Chapter IV: Introduction: Cicero’s Letters (1)

No history is more readily studied now-a-days than that of the last years of the Roman Republic. Learned works have recently been published upon this subject in France, England, and Germany,[1] and the public has read them with avidity. The importance of the subjects which were then debated, the dramatic character of the events, and the grandeur of the characters warrant this interest; but the attraction we feel for this singular epoch is better explained by the fact that it is narrated for us in Cicero’s letters.

A contemporary said that he who read these letters would not be tempted to seek the history of that time[2] elsewhere, and in fact we find it much more living and true in them than in regular works composed expressly to teach it to us. What more would Asinius Pollio, Livy, or Cremutius Cordus teach us if we had them preserved? They would give us their personal opinion; but this opinion is for the most part open to suspicion because it comes from persons who could not tell the whole truth, from men like Livy, who wrote at the court of the emperors, or who hoped, like Pollio, to get their treason pardoned, by blackening the character of those whom they had betrayed. Instead of receiving a ready-made opinion it is better to make one for ourselves, and the perusal of Cicero’s letters enables us to do this. It throws us into the midst of the events, and lets us follow them day by day. We seem to see them pass before our eyes, notwithstanding the eighteen centuries that intervene, and we find ourselves in the unique position of being sufficiently near the facts to see their real character, and sufficiently distant to judge them dispassionately.

The importance of these letters is easily explained. The politicians of those times had more need of correspondence with each other than those of the present day. The proconsul starting from Rome to govern some distant province felt that he was withdrawing altogether from political life. To pass several years in those out-of-the-way countries which the public rumour of Rome did not reach, was very irksome to men accustomed to the stir of business, the agitations of parties, or, as they said, the broad daylight of the Forum. They did indeed receive a sort of official gazette, the _Acta diurna_, the venerable ancestor of our _Moniteur_. But it appears as though every official journal is condemned by its nature to be somewhat insignificant. The Roman journal contained a rather tame official report of public meetings, a short summary of important cases tried in the Forum, besides an account of public ceremonies and accurate notice of atmospheric phenomena or prodigies occurring in Rome or its neighbourhood. This is not precisely the sort of news that a praetor or proconsul wished to know, and therefore, in order to fill up the gaps in the official journal, he had recourse to paid correspondents, who made “news-letters” for the use of inquisitive provincials, as was the fashion among ourselves in the last century; but while, in the eighteenth century, literary men of reputation, intimate with the nobles and well received by ministers, undertook this duty, the Roman correspondents were only obscure compilers, workmen as Caelius calls them, usually chosen among those hungry Greeks whom want made ready for anything. They had no admittance into the great houses, nor could they approach the politicians. Their part simply consisted in running over the town and picking up what they heard or saw in the streets. They carefully noted theatrical chit-chat, inquired about actors who had been hissed and gladiators who had been beaten, described minutely handsome funerals, noted the rumours and ill-natured gossip, and especially the scandalous tales they could catch.[3] All this chatter amused for a moment, but did not satisfy those political personages who wished above all to be kept abreast of affairs, and, in order to become acquainted with them, they naturally applied to some one who was in a position to know them. They chose a few trustworthy and well-informed friends of good position, and through them learnt the reason and the real character of the facts reported dryly and without comment by the journals; and while their paid correspondents gave them only the talk of the town, the others introduced them into the cabinets of the high politicians, and made them listen to their most private conversations.

No one felt this need of being kept informed of everything, and, so to say, of living in the midst of Rome after he had left it, more than Cicero. No one liked that excitement of public life which statesmen complain of when they possess it, and never cease to regret when they have lost it, more than he. We must not believe him too readily when he says that he is tired of the stormy discussions of the senate; that he seeks a country where they have not heard of Vatinius or Caesar, and where they do not trouble themselves about agrarian laws; that he has an anxious craving to go and forget Rome under the agreeable shades of Arpinum, or in the delightful neighbourhood of Formiae. As soon as he is settled down at Formiae or Arpinum, or in some other of those handsome villas which he proudly calls the gems of Italy, _ocellos Italiae_, his thoughts naturally return to Rome, and couriers are constantly starting to go and learn what people are thinking and doing there. He could never take his eyes off the Forum, whatever he may say. Far or near he must have what Saint-Simon calls “that smack of business that politicians cannot do without.” He wished by all means to know the position of parties, their secret agreements, their internal discords, all those hidden intrigues that lead up to events and explain them. This is what he was continually demanding of Atticus, Curio, Caelius, and so many other great men mixed up in these intrigues either as actors or spectators, and what he himself narrates to his absent friends in the most lively manner, and thus the letters that he received or sent contain, without his intending it, all the history of his time.[4]

The correspondence of political men of our time, when it is published, is far from having the same importance, because the exchange of sentiment and thought is not made so much by means of letters now as it was then. We have invented new methods. The immense publicity of the press has advantageously replaced those cautious communications which could not reach beyond a few persons. Now-a-days the newspapers keep a man informed of what is doing in the world, whatever unfrequented place he may have retired to. As he learns events almost as soon as they happen, he receives the excitement as well as the news of them, and has no need of a well-informed friend to apprise him of them. To seek for all that the newspapers have destroyed and replaced among us would be an interesting study. In Cicero’s time letters often took their place and rendered the same services. They were passed from hand to hand when they contained news men had an interest in knowing; and those of important persons which made known their sentiments were read, commented on, and copied. A politician, who was attacked, defended himself by them before people whose esteem he desired to preserve, and through them men tried to form a sort of public opinion in a limited public when the Forum was silent, as in Caesar’s time. The newspapers have taken up this duty now and make a business of politics, and as they are incomparably more convenient, rapid, and diffused, they have taken from correspondence one of its principal subjects.

It is true that private affairs remain for it, and we are tempted to think at first that this subject is inexhaustible, and that with the sentiments and affections of so many kinds that fill our home life it would always be rich enough. Nevertheless, I think that private correspondence becomes every day shorter and less interesting, where it is only a question of feeling and affection. That constant and agreeable intercourse which filled so large a place in the life of former times, tends almost to disappear, and one would say that by a strange chance the facility and rapidity of intercourse, which ought to give it more animation, have been injurious to it. Formerly, when there was no post, or when it was reserved for the emperor’s use, as with the Romans, men were obliged to take advantage of any opportunity that occurred, or to send their letters by a slave. Then writing was a serious affair. They did not want the messenger to make a useless journey; letters were made longer and more complete to avoid the necessity of beginning again too often; unconsciously they were more carefully finished, by the thought we naturally give to things that cost trouble and are not very easy. Even in the time of Madame de Sévigné, when the mails started only once or twice a week, writing was still a serious business to which every care was given. The mother, far from her daughter, had no sooner sent off her letter than she was thinking of the one she would send a few days later. Thoughts, memories, regrets gathered in her mind during this interval, and when she took up her pen “she could no longer govern this torrent.” Now, when we know that we can write when we will, we do not collect material as Madame de Sévigné did, we do not write a little every day, we no longer seek to “empty our budget,” or torment ourselves in order to forget nothing, lest forgetfulness should make the news stale by coming too late. While the periodical return of the post formerly brought more order and regularity into correspondence, the facility we have now for writing when we will causes us to write less often. We wait to have something to say, which is seldomer than one thinks. We write no more than is necessary; and this is very little for a correspondence whose chief pleasure lies in the superfluous, and we are threatened with a reduction of that little. Soon, no doubt, the telegraph will have replaced the post; we shall only communicate by this breathless instrument, the image of a matter-of-fact and hurried society, which, even in the style it employs, tries to use a little less than what is necessary. With this new progress the pleasure of private correspondence, already much impaired, will have disappeared for ever.

But when people had more opportunities for writing letters, and wrote them better, all did not succeed equally. Some dispositions are fitter for this work than others. People whose minds move slowly, and who have need of much reflection before writing, make memoirs and not letters. The sober-minded write in a regular and methodical manner, but they lack grace and warmth. Logicians and reasoners have the habit of following up their thoughts too closely; now, one ought to know how to pass lightly from one subject to another, in order that the interest may be sustained, and to leave them all before they are exhausted. Those who are solely occupied with one idea, who concentrate themselves on it, and will not leave it, are only eloquent when they speak of it, which is not enough. To be always agreeable, and on all subjects, as a regular correspondence demands, one must have a lively and active imagination which receives the impressions of the moment and changes abruptly with them. This is the first quality of good letter writers; I will add to it, if you like, a little artifice. Writing always requires a certain effort. To succeed in writing we must aim at success, and the disposition to please must precede the wish to do so. It is natural enough to wish to please that great public for whom books are written, but it is the mark of a more exacting vanity to exert one’s powers for a single person. It has often been asked since La Bruyère, why women succeed better than men in this kind of writing? Is it not because they have a greater desire to please and a natural vanity which is, so to say, always under arms, which neglects no conquest, and feels the need of making efforts to please everybody?

I think nobody ever possessed these qualities in the same degree as Cicero. That insatiable vanity, that openness to impressions, that easiness in letting himself be seized and mastered by events, are found in his whole life and in all his works. It seems, at first sight, that there is a great difference between his letters and his speeches, and we are tempted to ask ourselves how the same man has been able to succeed in styles so opposed; but astonishment ceases as soon as we look a little closer. When we seek the really original qualities of his speeches they are found to be altogether the same that charm us in his letters. His commonplaces have got rather old, his pathos leaves us cold, and we often find that there is too much artifice in his rhetoric, but his narrations and portraits remain living in his speeches. It would be difficult to find a greater talent than his for narrative and description, and for representing to the life as he does both events and men. If he shows them to us so clearly, it is because he has them himself before his eyes. When he shows us the trader Cherea “with his eyebrows shaved, and that head which smells of tricks, and in which malignity breathes,”[5] or the praetor Verres taking an airing in a litter with eight bearers, like a king of Bithynia, softly lying on Malta roses,[6] or Vatinius rushing forth to speak, “his eyes starting, his neck swollen, his muscles stretched,”[7] or the Gallic witnesses, who walk about the Forum with an air of triumph and head erect,[8] or the Greek witnesses who chatter without ceasing and gesticulate with the shoulders,[9] all those characters, in fine, that when once they have been met with in his works are never forgotten, his powerful and mobile imagination sees them before painting them. He possesses in a wonderful degree the faculty of making himself the spectator of what he narrates. Things strike him, persons attract or repel him with an incredible vivacity, and he throws himself entirely into the pictures he makes of them. What passion there is in his narratives! What furious bursts of anger in his attacks! What frenzy of joy when he describes some ill fortune of his enemies! How one feels that he is penetrated and overwhelmed with it, that he enjoys it, that he delights in it and gloats over it, according to his energetic expressions: _his ego rebus pascor, his delector, his perfruor!_[10] Saint-Simon, intoxicated with hatred and joy, expresses himself almost in the same terms in the famous scene of the “bed of justice,” when he sees the Duke of Maine struck down and the bastards discrowned. “I, however,” says he, “was dying with joy, I was even fearing a swoon. My heart, swelled to excess, found no room to expand.... I triumphed, I avenged myself, I swam in my vengeance.” Saint-Simon earnestly desired power, and twice he thought he held it; “but the waters, as with Tantalus, retired from his lips every time he thought to touch them.” I do not think, however, that we ought to pity him. He would have ill filled the place of Colbert and Louvois, and even his good qualities perhaps would have been hurtful to him. Passionate and irritable, he feels warmly the slightest injury, and flies into a passion at every turn. The smallest incidents excite him, and we feel that when he relates them he does so with all his heart. This ardent sensitiveness which warms all his narratives has made him an incomparable painter, but as it would always have confused his judgment it would have made him an indifferent politician. Cicero’s example shows this well.

We are right then in saying that we find the same qualities in Cicero’s speeches as in his letters, but they are more evident in his letters, because he is freer and gives more play to his feelings. When he writes to any of his friends, he does not reflect so long as when he is to address the people; he gives his first impressions, and gives them with life and passion as they rise in him. He does not take the trouble to polish his style; all that he writes has usually such a graceful air, something so easy and simple that we cannot suspect preparation or artifice. A correspondent who wished to please him, having spoken to him one day of the thunders of his utterance, _fulmina verborum_, he answered: “What do you think then of my letters? Do you not think that I write to you in the ordinary style? One must not always keep the same tone. A letter cannot resemble a pleading or a political speech ... one uses every-day expressions in it.”[11] Even if he had wished to give more care to them he could not have found leisure. He had so many to write to content everybody! Atticus alone sometimes received three in the same day. So he wrote them where he could—during the sitting of the senate, in his garden, when he is out walking, on the high-road when he is travelling. Sometimes he dates them from his dining-room, where he dictates them to his secretaries between two courses. When he writes them with his own hand he does not give himself time to reflect any the more. “I take the first pen I find,” he tells his brother, “and use it as if it were good.”[12] Thus it was not always easy to decipher him. When any one complains he does not lack excuses. It is the fault of his friends’ messengers, who will not wait. “They come all ready to start, with their travelling caps on, saying that their companions are waiting for them at the door.”[13] Not to keep them waiting, he must write at random all that comes into his mind.

Let us thank these impatient friends, these hurried messengers who did not give Cicero time to make eloquent essays. His letters please us precisely because they contain the first flow of his emotions, because they are full of graceful negligence and naturalness. As he does not take time to disguise himself we see him as he is. His brother said to him one day, “I saw your own self in your letter.”[14] We are inclined to say the same thing ourselves every time we read him. If he is so lively, earnest, and animated when he addresses his friends, it is because he so easily transports himself in imagination to the places where they are. “I feel as though I were talking to you,”[15] he writes to one of them. “I don’t know how it happens,” he says to another, “that I think I am near you while writing to you.”[16] He gives way to his passing emotions in his letters even more than in his speeches. When he arrives at one of his fine country houses that he likes so much, he gives himself up to the pleasure of seeing it again; it has never seemed to him so fine. He visits his porticoes, his gymnasia, his garden seats; he runs to his books, ashamed of having left them. Love of solitude seizes him so strongly that he never finds himself sufficiently alone. He ends by disliking his house at Formiae because there are so many intruders. “It is not a villa,” he says, “it is a public lounge.”[17] There he finds again the greatest bores in the world, his friend Sebosus and his friend Arrius, who persists in not returning to Rome, however much he may entreat him, in order to keep him company and philosophize with him all day long. “While I am writing to you,” he says to Atticus, “Sebosus is announced. I have not finished lamenting this when I hear Arrius saluting me. Is this leaving Rome? What is the use of flying from others to fall into the hands of these?” I wish, he adds, quoting a fine verse very likely borrowed from his own works, “I wish to fly to the mountains of my birthplace, the cradle of my infancy. _In montes patrios et ad incunabula nostra._”[18] He goes in fact to Arpinum; he extends his journey to Antium, the wild Antium, where he passes the time counting the waves. This obscure tranquillity pleases him so much that he regrets he was not duumvir in this little town rather than consul at Rome. He has no higher ambition than to be rejoined by his friend Atticus, to walk with him in the sun, or to talk philosophy “seated on the little bench beneath the statue of Aristotle.” At this moment he seems disgusted with public life, he will not hear speak of it. “I am resolved to think no more about it,”[19] he says. But we know how he kept this sort of promise. As soon as he is back in Rome he plunges into the thick of politics; the country and its pleasures are forgotten. We only detect from time to time a few passing regrets for a calmer life. “When shall we live then?” _quando vivemus?_ says he sadly in this whirlwind of business that hurries him on.[20] But these timorous complaints are soon stifled by the noise and movement of the combat. He enters and takes part in it with more ardour than anybody. He is still excited by it when he writes to Atticus, its agitation is shown by his letters which communicate it to us. We imagine ourselves looking on at those incredible scenes that take place in the senate when he attacks Clodius, sometimes by set speeches, sometimes by impetuous questions, employing against him by turns the heaviest arms of rhetoric and the lightest shafts of raillery. He is still more sprightly when he describes the popular assemblies and recounts the scandals of the elections. “Follow me to the Campus Martius, corruption is rampant, _sequere me in Campum; ardet ambitus_.”[21] And he shows us the candidates at work, purse in hand, or the judges in the Forum shamelessly selling themselves to whoever will pay them, _judices quos fames magis quam fama commovit_.

As he has the habit of giving way to his impressions and changing with them, his tone varies from letter to letter. Nothing is more desponding than those he writes in exile; they are a continual moan; but his sentences suddenly become majestic and triumphant immediately after his return from exile. They are full of those flattering superlatives that he distributes so liberally to those who have served him, _fortissimus_, _prudentissimus_, _exoptatissimus_, etc., he extols in magnificent terms the marks of esteem given him by people of position, the authority he enjoys in the Curia, the credit he has so gloriously reconquered in the Forum, _splendorem ilium forensem, et in senatu auctoritatem et apud viros bonos gratiam_.[22] Although he is only addressing his faithful Atticus, we think we hear an echo of the set orations he has just pronounced in the senate and before the people. It sometimes happens that on the gravest occasions he smiles and jokes with a friend who amuses him. In the thick of his conflict with Antony he writes that charming letter to Papirius Poetus, in which he advises him in such a diverting manner to frequent again the good tables, and to give good dinners to his friends.[23] He does not defy dangers, he forgets them; but let him meet some timorous person, he soon partakes his fear, his tone changes at once; he becomes animated, heated; sadness, fear, emotion carry him without effort to the highest flights of eloquence. When Caesar threatens Rome, and insolently places his final conditions before the senate, Cicero’s courage rises, and he uses, when writing to a single person, those energetic figures of speech which would not be out of place in a public oration. “What a fate is ours! Must we then give way to his impudent demands! for so Pompey calls them. In fact has a more shameless audacity ever been seen?—You have occupied for ten years a province that the senate has not given you, but which you have seized yourself by intrigue and violence. The term has arrived which your caprice alone and not the law has fixed for your power.—But let us suppose it was the law—the term having arrived, we name your successor, but you resist and say, ‘Respect my rights.’ And you, what do you do to ours? What pretext have you for keeping your army beyond the term fixed by the people, in spite of the senate?—You must give way to me or fight.—Well then! let us fight, answers Pompey, at least we have the chance of conquering or of dying free men.”[24]

If I wished to find another example of this agreeable variety and these rapid changes, I should not turn to Pliny or to those who, like him, wrote their letters for the public, I should come down to Madame de Sévigné. She, like Cicero, has a very lively and versatile imagination; she gives way to her first emotions without reflection; she is caught by things present, and the pleasure she is enjoying always seems the highest. It has been remarked that she took pleasure everywhere, not through that indolence of mind that attaches us to the place where we are, to avoid the trouble of changing, but by the vivacity of her character which gave her up entirely to the pleasures of the moment. Paris does not charm her so much as to prevent her liking the country, and no one of that age has spoken about nature better than this woman of fashion who was so much at ease in drawing-rooms, and seemed made for them. She escapes to Livry the first fine day to enjoy “the triumph of May,” to “the nightingale, the cuckoo, and the warbler that begin the spring in the woods.” But Livry is still too fashionable, she must have a more complete solitude, and she cheerfully retires under her great trees in Brittany. This time her Paris friends think she will be wearied to death, having no news to repeat or fine wits to converse with. But she has taken some serious moral treatise by Nicole with her; she has found among those neglected books whose last refuge, like that of old furniture, is the country, some romance of her young days which she reads again secretly, and in which she is astonished still to find pleasure. She chats with her tenants, and just as Cicero preferred the society of the country people to that of the provincial fashionables, she likes better to talk with her gardener Pilois than with “several who have preserved the title of esquire in the parliament of Rennes.” She walks in her Mall, in those solitary alleys where the trees covered with fine-sounding mottoes almost seem as though they were speaking to each other; she finds, in fact, so much pleasure in her desert that she cannot make up her mind to leave it; nevertheless no woman likes Paris better. Once back there she surrenders herself wholly to the pleasures of fashionable life. Her letters are full of it. She takes impressions so readily that we might almost tell in perusing them what books she has just been reading, at what conversations she has been present, what drawing-rooms she has just left. When she repeats so pleasantly to her daughter the gossip of the court we perceive that she has just been conversing with the graceful and witty Madame de Coulanges, who has repeated it to her. When she speaks so touchingly of Turenne she has just left the Hôtel de Bouillon, where the prince’s family are lamenting his broken fortunes as well as his death. She lectures, she sermonizes herself with Nicole, but not for long. Let her son come in and tell her some of those gay adventures of which he has been the hero or the victim, she recounts boldly the most risky tales on condition of saying a little later, “Pardon us, Monsieur Nicole!” When she has been visiting La Rochefoucauld everything turns to morality; she draws lessons from everything, everywhere she sees some image of life and of the human heart, even in the viper broth that they are going to give Madame de la Fayette who is ill. Is not this viper, which though opened and skinned still writhes, like our old passions? “What do we not do to them? We treat them with insult, harshness, cruelty, disdain; we wrangle, lament, and storm, and yet they move. We cannot overcome them. We think, when we have plucked out their heart, that they are done with and we shall hear no more of them. But no; they are always alive, they are always moving.” This ease with which she receives impressions, and which causes her to adopt so quickly the sentiments of the people she visits, makes her also feel the shock of the great events she looks on at. The style of her letters rises when she narrates them, and, like Cicero, she becomes eloquent unconsciously. Whatever admiration the greatness of the thoughts and the liveliness of expression in that fine piece of Cicero upon Caesar that I quoted just now may cause me, I am still more touched, I admit, by the letter of Madame de Sévigné on the death of Louvois, and I find more boldness and brilliancy in that terrible dialogue which she imagines between the minister who demands pardon and God who refuses it.

These are admirable qualities, but they bring with them certain disadvantages. Such hasty impressions are often rather fleeting. When people are carried away by a too vivid imagination, they do not take time to reflect before speaking, and run the risk of often having to change their opinion. Thus Madame de Sévigné has contradicted herself more than once. But being only a woman of fashion, her inconsistency has not much weight, and we do not look on it as a crime. What does it matter to us that her opinions on Fléchier and Mascaron have varied, that after having unreservedly admired the _Princesse de Clèves_ when she read it alone, she hastened to find a thousand faults in it when her cousin Bussy condemned it? But Cicero is a politician, and he is expected to be more serious. We demand that his opinions should have more coherency; now, this is precisely what the liveliness of his imagination least permits. He never boasted of being consistent. When he judges events or men he sometimes passes without scruple, in a few days, from one extreme to the other. In a letter of the end of October Cato is called an excellent friend (_amicissimus_), and the way in which he has acted is declared to be satisfactory; at the beginning of November he is accused of having been shamefully malevolent in the same affair,[25] because Cicero seldom judges but by his impressions, and in a mobile spirit like his, very different but equally vivid impressions follow each other very quickly.

Another danger, and one still greater, of this excess of imagination which cannot control itself is that it may give us the lowest and most false opinion of those who yield to it. Perfect characters are only found in novels. Good and evil are so intermingled in our nature that the one is seldom found without the other. The strongest characters have their weaknesses, and the finest actions do not spring only from the most honourable motives. Our best affections are not entirely exempt from selfishness; doubts and wrongful suspicions sometimes trouble the firmest friendships, and it may happen at certain moments that cupidity and jealousy, of which one is ashamed the next day, flit rapidly through the mind of the most honourable persons. The prudent and clever carefully conceal all those feelings which cannot bear the light; those whose quick impressions carry them away, like Cicero, speak out, and they are very much blamed. The spoken or written word gives more strength and permanence to these fugitive thoughts; they were only flashes; they are fixed and accentuated by writing; they acquire a clearness, a relief and importance that they had not in reality. Those momentary weaknesses, those ridiculous suspicions which spring from wounded self-esteem, those short bursts of anger, quieted as soon as reflected on, those unjust thoughts that vexation produces, those ambitious fits that reason hastens to disavow, never perish when once they have been confided to a friend. One of these days a prying commentator will study these too unreserved disclosures, and will use them, to draw a portrait of the indiscrete person who made them, to frighten posterity. He will prove by exact and irrefutable quotations that he was a bad citizen and a bad friend, that he loved neither his country nor his family, that he was jealous of honest people, and that he betrayed all parties. It is not so, however, and a wise man will not be deceived by the artifice of misleading quotations. Such a man well knows that we must not take these impetuous people literally or give too much credence to what they say. We must save them from themselves, refuse to listen to them when they are led astray by passion, and especially must we distinguish their real and lasting feelings from all those exaggerations which are merely passing. For these reasons every one is not fitted to thoroughly understand these letters, every one cannot read them as they should be read. I mistrust those learned men who, without any acquaintance with men or experience of life, pretend to judge Cicero from his correspondence. Most frequently they judge him ill. They search for the expression of his thought in that commonplace politeness which society demands, and which no more binds those who use it than it deceives those who accept it. Those concessions that must be made if we wish to live together they call cowardly compromises. They see manifest contradictions in those different shades a man gives to his opinions, according to the persons he is talking with. They triumph over the imprudence of certain admissions, or the fatuity of certain praises, because they do not perceive the fine irony that tempers them. To appreciate all these shades, to give things their real importance, to be a good judge of the drift of those phrases which are said with half a smile, and do not always mean what they seem to say, requires more acquaintance with life than one usually gets in a German university. If I must say what I think, I would rather trust a man of the world than a scholar in this matter, for a delicate appreciation.

Cicero is not the only person whom this correspondence shows us. It is full of curious details about all those who had friendly or business relations with him. They were the most illustrious persons of the time, and they played the chief parts in the revolution that put an end to the Roman Republic. No one deserves to be studied more than they. It must be remarked here, that one of Cicero’s failings has greatly benefited posterity. If it were a question of some one else, of Cato for instance, how many people’s letters would be missing in this correspondence! The virtuous alone would find a place in it, and Heaven knows their number was not then very great. But, happily, Cicero was much more tractable, and did not bring Cato’s rigorous scruples into the choice of his friends. A sort of good-nature made him accessible to people of every opinion; his vanity made him seek praise everywhere. He had dealings with all parties, a great fault in a politician, for which the shrewd people of his time have bitterly reproached him, but a fault that we profit by; hence it happens that all parties are represented in his correspondence. This obliging humour sometimes brought him into contact with people whose opinions were the most opposite to his, and he found himself at certain times in close relations with the worst citizens whom he has at other times lashed with his invectives. Letters that he had received from Antony, Dolabella, and Curio still remain, and these letters are full of expressions of respect and friendship. If the correspondence went further back we should probably have some of Catiline’s, and, frankly, I regret the want of them; for if we wish to judge of the state of a society as of the constitution of a man, it is not enough to examine the sound parts, we must handle and probe to the bottom the unsound parts. Thus, all the important men of that time, whatever their conduct may have been, or to whatever party they may have belonged, had dealings with Cicero. Memorials of all are found in his correspondence. A few of their letters still exist, and we have a large number of those that Cicero wrote to them. The private details he gives us about them, what he tells us of their opinions, their habits, and character, allows us to enter freely into their life. Thanks to him, all those persons indistinctly depicted by history resume their original appearance; he seems to bring them nearer to us and to make us acquainted with them; and when we have read his correspondence we can say that we have just visited the whole Roman society of his time.

The end we have in view in this book is to study closely a few of these personages, especially those who were most involved in the great political events of that period. But before beginning this study it is necessary to make a firm resolution not to bring to it considerations which belong to our own time. It is too much the custom now-a-days to seek arms for our present struggles in the history of the past. Smart allusions and ingenious parallels are most successful. Perhaps Roman antiquity is so much in fashion only because it gives political parties a convenient and less dangerous battle-field where, under ancient costumes, present-day passions may struggle. If the names of Caesar, Pompey, Cato, and Brutus are quoted on all occasions, these great men must not be too proud of the honour. The curiosity they excite is not altogether disinterested, and when they are spoken of it is almost always to point an epigram or set off a flattery. I wish to avoid this mistake. These illustrious dead seem to me to deserve something better than to serve as instruments in the quarrels that divide us, and I have sufficient respect for their memory and their repose not to drag them into the arena of our every-day disputes. It should never be forgotten that it is an outrage to history to subject it to the changing interest of parties, and that it should be, according to the fine expression of Thucydides, a work made for eternity.

These precautions being taken, let us penetrate with Cicero’s letters into the Roman society of that great period, and let us begin by studying him who offers himself so gracefully to do us the honours.

CICERO IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LIFE

I
CICERO’S PUBLIC LIFE

Cicero’s public life is usually severely judged by the historians of our time. He pays the penalty of his moderation. As this period is only studied now with political intentions, a man like him who tried to avoid extremes fully satisfies nobody. All parties agree in attacking him; on all sides he is laughed at or insulted. The fanatical partisans of Brutus accuse him of timidity, the warmest friends of Caesar call him a fool. It is in England and amongst us[26] that he has been least abused, and that classical traditions have been more respected than elsewhere; the learned still persist in their old habits and their old admirations, and in the midst of so many convulsions criticism at least has remained conservative. Perhaps also the indulgence shown to Cicero in both countries comes from the experience they have of political life. When a man has lived in the practice of affairs and in the midst of the working of parties, he can better understand the sacrifices that the necessities of the moment, the interest of his friends and the safety of his cause may demand of a statesman, but he who only judges his conduct by inflexible theories thought out in solitude and not submitted to the test of experience becomes more severe towards him. This, no doubt, is the reason why the German scholars use him so roughly. With the exception of M. Abeken,[27] who treats him humanely, they are without pity. Drumann[28] especially overlooks nothing. He has scrutinized his works and his life with the minuteness and sagacity of a lawyer seeking the grounds of a lawsuit. He has laid bare all his correspondence in a spirit of conscientious malevolence. He has courageously resisted the charm of those confidential disclosures which makes us admire the writer and love the man in spite of his weaknesses, and by opposing to each other detached fragments of his letters and discourses he has succeeded in drawing up a formal indictment, in which nothing is omitted and which almost fills a volume. M. Mommsen[29] is scarcely more gentle, he is only less long. Taking a general view of things he does not lose himself in the details. In two of those compact pages full of facts, such as he knows how to write, he has found means to heap on Cicero more insults than Drumann’s whole volume contains. We see particularly that this pretended statesman was only an egotist and a short-sighted politician, and that this great writer is only made up of a newspaper novelist and a special-pleader. Here we perceive the same pen that has just written down Cato a Don Quixote and Pompey a corporal. As in his studies of the past he always has the present in his mind, one would say that he looks for the squireens of Prussia in the Roman aristocracy, and that in Caesar he salutes in advance that popular despot whose firm hand can alone give unity to Germany.

How much truth is there in these fierce attacks? What confidence can we place in this boldness of revolutionary criticism? What judgment must we pronounce on Cicero’s political conduct? The study of the facts will teach us.

I.

Three causes generally contribute to form a man’s political opinions—his birth, his personal reflections, and his temperament. If I were not speaking here of sincere convictions only, I would readily add a fourth, which causes more conversions than the others, namely interest, that is to say, that leaning one has almost in spite of oneself to think that the most advantageous course is also the most just, and to conform one’s opinion to the position one holds or wishes for. Let us try and discover what influence these causes had upon Cicero’s conduct and political preferences.

At Rome, for a long time past, opinions had been decided by birth. In a city where traditions were so much respected the ideas of parents were inherited as well as their property or their name, and it was a point of honour to follow their politics faithfully; but in Cicero’s time these customs were beginning to decay. The oldest families had no scruple in failing in their hereditary engagements. At that time many names which had become illustrious by defending popular interests are found in the senatorial party, and the most audacious demagogue of that time bore the name of Clodius. Besides, Cicero would never at any time have found political direction in his birth. He belonged to an unknown family, he was the first of his race to engage in public affairs, and the name he bore did not commit him in advance to any party. In fact, he was not born at Rome. His father lived in one of those little country municipia of which the wits readily made fun, because doubtful Latin was spoken and fine manners were not well known in them, but which, none the less, were the strength and honour of the Republic. That rude but brave and temperate people who inhabited the neglected cities of Campania, Latium, and the Sabine country, and among whom the habits of rural life had preserved something of the ancient virtue,[30] was in reality the Roman people. That which filled the streets and squares of the great city, spent its time in the theatre, took part in the riots of the Forum, and sold its votes in the Campus Martius, was only a collection of freedmen and foreigners among whom only disorder, intrigue, and corruption could be learnt. Life was more honest and healthy in the municipia. The citizens who inhabited them remained for the most part strangers to the questions that were debated in Rome, and the rumour of public affairs did not reach them. They were sometimes seen on the Campus Martius or the Forum, when it was a question of voting for one of their fellow-citizens, or of supporting him by their presence before the tribunals; but usually they troubled themselves little about exercising their rights, and stayed at home. They were none the less devoted to their country, jealous of their privileges, even when they made no use of them, proud of their title of Roman citizens, and much attached to the Republican Government that had given it them. For them the Republic had preserved its prestige because, living at a distance, they saw less of its weaknesses and always recalled its ancient glory. Cicero’s childhood was spent in the midst of these rural populations, as backward in their ideas as in their manners. He learnt from them to love the past more than to know the present. This was the first impression and the first teaching he received from the places as from the people among whom his early years were passed. Later, he spoke with emotion of that humble house that his father had built near the Liris, and which recalled the house of the old Curius[31] by its stern simplicity. I fancy that those who lived in it must have thought themselves carried back a century, and that in causing them to live among the memorials of the past, it gave them the inclination and taste for old-fashioned things. If Cicero owed anything to his birth it was this. He may have gained in his family respect for the past, love of his country, and an instinctive preference for the Republican Government, but he found in it no precise tradition, no positive engagement with any party. When he entered political life he was obliged to decide for himself, a great trial for an irresolute character! And in order to choose among so many conflicting opinions it was necessary early to study and reflect.

Cicero has embodied the results of his reflections and studies in political writings, of which the most important, _The Republic_, has only reached us in a very imperfect state. What remains of it shows that he is here, as everywhere else, a fervent disciple of the Greeks. He attaches himself by preference to Plato, and his admiration for him is so strong that he often almost makes us think that he is content with translating him. In general Cicero does not appear to care much for the glory of originality. This is almost the only vanity he lacks. In his correspondence there is a singular admission on this subject, which has been freely used against him. In order to make his friend Atticus understand how his works cost him so little trouble, he says: “I only furnish the words, of which I have no lack”;[32] but Cicero, contrary to his usual custom, calumniates himself here. He is not such a servile translator as he wishes to make believe, and the difference between him and Plato is great, especially in his political works. Their books bear, indeed, the same title, but as soon as they are opened we perceive that in reality they are quite unlike. It is the characteristic of a speculative philosopher like Plato to consider the absolute end in everything. If he wants to form a constitution, instead of studying the people to be governed by it, he begins with some principle which reason lays down, and follows it up with inflexible rigour to its logical consequences. Thus he succeeds in forming one of those political systems where everything is bound and held together, and which by their admirable unity delight the mind of the sage who studies them as the regularity of a fine building pleases the eye of those who look at it. Unfortunately this kind of constitution, thought out in solitude and cast all of a piece, is difficult of application. When it comes to be put in practice unexpected resistance crops up on all sides. National traditions, character, and recollections, all those social forces which have been overlooked, will not submit to the severe laws imposed on them. It is then perceived that these things cannot be moulded at will, and since they absolutely refuse to give way, one must be prepared to modify this constitution which seemed so fine when it was not put into use. But here again the difficulty is great. It is not easy to change anything in these compact and logical systems, where everything is so skilfully arranged that one piece being disturbed throws the rest out of gear. Besides, philosophers are naturally imperious and absolute; they do not like to be thwarted. To avoid that opposition that provokes them, to escape as much as possible the demands of reality, they imitate the Athenian of whom Aristophanes speaks, who, despairing of finding here below a republic to suit him, went to look for one in the clouds. They also build castles in the air, ideal republics governed by imaginary laws. They frame admirable constitutions, but they have the defect of not applying to any particular country because they are made for the whole human race.

Cicero did not act thus. He knew the public he addressed; he knew that that grave and sensible race, so quick to seize the practical side of things, would be ill-satisfied with these fancies, and so he does not lose himself in these dreams of the ideal and the absolute. He does not presume to make laws for the universe; he is thinking especially of his own country and his own times, and although he appears to be drawing up the plan of a perfect republic, that is to say, one that cannot exist, it is plain that his eyes are fixed on a constitution which does really exist. The following are very nearly his political theories. Of the three forms of government usually distinguished, none altogether pleases him when it is isolated. I need not speak of the absolute government of a single man, he died in order to oppose that.[33]

The other two, government by all or by a few, that is to say democracy and aristocracy, do not seem to him faultless either. It is difficult to be quite contented with the aristocracy when one has not the advantage of belonging to a great family. The Roman aristocracy, notwithstanding the great qualities it displayed in the conquest and government of the world, was supercilious and exclusive like others. The checks it had suffered for a century, its visible decline, and the feeling it must have had of its approaching end, far from curing its pride, rendered it more intractable. Prejudices seem to become narrower and more inflexible when they have but a short time to live. We know how our _émigrés_, face to face with a victorious revolution, used up their last strength in foolish struggles for precedence. In the same way the Roman nobility, at the moment when the power was slipping from it, seemed to make a point of exaggerating its defects, and of discouraging by its disdain the respectable people who offered themselves to defend it. Cicero felt himself drawn towards it by his taste for refinement of manners and elegant pleasures; but he could not endure its insolence. Thus he always kept up the ill-will of the discontented plebeian against it, even while serving it. He knew very well that his birth was not overlooked, and that he was called an upstart (_homo novus_), and in return he was never tired of jesting about those fortunate people who do not need to have any merit, who do not require to take trouble, and to whom the highest places in the republic come while they are sleeping (_quibus omnia populi romani beneficia dormientibus deferuntur_).[34]