The History of Roman Literature / From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius

by Charles Thomas Cruttwell

Even in his own special department of judicial eloquence Cicero's mind was not able to cope with the great principles of law. Such fundamental questions as "Whether law may be set aside for the purpose of saving the state?" "How far an illegal action which has had good results is justifiable?" questions which concern the statesman and philosopher as much as the jurist, he meets with a superficial and merely popular treatment. Without any firm basis of opinion, either philosophical like Cato's, personal like Caesar's, or traditional like that of the senate, he was compelled to judge questions by the results which he could foresee at the moment, and by the floating popular standard to which, as an advocate, he had naturally turned.

But while denying to Cicero the highest legal attributes, we must not forget that the jury before whom he pleaded demanded eloquence rather than profound knowledge. The orations to which they were accustomed were laid out according to a fixed rhetorical plan, the plan proposed in the treatise to Herennius and in Cicero's own youthful work, the De Inventione. There is the introduction, containing the preliminary statement of the case, and the ethical proof; the body of the speech, the argument, and the peroration addressing itself to the passions of the judge. No better instance is found of this systematic treatment than the speech for Milo, [49] declared by native critics to be faultless, and of which, for the sake of illustration, we give a succinct analysis. It must be remembered that he has a bad case. He commences with a few introductory remarks intended to recommend himself and conciliate his judges, dilating on the special causes which make his address less confident than usual, and claiming their indulgence for it. He then answers certain a priori objections likely to be offered, as that no homicide deserves to live, which is refuted by the legal permission to kill in self-defence; that Milo's act had already been condemned by the senate, which is refuted by the fact that a majority of senators praised it; that Pompey had decided the question of law, which is refuted by his permitting a trial at all, which he would not have done unless a legal defence could be entertained. The objections answered, and a special compliment having been judiciously paid to the presiding judge, he proceeds to the Expositio, or statement of facts. In this particular case they were by no means advantageous; consequently, Cicero shows his art by cloaking them in an involved narration which, while apparently plausible, is in reality based on a suppression of truth. Having rapidly disposed of these, he proceeds to sketch the line of defence with its several successive arguments. He declares himself about to prove that so far from being the aggressor, Milo did but defend himself against a plot laid by Clodius. As this was quite a new light to the jury, their minds must be prepared for it by persuasive grounds of probability. He first shows that Clodius had strong reasons for wishing to be rid of Milo, Milo on the contrary had still stronger ones for not wishing to be rid of Clodius; he next shows that Clodius's life and character had been such as to make assassination a natural act for him to commit, while Milo on the contrary had always refused to commit violence, though he had many times had the power to do so; next, that time and place and circumstances favoured Clodius, but were altogether against Milo, some plausible objections notwithstanding, which he states with consummate art, and then proceeds to demolish; next, that the indifference of the accused to the crimes laid to his charge is surely incompatible with guilt; and lastly, that even if his innocence could not be proved, as it most certainly can, still he might take credit to himself for having done the state a service by destroying one of its worst enemies. And then, in the peroration that follows, he rouses the passions of the judges by a glowing picture of Clodius's guilt, balanced by an equally glowing one of Milo's virtues; he shows that Providence itself had intervened to bring the sinful career of Clodius to an end, and sanctified Milo by making him its instrument, and he concludes with a brilliant avowal of love and admiration for his client, for whose loss, if he is to be condemned, nothing can ever console him. But the judges will not condemn him; they will follow in the path pointed out by heaven, and restore a faithful citizen to that country which longs for his service.—Had Cicero but had the courage to deliver this speech, there can be scarcely any doubt what the result would have been. Neither senate, nor judges, nor people, ever could resist, or ever tried to resist, the impassioned eloquence of their great orator.

In the above speech the argumentative and ethical portions are highly elaborated, but the descriptive and personal are, comparatively speaking, absent. Yet in nothing is Cicero more conspicuous than in his clear and lifelike descriptions. His portraits are photographic. Whether he describes the money-loving Chaerea with his shaven eye-brows and head reeking with cunning and malice; [50] or the insolent Verres, lolling on a litter with eight bearers, like an Asiatic despot, stretched on a bed of rose-leaves; [51] or Vatinius, darting forward to speak, his eyes starting from his head, his neck swollen, and his muscles rigid; [52] or the Gaulish and Greek witnesses, of whom the former swagger erect across the forum, [53] the latter chatter and gesticulate without ever looking up; [54] we see in each case the master's powerful hand. Other descriptions are longer and more ambitious; the confusion of the Catilinarian conspirators after detection; [55] the character of Catiline; [56] the debauchery of Antony in Varro's villa; [57] the scourging and crucifixion of Gavius; [58] the grim old Censor Appius frowning on Clodia his degenerate descendent; [59] the tissue of monstrous crime which fills page after page of the Cluentius. [60] These are pictures for all time; they combine the poet's eye with the stern spirit of the moralist. His power of description is equalled by the readiness of his wit. Raillery, banter, sarcasm, jest, irony light and grave, the whole artillery of wit, is always at his command; and though to our taste many of his jokes are coarse, others dull, and others unfair or in bad taste, yet the Romans were never tired of extolling them. These are varied with digressions of a graver cast: philosophical sentiments, patriotic allusions, gentle moralisings, and rare gems of ancient legend, succeed each other in the kaleidoscope of his shifting fancy, whose combinations may appear irregular, but are generally bound together by chains of the most delicate art.

His chief faults are exaggeration, vanity, and an inordinate love of words. The former is at once a conscious rhetorical artifice, and an unconscious effect of his vehement and excitable temperament. It probably did not deceive his hearers any more than it deceives us. His vanity is more deplorable; and the only palliation it admits is the fact that it is a defect which rarely goes with a bad heart. Had Cicero been less vain, he might have been more ambitious; as it was, his ridiculous self-conceit injured no one but himself. His wordiness is of all his faults the most seductive and the most conspicuous, and procured for him even in his lifetime the epithet of Asiatic. He himself was sensible that his periods were overloaded. As has been well said, he leaves nothing to the imagination. [61] Later critics strongly censured him, and both Tacitus and Quintilian think it necessary to assert his pre-eminence. His wealth of illustration chokes the idea, as creepers choke the forest tree; both are beautiful and bright with flowers, but both injure what they adorn.

Nevertheless, if we are to judge his oratory by its effect on those for whom it was intended, and to whom it was addressed; as the vehement, gorgeous, impassioned utterance of an Italian speaking to Italians his countrymen, whom he knew, whom he charmed, whom he mastered; we shall not be able to refuse him a place as equal to the greatest of those whose eloquence has swayed the destinies of the world.

We now turn to consider Cicero as a Philosopher, in which character he was allowed to be the greatest teacher that Rome ever had, and has descended through the Middle Ages to our own time with his authority, indeed, shaken, but his popularity scarcely diminished. We must first observe that philosophy formed no part of his inner and real life. It was only when inactivity in public affairs was forced upon him that he devoted himself to its pursuit. During the agitation of the first triumvirate, he composed the De Republica and De Legibus, and during Caesar's dictatorship and the consulship of Antony, he matured the great works of his old age. But the moment he was able to return with honour to his post, he threw aside philosophy, and devoted himself to politics, thus clearly proving that he regarded it as a solace for leisure or a refuge from misfortune, rather than as the serious business of life. The system that would alone be suitable to such a character would be a sober scepticism, for scepticism in thought corresponds exactly to vacillation in conduct. But though his mind inclined to scepticism, he had aspirations far higher than his intellect or his conduct could attain; in his noblest moments he half rises to the grand Stoic ideal of a self-sufficient and all-wise virtue. But he cannot maintain himself at that height, and in general he takes the view of the Academy that all truth is but a question of more or less probability.

To understand the philosophy of Cicero, it is necessary to remember both his own mental training, and the condition of those for whom he wrote. He himself regarded philosophy as food for eloquence, as one of the chief ingredients of a perfect orator. And his own mind, which by nature and practice had been cast in the oratorical mould, naturally leaned to that system which best admitted of presenting truth under the form of two competing rhetorical demonstrations. His readers, too, would be most attracted by this form of truth. He did not write for the original thinkers, the Catos, the Varros, and the Scaevolas; [62] he wrote for the great mass of intelligent men, men of the world, whom he wished to interest in the lofty problems of which philosophy treats. He therefore above all things strove to make philosophy eloquent. He read for this purpose Plato, Aristotle, and almost all the great masters who ruled the schools in his day; but being on a level with his age and not above it, he naturally turned rather to the thinkers nearest his own time, whose clearer treatment also made them most easily understood. These were chiefly Epicureans, Stoics, and Academicians; and from the different placita of these schools he selected such views as harmonised with his own prepossessions, but neither chained himself down to any special doctrine, nor endeavoured to force any doctrine of his own upon others. In some of his more popular works, as those on political science and on moral duties, [63] he does not employ any strictness of method; but in his more systematic treatises he both recognises and strives to attain a regular process of investigation. We see this in the Topica, the De Finibus, and the Tusculanae Disputationes, in all of which he was greatly assisted by the Academic point of view which strove to reconcile philosophy with the dictates of common sense. A purely speculative ideal such as that of Aristotle or Plato had already ceased to be propounded even by the Greek systems; and Roman philosophy carried to a much more thorough development the practical tendency of the later Greek schools. In the Hortensius, a work unfortunately lost, which he intended to be the introduction to his great philosophical course, he removed the current objections to the study, and showed philosophy to be the only comforter in affliction and the true guide of life. The pursuit of virtue, therefore, being the proper end of wisdom, such speculations only should be pursued as are within the sphere of human knowledge. Nevertheless he is inconsistent with his own programme, for he extends his investigations far beyond the limits of ethics into the loftiest problems which can exercise the human mind. Carried away by the enthusiasm which he has caught from the great Greek sages, he asserts in one place [64] that the search for divine truth is preferable even to the duties of practical life; but that is an isolated statement. His strong Roman instinct calls him back to recognise the paramount claims of daily life; and he is nowhere more himself than when he declares that every one would leave philosophy to take care of herself at the first summons of duty. [65] This subordination of the theoretical to the practical led him to confuse in a rhetorical presentation the several parts of philosophy, and it seeks and finds its justification to a great extent in the endless disputes in which in every department of thought the three chief schools were involved. Physics (as the term was understood in his day) seemed to him the most mysterious and doubtful portion of the whole. A knowledge of the body and its properties is difficult enough; how much more unattainable is a knowledge of such entities as the Deity and the soul! Those who pronounce absolutely on points like these involve themselves in the most inextricable contradictions. While they declare as certainties things that obviously differ in the general credence they meet with, they forget that certainty does not admit of degrees, whereas probability does. How much more reasonable therefore to regard such questions as coming within the sphere of the probable, and varying between the highest and the lowest degrees of probability. [66]

In his moral theory Cicero shows greater decision. He is unwavering in his repudiation of the Epicurean view that virtue and pleasure are one, [67] and generally adheres to that of the other schools, who here agree in declaring that virtue consists in following nature. [68] But here occurs the difficulty as to what place is to be assigned to external goods. At one time he inclines to the lofty view of the Stoic that virtue is in itself sufficient for happiness; at another, struck by its inapplicability to practical life, he thinks this less true than the Peripatetic theory, which takes account of external circumstances, and though considering them as inappreciable when weighed in the balance against virtue, nevertheless admits that within certain limits they are necessary to a complete life. Thus it appears that both in physics and morals he doubted the reality of the great abstract conceptions of reason, and came back to the presentations of sense as at all events the most indisputably probable. This would lead us to infer that he rested upon the senses as the ultimate criterion of truth. But if he adopts them as a criterion at all, he does so with great reservations. He allows the senses indeed the power of judging between sweet and bitter, near and distant, and the like, but he never allows them to determine what is good and what is evil. [69] And similarly he allows the intellect the power of judgment on genera and species, but he does not deny that it sometimes spins out problems which it is wholly unable to solve. [70] Since therefore neither the senses nor the intellect are capable of supplying an infallible criterion, we must reject the Stoic doctrine that there are certain sensations so forcible as to produce an irresistible conviction of their truth. For these philosophers ascribe the full possession of this conviction to the sage alone, and he is not, nor can he be, one of the generality of mankind. Hence Cicero, who writes for these, gives his opinion that there are certain sensuous impressions in which from their permanence and force a man may safely trust, though he cannot assert them to be absolutely true. [71] This liberal and popular doctrine he is aware will be undermined by the absolute scepticism of the New Academy; [72] but he is willing to risk this, and to put his view forward as the best possible approximation to truth.

With these ultimate principles Cicero, in his De Natura Deorum, approaches the questions of the existence of God and of the human soul. The bias of his own nobler nature led him to hold fast these two vital truths, but he is fully aware that in attempting to prove them the Stoics have used arguments which are not convincing. In the Tusculan disputations [73] he acknowledges the necessity of assuming one supreme Creator or Ruler of all things, endued with eternal motion in himself; and he connects this view with the affinity which he everywhere assumes to subsist between the human and divine spirit. With regard to the essence of the human soul he has no clear views; but he strenuously asserts its existence and phenomenal manifestation analogous to those of the Deity, and is disposed to ascribe to it immortality also. [74] Free Will he considers to be a truth of peculiar importance, probably from the practical consideration that on it responsibility and, therefore, morality itself ultimately rest.

From this brief abstract it will be seen that Cicero's speculative beliefs were to a great extent determined by his moral convictions, and by his strong persuasion of the dignity of human nature. This leads him to combat with vigour, and satirise with merciless wit, the Epicurean theory of life; and while his strong common sense forbids him to accept the Stoic doctrine in all its defiant harshness, he strengthens the Peripatetic view, to which he on the whole leans, by introducing elements drawn from it. The peculiar combination which he thus strives to form takes its colour from his own character and from the terms of his native language. The Greeks declare that the beautiful (to kalon) is good; Cicero declares that the honourable (honestum) alone is good. Where, therefore, the Greeks had spoken of to kalon, and we should speak of moral good, Cicero speaks of honestum, and founds precisely similar arguments upon it. This conception implies, besides self-regarding rectitude, the praise of others and the rewards of glory, and hence is eminently suited to the public-spirited men for whom he wrote. To it is opposed the base (turpe), that disgraceful evil which all good men would avoid. But as his whole moral theory is built on observation as much as on reading or reflection, he never stretches a rule too tight; he makes allowance for overpowering circumstances, for the temper and bent of the individual. Applicable to all who are engaged in an honourable career with the stimulus of success before them, his ethics were especially suited to the noble families of Rome to whom the approval of their conscience was indeed a necessity of happiness, but the approval of those whom they respected was at least equally so.