, but a rule of conduct that he proposed to others and took for
himself. He was early accustomed to commune with his own thoughts, and
to place in this his pleasures and pains. Thence came that freedom of
mind that he preserved in the gravest affairs, that contempt for outward
things that all his contemporaries remarked, and the ease with which he
detached himself from them. On the eve of Pharsalia, when every one was
restless and uneasy, he was tranquilly reading Polybius and taking notes
while awaiting the moment of combat. After the Ides of March, in the
midst of the excitement and fears of his friends, he alone preserved a
constant serenity that rather annoyed Cicero. Driven away from Rome and
threatened by Caesar’s veterans, he consoled himself for everything by
saying: “There is nothing better than to rest upon the memory of one’s
good actions, and not to busy oneself with events or men.”[343] This
capacity for abstraction from outward things and this self-sufficingness
are certainly valuable qualities in a man of reflection and study: it is
the ideal that a philosopher proposes to himself; but is it not a danger
and a fault in a man of action and a politician? Is it right for a man
to hold himself aloof from the opinions of others when the success of
the things he undertakes depends upon their opinions? Under pretence of
listening to one’s conscience, and resolutely following it, ought a man
to take no account of circumstances, and risk himself heedlessly in
useless adventures? Indeed, by wishing to keep aloof from the multitude,
and preserve himself entirely from its passions, does he not risk the
loss of the tie that binds him to it and becoming incapable of leading
it? Appian, in the narrative that he gives of the last campaign of the
Republican army, relates that Brutus was always self-possessed, and that
he kept himself almost aloof from the grave affairs that were discussed.
He liked conversation and reading; he visited as a connoisseur the
places they passed through, and made the people of the country talk to
him: he was a philosopher in the midst of camps. Cassius, on the
contrary, occupied solely with the war, never allowing himself to be
turned aside, and, so to say, wholly intent upon that end, resembled a
fighting gladiator.[344] I suspect that Brutus must have rather
disdained that feverish activity entirely confined to ordinary duties,
and that this _rôle_ of gladiator made him smile. He was wrong; success
in human things belongs to the gladiator, and a man only succeeds by
throwing his whole soul into them. As to those speculative men, wrapped
up in themselves, who wish to keep outside of and above the passions of
the day, they astonish the multitude but do not lead it; they may be
sages, they make very bad party leaders.
And further, it is very possible that Brutus, if left to himself, would
not have thought of becoming a party leader. He was not hostile to the
new government, and Caesar had neglected no opportunity of attaching him
to himself by granting him the pardon of some of the very much
compromised Pompeians. On his return to Rome he confided to him the
government of one of the finest provinces of the empire, Cisalpine Gaul.
About the same time the news came of the defeat of the republican army
at Thapsus, and the death of Cato. No doubt Brutus felt it very much. He
himself wrote and persuaded Cicero to compose the eulogy of his uncle;
but we know from Plutarch that he blamed him for refusing Caesar’s
clemency. When Marcellus, who had just obtained his pardon, was
assassinated near Athens, some persons affected to believe and to say
that Caesar might well have been an accomplice in this crime. Brutus
hastened to write, with a warmth that surprised Cicero, to exculpate
him. He was at that time, then, quite under the spell of Caesar. We may
add that he had taken a horror of civil war in Pompey’s camp. It had
carried off some of his dearest friends, for instance Torquatus and
Triarius, two young men of great promise, whose loss he bitterly
regretted. In thinking of the disorders it had caused, and of the
victims it had made, he no doubt said with his friend, the philosopher
Favonius: “It is better to endure arbitrary power than to revive impious
wars.”[345] How, then, did he allow himself to be drawn on to recommence
them? By what clever conspiracy did his friends succeed in overcoming
his repugnance, in arming him against a man he loved, in involving him
in an enterprise that was to throw the world into confusion? This
deserves to be related, and Cicero’s letters allow us to catch a glimpse
of it.
III.
After Pharsalia, there was no want of malcontents. That great
aristocracy that had governed the world so long, could not consider
itself beaten after a single defeat. It was so much the more natural
that it should wish to make a last effort, as it was well aware that,
the first time, it had not fought under favourable conditions, and that,
in uniting its cause to Pompey’s, it had placed itself in a bad
position. Pompey inspired little more confidence in those who desired
liberty than Caesar. It was known that he had a taste for extraordinary
powers, and that he liked to concentrate all public authority in his
hands. At the commencement of the civil war he had rejected the most
just proposals with so much haughtiness, and shown so much ardour in
precipitating the crisis, that he seemed rather to wish to get rid of a
rival who hampered him than to come to the aid of the threatened
republic. His friend Cicero tells us that when the insolence of his
associates, and his own persistency in not taking advice from any one,
were seen in his camp, it was suspected that a man who took counsel so
ill before the battle would wish to make himself master after the
victory. That is why so many good citizens, and Cicero among the chief,
had hesitated so long to take his part; that is, above all, why intrepid
men like Brutus had hastened to lay down their arms after the first
defeat. It must be added that, if they were not perfectly satisfied
about Pompey’s intentions, it was also possible they might be mistaken
about Caesar’s projects. No one was ignorant that he wished for power;
but what kind of power? Was it only one of those temporary
dictatorships, necessary in free states after a period of anarchy, which
suspend liberty but do not annihilate it? Was it a question of repeating
the history of Marius and Sulla, whom the republic had survived? In
strictness it might be thought so, and nothing prevents us supposing
that several of Caesar’s officers, those especially who, when undeceived
later, conspired against him, did not think so then.
But after Pharsalia there was no longer any means of preserving this
illusion. Caesar did not demand an exceptional authority; he aspired to
found a new government. Had he not been heard to say that “republic” was
a word void of meaning, and that Sulla was a fool to have abdicated the
dictatorship? His measures for regulating the exercise of the popular
suffrage in his own interest, the choice that he had made in advance of
consuls and praetors for several years running, the delivery of the
public treasure and the administration of the revenue of the state by
his freedmen and slaves, the union of all dignities in his own person,
the censorship under the name of praefecture of morals, the perpetual
dictatorship, which did not prevent him getting himself appointed consul
every year; everything, in fine, in his laws and in his conduct
indicated a definitive taking possession of power. Far from taking any
of those precautions to hide the extent of his authority that Augustus
employed later, he seemed to exhibit it with complacency, and without
concerning himself about the enemies that his frankness might make him.
On the contrary, by a sort of ironical scepticism and bold impertinence,
that betrayed the great nobleman, he loved to shock the fanatical
partisans of ancient usages. He smiled at seeing pontifs and augurs
scared when he dared to deny the gods in full senate, and it was his
amusement to disconcert those ceremonious old men, the superstitious
guardians of ancient practices. Further, as he was a man of pleasure
before all things, he loved power not only for the sake of exercising
it, but also to enjoy its fruits; he was not contented with the reality
of sovereign authority, he wished also for its outward signs, the
splendour that surrounds it, the homage it exacts, the pomp that sets it
off, and even the name that designates it. He knew well how much that
title of king that he so ardently desired frightened the Romans; but his
hardihood took pleasure in braving old prejudices at the same time that
his candour no doubt thought it more honourable to give its real name to
the power he exercised. The result of this conduct of Caesar was to
dissipate all doubts. Thanks to it, illusion or misunderstanding was no
longer possible. The question was now, not between two ambitious rivals,
as at the time of Pharsalia, but between two opposite forms of
government. Opinions, as sometimes happens, became clearly defined one
by the other, and the intention of founding a monarchy, which Caesar
openly avowed, brought about the creation of a great republican party.
How was it that in this party the boldest and most violent men formed
the idea of uniting and organizing themselves? How, with growing
confidence, did they come to form a plot against the life of the
dictator? It is impossible to find this out exactly. All that we know is
that the first idea of the plot had been formed at the same time in two
quite opposite parties, among the vanquished of Pharsalia, and, what is
more surprising, among Caesar’s generals themselves. These two
conspiracies were probably distinct in origin, and each acted on its own
account: while Cassius was thinking of killing Caesar on the banks of
the Cydnus, Trebonius had been on the point of assassinating him at
Narbonne. They finally united.
Every party begins by seeking a leader. If they had wished to continue
the traditions of the preceding war, this leader was already at hand.
Sextus, a son of Pompey, remained. He had escaped by a miracle from
Pharsalia and Munda, and had survived all his family. Conquered, but not
discouraged, he wandered in the mountains or along the shores, by turns
an able partisan or a bold pirate, and the obstinate Pompeians united
around him. But men no longer desired to be of a Pompeian party. They
wished to have some one for chief who represented not merely a name but
a principle, one who should represent the republic and liberty without
any personal reservations. It was necessary that he should be in
complete opposition to the government they were going to attack, by his
life, his manners, and his character. He must be upright, because the
power was corrupt, disinterested, in order to protest against the
insatiable greed that surrounded Caesar, already illustrious, in order
that the different elements of which the party was composed should give
way to him, and still young, for they had need of a bold stroke. Now,
there was only one man who united all these qualities, namely Brutus.
Consequently, the eyes of every one were fixed on him. The public voice
marked him out as the chief of the republican party while he was still
the friend of Caesar. When the first conspirators went to all quarters
seeking accomplices, they always received the same answer: “We will join
you if Brutus will lead us.” Caesar himself, notwithstanding his
confidence and his friendship, seemed sometimes to have a presentiment
whence the danger would come to him. One day when they were trying to
alarm him with the discontent and threats of Antony and Dolabella: “No,”
he replied, “those debauchees are not to be feared; it is the thin and
pale men.” He meant chiefly to indicate Brutus.
To this pressure of public opinion, which wished to direct the action of
Brutus, and to implicate him without his assent, it was necessary to add
more formal exhortations in order to persuade him; they came to him from
all sides. I have no need to recall those notes that he found in his
tribunal, those inscriptions that were placed at the foot of his
grandfather’s statue,[346] and all those clever manœuvres that Plutarch
has so well narrated. But no one better served the designs of those who
wished to make Brutus a conspirator than Cicero, who, however, did not
know them. His letters show us the disposition of his mind at that time.
Spite, anger, regret for lost liberty break out in them with singular
vivacity. “I am ashamed of being a slave,”[347] he wrote one day to
Cassius, without suspecting that at that very moment Cassius was
secretly searching for the means of being so no longer. It was
impossible that these sentiments should not come to light in the books
he published at that time. We find them there now that we read them in
cold blood; much more must they have been seen when these books were
commented on by hatred and read with eyes rendered penetrating by
passion. How many epigrams were then appreciated which now escape us!
What stinging and bitter words, unperceived now, were then applauded and
maliciously repeated in those conversations where the master and his
friends were pulled to pieces! There was in them what Cicero wittily
calls “the bite of liberty which never tears better than when she has
been muzzled for some time.”[348] With a little effort we find allusions
everywhere. If the author spoke with so much admiration of the ancient
eloquence, it was because he wished to put to shame that deserted Forum
and that mute senate; the memories of the old government were only
recalled in order to attack the new one, and the praise of the dead
became the satire of the living. Cicero well understood the whole import
of his books when he said of them later: “They served me as a senate or
a rostrum from which I could speak.”[349] Nothing served more to stir up
public opinion, to put regret for the past and disgust for the present
into men’s minds, and thus to prepare the events which were to follow.
Brutus must have been more moved than any one else in reading Cicero’s
writings; they were dedicated to him; they were written for him.
Although they were meant to influence the whole public, they contained
passages addressed more directly to him. Cicero not only sought to
arouse his patriotic sentiments; he recalled the memories and hopes of
his youth. With perfidious skill he even interested his vanity in the
restoration of the ancient government by pointing out what a position he
might make for himself in it. “Brutus,” he said, “I feel my grief revive
when I look upon you and consider how the unhappy fate of the republic
has arrested the rapid advance to glory which we anticipated in your
youth. This is the true cause of my sorrow, this is the cause of my
cares and of those of Atticus, who shares in my esteem and affection for
you. You are the object of all our interest, we desire that you should
reap the fruits of your virtue; our most earnest wishes are that the
conditions of the republic may permit you one day to revive and increase
the glory of the two illustrious houses you represent. You ought to be
master in the Forum and reign there without a rival; we are, in truth,
doubly afflicted, that the republic is lost for you, and you for the
republic.”[350] Such regrets, expressed in this fashion, and with this
mixture of private and public interests, were well calculated to disturb
Brutus. Antony was not altogether wrong when he accused Cicero of having
been an accomplice in the death of Caesar. If he did not himself strike,
he armed the hands that struck, and the conspirators were perfectly
right when, on coming from the senate house, after the Ides of March,
they brandished their bloody swords and called aloud upon Cicero.
To these incitements from without there were added others of a still
more powerful kind from Brutus’ own household. His mother had always
used the influence she had over him to draw him towards Caesar; but just
at this critical time Servilia’s influence was lessened by the marriage
of Brutus with his cousin Porcia. Daughter of Cato and widow of Bibulus,
Porcia brought into her new home, all the passions of her father and her
first husband, and especially hatred of Caesar, who had caused all her
misfortunes. She had scarcely entered when disagreements arose between
her and her mother-in-law. Cicero, who tells us of them, does not relate
to us their cause; but it is not rash to suppose that these two women
contended for the affection of Brutus, and that they wished to rule him
that they might draw him in different directions. Servilia’s influence
no doubt lost something in these domestic discussions, and her voice,
opposed by the advice of a new and beloved wife, had no longer the same
authority when it spoke for Caesar.