EXILE.
The suppression of the "Great Conspiracy" was certainly the most
glorious achievement of Cicero's life. Honors such as had never before
been bestowed on a citizen of Rome were heaped upon him. Men of the
highest rank spoke of him both in the Senate and before the people as
the "Father of his fatherland." A public thanksgiving, such as was
ordered when great victories had been won, was offered in his name.
Italy was even more enthusiastic than the capital. The chief towns voted
him such honors as they could bestow; Capua in particular erected to him
a gilded statue, and gave him the title of Patron of the city.
Still there were signs of trouble in the future. It was the duty of the
consul on quitting office to swear that he had discharged his duty with
fidelity, and it was usual for him at the same time to make a speech in
which he narrated the events of his consulship. Cicero was preparing to
speak when one of the new tribunes intervened. "A man," he cried, "who
has put citizens to death without hearing them in their defense is not
worthy to speak. He must do nothing more than take the oath." Cicero was
ready with his answer. Raising his voice he said, "I swear that I, and I
alone, have saved this commonwealth and this city." The assembly shouted
their approval; and when the ceremony was concluded the whole multitude
escorted the ex-consul to his house. The time was not come for his
enemies to attack him; but that he had enemies was manifest.
With one dangerous man he had the misfortune to come into collision in
the year that followed his consulship. This was the Clodius of whom we
have heard something in the preceding chapter. The two men had hitherto
been on fairly good terms. Clodius, as we have seen, belonged to one of
the noblest families in Rome, was a man of some ability and wit, and
could make himself agreeable when he was pleased to do so. But events
for which Cicero was not in the least to blame brought about a life-long
enmity between them. Toward the close of the year Clodius had been
guilty of an act of scandalous impiety, intruding himself, disguised as
a woman, into some peculiarly sacred rites which the matrons of Rome
were accustomed to perform in honor of the "Good Goddess." He had
powerful friends, and an attempt was made to screen him, which Cicero,
who was genuinely indignant at the fellow's wickedness, seems to have
resisted. In the end he was put upon his trial, though it was before a
jury which had been specially packed for the occasion. His defense was
an _alibi_, an attempt, that is, to prove that he was elsewhere on the
night when he was alleged to have misconducted himself at Rome. He
brought forward witnesses who swore that they had seen him at the very
time at Interamna, a town in Umbria, and a place which was distant at
least two days' journey from Rome. To rebut this evidence Cicero was
brought forward by the prosecution. As he stepped forward the partisans
of the accused set up a howl of disapproval. But the jury paid him the
high compliment of rising from their seats, and the uproar ceased. He
deposed that Clodius had been at his house on the morning of the day in
question.
Clodius was acquitted. If evidence had any thing to do with the result,
it was the conduct of Caesar that saved him. It was in his house that
the alleged intrusion had taken place, and he had satisfied himself by a
private examination of its inmates that the charge was true. But now he
professed to know nothing at all about the matter. Probably the really
potent influence in the case was the money which Crassus liberally
distributed among the jurors. The fact of the money was indeed
notorious. Some of the jury had pretended that they were in fear of
their lives, and had asked for a guard. "A guard!" said Catulus, to one
of them, "what did you want a guard for? that the money should not be
taken from you?"
But Clodius, though he had escaped, never forgave the man whose evidence
had been given against him. Cicero too felt that there as war to the
knife between them. On the first meeting of the Senate after the
conclusion of the trial he made a pointed attack upon his old
acquaintance. "Lentulus," he said, "was twice acquitted, and Catiline
twice, and now this third malefactor has been let loose on the
commonwealth by his judges. But, Clodius, do not misunderstand what has
happened. It is for the prison, not for the city, that your judges have
kept you; not to keep you in the country, but to deprive you of the
privilege of exile was what they intended. Be of good cheer, then,
Fathers. No new evil has come upon us, but we have found out the evil
that exists. One villain has been put upon his trial, and the result has
taught us that there are more villains than one."
Clodius attempted to banter his antagonist. "You are a fine gentleman,"
he said; "you have been at Baiae" (Baiae was a fashionable
watering-place on the Campanian coast). "Well," said Cicero, "that is
better than to have been at the 'matrons' worship.'" And the attack and
repartee went on. "You have bought a fine house." (Cicero had spent a
large sum of money on a house on the Palatine, and was known to have
somewhat crippled his means by doing so.) "With you the buying has been
of jurymen." "They gave you no credit though you spoke on oath." "Yes;
five-and-twenty gave me credit" (five-and-twenty of the jury had voted
for a verdict of guilty; two-and-thirty for acquittal), "but your
thirty-two gave you none, for they would have their money down." The
Senate shouted applause, and Clodius sat down silent and confounded.
How Clodius contrived to secure for himself the office of tribune, the
vantage ground from which he hoped to work his revenge, has been
already told in the sketch of Caesar. Caesar indeed was really
responsible for all that was done. It was he who made it possible for
Clodius to act; and he allowed him "to act when he could have stopped
him by the lifting of his finger. He was determined to prove to Cicero
that he was master. But he never showed himself after the first
interference in the matter of the adoption. He simply allowed Clodius to
work his will without hindrance.
Clodius proceeded with considerable skill. He proposed various laws,
which were so popular that Cicero, though knowing that they would be
turned against himself, did not venture to oppose them. Then came a
proposal directly leveled at him. "Any man who shall have put to death a
Roman citizen uncondemned and without a trial is forbidden fire and
water." (This was the form of a sentence of exile. No one was allowed
under penalty of death to furnish the condemned with fire and water
within a certain distance of Rome.) Cicero at once assumed the squalid
dress with which it was the custom for accused persons to endeavor to
arouse the compassion of their fellow-citizens. Twenty thousand of the
upper classes supported him by their presence. The Senate itself, on the
motion of one of the tribunes, went into this strange kind of mourning
on his account.
The consuls of the year were Gabinus and Piso. The first was notoriously
hostile, of the second Cicero hoped to make a friend, the more so as he
was a kinsman of his daughter's husband. He gives a lively picture of an
interview with him. "It was nearly eleven o'clock in the morning when we
went to him. He came out of a dirty hovel to meet us, with his slippers
on, and his head muffled up. His breath smelt most odiously of wine; but
he excused himself on the score of his health, which compelled him, he
said, to use medicines in which wine was employed." His answer to the
petition of his visitors (for Cicero was accompanied by his son-in-law)
was at least commendably frank. "My colleague Gabinius is in absolute
poverty, and does not know where to turn. Without a province he must be
ruined. A province he hopes to get by the help of Clodius, but it must
be by my acting with him. I must humor his wishes, just as you, Cicero,
humored your colleague when you were consul. But indeed there is no
reason why you should seek the consul's protection. Every one must look
out for himself."
In default of the consuls there was still some hope that Pompey might be
induced to interfere, and Cicero sought an interview with him. Plutarch
says that he slipped out by a back door to avoid seeing him; but
Cicero's own account is that the interview was granted. "When I threw
myself at his feet" (he means I suppose, humiliated himself by asking
such a favor), "he could not lift me from the ground. He could do
nothing, he said, against the will of Caesar."
Cicero had now to choose between two courses. He might stay and do his
best with the help of his friends, to resist the passing of the law. But
this would have ended, it was well known, in something like an open
battle in the streets of Rome. Clodius and his partisans were ready to
carry their proposal by force of arms, and would yield to nothing but
superior strength. It was possible, even probable, that in such a
conflict Cicero would be victorious. But he shrank from the trial, not
from cowardice, for he had courage enough when occasion demanded, not
even from unwillingness to risk the lives of his friends, though this
weighed somewhat with him, but chiefly because he hated to confess that
freedom was becoming impossible in Rome, and that the strong hand of a
master was wanted to give any kind of security to life and property. The
other course was to anticipate the sentence and to go into voluntary
exile. This was the course which his most powerful friends pressed upon
him, and this was the course which he chose. He left Rome, intending to
go to Sicily, where he knew that he should find the heartiest of
welcomes.
Immediately on his departure Clodius formally proposed his banishment.
"Let it be enacted," so ran the proposition, "that, seeing that Marcus
Tullius Cicero has put Roman citizens to death without trial, forging
thereto the authority of the Senate, that he be forbidden fire and
water; that no one harbor or receive him on pain of death; and that
whosoever shall move, shall vote, or take any steps for the recalling of
him, be dealt with as a public enemy." The bill was passed, the distance
within which it was to operate being fixed at four hundred miles. The
houses of the banished man were razed to the ground, the site of the
mansion on the. Palatine, being dedicated to Liberty. His property was
partly plundered, partly sold by auction.
Cicero meanwhile had hurried to the south of Italy. He found shelter for
a while at the farm of a friend near Vibo in Brutii (now the Abruzzi),
but found it necessary to leave this place because it was within the
prescribed limits. Sicily was forbidden to him by its governor, who,
though a personal friend, was unwilling to displease the party in power.
Athens, which for many reasons he would have liked to choose for his
place of exile, was unsafe. He had bitter enemies there, men who had
been mixed up in Catiline's conspiracy. The place, too, was within the
distance, and though this was not very strictly insisted upon--as a
matter of fact, he did spend the greater part of his banishment inside
the prescribed limit--it might at any moment be made a means of
annoyance. Atticus invited him to take up his residence at his seat at
Buthrotum in Epirus (now Albania). But the proposal did not commend
itself to his taste. It was out of the way, and would be very dreary
without the presence of its master, who was still at Rome, and
apparently intended to remain there. After staying for about a fortnight
at a friend's house near Dyrrachium--the town itself, where he was once
very popular, for fear of bringing some trouble upon it, he refused to
enter--he crossed over to Greece, and ultimately settled himself at
Thessalonica.
Long afterward he tells us of a singular dream which seems to have given
him some little comfort at this time. "I had lain awake for the greater
part of the night, but fell into a heavy slumber toward morning. I was
at the point of starting, but my host would not allow me to be waked. At
seven o'clock, however, I rose, and then told my friend this dream. I
seemed to myself to be wandering disconsolately in some lonely place
when the great Marius met me. His lictors were with him, their _fasces_
wreathed with bays. 'Why are you so sad?' he asked me. 'I have been
wrongly banished from my country,' I answered. He then took my hand, and
turning to the nearest lictor, bade him lead me to his own Memorial
Hall. 'There,' he said, 'you will be safe.'" His friend declared that
this dream portended a speedy and honorable return. Curiously enough it
was in the Hall of Marius that the decree repealing the sentence of
banishment was actually proposed and passed.
For the most part he was miserably unhappy and depressed. In letter
after letter he poured out to Atticus his fears, his complaints, and his
wants. Why had he listened to the bad advice of his friends? He had
wished to stay at Rome and fight out the quarrel. Why had Hortensius
advised him to retire from the struggle? It must have been jealousy,
jealousy of one whom he knew to be a more successful advocate than
himself. Why had Atticus hindered his purposes when he thought of
putting an end to all his trouble by killing himself? Why were all his
friends, why was Atticus himself, so lukewarm in his cause? In one
letter he artfully reproaches himself for his neglect of his friends in
times past as the cause of their present indifference. But the reproach
is of course really leveled at them.
"If ever," he writes in one letter, "fortune shall restore me to my
country and to you, I will certainly take care that of all my friends;
none shall be more rejoiced than you. All my duty to you, a duty which I
must own in time past was sadly wanting, shall be so faithfully
discharged that you will feel that I have been restored to you quite as
much as I shall have been restored to my brother and to my children. For
whatever I have wronged you, and indeed because I have wronged you,
pardon me; for I have wronged myself far worse. I do not write this as
not knowing that you feel the very greatest trouble on my account; but
if you were and had been under the obligation to love me, as much as you
actually do love me and have loved me, you never would have allowed me
to lack the wise advice which you have so abundantly at your command."
This is perhaps a little obscure, as it is certainly somewhat subtle;
but Cicero means that Atticus had not interested himself in his affairs
as much as he would have felt bound to do, if he (Cicero) had been less
remiss in the duties of friendship.
To another correspondent, his wife Terentia, he poured out his heart yet
more freely. "Don't think," he writes in one of his letters to her,
"that I write longer letters to others than to you, except indeed I have
received some long communication which I feel I must answer. Indeed I
have nothing to write; and in these days I find it the most difficult of
duties. Writing to you and to my dearest Tullia I never can do without
floods of tears. I see you are utterly miserable, and I wanted you to be
completely happy. I might have made you so. I could have made you had I
been less timid.... My heart's delight, my deepest regret is to think
that you, to whom all used to look for help, should now be involved in
such sorrow, such distress! and that I should be to blame, I who saved
others only to ruin myself and mine!... As for expenditure, let others,
who can if they will, undertake it. And if you love me, don't distress
your health, which is already, I know, feeble. All night, all day I
think of you. I see that you are undertaking all imaginable labors on my
behalf; I only fear that you will not be able to endure them. I am aware
that all depends upon you. If we are to succeed in what you wish and are
now trying to compass, take care of your health." In another he writes:
"Unhappy that I am! to think that one so virtuous, so loyal, so honest,
so kind, should be so afflicted, and all on my account. And my dearest
Tullia, too, that she should be so unhappy about a father in whom she
once found so much happiness. And what shall I say about my dear little
Cicero? That he should feel the bitterest sorrow and trouble as soon as
he began to feel any thing! If all this was really, as you write, the
work of fate, I could endure it a little more easily; but it was all
brought about by my fault, thinking that I was loved by men who really
were jealous of me, and keeping aloof from others who were really on my
side."
This is, perhaps, a good opportunity of saying something about the lady
herself. Who she was we do not certainly know. There was a family of the
name in Rome, the most notable of whom perhaps was the Terentius
Varro[7] whose rashness brought upon his country the terrible disaster
of the defeat of Cannae. She had a half-sister, probably older than
herself, of the name of Fabia, who was a vestal virgin. She brought her
husband, to whom she was married about 78 B.C., a fair dowry, about
three thousand five hundred pounds. We have seen how affectionately
Cicero writes to her during his exile. She is his darling, his only
hope; the mere thought of her makes his eyes overflow with tears. And
she seems to have deserved all his praise and affection, exerting
herself to the utmost to help him, and ready to impoverish herself to
find him the means that he needed. Four letters of this period have been
preserved. There are twenty others belonging to the years 50-47 B.C. The
earlier of these are sufficiently affectionate. When he is about to
return to Rome from his province (Cilicia), she is still the most
amiable, the dearest of women. Then we begin to see signs of coolness,
yet nothing that would strike us did we not know what was afterwards to
happen. He excuses the rarity of his letters. There is no one by whom to
send them. If there were, he was willing to write. The greetings became
formal, the superlatives "dearest," "fondest," "best," are dropped. "You
are glad," he writes after the battle of Pharsalia had dashed his hopes,
"that I have got back safe to Italy; I hope that you may continue to be
glad." "Don't think of coming," he goes on, "it is a long journey and
not very safe; and I don't see what good you would do if you should
come." In another letter he gives directions about getting ready his
house at Tusculum for the reception of guests. The letter is dated on
the first of October, and he and his friends would come probably to stay
several days, on the seventh. If there was not a tub in the bath-room,
one must be provided. The greeting is of the briefest and most formal.
Meanwhile we know from what he writes to Atticus that he was greatly
dissatisfied with the lady's conduct. Money matters were at the bottom
of their quarrel. She was careless, he thinks, and extravagant. Though
he was a rich man, yet he was often in need of ready money, and Terentia
could not be relied upon to help him. His vexation takes form in a
letter to Atticus. "As to Terentia--there are other things without
number of which I don't speak--what can be worse than this? You wrote to
her to send me bills for one hundred and eight pounds; for there was so
much money left in hand. She sent me just ninety pounds, and added a
note that this was all. If she was capable of abstracting such a trifle
from so small a sum, don't you see what she would have done in matters
of real importance?" The quarrel ended in a divorce, a thing far more
common than, happily, it is among ourselves, but still a painful and
discreditable end to an union which had lasted for more than
five-and-twenty years. Terentia long survived her husband, dying in
extreme old age (as much, it was said, as a hundred and three years),
far on in the reign of Augustus; and after a considerable experience of
matrimony, if it be true that she married three or even, according to
some accounts, four other husbands.
[Footnote 7: Another of the same name was an eminent man of letters of
Cicero's own time.]
Terentia's daughter, Tullia, had a short and unhappy life. She was born,
it would seem, about 79 B.C., and married when fifteen or sixteen to a
young Roman noble, Piso Frugi by name. "The best, the most loyal of
men," Cicero calls him. He died in 57 B.C., and Rome lost, if his
father-in-law's praises of him may be trusted, an orator of the very
highest promise. "I never knew any one who surpassed my son-in-law,
Piso, in zeal, in industry, and, I may fairly say, in ability." The next
year she married a certain Crassipes, a very shadowy person indeed. We
know nothing of what manner of man he was, or what became of him. But in
50 B.C. Tullia was free to marry again. Her third venture was of her own
or her mother's contriving. Her father was at his government in Cilicia,
and he hears of the affair with surprise. "Believe me," he writes to
Atticus, "nothing could have been less expected by me. Tiberius Nero had
made proposals to me, and I had sent friends to discuss the matter with
the ladies. But when they got to Rome the betrothal had taken place.
This, I hope, will be a better match. I fancy the ladies were very much
pleased with the young gentleman's complaisance and courtesy, but do not
look for the thorns." The "thorns," however, were there. A friend who
kept Cicero acquainted with the news of Rome, told him as much, though
he wraps up his meaning in the usual polite phrases. "I congratulate
you," he writes, "on your alliance with one who is, I really believe, a
worthy fellow. I do indeed think this of him. If there have been some
things in which he has not done justice to himself, these are now past
and gone; any traces that may be left will soon, I am sure, disappear,
thanks to your good influence and to his respect for Tullia. He is not
offensive in his errors, and does not seem slow to appreciate better
things." Tullia, however, was not more successful than other wives in
reforming her husband. Her marriage seems to have been unhappy almost
from the beginning. It was brought to an end by a divorce after about
three years. Shortly afterward Tullia, who could have been little more
than thirty, died, to the inconsolable grief of her father. "My grief,"
he writes to Atticus, "passes all consolation. Yet I have done what
certainly no one ever did before, written a treatise for my own
consolation. (I will send you the book if the copyists have finished
it.) And indeed there is nothing like it. I write day after day, and all
day long; not that I can get any good from it, but it occupies me a
little, not much indeed; the violence of my grief is too much for me.
Still I am soothed, and do my best to compose, not my feelings, indeed,
but, if I can, my face." And again: "Next to your company nothing is
more agreeable to me than solitude. Then all my converse is with books;
yet this is interrupted by tears; these I resist as well as I can; but
at present I fail." At one time he thought of finding comfort in unusual
honors to the dead. He would build a shrine of which Tullia should be
the deity. "I am determined," he writes, "on building the shrine. From
this purpose I cannot be turned ... Unless the building be finished this
summer, I shall hold myself guilty." He fixes upon a design. He begs
Atticus, in one of his letters, to buy some columns of marble of Chios
for the building. He discusses the question of the site. Some gardens
near Rome strike him as a convenient place. It must be conveniently near
if it is to attract worshipers. "I would sooner sell or mortgage, or
live on little, than be disappointed." Then he thought that he would
build it on the grounds of his villa. In the end he did not build it at
all. Perhaps the best memorial of Tullia is the beautiful letter in
which one of Cicero's friends seeks to console him for his loss. "She
had lived," he says, "as long as life was worth living, as long as the
republic stood." One passage, though it has often been quoted before, I
must give. "I wish to tell you of something which brought me no small
consolation, hoping that it may also somewhat diminish your sorrow. On
my way back from Asia, as I was sailing from Aeigina to Megara, I began
to contemplate the places that lay around me. Behind me was Aegina,
before me Megara; on my right hand the Piraeus, on my left hand Corinth;
towns all of them that were once at the very height of prosperity, but
now lie ruined and desolate before our eyes. I began thus to reflect:
'Strange! do we, poor creatures of a day, bear it ill if one of us
perish of disease, or are slain with the sword, we whose life is bound
to be short, while the dead bodies of so many lie here inclosed within
so small a compass?"
But I am anticipating. When Cicero was in exile the republic had yet
some years to live; and there were hopes that it might survive
altogether. The exile's prospects, too, began to brighten. Caesar had
reached for the present the height of his ambition, and was busy with
his province of Gaul. Pompey had quarreled with Clodius, whom he found
to be utterly unmanageable. And Cicero's friend, one Milo, of whom I
shall have to say more hereafter, being the most active of them all,
never ceased to agitate for his recall. It would be tedious to recall
all the vicissitudes of the struggle. As early as May the Senate passed
a resolution repealing the decree of banishment, the news of it having
caused an outburst of joy in the city. Accius' drama of "Telamon" was
being acted at the time, and the audience applauded each senator as he
entered the Senate, and rose from their places to greet the consul as he
came in. But the enthusiasm rose to its height when the actor who was
playing the part of Telamon (whose banishment from his country formed
part of the action of the drama) declaimed with significant emphasis the
following lines--
What! he--the man who still with steadfast heart
Strove for his country, who in perilous days
Spared neither life nor fortune, and bestowed
Most help when most she needed; who surpassed
In wit all other men. Father of Gods,
_His_ house--yea, _his_!--I saw devoured by fire;
And ye, ungrateful, foolish, without thought
Of all wherein he served you, could endure
To see him banished; yea, and to this hour
Suffer that he prolong an exile's day.
Still obstacle after obstacle was interposed, and it was not till the
fourth of August that the decree passed through all its stages and
became finally law. Cicero, who had been waiting at the point of Greece
nearest to Italy, to take the earliest opportunity of returning, had
been informed by his friends that he might now safely embark. He sailed
accordingly on the very day when the decree was passed, and reached
Brundisium on the morrow. It happened to be the day on which the
foundation of the colony was celebrated, and also the birthday of
Tullia, who had come so far to meet her father. The coincidence was
observed by the towns-people with delight. On the eighth the welcome
news came from Rome, and Cicero set out for the capital. "All along my
road the cities of Italy kept the day of my arrival as a holiday; the
ways were crowded with the deputations which were sent from all parts to
congratulate me. When I approached the city, my coming was honored by
such a concourse of men, such a heartiness of congratulation as are past
believing. The way from the gates, the ascent of the Capitol, the return
to my home made such a spectacle that in the very height of my joy I
could not but be sorry that a people so grateful had yet been so
unhappy, so cruelly oppressed." "That day," he said emphatically, "that
day was as good as immortality to me."