During the remainder of this year, b.c. 59, Cicero was at Rome, and seems gradually to have become aware that a personal attack was to be made upon him. At the close of a long and remarkable letter written to his brother Quintus in November, he explains the state of his own mind, showing us, who have now before us the future which was hidden from him, how greatly mistaken he was as to the results which were to be expected. He had been telling his brother how nearly Cato had been murdered for calling Pompey, in public, a Dictator. Then he goes on to describe his own condition.[264] "You may see from this what is the state of the Republic. As far as I am concerned, it seems that friends will not be wanting to defend me. They offer themselves in a wonderful way, and promise assistance. I feel great hope and still greater spirit—hope, which tells me that we shall be victors in the struggle; spirit, which bids me fear no casualty in the present state of public affairs."[265] But the matter stands in this way: "If he"—that is, Clodius—"should indict me in court, all Italy would come to my defence, so that I should be acquitted with honor. Should he attack me with open violence, I should have, I think, not only my own party but the world at large to stand by me. All men promise me their friends, their clients, their freedmen, their slaves, and even their money. Our old body of aristocrats"—Cato, Bibulus, and the makers of fish-ponds generally—"are wonderfully warm in my cause. If any of these have heretofore been remiss, now they join our party from sheer hatred of these kings"—the Triumvirs. "Pompey promises everything, and so does Cæsar, whom I only trust so far as I can see them." Even the Triumvirs promise him that he will be safe; but his belief in Pompey's honesty is all but gone. "The coming Tribunes are my friends. The Consuls of next year promise well." He was wofully mistaken. "We have excellent Prætors, citizens alive to their duty. Domitius, Nigidius, Memmius, and Lentulus are specially trustworthy. The others are good men. You may therefore pluck up your courage and be confident." From this we perceive that he had already formed the idea that he might perhaps be required to fight for his position as a Roman citizen; and it seems also that he understood the cause of the coming conflict. The intention was that he should be driven out of Rome by personal enmity. Nothing is said in any of these letters of the excuse to be used, though he knew well what that excuse was to be. He was to be charged by the Patrician Tribune with having put Roman citizens to death in opposition to the law. But there arises at this time no question whether he had or had not been justified in what he, as Consul, had done to Lentulus and the others. Would Clodius be able to rouse a mob against him? and, if so, would Cæsar assist Clodius? or would Pompey who still loomed to his eyes as the larger of the two men? He had ever been the friend of Pompey, and Pompey had promised him all manner of assistance; but he knew already that Pompey would turn upon him. That Rome should turn upon him—Rome which he had preserved from the torches of Catiline's conspirators—that he could not bring himself to believe!
We must not pass over this long letter to Quintus without observing that through it all the evil condition of the younger brother's mind becomes apparent. The severity of his administration had given offence. His punishments had been cruel. His letters had been rash, and his language violent. In short, we gather from the brother's testimony that Quintus Cicero was very ill-fitted to be the civil governor of a province.
The only work which we have from Cicero belonging to this year, except his letters, is the speech, or part of the speech, he made for Lucius Valerius Flaccus. Flaccus had been Prætor when Cicero was Consul, and had done good service, in the eyes of his superior officers, in the matter of the Catiline conspiracy. He had then gone to Asia as governor, and, after the Roman manner, had fleeced the province. That this was so there is no doubt. After his return he was accused, was defended by Cicero, and was acquitted. Macrobius tells us that Cicero, by the happiness of a bon-mot, brought the accused off safely, though he was manifestly guilty. He adds also that Cicero took care not to allow the joke to appear in the published edition of his speech.[266] There are parts of the speech which have been preserved, and are sufficiently amusing even to us. He is very hard upon the Greeks of Asia, the class from which the witnesses against Flaccus were taken. We know here in England that a spaniel, a wife, and a walnut-tree may be beaten with advantage. Cicero says that in Asia there is a proverb that a Phrygian may be improved in the same way. "Fiat experimentum in corpore vili." It is declared through Asia that you should take a Carian for your experiment. The "last of the Mysians" is the well-known Asiatic term for the lowest type of humanity. Look through all the comedies, you will find the leading slave is a Lydian. Then he turns to these poor Asiatics, and asks them whether any one can be expected to think well of them, when such is their own testimony of themselves! He attacks the Jew, and speaks of the Jewish religion as a superstition worthy in itself of no consideration. Pompey had spared the gold in the Temple of Jerusalem, because he thought it wise to respect the religious prejudices of the people; but the gods themselves had shown, by subjecting the Jews to the Romans, how little the gods had regarded these idolatrous worshippers! Such were the arguments used; and they prevailed with the judges—or jury, we should rather call them—to whom they were addressed.
Chapter XII.
HIS EXILE.
We now come to that period of Cicero's life in which, by common consent of all who have hitherto written of him, he is supposed to have shown himself as least worthy of his high name. Middleton, who certainly loved his hero's memory and was always anxious to do him justice, condemns him. "It cannot be denied that in this calamity of his exile he did not behave himself with that firmness which might reasonably be expected from one who had borne so glorious a part in the Republic." Morabin, the French biographer, speaks of the wailings of his grief, of its injustice and its follies. "Cicéron était trop plein de son malheur pour donner entrée à de nouvelles espérances," he says. "Il avait supporté ce malheur avec peu de courage," says another Frenchman, M. Du Rozoir, in introducing us to the speeches which Cicero made on his return. Dean Merivale declares that "he marred the grace of the concession in the eyes of posterity"—alluding to the concession made to popular feeling by his voluntary departure from Rome, as will hereafter be described—"by the unmanly lamentations with which he accompanied it." Mommsen, with a want of insight into character wonderful in an author who has so closely studied the history of the period, speaks of his exile as a punishment inflicted on a "man notoriously timid, and belonging to the class of political weather-cocks." "We now come," says Mr. Forsyth, "to the most melancholy period of Cicero's life, melancholy not so much from its nature and the extent of the misfortunes which overtook him, as from the abject prostration of mind into which he was thrown." Mr. Froude, as might be expected, uses language stronger than that of others, and tells us that "he retired to Macedonia to pour out his sorrows and his resentments in lamentations unworthy of a woman." We have to admit that modern historians and biographers have been united in accusing Cicero of want of manliness during his exile. I propose—not, indeed, to wash the blackamoor white—but to show, if I can, that he was as white as others might be expected to have been in similar circumstances.
We are, I think, somewhat proud of the courage shown by public men of our country who have suffered either justly or unjustly under the laws. Our annals are bloody, and many such have had to meet their death. They have done so generally with becoming manliness. Even though they may have been rebels against the powers of the day, their memories have been made green because they have fallen like brave men. Sir Thomas More, who was no rebel, died well, and crowned a good life by his manner of leaving it. Thomas Cromwell submitted to the axe without a complaint. Lady Jane Grey, when on the scaffold, yielded nothing in manliness to the others. Cranmer and the martyr bishops perished nobly. The Earl of Essex, and Raleigh, and Strafford, and Strafford's master showed no fear when the fatal moment came. In reading the fate of each, we sympathize with the victim because of a certain dignity at the moment of death. But there is, I think, no crisis of life in which it is so easy for a man to carry himself honorably as that in which he has to leave it. "Venit summa dies et ineluctabile tempus." No doubting now can be of avail. No moment is left for the display of conduct beyond this, which requires only decorum and a free use of the pulses to become in some degree glorious. The wretch from the lowest dregs of the people can achieve it with a halter round his neck. Cicero had that moment also to face; and when it came he was as brave as the best Englishman of them all. But of those I have named no one had an Atticus to whom it had been the privilege of his life to open his very soul, in language so charming as to make it worth posterity's while to read it, to study it, to sift it, and to criticise it. Wolsey made many plaints in his misery, but they have reached us in such forms of grace that they do not disparage him; but then he too had no Atticus. Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke were dismissed ministers and doomed to live in exile, the latter for many years, and felt, no doubt, strongly their removal from the glare of public life to obscurity. We hear no complaint from them which can justify some future critic in saying that their wails were unworthy of a woman; but neither of them was capable of telling an Atticus the thoughts of his mind as they rose. What other public man ever had an Atticus to whom, in the sorrows which the ingratitude of friends had brought upon him, he could disclose every throb of his heart?
I think that we are often at a loss, in our efforts at appreciation of character, and in the expressions of our opinion respecting it, to realize the meaning of courage and manliness. That sententious Swedish Queen, one of whose foolish maxims I have quoted, has said that Cicero, though a coward, was capable of great actions, because she did not know what a coward was. To doubt—to tremble with anxiety—to vacillate hither and thither between this course and the other as to which may be the better—to complain within one's own breast that this or that thing has been an injustice—to hesitate within one's self, not quite knowing which way honor may require us to go—to be indignant even at fancied wrongs—to rise in wrath against another, and then, before the hour has passed, to turn that wrath against one's self—that is not to be a coward. To know what duty requires, and then to be deterred by fear of results—that is to be a coward; but the man of many scruples may be the greatest hero of them all. Let the law of things be declared clearly so that the doubting mind shall no longer doubt, so that scruples may be laid at rest, so that the sense of justice may be satisfied—and he of whom I speak shall be ready to meet the world in arms against him. There are men, very useful in their way, who shall never doubt at all, but shall be ready, as the bull is ready, to encounter any obstacles that there may be before them. I will not say but that for the coarse purposes of the world they may not be the most efficacious, but I will not admit that they are therefore the bravest. The bull, who has no imagination to tell him what the obstacle may do to him, is not brave. He is brave who, fully understanding the potentiality of the obstacle, shall, for a sufficient purpose, move against it.