Chapter XIV: Introduction: Cicero’s Letters (11)

A sufficiently correct idea is generally formed of Cato by us, and those who attack him as well as those who admire him are very nearly agreed upon the principal features of his character. He was not one of those elusive and many-sided natures like Cicero, that it is so difficult to seize. On the contrary, no one was ever more outspoken, more uniform, than he, and there is no figure in history whose good and bad qualities are so clearly marked. The only danger for those who study him is to be tempted to exaggerate still more this bold relief. With a little intention it is easy to make an obstinate block of this obstinate man, a boor and brute of this frank and sincere man; that is to say, to draw the caricature and not the portrait of Cato. To avoid falling into this extreme, it will be proper, before speaking of him, to read again a short letter that he addressed to Cicero when proconsul of Cilicia.[296] This note is all that remains to us of Cato, and I should be surprised if it did not very much astonish those who have a preconceived notion of him. There is neither rudeness nor brutality in it, but on the contrary much refinement and wit. The occasion of the letter was a very difficult one: it was a question of refusing Cicero a favour that he very much wished to obtain. He had had in his old age the aspiration to become a conqueror, and he asked the senate to vote a thanksgiving to the gods for the success of the campaign he had just made. The senate in general showed deference to this caprice, Cato almost alone resisted; but he did not wish to fall out with Cicero, and the letter he wrote to justify his refusal is a masterpiece of dexterity. He shows him that in opposing his demand, he understands the interests of his glory, better than he does himself. If he will not thank the gods for the successes Cicero has obtained, it is because he thinks that Cicero owes them to himself alone. Is it not better to give him all the honour than to attribute it to chance, or the protection of heaven? This is certainly a very amiable way of refusing, and one that did not leave Cicero an excuse for getting angry, discontented though he was. Cato, then, was a man of wit at odd moments, although at first sight we might have some difficulty in supposing so. His character had become supple by the study of Greek literature; he lived in the midst of an elegant society, and he had unconsciously taken something from it. This is what that witty letter makes us suspect, and we must remember it, and take care to read it again every time we are tempted to fancy him an ill-bred rustic.

We must, however, admit that usually he was stiff and stubborn, hard to himself, and severe on others. That was the turn of his humour; he added to it by his self-will. Nature is not alone to blame for those self-willed and absolute characters that we meet with; a certain pursuit of quaint originality and a little self-complacency, very often make us aid nature and bring it out more vigorously. Cato was led into this defect by the very name he bore. The example of his illustrious grandfather was always before his eyes, and his single study was to resemble him, without taking into account the difference of times and men. In imitating we exaggerate. There is always a little effort and excess in the virtues we try to reproduce. We take only the most salient points of the model, and neglect the others which tone them down. This happened with Cato, and Cicero justly blames him for imitating only the rough and hard sides of his grandfather. “If you let the austerity of your behaviour take a few tints of his gay and easy manners, your good qualities would be more pleasing.”[297] It is certain that there was in the old Cato a dash of piquant animation, of rustic gaiety, of bantering good-nature, that his grandson did not have. He only shared with him his roughness and obstinacy, which he pushed to extremes.

Of all excesses the most dangerous perhaps is the excess of good; it is at least that of which it is most difficult to correct oneself, for the culprit applauds himself, and no one dares to blame him. Cato’s great defect was that he never knew moderation. By dint of wishing to be firm in his opinion, he became deaf to the advice of his friends and the lessons of experience. The practical conduct of life, that imperious mistress, to speak like Bossuet, had no hold upon him. His energy often went to the length of obstinacy, and his sense of honour was sometimes in fault by being too scrupulous. This extreme delicacy prevented him succeeding when he canvassed for public offices. The people were very exacting towards those who asked for their votes. During the rest of the year they allowed themselves to be driven and ill-used, but on election day they knew they were masters and took pleasure in showing it. They could only be gained by flattering all their caprices. Cicero often laughed at those unfortunate and deferential candidates (_natio officiosissima candidatorum_), who go in the morning knocking at every door, who pass their time in paying visits and compliments, who make it a duty to accompany the generals when they enter or leave Rome, who form the retinue of all the influential orators, and who are forced to have infinite consideration and respect for everybody. Among the common people, upon whom after all the election depended, the more honest wished to be flattered, the rest required to be bought. Cato was not the man to do either the one or the other. He would neither flatter nor lie; still less would he consent to pay. When he was pressed to offer those repasts and those presents that for so long candidates had not dared to refuse, he answered bluntly: “Are you bargaining for pleasures with debauched young men, or asking the government of the world of the Roman people?” And he did not cease repeating this maxim, “that it is only a man’s merits which must solicit.”[298] A hard saying! said Cicero, and one they were not accustomed to hear at a time when all offices were for sale. It displeased the people, who profited by this venality, and Cato, who persisted in only soliciting on his merits, was almost always vanquished by those who solicited with their money.

Characters of this sort, honest and outspoken, are met with, in different degrees, in private as well as in public life, and for this reason they belong to the domain of comedy as well as to that of history. If I were not afraid of failing in respect towards the gravity of the personage I am studying, I should say that this haughty response that I have just quoted, makes me think involuntarily of one of the finest creations of our theatre. It is a Cato that Molière wished to paint in the _Misanthrope_. We are here only concerned with the fortune of a private individual, and not with the government of the world, we have only to do with a lawsuit; but in his position, the Cato of the Comedy speaks just like the other. He will not submit to customs that he does not approve of. Even at the risk of losing his case he will not visit the judges, and when people say to him: “And who do you then intend to solicit for you?” he answers as haughtily as Cato: “Who do I intend? Reason, my just cause, and equity.” Whatever we may feel, these personages always inspire a great respect. We have not the heart to blame them, but, nevertheless, we must have the courage to do so. Honesty, honour, liberty, all noble causes in fine, cannot well be defended with this exaggerated and strait-laced rigour. They have disadvantages enough by themselves in their struggle with corruption and licence, without making them more unpleasing still by a useless stiffness and severity. To multiply scruples is to disarm virtue. It is quite enough that she is forced to be grave; why wish to make her repulsive? Without sacrificing anything of principle, there are points on which she ought to give way to men in order to rule them. What proves that those men, who boast of never giving way, are wrong is that they are not as inflexible as they suppose, and that, in spite of their resistance, they always end by making some concessions. That austere, that stern Alceste, is a member of society after all, and of the best. He lives at court, and we can see very well what he is. I do not say only by his manners and appearance, although I imagine _the man with the green ribbons_ dressed with taste and elegance, but by those turns of phrase he employs, by those polite evasions which are also lies, and which he will not endure in Philinte. Before breaking out against the nobleman of the sonnet he uses adroit formulas where we only catch a glimpse of the truth:

“Do you find anything amiss in my sonnet?”

“I do not say that.”

What is this “_I do not say that_,” which he repeats so often, but a blameworthy compliance and weakness, if we judge it with the rigour of the misanthrope? Rousseau severely reproaches Alceste for it, and I do not think that Alceste, if he remains faithful to his principles, can find any reply to Rousseau; it would not be difficult either to point out contradictions of the same kind in Cato. This stern enemy of intrigue, who at first will do nothing for the success of his candidature, ends by canvassing: he went to the Campus Martius like everybody else, to shake hands with the citizens and ask for their votes. “What!” says Cicero to him ironically, whom these inconsistencies put into good humour, “is it your business to come and ask for my vote? Is it not rather I who ought to thank a man of your merit who wishes to brave fatigue and dangers for me?”[299] This stern enemy of lying did more: he had one of those slaves called _nomenclatores_ who knew the name and profession of every citizen of Rome, and he used him like the rest, to make the poor electors believe that he knew them. “Is not this cheating and deceiving the public?” said Cicero, and he was not wrong. The saddest thing is that these concessions, that compromise the dignity and unity of a character, are of no use: they are generally made with a bad grace, and too late; they do not efface the remembrance of past rudeness, and gain nobody. Notwithstanding his tardy solicitations and the aid of his _nomenclator_, Cato did not attain the consulship, and Cicero severely blames the awkwardness that made him fail. No doubt he could do without being consul; but the republic had need that he should be consul, and in the eyes of many good citizens, to favour by refinements of scrupulosity and exaggerations of honour the triumph of the worst men was almost to abandon and betray it.

It is easy to understand these excesses and exaggerations in a man who intends _to fly the approach of humankind_, like Alceste; but they are unpardonable in one who wishes to live with men, and still more so in one who aspires to govern them. The government of men is a nice and difficult matter which requires a man not to begin by repelling those whom he is desirous of leading. Certainly he ought to intend to make them better, but it is necessary to begin by taking them as they are. The first law of politics is to aim only at the possible. Cato often overlooked this law. He could not condescend to those attentions without which one cannot govern the people; he had not sufficient flexibility of character nor that turn for honourable intrigue which make a man succeed in the things he undertakes; he wanted some of that pliancy that brings opposing pretensions together, calms jealous rivalries, and groups people divided by humours, opinions and interests around one man. He could only be a striking protest against the manners of his time; he was not the head of a party. Let us venture to say, notwithstanding the respect we feel for him, that his spirit was obstinate because his mind was narrow. He did not at first distinguish the points on which a man should give way and those that ought to be defended to the last. A disciple of the Stoics, who said that all faults are equal, that is, according to Cicero’s joke, that it is as wrong to kill a fowl needlessly as to strangle one’s father, he had applied this hard and strange theory to politics. His mind being restricted to the merest legality, he defended the smallest things with tiresome obstinacy. His admiration of the past knew no discrimination. He imitated the ancient costumes as he followed the old maxims, and he affected not to wear a tunic under his toga because Camillus did not wear one. His want of breadth of mind, his narrow and obstinate zeal were more than once hurtful to the republic. Plutarch reproaches him with having thrown Pompey into Caesar’s arms by refusing some unimportant gratifications of his vanity. Cicero blames him for having dissatisfied the knights whom he had had so much trouble to conciliate with the senate. No doubt the knights made unreasonable demands, but he should have conceded everything rather than let them give Caesar the support of their immense wealth. It was on this occasion that Cicero said of him: “He thinks he is in the republic of Plato and not in the mud of Romulus,”[300] and this saying is still that which best characterizes that clumsy policy that, by asking too much of men, ends by getting nothing.

Cato’s natural character was that of opposition. He did not understand how to discipline and lead a party, but he was admirable when it was a question of making head against an adversary. To conquer him, he employed a tactic in which he often succeeded: when he saw that a decision that seemed to him fatal, was about to be taken, and that it was necessary at any price to prevent the people voting, he began to speak and did not leave off. Plutarch says that he could speak for a whole day without fatigue. Nothing deterred him, neither murmurs, cries, nor threats. Sometimes a lictor would pull him down from the rostrum, but as soon as he was free he went up again. One day the tribune Trebonius got so much out of patience with this resistance that he had him led off to prison: Cato, without being disconcerted, continued his speech while going along, and the crowd followed him to listen. It is to be remarked that he was never really unpopular: the common people, who love courage, were at last mastered by this steady coolness and this unconquerable energy. It sometimes happened that they declared themselves in his favour, contrary to their interests and preferences, and Caesar, all-powerful with the populace, dreaded nevertheless the freaks of Cato.

It is none the less true, as I have already said, that Cato could not be the head of a party, and what is more deplorable is, that the party for which he fought had no head. It was an assemblage of men of capacity and of dignified personages, none of whom had the necessary qualities to take the lead of the rest. Not to mention Pompey, who was only a doubtful and distrusted ally, among the others, Scipio repelled every one by his haughtiness and cruelty; Appius Claudius was only a credulous augur who believed in the sacred chickens; Marcellus was wanting in pliability and urbanity, and was himself aware that scarcely anybody liked him; Servius Sulpicius had all the weaknesses of a punctilious lawyer; and lastly, Cicero and Cato erred in opposite directions, and it would have been necessary to unite them both, or modify them one by the other in order to have a complete politician. There were, therefore, only brilliant personalities and no head in the republican party before Pharsalia, and we may even say that, as this jealous selfishness and these rival vanities were ill blended, there was scarcely a party.

The civil war, which was a stumbling-block for so many others, which laid bare so many littlenesses and so much cowardice, revealed, on the other hand, all the goodness and all the greatness of Cato. A sort of crisis then took place in his character. As in certain maladies the approach of the last moments gives more elevation and lucidity to the mind, so, it seems, that at the threat of that great catastrophe which was about to engulf the free institutions of Rome, Cato’s honest soul was yet further purified, and that his intelligence took a juster view of the situation from the feeling of the public dangers. While fear makes others go to extremes, he restrains the usual violence of his conduct, and, while thinking of the dangers the republic is running, he becomes all at once discreet and moderate. He who was always ready to attempt useless resistance, advises giving way to Caesar; he wishes them to grant all his demands; he resigns himself to all concessions in order to avoid civil war. When it breaks out he submits to it with sorrow, and tries by all means to diminish its horrors. Every time he is consulted he is on the side of moderation and mildness. In the midst of those young men, the heroes of the polished society of Rome, among those lettered and elegant wits, it is the rugged Cato who defends the cause of humanity. He compelled the decision, in spite of the outbursts of the fiery Pompeians, that no town shall be sacked, no citizen be killed off the field of battle. It seems that the approach of the calamities he foresaw, softened that energetic heart. On the evening of the battle of Dyrrhachium, while every one was rejoicing in Pompey’s camp, Cato alone, seeing the corpses of so many Romans lying on the ground, wept: noble tears, worthy of being compared with those that Scipio shed over the ruins of Carthage, the memory of which antiquity so often recalled! In the camp at Pharsalia, he severely blamed those who spoke only of massacre and proscription and divided among themselves in advance the houses and lands of the conquered. It is true that after the defeat, when the greater number of those wild schemers were at Caesar’s knees, Cato went everywhere to stir him up enemies and to revive the civil wars in all the ends of the earth. Just as he had wished them to yield before the battle, so was he determined not to submit when there was no more hope of freedom. We know his heroic resistance in Africa, not only against Caesar, but against the furious men of the republican party, who were always ready to commit some excess. We know how he would not accept the pardon of the victor after Thapsus, when he saw that all was lost, and killed himself at Utica.

His death made an immense impression in all the Roman world. It put to the blush those who were beginning to accustom themselves to slavery; it gave a sort of new impulse to the discouraged republicans, and revived opposition. During his life-time, Cato had not always rendered good service to his party; he was very useful to it after his death. The proscribed cause had henceforth its ideal and its martyr. Its remaining partisans united and sheltered themselves under that great name. At Rome especially, in that great, unquiet, restless city, where so many men bowed the head without submitting, his glorification became the ordinary theme of the discontented. “The battle raged round the body of Cato,” says M. Mommsen, “as at Troy it had raged around that of Patroclus.” Fabius Gallus, Brutus, Cicero, and many others no doubt whom we do not know, wrote his eulogy. Cicero began his at the request of Brutus. At first he was repelled by the difficulty of the subject: “This is a work for Archimedes,” said he;[301] but as he advanced, he took a liking to his work and finished it with a sort of enthusiasm. This book has not come down to us: we only know that Cicero made a complete and unreserved apology for Cato. “he raises him to the skies,”[302] says Tacitus. They had, however, disagreed more than once, and he speaks of him without much consideration in many passages of his correspondence; but, as often happens, death reconciled everything. Besides, Cicero, who reproached himself with not having done enough for his party, was happy to find an opportunity of paying his debt. His book, that the name of the author and that of the hero recommended at once, had so great a success that Caesar was uneasy and discontented about it. He took care, however, not to show his ill-humour; on the contrary, he hastened to write a flattering letter to Cicero to congratulate him on the talent he had displayed in his work. “In reading it,” he told him, “I feel that I become more eloquent.”[303] Instead of employing any rigorous measure, as was to be feared, he thought that the pen alone, according to the expression of Tacitus, ought to avenge the attacks that the pen had made. By his order, his lieutenant and friend Hirtius addressed a long letter to Cicero, which was published, and in which he controverted his book. Later, as this answer was not thought sufficient, Caesar himself entered the lists, and, in the midst of the anxieties of the war in Spain, he composed the _Anti-Cato_.

This moderation of Caesar has been justly praised: it is not common with men who possess unlimited authority, and the Romans justly said, that it is seldom a man is contented to write when he can proscribe. The fact that he detested Cato adds to the merit of his generous conduct. He always speaks of him with bitterness in his _Commentaries_, and although he was accustomed to do justice to his enemies, he never misses an opportunity of decrying him. Has he not dared to assert that in taking up arms against him, Cato gave way to personal rancour and to the desire of revenging his electoral defeats,[304] when he well knew that no one had more generously forgotten himself in order to think only of his country! This was because there was more than political disagreement between them, there was antipathy of character. The defects of Cato must have been particularly disagreeable to Caesar, and his virtues were those that Caesar not only did not seek to acquire, but which he could not even understand. How could he have any feeling for his strict respect for law, for his almost servile attachment to old customs? he who found a lively pleasure in laughing at ancient usages. How could a prodigal, who had formed the habit of squandering the money of the state and his own without reckoning, how could he do justice to those rigorous scruples that Cato had in the handling of the public funds, to the attention he gave to his private affairs, and to that ambition, so strange for that time, of not having more debts than assets? These were, I repeat, qualities that Caesar could not comprehend. He was, then, sincere and convinced when he attacked them. A man of wit and pleasure, indifferent to principles, sceptical in opinion, accustomed to live in a frivolous and polished society, Cato could scarcely appear to him anything else than fanatical and brutal. As there was nothing that he put above refinement and politeness of manners, an elegant vice suited him better than a savage virtue. Cato, on the contrary, although he was not a stranger to literary culture and the spirit of society, had none the less remained at bottom an old-fashioned Roman. Notwithstanding their power, society and letters could not entirely overcome that bluntness, or if you will, that brutality of manner that he owed to his constitution and his race, and of which we find something even in his finest actions. To cite only one example; Plutarch, in the admirable narrative that he has given of his last moments, relates that, when a slave refused, through affection for Cato, to give him his sword, he knocked him down with a furious blow by which his hand was covered with blood. To the eyes of a fastidious man like Caesar, this blow revealed a vulgar nature, and I am afraid prevented him understanding the grandeur of this death. The same contrast, or rather the same antipathy, is found in all their private conduct. While Caesar’s maxim was to pardon everything in his friends, and he therefore pushed complacency so far as to shut his eyes to their treasons, Cato was too exacting and particular with regard to his. At Cyprus he did not hesitate to fall out with Munatius, his life-long companion, by showing an offensive distrust of him. He was, no doubt, in his household, a model of honour and fidelity; yet he did not always maintain that respect and regard for his wife that she deserved. We know how he gave her up without ceremony to Hortensius, who had asked him for her, to take her again without scruple after Hortensius’ death. How different was Caesar’s conduct with regard to his, although he had reason to complain of her! A man had been surprised at night in his house, the affair came before the courts, he might have avenged the outrage, but he preferred rather to forget it. Called as a witness before the judges, he declared he knew nothing about it, thus saving his rival in order to preserve his wife’s reputation. He only divorced her later, when the report of the intrigue had blown over. This was acting like a well-bred man of the world. Here again, between Cato and him, it is the least scrupulous and in the main the least honourable of the two, the fickle and libertine husband, who, by reason of a certain natural delicacy, appears in a more advantageous light.

This contrast in conduct, this opposition of character, seem to me to explain the way in which Caesar writes of Cato in his book, even better than all their political disagreements. The fragments of it that survive and the testimony of Plutarch, show that he attacked him with extreme violence, and that he tried to make him at once ridiculous and odious. But it was useless, it was lost labour. People continued, notwithstanding his efforts, to read and admire Cicero’s book. Not only did Cato’s reputation survive Caesar’s insults, it increased still more under the empire. In Nero’s time, when despotism was heaviest, Thrasea wrote his history again, Seneca quotes him on every page of his books, and to the end he was the pride and model of honest men who preserved some feeling of honour and dignity in the general abasement of character. They studied his death even more than his life, for they needed then, above all, to learn how to die, and when this sad necessity presented itself, it was his example they set before their eyes, and his name that was in their mouths. To have sustained and consoled so many noble hearts in these cruel trials is assuredly a great glory, and I think that Cato would not have desired any other.

III.

The conclusion to be drawn from Caesar’s conduct after Pharsalia, and from his relations with Cicero, is, that he wished at that time to draw nearer to the republican party. It was difficult for him to act otherwise. As long as it was a question of overturning the republic, he had accepted the support of everybody, and the worst men had come to him by preference. “When a man was eaten up with debts and in want of everything,” said Cicero, “and if, besides, he was shown to be a scoundrel capable of daring anything, Caesar made him his friend;”[305] but all these unprincipled and unscrupulous men, excellent for upsetting an established power, were worth nothing in setting up a new one. It was impossible that Caesar’s government should inspire any confidence as long as some honourable persons, whom men were accustomed to respect, were not seen with the master and alongside these adventurers, whom they had learnt to fear. Now, honourable men were chiefly found among the vanquished. We must add that it was not Caesar’s idea that one party alone should profit by his victory. He had no ambition to work, like Marius or Sulla, for the triumph of a faction: he wished to found a new government, and he invited men of different opinions to aid him in the enterprise. It has been asserted that he sought to reconcile parties, and great compliments have been paid him for it. The praise is not altogether just: he did not reconcile them, he annihilated them. In the monarchical system, that he wished to establish,[306] the old parties of the republic had no place. He had cleverly used the dissensions of the people and the senate to dominate both; the first result of his victory was to put them both aside, and we may say that after Pharsalia, there was only Caesar on one side, and the vanquished on the other. This explains how it was that, once victorious, he made use indifferently of the partisans of the senate and those of the democrats. This equality which he established between them was natural, since they had all become, equally and without distinction, his subjects. Only he well knew that in accepting the services of the old republicans he should not have instruments always tractable, and that he would be obliged to allow them a certain independence of action and speech, to preserve, at least outwardly, some appearance of a republic; but that in itself did not give him much uneasiness. He had not that invincible repugnance for liberty that princes have who are born to an absolute throne, and who only know its name to dread and detest it. He had lived with it for twenty-three years, he had become accustomed to it, he knew its importance. Therefore he did not seek to destroy it entirely. He did not silence, as he might have done, the eloquent voices that regretted the past; he did not even impose silence on that harassing opposition that tried to respond to his victories by jeers. He allowed some acts of his administration to be criticized, and permitted men to give him advice. This great mind well knew that a country becomes enervated when the citizens are rendered indifferent to public affairs, and lose the taste for attending to them. He did not think that anything solid could be established on passive and silent obedience, and in the government that he founded he wished to preserve something of public life. Cicero tells us this in a curious passage of his correspondence: “We enjoy here a profound calm,” he writes to one of his friends; “I should rather prefer, however, a little honest and salutary agitation;” and he adds: “I see that Caesar is of my opinion.”[307]

All these reasons decided him to take one step further on that path of generosity and clemency on which he had entered after Pharsalia. He had pardoned the greater number of those who had borne arms against him; he invited some of them to share his power. At the very time that he was recalling the greater part of the exiles, he appointed Cassius his lieutenant; he gave Brutus the government of Cisalpine Gaul, and Sulpicius that of Greece. We shall speak further on of the first two; it is important, the better to appreciate Caesar’s policy, to rapidly make known the third, and to inquire how he had become worthy of the favours of the conqueror, and in what manner he profited by them.

Servius Sulpicius belonged to an important Roman family, and was the most celebrated lawyer of his time. Cicero gives him this great praise, namely, that he was the first to bring philosophy into the law, that is to say, that he bound together all those minute rules and precise formulas of which this science is composed, by general principles and comprehensive views.[308] Accordingly he does not hesitate to place him much above his predecessors, and more especially, over that great family of the Scaevolas, in which as it seemed Roman jurisprudence had been up to that time incarnate. There was, however, a difference between them and Sulpicius, which it is important to notice: the Scaevolas had given to Rome, lawyers, augurs, pontifs, that is to say, they excelled in the arts that are friendly to tranquillity and peace; but they were also very active citizens, resolute politicians, valiant soldiers who courageously defended their country against conspirators and against the foreigner. They showed themselves, in their busy life, competent for all affairs and equal to all situations. Scaevola the augur, when Cicero knew him, was still, notwithstanding his age, a vigorous old man, who rose at daybreak to meet his country clients. He was the first to arrive at the Curia, and he had always some book with him, that he read so as not to remain idle while waiting for his colleagues; but the day that Saturninus threatened the public tranquillity, this learned man who loved study so much, this infirm old man who supported himself with difficulty, and could only use one arm, seized a javelin with that arm, and marched at the head of the people to the assault of the Capitol.[309] Scaevola the pontif was not only an able lawyer, he was also an upright administrator whose memory Asia never forgot. When the farmers of the taxes attacked his quaestor Rutilius, guilty of having wished to prevent them ruining the province, he defended him with an admirable eloquence and vigour that no threat could shake. He refused to leave Rome at the time of the first proscriptions, and abandon his clients and their business, although he knew the fate that was awaiting him. Wounded at the funeral of Marius, he was dispatched a few days later near the temple of Vesta.[310] However, such men were not exceptional at Rome. In the best times of the republic, the complete citizen had to be at once agriculturist, soldier, administrator, financier, advocate, and even jurist. There were no specialists then, and we should be forced to make now-a-days four or five different persons out of one ancient Roman; but in the period of which we are now speaking, these diverse aptitudes that were then required in a single man were separated: each man gave himself to a special science, and we can begin to divide men of study from men of action. It is difficult to say whether the reason of this was that men had lost the energy of their character; or perhaps we should think that since the masterpieces of Greece had been made known, and each science had become more complicated, one man could not any longer bear the burden of all united? However this may be, if Sulpicius was above the Scaevolas as a lawyer, he was far from having their firmness as a citizen. Praetor or consul, he was never anything more than a man of learning and chamber practice. In circumstances that require resolution, every time it was necessary to decide and to act, he was ill at ease. We feel that this honest and gentle soul was not made to be the first magistrate of a republic in a period of revolution. His fondness for always playing the part of conciliator and arbitrator in that time of violence ended by exciting laughter. Cicero himself, although he was his friend, quizzes him a little, when he shows us this great peacemaker starting off with his little secretary, after having looked over all his lawyers’ rules, to intervene between the parties at the time these parties only desired to destroy one another.

Caesar had always thought that Sulpicius was not of a character to oppose him vigorously, and had early worked to attach him to himself. He began by making an ally in his house, and a powerful ally. It was a matter of common talk at Rome, that the worthy Sulpicius allowed himself to be led by his wife Postumia; Cicero, who likes to repeat scandals, several times tells us this. Now, Postumia’s reputation was not spotless, and Suetonius places her name on the list of those women who were loved by Caesar. She is one of a very numerous company; but this fickle man, who passed so quickly from one mistress to another, had this singular privilege, that all the women whom he abandoned, remained none the less his devoted friends. They forgave his infidelities, they continued to take an interest in all his successes, they put those immense resources of ingenuity and persistency which belong only to a woman who is in love, at the service of his policy. It was no doubt Postumia who decided Sulpicius to work for Caesar during the whole time that he was consul, and to oppose the vehemence of his colleague Marcellus who wished another governor of Gaul to be appointed. However, notwithstanding all his weaknesses, Sulpicius was none the less a sincere republican, and when the war had broken out, he declared against Caesar, and left Italy. After the defeat, he submitted like the rest, and he had resumed his usual occupations, when Caesar sought him out in his retreat in order to appoint him governor of Greece. It was certainly impossible to find a government that suited him better. A residence in Athens, at all times agreeable to the rich Romans, must have been especially so at this time when that city was the asylum of so many illustrious exiles. Sulpicius could at the same time have the pleasure of hearing the most celebrated rhetoricians and philosophers of the world, and could talk of Rome and the republic with eminent persons like Marcellus and Torquatus, and thus satisfy all his tastes at once. Nothing could have been more pleasing, we should have thought, to this scholar and man of letters, whom chance had made a statesman, than the exercise of extensive power, without danger, combined with the most refined intellectual pleasures in one of the grandest and most beautiful countries in the world. We should, therefore, have thought that Caesar had done the most agreeable thing for him, in sending him on duty to that city where the Romans usually went for pleasure. Yet it does not seem that Sulpicius appreciated these advantages. He had scarcely arrived in Greece, when he was discontented at having gone, and longed to depart. Evidently it was not the country that displeased him, he would not have thought himself better off anywhere else; but he regretted the republic. After having so timidly defended it, he could not console himself for its fall, and blamed himself for serving him who had overturned it. These feelings are clearly expressed in a letter that he wrote to Cicero from Greece. “Fortune,” he tells him, “has taken from us our most precious possessions; we have lost our honour, our dignity, and our country.... In the times in which we live, those are most happy who are dead.”[311]

When a timid and moderate man like Sulpicius dared speak thus, what must others not have said and thought! We can guess this when we see how Cicero writes to the greater number of them. Although he is addressing officials of the new government, he does not take the trouble to hide his opinions; he freely expresses his regrets, because he well knows they are shared by those to whom he is writing. He speaks to Servilius Isauricus, the proconsul of Asia, as to a man whom the absolute power of one does not satisfy, and who wishes some restraints to be put on it.[312] He tells Cornificius, the governor of Africa, that affairs are going ill at Rome, and that many things happen there which would pain him.[313] “I know what you think of the lot of honest people, and of the misfortunes of the republic,” he writes to Furfanius, the proconsul of Sicily, in recommending an exile to him.[314] These persons, however, had accepted important offices from Caesar: they shared his power, they passed for his friends; but all the favours they had received from him had not thoroughly attached them to his cause. They made their reservations while serving him, and only half gave themselves up to him. Whence could this opposition come, that the new government met with among men who had at first agreed to take a share in it? It proceeded from different motives which it is easy to point out. The first, perhaps the most important, was that this government, even while loading them with honours, could not give them what the old republic would have given them. With the establishment of the monarchy an important change in all public employments was accomplished: the magistrates became subordinate officials. Formerly, those elected by the popular vote had the right to act as they pleased within the sphere of their functions. A fertile power of initiative inspired every rank of this hierarchy of republican dignitaries. From the aedile to the consul all were supreme within their own limits. They could not be so under an absolute government. Instead of governing on their own account, they were only the channels, so to say, by which the will of a single man acted to the ends of the earth. Certainly public security gained much by the cessation of those conflicts of authorities, which had continually troubled it, and it was a great advantage for the provinces that absolute power had been taken away from their greedy governors. Nevertheless, if the governed profited by these reforms, it was natural that the governors should be discontented with them. From the moment that they were only entrusted with the execution of the orders of another man the importance of their functions diminished, and this sovereign and absolute authority whose weight they always felt, finally vexed even the most submissive. If ambitious men complained of the diminution of their power, honest people did not get accustomed so easily as might have been expected to the loss of their liberty. In proportion as they left Pharsalia behind, their regrets became more lively. They began to get over the surprise of the defeat, and gradually recovered from the fear it had caused them. During the moments that immediately follow those great disasters in which men have expected to perish, they give themselves up entirely to the pleasure of living, but this pleasure is one of those to which men accustom themselves so quickly, and which are taken so much as a matter of course, that they soon cease to be sensible of it. All those terrified people who on the morrow of Pharsalia desired only tranquillity, when it had been given them, wished for something else. As long as men are uncertain of their life, they do not trouble themselves to know if they shall live free, but when once life is assured, the desire for liberty returns to all hearts, and those who served Caesar felt it like the rest. Caesar, we know, partly satisfied this desire, but this satisfaction did not last long. It is as difficult to halt on the road to liberty as on that to absolutism. One favour granted makes men desire another, and men think less of enjoying what they have obtained than of lamenting what they lack. It was thus that Cicero, who had welcomed Caesar’s clemency with transports of joy, and who saluted the return of Marcellus as a sort of restoration of the republic, soon changed his opinion and language. As we get on further in his correspondence, he becomes more bitter and more revolutionary. He who had so severely condemned those who “after having disarmed their hands did not disarm their hearts,”[315] had his own heart filled with the bitterest resentment. He said on every opportunity that all was lost, that he blushed to be a slave, that he was ashamed to live. He attacked with his pitiless raillery the most useful measures and the most just acts. He laughed at the reform of the calendar, and pretended to appear scandalized at the enlargement of Rome. He went further. On the day that the senate ordered Caesar’s statue to be placed beside those of the ancient kings, he could not avoid making a cruel allusion to the manner in which the first of these kings had perished. “I am very glad,” said he, “to see Caesar so near to Romulus!”[316] And yet it was scarcely a year since, in his speech for Marcellus, he had implored him in the name of the country to watch over his life, and had said with much feeling, “Your safety is ours!”

Caesar, then, had only malcontents around him. The moderate republicans, on whom he reckoned to aid him in his work, could not resign themselves to the loss of the republic. The exiles whom he had recalled to Rome were more humiliated by his clemency than grateful for it, and did not give up their resentment. His own generals, whom he loaded with riches and honours, without being able to satisfy their cupidity, reproached him for his ingratitude, and even plotted his death. The common people, at last, of whom he was the idol, and who had so cheerfully granted all his demands, the people themselves began to withdraw from him; they no longer welcomed his victories with the same applause as formerly, and seemed to be afraid that they had made him too great. When his statue was placed beside those of the kings, the multitude, who saw it pass, remained mute, and we know that the news of this unusual silence was spread by the messengers of the allied kings and nations in all the countries of the world, and caused it to be believed everywhere that a revolution was at hand.[317] In the provinces of the East, where the last soldiers of Pompey were hiding, the fire of civil war, which was smouldering rather than extinct, constantly revived, and these perpetual alarms, without leading to serious danger, prevented the public tranquillity becoming settled. At Rome, Cicero’s works, in which he celebrated the glories of the republic, were read with enthusiasm; anonymous pamphlets, which had never been more violent or more numerous, were eagerly sought. As happens on the eve of great crises, every one was discontented with the present, unquiet about the future, and prepared for the unforeseen. We know in how tragical a manner this strained situation terminated. The stab of Brutus’ dagger was not altogether, as has been said, an unpremeditated incident and a chance; it was the general uneasiness of men’s minds which led to and which explains such a terrible catastrophe. The conspirators were but little over sixty in number, but they had all Rome for their accomplice.[318] All this disquietude and rancour, those bitter regrets for the past, those disappointed ambitions, this baffled cupidity, this open or secret hatred, those bad or generous passions of which men’s hearts were full, armed their hands, and the Ides of March were only the deadly explosion of so much stored-up anger. Thus events frustrated all Caesar’s projects. He did not find safety in his clemency, as he thought; he failed in that work of conciliation that he had attempted with the applause of the world: he did not succeed in disarming parties. This glory was reserved for a man who had neither his breadth of genius, nor his generosity of character—for the crafty and cruel Octavius. This is not the only time that history shows us the sad spectacle of the success of ordinary men where the greatest have failed; but in enterprises of this nature success depends above all on circumstances, and it must be admitted that they singularly favoured Augustus. Tacitus tells us the principal cause of his good fortune, when he says, speaking of the establishment of the empire: “There was almost no one left who had seen the republic.”[319] The men over whom Caesar aspired to reign, on the contrary, had all seen it. Many cursed it when it troubled the tranquillity of their lives by its storms and agitations; almost all regretted it as soon as they had lost it. There is, notwithstanding the perils to which it exposes men, a singular charm and attraction in the habit and exercise of liberty which cannot be forgotten when once it has been known. It was against this inextinguishable memory that the genius of Caesar was shattered. But after the battle of Actium, the men who had looked upon the grand scenes of liberty, and who had seen the republic, no longer existed. A civil war of twenty years, the most murderous of all those that have ever depopulated the world, had destroyed them almost all. The recollections of the new generation did not go further back than Caesar. The first sounds it had heard were the acclamations that saluted the conqueror of Pharsalia, of Thapsus, and of Munda; the first spectacle that had struck its eyes was that of the proscriptions. It had grown up among pillage and massacres. During twenty years it had daily trembled for its property or its life. It thirsted for security, and was ready to sacrifice everything for repose. Nothing attracted it towards the past, as the contemporaries of Caesar had been attracted. On the contrary, all the memories of the past which survived only attached it more to the government under which it lived, and when by chance it turned its eyes backwards it found many subjects for fear without any subject for regret. It was only under these circumstances that absolute power could peaceably succeed the republic.

BRUTUS

HIS RELATIONS WITH CICERO

We should not know Brutus without Cicero’s letters. As he has never been spoken of with composure, and as political parties have been accustomed to screen their hatred or their hopes under his name, the true features of his character were early effaced. Amid the heated discussions that his mere name raises, while some, like Lucan, exalt him almost to heaven, and others, like Dante, resolutely place him in hell, it was not long before he became a sort of legendary personage. To read Cicero brings us back to the reality. Thanks to him, this striking but indistinct figure, that admiration or terror have immoderately enlarged, becomes more defined and takes human proportions. If it loses in grandeur by being viewed so close, at least it gains something by becoming true and living.

The connection between Cicero and Brutus lasted ten years. The collection of letters they wrote to each other during this interval must have been voluminous, since a grammarian quotes the ninth book of them. They are all lost, with the exception of twenty-five which were written after the death of Caesar.[320] Notwithstanding the loss of the rest, Brutus still holds such a large place in the surviving works of Cicero, and especially in his correspondence, that we find in it all the elements necessary for becoming well acquainted with him. I am going to collect these references, and to re-write, not the narrative of Brutus’ entire life, which would oblige me to dwell upon very well-known events, but only the history of his relations with Cicero.

I.