III.
It was no doubt about the middle of the reign, when he who was the absolute master of the republic was pretending to restore the government to the people and senate, that Cicero’s letters appeared. The exact date of their publication is unknown; but everything tends to the belief that it should be placed in the years that followed the battle of Actium. The power of Augustus, become more popular since it had become more moderate, felt itself strong enough to allow some liberty of writing. It was mistrustful before that time because it was not sufficiently consolidated; it became so again later when it perceived that public favour was passing from it. This reign, which began by proscribing men, ended by burning books. Cicero’s correspondence could only have been published in the interval that separates these periods.
No one has told us what impression it produced on those who read it for the first time; but it may be fearlessly asserted that it was a very lively impression. The civil wars had only just ended, up till that time men were only occupied with present ills; in those misfortunes no man’s mind was sufficiently free to think of the past, but in the first period of tranquillity which that troubled generation knew, it hastened to throw a glance backward. Whether it sought to account for the events that had happened or wished to enjoy that bitter pleasure which is found, according to the poet, in the recollections of former sufferings, it retraced the sad years it had just traversed, and wished to go back to the very beginning of that struggle whose end it had seen. Nothing could satisfy their curiosity better than Cicero’s letters, and it cannot therefore be doubtful that everybody at that time eagerly read them.
I do not think that this reading did any harm to the government of Augustus. Perhaps the reputation of some important personages of the new government suffered a little from it. To have their republican professions of faith disinterred was unpleasant for men who boasted of being the private friends of the prince. I suppose that the malicious must have diverted themselves with those letters in which Pollio swears to be the eternal enemy of tyrants and in which Plancus harshly attributes the misfortunes of the republic to the treason of Octavius, who himself was not to be spared; and these lively recollections of a time when he held out his hand to Caesar’s assassins and called Cicero his father, were not favourable to him. All this provided subjects of conversation for the malcontents during several weeks. But upon the whole, the mischief was small, and these railleries did not endanger the security of the great empire. What was most to be feared for it was that imagination, always favourable to the past, should freely attribute to the republic those qualities with which it is so easy to adorn institutions that no longer exist. Now, Cicero’s letters were much more suited to destroy these illusions than to encourage them. The picture they present of the intrigues, the disorders, and the scandals of that time did not permit men to regret it. The men whom Tacitus depicts to us as worn out with struggles and eager for repose, found in it nothing that could attract them, and the bad use that men like Curio, Caelius, and Dolabella had made of liberty, rendered them less sensitive to the sorrow of having lost it.
The memory of him who wrote these letters gained most by their publication. It was very common at that time to speak ill of Cicero. Notwithstanding the manner in which the court historians narrated the meeting at Bologna and the honourable part they attempted to give Octavius in the proscriptions,[[391]] they were none the less unpleasant recollections for him. His victims were calumniated in order to diminish his faults. This is what Asinius Pollio wished to do, when he said, in his speech for Lamia, that Cicero died like a coward.[[392]] Those whose devotedness did not go so far, and who had not enough courage to insult him, took care at least to say nothing of him. It has been remarked that none of the great poets of this time speak of him, and we know from Plutarch that at the Palatine it was necessary to read his works in secret. Silence therefore fell, as far as it was indeed possible, around Cicero’s great glory; but the publication of his letters recalled him to the memory of everybody. When once they had been read, this intellectual and gentle figure, so amiable, so human and so attractive even in its weaknesses, could not again be forgotten.
To the interest that the personality of Cicero gives to his letters, a still more vivid interest is added for us. We have seen, in what I have just written, how much our time resembles that of which these letters speak to us. It had no solid faith any more than our own, and its sad experiences of revolutions had disgusted it with everything while inuring it to everything. The men of that time knew, just as we do, that discontent with the present and that uncertainty of the morrow which do not allow us to enjoy tranquillity or repose. In them we see ourselves; the sorrows of the men of those times are partly our own, and we have suffered the same ills of which they complained. We, like them, live in one of those transitional periods, the most mournful of history, in which the traditions of the past have disappeared and the future is not yet clearly defined, and know not on what to set our affections, and we can well understand that they might have said with the ancient Hesiod: “Would that I had died sooner or been born later!” This is what gives Cicero’s letters so lively though mournful an interest for us; this is what first attracted me towards them; this is what, perhaps, will give us some pleasure in spending a short time in the society of the persons they depict, who, in spite of the lapse of years, seem almost to be our contemporaries.