So significant and empathetic were his tone and gesture as he addressed himself pointedly to his Roman audience, that they recalled him, and, amid a storm of plaudits, made him repeat the passage. He added to it the words—which were not set down for him—

"Best of all friends in direst strait of war!"

and the applause was redoubled. The actor drew courage from his success. When, as the play went on, he came to speak the words—

"And you—you let him live a banished man— See him driven forth and hunted from your gates!"

he pointed to the nobles, knights, and commons, as they sat in their respective seats in the crowded rows before him, his own voice broke with grief, and the tears even more than the applause of the whole audience bore witness alike to their feelings towards the exile, and the dramatic power of the actor. "He pleaded my cause before the Roman people", says Cicero (for it is he that tells the story), "with far more weight of eloquence than I could have pleaded for myself".[1]

[Footnote 1: Defence of Sestius, c. 56, &c.]

He had been visited with a remarkable dream, while staying with one of his friends in Italy, during the earlier days of his exile, which he now recalled with some interest. He tells us this story also himself, though he puts it into the mouth of another speaker, in his dialogue on "Divination". If few were so fond of introducing personal anecdotes into every place where he could find room for them, fewer still could tell them so well.

"I had lain awake a great part of the night, and at last towards dawn had begun to sleep soundly and heavily. I had given orders to my attendant that, in this case, though we had to start that very morning, strict silence should be kept, and that I was on no account to be disturbed; when about seven o'clock I awoke, and told him my dream. I thought I was wandering alone in some solitary place, when Caius Marius appeared to me, with his fasces bound with laurel, and asked why I was so sad? And when I answered that I had been driven from my country, he caught my hand, bade me be of good cheer, and put me under the guidance of his own lictor to lead me to his monument; there, he said, I should find my deliverance".

So indeed it had turned out. The temple dedicated to Honour and Virtue, in which the Senate sat when they passed the first resolution for Cicero's recall, was known as the "Monument of Marius". There is no need to doubt the perfect good faith of the story which he tells, and it may be set down as one of the earliest authenticated instances of a dream coming true. But if dreams are fashioned out of our waking imaginations, it is easy to believe that the fortunes of his great townsman Marius, and the scenes in the Senate at Rome, were continually present to the exile's thoughts.

His return was a triumphal progress. He landed at Brundusium on his daughter's birthday. She had only just lost her husband Piso, who had gallantly maintained her father's cause throughout, but she was the first to welcome him with tears of joy which overmastered her sorrow. He was careful to lose no chance of making his return impressive. He took his way to Rome with the slow march of a conqueror. The journey which Horace made easily in twelve days, occupied Cicero twenty-four. But he chose not the shortest but the most public route, through Naples, Capua, Minturnae, Terracina, and Aricia.

Let him tell the story of his own reception. If he tells it (as he does more than once) with an undisguised pride, it is a pride with which it is impossible not to sympathise. He boasted afterwards that he had been "carried back to Rome on the shoulders of Italy;" and Plutarch says it was a boast he had good right to make.

"Who does not know what my return home was like? How the people of Brundusium held out to me, as I might say, the right hand of welcome on behalf of all my native land? From thence to Rome my progress was like a march of all Italy. There was no district, no town, corporation, or colony, from which a public deputation was not sent to congratulate me. Why need I speak of my arrival at each place? how the people crowded the streets in the towns; how they flocked in from the country—fathers of families with wives and children? How can I describe those days, when all kept holiday, as though it were some high festival of the immortal gods, in joy for my safe return? That single day was to me like immortality; when I returned to my own city, when I saw the Senate and the population of all ranks come forth to greet me, when Rome herself looked as though she had wrenched herself from her foundations to rush to embrace her preserver. For she received me in such sort, that not only all sexes, ages, and callings, men and women, of every rank and degree, but even the very walls, the houses, the temples, seemed to share the universal joy".

The Senate in a body came out to receive him on the Appian road; a gilded chariot waited for him at the city gates; the lower class of citizens crowded the steps of the temples to see him as he passed; and so he rode, escorted by troops of friends, more than a conqueror, to the Capitol.

His exultation was naturally as intense as his despair had been. He made two of his most florid speeches (if indeed they be his, which is doubtful), one in the Senate and another to the people assembled in the Forum, in which he congratulated himself on his return, and Rome on having regained her most illustrious citizen. It is a curious note of the temper and logical capacities of the mob, in all ages of the world alike, that within a few hours of their applauding to the echo this speech of Cicero's, Clodius succeeded in exciting them to a serious riot by appealing to the ruinous price of corn as one of the results of the exile's return.

For nearly four years more, though unable to shake Cicero's recovered position in the state—for he was now supported by Pompey—Clodius and his partisans, backed by a strong force of trained gladiators in their pay, kept Rome in a state of anarchy which is almost inexplicable. It was more than suspected that Crassus, now utterly estranged from Pompey, supplied out of his enormous wealth the means of keeping on foot this lawless agitation. Elections were overawed, meetings of the Senate interrupted, assassinations threatened and attempted. Already men began to look to military rule, and to think a good cause none the worse for being backed by "strong battalions". Things were fast tending to the point where Pompey and Caesar, trusty allies as yet in profession and appearance, deadly rivals at heart, hoped to step in with their veteran legions. Even Cicero, the man of peace and constitutional statesman, felt comfort in the thought that this final argument could be resorted to by his own party. But Clodius's mob-government, at any rate, was to be put an end to somewhat suddenly. Milo, now one of the candidates for the consulship, a man of determined and unscrupulous character, had turned his own weapons against him, and maintained an opposition patrol of hired gladiators and wild-beast fighters. The Senate quite approved, if they did not openly sanction, this irregular championship of their order. The two parties walked the streets of Rome like the Capulets and Montagues at Verona; and it was said that Milo had been heard to swear that he would rid the city of Clodius if he ever got the chance. It came at last, in a casual meeting on the Appian road, near Bovillae. A scuffle began between their retainers, and Clodius was killed—his friends said, murdered. The excitement at Rome was intense: the dead body was carried and laid publicly on the Rostra. Riots ensued; Milo was obliged to fly, and renounce his hopes of power; and the Senate, intimidated, named Pompey—not indeed "Dictator", for the name had become almost as hateful as that of King—but sole consul, for the safety of the state.

Cicero had resumed his practice as an advocate, and was now called upon to defend Milo. But Pompey, either from some private grudge, or in order to win favour with the populace, determined that Milo should be convicted. The jury were overawed by his presence in person at the trial, and by the occupation by armed soldiers of all the avenues of the court under colour of keeping order. It was really as great an outrage upon the free administration of justice as the presence of a regiment of soldiers at the entrance to Westminster Hall would be at a modern trial for high treason or sedition. Cicero affected to see in Pompey's legionaries nothing more than the maintainers of the peace of the city. But he knew better; and the fine passage in the opening of his speech for the defence, as it has come down to us, is at once a magnificent piece of irony, and a vindication of the rights of counsel.

"Although I am conscious, gentlemen, that it is a disgrace to me to show fear when I stand here to plead in behalf of one of the bravest of men;—and especially does such weakness ill become me, that when Milo himself is far more anxious about the safety of the state than about his own, I should be unable to bring to his defence the like magnanimous spirit;—yet this strange scene and strangely constituted court does terrify my eyes, for, turn them where I will, I look in vain for the ancient customs of the Forum, and the old style of public trials. For your tribunal to-day is girt with no such audience as was wont; this is no ordinary crowd that hems us in. Yon guards whom you see on duty in front of all the temples, though set to prevent violence, yet still do a sort of violence to the pleader; since in the Forum and the count of justice, though the military force which surrounds us be wholesome and needful, yet we cannot even be thus freed from apprehension without looking with some apprehension on the means. And if I thought they were set there in hostile array against Milo, I would yield to circumstances, gentlemen, and feel there was no room for the pleader amidst such a display of weapons. But I am encouraged by the advice of a man of great wisdom and justice—of Pompey, who surely would not think it compatible with that justice, after committing a prisoner to the verdict of a jury, then to hand him over to the swords of his soldiers; nor consonant with his wisdom to arm the violent passions of a mob with the authority of the state. Therefore those weapons, those officers and men, proclaim to us not peril but protection; they encourage us to be not only undisturbed but confident; they promise me not only support in pleading for the defence, but silence for it to be listened to. As to the rest of the audience, so far as it is composed of peaceful citizens, all, I know, are on our side; nor is there any single man among all those crowds whom you see occupying every point from which a glimpse of this court can be gained, looking on in anxious expectation of the result of this trial, who, while he approves the boldness of the defendant, does not also feel that the fate of himself, his children, and his country, hangs upon the issue of to-day".

After an elaborate argument to prove that the slaying of Clodius by Milo was in self-defence, or, at the worst, that it was a fate which he well deserved as a public enemy, he closes his speech with a peroration, the pathos of which has always been admired:

"I would it had been the will of heaven—if I may say so with all reverence for my country, for I fear lest my duty to my client may make me say what is disloyal towards her—I would that Publius Clodius were not only alive, but that he were praetor, consul, dictator even, before my eyes had seen this sight! But what says Milo? He speaks like a brave man, and a man whom it is your duty to protect—'Not so—by no means', says he. 'Clodius has met the doom he well deserved: I am ready, if it must be so, to meet that which I do not deserve'. ... But I must stop; I can no longer speak for tears; and tears are an argument which he would scorn for his defence. I entreat you, I adjure you, ye who sit here in judgment, that in your verdict you dare to give utterance to what I know you feel".

But the appeal was in vain, or rather, as far as we can ascertain, was never made,—at least in such powerful terms as those in which we read it. The great advocate was wholly unmanned by the scene before him, grew nervous, and broke down utterly in his speech for the defence. This presence of a military force under the orders of Pompey—the man in whom he saw, as he hoped, the good genius of Rome—overawed and disturbed him. The speech which we read is almost certainly not that which he delivered, but, as in the previous case of Verres, the finished and elaborate composition of his calmer hours. Milo was convicted by a large majority; in fact, there can be little doubt but that he was legally guilty, however political expediency might, in the eyes of Cicero and his party, have justified his deed. Cato sat on the jury, and did all he could to insure an acquittal, showing openly his voting-paper to his fellow jurors, with that scorn of the "liberty of silence" which he shared with Cicero.

Milo escaped any worse penalty by at once going into voluntary banishment at Marseilles. But he showed more practical philosophy than his advocate; for when he read the speech in his exile, he is said to have declared that "it was fortunate for him it was not spoken, or he should never have known the flavour of the red mullet of Marseilles".

The removal of Clodius was a deliverance upon which Cicero never ceased to congratulate himself. That "battle of Bovillae", as he terms it, became an era in his mental records of only less significance than his consulship. His own public life continued to be honourable and successful. He was elected into the College of Augurs, an honour which he had long coveted; and he was appointed to the government of Cilicia. This latter was a greatness literally "thrust upon him", and which he would gladly have declined, for it took him away in these eventful days from his beloved Rome; and to these grand opportunities for enriching himself he was, as has been said, honourably indifferent. The appointment to a distant province was, in fact, to a man like Cicero, little better than an honourable form of exile: it was like conferring on a man who had been, and might hope one day to be again, Prime Minister of England, the governor-generalship of Bombay.

One consolation he found on reaching his new government—that even in the farthest wilds of Cilicia there were people who had heard of "the consul who saved Rome". And again the astonished provincials marvelled at a governor who looked upon them as having rights of their own, and neither robbed nor ill-used them. He made a little war, too, upon some troublesome hill-tribes (intrusting the command chiefly to his brother Quintus, who had served with distinction under Caesar in Gaul), and gained a victory which his legions thought of sufficient importance to salute him with the honoured title of "imperator". Such military honours are especially flattering to men who, like Cicero, are naturally and essentially civilians; and to Cicero's vanity they were doubly delightful. Unluckily they led him to entertain hopes of the further glory of a triumph; and this, but for the revolution which followed, he might possibly have obtained. As it was, the only result was his parading about with him everywhere, from town to town, for months after his return, the lictors with laurelled fasces, which betokened that a triumph was claimed—a pompous incumbrance, which became, as he confessed, a grand subject for evil-disposed jesters, and a considerable inconvenience to himself.



CHAPTER V.

CICERO AND CAESAR.

The future master of Rome was now coming home, after nearly ten years' absence, at the head of the victorious legions with which he had struck terror into the Germans, overrun all Spain, left his mark upon Britain, and "pacified" Gaul. But Cicero, in common with most of the senatorial party, failed to see in Julius Caesar the great man that he was. He hesitated a little—Caesar would gladly have had his support, and made him fair offers; but when the Rubicon was crossed, he threw in his lot with Pompey. He was certainly influenced in part by personal attachment: Pompey seems to have exercised a degree of fascination over his weakness. He knew Pompey's indecision of character, and confessed that Caesar was "a prodigy of energy;" but though the former showed little liking for him, he clung to him nevertheless. He foreboded that, let the contest end which way it would, "the result would certainly be a despotism". He foresaw that Pompey's real designs were as dangerous to the liberties of Rome as any of which Caesar could be suspected. "Sullaturit animus", he says of him in one of his letters, coining a verb to put his idea strongly—"he wants to be like Sulla". And it was no more than the truth. He found out afterwards, as he tells Atticus, that proscription-lists of all Caesar's adherents had been prepared by Pompey and his partisans, and that his old friend's name figured as one of the victims. Only this makes it possible to forgive him for the little feeling that he showed when he heard of Pompey's own miserable end.

Cicero's conduct and motives at this eventful crisis have been discussed over and over again. It may be questioned whether at this date we are in any position to pass more than a very cautious and general judgment upon them. We want all the "state papers" and political correspondence of the day—not Cicero's letters only, but those of Caesar and Pompey and Lentulus, and much information besides that was never trusted to pen or paper—in order to lay down with any accuracy the course which a really unselfish patriot could have taken. But there seems little reason to accuse Cicero of double-dealing or trimming in the worst sense. His policy was unquestionably, from first to last, a policy of expedients. But expediency is, and must be more or less, the watchword of a statesman. If he would practically serve his country, he must do to some extent what Cicero professed to do—make friends with those in power. "Sic vivitur"—"So goes the world;" "Tempori serviendum est"—"We must bend to circumstances"—these are not the noblest mottoes, but they are acted upon continually by the most respectable men in public and private life, who do not open their hearts to their friends so unreservedly as Cicero does to his friend Atticus. It seemed to him a choice between Pompey and Caesar; and he probably hoped to be able so far to influence the former, as to preserve some shadow of a constitution for Rome. What he saw in those "dregs of a Republic",[1] as he himself calls it, that was worth preserving;—how any honest despotism could seem to him more to be dreaded than that prostituted liberty,—this is harder to comprehend. The remark of Abeken seems to go very near the truth—"His devotion to the commonwealth was grounded not so much upon his conviction of its actual merits, as of its fitness for the display of his own abilities".

[Footnote 1: "Faex Romuli".]

But that commonwealth was past saving even in name. Within two months of his having been declared a public enemy, all Italy was at Caesar's feet. Before another year was past, the battle of Pharsalia had been fought, and the great Pompey lay a headless corpse on the sea-shore in Egypt. It was suggested to Cicero, who had hitherto remained constant to the fortunes of his party, and was then in their camp at Dyrrachium, that he should take the chief command, but he had the sense to decline; and though men called him "traitor", and drew their swords upon him, he withdrew from a cause which he saw was lost, and returned to Italy, though not to Rome.

The meeting between him and Caesar, which came at last, set at rest any personal apprehensions from that quarter. Cicero does not appear to have made any dishonourable submission, and the conqueror's behaviour was nobly forgetful of the past. They gradually became on almost friendly terms. The orator paid the Dictator compliments in the Senate, and found that, in private society, his favourite jokes were repeated to the great man, and were highly appreciated. With such little successes he was obliged now to be content. He had again taken up his residence in Rome; but his political occupation was gone, and his active mind had leisure to employ itself in some of his literary works.

It was at this time that the blow fell upon him which prostrated him for the time, as his exile had done, and under which he claims our far more natural sympathy. His dear daughter Tullia—again married, but unhappily, and just divorced—died at his Tusculan villa. Their loving intercourse had undergone no change from her childhood, and his grief was for a while inconsolable. He shut himself up for thirty days. The letters of condolence from well-meaning friends were to him—as they so often are—as the speeches of the three comforters to Job. He turned in vain, as he pathetically says, to philosophy for consolation.

It was at this time that he wrote two of his philosophical treatises, known to us as 'The True Ends of Life',[1] and the 'Tusculan Disputations', of which more will be said hereafter. In this latter, which he named from his favourite country-house, he addressed himself to the subjects which suited best with his own sorrowful mood under his recent bereavement. How men might learn to shake off the terrors of death—nay, to look upon it rather as a release from pain and evil; how pain, mental and bodily, may best be borne; how we may moderate our passions; and, lastly, whether the practice of virtue be not all-sufficient for our happiness.

[Footnote 1: 'De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum'—a title hard to translate.]

A philosopher does not always find in himself a ready pupil. It was hardly so in Cicero's case. His arguments were incontrovertible; but he found them fail him sadly in their practical application to life. He never could shake off from himself that dread of death which he felt in a degree unusually vivid for a Roman. He sought his own happiness afterwards, as he had done before, rather in the exciting struggle of public life than in the special cultivation of any form of virtue; and he did not even find the remedy for his present domestic sorrow in any of those general moral reflections which philosophy, Christian as well as pagan, is so ready to produce upon such occasions; which are all so undeniable, and all so utterly unendurable to the mourner.

Cicero found his consolation, or that diversion of thought which so mercifully serves the purpose of consolation, where most men of active minds like his seek for it and find it—in hard work. The literary effort of writing and completing the works which have been just mentioned probably did more to soothe his mind than all the arguments which they contained. He resumed his practice as an advocate so far as to plead a cause before Caesar, now ruling as Dictator at Rome—the last cause, as events happened, that he was ever to plead. It was a cause of no great importance—a defence of Deiotarus, titulary king of Armenia, who was accused of having entertained designs against the life of Caesar while entertaining him as a guest in his palace. The Dictator reserved his judgment until he should have made his campaign against the Parthians. That more convenient season never came: for before the spring campaign could open, the fatal "Ides of March" cut short Caesar's triumphs and his life.



CHAPTER VI.

CICERO AND ANTONY.

It remained for Cicero yet to take a part in one more great national struggle—the last for Rome and for himself. No doubt there was some grandeur in the cause which he once more so vigorously espoused—the recovery of the liberties of Rome. But all the thunders of Cicero's eloquence, and all the admiration of modern historians and poets, fail to enlist our hearty sympathies with the assassins of Caesar. That "consecration of the dagger" to the cause of liberty has been the fruitful parent of too much evil ever since to make its use anything but hateful. That Cicero was among the actual conspirators is probably not true, though his enemies strongly asserted it. But at least he gloried in the deed when done, and was eager to claim all the honours of a tyrannicide. Nay, he went farther than the actual conspirators, in words at least; it is curious to find him so careful to disclaim complicity in the act. "Would that you had invited me to that banquet on the Ides of March! there would then have been no leavings from the feast",—he writes to Cassius. He would have had their daggers turned on Antony, at all events, as well as on Caesar. He wishes that "the gods may damn Caesar after he is dead;" professing on this occasion a belief in a future retribution, on which at other times he was sceptical. It is but right to remember all this, when the popular tide turned, and he himself came to be denounced to political vengeance. The levity with which he continually speaks of the assassination of Caesar—a man who had never treated him, at any rate, with anything but a noble forbearance—is a blot on Cicero's character which his warmest apologists admit.

The bloody deed in the Capitol was done—a deed which was to turn out almost what Goethe called it—"the most absurd that ever was committed". The great Dictator who lay there alone, a "bleeding piece of earth", deserted by the very men who had sought of late to crown him, was perhaps Rome's fittest master; certainly not the worst of the many with whom a personal ambition took the place of principle. Three slaves took up the dead body of their master, and carried it home to his house. Poor wretches! they knew nothing about liberty or the constitution; they had little to hope, and probably little to fear; they had only a humble duty to do, and did it. But when we read of them, and of that freedman who, not long before, sat by the dead body of Pompey till he could scrape together wreck from the shore to light some sort of poor funeral-pile, we return with a shudder of disgust to those "noble Romans" who occupy at this time the foreground of history.

Caesar had been removed, but it is plain that Brutus and Cassius and their party had neither the ability nor the energy to make any real use of their bloody triumph. Cicero soon lost all hope of seeing in them the liberators of his country, or of being able to guide himself the revolution which he hoped he had seen begun. "We have been freed", he writes to Atticus, "but we are not free". "We have struck down the tyrant, but the tyranny survives". Antony, in fact, had taken the place of Caesar as master of Rome—a change in all respects for the worse. He had surrounded himself with guards; had obtained authority from the Senate to carry out all decrees and orders left by the late Dictator; and when he could not find, amongst Caesar's memoranda, materials to serve his purpose, he did not hesitate to forge them. Cicero had no power, and might be in personal danger, for Antony knew his sentiments as to state matters generally, and more particularly towards himself. Rome was no longer any place for him, and he soon left it—this time a voluntary exile. He wandered from place to place, and tried as before to find interest and consolation in philosophy. It was now that he wrote his charming essays on 'Friendship' and on 'Old Age', and completed his work 'On the Nature of the Gods', and that on 'Divination'. His treatise 'De Officiis' (a kind of pagan 'Whole Duty of Man') is also of this date, as well as some smaller philosophical works which have been lost. He professed himself hopeless of his country's future, and disgusted with political life, and spoke of going to end his days at Athens.

But, as before and always, his heart was in the Forum at Rome. Political life was really the only atmosphere in which he felt himself breathe vigorously. Unquestionably he had also an earnest patriotism, which would have drawn him back to his country's side at any time when he believed that she had need of his help. He was told that he was needed there now; that there was a prospect of matters going better for the cause of liberty; that Antony was coming to terms of some kind with the party of Brutus,—and he returned.

For a short while these latter days brought with them a gleam of triumph almost as bright as that which had marked the overthrow of Catiline's conspiracy. Again, on his arrival at Rome, crowds rushed to meet him with compliments and congratulations, as they had done some thirteen years before. And in so far as his last days were spent in resisting to the utmost the basest of all Rome's bad men, they were to him greater than any triumph. Thenceforth it was a fight to the death between him and Antony; so long as Antony lived, there could be no liberty for Rome. Cicero left it to his enemy to make the first attack. It soon came. Two days after his return, Antony spoke vehemently in the Senate against him, on the occasion of moving a resolution to the effect that divine honours should be paid to Caesar. Cicero had purposely stayed away, pleading fatigue after his journey; really, because such a proposition was odious to him. Antony denounced him as a coward and a traitor, and threatened to send men to pull down his house about his head—that house which had once before been pulled down, and rebuilt for him by his remorseful fellow-citizens. Cicero went down to the Senate the following day, and there delivered a well-prepared speech, the first of those fourteen which are known to us as his 'Philippics'—a name which he seems first to have given to them in jest, in remembrance of those which his favourite model Demosthenes had delivered at Athens against Philip of Macedon. He defended his own conduct, reviewed in strong but moderate terms the whole policy of Antony, and warned him—still ostensibly as a friend—against the fate of Caesar. The speaker was not unconscious what his own might possibly be.

"I have already, senators, reaped fruit enough from my return home, in that I have had the opportunity to speak words which, whatever may betide, will remain in evidence of my constancy in my duty, and you have listened to me with much kindness and attention. And this privilege I will use so often as I may without peril to you and to myself; when I cannot, I will be careful of myself, not so much for my own sake as for the sake of my country. For me, the life that I have lived seems already well-nigh long enough, whether I look at my years or my honours; what little span may yet be added to it should be your gain and the state's far more than my own".

Antony was not in the house when Cicero spoke; he had gone down to his villa at Tibur. There he remained for a fortnight, brooding over his reply—taking lessons, it was said, from professors in the art of rhetorical self-defence. At last he came to Rome and answered his opponent. His speech has not reached us; but we know that it contained the old charges of having put Roman citizens to death without trial in the case of the abettors of Catiline, and of having instigated Milo to the assassination of Clodias. Antony added a new charge—that of complicity with the murderers of Caesar. Above all, he laughed at Cicero's old attempts as a poet; a mode of attack which, if not so alarming, was at least as irritating as the rest. Cicero was not present—he dreaded personal violence; for Antony, like Pompey at the trial of Milo, had planted an armed guard of his own men outside and inside the Senate-house. Before Cicero had nerved himself to reply, Antony had left Rome to put himself at the head of his legions, and the two never met again.

The reply, when it came, was the terrible second Philippic; never spoken, however, but only handed about in manuscript to admiring friends. There is little doubt, as Mr. Long observes, that Antony had also some friend kind enough to send him a copy; and if we may trust the Roman poet Juvenal, who is at least as likely to have been well informed upon the subject as any modern historian, this composition eventually cost the orator his life. It is not difficult to understand the bitter vindictiveness of Antony. Cicero had been not merely a political opponent; he had attacked his private character (which presented abundant grounds for such attack) with all the venom of his eloquence. He had said, indeed, in the first of these powerful orations, that he had never taken this line.

"If I have abused his private life and character, I have no right to complain if he is my enemy: but if I have only followed my usual custom, which I have ever maintained in public life,—I mean, if I have only spoken my opinion on public questions freely,—then, in the first place, I protest against his being angry with me at all: or, if this be too much to expect, I demand that he should be angry with me only as with a fellow-citizen".

If there had been any sort of reticence on this point hitherto on the part of Cicero, he made up for it in this second speech. Nothing can equal its bitter personality, except perhaps its rhetorical power. He begins the attack by declaring that he will not tell all he knows—"in order that, if we have to do battle again hereafter, I may come always fresh-armed to the attack; an advantage which the multiplicity of that man's crimes and vices gives me in large measure". Then he proceeds:

"Would you like us, then, to examine into your course of life from boyhood? I conclude you would. Do you remember that before you put on the robe of manhood, you were a bankrupt? That was my father's fault, you will say. I grant it—it is a defence that speaks volumes for your feelings as a son. It was your own shamelessness, however, that made you take your seat in the stalls of honourable knights, whereas by law there is a fixed place for bankrupts, even when they have become so by fortune's fault, and not their own. You put on the robe which was to mark your manhood,—on your person it became the flaunting gear of a harlot".

It is not desirable to follow the orator through some of his accusations; when he had to lash a man whom he held to be a criminal, he did not much care where or how he struck. He even breaks off himself—after saying a good deal.

"There are some things, which even a decent enemy hesitates to speak of.... Mark, then, his subsequent course of life, which I will trace as rapidly as I can. For though these things are better known to you than even to me, yet I ask you to hear me with attention—as indeed you do; for it is right that in such cases men's feelings should be roused not merely by the knowledge of the facts, but by calling them back to their remembrance; though we must dash at once, I believe, into the middle of his history, lest we should be too long in getting to the end".

The peroration is noble and dignified, in the orator's best style. He still supposes himself addressing his enemy. He has warned Antony that Caesar's fate may be his: and he is not unconscious of the peril in which his own life may stand.

"But do you look to yourself—I will tell you how it stands with me. I defended the Commonwealth when I was young—I will not desert it now I am old. I despised the swords of Catiline—I am not likely to tremble before yours. Nay, I shall lay my life down gladly, if the liberty of Rome can be secured by my death, so that this suffering nation may at last bring to the birth that which it his long been breeding.[1] If, twenty years ago, I declared in this house that death could never be said to have come before its time to a man who had been consul of Rome, with how much more truth, at my age, may I say it now! To me indeed, gentlemen of the Senate, death may well be a thing to be even desired, when I have done what I have done and reaped the honours I have reaped. Only two wishes I have,—the one, that at my death I may leave the Roman people free—the immortal gods can give me no greater boon than this; the other, that every citizen may meet with such reward as his conduct towards the state may have deserved".

[Footnote 1: I.e., the making away with Antony.]

The publication of this unspoken speech raised for the time an enthusiasm against Antony, whom Cicero now openly declared to be an enemy to the state. He hurled against him Philippic after Philippic. The appeal at the end of that which comes the sixth in order is eloquent enough.

"The time is come at last, fellow-citizens; somewhat too late, indeed, for the dignity of the people of Rome, but at least the crisis is so ripe, that it cannot now be deferred an instant longer. We have had one calamity sent upon us, as I may say, by fate, which we bore with—in such sort as it might be borne. If another befalls us now, it will be one of our own choosing. That this Roman people should serve any master, when the gods above have willed us to be the masters of the world, is a crime in the sight of heaven. The question hangs now on its last issue. The struggle is for our liberties. You must either conquer, Romans,—and this, assuredly, with such patriotism and such unanimity as I see here, you must do, or you must endure anything and everything rather than be slaves. Other nations may endure the yoke of slavery, but the birthright of the people of Rome is liberty".

Antony had left Rome, and thrown himself, like Catiline, into the arms of his soldiers, in his province of Cisalpine Gaul. There he maintained himself in defiance of the Senate, who at last, urged by Cicero, declared him a public enemy. Caesar Octavianus (great-nephew of Julius) offered his services to the state, and with some hesitation they were accepted. The last struggle was begun. Intelligence soon arrived that Antony had been defeated at Mutina by the two last consuls of the Republic, Hirtius and Pansa. The news was dashed, indeed, afterwards by the further announcement that both consuls had died of their wounds. But it was in the height of the first exultation that Cicero addressed to the Senate his fourteenth Philippic—the last oration which he was ever to make. For the moment, he found himself once more the foremost man at Rome. Crowds of roaring patriots had surrounded his house that morning, escorted him in triumph up to the Capitol, and back to his own house, as they had done in the days of his early glory. Young Caesar, who had paid him much personal deference, was professing himself a patriot; the Commonwealth was safe again—and Cicero almost thought that he again himself had saved it.

But Rome now belonged to those who had the legions. It had come to that: and when Antony succeeded in joining interests with Octavianus (afterwards miscalled Augustus)—"the boy", as both Cicero and Antony called him—a boy in years as yet, but premature in craft and falsehood—who had come "to claim his inheritance", and succeeded in rousing in the old veterans of his uncle the desire to take vengeance a on his murderers, the fate of the Republic and of Cicero was sealed.

It was on a little eyot formed by the river Reno, near Bologna, that Antony, young Caesar, and Lepidus (the nominal third in what is known as the Second Triumvirate) met to arrange among themselves the division of power, and what they held to be necessary, to the securing it for the future—the proscription of their several enemies. No private affections or interests were to be allowed to interfere with this merciless arrangement. If Lepidus would give up his brother, Antony would surrender an obnoxious uncle. Octavianus made a cheaper sacrifice in Cicero, whom Antony, we may be sure, with those terrible Philippics ringing in his ears, demanded with an eager vengeance. All was soon amicably settled; the proscription-lists were made out, and the Triumvirate occupied Rome.

Cicero and his brother—whose name was known to be also on the fatal roll—heard of it while they were together at the Tusculan villa. Both took immediate measures to escape. But Quintus had to return to Rome to get money for their flight, and, as it would appear, to fetch his son. The emissaries of the Triumvirate were sent to search the house: the father had hid himself, but the son was seized, and refusing to give any information, was put to the torture. His father heard his cries of agony, came forth from his hiding-place, and asked only to be put to death first. The son in his turn made the same request, and the assassins were so far merciful that they killed both at once.

Cicero himself might yet have escaped, but for some thing of his old indecision. He had gone on board a small vessel with the intention of joining Brutus in Macedonia, when he suddenly changed his mind, and insisted on being put on shore again. He wandered about, half-resolving (for the third) time on suicide. He would go to Rome, stab himself on the altar-hearth in young Caesar's house, and call down the vengeance of heaven upon the traitor. The accounts of these last hours of his life are, unfortunately, somewhat contradictory, and none of the authorities to be entirely depended on; Abeken has made a careful attempt to harmonise them, which it will be best here to follow.

Urged by the prayers of his slaves, the faithful adherents of a kind master, he once more embarked, and once more (Appian says, from sea-sickness, which he never could endure) landed near Caieta, where be had a seaside villa. Either there, or, as other accounts say, at his house at Formiae, he laid himself down to pass the night, and wait for death. "Let me die", said he, "in my own country, which I have so often saved". But again the faithful slaves aroused him, forced him into a litter, and hurried him down through the woods to the sea-shore—for the assassins were in hot pursuit of him. They found his house shut up; but some traitor showed them a short cut by which to overtake the fugitive. As he lay reading (it is said), even during these anxious moments, a play of his favourite Euripides, every line of whom he used to declare contained some maxim worth remembering, he heard their steps approaching, and ordered the litter to be set down. He looked out, and recognised at the head of the party an officer named Laenas, whom he had once successfully defended on a capital charge; but he saw no gratitude or mercy in the face, though there were others of the band who covered their eyes for pity, when they saw the dishevelled grey hair and pale worn features of the great Roman (he was within a month of sixty-four). He turned from Laenas to the centurion, one Herennius, and said, "Strike, old soldier, if you understand your trade!" At the third blow—by one or other of those officers, for both claimed the evil honour—his head was severed. They carried it straight to Antony, where he sat on the seat of justice in the Forum, and demanded the offered reward. The triumvir, in his joy, paid it some ten times over. He sent the bloody trophy to his wife; and the Roman Jezebel spat in the dead face, and ran her bodkin through the tongue which had spoken those bold and bitter truths against her false husband. The great orator fulfilled, almost in the very letter, the words which, treating of the liberty of the pleader, he had put into the mouth of Crassus—"You must cut out this tongue, if you would check my free speech: nay, even then, my very breathing should protest against your lust for power". The head, by Antony's order, was then nailed upon the Rostra, to speak there, more eloquently than ever the living lips had spoken, of the dead liberty of Rome.



CHAPTER VII.

CHARACTER AS A POLITICIAN AND AN ORATOR.

Cicero shared very largely in the feeling which is common to all men of ambition and energy,—a desire to stand well not only with their own generation, but with posterity. It is a feeling natural to every man who knows that his name and acts must necessarily become historical. If it is more than usually patent in Cicero's case, it is only because in his letters to Atticus we have more than usual access to the inmost heart of the writer; for surely such a thoroughly confidential correspondence has never been published before or since. "What will history say of me six hundred years hence?" he asks, unbosoming himself in this sort to his friend. More than thrice the six hundred years have passed, and, in Cicero's case, history has hardly yet made up its mind. He has been lauded and abused, from his own times down to the present, in terms as extravagant as are to be found in the most passionate of his own orations; both his accusers and his champions have caught the trick of his rhetorical exaggeration more easily than his eloquence. Modern German critics like Drumann and Mommsen have attacked him with hardly less bitterness, though with more decency, than the historian Dio Cassius, who lived so near his own times. Bishop Middleton, on the other hand, in those pleasant and comprehensive volumes which are still to this day the great storehouse of materials for Cicero's biography, is as blind to his faults as though he were himself delivering a panegyric in the Rostra at Rome. Perhaps it is the partiality of the learned bishop's view which has produced a reaction in the minds of sceptical German scholars, and of some modern writers of our own. It is impossible not to sympathise in some degree with that Athenian who was tired of always hearing Aristides extolled as "the Just;" and there was certainly a strong temptation to critics to pick holes in a man's character who was perpetually, during his lifetime and for eighteen centuries after his death, having a trumpet sounded before him to announce him as the prince of patriots as well as philosophers; worthy indeed, as Erasmus thought, to be canonised as a saint of the Catholic Church, but for the single drawback of his not having been a Christian.

On one point some of his eulogists seem manifestly unfair. They say that the circumstances under which we form our judgment of the man are exceptional in this—that we happen to possess in his case all this mass of private and confidential letters (there are nearly eight hundred of his own which have come down to us), giving us an insight into his private motives, his secret jealousies, and hopes, and fears, and ambitions, of which in the case of other men we have no such revelation. It is quite true; but his advocates forget that it is from the very same pages which reveal his weaknesses, that they draw their real knowledge of many of those characteristics which they most admire—his sincere love for his country, his kindness of heart, his amiability in all his domestic relations. It is true that we cannot look into the private letters of Caesar, or Pompey, or Brutus, as we can into Cicero's; but it is not so certain that if we could, our estimate of their characters would be lowered. We might discover, in their cases as in his, many traces of what seems insincerity, timidity, a desire to sail with the stream; we might find that the views which they expressed in public were not always those which they entertained in private; but we might also find an inner current of kindness, and benevolence, and tenderness of heart, for which the world gives them little credit. One enthusiastic advocate, Wieland, goes so far as to wish that this kind of evidence could, in the case of such a man as Cicero, have been "cooked", to use a modern phrase: that we could have had only a judicious selection from this too truthful mass, of correspondence; that his secretary, Tiro, or some judicious friend, had destroyed the whole packet of letters in which the great Roman bemoaned himself, during his exile from Rome, to his wife, to his brother, and to Atticus. The partisan method of writing history, though often practised, has seldom been so boldly professed.

But it cannot be denied, that if we know too much of Cicero to judge him merely by his public life, as we are obliged to do with so many heroes of history, we also know far too little of those stormy times in which he lived, to pronounce too strongly upon his behaviour in such difficult circumstances. The true relations between the various parties at Rome, as we have tried to sketch them, are confessedly puzzling even to the careful student. And without a thorough understanding of these, it is impossible to decide, with any hope of fairness, upon Cicero's conduct as a patriot and a politician. His character was full of conflicting elements, like the times in which he lived, and was necessarily in a great degree moulded by them. The egotism which shows itself so plainly alike in his public speeches and in his private writings, more than once made him personal enemies, and brought him into trouble, though it was combined with great kindness of heart and consideration for others. He saw the right clearly, and desired to follow it, but his good intentions were too often frustrated by a want of firmness and decision. His desire to keep well with men of all parties, so long as it seemed possible (and this not so much from the desire of self-aggrandisement, as from a hope through their aid to serve the commonwealth) laid him open on more than one occasion to the charge of insincerity.

There is one comprehensive quality which may be said to lave been wanting in his nature, which clouded his many excellences, led him continually into false positions, and even in his delightful letters excites in the reader, from time to time, an impatient feeling of contempt. He wanted manliness. It was a quality which was fast dying out, in his day, among even the best of the luxurious and corrupt aristocracy of Rome. It was perhaps but little missed in his character by those of his contemporaries who knew and loved him best. But without that quality, to an English mind, it is hard to recognise in any man, however brilliant and amiable, the true philosopher or hero.

The views which this great Roman politician held upon the vexed question of the ballot did not differ materially from those of his worthy grandfather before-mentioned.[1] The ballot was popular at Rome,—for many reasons, some of them not the most creditable to the characters of the voters; and because it was popular, Cicero speaks of it occasionally, in his forensic speeches, with a cautious praise; but of his real estimate of it there can be no kind of doubt. "I am of the same opinion now", he writes to his brother, "that ever I was; there is nothing like the open suffrage of the lips". So in one of his speeches, he uses even stronger language: "The ballot", he says, "enables men to open their faces, and to cover up their thoughts; it gives them licence to promise whatever they are asked, and at the same time to do whatever they please". Mr. Grote once quoted a phrase of Cicero's, applied to the voting-papers of his day, as a testimony in favour of this mode of secret suffrage—grand words, and wholly untranslatable into anything like corresponding English—"Tabella vindex tacitae libertatis"—"the tablet which secures the liberty of silence". But knowing so well as Cicero did what was the ordinary character of Roman jurors and Roman voters, and how often this "liberty of silence" was a liberty to take a bribe and to vote the other way, one can almost fancy that we see upon his lips, as he utters the sounding phrase, that playful curve of irony which is said to have been their characteristic expression.[2] Mr. Grote forgot, too, as was well pointed out by a writer in the 'Quarterly Review',[3] that in the very next sentence the orator is proud to boast that he himself was not so elected to office, but "by the living voices" of his fellow-citizens.

[Footnote 1: See p. 3.]

[Footnote 2: No bust, coin, or gem is known which bears any genuine likeness of Cicero. There are several existing which purport to be such, but all are more or less apocryphal.]

[Footnote 3: Quart. Rev., lxi. 522.]

The character of his eloquence may be understood in some degree by the few extracts which have been given from his public speeches; always remembering how many of its charms are necessarily lost by losing the actual language in which his thoughts were clothed. We have lost perhaps nearly as much in another way, in that we can only read the great orator instead of listening to him. Yet it is possible, after all, that this loss to us is not so great as it might seem. Some of his best speeches, as we know—those, for instance, against Verres and in defence of Milo—were written in the closet, and never spoken at all; and most of the others were reshaped and polished for publication. Nor is it certain that his declamation, which some of his Roman rivals found fault with as savouring too much of the florid Oriental type, would have been agreeable to our colder English taste. He looked upon gesture and action as essential elements of the orator's power, and had studied them carefully from the artists of the theatre. There can be no doubt that we have his own views on this point in the words which he has put into the mouth of his "Brutus", in the treatise on oratory which bears that name. He protests against the "Attic coldness" of style which, he says, would soon empty the benches of their occupants. He would have the action and bearing of the speaker to be such that even the distant spectator, too far off to hear, should "know that there was a Roscius on the stage". He would have found a French audience in this respect more sympathetic than an English one.[1] His own highly nervous temperament would certainly tend to excited action. The speaker, who, as we are told, "shuddered visibly over his whole body when he first began to speak", was almost sure, as he warmed to his work, to throw himself into it with a passionate energy.

[Footnote 1: Our speakers certainly fall into the other extreme. The British orator's style of gesticulation may still be recognised, mutatis mutandis, in Addison's humorous sketch of a century ago: "You may see many a smart rhetorician turning his hat in his hands, moulding it into several different cocks, examining sometimes the lining and sometimes the button, during the whole course of his harangue. A deaf man would think that he was cheapening a beaver, when he is talking perhaps of the fate of the British nation".]

He has put on record his own ideas of the qualifications and the duties of the public speaker, whether in the Senate or at the bar, in three continuous treatises on the subject, entitled respectively, 'On Oratory', 'Brutus', and 'The Orator', as well as in some other works of which we have only fragments remaining. With the first of these works, which he inscribed to his brother, he was himself exceedingly well satisfied, and it perhaps remains still the ablest, as it was the first, attempt to reduce eloquence to a science. The second is a critical sketch of the great orators of Rome: and in the third we have Cicero's view of what the perfect orator should be. His ideal is a high one, and a true one; that he should not be the mere rhetorician, any more than the mere technical lawyer or keen partisan, but the man of perfect education and perfect taste, who can speak on all subjects, out of the fulness of his mind, "with variety and copiousness".

Although, as has been already said, he appears to have attached but little value to a knowledge of the technicalities of law, in other respects his preparation for his work was of the most careful kind; if we may assume, as we probably may, that it is his own experience which, in his treatise on Oratory, he puts into the mouth of Marcus Antonius, one of his greatest predecessors at the Roman bar.

"It is my habit to have every client explain to me personally his own case; to allow no one else to be present, that so he may speak more freely. Then I take the opponent's side, while I make him plead his own cause, and bring forward whatever arguments he can think of. Then, when he is gone, I take upon myself, with as much impartiality as I can, three different characters—my own, my opponent's, and that of the jury. Whatever point seems likely to help the case rather than injure it, this I decide must be brought forward; when I see that anything is likely to do more harm than good, I reject and throw it aside altogether. So I gain this,—that I think over first what I mean to say, and speak afterwards; while a good many pleaders, relying on their abilities, try to do both at once".[1]

[Footnote 1: De Oratore, II. 24, 72.]

He reads a useful lesson to young and zealous advocates in the same treatise—that sometimes it may be wise not to touch at all in reply upon a point which makes against your client, and to which you have no real answer; and that it is even more important to say nothing which may injure your case, than to omit something which might possibly serve it. A maxim which some modern barristers (and some preachers also) might do well to bear in mind.

Yet he did not scorn to use what may almost be called the tricks of his art, if he thought they would help to secure him a verdict. The outward and visible appeal to the feelings seems to have been as effective in the Roman forum as with a British jury. Cicero would have his client stand by his side dressed in mourning, with hair dishevelled, and in tears, when he meant to make a pathetic appeal to the compassion of the jurors; or a family group would be arranged, as circumstances allowed,—the wife and children, the mother and sisters, or the aged father, if presentable, would be introduced in open court to create a sensation at the right moment. He had tears apparently as ready at his command as an eloquent and well-known English Attorney-General. Nay, the tears seem to have been marked down, as it were, upon his brief. "My feelings prevent my saying more", he declares in his defence of Publius Sylla. "I weep while I make the appeal"—"I cannot go on for tears"—he repeats towards the close of that fine oration in behalf of Milo—the speech that never was spoken. Such phrases remind us of the story told of a French preacher, whose manuscripts were found to have marginal stage directions: "Here take out your handkerchief;"—"here cry—if possible". But such were held to be the legitimate adjuncts of Roman oratory, and it is quite possible to conceive that the advocate, like more than one modern tragedian who could be named, entered so thoroughly into the spirit of the part that the tears flowed quite naturally.

A far less legitimate weapon of oratory—offensive and not defensive—was the bitter and coarse personality in which he so frequently indulged. Its use was held perfectly lawful in the Roman forum, whether in political debate or in judicial pleadings, and it was sure to be highly relished by a mixed audience. There is no reason to suppose that Cicero had recourse to it in any unusual degree; but employ it he did, and most unscrupulously. It was not only private character that he attacked, as in the case of Antony and Clodius, but even personal defects or peculiarities were made the subject of bitter ridicule. He did not hesitate to season his harangue by a sarcasm on the cast in the prosecutor's eye, or the wen on the defendant's neck, and to direct the attention of the court to these points, as though they were corroborative evidence of a moral deformity. The most conspicuous instance of this practice of his is in the invective which he launched in the Senate against Piso, who had made a speech reflecting upon him. Referring to Cicero's exile, he had made that sore subject doubly sore by declaring that it was not Cicero's unpopularity, so much as his unfortunate propensity to bad verse, which had been the cause of it. A jingling line of his to the effect that

"The gown wins grander triumphs than the sword"[1]

had been thought to be pointed against the recent victories of Pompey, and to have provoked him to use his influence to get rid of the author. But this annotation of Cicero's poetry had not been Piso's only offence. He had been consul at the time of the exile, and had given vent, it may be remembered, to the witticism that the "saviour of Rome" might save the city a second time by his absence. Cicero was not the man to forget it. The beginning of his attack on Piso is lost, but there is quite enough remaining. Piso was of a swarthy complexion, approaching probably to the negro type. "Beast"—is the term by which Cicero addresses him. "Beast! there is no mistaking the evidence of that slave-like hue, those bristly cheeks, those discoloured fangs. Your eyes, your brows, your face, your whole aspect, are the tacit index to your soul".[2]

[Footnote 1: "Cedant arma togae, concedat laurea linguae".]

[Footnote 2: Such flowers of eloquence are not encouraged at the modern bar. But they were common enough, even in the English law-courts, in former times. Mr. Attorney-General Coke's language to Raleigh at his trial—"Thou viper!"—comes quite up to Cicero's. Perhaps the Irish House of Parliament, while it existed, furnished the choicest modern specimens of this style of oratory. Mr. O'Flanagan, in his 'Lives of the Lord Chancellors of Ireland', tells us that a member for Galway, attacking an opponent when he knew that his sister was present during the debate, denounced the whole family—"from the toothless old hag that is now grinning in the gallery, to the white-livered scoundrel that is shivering on the floor".]

It is not possible, within the compass of these pages, to give even the briefest account of more than a few of the many causes (they are twenty-four in number) in which the speeches made by Cicero, either for the prosecution or the defence, have been preserved to us. Some of them have more attraction for the English reader than others, either from the facts of the case being more interesting or more easily understood, or from their affording more opportunity for the display of the speaker's powers.

Mr. Fox had an intense admiration for the speech in defence of Caelius. The opinion of one who was no mean orator himself, on his great Roman predecessor, may be worth quoting:

"Argumentative contention is not what he excels in; and he is never, I think, so happy as when he has an opportunity of exhibiting a mixture of philosophy and pleasantry, and especially when he can interpose anecdotes and references to the authority of the eminent characters in the history of his own country. No man appears, indeed, to have had such a real respect for authority as he; and therefore when he speaks on that subject he is always natural and earnest".[1]

[Footnote 1: Letter to G. Wakefield—Correspondence, p. 35.]

There is anecdote and pleasantry enough in this particular oration; but the scandals of Roman society of that day, into which the defence of Caelius was obliged to enter, are not the most edifying subject for any readers. Caelius was a young man of "equestrian" rank, who had been a kind of ward of Cicero's, and must have given him a good deal of trouble by his profligate habits, if the guardianship was anything more than nominal. But in this particular case the accusation brought against him—of trying to murder an ambassador from Egypt by means of hired assassins, and then to poison the lady who had lent him the money to bribe them with—was probably untrue. Clodia, the lady in question, was the worthy sister of the notorious Clodius, and bore as evil a reputation as it was possible for a woman to bear in the corrupt society of Rome—which is saying a great deal. She is the real mover in the case, though another enemy of Caelius, the son of a man whom he had himself brought to trial for bribery, was the ostensible prosecutor. Cicero, therefore, throughout the whole of his speech, aims the bitter shafts of his wit and eloquence at Clodia. His brilliant invectives against this lady, who was, as he pointedly said, "not only noble but notorious", are not desirable to quote. But the opening of the speech is in the advocate's best style. The trial, it seems, took place on a public holiday, when it was not usual to take any cause unless it were of pressing importance.

"If any spectator be here present, gentlemen, who knows nothing of our laws, our courts of justice, or our national customs, he will not fail to wonder what can be the atrocious nature of this case, that on a day of national festival and public holiday like this, when all other business in the Forum is suspended, this single trial should be going on; and he will entertain no doubt but that the accused is charged with a crime of such enormity, that if it were not at once taken cognisance of, the constitution itself would be in peril. And if he heard that there was a law which enjoined that in the case of seditious and disloyal citizens who should take up arms to attack the Senate-house, or use violence against the magistrates, or levy war against the commonwealth, inquisition into the matter should be made at once, on the very day;—he would not find fault with such a law: he would only ask the nature of the charge. But when he heard that it was no such atrocious crime, no treasonable attempt, no violent outrage, which formed the subject of this trial, but that a young man of brilliant abilities, hard-working in public life, and of popular character, was here accused by the son of a man whom he had himself once prosecuted, and was still prosecuting, and that all a bad woman's wealth and influence was being used against him,—he might take no exception to the filial zeal of Atratinus; but he would surely say that woman's infamous revenge should be baffled and punished.... I can excuse Atratinus; as to the other parties, they deserve neither excuse nor forbearance".

It was a strange story, the case for the prosecution, especially as regarded the alleged attempt to poison Clodia. The poison was given to a friend of Caelius, he was to give it to some slaves of Clodia whom he was to meet at certain baths frequented by her, and they were in some way to administer it. But the slaves betrayed the secret; and the lady employed certain gay and profligate young men, who were hangers-on of her own, to conceal themselves somewhere in the baths, and pounce upon Caelius's emissary with the poison in his possession. But this scheme was said to have failed. Clodia's detectives had rushed from their place of concealment too soon, and the bearer of the poison escaped. The counsel for the prisoner makes a great point of this.

"Why, 'tis the catastrophe of a stage-play—nay, of a burlesque; when no more artistic solution of the plot can be invented, the hero escapes, the bell rings, and—the curtain falls! For I ask why, when Licinius was there trembling, hesitating, retreating, trying to escape—why that lady's body-guard let him go out of their hands? Were they afraid lest, so many against one, such stout champions against a single helpless man, frightened as he was and fierce as they were, they could not master him? I should like exceedingly to see them, those curled and scented youths, the bosom-friends of this rich and noble lady; those stout men-at-arms who were posted by their she-captain in this ambuscade in the baths. And I should like to ask them how they hid themselves, and where? A bath?—why, it must rather have been a Trojan horse, which bore within its womb this band of invincible heroes who went to war for a woman! I would make them answer this question,—why they, being so many and so brave, did not either seize this slight stripling, whom you see before you, where he stood, or overtake him when he fled? They will hardly be able to explain themselves, I fancy, if they get into that witness-box, however clever and witty they may be at the banquet,—nay, even eloquent occasionally, no doubt, over their wine. But the air of a court of justice is somewhat different from that of the banquet-hall; the benches of this court are not like the couches of a supper-table; the array of this jury presents a different spectacle from a company of revellers; nay, the broad glare of sunshine is harder to face than the glitter of the lamps. If they venture into it, I shall have to strip them of their pretty conceits and fools' gear. But, if they will be ruled by me, they will betake themselves to another trade, win favour in another quarter, flaunt themselves elsewhere than in this court. Let them carry their brave looks to their lady there; let them lord it at her expense, cling to her, lie at her feet, be her slaves; only let them make no attempt upon the life and honour of an innocent man".

The satellites of Clodia could scarcely have felt comfortable under this withering fire of sarcasm. The speaker concluded with an apology—much required—for his client's faults, as those of a young man, and a promise on his behalf—on the faith of an advocate—that he would behave better for the future. He wound up the whole with a point of sensational rhetoric which was common, as has been said, to the Roman bar as to our own—an appeal to the jurymen as fathers. He pointed to the aged father of the defendant, leaning in the most approved attitude upon the shoulder of his son. Either this, or the want of evidence, or the eloquence of the pleader, had its due effect. Caelius was triumphantly acquitted; and it is a proof that the young man was not wholly graceless, that he rose afterwards to high public office, and never forgot his obligations to his eloquent counsel, to whom he continued a stanch friend. He must have had good abilities, for he was honoured with frequent letters from Cicero when the latter was governor of Cilicia. He kept up some of his extravagant tastes; for when he was Aedile (which involved the taking upon him the expense of certain gladiatorial and wild-beast exhibitions), he wrote to beg his friend to send him out of his province some panthers for his show. Cicero complied with the request, and took the opportunity, so characteristic of him, of lauding his own administration of Cilicia, and making a kind of pun at the same time. "I have given orders to the hunters to see about the panthers; but panthers are very scarce, and the few there are complain, people say, that in the whole province there are no traps laid for anybody but for them". Catching and skinning the unfortunate provincials, which had been a favourite sport with governors like Verres, had been quite done away with in Cilicia, we are to understand, under Cicero's rule.

His defence of Ligarius, who was impeached of treason against the state in the person of Caesar, as having borne arms against him in his African campaign, has also been deservedly admired. There was some courage in Cicero's undertaking his defence; as a known partisan of Pompey, he was treading on dangerous and delicate ground. Caesar was dictator at the time; and the case seems to have been tried before him as the sole judicial authority, without pretence of the intervention of anything like a jury. The defence—if defence it may be called—is a remarkable instance of the common appeal, not to the merits of the case, but to the feelings of the court. After making out what case he could for his client, the advocate as it were throws up his brief, and rests upon the clemency of the judge. Caesar himself, it must be remembered, had begun public life, like Cicero, as a pleader: and, in the opinion of some competent judges, such as Tacitus and Quintilian, had bid fair to be a close rival.

"I have pleaded many causes, Caesar—some, indeed, in association with yourself, while your public career spared you to the courts; but surely I never yet used language of this sort,—'Pardon him, sirs, he has offended: he has made a false step: he did not think to do it; he never will again'. This is language we use to a father. To the court it must be,—'He did not do it: he never contemplated it: the evidence is false; the charge is fabricated'. If you tell me you sit but as the judge of the fact in this case, Caesar,—if you ask me where and when he served against you,—I am silent; I will not now dwell on the extenuating circumstances, which even before a judicial tribunal might have their weight. We take this course before a judge, but I am here pleading to a father. 'I have erred—I have done wrong, I am sorry: I take refuge in your clemency; I ask forgiveness for my fault; I pray you, pardon me'.... There is nothing so popular, believe me, sir, as kindness; of all your many virtues none wins men's admiration and their love like mercy. In nothing do men reach so near the gods, as when they can give life and safety to mankind. Fortune has given you nothing more glorious than the power, your own nature can supply nothing more noble than the will, to spare and pardon wherever you can. The case perhaps demands a longer advocacy—your gracious disposition feels it too long already. So I make an end, preferring for my cause that you should argue with your own heart, than that I or any other should argue with you. I will urge nothing more than this,—the grace which you shall extend to my client in his absence, will be felt as a boon by all here present".

The great conqueror was, it is said, visibly affected by the appeal, and Ligarius was pardoned.



CHAPTER VIII.

MINOR CHARACTERISTICS.

Not content with his triumphs in prose, Cicero had always an ambition—to be a poet. Of his attempts in this way we have only some imperfect fragments, scattered here and there through his other works, too scanty to form any judgment upon. His poetical ability is apt to be unfairly measured by two lines which his opponents were very fond of quoting and laughing at, and which for that reason have become the best known. But it is obvious that if Wordsworth or Tennyson were to be judged solely by a line or two picked out by an unfavourable reviewer—say from 'Peter Bell' or from the early version of the 'Miller's Daughter'—posterity would have a very mistaken appreciation of their merits. Plutarch and the younger Pliny, who had seen more of Cicero's poetry than we have, thought highly of it. So he did himself; but so it was his nature to think of most of his own performances; and such an estimate is common to other authors besides Cicero, though few announce it so openly. Montaigne takes him to task for this, with more wit, perhaps, than fairness. "It is no great fault to write poor verses; but it is a fault not to be able to see how unworthy such poor verses were of his reputation". Voltaire, on the other hand, who was perhaps as good a judge, thought there was "nothing more beautiful" than some of the fragments of his poem on 'Marius', who was the ideal hero of his youth. Perhaps the very fact, however, of none of his poems having been preserved, is some argument that such poetic gift as he had was rather facility than genius. He wrote, besides this poem on 'Marius', a 'History of my Consulship', and a 'History of my Own Times', in verse, and some translations from Homer.

He had no notion of what other men called relaxation: he found his own relaxation in a change of work. He excuses himself in one of his orations for this strange taste, as it would seem to the indolent and luxurious Roman nobles with whom he was so unequally yoked.

"Who after all shall blame me, or who has any right to be angry with me, if the time which is not grudged to others for managing their private business, for attending public games and festivals, for pleasures of any other kind,—nay, even for very rest of mind and body,—the time which others give to convivial meetings, to the gaming-table, to the tennis-court,—this much I take for myself, for the resumption of my favourite studies?"

In this indefatigable appetite for work of all kinds, he reminds us of no modern politician so much as of Sir George Cornewall Lewis; yet he would not have altogether agreed with him in thinking that life would be very tolerable if it were not for its amusements. He was, as we have seen, of a naturally social disposition. "I like a dinner-party", he says in a letter to one of his friends; "where I can say just what comes uppermost, and turn my sighs and sorrows into a hearty laugh. I doubt whether you are much better yourself, when you can laugh as you did even at a philosopher. When the man asked—'Whether anybody wanted to know anything?' you said you had been wanting to know all day when it would be dinner-time. The fellow expected you to say you wanted to know how many worlds there were, or something of that kind".[1]

[Footnote 1: These professional philosophers, at literary dinner-parties, offered to discuss and answer any question propounded by the company.]

He is said to have been a great laugher. Indeed, he confesses honestly that the sense of humour was very powerful with him—"I am wonderfully taken by anything comic", he writes to one of his friends. He reckons humour also as a useful ally to the orator. "A happy jest or facetious turn is not only pleasant, but also highly useful occasionally;" but he adds that this is an accomplishment which must come naturally, and cannot be taught under any possible system.[1] There is at least sufficient evidence that he was much given to making jokes, and some of them which have come down to us would imply that a Roman audience was not very critical on this point. There is an air of gravity about all courts of justice which probably makes a very faint amount of jocularity hailed as a relief. Even in an English law-court, a joke from the bar, much more from the bench, does not need to be of any remarkable brilliancy in order to be secure of raising a laugh; and we may fairly suppose that the same was the case at Rome. Cicero's jokes were frequently nothing more than puns, which it would be impossible, even if it were worth while, to reproduce to an English ear. Perhaps the best, or at all events the most intelligible, is his retort to Hortensius during the trial of Verres. The latter was said to have feed his counsel out of his Sicilian spoils—especially, there was a figure of a sphinx, of some artistic value, which had found its way from the house of the ex-governor into that of Hortensius. Cicero was putting a witness through a cross-examination of which his opponent could not see the bearing. "I do not understand all this", said Hortensius; "I am no hand at solving riddles". "That is strange, too", rejoined Cicero, "when you have a sphinx at home". In the same trial he condescended, in the midst of that burning eloquence of which we have spoken, to make two puns on the defendant's name. The word "Verres" had two meanings in the old Latin tongue: it signified a "boar-pig", and also a "broom" or "sweeping-brush". One of Verres's friends, who either was or had the reputation of being a Jew, had tried to get the management of the prosecution out of Cicero's hands. "What has a Jew to do with pork?" asked the orator. Speaking, in the course of the same trial, of the way in which the governor had made "requisitions" of all the most valuable works of art throughout the island, "the broom", said he, "swept clean". He did not disdain the comic element in poetry more than in prose; for we find in Quinitilian [2] a quotation from a punning epigram in some collection of such trifles which in his time bore Cicero's name. Tiro is said to have collected and published three volumes of his master's good things after his death; but if they were not better than those which have come down to us, as contained in his other writings, there has been no great loss to literature in Tiro's 'Ciceroniana'. He knew one secret at least of a successful humourist in society: for it is to him that we owe the first authoritative enunciation of a rule which is universally admitted—"that a jest never has so good an effect as when it is uttered with a serious countenance".

[Footnote 1: De Orat. II. 54.]

[Footnote 2: 'Libellus Jocularis', Quint. viii. 6.]

Cicero had a wonderful admiration for the Greeks. "I am not ashamed to confess", he writes to his brother, "especially since my life and career have been such that no suspicion of indolence or want of energy can rest upon me, that all my own attainments are due to those studies and those accomplishments which have been handed down to us in the literary treasures and the philosophical systems of the Greeks". It was no mere rhetorical outburst, when in his defence of Valerius Flaccus, accused like Verres, whether truly or falsely, of corrupt administration in his province, he thus introduced the deputation from Athens and Lacedaemon who appeared as witnesses to the character of his client.

"Athenians are here to-day, amongst whom civilisation, learning, religion, agriculture, public law and justice, had their birth, and whence they have been disseminated over all the world: for the possession of whose city, on account of its exceeding beauty, even gods are said to have contended: which is of such antiquity, that she is said to have bred her citizens within herself, and the same soil is termed at once their mother, their nurse, and their country: whose importance and influence is such that the name of Greece, though it has lost much of its weight and power, still holds its place by virtue of the renown of this single city".

He had forgotten, perhaps, as an orator is allowed to forget, that in the very same speech, when his object was to discredit the accusers of his client, he had said, what was very commonly said of the Greeks at Rome, that they were a nation of liars. There were excellent men among them, he allowed—thinking at the moment of the counter-evidence which he had ready for the defendant—but he goes on to make this sweeping declaration:

"I will say this of the whole race of the Greeks: I grant them literary genius, I grant them skill in various accomplishments, I do not deny them elegance in conversation, acuteness of intellect, fluent oratory; to any other high qualities they may claim I make no objection: but the sacred obligation that lies upon a witness to speak the truth is what that nation has never regarded".[1]

[Footnote 1: Defence of Val. Flaccus, c. 4.]

There was a certain proverb, he went on to say, "Lend me your evidence", implying—"and you shall have mine when you want it;" a Greek proverb, of course, and men knew these three words of Greek who knew no Greek besides. What he loved in the Greeks, then, was rather the grandeur of their literature and the charm of their social qualities (a strict regard for truth is, unhappily, no indispensable ingredient in this last); he had no respect whatever for their national character. The orator was influenced, perhaps, most of all by his intense reverence for the Athenian Demosthenes, whom, as a master in his art, he imitated and well-nigh worshipped. The appreciation of his own powers which every able man has, and of which Cicero had at least his share, fades into humility when he comes to speak of his great model. "Absolutely perfect", he calls him in one place; and again in another, "What I have attempted, Demosthenes has achieved". Yet he felt also at times, when the fervour of genius was strong within him, that there was an ideal of eloquence enshrined in his own inmost mind, "which I can feel", he says, "but which I never knew to exist in any man".

He could not only write Greek as a scholar, but seems to have spoken it with considerable ease and fluency; for on one occasion he made a speech in that language, a condescension which some of his friends thought derogatory to the dignity of a Roman.

From the Greeks he learnt to appreciate art. How far his taste was really cultivated in this respect is difficult for us to judge. Some passages in his letters to Atticus might lead us to suspect that, as Disraeli concludes, he was rather a collector than a real lover of art. His appeals to his friend to buy up for him everything and anything, and his surrender of himself entirely to Atticus's judgment in such purchases, do not bespeak a highly critical taste. In a letter to another friend, he seems to say that he only bought statuary as "furniture" for the gymnasium at his country-seat; and he complains that four figures of Bacchanals, which this friend had just bought for him, had cost more than he would care to give for all the statues that ever were made. On the other hand, when he comes to deal with Verres's wholesale plunder of paintings and statues in Sicily, he talks about the several works with considerable enthusiasm. Either he really understood his subject, or, like an able advocate, he had thoroughly got up his brief. But the art-notices which are scattered through his works show a considerable acquaintance with the artist-world of his day. He tells us, in his own admirable style, the story of Zeuxis, and the selection which he made from all the beauties of Crotona, in order to combine their several points of perfection in his portrait of Helen; he refers more than once, and always in language which implies an appreciation of the artist, to the works of Phidias, especially that which is said to have cost him his life—the shield of Minerva; and he discusses, though it is but by way of illustration, the comparative points of merit in the statues of Calamis, and Myron, and Polycletus, and in the paintings of the earlier schools of Zeuxis, Polygnotus, and Timanthes, with their four primitive colours, as compared with the more finished schools of Protogenes and Apelles.



CHAPTER IX.

CICERO'S CORRESPONDENCE.

I. ATTICUS.

It seems wonderful how, in the midst of all his work, Cicero found time to keep up such a voluminous correspondence. Something like eight hundred of his letters still remain to us, and there were whole volumes of them long preserved which are now lost,[1] to say nothing of the very many which may never have been thought worth preserving. The secret lay in his wonderful energy and activity. We find him writing letters before day-break, during the service of his meals, on his journeys, and dictating them to an amanuensis as he walked up and down to take needful exercise.

[Footnote 1: Collections of his letters to Caesar, Brutus, Cornelius Nepos the historian, Hirtius, Pansa, and to his son, are known to have existed.]

His correspondents were of almost all varieties of position and character, from Caesar and Pompey, the great men of the day, down to his domestic servant and secretary, Tiro. Amongst them were rich and ease-loving Epicureans like Atticus and Paetus, and even men of pleasure like Caelius: grave Stoics like Cato, eager patriots like Brutus and Cassius, authors such as Cornelius Nepos and Lucceius the historians, Varro the grammarian, and Metius the poet; men who dabbled with literature in a gentleman-like way, like Hirtius and Appius, and the accomplished literary critic and patron of the day—himself of no mean reputation as poet, orator, and historian—Caius Asinius Pollio. Cicero's versatile powers found no difficulty in suiting the contents of his own letters to the various tastes and interests of his friends. Sometimes he sends to his correspondent what was in fact a political journal of the day—rather one-sided, it must be confessed, as all political journals are, but furnishing us with items of intelligence which throw light, as nothing else can, on the history of those latter days of the Republic. Sometimes he jots down the mere gossip of his last dinner-party; sometimes he notices the speculations of the last new theorist in philosophy, or discusses with a literary friend some philological question—the latter being a study in which he was very fond of dabbling, though with little success, for the science of language was as yet unknown.

His chief correspondent, as has been said, was his old school-fellow and constant friend through life, Pomponius Atticus. The letters addressed to him which still remain to us cover a period of twenty-four years, with a few occasional interruptions, and the correspondence only ceased with Cicero's death. The Athenianised Roman, though he had deliberately withdrawn himself from the distracting factions of his native city, which he seldom revisited, kept on the best terms with the leaders of all parties, and seems to have taken a very lively interest, though merely in the character of a looker-on, in the political events which crowded so fast upon each other during the fifty years of his voluntary expatriation. Cicero's letters were to him what an English newspaper would be now to an English gentleman who for his own reasons preferred to reside in Paris, without forswearing his national interests and sympathies. At times, when Cicero was more at leisure, and when messengers were handy (for we have to remember that there was nothing like our modern post), Cicero would despatch one of these letters to Atticus daily. We have nearly four hundred of them in all. They are continually garnished, even to the point of affectation, with Greek quotations and phrases, partly perhaps in compliment to his friend's Athenian tastes, and partly from the writer's own passion for the language.

So much reference has been made to them throughout the previous biographical sketch,—for they supply us with some of the most important materials for Cicero's life and times,—that it may be sufficient to give in this place two or three of the shorter as specimens of the collection. One which describes a visit which he received from Julius Caesar, already dictator, in his country-house near Puteoli, is interesting, as affording a glimpse behind the scenes in those momentous days when no one knew exactly whether the great captain was to turn out a patriot or a conspirator against the liberties of Rome.

"To think that I should have had such a tremendous visitor! But never mind; for all went off very pleasantly. But when he arrived at Philippus's house[1] on the evening of the second day of the Saturnalia, the place was so full of soldiers that they could hardly find a spare table for Caesar himself to dine at. There were two thousand men. Really I was in a state of perplexity as to what was to be done next day: but Barba Cassius came to my aid,—he supplied me with a guard. They pitched their tents in the grounds, and the house was protected. He stayed with Philippus until one o'clock on the third day of the Saturnalia, and would see no one. Going over accounts, I suppose, with Balbus. Then he walked on the sea-shore. After two he had a bath: then he listened to some verses on Mamurra, without moving a muscle of his countenance: then dressed,[2] and sat down to dinner. He had taken a precautionary emetic, and therefore ate and drank heartily and unrestrainedly. We had, I assure you, a very good dinner, and well served; and not only that, but

'The feast of reason and the flow of soul'[3]

besides. His suite were abundantly supplied at three other tables: the freedmen of lower rank, and even the slaves, were well taken care of. The higher class had really an elegant entertainment. Well, no need to make a long story; we found we were both 'flesh and blood'. Still he is not the kind of guest to whom you would say—'Now do, pray, take us in your way on your return'. Once is enough. We had no conversation on business, but a good deal of literary talk. In short, he seemed to be much pleased, and to enjoy himself. He said he should stay one day at Puteoli, and another at Baiae. So here you have an account of this visit, or rather quartering of troops upon me, which I disliked the thoughts of, but which really, as I have said, gave me no annoyance. I shall stay here a little longer, then go to my house at Tusculum. When Caesar passed Dolabella's villa, all the troops formed up on the right and left of his horse, which they did nowhere else.[4] I heard that from Nicias".

[Footnote 1: This was close to Cicero's villa, on the coast.]

[Footnote 2: Literally, "he got himself oiled". The emetic was a disgusting practice of Roman bon vivants who were afraid of indigestion.]

[Footnote 3: The verse which Cicero quotes from Lucilius is fairly equivalent to this.]

[Footnote 4: Probably by way of salute; or possibly as a precaution.]

In the following, he is anticipating a visit from his friend, and from the lady to whom he is betrothed.

"I had a delightful visit from Cincius on the 30th of January, before daylight. For he told me that you were in Italy, and that he was going to send off some messengers to you, and would not let them go without a letter from me. Not that I have much to write about (especially when you are all but here), except to assure you that I am anticipating your arrival with the greatest delight. Therefore fly to me, to show your own affection, and to see what affection I bear you. Other matters when we meet. I have written this in a hurry. As soon as ever you arrive, bring all your people to my house. You will gratify me very much by coming. You will see how wonderfully well Tyrrannio has arranged my books, the remains of which are much better than I had thought. And I should be very glad if you could send me a couple of your library clerks whom Tyrrannio could make use of as binders, and to help him in other ways; and tell them to bring some parchment to make indices—syllabuses, I believe you Greeks call them. But this only if quite convenient to you. But, at any rate, be sure you come yourself, if you can make any stay in our parts, and bring Pilia with you, for that is but fair, and Tullia wishes it much. Upon my word you have bought a very fine place. I hear that your gladiators fight capitally. If you had cared to hire them out, you might have cleared your expenses at these two last public shows. But we can talk about this hereafter. Be sure to come; and do your best about the clerks, if you love me".

The Roman gentleman of elegant and accomplished tastes, keeping a troop of private gladiators, and thinking of hiring them out, to our notions, is a curious combination of character; but the taste was not essentially more brutal than the prize-ring and the cock-fights of the last century.

II. PAETUS.

Another of Cicero's favourite correspondents was Papirius Paetus, who seems to have lived at home at ease, and taken little part in the political tumults of his day. Like Atticus, he was an Epicurean, and thought more of the pleasures of life than of its cares and duties. Yet Cicero evidently took great pleasure in his society, and his letters to him are written in the same familiar and genial tone as those to his old school-fellow. Some of them throw a pleasant light upon the social habits of the day. Cicero had had some friends staying with him at his country-seat at Tusculum, to whom, he says, he had been giving lessons in oratory. Dolabella, his son-in-law, and Hirtius, the future consul, were among them. "They are my scholars in declamation, and I am theirs in dinner-eating; for I conclude you have heard (you seem to hear everything) that they come to me to declaim, and I go to them for dinners. 'Tis all very well for you to swear that you cannot entertain me in such grand fashion as I am used to, but it is of use.... Better be victimised by your friend than by your debtors, as you have been. After all, I don't require such a banquet as leaves a great waste behind it; a little will do, only handsomely served and well cooked. I remember your telling me about a dinner of Phamea's—well, it need not be such a late affair as that, nor so grand in other respects; nay, if you persist in giving me one of your mother's old family dinners, I can stand even that. My new reputation for good living has reached you, I find, before my arrival, and you are alarmed at it; but, pray, put no trust in your ante-courses—I have given up that altogether. I used to spoil my appetite, I remember, upon your oil and sliced sausages.... One expense I really shall put you to; I must have my warm bath. My other habits, I assure you, are quite unaltered; all the rest is joke".

Paetus seems to answer him with the same good-humoured badinage. Balbus, the governor of Africa, had been to see him, he says, and he had been content with such humble fare as he feared Cicero might despise. So much, at least, we may gather from Cicero's answer.

"Satirical as ever, I see. You say Balbus was content with very modest fare. You seem to insinuate that when grandees are so moderate, much more ought a poor ex-consul like myself so to be. You don't know that I fished it all out of your visitor himself, for he came straight to my house on his landing. The very first words I said to him were, 'How did you get on with our friend Paetus?' He swore he had never been better entertained. If this referred to the charms of your conversation, remember, I shall be quite as appreciative a listener as Balbus; but if it meant the good things on the table, I must beg you will not treat us men of eloquence worse than you do a 'Lisper'".[1]

[Footnote 1: One of Cicero's puns. Balbus means 'Lisper'.]

They carry on this banter through several letters. Cicero regrets that he has been unable as yet to pay his threatened visit, when his friend would have seen what advances he had made in gastronomic science. He was able now to eat through the whole bill of fare—"from the eggs to the roti".

"I [Stoic that used to be] have gone over with my whole forces into the camp of Epicurus. You will have to do with a man who can eat, and who knows what's what. You know how conceited we late learners are, as the proverb says. You will have to unlearn those little 'plain dinners' and makeshifts of yours. We have made such advances in the art, that we have been venturing to invite, more than once, your friends Verrius and Camillus (what elegant and fastidious gentlemen they are!). But see how audacious we are getting! I have even given Hirtius a dinner—but without a peacock. My cook could imitate nothing in his entertainments except the hot soup".

Then he hears that his friend is in bed with the gout.

"I am extremely sorry to hear it, as in duty bound; still, I am quite determined to come, that I may see you, and pay my visit,—yes, and have my dinner: for I suppose your cook has not got the gout as well".

Such were the playful epistles of a busy man. But even in some of these lightest effusions we see the cares of the statesman showing through. Here is a portion of a later letter to the same friend.

"I am very much concerned to hear you have given up going out to dinner; for it is depriving yourself of a great source of enjoyment and gratification. Then, again, I am afraid—for it is as well to speak honestly—lest you should unlearn certain old habits of yours, and forget to give your own little dinners. For if formerly, when you had good examples to imitate, you were still not much of a proficient in that way, how can I suppose you will get on now? Spurina, indeed, when I mentioned the thing to him, and explained your previous habits, proved to demonstration that there would be danger to the highest interests of the state if you did not return to your old ways in the spring. But indeed, my good Paetus, I advise you, joking apart, to associate with good fellows, and pleasant fellows, and men who are fond of you. There is nothing better worth having in life, nothing that makes life more happy.... See how I employ philosophy to reconcile you to dinner-parties. Take care of your health; and that you will best do by going out to dinner.... But don't imagine, as you love me, that because I write jestingly I have thrown off all anxiety about public affairs. Be assured, my dear Paetus, that I seek nothing and care for nothing, night or day, but how my country may be kept safe and free. I omit no opportunity of advising, planning, or acting. I feel in my heart that if in securing this I have to lay down my life, I shall have ended it well and honourably".