We have records of at least a dozen speeches, made b.c. 55 and b.c. 54, between that against Piso and the next that is extant, which was delivered in defence of Plancius. He defended Cispius, but Cispius was convicted. He defended Caninius Gallus, of whom we may presume that he was condemned and exiled, because Cicero found him at Athens on his way to Cilicia, Athens being the place to which exiled Roman oligarchs generally betook themselves.[35] In this letter to his young friend Cælius he speaks of the pleasure he had in meeting with Caninius at Athens; but in the letter to Marius which I have quoted he complains of the necessity which has befallen him of defending the man. The heat of the summer of this year he passed in the country, but on his return to the city in November he found Crassus defending his old enemy Gabinius. Gabinius had crept back from his province into the city, and had been received with universal scorn and a shower of accusations. Cicero at first neither accused nor defended him, but, having been called on as a witness, seems to have been unable to refrain from something of the severity with which he had treated Piso. There was at any rate a passage of arms in which Gabinius called him a banished criminal.[36] The Senate then rose as one body to do honor to their late exile. He was, however, afterward driven by the expostulations of Pompey to defend the man. At his first trial Gabinius was acquitted, but was convicted and banished when Cicero defended him. Cicero suffered very greatly in the constraint thus put upon him by Pompey, and refused Pompey till Cæsar's request was added. We can imagine that nothing was more bitter to him than the obligation thus forced upon him. We have nothing of the speech left, but can hardly believe that it was eloquent. From this, however, there rose a reconciliation between Crassus and Cicero, both Cæsar and Pompey having found it to their interest to interfere. As a result of this, early in the next year Cicero defended Crassus in the Senate, when an attempt was made to rob the late Consul of his coveted mission to Syria. Of what he did in this respect he boasts in a letter to Crassus,[37] which, regarded from our point of view, would no doubt be looked upon as base. He despised Crassus, and here takes credit for all the fine things he had said of him; but we have no right to think that Cicero could have been altogether unlike a Roman. He speaks also in the Senate on behalf of the people of Tenedos, who had brought their immunities and privileges into question by some supposed want of faith. All we know of this speech is that it was spoken in vain. He pleaded against an Asiatic king, Antiochus of Comagene, who was befriended by Pompey, but Cicero seems to have laughed him out of some of his petty possessions.[38] He spoke for the inhabitants of Reate on some question of water-privilege against the Interamnates. Interamna we now know as Terne, where a modern Pope made a lovely water-fall, and at the same time rectified the water-privileges of the surrounding district. Cicero went down to its pleasant Tempe, as he calls it, and stayed there awhile with one Axius.[39] He returned thence to Rome to undertake some case for Fonteius, and attended the games which Milo was giving, Milo having been elected Ædile. Here we have a morsel of dramatic criticism on Antiphon the actor and Arbuscula the actress, which reminds one of Pepys. Then he defended Messius, then Drusus, then Scaurus. He mentions all these cases in the same letter, but so slightly that we cannot trouble ourselves with their details. We only feel that he was kept as busy as a London barrister in full practice. He also defended Vatinius—that Vatinius with whose iniquities he had been so indignant at the trial of Sextius. He defended him twice at the instigation of Cæsar; and he does not seem to have suffered in doing so, as he had certainly done when called upon to stand up and plead for his late consular enemy, Gabinius. Valerius Maximus, a dull author, often quoted but seldom read, whose task it was to give instances of all the virtues and vices produced by mankind, refers to these pleadings for Gabinius and Vatinius as instances of an almost divine forgiveness of injury.[40] I think we must seek for the good, if good is to be discovered in the proceeding, in the presumed strength which might be added to the Republic by friendly relations between himself and Cæsar.
b.c. 54, ætat. 53.
In the spring of the year we find Cicero writing to Cæsar in apparently great intimacy. He recommends to Cæsar his young friend Trebatius, a lawyer, who was going to Gaul in search of his fortune, and in doing so he refers to a joking promise from Cæsar that he would make another friend, whom he had recommended, King of Gaul; or, if not that, foreman at least to Lepta, his head of the mechanics. Lepta was an officer in trust under Cæsar, with whose name we become familiar in Cicero's correspondence, though I do not remember that Cæsar ever mentions him. "Send me some one else that I may show my friendship," Cæsar had said, knowing well that Cicero was worth any price of the kind. Cicero declares to Cæsar that on hearing this he held up his hands in grateful surprise, and on this account he had sent Trebatius. "Mi Cæsar," he says, writing with all affection; and then he praises Trebatius, assuring Cæsar that he does not recommend the young man loosely, as he had some other young men who were worthless—such as Milo, for instance. This results in much good done to Trebatius, though the young man at first does not like the service with the army. He is a lawyer, and finds the work in Gaul very rough. Cicero, who is anxious on his behalf, laughs at him and bids him take the good things that come in his way. In subsequent years Trebatius was made known to the world as the legal pundit whom Horace pretends to consult as to the libellous nature of his satires.[41]
In September of this year Cicero pleaded in court for his friend Cn. Plancius, against whom there was brought an accusation that, in canvassing and obtaining the office of Ædile, he had been guilty of bribery. In all these accusations, which come before us as having been either promoted or opposed by Cicero, there is not one in which the reader sympathizes more strongly with the person accused than in this. Plancius had shown Cicero during his banishment the affection of a brother, or almost of a son. Plancius had taken him in and provided for him in Macedonia, when to do so was illegal. Cicero now took great delight in returning the favor. The reader of this oration cannot learn from it that Plancius had in truth done anything illegal. The complaint really made against him was that he, filling the comparatively humble position of a knight, had ventured to become the opposing candidate of such a gallant young aristocrat as M. Juventius Laterensis, who was beaten at this election, and now brought this action in revenge. There is no tearing of any enemy to tatters in this oration, but there is much pathos, and, as was usual with Cicero at this period of his life, an inordinate amount of self-praise. There are many details as to the way in which the tribes voted at elections, which the patient and curious student will find instructive, but which will probably be caviare to all who are not patient and curious students. There are a few passages of peculiar force. Addressing himself to the rival of Plancius, he tells Laterensis that, even though the people might have judged badly in selecting Plancius, it was not the less his duty to accept the judgment of the people.[42] Say that the people ought not to have done so; but it should have been sufficient for him that they had done so. Then he laughs with a beautiful irony at the pretensions of the accuser. "Let us suppose that it was so," he says.[43] "Let no one whose family has not soared above prætorian honors contest any place with one of consular family. Let no mere knight stand against one with prætorian relations." In such a case there would be no need of the people to vote at all. Farther on he gives his own views as to the honors of the State in language that is very grand. "It has," he says, "been my first endeavor to deserve the high rank of the State; my second, to have been thought to deserve it. The rank itself has been but the third object of my desires."[44] Plancius was acquitted—it seems to us quite as a matter of course.
In this perhaps the most difficult period of his existence, when the organized conspiracy of the day had not as yet overturned the landmarks of the constitution, he wrote a long letter to his friend Lentulus,[45] him who had been prominent as Consul in rescuing him from his exile, and who was now Proconsul in Cilicia. Lentulus had probably taxed him, after some friendly fashion, with going over from the "optimates" or Senatorial party to that of the conspirators Pompey, Cæsar, and Crassus. He had been called a deserter for having passed in his earlier years from the popular party to that of the Senate, and now the leading optimates were doubtful of him—whether he was not showing himself too well inclined to do the bidding of the democratic leaders. The one accusation has been as unfair as the other. In this letter he reminds Lentulus that a captain in making a port cannot always sail thither in a straight line, but must tack and haul and use a slant of wind as he can get it. Cicero was always struggling to make way against a head-wind, and was running hither and thither in his attempt, in a manner most perplexing to those who were looking on without knowing the nature of the winds; but his port was always there, clearly visible to him, if he could only reach it. That port was the Old Republic, with its well-worn and once successful institutions. It was not to be "fetched." The winds had become too perverse, and the entrance had become choked with sand. But he did his best to fetch it; and, though he was driven hither and thither in his endeavors, it should be remembered that to lookers-on such must ever be the appearance of those who are forced to tack about in search of their port.
I have before me Mr. Forsyth's elaborate and very accurate account of this letter. "Now, however," says the biographer, "the future lay dark before him; and not the most sagacious politician at Rome could have divined the series of events—blundering weakness on the one side and unscrupulous ambition on the other—which led to the Dictatorship of Cæsar and the overthrow of the constitution." Nothing can be more true. Cicero was probably the most sagacious politician in Rome; and he, though he did understand much of the weakness—and, it should be added, of the greed—of his own party, did not foresee the point which Cæsar was destined to reach, and which was now probably fixed before Cæsar's own eyes. But I cannot agree with Mr. Forsyth in the result at which he had arrived when he quoted a passage from one of the notes affixed by Melmoth to his translation of this letter: "It was fear alone that determined his resolution; and having once already suffered in the cause of liberty, he did not find himself to be disposed to be twice its martyr." I should not have thought these words worthy of refutation had they not been backed by Mr. Forsyth. How did Cicero show his fear? Had he feared—as indeed there was cause enough, when it was difficult for a leading man to keep his throat uncut amid the violence of the times, or a house over his head—might he not have made himself safe by accepting Cæsar's offers? A Proconsul out of Rome was safe enough, but he would not be a Proconsul out of Rome till he could avoid it no longer. When the day of danger came, he joined Pompey's army against Cæsar, doubting, not for his life but for his character, as to what might be the best for the Republic. He did not fear when Cæsar was dead and only Antony remained. When the hour came in which his throat had to be cut, he did not fear. When a man has shown such a power of action in the face of danger as Cicero displayed at forty-four in his Consulship, and again at sixty-four in his prolonged struggle with Antony, it is contrary to nature that he should have been a coward at fifty-four.
And all the evidence of the period is opposed to this theory of cowardice. There was nothing special for him to fear when Cæsar was in Gaul, and Crassus about to start for Syria, and Pompey for his provinces. Such was the condition of Rome, social and political, that all was uncertain and all was dangerous. But men had become used to danger, and were anxious only, in the general scramble, to get what plunder might be going. Unlimited plunder was at Cicero's command—provinces, magistracies, abnormal lieutenancies—but he took nothing. He even told his friend in joke that he would have liked to be an augur, and the critics have thereupon concluded that he was ready to sell his country for a trifle. But he took nothing when all others were helping themselves.
The letter to Lentulus is well worth studying, if only as evidence of the thoughtfulness with which he weighed every point affecting his own character. He did wish to stand well with the "optimates," of whom Lentulus was one. He did wish to stand well with Cæsar, and with Pompey, who at this time was Cæsar's jackal. He did find the difficulty of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. He must have surely learned at last to hate all compromise. But he had fallen on hard times, and the task before him was impossible. If, however, his hands were clean when those of others were dirty, and his motives patriotic while those of others were selfish, so much ought to be said for him.
In the same year he defended Rabirius Postumus, and in doing so carried on the purpose which he had been instigated to undertake by Cæsar in defending Gabinius. This Rabirius was the nephew of him whom ten years before Cicero had defended when accused of having killed Saturninus. He was a knight, and, as was customary with the Equites, had long been engaged in the pursuit of trade, making money by lending money, and such like. He had, it seems, been a successful man, but, in an evil time for himself, had come across King Ptolemy Auletes when there was a question of restoring that wretched sovereign to the throne of Egypt. As Cicero was not himself much exercised in this matter, I have not referred to the king and his affairs, wishing as far as possible to avoid questions which concern the history of Rome rather than the life of Cicero; but the affairs of this banished king continually come up in the records of this time. Pompey had befriended Auletes, and Gabinius, when Proconsul in Syria, had succeeded in restoring the king to his throne—no doubt in obedience to Pompey, though not in obedience to the Senate. Auletes, when in Rome, had required large sums of money—suppliant kings when in the city needed money to buy venal Senators—and Rabirius had supplied him. The profits to be made from suppliant kings when in want of money were generally very great, but this king seems so have got hold of all the money which Rabirius possessed, so that the knight-banker found himself obliged to become one of the king's suite when the king went back to take possession of his kingdom. In no other way could he hang on to the vast debt that was owing to him. In Egypt he found himself compelled to undergo various indignities. He became no better than a head-servant among the king's servants. One of the charges brought against him was that he, a Roman knight, had allowed himself to be clothed in the half-feminine garb of an Oriental attendant upon a king. It was also brought against him as part of the accusation that he had bribed, or had endeavored to bribe, a certain Senator. The crime nominally laid to the charge of Rabirius was "de repetundis"—for extorting money in the position of a magistrate. The money alluded to had been, in truth, extorted by Gabinius from Ptolemy Auletes as the price paid for his restoration, and had come in great part probably from out of the pocket of Rabirius himself. Gabinius had been condemned, and ordered to repay the money. He had none to repay, and the claim, by some clause in the law to that effect was transferred to Rabirius as his agent. Rabirius was accused as though he had extorted the money—which he had in fact lost, but the spirit of the accusation lay in the idea that he, a Roman knight, had basely subjected himself to an Egyptian king. That Rabirius had been base and sordid there can be no doubt. That he was ruined by his transaction with Auletes is equally certain. It is supposed that he was convicted. He was afterward employed by Cæsar, who, when in power, may have recalled him from banishment. There are many passages in the oration to which I would fain refer the reader had I space to do so. I will name only one in which Cicero endeavors to ingratiate himself with his audience by referring to the old established Roman hatred of kings: "Who is there among us who, though he may not have tried them himself, does not know the ways of kings? 'Listen to me here!' 'Obey my word at once!' 'Speak a word more than you are told, and you'll see what you'll get!' 'Do that a second time, and you die!' We should read of such things and look at them from a distance, not only for our pleasure, but that we may know of what we have to be aware, and what we ought to avoid."[46]
There is a letter written in this year to Curio, another young friend such as Cælius, of whom I have spoken. Curio also was clever, dissipated, extravagant, and unscrupulous. But at this period of his life he was attached to Cicero, who was not indifferent to the services which might accrue to him from friends who might be violent and unscrupulous on the right side.