CHARACTER AS A POLITICIAN AND AN ORATOR.
Cicero shared very largely in the feeling which is common to all men of
ambition and energy,--a desire to stand well not only with their own
generation, but with posterity. It is a feeling natural to every man who
knows that his name and acts must necessarily become historical. If it
is more than usually patent in Cicero's case, it is only because in his
letters to Atticus we have more than usual access to the inmost heart of
the writer; for surely such a thoroughly confidential correspondence has
never been published before or since. "What will history say of me six
hundred years hence?" he asks, unbosoming himself in this sort to his
friend. More than thrice the six hundred years have passed, and, in
Cicero's case, history has hardly yet made up its mind. He has been
lauded and abused, from his own times down to the present, in terms as
extravagant as are to be found in the most passionate of his own orations;
both his accusers and his champions have caught the trick of his
rhetorical exaggeration more easily than his eloquence. Modern German
critics like Drumann and Mommsen have attacked him with hardly less
bitterness, though with more decency, than the historian Dio Cassius, who
lived so near his own times. Bishop Middleton, on the other hand, in those
pleasant and comprehensive volumes which are still to this day the great
storehouse of materials for Cicero's biography, is as blind to his faults
as though he were himself delivering a panegyric in the Rostra at Rome.
Perhaps it is the partiality of the learned bishop's view which has
produced a reaction in the minds of sceptical German scholars, and of some
modern writers of our own. It is impossible not to sympathise in some
degree with that Athenian who was tired of always hearing Aristides
extolled as "the Just;" and there was certainly a strong temptation to
critics to pick holes in a man's character who was perpetually, during
his lifetime and for eighteen centuries after his death, having a trumpet
sounded before him to announce him as the prince of patriots as well as
philosophers; worthy indeed, as Erasmus thought, to be canonised as a
saint of the Catholic Church, but for the single drawback of his not
having been a Christian.
On one point some of his eulogists seem manifestly unfair. They say
that the circumstances under which we form our judgment of the man are
exceptional in this--that we happen to possess in his case all this mass
of private and confidential letters (there are nearly eight hundred of his
own which have come down to us), giving us an insight into his private
motives, his secret jealousies, and hopes, and fears, and ambitions, of
which in the case of other men we have no such revelation. It is quite
true; but his advocates forget that it is from the very same pages which
reveal his weaknesses, that they draw their real knowledge of many of
those characteristics which they most admire--his sincere love for his
country, his kindness of heart, his amiability in all his domestic
relations. It is true that we cannot look into the private letters of
Caesar, or Pompey, or Brutus, as we can into Cicero's; but it is not
so certain that if we could, our estimate of their characters would be
lowered. We might discover, in their cases as in his, many traces of what
seems insincerity, timidity, a desire to sail with the stream; we might
find that the views which they expressed in public were not always those
which they entertained in private; but we might also find an inner current
of kindness, and benevolence, and tenderness of heart, for which the world
gives them little credit. One enthusiastic advocate, Wieland, goes so far
as to wish that this kind of evidence could, in the case of such a man as
Cicero, have been "cooked", to use a modern phrase: that we could have had
only a judicious selection from this too truthful mass, of correspondence;
that his secretary, Tiro, or some judicious friend, had destroyed the
whole packet of letters in which the great Roman bemoaned himself, during
his exile from Rome, to his wife, to his brother, and to Atticus. The
partisan method of writing history, though often practised, has seldom
been so boldly professed.
But it cannot be denied, that if we know too much of Cicero to judge him
merely by his public life, as we are obliged to do with so many heroes of
history, we also know far too little of those stormy times in which he
lived, to pronounce too strongly upon his behaviour in such difficult
circumstances. The true relations between the various parties at Rome, as
we have tried to sketch them, are confessedly puzzling even to the careful
student. And without a thorough understanding of these, it is impossible
to decide, with any hope of fairness, upon Cicero's conduct as a patriot
and a politician. His character was full of conflicting elements, like the
times in which he lived, and was necessarily in a great degree moulded
by them. The egotism which shows itself so plainly alike in his public
speeches and in his private writings, more than once made him personal
enemies, and brought him into trouble, though it was combined with great
kindness of heart and consideration for others. He saw the right clearly,
and desired to follow it, but his good intentions were too often
frustrated by a want of firmness and decision. His desire to keep well
with men of all parties, so long as it seemed possible (and this not so
much from the desire of self-aggrandisement, as from a hope through their
aid to serve the commonwealth) laid him open on more than one occasion to
the charge of insincerity.
There is one comprehensive quality which may be said to lave been wanting
in his nature, which clouded his many excellences, led him continually
into false positions, and even in his delightful letters excites in the
reader, from time to time, an impatient feeling of contempt. He wanted
manliness. It was a quality which was fast dying out, in his day, among
even the best of the luxurious and corrupt aristocracy of Rome. It was
perhaps but little missed in his character by those of his contemporaries
who knew and loved him best. But without that quality, to an English mind,
it is hard to recognise in any man, however brilliant and amiable, the
true philosopher or hero.
The views which this great Roman politician held upon the vexed question
of the ballot did not differ materially from those of his worthy
grandfather before-mentioned.[1] The ballot was popular at Rome,--for many
reasons, some of them not the most creditable to the characters of the
voters; and because it was popular, Cicero speaks of it occasionally, in
his forensic speeches, with a cautious praise; but of his real estimate
of it there can be no kind of doubt. "I am of the same opinion now", he
writes to his brother, "that ever I was; there is nothing like the open
suffrage of the lips". So in one of his speeches, he uses even stronger
language: "The ballot", he says, "enables men to open their faces, and to
cover up their thoughts; it gives them licence to promise whatever they
are asked, and at the same time to do whatever they please". Mr. Grote
once quoted a phrase of Cicero's, applied to the voting-papers of his day,
as a testimony in favour of this mode of secret suffrage--grand words,
and wholly untranslatable into anything like corresponding
English--"_Tabella vindex tacitae libertatis_"--"the tablet which
secures the liberty of silence". But knowing so well as Cicero did what
was the ordinary character of Roman jurors and Roman voters, and how often
this "liberty of silence" was a liberty to take a bribe and to vote the
other way, one can almost fancy that we see upon his lips, as he utters
the sounding phrase, that playful curve of irony which is said to have
been their characteristic expression.[2] Mr. Grote forgot, too, as was
well pointed out by a writer in the 'Quarterly Review',[3] that in the
very next sentence the orator is proud to boast that he himself was not so
elected to office, but "by the living voices" of his fellow-citizens.
[Footnote 1: See p. 3.]
[Footnote 2: No bust, coin, or gem is known which bears any genuine
likeness of Cicero. There are several existing which purport to be such,
but all are more or less apocryphal.]
[Footnote 3: Quart. Rev., lxi. 522.]
The character of his eloquence may be understood in some degree by the
few extracts which have been given from his public speeches; always
remembering how many of its charms are necessarily lost by losing the
actual language in which his thoughts were clothed. We have lost perhaps
nearly as much in another way, in that we can only read the great orator
instead of listening to him. Yet it is possible, after all, that this loss
to us is not so great as it might seem. Some of his best speeches, as we
know--those, for instance, against Verres and in defence of Milo--were
written in the closet, and never spoken at all; and most of the others
were reshaped and polished for publication. Nor is it certain that his
declamation, which some of his Roman rivals found fault with as savouring
too much of the florid Oriental type, would have been agreeable to our
colder English taste. He looked upon gesture and action as essential
elements of the orator's power, and had studied them carefully from the
artists of the theatre. There can be no doubt that we have his own
views on this point in the words which he has put into the mouth of his
"Brutus", in the treatise on oratory which bears that name. He protests
against the "Attic coldness" of style which, he says, would soon empty the
benches of their occupants. He would have the action and bearing of the
speaker to be such that even the distant spectator, too far off to hear,
should "know that there was a Roscius on the stage". He would have found a
French audience in this respect more sympathetic than an English one.[1]
His own highly nervous temperament would certainly tend to excited action.
The speaker, who, as we are told, "shuddered visibly over his whole body
when he first began to speak", was almost sure, as he warmed to his work,
to throw himself into it with a passionate energy.
[Footnote 1: Our speakers certainly fall into the other extreme. The
British orator's style of gesticulation may still be recognised,
_mutatis mutandis_, in Addison's humorous sketch of a century ago:
"You may see many a smart rhetorician turning his hat in his hands,
moulding it into several different cocks, examining sometimes the lining
and sometimes the button, during the whole course of his harangue. A
deaf man would think that he was cheapening a beaver, when he is talking
perhaps of the fate of the British nation".]
He has put on record his own ideas of the qualifications and the duties
of the public speaker, whether in the Senate or at the bar, in three
continuous treatises on the subject, entitled respectively, 'On Oratory',
'Brutus', and 'The Orator', as well as in some other works of which we
have only fragments remaining. With the first of these works, which he
inscribed to his brother, he was himself exceedingly well satisfied, and
it perhaps remains still the ablest, as it was the first, attempt to
reduce eloquence to a science. The second is a critical sketch of the
great orators of Rome: and in the third we have Cicero's view of what the
perfect orator should be. His ideal is a high one, and a true one; that
he should not be the mere rhetorician, any more than the mere technical
lawyer or keen partisan, but the man of perfect education and perfect
taste, who can speak on all subjects, out of the fulness of his mind,
"with variety and copiousness".
Although, as has been already said, he appears to have attached but little
value to a knowledge of the technicalities of law, in other respects his
preparation for his work was of the most careful kind; if we may assume,
as we probably may, that it is his own experience which, in his treatise
on Oratory, he puts into the mouth of Marcus Antonius, one of his greatest
predecessors at the Roman bar.
"It is my habit to have every client explain to me personally his own
case; to allow no one else to be present, that so he may speak more
freely. Then I take the opponent's side, while I make him plead his own
cause, and bring forward whatever arguments he can think of. Then, when
he is gone, I take upon myself, with as much impartiality as I can,
three different characters--my own, my opponent's, and that of the jury.
Whatever point seems likely to help the case rather than injure it, this I
decide must be brought forward; when I see that anything is likely to do
more harm than good, I reject and throw it aside altogether. So I gain
this,--that I think over first what I mean to say, and speak afterwards;
while a good many pleaders, relying on their abilities, try to do both at
once".[1]
[Footnote 1: De Oratore, II. 24, 72.]
He reads a useful lesson to young and zealous advocates in the same
treatise--that sometimes it may be wise not to touch at all in reply upon
a point which makes against your client, and to which you have no real
answer; and that it is even more important to say nothing which may injure
your case, than to omit something which might possibly serve it. A maxim
which some modern barristers (and some preachers also) might do well to
bear in mind.
Yet he did not scorn to use what may almost be called the tricks of his
art, if he thought they would help to secure him a verdict. The outward
and visible appeal to the feelings seems to have been as effective in the
Roman forum as with a British jury. Cicero would have his client stand by
his side dressed in mourning, with hair dishevelled, and in tears, when
he meant to make a pathetic appeal to the compassion of the jurors; or a
family group would be arranged, as circumstances allowed,--the wife and
children, the mother and sisters, or the aged father, if presentable,
would be introduced in open court to create a sensation at the right
moment. He had tears apparently as ready at his command as an eloquent
and well-known English Attorney-General. Nay, the tears seem to have been
marked down, as it were, upon his brief. "My feelings prevent my saying
more", he declares in his defence of Publius Sylla. "I weep while I make
the appeal"--"I cannot go on for tears"--he repeats towards the close of
that fine oration in behalf of Milo--the speech that never was spoken.
Such phrases remind us of the story told of a French preacher, whose
manuscripts were found to have marginal stage directions: "Here take out
your handkerchief;"--"here cry--if possible". But such were held to be the
legitimate adjuncts of Roman oratory, and it is quite possible to conceive
that the advocate, like more than one modern tragedian who could be named,
entered so thoroughly into the spirit of the part that the tears flowed
quite naturally.
A far less legitimate weapon of oratory--offensive and not defensive--was
the bitter and coarse personality in which he so frequently indulged. Its
use was held perfectly lawful in the Roman forum, whether in political
debate or in judicial pleadings, and it was sure to be highly relished by
a mixed audience. There is no reason to suppose that Cicero had
recourse to it in any unusual degree; but employ it he did, and most
unscrupulously. It was not only private character that he attacked, as in
the case of Antony and Clodius, but even personal defects or peculiarities
were made the subject of bitter ridicule. He did not hesitate to season
his harangue by a sarcasm on the cast in the prosecutor's eye, or the wen
on the defendant's neck, and to direct the attention of the court to these
points, as though they were corroborative evidence of a moral deformity.
The most conspicuous instance of this practice of his is in the invective
which he launched in the Senate against Piso, who had made a speech
reflecting upon him. Referring to Cicero's exile, he had made that sore
subject doubly sore by declaring that it was not Cicero's unpopularity, so
much as his unfortunate propensity to bad verse, which had been the cause
of it. A jingling line of his to the effect that
"The gown wins grander triumphs than the sword"[1]
had been thought to be pointed against the recent victories of Pompey, and
to have provoked him to use his influence to get rid of the author. But
this annotation of Cicero's poetry had not been Piso's only offence. He
had been consul at the time of the exile, and had given vent, it may be
remembered, to the witticism that the "saviour of Rome" might save the
city a second time by his absence. Cicero was not the man to forget it.
The beginning of his attack on Piso is lost, but there is quite enough
remaining. Piso was of a swarthy complexion, approaching probably to the
negro type. "Beast"--is the term by which Cicero addresses him. "Beast!
there is no mistaking the evidence of that slave-like hue, those bristly
cheeks, those discoloured fangs. Your eyes, your brows, your face, your
whole aspect, are the tacit index to your soul".[2]
[Footnote 1: "Cedant arma togae, concedat laurea linguae".]
[Footnote 2: Such flowers of eloquence are not encouraged at the modern
bar. But they were common enough, even in the English law-courts, in
former times. Mr. Attorney-General Coke's language to Raleigh at his
trial--"Thou viper!"--comes quite up to Cicero's. Perhaps the Irish House
of Parliament, while it existed, furnished the choicest modern specimens
of this style of oratory. Mr. O'Flanagan, in his 'Lives of the Lord
Chancellors of Ireland', tells us that a member for Galway, attacking
an opponent when he knew that his sister was present during the debate,
denounced the whole family--"from the toothless old hag that is now
grinning in the gallery, to the white-livered scoundrel that is shivering
on the floor".]
It is not possible, within the compass of these pages, to give even
the briefest account of more than a few of the many causes (they are
twenty-four in number) in which the speeches made by Cicero, either for
the prosecution or the defence, have been preserved to us. Some of them
have more attraction for the English reader than others, either from the
facts of the case being more interesting or more easily understood, or
from their affording more opportunity for the display of the speaker's
powers.
Mr. Fox had an intense admiration for the speech in defence of Caelius.
The opinion of one who was no mean orator himself, on his great Roman
predecessor, may be worth quoting:
"Argumentative contention is not what he excels in; and he is never, I
think, so happy as when he has an opportunity of exhibiting a mixture of
philosophy and pleasantry, and especially when he can interpose anecdotes
and references to the authority of the eminent characters in the history
of his own country. No man appears, indeed, to have had such a real
respect for authority as he; and therefore when he speaks on that subject
he is always natural and earnest".[1]
[Footnote 1: Letter to G. Wakefield--Correspondence, p. 35.]
There is anecdote and pleasantry enough in this particular oration; but
the scandals of Roman society of that day, into which the defence of
Caelius was obliged to enter, are not the most edifying subject for any
readers. Caelius was a young man of "equestrian" rank, who had been a kind
of ward of Cicero's, and must have given him a good deal of trouble by his
profligate habits, if the guardianship was anything more than nominal. But
in this particular case the accusation brought against him--of trying to
murder an ambassador from Egypt by means of hired assassins, and then
to poison the lady who had lent him the money to bribe them with--was
probably untrue. Clodia, the lady in question, was the worthy sister of
the notorious Clodius, and bore as evil a reputation as it was possible
for a woman to bear in the corrupt society of Rome--which is saying a
great deal. She is the real mover in the case, though another enemy
of Caelius, the son of a man whom he had himself brought to trial for
bribery, was the ostensible prosecutor. Cicero, therefore, throughout the
whole of his speech, aims the bitter shafts of his wit and eloquence
at Clodia. His brilliant invectives against this lady, who was, as he
pointedly said, "not only noble but notorious", are not desirable to
quote. But the opening of the speech is in the advocate's best style. The
trial, it seems, took place on a public holiday, when it was not usual to
take any cause unless it were of pressing importance.
"If any spectator be here present, gentlemen, who knows nothing of our
laws, our courts of justice, or our national customs, he will not fail to
wonder what can be the atrocious nature of this case, that on a day of
national festival and public holiday like this, when all other business in
the Forum is suspended, this single trial should be going on; and he will
entertain no doubt but that the accused is charged with a crime of
such enormity, that if it were not at once taken cognisance of, the
constitution itself would be in peril. And if he heard that there was a
law which enjoined that in the case of seditious and disloyal citizens who
should take up arms to attack the Senate-house, or use violence against
the magistrates, or levy war against the commonwealth, inquisition into
the matter should be made at once, on the very day;--he would not find
fault with such a law: he would only ask the nature of the charge. But
when he heard that it was no such atrocious crime, no treasonable attempt,
no violent outrage, which formed the subject of this trial, but that a
young man of brilliant abilities, hard-working in public life, and of
popular character, was here accused by the son of a man whom he had
himself once prosecuted, and was still prosecuting, and that all a bad
woman's wealth and influence was being used against him,--he might take no
exception to the filial zeal of Atratinus; but he would surely say that
woman's infamous revenge should be baffled and punished.... I can excuse
Atratinus; as to the other parties, they deserve neither excuse nor
forbearance".
It was a strange story, the case for the prosecution, especially as
regarded the alleged attempt to poison Clodia. The poison was given to a
friend of Caelius, he was to give it to some slaves of Clodia whom he was
to meet at certain baths frequented by her, and they were in some way to
administer it. But the slaves betrayed the secret; and the lady employed
certain gay and profligate young men, who were hangers-on of her own,
to conceal themselves somewhere in the baths, and pounce upon Caelius's
emissary with the poison in his possession. But this scheme was said
to have failed. Clodia's detectives had rushed from their place of
concealment too soon, and the bearer of the poison escaped. The counsel
for the prisoner makes a great point of this.
"Why, 'tis the catastrophe of a stage-play--nay, of a burlesque; when no
more artistic solution of the plot can be invented, the hero escapes, the
bell rings, and--the curtain falls! For I ask why, when Licinius was there
trembling, hesitating, retreating, trying to escape--why that lady's
body-guard let him go out of their hands? Were they afraid lest, so
many against one, such stout champions against a single helpless man,
frightened as he was and fierce as they were, they could not master him? I
should like exceedingly to see them, those curled and scented youths, the
bosom-friends of this rich and noble lady; those stout men-at-arms who
were posted by their she-captain in this ambuscade in the baths. And I
should like to ask them how they hid themselves, and where? A bath?--why,
it must rather have been a Trojan horse, which bore within its womb this
band of invincible heroes who went to war for a woman! I would make them
answer this question,--why they, being so many and so brave, did not
either seize this slight stripling, whom you see before you, where he
stood, or overtake him when he fled? They will hardly be able to explain
themselves, I fancy, if they get into that witness-box, however clever and
witty they may be at the banquet,--nay, even eloquent occasionally, no
doubt, over their wine. But the air of a court of justice is somewhat
different from that of the banquet-hall; the benches of this court are
not like the couches of a supper-table; the array of this jury presents a
different spectacle from a company of revellers; nay, the broad glare of
sunshine is harder to face than the glitter of the lamps. If they venture
into it, I shall have to strip them of their pretty conceits and fools'
gear. But, if they will be ruled by me, they will betake themselves to
another trade, win favour in another quarter, flaunt themselves elsewhere
than in this court. Let them carry their brave looks to their lady there;
let them lord it at her expense, cling to her, lie at her feet, be her
slaves; only let them make no attempt upon the life and honour of an
innocent man".
The satellites of Clodia could scarcely have felt comfortable under this
withering fire of sarcasm. The speaker concluded with an apology--much
required--for his client's faults, as those of a young man, and a promise
on his behalf--on the faith of an advocate--that he would behave better
for the future. He wound up the whole with a point of sensational rhetoric
which was common, as has been said, to the Roman bar as to our own--an
appeal to the jurymen as fathers. He pointed to the aged father of the
defendant, leaning in the most approved attitude upon the shoulder of
his son. Either this, or the want of evidence, or the eloquence of the
pleader, had its due effect. Caelius was triumphantly acquitted; and it
is a proof that the young man was not wholly graceless, that he rose
afterwards to high public office, and never forgot his obligations to his
eloquent counsel, to whom he continued a stanch friend. He must have had
good abilities, for he was honoured with frequent letters from Cicero when
the latter was governor of Cilicia. He kept up some of his extravagant
tastes; for when he was Aedile (which involved the taking upon him the
expense of certain gladiatorial and wild-beast exhibitions), he wrote to
beg his friend to send him out of his province some panthers for his
show. Cicero complied with the request, and took the opportunity, so
characteristic of him, of lauding his own administration of Cilicia, and
making a kind of pun at the same time. "I have given orders to the hunters
to see about the panthers; but panthers are very scarce, and the few there
are complain, people say, that in the whole province there are no traps
laid for anybody but for them". Catching and skinning the unfortunate
provincials, which had been a favourite sport with governors like Verres,
had been quite done away with in Cilicia, we are to understand, under
Cicero's rule.
His defence of Ligarius, who was impeached of treason against the state
in the person of Caesar, as having borne arms against him in his African
campaign, has also been deservedly admired. There was some courage in
Cicero's undertaking his defence; as a known partisan of Pompey, he was
treading on dangerous and delicate ground. Caesar was dictator at the
time; and the case seems to have been tried before him as the sole
judicial authority, without pretence of the intervention of anything like
a jury. The defence--if defence it may be called--is a remarkable instance
of the common appeal, not to the merits of the case, but to the feelings
of the court. After making out what case he could for his client, the
advocate as it were throws up his brief, and rests upon the clemency of
the judge. Caesar himself, it must be remembered, had begun public life,
like Cicero, as a pleader: and, in the opinion of some competent judges,
such as Tacitus and Quintilian, had bid fair to be a close rival.
"I have pleaded many causes, Caesar--some, indeed, in association with
yourself, while your public career spared you to the courts; but surely I
never yet used language of this sort,--'Pardon him, sirs, he has offended:
he has made a false step: he did not think to do it; he never will again'.
This is language we use to a father. To the court it must be,--'He did
not do it: he never contemplated it: the evidence is false; the charge is
fabricated'. If you tell me you sit but as the judge of the fact in this
case, Caesar,--if you ask me where and when he served against you,--I am
silent; I will not now dwell on the extenuating circumstances, which even
before a judicial tribunal might have their weight. We take this course
before a judge, but I am here pleading to a father. 'I have erred--I have
done wrong, I am sorry: I take refuge in your clemency; I ask forgiveness
for my fault; I pray you, pardon me'.... There is nothing so popular,
believe me, sir, as kindness; of all your many virtues none wins men's
admiration and their love like mercy. In nothing do men reach so near the
gods, as when they can give life and safety to mankind. Fortune has given
you nothing more glorious than the power, your own nature can supply
nothing more noble than the will, to spare and pardon wherever you can.
The case perhaps demands a longer advocacy--your gracious disposition
feels it too long already. So I make an end, preferring for my cause that
you should argue with your own heart, than that I or any other should
argue with you. I will urge nothing more than this,--the grace which you
shall extend to my client in his absence, will be felt as a boon by all
here present".
The great conqueror was, it is said, visibly affected by the appeal, and
Ligarius was pardoned.