But nothing, assuredly, could have won him so many friends as his readiness to oblige them. This was inexhaustible, and it could not be asserted that it was interested, since, contrary to custom, he gave much and demanded nothing. Here again is one of the reasons why his friendships were so lasting, for it is always this sort of interchange that we think we have a right to demand, and the comparisons that we make, in spite of ourselves, between good offices which we render and those which we receive, which in the end disturb the most firm friendships. Atticus, who knew this well, had so contrived as to have need of nobody. He was rich, he never had law-suits, he did not seek public employments, so that a friend who was determined to recompense the services he had received could never find the opportunity,[[156]] and remained always under obligations to him, and his debt continued to increase, for Atticus never wearied of being useful. We have an easy means of appreciating the extent of this serviceableness, to see it close, and, so to say at work, namely, to rapidly recall the services of all sorts that he had rendered Cicero during their long intimacy. Cicero had much need of a friend like Atticus. He was one of those clever men who cannot reckon; when his account-books were presented to him he would gladly have said, like his pupil, Pliny the Younger, that he was used to another sort of literature: aliis sum chartis, aliis litteris initiatus. Atticus became his man of business; we know his talent for this profession. He leased Cicero’s property very dear, saved as much as he could out of the income and paid the most pressing debts. When he discovered new ones, he dared to scold his friend, who hastened to reply very humbly that he would be more careful for the future. Atticus, who did not much believe this, set to work to make up the deficit. He went to see the wealthy Balbus or the other great bankers of Rome with whom he had business relations. If the calamities of the times made it difficult to get credit, he did not hesitate to dip into his own purse. Those who know him will not think this generosity without merit. When Cicero wished to buy some estate, Atticus at first would get angry; but if his friend did not give way, he quickly went to visit it and discuss the price. If it was a question of building some elegant villa, Atticus lent his architect, corrected the plans, and overlooked the work. When the house was built, it had to be adorned, and Atticus would send to Greece for statues. He excelled in selecting them, and Cicero was inexhaustible in his praises of the Hermathenae in Pentelican marble that he had procured for him. In a villa of Cicero, we can well understand that the library was not forgotten, and it was from Atticus again that the books came. He traded in them, and kept the handsomest for his friend. The books being bought, it was necessary to arrange them, so Atticus sent his librarian Tyrannion with his workmen, who painted the shelves, pasted together the detached leaves of papyrus, put the labels on the rolls, and arranged the whole in such good order that Cicero, enchanted, wrote: “Since Tyrannion has arranged my books one would say that the house has a soul.”[[157]]
But Atticus did not stop at these services, which we might call external; he penetrated into the home, he knew all its secrets. Cicero kept nothing from him, and confided to him unreservedly all his domestic griefs. He tells him about the violent temper of his brother and the follies of his nephew; he consults him on the vexations that his wife and son cause him. When Tullia was of an age to marry, it was Atticus who sought her a husband. The one he proposed was the son of a rich and well-conducted knight. “Return,” he said sagely to Cicero, “return to your old flock.” Unfortunately he was not listened to. They preferred to the rich financier a broken-down nobleman, who squandered Tullia’s dowry and forced her to leave him. When Tullia was dead, of grief perhaps, Atticus went to the nurse’s to visit the little child she had left, and took care that it wanted for nothing. At the same time Cicero gave him plenty of occupation with his two divorces. After he had divorced his first wife, Terentia, it was Atticus whom he charged to get her to make a will in his favour. It was to him also that he gave the disagreeable commission to remove the second, Publilia, when she was determined to forcibly re-enter the home of her husband, who would have nothing more to do with her.
These are doubtless great services; he rendered others still more delicate, still more appreciated. It was to him that Cicero entrusted what was most dear to him in the world, his literary glory. He communicated his works to him as soon as he had written them, he took his advice in making corrections, and waited for his decision to publish them. Thus he treated him as a friend with whom one feels at home, and to whom one unbosoms oneself completely. Although he was eager that his eloquence should be taken seriously, when he was sure of being heard by Atticus only, he made no scruple of joking about himself and his works. He introduced him without reserve to all the secrets of the craft, and showed him the receipts for his most popular effects. “This time, said he gaily, I employed the whole scent-box of Isocrates, and all the caskets of the disciples.”[[158]] Nothing can be more curious than the way in which he related to him one day, one of his greatest oratorical successes. It was a question of celebrating the fame of the great consulship, a subject upon which, as we know, he was inexhaustible. That day he had a reason for speaking with more brilliancy than usual. Pompey was present; now Pompey had the weakness to be jealous of Cicero’s glory. It was a good opportunity to enrage him, and Cicero took care not to neglect it. “When my turn came to speak, he writes to Atticus, immortal gods! what rein I gave myself! What pleasure I took in loading myself with praises in the presence of Pompey, who had never heard me extol my consulship! If I ever called to my aid periods, enthymemes, metaphors, and all the other figures of rhetoric, it was then. I did not speak, I shouted, for it was a question of my stock subjects, the wisdom of the senate, the good-will of the knights, the union of all Italy, the smothered remains of the conspiracy, peace and plenty re-established, etc. You know my thunders when I speak of these subjects. They were so fine that day that I have no need to tell you more about them; you may often have heard the like at Athens!”[[159]] It is impossible to quiz oneself with greater lightheartedness. Atticus repaid these confidences by the trouble he took for the success of his friend’s works. As he had seen their birth, and had busied himself with them before they were known to the public, he almost regarded himself as their parent. It was he who took upon himself to start them in the world and make them succeed. Cicero says that he was admirably well skilled in this, and it does not surprise us. The means he most frequently employed to create a good opinion of them, was to have the finest passages read by his best readers to the clever men whom he assembled round his table. Cicero, who knew the usual frugality of his repasts, begged him to deviate from it a little on these occasions. “Have a care, he writes to him, to treat your guests well, for if they are in a bad humour with you, they will vent it on me.”[[160]] It was natural that Cicero should be extremely grateful for all these services; but it would be judging him ill to suppose that he was only attached to him for the benefits he received from him. He really loved him, and all his letters are full of evidences of the most sincere affection. He was always happy with him; he was never tired of associating with him; he had scarcely left him than he ardently wished to see him again. “May I die, he wrote to him, if either my house at Tusculum, where I feel so comfortable, or the Isles of the Blest could please me without you!”[[161]] Whatever pleasure he experienced at being fêted, applauded, flattered, at having around him an obsequious and admiring multitude, in the midst of this crowd and noise he always turned with regret towards his absent friend. “With all these people, he tells him, I feel myself more alone than if I had only you.”[[162]] All these people, in fact, are composed of political friends who change with circumstances, whom a common interest brings to you, and a rival ambition takes away again; with them Cicero is obliged to be reserved and careful, which is a torture for such an open-hearted nature. On the other hand, he can tell Atticus everything, and confide in him without restraint. So he hastens to demand his presence when the least annoyance happens to him. “I want you, he writes to him, I have need of you, I am waiting for you. I have a thousand things that disturb and vex me, and a single walk with you will relieve me.”[[163]] We should never end if we were to collect all those charming expressions of which the correspondence is full, and in which his heart plainly speaks. They leave no doubt about Cicero’s feelings; they prove that he regarded Atticus not only as one of those steadfast and serious friends on whose support he could count, but also, which is more surprising, as a sensitive and tender soul: “You take your share,” he tells him, “in all the troubles of others.”[[164]]
Here is something far removed from the notion we usually have of him, and yet we cannot resist such clear testimony. How can we contend that he had only a doubtful affection for his friends when we see all his friends contented with it? Are we to be more exacting than they, and would it not be wronging men like Brutus and Cicero to suppose that they had been dupes so long without perceiving it? On the other hand, how can we explain the fact that posterity, which only judges by the documents that the friends of Atticus have furnished it, draws from these very documents an opinion quite the reverse of that held by them? Evidently it is because posterity and contemporaries do not judge men from the same stand-point. We have seen that Atticus, who had made a rule not to engage in public affairs, did not think himself obliged to partake the dangers that his friends might run, through having taken part in them. He left them both the honours and the perils. Sensitive, obliging, devoted to them in the ordinary business of life, when a great political crisis occurred that compromised them, he stood aside, and left them to expose themselves alone. Now, when we look at the facts from a distance, and are separated from them, as we are, by several centuries, we only perceive the most important events, and especially the political revolutions, that is to say, precisely those circumstances with which the friendship of Atticus had nothing to do. Hence the severe judgment we pronounce upon it. But his contemporaries judged otherwise. Those great crises are, after all, but rare and passing exceptions; without doubt contemporaries are much struck by them, but they are still more impressed by those numberless small incidents which make up every-day life, and which posterity does not perceive. They judge of a man’s friendship by those services which are rendered every moment, and which are important by their mere number, much more than by any exceptional service which may be given on one of these great and rare occasions. This accounts for the fact that they had an opinion of Atticus so different from ours.
It is, beyond doubt, one of the characteristic traits of this person, that it was a necessity to him to have many friends, and that he took trouble to attract and retain them. We may refuse to admit, if we will, that this need was, with him, the effect of a generous and sympathetic nature, that it came from what Cicero admirably calls “the impulse of the soul that desires to love;” but, even supposing that he only thought of occupying and filling up his life, we must acknowledge that to fill it up in this manner is not a mark of a vulgar nature. This refined Epicurean, this master in the art of living at ease, knew “that life is no longer life if we cannot repose on the affection of a friend.”[[165]] He had given up the excitement of political strife, the triumphs of eloquence, the joys of satisfied ambition, but, as a compensation, he was determined to enjoy all the pleasures of private life. The more he confined and limited himself to it, the more particular and refined he became with regard to the pleasures it could give; as he had only left himself these, he wished to enjoy them fully, to relish them, to live on them. He needed friends, and among them the greatest minds, the noblest souls of his time. He expended all that energy which he did not employ in anything else, in procuring for himself those pleasures of society that Bossuet calls the greatest good of human life. Atticus enjoyed this good even beyond his desires, and friendship generously repaid him for all the trouble he had taken for it. It was his single passion; he was able to satisfy it completely, and friendship, after having adorned his life, has shed a lustre on his name.
III.
Atticus appears in a favourable light in private life. He is less fortunate when we study the course he followed in public affairs. On this point he has not been spared blame, and it is not easy to defend him.
We should not however be very unfavourable to him if we judged his conduct entirely according to the ideas of our days. Opinion has become less severe now on those who openly make profession of living apart from politics. So many men aspire to govern their country, and it has become so difficult to make choice among this multitude, that we are tempted to look kindly upon those who have not this ambition. Far from being blamed, they are called moderate and wise; they form an exception which is encouraged in order to lessen the number of aspirants. At Rome they thought otherwise, and it is not difficult to find reasons for this difference. There, what we may call the political body was in reality very circumscribed. Besides the slaves, who did not count, and the common people, who contented themselves with giving or rather selling their votes in the elections, and whose greatest privilege it was to be entertained at the expense of the candidates, and fed at the expense of the public treasury, there remained only a few families of ancient lineage or more recent celebrity who divided all public employments among themselves. The aristocracy of birth and of fortune was not very numerous, and scarcely sufficed to furnish the required number of officials of all sorts to govern the world. It was necessary therefore that no one should refuse to take his part, and to live in retirement was considered a desertion. It is not the same in our democracy. As all offices are open to everybody, and as, thanks to the diffusion of education, men worthy to occupy them may arise in all ranks, we need no longer fear lest the absence of a few quiet people, friends of peace and repose, will make a sensible and regrettable gap in the serried ranks of those who struggle from all quarters for power. Moreover, we think now that there are many other ways of serving one’s country besides public life. Romans of high birth knew no other; they looked upon commerce as a not very honourable means[[166]] that a private man might employ to make his fortune, and did not see what the state might gain by it; literature seemed an agreeable but trivial pastime, and they did not understand its social importance. It follows that among them, a man of a certain rank could only find one honourable mode of employing his activity and being useful to his country, namely, to fill political offices.[[167]] To do anything else was, according to their ideas, to do nothing; they gave the name of idlers to the most laborious scholars, and it did not come into their heads that there was anything worth the trouble of occupying a citizen’s time beyond the service of the state. All the ancient Romans thought thus, and they would have experienced a strange surprise if they had seen any one claim the right, as Atticus did, not to serve his country within the limits of his powers and talents. Assuredly Cato, who never rested, and who, at ninety years of age, bravely quitted his villa at Tusculum to go and accuse Servius Galba, the butcher of the Lusitanians, would have thought that to remain in his house on the Quirinal, or on his estate in Epirus in the midst of his books and statues, while the fate of Rome was being decided in the Forum or at Pharsalia, was to commit the same crime as to remain in his tent on the day of battle.
This systematic abstention of Atticus was not, then, a Roman custom; he had it from the Greeks. In those small ungovernable republics of Greece, where they knew no repose, and which passed constantly and without warning from the sternest tyranny to the most unbridled licence, we can understand that quiet and studious men should have grown weary of all this sterile agitation, and ceased to desire public employments which were only obtained by flattering the capricious multitude, and only kept on condition of obeying it. Moreover, what value could this power, so hardly acquired, so seldom preserved, have, when it was necessary to share it with the most obscure demagogues? was it really worth while to take so much trouble in order to become the successor or the colleague of Cleon? At the same time that weariness and disgust kept honourable men aloof from these paltry struggles, philosophy, more studied every day, communicated to its disciples a sort of pride which led them to the same result. Men who passed their time in meditating upon God and the world, and who endeavoured to understand the laws that govern the universe, did not deign to descend from these heights to govern states a few leagues square. Thus they constantly discussed in the schools, whether a man should occupy himself with public affairs, whether the sage ought to seek public office, and whether the active or the contemplative life was the better. A few philosophers hesitatingly gave the preference to active life, the greater number sustained the opposite opinion, and under cover of these discussions many men thought themselves authorized to create a sort of elegant indolence in voluptuous retreats embellished by letters and the arts, where they lived happily while Greece was perishing.
Atticus followed their example. Importing this custom from Greece into Rome, he openly announced his resolution not to take part in political discussions. He began by adroitly keeping aloof during all those quarrels that continually agitated Rome from the time of Cicero’s consulship to the civil wars. At the very moment when these struggles were most active he frequented all parties, he had friends on all sides, and found in these widespread friendships a new pretext for remaining neutral. Atticus was more than sixty years old when Caesar passed the Rubicon, an age when the obligation of military service ceased among the Romans. This was another reason for remaining quiet, and he did not fail to use it. “I have taken my discharge,”[[168]] he replied to those who wished to enrol him. He held the same course, and with the same success, after the death of Caesar; but he then disappointed public opinion still more. He was so well known to be the friend of Brutus that it was thought he would not hesitate to take his side this time. Cicero himself, who ought to have known him, reckoned upon it; but Atticus was not inconsistent with himself, and took advantage of an important occasion to let the public know that he would not be drawn in against his will. While Brutus was raising an army in Greece, some knights, his friends, started the idea of raising a subscription among the richest men of Rome to give him the means of maintaining his soldiers. They applied at first to Atticus, whose name they wished to put at the head of the list. Atticus bluntly refused to subscribe. He answered that his fortune was at the service of Brutus, if he had need of it, and asked him as a friend, but he declared at the same time that he would take no part in a political manifestation, and his refusal caused the failure of the subscription. At the same time, true to his habit of flattering all parties, he welcomed Fulvia, Antony’s wife, as well as Volumnius the superintendent of his workmen, and, sure of having friends everywhere, he waited for the result of the struggle without much fear.