I.
I must first recall the events which led Cicero to desert the aristocratic party to which he had been attached since his consulship, in order to serve the triumvirs, and how the courageous friend of Hortensius and of Cato became so subservient to Pompey and Caesar. It is not an honourable period in his life, and his most convinced admirers say as little about it as possible. However, there is some interest, perhaps even some profit, in pausing upon it for a moment.
Cicero’s return from the exile to which he had been condemned after his consulship by the efforts of Clodius, was a veritable triumph. Brundusium, where he disembarked, celebrated his arrival by public rejoicings. All the citizens of the free towns that bordered the Appian Way, waited for him on the road, and the heads of families with their wives and children came from all the neighbouring farms to see him pass. At Rome, he was received by an immense multitude crowded on the public squares, or ranged on the steps of the temples. “It seemed,” said he, “that all the city was drawn from its foundations to come and salute its liberator.”[[236]] At his brother’s house, where he was going to live, he found the most eminent members of the senate awaiting him, and at the same time congratulatory addresses from all the popular societies of the city. It is probable that some who had signed these, had voted with the same eagerness the preceding year for the law that exiled him, and that many clapped their hands on his return who had applauded his departure; but the people have occasionally these strange and generous impulses. It sometimes happens that they break away by a sudden bound from the malice, distrust, and narrowness of party spirit, and, at the very moment when passions seem most inflamed and divisions most clearly marked, they unite all at once to render homage to some great genius or to some great character, which, we know not how, has compelled their recognition. Usually, this gratitude and admiration last but a short time; but, should they endure only a day, they do eternal honour to him who has been their object, and the glory they leave behind is sufficient to illumine a whole life. Therefore we must pardon Cicero for having spoken so often and with so much effusiveness of this glorious day. A little pride was here both legitimate and natural. How could a soul so sensitive to popular applause have resisted the intoxication of a triumphal return? “I do not feel as though I were simply returning from exile,” said he, “I appear to myself to be mounting to heaven.”[[237]]
But he was not long in descending again to earth. Whatever he may have thought at first, he soon recognized that this city which welcomed him with so much rejoicing was not changed, and that he found it much the same as when he left it. Anarchy had reigned there for three years, an anarchy such as we have difficulty in imagining, notwithstanding all the examples that our own revolutions have given us. Since the triumvirs had let loose the rabble in order to seize upon the government of the republic, it had become entirely master. A daring tribune, a deserter from the aristocracy, and one who bore the most illustrious name in Rome, Clodius, had taken upon himself to lead it, and as far as possible, to discipline it. He had displayed in this difficult work many talents and much audacity, and had succeeded well enough to deserve to become the terror of honest people. When we speak of the Roman mob, we must not forget that it was much more frightful than our own, and was recruited from more formidable elements. Whatever just dismay the populace that emerges all at once from the lowest quarters of our manufacturing cities, on a day of riot, may cause us, let us remember that at Rome, this inferior social stratum descended still lower. Below the vagabond strangers and the starving workmen, the ordinary tools of revolutions, there was all that crowd of freedmen demoralized by slavery, to whom liberty had given but one more means for evil-doing; there were those gladiators, trained to fight beast or man, who made light of the death of others or themselves; there were, still lower, those fugitive slaves, who were indeed the worst of all classes, who, after having robbed or murdered at home, and lived by pillage on the road, came from all Italy to take refuge and disappear in the obscurity of the slums of Rome, an unclean and terrible multitude of men without family, without country, who, outlawed by the general sentiment of society, had nothing to respect as they had nothing to lose. It was among these that Clodius recruited his bands. Enlistments were made in open day, in one of the most frequented spots in Rome, near the Aurelian steps. The new soldiers were then organized in decuries and centuries, under energetic leaders. They assembled by districts in secret societies, where they went to receive the password, and had their centre and arsenal at the temple of Castor. When the day arrived, and a popular manifestation was wanted, the tribunes ordered the shops to be closed; then, the artisans were thrown on the public streets, and all the army of the secret societies marched together towards the Forum. There they met, not the honest folks, who, feeling themselves the weaker party, stayed at home, but the gladiators and herdsmen whom the senate had fetched to defend them from the wilds of Picenum or Gaul, and then the battle commenced. “Imagine London,” says M. Mommsen, “with the slave population of New Orleans, the police of Constantinople, and the industrial condition of modern Rome, and think of the political state of Paris in 1848: you will have some idea of republican Rome in its last days.”
No law was any longer respected, no citizen, no magistrate was secure from violence. One day the fasces of a consul were broken, the next a tribune was left for dead. The senate itself, led away by these examples, had at last lost that quality which Romans lost the last, its dignity. In that assembly of kings, as a Greek had called it, they debated with revolting coarseness. Cicero surprised no one when he gave his adversaries the names of swine, filth, rotten flesh. Sometimes the discussions became so heated that the noise reached that excited crowd that filled the porticoes near the curia, which then took part in them, with so much violence that the terrified senators hastened to fly.[[238]] We can easily understand that it was much worse in the Forum. Cicero relates that, when they were tired of insulting, they spat in each other’s faces.[[239]] When a man wished to address the people, he had to take the rostrum by storm, and he risked his life in trying to keep his place there. The tribunes had found a new way of obtaining unanimity of votes for the laws that they proposed: namely, to beat and drive away all who took it into their heads not to agree with them. But contests were nowhere more violent than on the Campus Martius on election days. Men were driven to regret the time when they trafficked publicly in the votes of the electors. Now, they did not even take the trouble to buy public offices; they found it more convenient to seize them by force. Each party went before daylight to the Campus Martius. Collisions took place on the roads leading to it. Each party hastened to arrive before its adversaries, or, if these were already established there, attacked them in order to dislodge them: naturally the appointments belonged to those who remained masters of the place. In the midst of all these armed bands there was no security for any one. Men were obliged to fortify themselves in their houses for fear of being surprised. They could only go out with a train of gladiators and slaves. To go from one quarter of the city to another, they took as many precautions as if they had to traverse a desert country, and they met at the turning of a street with the same fear they would have had at the corner of a wood. In the midst of Rome there were real battles and regular sieges. It was an ordinary manœuvre to set fire to the houses of their enemies at the risk of burning down a whole quarter, and, towards the end, no election or popular assembly took place without bloodshed. “The Tiber,” says Cicero, speaking of one of these combats, “was full of the corpses of the citizens, the public sewers were choked with them, and they were obliged to mop up with sponges the blood that streamed from the Forum.”[[240]]
Such were the obscure convulsions in which the Roman republic perished, and the shameful disorders that sapped its remaining strength. Cicero well knew that bloody anarchy and the dangers he was about to run, and had therefore resolved, before re-entering Rome, to be prudent, so as not to run the risk of having to leave it again. His was not one of those minds that misfortune strengthens, and that feel a kind of pleasure in struggling against ill-fortune. Exile had discouraged him. During the long weariness of his sojourn in Thessaly, he had made a sad review of the past. He had reproached himself for his occasional courage and independence, for his boldness in combating the powerful, and for the mistake he had made in joining himself too closely to the party which he had judged the best, but which was evidently the weakest, as though to act thus had been a crime. He came back thoroughly resolved to entangle himself as little as possible with any one, to disarm his enemies by concession, and to keep on good terms with everybody. This was the course he followed on his arrival, and his first speeches are masterpieces of policy. It is plain that he still leans towards the aristocracy which had taken an active part in his restoration, and to praise it he has noble expressions of patriotism and gratitude; but already he commences to flatter Caesar, and he calls Pompey “the most virtuous, the wisest, the greatest of the men of his age or of any age.”[[241]] At the same time, he tells us himself, he took good heed not to appear in the senate when irritating questions were to be discussed, and was very careful to escape from the Forum as soon as the debate became too heated. “No more violent remedies,” he replied to those who tried to urge him to some brilliant action; “I must put myself on diet.”[[242]]
However, he soon perceived that this adroit reserve was not sufficient to ward off all danger. While he was rebuilding his house on the Palatine, which had been destroyed after his departure, the bands of Clodius threw themselves on the workmen and dispersed them, and, emboldened by this success, set fire to the house of his brother Quintus, which was close by. A few days later, as he was walking on the Via Sacra, he heard all at once a great noise, and on turning round saw sticks raised and naked swords. It was the same men who came to attack him. He had great difficulty in escaping into the vestibule of a friendly house while his slaves fought bravely before the door to give him time to escape. Cato would not have been moved by this violence; Cicero must have been very much frightened; above all it taught him that his system of prudent reserve did not sufficiently assure his safety. It was, in fact, probable that no party would expose itself to defend him as long as he had only compliments to give it, and as he could not stand alone and without support in the midst of all these armed factions, it was really necessary that, in order to find the support he needed, he should consent to attach himself more closely to one of them.
But which should he choose? This was a grave question in which his interests were at variance with his sympathies. All his inclinations were evidently for the aristocracy. He had closely attached himself to it about the time of his consulship, and since that time he had professed to serve it, and it was for it that he had just braved the anger of the people and exposed himself to exile. But this very exile had taught him how the most honourable course was also the least safe. At the last moment, the senate had not found better means of saving him than to make useless decrees, to put on mourning, and go and throw themselves at the feet of the consuls. Cicero thought that this was not enough. Seeing himself so ill-defended, he had suspected that people who did not take his interests in hand more resolutely were not very sorry for his misfortunes; and perhaps he was not wrong. The Roman aristocracy, whatever he had done for it, could not forget he was a “new” man. The Claudii, the Cornelii, the Manlii, always looked with a certain displeasure on this insignificant townsman of Arpinum, whom the popular vote had made their equal. Still they might have pardoned his good fortune if he had borne it with more modesty; but we know his vanity; though it was only ridiculous, the aristocracy, whom it offended, thought it criminal. They could not tolerate the legitimate pride with which he constantly recalled that he was only a parvenu. They thought it strange that, when attacked by insolence, he dared to reply by raillery; and quite recently they had shown themselves scandalized that he had forgotten himself so far as to buy the villa of Catulus at Tusculum, and to go and live on the Palatine in the house of Crassus. Cicero, with his usual shrewdness, very clearly discerned all these sentiments of the aristocracy, and even exaggerated them. Since his return from exile he had yet other grievances against them. They had taken much trouble to get him recalled; but had not foreseen the splendour of his return, and it did not seem that they were very well pleased with it. “Those who have clipped my wings,” said Cicero, “are sorry to see them grow again.”[[243]] From this moment his good friends in the senate would do nothing more for him. He had found his finances much embarrassed, his house on the Palatine burnt, his villas at Tusculum and Formiae plundered and destroyed, and they decided with reluctance to indemnify him for these losses. What irritated him still more, was that he saw clearly that they did not share in his anger against Clodius. They showed themselves cool or remained silent during his violent fits of anger. A few even, the most adroit, affected to speak only with esteem of this factious tribune, and did not blush to give him their hand in public. Whence came their regard for a man who had so little for them? It was that they hoped to make use of him, and that they secretly nourished the thought of calling in the mob to the help of the endangered aristocracy. This alliance, although less usual than that of the mob with despotism, was not impossible, and the bands of Clodius, if they could be enlisted, would have permitted the senate to hold the triumvirs in check. Cicero, who perceived this policy, feared to become its victim; he bitterly regretted then the services he had tried to render to the senate, and which had cost him so dear. In recalling the dangers to which he had exposed himself in order to defend it, the obstinate and unsuccessful struggles that he had maintained for four years, the ruin of his political position and the disasters of his private fortune, he said with sorrow: “I see clearly now that I have been only a fool (scio me asinum germanum fuisse”).[[244]]
It only remained for him then to turn to the triumvirs. This was the advice given to him by his friend the prudent Atticus, and his brother Quintus, whom the burning of his house had rendered cautious contrary to his habit; this was the resolution he was himself tempted to take every time he ran some fresh danger. Nevertheless, he had some trouble in making up his mind. The triumvirs had been heretofore his most cruel enemies. Without speaking of Crassus, in whom he detected an accomplice of Catiline, he well knew that it was Caesar who had let Clodius loose against him, and he could not forget that Pompey, who had sworn to defend him, had lately abandoned him to the vengeance of his two friends; but he had no choice of alliances, and since he dared no longer trust the aristocratic party, he was forced to put himself under the protection of others. He had then to resign himself to his fate. He authorized his brother to pledge him to Caesar and Pompey, and prepared himself to serve their ambition. His first act, after his return, had been to demand for Pompey one of those extraordinary powers of which he was so greedy: by his exertions Pompey had been entrusted for six years with the victualling of Rome, and on this occasion he had been invested with an almost unlimited authority. A short time after, although the public treasury was exhausted, he had a sum of money granted to Caesar for the payment of his legions, and permission to have ten lieutenants under his orders. When the aristocracy, who understood with what design Caesar was carrying out the conquest of Gaul, wished to prevent him continuing it, it was again Cicero who demanded and obtained for him permission to finish his work. It was thus that the old enemy of the triumvirs became their usual defender before the senate. The support that he consented to give was not useless to them. His great name and his eloquence drew towards him the moderate men of all parties, those whose opinion was wavering and their convictions undecided; those, above all, who, wearied with a too tempestuous liberty, sought everywhere a firm hand that might give them repose; and these, joined to the personal friends of Caesar and Pompey, to the tools that the rich Crassus had made by bribery, and to the ambitious men of all sorts who foresaw the advent of the monarchy and wished to be the first to salute it, formed in the senate a majority of which Cicero was the head and the orator, and which rendered to the triumvirs the important service of giving a legal sanction to that power which they had gained by violence and exercised illegally.
Cicero had at length obtained repose. His enemies feared him, Clodius dared no longer risk attacking him, his familiarity with the new masters was envied, and yet this skilful conduct, which gained for him the thanks of the triumvirs and the congratulations of Atticus, did not fail at times to disturb him. It was in vain for him to say to himself that “his life had regained its splendour,” he did not feel less remorse in serving men whose ambition he knew, and whom he knew to be dangerous to the liberty of his country. In the midst of the efforts that he made to satisfy them, he had sudden awakenings of patriotism which made him blush. His private correspondence bears everywhere the trace of the alternations of mood through which he passed. One day he wrote to Atticus in a light and resolute tone: “Let us give up honour, justice, and fine sentiments.... Since those who can do nothing will not love me, let us try to make ourselves loved by those who can do everything.”[[245]] But shame seized him the next day, and he could not avoid saying to his friend: “Is anything sadder than our life, mine above all? If I speak according to my convictions I pass for a madman; if I listen to my interests, I am accused of being a slave; if I am silent, they say I am afraid.”[[246]] Even in his public speeches, notwithstanding the restraint he puts on himself, we can feel his secret dissatisfaction. It seems to me that we discover it above all in that extraordinary tone of bitterness and violence which was then habitual to him. Never, perhaps, did he pronounce more passionate invectives. Now this excess of violence towards others often comes from a mind ill at ease. What made his eloquence so bitter at this time was that uneasy feeling which a man has who is in the wrong path and has not the courage to leave it. He did not forgive his old friends their raillery and his new ones their demands; he reproached himself secretly for his base concessions; he had a spite against others and against himself, and Vatinius or Piso suffered for all the rest. In this condition of mind he could not be a safe friend for anybody. It happened sometimes that he suddenly turned on his new friends, and gave blows so much the more disagreeable that they were not expected. Sometimes he diverted himself by attacking their best friends, to show others and prove to himself that he had not entirely lost his liberty. People had been very much surprised to hear him, in a speech in which he defended Caesar’s interests, praise to excess Bibulus, whom Caesar detested. One day even he seemed quite ready to return to those whom he had called honest men before he abandoned them. It seemed to him a good opportunity to break with his new party in a formal manner. The friendship of the triumvirs had become very cool. Pompey was not pleased with the success of that Gallic war which threatened to make his own victories forgotten. Cicero, who heard him speak without restraint against his rival, thought he might without danger give some satisfaction to his irritated conscience, and wished by a brilliant stroke to deserve the pardon of his old friends. Taking advantage of some difficulty that was raised in regard to the carrying out of Caesar’s agrarian law, he formally announced that on the Ides of May he would speak on the sale of the Campanian lands which by this law were distributed among the people. The effect of his declaration was very great. The allies of the triumvirs were as much offended as they were surprised, and the aristocratic party hastened to welcome with transports of joy the return of the eloquent deserter, but in a few days everything turned against him. At the very moment when he decided on this brilliant stroke, the alliance between the triumvirs that was thought to be broken, was renewed at Lucca, and, amid a concourse of their flatterers, they once more divided the world between them. Cicero, then, was about to find himself again alone and without support in the presence of an angry and all-powerful enemy who threatened to deliver him up again to the vengeance of Clodius. Atticus scolded; Quintus, who had pledged himself for his brother, complained roughly that his promises were being broken. Pompey, although he had secretly encouraged the defection, affected to be more angry than anybody. The unhappy Cicero, attacked on all sides, and trembling at the passions which he had raised, hastened to submit, and promised everything that was required. Thus this attempt at independence only made his slavery heavier.
From this moment he seems to have resolutely accepted his new position, from a feeling that he could not change it. He resigned himself to heap more and more exaggerated praises on the vain Pompey, who never had enough. He consented to become the agent of Caesar with Oppius and Balbus, and to supervise the public buildings he was constructing. He went further, and was willing at the request of his powerful protectors to give his hand to men whom he regarded as his greatest enemies. This was not a small sacrifice for a man who had such strong aversions; but from the time that he joined their party so decidedly, he was obliged to accept their friendship as he defended their plans. They began to take steps to reconcile him to Crassus. This was a great matter which was not done in a day, for when it was thought that their old enmity was appeased, it broke out all at once in a discussion in the senate, and Cicero abused his new ally with a violence that surprised himself. “I thought my hatred exhausted,” said he naïvely, “and did not imagine any remained in my heart.”[[247]] He was then asked to undertake the defence of Vatinius; he consented with a pretty good grace, although he had pronounced a furious invective against him the year before. The advocates in Rome were accustomed to these sudden changes, and Cicero had done the same thing more than once. When Gabinius returned from Egypt, after having restored King Ptolemy against the formal command of the senate, Cicero, who could not abide him, thinking it a good opportunity to ruin him, prepared to attack him; but Pompey came to beg him urgently to defend him. He dared not refuse, changed his part, and submitted to speak in favour of a man whom he detested and a cause which he considered bad. He had at least the consolation of losing his case, and although he was always anxious for success, it is probable that this failure did not give him much pain.
But he well understood that so much deference and submission, all these notorious self-contradictions to which he was forced, would end by rousing public opinion against him. Therefore, about this time, he decided to write an important letter to his friend Lentulus, one of the chiefs of the aristocracy, which he probably intended to be circulated, and in which he explains his conduct.[[248]] In this letter, after having related the facts in his own way and sufficiently abused those whom he had abandoned, a convenient and common mode of anticipating their complaints and making them responsible for the mischief he was about to do them, he ventures to present, with singular candour, a sort of apology for his political instability. The reasons he gives to justify it are not always very good; but we must believe that better cannot be found, since they have not ceased to be used. Under the pretence that Plato has somewhere said, “one must not do violence to one’s country any more than to one’s father,” Cicero lays it down as a principle, that a politician ought not to persist in wishing for what his fellow-citizens do not wish, nor lose his pains in attempting useless opposition. Circumstances change, one must change with them, and suit oneself to the wind that blows, so as not to go to pieces on the rocks. Besides, is that really to change? Cannot one in the main wish for the same thing and serve one’s country under different banners? A man is not fickle for defending, according to circumstances, opinions that seem contradictory if by opposite routes he marches to the same goal, and do we not know “that we must often shift the sails when we wish to arrive in port”? These are only the general maxims which an inventive politician can make up to hide his weaknesses, and there is no need to discuss them. The best way to defend Cicero is to remember in what a time he lived, and how little fitted he was for that time. This elegant literary man, this skilful artist, this friend of the arts of peace, had been placed, by a caprice of fate, in one of the most stormy and troubled periods of history. What could a man of leisure and study do among those deadly struggles where force was master, a man who had no arms but his words, and who always dreamed of the pleasures of peaceful times and the pacific laurels of eloquence? A more manly soul than his would have been needed to make head against these assaults. Events stronger than himself confounded his designs every instant and played with his hesitating will. On his entry into public life he had taken for his motto, leisure and honour, otium cum dignitate; but these two things are not easy to unite in revolutionary times, and almost always one of the two is lost when we are too anxious to preserve the other. Resolute characters, who know this well, make their choice between them at once, and, according as one is a Cato or an Atticus, one decides from the very first day either for leisure or for honour. The undecided, like Cicero, pass from one to the other, according to circumstances, and thus jeopardize both. We have arrived at one of those painful moments in his life when he sacrifices honour to leisure; let us not be too severe upon him, and let us remember that, later, he sacrificed not only his leisure, but even his life, to save his honour.