chance, and seized it. The impeachment of Verres for maladministration in
the government of Sicily was a political trial of great constitutional
importance. It was undertaken at the direct encouragement of Pompeius,
who had entered on his first or democratic consulate, and was indirectly
a formidable attack both on the oligarchic administration of the
provinces and on the senatorian jury-panels, in whose hands the Sullan
constitution had placed the only check upon misgovernment. The defence of
Verres was undertaken by Hortensius; the selection of Cicero as chief
counsel for the prosecution by the democratic leaders was a public
recognition of him as the foremost orator on the Pompeian side. He threw
himself into the trial with all his energy. After his opening speech, and
the evidence which followed, Verres threw up his defence and went into
exile. This, of course, brought the case to an end; but the cause turned
on larger issues than his particular guilt or innocence. The whole of the
material prepared against him was swiftly elaborated by Cicero into five
great orations, and published as a political document. These orations,
the _Second Action against Verres_ as they are called, were at once the
most powerful attack yet made on the working of the Sullan constitution,
and the high-water mark of the earlier period of Cicero's eloquence. It
was not till some years later that his oratory culminated; but he never
excelled these speeches in richness and copiousness of style, in ease and
lucidity of exposition, and in power of dealing with large masses of
material. He at once became an imposing political force; perhaps it was
hardly realised till later how incapable that force was of going straight
or of bearing down opposition. The series of political and semi-political
speeches of the next ten years, down to his exile, represent for the time
the history of Rome; and together with these we now begin the series of
his private letters. The year of his praetorship, 66 B.C., is marked by
the two orations which are on the whole his greatest, one public and the
other private. The first, the speech known as the _Pro Lege Manilia_,
which should really be described as the panegyric of Pompeius and of the
Roman people, does not show any profound appreciation of the problems
which then confronted the Republic; but the greatness of the Republic
itself never found a more august interpreter. The stately passage in
which Italy and the subject provinces are called on to bear witness to
the deeds of Pompeius breathes the very spirit of an imperial race.
Throughout this and the other great speeches of the period "the Roman
People" is a phrase that keeps perpetually recurring with an effect like
that of a bourdon stop. As the eye glances down the page, _Consul Populi
Romani, Imperium Populi Romani, Fortuna Populi Romani_, glitter out of
the voluminous periods with a splendour that hardly any other words could
give.
The other great speech of this year, Cicero's defence of Aulus Cluentius
Habitus of Larinum on a charge of poisoning, has in its own style an
equal brilliance of language. The story it unfolds of the ugly tragedies
of middle-class life in the capital and the provincial Italian towns is
famous as one of the leading documents for the social life of Rome.
According to Quintilian, Cicero confessed afterwards that his client was
not innocent, and that the elaborate and impressive story which he
unfolds with such vivid detail was in great part an invention of his own.
This may be only bar gossip; true or false, his defence is an
extraordinary masterpiece of oratorical skill.
The manner in which Cicero conducted a defence when the cause was not so
grave or so desperate is well illustrated by a speech delivered four
years later, the _Pro Archia_. The case here was one of contested
citizenship. The defendant, one of the Greek men of letters who lived in
great numbers at Rome, had been for years intimate with the literary
circle among the Roman aristocracy. This intimacy gained him the
privilege of being defended by the first of Roman orators, who would
hardly, in any other circumstances, have troubled himself with so trivial
a case. But the speech Cicero delivered is one of the permanent glories
of Latin literature. The matter immediately at issue is summarily dealt
with in a few pages of cursory and rather careless argument; then the
scholar lets himself go. Among the many praises of literature which great
men of letters have delivered, there is none, ancient or modern, more
perfect than this; some of the sentences have remained ever since the
abiding motto and blason of literature itself. _Haec studia,
adolescentiam agunt, senectutem oblectant, secundas res ornant, adversis
perfugium ac solatium praebent, delectant domi, non impediunt foris,
pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur;_ and again, _Nullam enim
virtus aliam mercedem laborum periculorumque desiderat, praeter hanc
laudis et gloriae; qua quidem detracta, iudices, quid est quod in hoc tam
exiguo vitae curriculo, et tam brevi, tantis nos in laboribus exerceamus?
Certe, si nihil animus praesentiret in posterum, et si quibus regionibus
vitae spatium circumscriptum est, eisdem omnes cogitationes terminaret
suas, nec tantis se laboribus frangeret, neque tot curis vigiliisque
angeretur, neque teties de vita ipsa dimicaret_. Strange words these to
fall from a pleader's lips in the dusty atmosphere of the praetor's
court! _non fori, neque iudiciali consuetudine_, says Cicero himself, in
the few words of graceful apology with which the speech ends. But, in
truth, as he well knew, he was not speaking to the respectable gentlemen
on the benches before him. He addressed a larger audience; posterity, and
the civilised world.
The _Pro Archia_ foreshadows already the change which was bound to take
place in Cicero's life, and which was precipitated by his exile four
years later. More and more he found himself forced away from the inner
circle of politics, and turned to the larger field where he had an
undisputed supremacy, of political and ethical philosophy clothed in the
splendid prose of which he had now obtained the full mastery. The roll of
his great speeches is indeed continued after his return from exile; but
even in the greatest, the _Pro Sestio_, the _Pro Caelio_, the _De
Provinciis Consularibus_ of 56, or the _In Pisonem_ and _Pro Plancio_ of
55 B.C., something of the old tone is missing; it is as though the same
voice spoke on a smaller range of notes and with less flexibility of
cadence. And now alongside of the speeches begins the series of his works
on oratory and philosophy, with the _De Oratore_ of 55, and the _De
Republica_ of 54 B.C.
The three books _De Oratore_ are perhaps the most finished examples of
the Ciceronian style. The subject (which cannot be said of all the
subjects he deals with) was one of which, over all its breadth and in all
its details, he was completely master; and, thus left unhampered by any
difficulties with his material, he could give full scope to his brilliant
style and diction. The arrangement of the work follows the strict
scholastic divisions; but the form of dialogue into which it is thrown,
and which is managed with really great skill, avoids the tediousness
incident to a systematic treatise. The principal persons of the dialogue
are the two great orators of the preceding age, Lucius Crassus and Marcus
Antonius; this is only one sign out of many that Cicero was more and more
living in a sort of dream of the past, that past of his own youth which
was still full of traditions of the earlier Republic.
The _De Oratore_ was so complete a masterpiece that its author probably
did not care to weaken its effect by continuing at the time to bring out
any of the supplementary treatises on Roman oratory for which his
library, and still more his memory, had accumulated immense quantities of
material. In the treatise _De Republica_, which was begun in 54 B.C.,
though not published till three years later, he carried the achievement
of Latin prose into a larger and less technical field--that of the
philosophy of politics. Again the scene of the dialogue is laid in a past
age; but now he goes further back than he had done in the _De Oratore_,
to the circle of the younger Scipio. The work was received, when
published, with immense applause; but its loss in the Middle Ages is
hardly one of those which are most seriously to be deplored, except in so
far as the second and fifth books may have preserved real information on
the early history of the Roman State and the development of Roman
jurisprudence. Large fragments were recovered early in the present
century from a palimpsest, itself incomplete, on which the work of Cicero
had been expunged to make room for the commentary of St. Augustine on the
Psalms. The famous _Somnium Scipionis_, with which (in imitation of the
vision of Er in Plato's _Republic_) the work ended, has been
independently preserved. Though it flagrantly challenges comparison with
the unequalled original, it has, nevertheless, especially in its opening
and closing passages, a grave dignity which is purely Roman, and
characteristically Ciceronian. Perhaps some of the elaborate fantasies of
De Quincey (himself naturally a Ciceronian, and saturated in the rhythms
and cadences of the finest Latin prose) are the nearest parallel to this
piece in modern English. The opening words of Scipio's narrative, _Cum in
Africam venissem, Mania Manilio consuli ad quartam legionem tribunus_,
come on the ear like the throb of a great organ; and here and there
through the piece come astonishing phrases of the same organ-music:
_Ostendebat autem Karthaginem de excelso et pleno stellarum inlustri et
claro quodam loco.... Quis in reliquis orientis aut obeuntis solis,
ultimis aut aquilonis austrive partibus, tuum nomen audiet?... Deum te
igitur scito esse, siquidem deus est, qui viget, qui sentit, qui meminit,
qui providet_--hardly from the lips of Virgil himself does the noble
Latin speech issue with a purer or a more majestic flow.
During the next few years the literary activity of Cicero suffered a
check. The course of politics at Rome filled him with profound
disappointment and disgust. Public issues, it became more and more plain,
waited for their determination, not on the senate-house or the forum, but
on the sword. The shameful collapse of his defence of Milo in 52 B.C.
must have stung a vanity even as well-hardened as Cicero's to the quick;
and his only important abstract work of this period, the _De Legibus_,
seems to have been undertaken with little heart and carried out without
either research or enthusiasm. His proconsulate in Cilicia in 51 and 50
B.C. was occupied with the tedious details of administration and petty
warfare; six months after his return the Civil war broke out, and, until
permitted to return to Rome by Caesar in the autumn of 47 B.C., he was
practically an exile, away from his beloved Rome and his more beloved
library, hating and despising the ignorant incompetence of his
colleagues, and looking forward with almost equal terror to the
conclusive triumph of his own or the opposite party. When at last he
returned, his mind was still agitated and unsettled. The Pompeian party
held Africa and Spain with large armies; their open threats that all who
had come to terms with Caesar would be proscribed as public enemies were
not calculated to restore Cicero's confidence. The decisive battle of
Thapsus put an end to this uncertainty; and meanwhile Cicero had resumed
work on his _De Legibus_, and had once more returned to the study of
oratory in one of the most interesting of his writings, the _Brutus de
claris Oratoribus_, in which he gives a vivid and masterly sketch of the
history of Roman oratory down to his own time, filled with historical
matter and admirable sketches of character.
The spring of 45 B.C. brought with it two events of momentous importance
to Cicero: the final collapse of the armed opposition to Caesar at the
battle of Munda, and the loss, by the death of his daughter Tullia, of
the one deep affection of his inner life. Henceforth it seemed as if
politics had ceased to exist, even had he the heart to interest himself
in them. He fell back more completely than ever upon philosophy; and the
year that followed (45-44 B.C.) is, in mere quantity of literary
production, as well as in the abiding effect on the world of letters of
the work he then produced, the _annus mirabilis_ of his life. Two at
least of the works of this year, the _De Gloria_ and the _De Virtutibus_,
have perished, though the former survived long enough to be read by
Petrarch; but there remain extant (besides one or two other pieces of
slighter importance) the _De Finibus_, the _Academics_, the _Tusculans_,
the _De Natura Deorum_, the _De Divinatione_, the _De Fato_, the _De
Officiis_, and the two exquisite essays _De Senectute_ and _De Amicitia_.
It is the work of this astonishing year which, on the whole, represents
Cicero's permanent contribution to letters and to human thought. If his
philosophy seems now to have exhausted its influence, it is because it
has in great measure been absorbed into the fabric of civilised society.
Ciceronianism, at the period of the Renaissance, and even in the
eighteenth century, meant more than the impulse towards florid and
sumptuous style. It meant all that is conveyed by the Latin word
_humanitas;_ the title of "the humaner letters," by which Latin was long
designated in European universities, indicated that in the great Latin
writers--in Cicero and Virgil preeminently--a higher type of human life
was to be found than existed in the literature of other countries: as
though at Rome, and in the first century before Christ, the political and
social environment had for the first time produced men such as men would
wish to be, at all events for the ideals of Western Europe. To less
informed or less critical ages than our own, the absolute contribution of
Cicero to ethics and metaphysics seemed comparable to that of the great
Greek thinkers; the _De Natura Deorum_ was taken as a workable argument
against atheism, and the thin and wire-drawn discussions of the
_Academics_ were studied with an attention hardly given to the founder of
the Academy. When a sounder historical method brought these writings into
their real proportion, it was inevitable that the scale should swing
violently to the other side; and for a time no language was too strong in
which to attack the reputation of the "phrase-maker," the "journalist,"
whose name had once dominated Europe. The violence of this attack has now
exhausted itself; and we may be content, without any exaggerated praise
or blame, to note the actual historical effect of these writings through
many ages, and the actual impression made on the world by the type of
character which they embodied and, in a sense, created. In this view,
Cicero represents a force that no historian can neglect, and the
importance of which it is not easy to overestimate. He did for the Empire
and the Middle Ages what Lucretius, with his far greater philosophic
genius, totally failed to do--created forms of thought in which the life
of philosophy grew, and a body of expression which alone made its growth
in the Latin-speaking world possible; and to that world he presented a
political ideal which profoundly influenced the whole course of European
history even up to the French Revolution. Without Cicero, the Middle Ages
would not have had Augustine or Aquinas; but, without him, the movement
which annulled the Middle Ages would have had neither Mirabeau nor Pitt.
The part of Cicero's work which the present age probably finds the most
interesting, and the interest of which is, in the nature of things,
perennial, has been as yet left unmentioned. It consists of the
collections of his private letters from the year 68 B.C. to within a few
months of his death. The first of these collections contains his letters
to the friend and adviser, Titus Pomponius Atticus, with whom, when they
were not both in Rome, he kept up a constant and an extremely intimate
correspondence. Atticus, whose profession, as far as he had one, was that
of a banker, was not only a man of wide knowledge and great political
sagacity, but a refined critic and an author of considerable merit. The
publishing business, which he conducted as an adjunct to his principal
profession, made him of great use to Cicero by the rapid multiplication
in his workshops of copies of the speeches or other writings for which
there was an immediate public demand. But the intimacy was much more than
that of the politician and his confidential adviser, or the author and
his publisher. Cicero found in him a friend with whom he could on all
occasions be perfectly frank and at his ease, and on whose sober judgment
and undemonstrative, but perfectly sincere, attachment his own excitable
and emotional nature could always throw itself without reserve. About
four hundred of the letters were published by Atticus several years after
Cicero's death. It must always be a source of regret that he could not,
or, at all events, did not, publish the other half of the correspondence;
many of the letters, especially the brief confidential notes, have the
tantalising interest of a conversation where one of the speakers is
inaudible. It is the letters to Atticus that place Cicero at the head of
all epistolary stylists. We should hardly guess from the more formal and
finished writings what the real man was, with his excitable Italian
temperament, his swift power of phrase, his sensitive affections.
The other large collection of Cicero's letters, the _Epistolae ad
Familiares_, was preserved and edited by his secretary, Tiro. They are,
of course, of very unequal value and interest. Some are merely formal
documents; others, like those to his wife and family in book xiv., are as
intimate and as valuable as any we possess. The two smaller collections,
the letters to his brother Quintus, and those to Marcus Brutus, of which
a mere fragment is extant, are of little independent value. The
_Epistolae ad Familiares_ include, besides Cicero's own letters, a large
number of letters addressed to him by various correspondents; a whole
book, and that not the least interesting, consists of those sent to him
during his Cilician proconsulate by the brilliant and erratic young
aristocrat, Marcus Caelius Rufus, who was the temporary successor of
Catullus as the favoured lover of Clodia. Full of the political and
social gossip of the day, they are written in a curiously slipshod but
energetic Latin, which brings before us even more vividly than Cicero's
own the familiar language of the upper classes at Rome at the time.
Another letter, which can hardly be passed over in silence in any history
of Latin literature, is the noble message of condolence to Cicero on the
death of his beloved Tullia, by the statesman and jurist, Servius
Sulpicius Rufus, who carried on in this age the great tradition of the
Scaevolae.
It is due to these priceless collections of letters, more than to any
other single thing, that our knowledge of the Ciceronian age is so
complete and so intimate. At every point they reinforce and vitalise the
more elaborate literary productions of the period. The art of letter-
writing suddenly rose in Cicero's hands to its full perfection. It fell
to the lot of no later Roman to have at once such mastery over familiar
style, and contemporary events of such engrossing and ever-changing
interest on which to exercise it. All the great letter-writers of more
modern ages have more or less, consciously or unconsciously, followed the
Ciceronian model. England of the eighteenth century was peculiarly rich
in them; but Horace Walpole, Cowper, Gray himself, would willingly have
acknowledged Cicero as their master.
Caesar's assassination on the 15th of March, 44 B.C., plunged the
political situation into a worse chaos than had ever been reached during
the Civil wars. For several months it was not at all plain how things
were tending, or what fresh combinations were to rise out of the welter
in which a vacillating and incapable senate formed the only
constitutional rallying-point. In spite of all his long-cherished
delusions, Cicero must have known that this way no hope lay; when at last
he flung himself into the conflict, and broke away from his literary
seclusion to make the fierce series of attacks upon Antonius which fill
the winter of 44-43 B.C., he may have had some vague hopes from the
Asiatic legions which once before, in Sulla's hands, had checked the
revolution, and some from the power of his own once unequalled eloquence;
but on the whole he seems to have undertaken the contest chiefly from the
instinct that had become a tradition, and from his deep personal
repugnance to Antonius. The fourteen _Philippics_ add little to his
reputation as an orator, and still less to his credit as a statesman. The
old watchwords are there, but their unreality is now more obvious; the
old rhetorical skill, but more coarsely and less effectively used. The
last _Philippic_ was delivered to advocate a public thanksgiving for the
victory gained over Antonius by the consuls, Hirtius and Pansa. A month
later, the consuls were both dead, and their two armies had passed into
the control of the young Octavianus. In autumn the triumvirate was
constituted, with an armed force of forty legions behind it. The
proscription lists were issued in November. On the 7th of December, after
some aimless wandering that hardly was a serious effort to escape, Cicero
was overtaken near Formiae by a small party of Antonian troops. He was
killed, and his head sent to Rome and displayed in the senate-house.
There was nothing left for which he could have wished to live. In the
five centuries of the Republic there never had been a darker time for
Rome. Cicero had outlived almost all the great men of his age. The newer
generation, so far as they had revealed themselves, were of a type from
which those who had inherited the great traditions of the Republic shrank
with horror. Caesar Octavianus, the future master of the world, was a
delicate boy of twenty, already an object of dislike and distrust to
nearly all his allies. Virgil, a poet still voiceless, was twenty-seven.
VII.
PROSE OF THE CICERONIAN AGE: CAESAR AND SALLUST.
Fertile as the Ciceronian age was in authorship of many kinds, there was
only one person in it whose claim to be placed in an equal rank with
Cicero could ever be seriously entertained; and this was, strangely
enough, one who was as it were only a man of letters by accident, and
whose literary work is but among the least of his titles to fame--Julius
Caesar himself. That anything written by that remarkable man must be
interesting and valuable in a high degree is obvious; but the combination
of literary power of the very first order with his unparallelled military
and political genius is perhaps unique in history.
It is one of the most regrettable losses in Latin literature that
Caesar's speeches and letters have almost completely perished. Of the
latter several collections were made after his death, and were extant in
the second century; but none are now preserved, except a few brief notes
to Cicero, of which copies were sent by him at the time to Atticus. The
fragments of his speeches are even less considerable; yet, according to
the unanimous testimony both of contemporary and of later critics, they
were unexcelled in that age of great oratory. He used the Latin language
with a purity and distinction that no one else could equal. And along
with this quality, the _mira elegantia_ of Quintilian, his oratory had
some kind of severe magnificence which we can partly guess at from his
extant writings--_magnifica et generosa_, says Cicero; _facultas dicendi
imperatoria_ is the phrase of a later and able critic.
Of Caesar's other lost writings little need be said. In youth, like most
of his contemporaries, he wrote poems, including a tragedy, of which
Tacitus drily observes that they were not better than those of Cicero. A
grammatical treatise, _De Analogia_, was composed by him during one of
his long journeys between Northern Italy and the headquarters of his army
in Gaul during his proconsulate. A work on astronomy, apparently written
in connection with his reform of the calendar, two pamphlets attacking
Cato, and a collection of apophthegms, have also disappeared. But we
possess what were by far the most important of his writings, his famous
memoirs of the Gallic and Civil Wars.