_AFTER THE BATTLE._
[Sidenote: B.C. 48, aetat. 59.]
In the autumn of this year Cicero had himself landed at Brundisium. He
remained nearly a year at Brundisium, and it is melancholy to think how
sad and how long must have been the days with him. He had no country
when he reached the nearest Italian port; it was all Caesar's, and Caesar
was his enemy. There had been a struggle for the masterdom between two
men, and of the two the one had beaten with whom Cicero had not ranged
himself. He had known how it would be. All the Getae, and the men of
Colchis, and the Armenians, all the lovers of the fish-ponds and those
who preferred the delicacies of Baiae to the work of the Forum, all who
had been taught to think that there were provinces in order that they
might plunder, men who never dreamed of a country but to sell it, all
those whom Caesar was determined either to drive out of Italy or keep
there in obedience to himself, had been brought together in vain. We
already know, when we begin to read the story, how it will be with them
and with Caesar. On Caesar's side there is an ecstasy of hope carried to
the very brink of certainty; on the other is that fainting spirit of
despair which no battalions can assuage. We hear of no Scaeva and of no
Crastinus on Pompey's side. Men change their nature under such leading
as was that of Caesar. The inferior men become heroic by contact with the
hero; but such heroes when they come are like great gouts of blood
dabbled down upon a fair cloth. Who that has eyes to see can look back
upon the career of such a one and not feel an agony of pain as the
stern man passes on without a ruffled face, after ordering the right
hands of those who had fought at Uxellodunum to be chopped off at the
wrist, in order that men might know what was the penalty of fighting for
their country?
There are men--or have been, from time to time, in all ages of the
world--let loose, as it were, by the hand of God to stop the iniquities
of the people, but in truth the natural product of those iniquities.
They have come and done their work, and have died, leaving behind them
the foul smell of destruction. An Augustus followed Caesar, and him
Tiberius, and so on to a Nero. It was necessary that men should suffer
much before they were brought back to own their condition. But they who
can see a Cicero struggling to avoid the evil that was coming--not for
himself but for the world around him--and can lend their tongues, their
pens, their ready wits to ridicule his efforts, can hardly have been
touched by the supremacy of human suffering.
It must have been a sorry time with him at Brundisium. He had to stay
there waiting till Caesar's pleasure had been made known to him, and
Caesar was thinking of other things. Caesar was away in Egypt and the
East, encountering perils at Alexandria which, if all be true that we
have heard, imply that he had lived to be past fear. Grant that a man
has to live as Caesar did, and it will be well that he should be past
fear. At any rate he did not think of Cicero, or thinking of him felt
that he was one who must be left to brood in silence over the choice he
had made. Cicero did brood--not exactly in silence--over the things that
fate had done for him and for his country. For himself, he was living in
Italy, and yet could not venture to betake himself to one of the
eighteen villas which, as Middleton tells us, he had studded about the
country for his pastime. There were those at Tusculum, Antium, Astura,
Arpinum--at Formiae, at Cumae, at Puteoli, and at Pompeii. Those who tell
us of Cicero's poverty are surely wandering, carried away by their
erroneous notions of what were a Roman nobleman's ideas as to money. At
no period of his life do we find Cicero not doing what he was minded to
do for want of money, and at no period is there a hint that he had
allowed himself in any respect to break the law. It has been argued that
he must have been driven to take fees and bribes and indirect payments,
because he says that he wanted money. It was natural that he should
occasionally want money, and yet be in the main indifferent. The
incoming of a regular revenue was not understood as it is with us. A man
here and there might attend to his money, as did Atticus. Cicero did
not; and therefore, when in want of it, he had to apply to a friend for
relief. But he always applies as one who knows well that the trouble is
not enduring. Is it credible that a man so circumstanced should have
remained with those various sources of extravagance which it would have
been easy for him to have avoided or lessened? We are led to the
conviction that at no time was it expedient to him to abandon his
villas, though in the hurry-scurry of Roman affairs it did now and again
become necessary for him to apply to Atticus for accommodation. Let us
think what must have been Caesar's demands for money. Of these we hear
nothing, because he was too wise to have an Atticus to whom he wrote
everything, or too wary to write letters upon business which should be
treasured for the curiosity of after-ages.
To be hopeful and then tremulous; to be eager after success and then
desponding; to have believed readily every good and then, as readily,
evil; to have relied implicitly on a man's faith, and then to have
turned round and declared how he had been deceived; to have been very
angry and then to have forgiven--this seems to have been Cicero's
nature. Verres, Catiline, Clodius, Piso, and Vatinius seem to have
caused his wrath; but was there one of them against whom, though he did
not forgive him, his anger did not die out? Then, at last, he was moved
to an internecine fight with Antony. Is there any one who has read the
story which we are going to tell who will not agree with us that, if
after Mutina Octavius had thought fit to repudiate Antony and to follow
Cicero's counsels, Antony would not have been spared?
Nothing angers me so much in describing Cicero as the assertion that he
was a coward. It has sprung from a wrong idea of what constitutes
cowardice. He did not care to fight; but are all men cowards who do not
care to fight when work can be so much better done by talking? He saw
that fighting was the work fit for men of common clay, or felt it if he
did not see it. When men rise to such a pitch as that which he filled,
and Caesar and Pompey, and some few others around them, their greatest
danger does not consist in fighting. A man's tongue makes enemies more
bitter than his sword. But Cicero, when the time came, never shirked his
foe. Whether it was Verres or Catiline, or Clodius or Antony, he was
always there, ready to take that foe by the throat, and ready to offer
his own in return. At moments such as that there was none of the fear
which stands aghast at the wrath of the injured one, and makes the man
who is a coward quail before the eyes of him who is brave.
His friendship for Pompey is perhaps, of all the strong feelings of his
life, the one most requiring excuse, and the most difficult to excuse.
For myself I can see why it was so; but I cannot do that without
acknowledging in it something which derogated from his greatness. Had he
risen above Pompey, he would have been great indeed; for I look upon it
as certain that he did see that Pompey was as untrue to the Republic as
Caesar. He saw it occasionally, but it was not borne in upon him at all
times that Pompey was false. Caesar was not false. Caesar was an open foe.
I doubt whether Pompey ever saw enough to be open. He never realized to
himself more than men. He never rose to measures--much less to the
reason for them. When Caesar had talked him over, and had induced him to
form the Triumvirate, Pompey's politics were gone. Cicero never
blanched. Whether, full of new hopes, he attacked Chrysogonus with all
the energy of one to whom his injured countrymen were dear, or, with
the settled purpose of his life, he accused Verres in the teeth of the
coming Consul Hortensius; whether in driving out Catiline, or in
defending Milo; whether, even, in standing up before Caesar for
Marcellus, or in his final onslaught upon Antony, his purpose was still
the same. As time passed on he took to himself coarser weapons, and went
down into the arena and fought the beasts at Ephesus. Alas, it is so
with mankind! Who can strive to do good and not fight beasts? And who
can fight them but after some fashion of their own? He was fighting
beasts at Ephesus when he was defending Milo. He was an oligarch, but he
wanted the oligarchy round him to be true and honest! It was impossible.
These men would not be just, and yet he must use them. Milo and Caelius
and Curio were his friends. He knew them to be bad, but he could not
throw off from him all that were bad men. If by these means he could win
his way to something that might be good, he would pardon their evil. As
we make our way on to the end of his life we find that his character
becomes tarnished, and that his high feelings are blunted by the party
which he takes and the men with whom he associates.
He did not, indeed, fall away altogether. The magistracy offered to him,
the lieutenancy offered to him, the "free legation" offered to him, the
last appeal made to him that he would go to Rome and speak a few
words--or that he would stay away and remain neutral--did not move him.
He did not turn conspirator and then fight for the prize, as Pompey had
done. But he had, for so many years, clung to Pompey as the leader of a
party; had had it so dinned into his ears that all must depend on
Pompey; had found himself so bound up with the man who, when appealed to
as to his banishment, had sullenly told him he could only do as Caesar
would have him; whom he had felt to be mean enough to be stigmatized as
Sampsiceramus, him of Jerusalem, the hero of Arabia; whom he knew to be
desirous of doing with his enemies as Sulla had done with his--that, in
spite of it all, he clung to him still!
I cannot but blame Cicero for this, but yet I can excuse it. It is hard
to have to change your leader after middle life, and Cicero could only
have changed his by becoming a leader himself. We can see how hopeless
it was. Would it not have been mean had he allowed those men to go and
fight in Macedonia without him? Who would have believed in him had he
seemed to be so false? Not Cato, not Brutus, not Bibulus, not Scipio,
not Marcellus. Such men were the leaders of the party of which he had
been one. Would they not say that he had remained away because he was
Caesar's man? He must follow either Caesar or Pompey. He knew that Pompey
was beaten. There are things which a man knows, but he cannot bring
himself to say so even to himself. He went out to fight on the side
already conquered; and when the thing was done he came home with his
heart sad, and lived at Brundisium, mourning his lot.
From thence he wrote to Atticus, saying that he hardly saw the advantage
of complying with advice which had been given to him that he should
travel incognito to Rome. But it is the special reason given which
strikes us as being so unlike the arguments which would prevail to-day:
"Nor have I resting-places on the way sufficiently convenient for me to
pass the entire daytime within them."[130] The "diversorium" was a place
by the roadside which was always ready should the owner desire to come
that way. It must be understood that he travelled with attendants, and
carried his food with him, or sent it on before. We see at every turn
how much money could do; but we see also how little money had done for
the general comfort of the people. Brundisium is above three hundred
miles from Rome, and the journey is the same which Horace took
afterward, going from the city.[131] Much had then been done to make
travelling comfortable, or at any rate cheaper than it had been
four-and-twenty years before. But now the journey was not made. He
reminds Atticus in the letter that if he had not written through so long
an interval it was not because there had been a dearth of subjects. It
had been no doubt prudent for a man to be silent when so many eyes and
so many ears were on the watch. He writes again some days later, and
assures Atticus that Caesar thinks well of his "lictors!" Oh those
eternal lictors! "But what have I to do with lictors," he says, "who am
almost ordered to leave the shores of Italy?"[132] And then Caesar had
sent angry messages. Cato and Metellus had been said to have come home.
Caesar did not choose that this should be so, and had ordered them away.
It was clearly manifest to every man alive now that Caesar was the actual
master of Italy.
During the whole of this winter he is on terms with Terentia, but he
writes to her in the coldest strain. There are many letters to Terentia,
more in number than we have ever known before, but they are all of the
same order. I translate one here to show the nature of his
correspondence: "If you are well, I am so also. The times are such that
I expect to hear nothing from yourself, and on my part have nothing to
write. Nevertheless, I look for your letters, and I write to you when a
messenger is going to start. Voluminia ought to have understood her duty
to you, and should have done what she did do better. There are other
things, however, which I care for more, and grieve for more bitterly--as
those have wished who have driven me from my own opinion."[133] Again he
writes to Atticus, deploring that he should have been born--so great are
his troubles--or, at any rate, that one should have been born after him
from the same mother. His brother has addressed him in anger--his
brother, who has desired to make his own affairs straight with Caesar,
and to swim down the stream pleasantly with other noble Romans of the
time. I can imagine that with Quintus Cicero there was nothing much
higher than the wealth which the day produced. I can fancy that he was
possessed of intellect, and that when it was fair sailing with our
Consul it was all well with Quintus Cicero; but I can see also that,
when Caesar prevailed, it was occasionally a matter of doubt with Quintus
whether his brother should not be abandoned among other things which
were obtrusive and vain. He could not quite do it. His brother compelled
him into propriety, and carried him along within the lines of the
oligarchy. Then Caesar fell, and Quintus saw that the matter was right;
but Caesar, though he fell, did not altogether fall, and therefore
Quintus after all turned out to be in the wrong. I fancy that I can see
how things went ill with Quintus.
[Sidenote: B.C. 47, aetat. 60.]
Caesar, after the battle of the Pharsalia, had followed Pompey, but had
failed to catch him. When he came upon the scene in the roadstead at
Alexandria, the murder had been effected. He then disembarked, and
there, as circumstances turned out, was doomed to fight another campaign
in which he nearly lost his life. It is not a part of my plan to write
the life of Caesar, nor to meddle with it further than I am driven to do
in seeking after the sources of Cicero's troubles and aspiration; but
the story must be told in a few words. Caesar went from Alexandria into
Asia, and, flashing across Syria, beat Pharnaces, and then wrote his
famous "Veni, vidi, vici," if those words were ever written. Surely he
could not have written them and sent them home! Even the subservience of
the age would not have endured words so boastful, nor would the glory of
Caesar have so tarnished itself. He hurried back to Italy, and quelled
the mutiny of his men by a masterpiece of stage-acting. Simply by
addressing them as "Quirites," instead of "Milites," he appalled them
into obedience. On this journey into Italy he came across Cicero. If he
could be cruel without a pang--to the arranging the starvation of a
townful of women, because they as well as the men must eat--he could be
magnificent in his treatment of a Cicero. He had hunted to the death his
late colleague in the Triumvirate, and had felt no remorse; though
there seems to have been a moment when in Egypt the countenance of him
who had so long been his superior had touched him. He had not ordered
Pompey's death. On no occasion had he wilfully put to death a Roman
whose name was great enough to leave a mark behind. He had followed the
convictions of his countrymen, who had ever spared themselves. To him a
thousand Gauls, or men of Eastern origin, were as nothing to a single
Roman nobleman. Whether there can be said to have been clemency in such
a course it is useless now to dispute. To Caesar it was at any rate
policy as well. If by clemency he meant that state of mind in which it
is an evil to sacrifice the life of men to a spirit of revenge, Caesar
was clement. He had moreover that feeling which induces him who wins to
make common cause--in little things--with those who lose. We can see
Caesar getting down from his chariot when Cicero came to meet him, and,
throwing his arms round his neck, walking off with him in pleasant
conversation; and we can fancy him talking to Cicero pleasantly of the
greatness which, in times yet to come, pursuits such as his would show
in comparison with those of Caesar's. "Cedant arma togae; concedat laurea
linguae," we can hear Caesar say, with an irony expressed in no tone of
his voice, but still vibrating to the core of his heart, as he thought
so much of his own undoubted military supremacy, and absolutely nothing
of his now undoubted literary excellence.
[Sidenote: B.C. 47, aetat. 60.]
But to go back a little; we shall find Cicero still waiting at
Brundisium during August and September. In the former of these months he
reminds Atticus that "he cannot at present sell anything, but that he
can put by something so that it may be in safety when the ruin shall
fall upon him."[134] From this may be deduced a state of things very
different to that above described, but not contradicting it. I gather
from this unintelligible letter, written, as he tells us, for the most
part in his own handwriting, that he was at the present moment under
some forfeiture of the law to Caesar. It may well be that, as one
adjudged to be a rebel to his country, his property should not be
salable. If that were so, Caesar in some of these bland moments must have
revoked the sentence--and at such a time all sentences were within
Caesar's control--because we know that on his return Cicero's villas were
again within his own power. But he is in sad trouble now about his wife.
He has written to her to send him twelve thousand sesterces, which he
had as it were in a bag, and she sends him ten, saying that no more is
left. If she would deduct something from so small a sum, what would she
do if it were larger?[135] Then follow two letters for his wife--a mere
word in each--not a sign of affection nor of complaint in either of
them. In the first he tells her she shall be informed when Caesar is
coming--in the latter, that he is coming. When he has resolved whether
to go and meet him or to remain where he is till Caesar shall have come
upon him, he will again write. Then there are three to Atticus, and two
more to Terentia. In the first he tells him that Caesar is expected. Some
ten or twelve days afterward he is still full of grief as to his brother
Quintus, whose conduct has been shameful. Caesar he knows is near at
hand, but he almost hopes that he will not come to Brundisium. In the
third, as indeed he has in various others, he complains bitterly of the
heat: it is of such a nature that it adds to his grief. Shall he send
word to Caesar that he will wait upon him nearer to Rome?[136] He is
evidently in a sad condition. Quintus, it must be remembered, had been
in Gaul with Caesar, and had seen the rising sun. On his return to Italy
he had not force enough to declare a political conviction, and to go
over to Caesar boldly. He had indeed become lieutenant to his brother
when in Cilicia, having left Caesar for the purpose. He afterward went
with his brother to the Pharsalus, assuring the elder Cicero that they
two would still be of the same party. Then the great catastrophe had
come, when Cicero returned from that wretched campaign to Brundisium,
and remained there in despair as at some penal settlement. Quintus
followed Caesar into Asia with his son, and there pleaded his own cause
with him at the expense of his brother. Of Caesar we must all admit that,
though indifferent to the shedding of blood, arrogant, without principle
in money and without heart in love, he was magnificent, and that he
injured none from vindictive motives. He passed on, leaving Quintus
Cicero, who as a soldier had been true to him, without, as we can fancy,
many words. Cicero afterward interceded for his brother who had reviled
him, and Quintus will ever after have to bear the stain of his
treachery. Then came the two letters for his wife, with just a line in
each. If her messenger should arrive, he will send her word back as to
what she is to do. After an interval of nearly a month, there is the
other--ordering, in perfectly restored good-humor, that the baths shall
be ready at the Tusculan villa: "Let the baths be all ready, and
everything fit for the use of guests; there will probably be many of
them."[137] It is evident that Caesar has passed on in a good-humor, and
has left behind him glad tidings, such as should ever brighten the feet
of the conqueror.
It is singular that, with a correspondence such as that of Cicero's, of
which, at least through the latter two or three years of his life, every
letter of his to his chief friend has been preserved, there should have
been nothing left to us from that friend himself. It must have been the
case, as Middleton suggests, that Atticus, when Cicero was dead, had the
handling of the entire MS., and had withdrawn his own; either that, or
else Cicero and Atticus mutually agreed to the destruction of their
joint labors, and Atticus had been untrue to his agreement, knowing
well the value of the documents he preserved. That there is no letter
from a woman--not even a line to Cicero from his dear daughter--is much
to be regretted. And yet there are letters--many from Caelius, who is
thus brought forward as almost a second and a younger Atticus--and from
various Romans of the day. When we come to the latter days of his life,
in which he had taken upon himself the task of writing to Plancus and
others as to their supposed duty to the State, they become numerous.
There are ten such from Plancus, and nine from Decimus Brutus; and there
is a whole mass of correspondence with Marcus Brutus--to be taken for
what it is worth. With a view to history, they are doubtless worth much;
but as throwing light on Cicero's character, except as to the vigor that
was in the man to the last, they are not of great value. How is it that
a correspondence, which is for its main purpose so full, should have
fallen so short in many of its details? There is no word, no allusion
derogatory to Atticus in these letters, which have come to us from
Caelius and others. We have Atticus left to us for our judgment, free
from the confession of his own faults, and free also from the
insinuations of others. Of whom would we wish that the familiar letters
of another about ourselves should be published? Would those
objectionable epithets as to Pompey have been allowed to hold their
ground had Pompey lived and had they been in his possession?
But, in reading histories and biographies, we always accept with a bias
in favor of the person described the anecdotes of those who talk of
them. We know that the ready wit of the surrounding world has taken up
these affairs of the moment and turned them into ridicule--then as they
do now. We discount the "Hierosolymarius." We do not quite believe that
Bibulus never left the house while an enemy was to be seen; but we think
that a man may be expected to tell the truth of himself; at any rate, to
tell no untruth against himself. We think that Cicero of all men may be
left to do so--Cicero, who so well understood the use of words, and
could use them in his own defence so deftly. I maintain that it has been
that very deftness which has done him all the harm. Not one of those
letters of the last years would have been written as it is now had
Cicero thought, when writing it, that from it would his conduct have
been judged after two thousand years. "No," will say my readers, "that
is their value; they would not have otherwise been true, as they are. We
should not then have learned his secrets." I reply, "It is a hard
bargain to make: others do not make such bargains on the same terms. But
be sure, at any rate, that you read them aright: be certain that you
make the necessary allowances. Do not accuse him of falsehood because he
unsays on a Tuesday the words he said on the Monday. Bear in mind on his
behalf all the temporary ill that humanity is heir to. Could you, living
at Brundisium during the summer months, 'when you were scarcely able to
endure the weight of the sun,'[138] have had all your intellects about
you, and have been able always to choose your words?" No, indeed! These
letters, if truth is to be expected from them, have to be read with all
the subtle distinctions necessary for understanding the frame of mind in
which they were written. His anger boils over here, and he is hot. Here
tenderness has mastered him, and the love of old days. He is weak in
body just now, and worn out in spirit; he is hopeless, almost to the
brink of despair; he is bright with wit, he is full of irony, he is
purposely enigmatic--all of which require an Atticus who knew him and
the people among whom he had lived, and the times in which the events
took place, for their special reading. Who is there can read them now so
as accurately to decipher every intended detail? Then comes some critic
who will not even attempt to read them--who rushes through them by the
light of some foregone conclusion, and missing the point at which the
writer subtly aims, tells us of some purpose of which he was altogether
innocent! Because he jokes about the augurship, we are told how
miserably base he was, and how ready to sell his country!
During the whole of the last year he must have been tortured by various
turns of mind. Had he done well in joining himself to Pompey? and having
done so, had he done well in severing himself, immediately on Pompey's
death, from the Pompeians? Looking at the matter as from a stand-point
quite removed from it, we are inclined to say that he had done well in
both. He could not without treachery have gone over to Caesar when Caesar
had come to the gate of Italy, and, as it were with a blast of his
trumpet, had demanded the Consulship, a triumph, the use of his legions,
and the continuance of his military power. "Let Pompey put down his, and
I will put down mine," he had said. Had Pompey put down his, Pompey and
Cicero, Cato and Brutus, and Bibulus would all have had to walk at the
heels of Caesar. When Pompey declared that he would contest the point, he
declared for them all. Cicero was bound to go to Pharsalia. But when, by
Pompey's incompetence, Caesar was the victor; when Pompey had fallen at
the Nile, and all the lovers of the fish-ponds, and the intractable
oligarchs, and the cutthroats of the Empire, such as young Pompey had
become, had scattered themselves far and wide, some to Asia, some to
Illyricum, some to Spain, and more to Africa--as a herd of deer shall be
seen to do when a vast hound has appeared among them, with his jaws
already dripping with blood--was Cicero then to take his part with any
of them? I hold that he did what dignity required, and courage also. He
went back to Italy, and there he waited till the conqueror should come.
It must have been very bitter. Never to have become great has nothing in
it of bitterness for a noble spirit. What matters it to the unknown man
whether a Caesar or a Pompey is at the top of all things? Or if it does
matter--as indeed that question of his governance does matter to every
man who has a soul within him to be turned this way or that--which way
he is turned, though there may be inner regrets that Caesar should become
the tyrant, perhaps keener regrets, if the truth were all seen, that
Pompey's hands should be untrammelled, who sees them? I can walk down to
my club with my brow unclouded, or, unless I be stirred to foolish wrath
by the pride of some one equally vain, can enjoy myself amid the
festivities of the hour. It is but a little affair to me. If it come in
my way to do a thing, I will do my best, and there is an end of it. The
sense of responsibility is not there, nor the grievous weight of having
tried but failed to govern mankind. But to have clung to high places; to
have sat in the highest seat of all with infinite honor; to have been
called by others, and, worse still, to have called myself, the savior of
my country; to have believed in myself that I was sufficient, that I
alone could do it, that I could bring back, by my own justice and
integrity, my erring countrymen to their former simplicity--and then to
have found myself fixed in a little town, just in Italy, waiting for the
great conqueror, who though my friend in things social was opposed to me
body and soul as to rules of life--that, I say, must have been beyond
the bitterness of death.
During this year he had made himself acquainted with the details of that
affair, whatever it might be, which led to his divorce soon after his
return to Rome. He had lived about thirty years with his wife, and the
matter could not but have been to him the cause of great unhappiness.
Terentia was not only the mother of his children, but she had been to
him also the witness of his rise in life and the companion of his fall.
He was one who would naturally learn to love those with whom he was
conversant. He seems to have projected himself out of his own time into
those modes of thought which have come to us with Christianity, and such
a separation from this woman after an intercourse of so many years must
have been very grievous to him. All married Romans underwent divorce
quite as a matter of course. There were many reasons. A young wife is
more agreeable to the man's taste than one who is old. A rich wife is
more serviceable than a poor. A new wife is a novelty. A strange wife is
an excitement. A little wife is a relief to one overburdened with the
flesh; a buxom wife to him who has become tired of the pure spirit.
Xanthippe asks too much, while Griselda is too tranquil. And then, as a
man came up in the world, causes for divorce grew without even the
trouble of having to search for faults. Caesar required that his wife
should not be ill spoken of, and therefore divorced her. Pompey cemented
the Triumvirate with a divorce. We cannot but imagine that, when men had
so much the best of it in the affairs of life, a woman had always the
worst of it in these enforced separations. But as the wind is tempered
to the shorn lamb, so were divorces made acceptable to Roman ladies. No
woman was disgraced by a divorce, and they who gave over their husbands
at the caprice of a moment to other embraces would usually find
consolation. Terentia when divorced from Cicero was at least fifty, and
we are told she had the extreme honor of having married Sallust after
her break with Cicero. They say that she married twice again after
Sallust's death, and that having lived nearly through the reign of
Augustus, she died at length at the age of a hundred and three. Divorce
at any rate did not kill her. But we cannot conceive but that so sudden
a disruption of all the ties of life must have been grievous to Cicero.
We shall find him in the next chapter marrying a young ward, and then,
too, divorcing her; but here we have only to deal with the torments
Terentia inflicted on him. What those torments were we do not know, and
shall never learn unless by chance the lost letters of Atticus should
come to light. But the general idea has been that the lady had, in
league with a freedman and steward in her service, been guilty of fraud
against her husband. I do not know that we have much cause to lament the
means of ascertaining the truth. It is sad to find that the great men
with whose name we are occupied have been made subject to those "whips
and scorns of time" which we thought to be peculiar to ourselves,
because they have stung us. Terentia, Cicero's wife two thousand years
ago, sent him word that he had but L100 left in his box at home, when he
himself knew well that there must be something more. That would have
gone for nothing had there not been other things before that, many other
things. So, in spite of his ordering at her hands the baths and various
matters to be got ready for his friends at his Tusculum, a very short
time after his return there he had divorced her.
During this last year he had been engaged on what has since been found
to be the real work of his life. He had already written much, but had
written as one who had been anxious to fill up vacant spaces of time as
they came in his way. From this time forth he wrote as does one who has
reconciled himself to the fact that there are no more days to be lost if
he intends, before the sun be set, to accomplish an appointed task. He
had already compiled the De Oratore, the De Republica, and the De
Legibus. Out of the many treatises which we have from Cicero's hands,
these are they which are known as the works of his earlier years. He
commenced the year with an inquiry, De Optimo Genere Oratorum, which he
intended as a preface to the translations which he made of the great
speeches of AEschines and Demosthenes, De Corona. These translations are
lost, though the preface remains. He then translated, or rather
paraphrased the Timaeus of Plato, of which a large proportion has come
down to us, and the Protagoras, of which we have lost all but a sentence
or two. We have his Oratoriae Partitiones, in which, in a dialogue
between himself and his son, he repeats the lessons on oratory which he
has given to the young man. It is a recapitulation, in short, of all
that had been said on a subject which has since been made common, and
which owed its origin to the work of much earlier years. It is but dull
reading, but I can imagine that even in these days it may be useful to a
young lawyer. There is a cynical morsel among these precepts which is
worth observing, "Cito enim arescit lachryma praesertim in alienis
malis;"[139] and another grandly simple, "Nihil enim est aliud
eloquentia nisi copiose loquens sapientia." Can we fancy anything more
biting than the idea that the tears caused by the ills of another soon
grow dry on the orator's cheek, or more wise than that which tells us
that eloquence is no more than wisdom speaking eloquently? Then he wrote
the six Paradoxes addressed to Brutus--or rather he then gave them to
the world, for they were surely written at an earlier date. They are
short treatises on trite subjects, put into beautiful language, so as to
arrest the attention of all readers by the unreasonableness of their
reasoning. The most remarkable is the third, in which he endeavored to
show that a man cannot be wise unless he be all-wise, a doctrine which
he altogether overturns in his De Amicitia, written but four years
afterward. Cicero knew well what was true, and wrote his paradox in
order to give a zest to the subject. In the fourth and the sixth are
attacks upon Clodius and Crassus, and are here republished in what would
have been the very worst taste amid the politeness of our modern times.
A man now may hate and say so while his foe is still alive and strong;
but with the Romans he might continue to hate, and might republish the
words which he had written, eight years after the death of his victim.
I know nothing of Cicero's which so much puts us in mind of the
struggles of the modern authors to make the most of every word that has
come from them, as do these paradoxes. They remind us of some writer of
leading articles who gets together a small bundle of essays and then
gives them to the world. Each of them has done well at its time, but
that has not sufficed for his ambition; therefore they are dragged out
into the light and put forward with a separate claim for attention, as
though they could stand well on their own legs. But they cannot stand
alone, and they fall from having been put into a position other than
that for which they were intended when written.