# Cicero And The Fall Of The Roman Republic/Chapter 12

Layout 2
CHAPTER XII.
CÆSAR'S DICTATORSHIP.
47-44 B.C.
ROM Cæsar's return to Rome at the end of September 47 B.C., we may date the commencement of his direct responsibility for the central government of the Empire. His rule lasted for thirty-two months in all, but of these eighteen were passed in Africa and Spain, and two dangerous wars had to be waged in the course of them.
In this brief period Cæsar showed great activity as a legislator. Besides a number of laws called by the name of Julius, which defined or consolidated existing arrangements with slight modifications of detail, we find many fresh projects, from the increase ​of the patriciate and the borrowing of an amended Egyptian Calendar to sumptuary laws and plans for roads and drainage works. Cæsar, as Dictator, undid two pieces of mischief which had been the work of his creature Clodius, by dissolving the "collegia" or street-guilds (see p. 230) and by restricting the distribution of corn. The enlargement of the boundary of Italy by the grant of the Roman franchise to the inhabitants of the country between the river Po and the Alps was a necessary consequence of Cæsar's victory. These "Transpadanes" had been his warm supporters, and he had always maintained that they were already by right Roman citizens. Outside the natural limits of Italy, Cæsar likewise made certain amplifications both of the Roman and of the Latin franchise; the most important was the grant of Latin rights to Sicily. He extended to the province of Asia a wise system, which had long ruled in Spain, by which the subject communities collected their own taxes, and paid out of them the tribute due to Rome; and he revived an excellent project of Caius Gracchus by founding Roman colonies at Carthage and at Corinth.
BUST OF CÆSAR IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM.
The changes which I have been recording were not unimportant in themselves, but they are hardly ​mentioned in Cicero's correspondence. Their interest was in truth eclipsed by the presence of the great problem which called on Cæsar and the Romans for solution. The world stood at the parting of two ways; Rome was destined, for good or for evil, to absorb into her citizenship all civilised men; and it rested with Cæsar to decide what should be the nature of the new Cosmopolitan State. The Roman Empire might be organised on one of two systems. The first was the obvious and easy expedient, familiar to the world since the days of the Pyramids, of a despotism, dependent only on the swords of a professional soldiery. This required nothing but a trained army and a skilful general for its inception. Its results were equally sure: the periodical recurrence of civil war whenever the soldiers could not agree on a chief; occasional stretches of decent government when accident brought a skilful administrator to the head of affairs; wild freaks of tyranny when the chances of the succession turned out unluckily; and throughout a steady degradation of character, the loss of manhood, and the destruction of the capacity for self-government in the civilised human being. All hopes of freemen, all ideals of political aspiration, all causes worth fighting for, perished along with the Roman Republic, and the world entered on a period of its history, in which its life seems to be "weary, state, flat, and unprofitable." The unmixed despotism which Cæsar established was somewhat tempered by the wisdom of Augustus; yet the essential ​mischief remained, and the result was inevitable. Three out of four of the Roman emperors perished by violence, and each mutiny or assassination or civil war was the occasion for fresh degradation of the citizens. The Italian nation, which under happier auspices would have been the centre from which liberty and self-government might spread over the civilised world, only led the way in abasement and servility. Gibbon has summed up for us the story of its fate in words which may be repeated with little change for each of the nations which lay beneath the shadow of the Roman Empire. "The forms of the constitution, which alleviated or disguised their abject slavery, were abolished by time or violence; the Italians alternately lamented the presence or the absence of the sovereigns whom they detested or despised; and the succession of five centuries inflicted the various evils of military license, capricious despotism, and elaborate oppression." It has even been argued, though the argument is to my mind far from convincing, that the fragments of liberty which Augustus retained cost more than they were worth in friction and inconvenience, and that if the ideas of freedom and self-government, the only political ideas worth having, were in truth absolutely beyond realisation in practice for the world as it was, then the more outspoken despotism of Julius or of Diocletian was the lesser of the two evils. Even so, such a plea serves but to extenuate. The work of Cæsar may be excused as a miserable necessity; it ​is not, like the work of Washington or of Cavour or of Bismarck, an achievement to glory in.
It is not without regret that we contemplate this lame and impotent conclusion to the life-long toil of a great man. Cæsar was unsurpassed as a soldier, as a scholar, as a gentleman, as a leader and manager of men; in him the saying of Cervantes finds its fullest realisation, that "the lance has not dulled the pen, nor the pen the lance." But after all the tree is known by its fruit, and Cæsarism is condemned by the character which the despotism necessarily stamped upon the generations bred under it. We must look for its perfect work in the subjects of the later Empire, ground down by an intolerable burden of taxation, with souls which had lost all nobler political interests, trusting to hired soldiers to fight for them, no longer capable of managing their own concerns nor of striking a blow in defence of their own hearths. All the horrors of the barbarian invasion and all the darkness of the Middle Ages were not a price too heavy to pay for the infusion of fresher and stronger blood, and the revival of the sense of dignity in mankind.
Such was the path in which Cæsar willed that the world should walk. The other alternative before him was to undertake a complicated and difficult task, requiring the highest constructive statesmanship. The Italian people was still sound at heart; Italy still loved liberty and hated despotism; her sons could still endure with patience, and dare with energy, and die with heroism around the eagles. When a people displays such qualities, a statesman need not despair of organising it into a free nation. ​
COIN OF CÆSAR.
(Babelon.)
JULIUS CÆSAR.
FROM COIN IN BRITISH MUSEUM.
COIN OF CÆSAR.
HEAD OF VENUS.ÆNEAS AND ANCHISES.
(Cohen.)
In a very half-hearted and imperfect way Cæsar's great successor seems to have recognised some of the needs of the world in this matter, and to have striven to find a place in his system for other powers and activities beside his own. Thus he averted for a time the full degradation of life under a despotism. The elder Cæsar had much better chances than his nephew. He had never been under the necessity of ​shedding blood except on the battle-field; his wise and noble clemency predisposed all hearts in his favour; even Republicans were not anxious for his defeat in the last struggle in Spain, and Jan. 45 B.C.preferred, as Cassius said to Cicero, "the old kindly master to an untried and angry one." The Romans were willing to accept any tolerable compromise at his hands. But of compromise Cæsar would not hear a word. He seems to have been utterly blind to the evils of a despotism, and utterly indifferent to the preservation of the dignity and manliness of the Romans. With relentless and foolish consistency he pushed the doctrine of his own supremacy to its uttermost conclusions. The first act of this so-called democratic leader was to deprive the popular assemblies of the little power that had remained to them under the later Republic. In legislation, the assent of the people had already become merely formal, and so it remained; but in elections some power of choice had hitherto really lain with the voters. This was now taken away by the Dictator, who granted letters of recommendation to his candidates, and so had them returned without opposition. The elections indeed might as well not have been held at all. Cæsar lost no opportunity of degrading the Republican magistracies in the eyes of the people. Sometimes the State was left for ​months without consuls or printors, and Cæsar nominated prefects to do their work; sometimes a number of consulships were crowded into a short space, and Rome now contained a consular in whose term of office "no one had breakfasted."
Cæsar's treatment of the Senate was even more inexcusable than his action towards the People or towards the magistrates. It can only be explained on the supposition that his head was turned by the giddy height of supreme power, and that he was no longer the cool and sober politician who had trod the upward way so skilfully. The Senate was the only possible home of free speech and independent counsel, yet we find it exposed in the person of its most distinguished members to wanton insult. Cicero writes to his friend Pætus, who has urged him to remain at Rome and take part in public business: "You cite the example of Catulus and his time. Where is the resemblance? In those days I too was loath to be long away from my post in the State. For then we sat on the poop of the vessel with our hands to the tiller; now there is scarcely a place for us in the hold. Do you suppose that any fewer decrees of the Senate will be passed if I stay at Naples? Why, when I am in Rome, and in the thick of the Forum, the decrees of the Senate are written out at our friend's house; aye, and if it comes into his head, I am set down as one of those who attested the registration, and I get ​intelligence of the arrival in Armenia or Syria of decrees, said to have been passed on my proposition, before I have heard a word about the matter. Pray do not think I am jesting. I assure you I have received letters from princes in the uttermost parts of the earth, returning thanks for the salutation as 'King,' which had been given them on my proposal—people of whom I was so far from knowing that they had been saluted kings, that I had never even heard of their existence."
Cicero was willing, as he said to Varro, "to lend a hand, if not as an architect, then even as a mason, to the reconstruction of the commonwealth." There is no reason to suppose indeed that he any more than Cæsar had a solution for the almost inextricable difficulties which presented themselves in the way of combining liberty with empire. But Cicero at least held fast to that which Cæsar ignored. He felt that it was apostasy and cowardice to slide back from the political faith which Greece had delivered once for all to the world, that it was of the essence of the higher civilisation of the West to protest against arbitrary power, to believe in government by discussion and consent, and in the rule of reason and of law. "From the man," he writes, "who has all power in his hands, I see no reason to fear anything, except that everything is uncertain when once you set law on one side: it is impossible to guarantee a future which depends on the will, not to say on the caprice, of a single man."
​It was long before Cicero gave up the hope that after all there was to be "some sort of Free State," and that Cæsar was destined to be its founder. This delusion was fostered, and not unnaturally, by the spectacle of Cæsar's constant clemency and kindness to the conquered. "The all-powerful ruler," he writes to an exiled Pompeian in January, 45 B.C., "seems to me to be daily inclining more and more to justice and to a reasonable view of things . . . Every day something is done with more of lenity and liberality than we were expecting." "No one," he says in another letter, "is so much an enemy to the cause which Pompey supported with more spirit than prudence, as to venture to call us bad men or unworthy citizens; and in this I always admire the rectitude, fairness, and good sense of Cæsar. He never speaks of Pompey, but in the most honourable terms." Cicero is eager to make excuses for Cæsar. If he delays the restoration of the Republic, it is because "Cæsar himself is the slave of the situation." "Since," he says, "I have judged it right to live on, I cannot but feel a kindness for the man by whose favour life has been granted me. If that man desires that there should be a commonwealth such as perhaps he wishes, and such as we are all bound to pray for, he has no power to realise it, so hampered is he by obligations to his followers."
​Cicero became a main channel of Cæsar's grace towards his old comrades, and in the delight of serving them committed himself more and more to acquiescence in the new government, and to hopes based on the personal character and conduct of its chief—"nothing can be better than the ruler himself; for the rest, men and things are such that, if needs be, it is better to hear of them than to see them."
Cicero is the main hope and stay of the exiled Pompeians. He is ever writing them letters of solace and encouragement, and working assiduously for their restoration. "You," writes Aulus Cæcina to Cicero, "must bear the whole burden; all my hopes are staked on you. Only persuade yourself that your part is not to do whatever you are asked in this business (though that were favour enough), but that the whole is your own work; then you will succeed. I fear that my misery makes me foolish, or my friendship shameless in heaping burdens on you: your own conduct must serve as my excuse; all your life long you have so accustomed us to see you labouring for your friends, that now we who may claim that title do not so much beg as requisition your services." To another exile, Ampius Balbus, Cicero writes: "I spoke in your cause with more bluntness than my present situation justifies; but the very ill-luck proper to my shipwrecked fortunes was overborne by your dearness to ​me, and by the long friendship between us which you have so sedulously cherished. Everything which relates to your restoration is promised, pledged, guaranteed, determined. I speak from my own sight, and knowledge, and participation."
Cæsar was ready enough to pardon on his own account; but even in cases where he felt specially displeased, he was generally willing to give up his resentment at Cicero's request. It was thus that Cicero saved Quintus Ligarius, the only one of the Pompeians, so far as we know, who was publicly and formally put on his trial. Cicero defended him at Cæsar's bar in a brief but interesting speech, which he afterwards published by the advice of Balbus and Oppius, and which still survives. The circumstances may best be described in the words of Plutarch. "The story goes that when Quintus Ligarius was put on his trial as an enemy to Cæsar, and Cicero appeared as his advocate, Cæsar said to his friends: 'We know beforehand that the prisoner is a pestilent fellow and a public enemy: what harm can it do to listen once again to a speech of Cicero?' But soon he felt himself strangely stirred by Cicero's opening words, and as the speech proceeded, instinct with passion and exquisite in grace, one might see rapid changes of colour pass over Cæsar's face, bearing witness to the tide of emotions ebbing and flowing through his mind. At length, when the speaker touched on the struggle at Pharsalia, Cæsar became so agitated that his body trembled, and ​some papers which he was holding dropped from his hand. In the end he was carried by storm, and acquitted the accused."
Another notable instance of clemency, the pardon of Marcus Marcellus, who, as consul in the year 51, had taken a prominent part in the opposition to Cæsar, overpowered the resolution of Cicero not to open his lips again in the Senate. "This day," he writes to Servius Sulpicius, "seemed to dawn so fairly on me, that I fancied I could see, as it were, some vision of the Republic springing to life again. . . . When my turn came, I departed from my original intention. For I had resolved, not, I assure you, from sloth, but from a sense of the aching void left by the loss of my old independence, to hold my peace for ever. My resolution broke down in the presence of Cæsar's magnanimity and of the loyalty with which the Senate had pressed our friend's cause. And so I made a long speech of thanks to Cæsar; I only fear that by so doing I have debarred myself for the future from that decent quiescence which was my only consolation in these bad times."
This speech, too, has been preserved. From the enthusiasm with which Cicero speaks of the occasion in the confidential letter to his friend, it will readily be conceived that the public expression of thanks is conveyed in language whose fervour knows no bounds. The hyperbolical protestations of gratitude and devotion are in painful contrast to the satisfaction which Cicero afterwards took in Cæsar's assassination; but at the moment the speaker was doubtless ​sincere in his declarations, as in his hopes. The real interest of the speech Pro Marcello lies in the expression of these hopes, which Cicero still cherished in the autumn of the year 46, though Cæsar had killed them before he himself fell on the fatal Ides of March, twenty months later. Cicero told the Dictator in language guarded indeed, but sufficiently explicit, that Rome expected something more from him.
"At this moment, though your achievements have embraced the whole State and the preservation of all its citizens, yet so far are you from setting the coping-stone on your greatest work, that you have not yet laid the foundation-stone of that which you design. . . . If, Cæsar, after all your splendid deeds, this were to be the final result, that now your adversaries are overpowered you should leave the commonwealth in the condition in which it at present lies, consider, I pray you, whether your career will not seem famous, indeed, but scarcely glorious; for glory, I take it, consists in the tidings, spread through the world, of great services done to friends or to country or to mankind. This portion, then, of your task, is still before you; this act is still to be played; this work is still unwrought; you have yet to reconstruct the Republic; you have yet to enter on and share with us, amidst all peace and quiet, the fruition of your labours. Then, and not till then, when you have paid to your country her due, and filled up the measure allotted by nature to man, it will be time to say that you 'have lived long enough.' . . . And yet why count this as your ​life, which is hemmed in by the bounds of body and of breath? Your life is there, there, I say, where it will be fresh in the memory of all ages, where posterity will cherish it, where eternity itself will claim it for its own. It is the approval of that time to come which you must court, to its good-will you must commend yourself. It has much already to wonder at in you, now it asks for something to praise. Future generations will listen awe-struck, doubtless, as they hear or read the tale of all your conflicts and all your triumphs. But unless you have so designed and framed the constitution as to set this city on a sure foundation, your name, though it may go forth into all lands, will find no abiding resting-place. Among those who are yet to be born there will be controversy, as there has been amongst ourselves; some will extol your deeds, others perchance will find something wanting, and ttiat the one thing needful, unless you quench the coal of civil war, by giving life to our State, so that men may ascribe the first to the inexorableness of destiny, the second to the providence of your design. Labour, then, as beneath the eye of that tribunal which will give its sentence concerning you many ages hence, a sentence perhaps more disinterested than any which we can pass to-day; for posterity will pronounce, undisturbed by favour or hope of advantage, undisturbed, likewise, by passion or by jealousy."
When Cicero uttered these words it is clear that the question "is there to be any sort of Free State?" had not yet received a definite answer in the ​negative. Cæsar had not yet, to Cicero's mind, finally stamped himself a "tyrant."
Though with many fluctuations and much doubt, the tone of Cicero's mind in the latter part of the year 46 and the first months of 45 B.C. is on the whole cheerful. He has "mourned for the commonwealth longer and more bitterly than ever a mother mourned for her only son," and now his thoughts dwell by choice on the redeeming features of the situation, or turn to other interests and pursuits. He was on terms of intimacy with many of Cæsar's personal friends, especially with Balbus, Oppius, Matius, Hirtius, Pansa, and Dolabella. These were most useful to him in the negotiations for the pardon of his Pompeian comrades. He gives special credit to Pansa for his help. "He is an example," Cicero writes to Cassius (who "held Epicurus strong")," of the doctrine which you have begun to doubt, that righteousness is desirable on its own account. He has relieved many from their distress, and he has shown himself humane in these bad times, and so the good-will of honest men goes with him to a notable degree." Cicero's social intercourse with the younger Cæsarians was cheerful and pleasant; they gathered round the old orator to learn from him the secrets of his craft, and he amused himself and pleased them by giving lessons in declamation, "like Dionysius the tyrant," he says, "keeping school at Corinth," while they in turn instructed him in the new art and science of good living— ​"for they are my pupils in speaking, but my tutors in dining." Sometimes indeed he is painfully struck by the contrast between these empty rhetorical displays and the glorious strife of his old days in the Senate and the law courts. "If I ever utter anything worthy of my ancient name, then I groan like Philoctetes in the play, to think that 'these shafts are spent inglorious on a feathered not an armed prey.'" Nevertheless he felt the better for these exertions, "in the first place as regards my health, which had suffered from the want of exercise to my lungs, next because any faculty of speech I may have had would have dried up, unless I had refreshed it by these declamations; there is another reason, which perhaps you will think worthy of the first place: I have been the death of more peacocks than you have of young pigeons."
With the return of hope, Cicero's sanguine and mercurial temperament recovered its elasticity, and though the despotism bowed it did not crush him. Plutarch says of Cicero, that "he was by nature framed for mirth and jests, and his countenance expressed smiles and sunshine." At this period his wit played freely on the new situations of politics and society; and the despotism of Cæsar, like that of Lewis XIV., was "tempered by epigrams." Cæsar could listen with frank and fearless enjoyment to strokes of satire directed against himself and his system. He even prided himself on his ​critical acuteness in detecting the true flavour of Cicero's jests, and in refusing to be taken in by the work of any inferior craftsman.
"Cæsar has a very shrewd literary judgment, and just as your brother Servius, one of the best critics I ever knew, would say off-hand, 'this verse is Plautus', this is not,' because he had an ear trained by habits of study and of noting the style of the various poets, so I am told, that Cæsar, when compiling a collection of jests, would at once reject any spurious ones which were brought to him under my name. He can do this the more easily at present, because his most intimate friends are almost every day in my company. Many things drop out in the course of conversation which my hearers are good enough to consider not devoid of wit and neatness. These are regularly reported to him along with the news of the day—such are his orders—and so he pays no attention to forgeries from outside."
This period of suspense from active politics was fruitful in literary labour, which was indeed Cicero's most plentiful source of contentment. "I must tell you," he writes to Varro, "that so soon as I returned home again I was restored to favour by my old friends, my books. They have forgiven my neglect, and summon me back to the old intimacy." The works of the next year and a half are chiefly on the art of Sept., 47 - Dec., 46 B.C.rhetoric. In the Brutus and the Orator ad Brutum Cicero pursues the discussions ​begun in the dialogue De Oratore. The Brutus is especially valuable and interesting, on account of the personal experiences which Cicero there records of his training and practice as a speaker. Several extracts from it are to be found in earlier chapters.
In the same year (46 B.C.) Cicero was engaged with a panegyric of Cato. The theme seems to have been suggested to him by his republican friends soon after the suicide of his hero at Utica in April. It was, as he says, a problem fit for Archimedes, to write on such a topic without giving deadly offence to the party in power. "Cato cannot be fairly treated, unless I make it a theme for praise that he struggled against the state of things which now is and which he saw coming, and that rather than look on its realisation he took refuge in the grave." He succeeded, however, entirely to his satisfaction. Cæsar was too generous to take offence at praises of his fallen enemy, and Brutus was encouraged to follow Cicero's example and publish a work in his uncle's honour. We have a curious record of Cæsar's criticism on the two in a letter to Balbus. He had read Cicero's Cato, he said, over and over again, and had enriched his mind in the process, but Brutus' book flattered him with the idea that he could write better himself. In the midst of the occupations of his Spanish campaign the Dictator found time to pen an Anti-Cato in answer to Cicero's panegyric. While inveighing against Cato, Cæsar spoke in high terms of Cicero, whom he compared for eloquence ​and for statesmanship to Pericles and Theramenes. These compliments called forth a suitable letter in reply from Cicero. "I wrote," he says to Atticus, "precisely as I should have done to an equal; for I really think highly of his work, as I mentioned to you in conversation, so that without flattery I was able to write what he, I think, will be pleased to read."
At some time during the year 46 the estrangement between Cicero and his wife Terentia ended in a divorce. We hear very little about this in his letters. He would hardly write on such a subject to any one but Atticus, and probably Atticus was with him when matters came to a crisis. Soon afterwards Cicero took a second wife, a young and wealthy woman named Publilia, who had been his ward. In the interest of this new connection, in literature and in the pleasures of society, graver cares were for the moment forgotten. "I would write more at length," he says in a letter to Cassius, "if I had any nonsense to write about, for we can hardly discuss serious topics without danger. Well at any rate, you say, we can laugh. That is not so easy after all; but ​there is no other way of forgetting our anxieties. But where, you say, is philosophy gone? Yours to the kitchen, and mine to the rhetoric school. I am ashamed to be a slave, and so I make believe to be busy, that I may shut my ears to the reproaches of Plato." To another friend he describes a dinner with Volumnius Eutrapelus, where Cicero and Atticus and other grey-beards found that they had been invited to meet a lively person, hardly fit company for a consular of Rome. "You wonder that we can make our slavery so merry. Well, what am I to do? I ask you, the student of philosophy. Shall I wring my heart and torment myself? Who will be the better for that? and how long am I to go on with it? . . . I never was much attracted by women of that class even when I was young, to say nothing of my old age: but I do enjoy the dinner table; there I speak whatever comes uppermost, and turn all my lamentations into hearty laughter."
This easy life was rudely cut short by a great and unexpected calamity. Cicero's daughter Tullia, died suddenly at Rome about the end of March in the year 45 B.Cc. Tullia was her father's darling, the only one of his family of whose conduct he never complains, his consolation in all his troubles, and his tender and sympathising companion in all his pursuits. Cicero was overwhelmed with grief, and sought refuge in tears and seclusion. "In this desolate spot," he writes to Atticus from Astura soon after his bereavement, "I avoid speaking a word to any one. ​Early in the morning I hide myself away in a thick wood and do not quit it till evening. Next to yourself my best friend is solitude." He attempted to beguile his grief by a project of erecting a shrine for Tullia, and so deifying her memory. His letters are full of schemes for the purchase of gardens near Rome suitable for the purpose. It does not appear that Cicero's wish was ever realised, and the disturbances after Cæsar's death interrupted all his plans.
Cicero's young wife Publilia had been jealous of her stepdaughter, and she was unable to conceal her satisfaction when Tullia died. This heartlessness deeply offended Cicero. He at once divorced Publilia, and though she and her friends made several overtures for a reconciliation, he would never see her again.
In this great trouble Cicero found much consolation in literature. "Those old friends," his books, now once again proved true to him. "There is not a treatise on consolation under bereavement, that I did not read through when I was in your house; but my grief was too strong for the medicine. Nay, I did what I believe no one ever did before; I wrote a treatise on consolation myself. I will send you this book if the copyists have written it out. I declare to you, this has given more relief than anything. Now I write from morning to night; not that what I write is good for much, but it checks my grief to a certain extent." These words were written soon after his loss. Some two months later Cicero can appeal unhesitatingly to his literary ​activity, which is producing the Tusculan Disputations, as a proof that he is not yielding an unmanly subjection to his grief. "Those cheerful souls," he writes, "who find fault with me, cannot read as much as I have written in the time. Whether the work is good or bad, is nothing to the point; it could not have been attempted by anyone who had abandoned himself to despair."
Almost all Cicero's philosophical works belong to this (45 B.C.) and the following year. His writing was hardly interrupted by Cæsar's death and ceased only with his own recall to the active labours of a statesman at the end of the year 44. Not to mention several works which are lost, we have from this period the Academic Questions, the treatise On the Definitions of Good and Evil, the Tusculan Disputations, the dialogues On the Nature of the Gods, On Divination, On Old Age, and On Friendship, and finally the treatise On Duty (De Officiis) addressed to his son Marcus, Cicero found the materials for most of these works in the writings of the Greek philosophers: "I have to supply little but the words," he writes, "and for these I am never at a loss." Though Cicero has no pretensions to be considered a thinker of original and inventive genius in the region of philosophy, it was no small achievement thus to mould the Latin tongue to be a vehicle for Greek philosophic thought. Cicero wiped away the reproach of "the poverty of our native speech," of which Lucretius complains, and in so doing he ​secured the tradition of ideas and modes of thought which must otherwise have missed their influence on the world. There have been ages during which Plato and Aristotle have suffered eclipse; but perhaps hardly one in which Cicero's philosophic writings have not been cherished by at least a few men of letters. They have thus kept alive the memory of ancient philosophy, and have humanised the thoughts and words of one generation after another. If we were required to decide what ancient writings have most directly influenced the modern world, the award must probably go in favour of Plutarch's Lives and of the philosophic works of Cicero.
Tullia's death marks a turning-point in Cicero's appreciation of Cæsar and his work. He is resolved that patience shall not be wanting, but he "has lost for ever that cheerfulness with which we used to season the bitterness of the time." It is characteristic of the man, their his private sorrow opens his eyes to the fact that the hopes which he has been indulging for the commonwealth are all delusions. When once the truth is grasped, Cæsar's proceedings during the last months of his life serve to confirm Cicero's melancholy conviction, and to bring him to the state of mind in which he is ready to approve the deed of the Ides of March.
"All is lost, my dear Atticus," he writes in the month of his daughter's death, "all is lost; that is ​no new thing; but now that my one hold on life is gone, I am fain to acknowledge it." His reply to the consolations of his friend Lucceius, a month later, breathes the same spirit. "In one respect I think that I am even more courageous than yourself, who exhort me to courage; for you seem to be cherishing some hope that better days may be in store. Your illustrations from the chances of combat and the like, and the arguments you adduce, seem intended to forbid me from despairing utterly for the commonwealth. I do not wonder then that you are braver than I, since you have some hope; but I do wonder that you should still hope on. What remains that is not so stricken, that we must needs confess it to be doomed and blasted? Look round on all the limbs of the State which you know so well; where will you find one that is not crushed and crippled . . . So I will bear my private grief, as you bid me, and the public grief perhaps even more patiently than you, my preceptor. For you have some hope to comfort you, I am resolved to be strong amidst absolute despair."
The misery and hopelessness, which was entailed on the Romans by Cæsar's government, may be well illustrated by Cicero's correspondence with his old friend Servius Sulpicius Rufus. Servius had taken no part against Cæsar in the Civil War (see above, p. 337), and at its close he was nominated by the Dictator to the governorship of Greece. This appointment was a kindly and delicate action on Cæsar's part. He must have known that Servius ​was at heart a Pompeian, and Greece was full of republican exiles to whom the presence of a sympathetic proconsul was a great comfort and protection. Nevertheless, Servius, far from congratulating himself that he has played his cards well, is "deeply troubled, and in the midst of the public misery is tormented by a grief peculiar to himself." The reproaches of conscience, felt by one who had been hardly more than a neutral, may serve to explain the bitter wrath of those members of the democratic party who had actively aided Cæsar in arms, and who now found that they had been unconsciously conspiring to destroy the last remnant of popular government, and to set up an unmitigated despotism. This disappointment, sharpened by self-reproach, armed against Cæsar the daggers of some of his best officers, Decimus Brutus, Trebonius, and Galba.
Servius Sulpicius is best known to modern readers as "the Roman friend of Rome's least mortal mind," part of whose beautiful letter of consolation on the death of Tullia is paraphrased by Byron:
"Wandering in youth, I traced the path of him,
The Roman friend of Rome's least mortal mind,
The friend of Tully: as my bark did skim
The bright blue waters with a fanning wind,
Came Megara before me, and behind
Ægina lay, Piræus on the right
And Corinth on the left; I lay reclined
Along the prow, and saw all these unite
In ruin, even as he had seen the desolate sight.
The Roman saw these tombs in his own age
These sepulchres of cities, which excite
Sad wonder, and his yet surviving page
The moral lesson bears, drawn from such pilgrimage."
The reflection on human nothingness by one who contemplates the ruins of by-gone cities and empires is a topic for every age. But Servius has special considerations to urge, which are happily not of so universal application: "Do you grieve for her lot, who is taken away from the evil to come? who has seen the great days of the Republic, and has expired with its expiration? Does it not often occur to you, as it does to me, that we have fallen on times in which those are to be congratulated who can pass painlessly from life to death? Why be so deeply stirred by a private grief? Consider how fortune has buffeted us already. We have been bereft of those things which men should hold not less dear than their children—our country, our reputation, our dignity,—everything which made life honourable. What can one blow more add to our pain? Schooled in such a fate as ours, ought not the mind to become callous, and hold whatever may befall as insignificant."
In sentences such as these we seem to catch the note of dull, passive despair, which Tacitus has laught us to recognise as the tone appropriate to the Romans under the Empire. The inexorable, unapproachable despotism already throws its chill shadow over the world, and the "petty men," as Cassius says, "peep about, to find themselves dishonourable graves."
​Every incident of monarchy was galling and degrading to those who had been nurtured in the proud atmosphere of aristocratic republicanism. There are indications that Cæsar himself was not blind to the feelings which his domination inspired, though he lacked the energy of purpose to correct the faults of which such feelings were the natural outcome. Cicero was dancing attendance one day in the antechamber of the Dictator, waiting for his turn of audience. "Can I doubt," exclaimed Cæsar, "that I am cordially hated, when Marcus Cicero has to sit there waiting, and cannot see me at his own convenience? Well if any one is good-natured it is Cicero, but no doubt he must hate me bitterly." Cicero had certainly no personal reason for disliking Cæsar, and those who have followed his utterances so far, have before them abundant evidence that personally he revered and admired him. What he hated was not the man but the monarch; yet his hatred of the monarch was sufficient to cause him not only to accept Cæsar's assassination as a necessary measure, but to triumph over it as a righteous retribution. Even when he doubts whether its practical results will not prove worthless, he sets down as clear gain "the exultation in the deed, and the exaction of the penalty desired by our hatred and indignation." Even "this same easy-tempered man," had felt the iron enter into his soul. To men of sterner mould the thrust of the dagger seemed the only possible answer to the ignominy under which they suffered. ​"It makes a world of difference, what his will is," Cæsar was wont to say of Marcus Brutus; "whatever he wills, he wills it strongly." Such wills Cæsar had set in deadly opposition to himself and his policy.
In the latter part of the year 45 we find Cicero engaged, though with little hope of any profitable result, on a letter of political advice addressed to Cæsar. His model was to be a treatise dedicated to Alexander by Aristotle. "There is nothing in it," he writes, "which may not become a good citizen, but a citizen such as the facts of the time admit of; and all political philosophers bid us adapt our course to the circumstances." Balbus and Oppius, who always knew Cæsar's mind, objected to some portions of the letter. "Some improvements," Cicero writes, "were suggested on the present order of things; and because they are improvements they are found fault with." He declined to alter what he had written, and preferred to withdraw the letter altogether. "Let us throw all these futilities to the winds," he exclaims, "and hold to the half-freedom of submitting in silence and retirement."
Thus ended the last effort to deter the Dictator from the line of action which was leading him to his death. Cæsar paid a visit to Cicero at his villa near ​Puteoli in the month of December, 45; but the conversation was all on literary topics, "of serious matters not a word"; on these "serious matters" Cæsar had no intention of listening to counsel, and he was daily revealing to the eyes of the Romans that he had spoken his last word in politics, and that the yoke which they abhorred was to be fixed on their necks for ever. "There would be no complaint," writes Mommsen, "at least on the score that Cæsar left the public in the dark as to his view of his position; as distinctly and formally as possible he came forward not merely as monarch but as very King of Rome." After the Spanish War was over, he accepted for the firse time, under the title of Dictator for life, absolute and unlimited dominion; and he never even pretended that he would voluntarily set a term to his power, as Sulla had done. Cæsar was not only greedy of the substance of power, but was caught by the glitter of its trappings. Though he knew the hatred which the Romans had cherished for centuries to the name of King, he suffered his partisans to play with the offer of the diadem, the symbol of Oriental monarchy. This offer which took place in January, 44, (see below p. 397) really, says Cicero, cost Cæsar his life. Meanwhile he set up his statue along with those of the Seven Kings of Rome, and adopted the golden throne and the robes which tradition assigned to them. He thus wilfully trampled on the ​susceptibilities of men, who dwelt proudly on the recollection of the long centuries of glory, in which freedom and self-government had made them masters of the world. He attempted to force on them the show of despotism for which the Roman world was not ripe for yet three hundred years. The setting up of Cæsar's statue beside that of Quirinus, the deified Romulus, brings to Cicero's lips the sharp retort: "I am better pleased to see him the neighbour of Quirinus, than as sharing the temple of Safety." The legend ran that Romulus had governed tyrannically, and had been torn in pieces by the Senators. In indicating such an omen for the new monarch of Rome, Cicero shows that the idea was already (May 45 B.C.) floating before his mind that the effort to reconstruct the Republic might have to be made over the dead body of Cæsar.
While on the one hand Cæsar accepted the odious memory of the office which the free State had renounced for ever, on the other hand we see in him a hankering after the barbaric expressions by which Eastern potentates were wont to attempt to realise to themselves the plenitude of their power. He aspired to a "Divine Right," not in that comparatively innocent form in which the ruler is regarded as the special servant and delegate of Heaven, but in the slavish sense in which the prostrate Asiatic deifies the person of his master. Cæsar must have his statue borne in procession among the images of the gods, he must have temples and a flamen to offer incense to his divinity and a statue inscribed, "the ​invincible god." These pretensions would have seemed impious to the believers in a dogmatic theology; but this was hardly the case with the Romans; their objection was not so much religious as political. Such conduct in a man was "incivism"; it was to claim submission as to a being of higher nature; it was to arrogate a pre-eminence, injurious and insulting to his fellows.
About the same time when Cæsar was parading his image among the gods, Aurelius Cotta was employed to discover a Sibylline oracle which might justify the Dictator in assuming the title of King. The hurried sentences of a note scribbled to Atticus give us a glimpse of Cicero's feelings. "How I delighted in your letter! but this procession is a bitter business. However, it is well to be kept informed about everything, even about Cotta. Well done the people! that they would not lend a hand even to clap the Victory, because of the bad company she was in. Brutus is here; he wants me to write to Cæsar. I had promised to do so, but now I tell him to look at this procession."
The Ides of March were now drawing on. Cæsar had not allowed the old year to expire without a ​deadly insult to the memory of the chief magistracy of republican Rome. Caninius Rebilus was elected consul for a few hours of the last day of the year 45. It was the public proclamation of the fact that the consulship was now only a mockery and a farce. The account of the spectacle which Cicero gives to his friend Curius in one of the last letters written before Cæsar's death, may serve as a fitting close to his experiences of the government of the Dictator:
"I give up pressing you or even inviting you to return home. All I wish is that I, too, could take to myself wings, and come at some land 'where I shall never hear of the name nor the deeds of the sons of Pelops.' I cannot tell you how mean I feel for having any part in these things. Verily you seem to me to have had a foresight long ago of what was coming on us, when you took your flight from these parts. Bitter as things are to hear of, they are a thousand times worse to see. At any rate you have escaped being present in the Campus Martius at eight o'clock in the morning when the elections for quæstors were being held. The curule chair of Fabius, whom they were pleased to call consul, was duly set. There comes a messenger to say the man is dead, and away goes his chair. Thereupon, Cæsar, who had taken the auspices for an assembly by tribes, held an assembly by centuries instead. At twelve o'clock he returned a consul duly elected to hold office till the 1st of January, that is to say, for the remainder of the day of election. So you are to ​know that in the consulship of Caninius no one breakfasted. It must be granted that his consulship was remarkably free from crime, owing to his marvellous vigilance, for during his term of office he never closed an eye. This seems a joke to you. Yes, for you are far away: if you were here to see it, you could not refrain from tears. Am I to write anything more of the sort? for plenty of the sort is happening. I could not bear it at all, were it not that I take refuge in the haven of philosophy, and that I have our dear Atticus as the companion of my studies."
* ↑ It must be remembered that three extra months were given to the year 46 B.C. in order to bring the Calendar straight.
* ↑ E.g., the Leges Juliæ Municipalis, de vi, de majestate, de liberis legationibus (modifying Cicero's), de provinciis (of length of tenure), de sacerdotiis, and de judiciis (abolishing Pompey's third decury).
* ↑ The principle of the Julian Year (i.e., 365 days with an extra day added every fourth year) is to be found in a bilingual inscription of 238 B.C. (the decree of Canopus) now in the Museum of Cairo. The distinguished mathematicians and astronomers whom Cæsar consulted (Plutarch, Cæs., 59) perhaps did not think it necessary to inform him that the work had been done two centuries before.
* ↑ It is difficult to say on what the claim was founded, but that it must have been very strong is proved by the admission of so rigid an aristocrat as the elder Curio. Cicero informs us (De Off., iii., 22, 88) that Curio used to say: "The claim of the Transpadanes has right on its side, but expediency forbids, and that is enough."
* ↑ Ad Fam., ix., 7, 2.
* ↑ See above, p. 167.
* ↑ Gibbon, ch. 36.
* ↑ Ad Fam., xv., 19, 4. The reference is to Pompey's son Cnæus, who was killed in Spain. Cassius was much in dread of him. "You know how foolish he is, and how apt to mistake cruelty for manliness. He always thought we were laughing at him, and I few repartees delivered in boorish fashion at point of sword.
* ↑ See below, p. 378
* ↑ Ad Fam., ix., 15, 4.
* ↑ One would fain hope that the person meant is not Cæsar himself.
* ↑ Ad Fam., ix., 2, 5.
* ↑ Ad Fam., ix., 16, 3.
* ↑ Trebianus, Ad Fam., vi., 10, 5.
* ↑ Ad Fam., vi., 6, 10.
* ↑ Ad Fam., ix., 17, 3.
* ↑ Ad Fam., ix., 17, 2.
* ↑ Ad Fam., iv., 4, 5 (to Ser. Sulpicius).
* ↑ Ad Fam., vi., 7, 5.
* ↑ Ad Fam., vi., 12, 1.
* ↑ Ad Att., xiii., 19, 2.
* ↑ Plutarch, Cic., 39.
* ↑ Ad Fam., iv., 4, 3.
* ↑ Pro Marcello, ch. viii., 25 seq.
* ↑ Ad Fam., ix., 20, 3.
* ↑ Ad Fam., xv., 17, 3.
* ↑ Ad Fam., ix., 16, 7.
* ↑ Ad Fam., vii., 33, 1.
* ↑ Ad Fam., ix., 18, 3.
* ↑ Plutarch, Comp. Cic. et Dem., i., 6.
* ↑ Ad Fam., ix., 16, 4.
* ↑ Ad Fam., ix, 1, 2.
* ↑ Ad Att., xii., 4, 2.
* ↑ Ad Att., xiii., 46, 2.
* ↑ Plutarch, Cic., 39. Cæsar probably had in mind the verdict of Aristotle on Theramenes, which in its complete shape has just come to light in the newly discovered Constitution of Athens, ch. xxviii "Those who weigh their judgments are agreed that he did not, as was said against him, wreck all governments, but that rather he furthered all so long as they kept within the limits of the law, being capable of serving under all, as a good citizen should, but that when they crossed these limits he resisted and repudiated them."
* ↑ Ad Att., xiii., 51.
* ↑ Ad Fam., xv., 18, 1.
* ↑ Pætus, Ad Fam., ix., 26, 2.
* ↑ Ad Att., xii., 15.
* ↑ Ad Att., xii., 14, 3.
* ↑ Ad Att., xii., 40, 2.
* ↑ Ad Att., xii., 52, 3.
* ↑ On the absorption of Greek moral doctrine into the ethics of the Christian Church, effected mainly through the influence of Cicero on St. Ambrose, see Hibbert Lectures, 1888, by Edwin Hatch, ch. vi.
* ↑ Ad Att., xii., 23, 1.
* ↑ Ad Fam., v., 13, 3.
* ↑ Ad Fam., iv., 3, 1.
* ↑ Extract from Ad Fam., iv., 5.
* ↑ Ad Att., xiv., 1, 2.
* ↑ Ad Att., xiv., 12, 1.
* ↑ Ad Att., xiv., 1, 2.
* ↑ Ad Att., xii., 51, 2.
* ↑ Ad Att., xiii., 28, 2.
* ↑ Ad Att., xiii., 31, 3.
* ↑ Ad Att., xiii., 52, 2.
* ↑ Phil., xiii., 19, 41.
* ↑ De Div., i., 52, 119.
* ↑ Ad Att., xii., 45, 3.
* ↑ Appian, Bell. Civ., ii., 106; Dio Cassius, xliii., 45, 3; Suetonius, Jul., 76. Mommsen's comments are characteristic of the modern Cæsarian school. "Since the principle of the monarchy leads by logical sequence either from its religious side up to the king-god, or from its legal side up to the king-master, we must recognise in this procedure that absolute and unshrinking thoroughness of thought and action, which, here as elsewhere, vindicates for Cæsar a unique station in history."—Rōmische Staats-Recht, vol. ii. p. 755.
* ↑ Ad Att., xiii., 44, 1.
* ↑ Ad Fam., vii., 30.
* ↑ From an unknown Latin tragedian.