A ROMAN UNDERGRADUATE.
In the last chapter we had no particular "Roman Boy" in view; but our
"Roman Undergraduate" will be a real person, Cicero's son. It will be
interesting to trace the notices which we find of him in his father's
letters and books. "You will be glad to hear," he writes in one of his
earliest letters to Atticus, "that a little son has been born to me, and
that Terentia is doing well." From time to time we hear of him, and
always spoken of in terms of the tenderest affection. He is his
"honey-sweet Cicero," his "little philosopher." When the father is in
exile the son's name is put on the address of his letters along with
those of his mother and sister. His prospects are the subject of most
anxious thought. Terentia, who had a considerable fortune of her own,
proposes to sell an estate. "Pray think," he writes, "what will happen
to us. If the same ill fortune shall continue to pursue us, what will
happen to our unhappy boy? I cannot write any more. My tears fairly
overpower me; I should be sorry to make you as sad as myself. I will say
so much. If my friends do their duty by me, I shall not want for money;
if they do not, your means will not save me. I do implore you, by all
our troubles, do not ruin the poor lad. Indeed he is ruined enough
already. If he has only something to keep him from want, then modest
merit and moderate good fortune will give him all he wants."
Appointed to the government of Cilicia, Cicero takes his son with him
into the province. When he starts on his campaign against the mountain
tribes, the boy and his cousin, young Quintus, are sent to the court of
Deiotarus, one of the native princes of Galatia. "The young Ciceros," he
writes to Atticus, "are with Deiotarus. If need be, they will be taken
to Rhodes." Atticus, it may be mentioned, was uncle to Quintus, and
might be anxious about him. The need was probably the case of the old
prince himself marching to Cicero's help. This he had promised to do,
but the campaign was finished without him. This was in the year 51 B.C.,
and Marcus was nearly fourteen years old, his cousin being his senior by
about two years. "They are very fond of each other," writes Cicero;
"they learn, they amuse themselves together, but one wants the rein, the
other the spur." (Doubtless the latter is the writer's son.) "I am very
fond of Dionysius their teacher: the lads say that he is apt to get
furiously angry. But a more learned and more blameless man there does
not live." A year or so afterwards he seems to have thought less
favorably of him. "I let him go reluctantly when I thought of him as the
tutor of the two lads, but quite willingly as an ungrateful fellow." In
B.C. 49, when the lad was about half through his sixteenth year, Cicero
"gave him his _toga_." To take the _toga_, that is to exchange the gown
of the boy with its stripe of purple for the plain white gown of the
citizen, marked the beginning of independence (though indeed a Roman's
son was even in mature manhood under his father's control). The ceremony
took place at Arpinum, much to the delight of the inhabitants, who felt
of course the greatest pride and interest in their famous
fellow-townsman. But it was a sad time. "There and every where as I
journeyed I saw sorrow and dismay. The prospect of this vast trouble is
sad indeed." The "vast trouble" was the civil war between Caesar and
Pompey. This indeed had already broken out. While Cicero was
entertaining his kinsfolk and friends at Arpinum, Pompey was preparing
to fly from Italy. The war was probably not an unmixed evil to a lad who
was just beginning to think himself a man. He hastened across the
Adriatic to join his father's friend, and was appointed to the command
of a squadron of auxiliary cavalry. His maneuvers were probably assisted
by some veteran subordinate; but his I seat on horseback, his skill with
the javelin, and his general soldierly qualities were highly praised
both by his chief and by his comrades. After the defeat at Pharsalia he
waited with his father at Brundisium till a kind letter from Caesar
assured him of pardon. In B.C. 46 he was made aedile at Arpinum, his
cousin being appointed at the same time. The next year he would have
gladly resumed his military career. Fighting was going on in Spain,
where the sons of Pompey were holding out against the forces of Caesar;
and the young Cicero, who was probably not very particular on which side
he drew his sword, was ready to take service against the son of his old
general. Neither the cause nor the career pleased the father, and the
son's wish was overruled, just as an English lad has sometimes to give
up the unremunerative profession of arms, when there is a living in the
family, or an opening in a bank, or a promising connection with a firm
of solicitors. It was settled that he should take up his residence at
Athens, which was then the university of Rome, not indeed exactly in the
sense in which Oxford and Cambridge are the universities of England, but
still a place of liberal culture, where the sons of wealthy Roman
families were accustomed to complete their education. Four-and-twenty
years before the father had paid a long visit to the city, partly for
study's sake. "In those days," he writes, "I was emaciated and feeble to
a degree; my neck was long and thin; a habit of body and a figure that
are thought to indicate much danger to life, if aggravated by a
laborious profession and constant straining of the voice. My friends
thought the more of this, because in those days I was accustomed to
deliver all my speeches without any relaxation of effort, without any
variety, at the very top of my voice, and with most abundant
gesticulation. At first, when friends and physicians advised me to
abandon advocacy for a while, I felt that I would sooner run any risk
than relinquish the hope of oratorical distinction. Afterwards I
reflected that by learning to moderate and regulate my voice, and
changing my style of speaking, I might both avert the danger that
threatened my health and also acquire a more self-controlled manner. It
was a resolve to break through the habits I had formed that induced me
to travel to the East. I had practiced for two years, and my name had
become well known when I left Rome. Coming to Athens I spent six months
with Antiochus, the most distinguished and learned philosopher of the
Old Academy, than whom there was no wiser or more famous teacher. At the
same time I practiced myself diligently under the care of Demetrius
Syrus, an old and not undistinguished master of eloquence." To Athens,
then, Cicero always looked back with affection. He hears, for instance,
that Appius is going to build a portico at Eleusis. "Will you think me a
fool," he writes to Atticus, "if I do the same at the Academy? 'I think
so,' you will say. But I love Athens, the very place, much; and I shall
be glad to have some memorial of me there."
The new undergraduate, as we should call him, was to have a liberal
allowance. "He shall have as much as Publilius, as much as Lentulus the
Flamen, allow their sons." It would be interesting to know the amount,
but unhappily this cannot be recovered. All that we know is that the
richest young men in Rome were not to have more. "I will guarantee,"
writes this liberal father, "that none of the three young men [whom he
names] who, I hear, will be at Athens at the same time shall live at
more expense than he will be able to do on those rents." These "rents"
were the incomings from certain properties at Rome. "Only," he adds, "I
do not think he will want a horse."
We know something of the university buildings, so to speak, which the
young Cicero found at Athens. "To seek for truth among the groves of
Academus" is the phrase by which a more famous contemporary, the poet
Horace, describes his studies at Athens. He probably uses it generally
to express philosophical pursuits; taken strictly it would mean that he
attached himself to the sage whose pride it was to be the successor of
Plato. Academus was a local hero, connected with the legend of Theseus
and Helen. Near his grove, or sacred inclosure, which adjoined the road
to Eleusis, Plato had bought a garden. It was but a small spot,
purchased for a sum which maybe represented by about three or four
hundred pounds of our money, but it had been enlarged by the liberality
of successive benefactors. This then was one famous lecture-room.
Another was the Lyceum. Here Aristotle had taught, and after Aristotle,
Theophrastus, and after him, a long succession of thinkers of the same
school. A third institution of the same kind was the garden in which
Epicurus had assembled his disciples, and which he bequeathed to
trustees for their benefit and the benefit of their successors for all
time.
To a Roman of the nobler sort these gardens and buildings must have been
as holy places. It was with these rather than with the temples of gods
that he connected what there was of goodness and purity in his life. To
worship Jupiter or Romulus did not make him a better man, though it
might be his necessary duty as a citizen; his real religion, as we
understand it, was his reverence for Plato or Zeno. Athens to him was
not only what Athens, but what the Holy Land is to us. Cicero describes
something of this feeling in the following passage: "We had been
listening to Antiochus (a teacher of the Academics) in the school called
the Ptolemaeus, where he was wont to lecture. Marcus Piso was with me,
and my brother Quintus, and Atticus, and Lucius Cicero, by relationship
a cousin, in affection a brother. We agreed among ourselves to finish
our afternoon walk in the Academy, chiefly because that place was sure
not to be crowded at that hour. At the proper time we met at Piso's
house; thence, occupied with varied talk, we traversed the six furlongs
that lie between the Double Gate and the Academy; and entering the walls
which can give such good reason for their fame, found there the solitude
which we sought. 'Is it,' said Piso, 'by some natural instinct or
through some delusion that when we see the very spots where famous men
have lived we are far more touched than when we hear of the things that
they have done, or read something that they have written? It is thus
that I am affected at this moment. I think of Plato, who was, we are
told, the first who lectured in this place; his little garden which lies
there close at hand seems not only to remind me of him, but actually to
bring him up before my eyes. Here spake Speusippus, here Xenocrates,
here his disciple Polemo--to Polemo indeed belonged this seat which we
have before us.'" This was the Polemo who had been converted, as we
should say, when, bursting in after a night of revel upon a lecture in
which Xenocrates was discoursing of temperance, he listened to such
purpose that from that moment he became a changed man. Then Atticus
describes how he found the same charms of association in the garden
which had belonged to his own master, Epicurus; while Quintus Cicero
supplies what we should call the classical element by speaking of
Sophocles and the grove of Colonus, still musical, it seems, with the
same song of the nightingale which had charmed the ear of the poet more
than three centuries before.
One or other, perhaps more than one, of these famous places the young
Cicero frequented. He probably witnessed, he possibly took part (for
strangers were admitted to membership) in, the celebrations with which
the college of Athenian youths (Ephebi) commemorated the glories of
their city, the procession to the tombs of those who died at Marathon,
and the boat-races in the Bay of Salamis. That he gave his father some
trouble is only too certain. His private tutor in rhetoric, as we should
call him, was a certain Gorgias, a man of ability, and a writer of some
note, but a worthless and profligate fellow. Cicero peremptorily ordered
his son to dismiss him; and the young man seems to have obeyed and
reformed. We may hope at least that the repentance which he expresses
for his misdoings in a letter to Tiro, his father's freedman, was
genuine. This is his picture of his life in the days of repentance and
soberness: "I am on terms of the closest intimacy with Cratippus, living
with him more as a son than as a pupil. Not only do I hear his lectures
with delight, but I am greatly taken with the geniality which is
peculiar to the man. I spend whole days with him, and often no small
part of the night; for I beg him to dine with me as often as he can.
This has become so habitual with him that he often looks in upon us at
dinner when we are not expecting him; he lays aside the sternness of the
philosopher and jokes with us in the pleasantest fashion. As for
Bruttius, he never leaves me; frugal and strict as is his life, he is
yet a most delightful companion. For we do not entirely banish mirth
from our daily studies in philology. I have hired a lodging for him
close by; and do my best to help his poverty out of my own narrow means.
I have begun to practice Greek declamation with Cassius, and wish to
have a Latin course with Bruttius. My friends and daily companions are
the pupils whom Cratippus brought with him from Mitylene, well-read men,
of whom he highly approves. I also see much of Epicrates, who is the
first man at Athens." After some pleasant words to Tiro, who had bought
a farm, and whom he expects to find turned into a farmer, bringing
stores, holding consultations with his bailiff, and putting by
fruit-seeds in his pocket from dessert, he says, "I should be glad if
you would send me as quickly as possible a copyist, a Greek by
preference. I have to spend much pains on writing out my notes."
A short time before one of Cicero's friends had sent a satisfactory
report of the young man's behavior to his father. "I found your son
devoted to the most laudable studies and enjoying an excellent
reputation for steadiness. Don't fancy, my dear Cicero, that I say this
to please you; there is not in Athens a more lovable young man than your
son, nor one more devoted to those high pursuits in which you would have
him interested."
Among the contemporaries of the young Cicero was, as has been said, the
poet Horace. His had been a more studious boyhood. He had not been taken
away from his books to serve as a cavalry officer under Pompey. In him
accordingly we see the regular course of the studies of a Roman lad.
"It was my lot," he says, "to be bred up at Rome, and to be taught how
much the wrath of Achilles harmed the Greeks. In other words, he had
read his Homer, just as an English boy reads him at Eton or Harrow.
"Kind Athens," he goes on, "added a little more learning, to the end
that I might be able to distinguish right from wrong, and to seek for
truth amongst the groves of Academus." And just in the same way the
English youth goes on to read philosophy at Oxford.
The studies of the two young men were interrupted by the same cause, the
civil war which followed the death of Caesar. They took service with
Brutus, both having the same rank, that of military tribune, a command
answering more or less nearly to that of colonel in our own army. It
was, however, mainly an ornamental rank, being bestowed sometimes by
favor of the general in command, sometimes by a popular vote. The young
Cicero indeed had already served, and he now distinguished himself
greatly, winning some considerable successes in the command of the
cavalry which Brutus afterwards gave him. When the hopes of the party
were crushed at Phillippi, he joined the younger Pompey in Sicily; but
took an opportunity of an amnesty which was offered four years
afterwards to return to Rome. Here he must have found his old
fellow-student, who had also reconciled himself to the victorious party.
He was made one of the college of augurs, and also a commissioner of the
mint, and in B.C. 30 he had the honour of sharing the consulship with
Augustus himself. It was to him that the dispatch announcing the final
defeat and death of Antony was delivered; and it fell to him to execute
the decree which ordered the destruction of all the statues of the
fallen chief. "Then," says Plutarch, "by the ordering of heaven the
punishment of Antony was inflicted at last by the house of Cicero." His
time of office ended, he went as Governor to Asia, or, according to some
accounts, to Syria; and thus disappears from our view.
Pliny the Elder tells us that he was a drunkard, sarcastically observing
that he sought to avenge himself on Antony by robbing him of the
reputation which he had before enjoyed of being the hardest drinker of
the time. As the story which he tells of the younger Cicero being able
to swallow twelve pints of wine at a draught is clearly incredible,
perhaps we may disbelieve the whole, and with it the other anecdote,
that he threw a cup at the head of Marcus Agrippa, son-in-law to the
Emperor, and after him the greatest man in Rome.