All these reasons decided him to take one step further on that path of generosity and clemency on which he had entered after Pharsalia. He had pardoned the greater number of those who had borne arms against him; he invited some of them to share his power. At the very time that he was recalling the greater part of the exiles, he appointed Cassius his lieutenant; he gave Brutus the government of Cisalpine Gaul, and Sulpicius that of Greece. We shall speak further on of the first two; it is important, the better to appreciate Caesar’s policy, to rapidly make known the third, and to inquire how he had become worthy of the favours of the conqueror, and in what manner he profited by them.

Servius Sulpicius belonged to an important Roman family, and was the most celebrated lawyer of his time. Cicero gives him this great praise, namely, that he was the first to bring philosophy into the law, that is to say, that he bound together all those minute rules and precise formulas of which this science is composed, by general principles and comprehensive views.[[308]] Accordingly he does not hesitate to place him much above his predecessors, and more especially, over that great family of the Scaevolas, in which as it seemed Roman jurisprudence had been up to that time incarnate. There was, however, a difference between them and Sulpicius, which it is important to notice: the Scaevolas had given to Rome, lawyers, augurs, pontifs, that is to say, they excelled in the arts that are friendly to tranquillity and peace; but they were also very active citizens, resolute politicians, valiant soldiers who courageously defended their country against conspirators and against the foreigner. They showed themselves, in their busy life, competent for all affairs and equal to all situations. Scaevola the augur, when Cicero knew him, was still, notwithstanding his age, a vigorous old man, who rose at daybreak to meet his country clients. He was the first to arrive at the Curia, and he had always some book with him, that he read so as not to remain idle while waiting for his colleagues; but the day that Saturninus threatened the public tranquillity, this learned man who loved study so much, this infirm old man who supported himself with difficulty, and could only use one arm, seized a javelin with that arm, and marched at the head of the people to the assault of the Capitol.[[309]] Scaevola the pontif was not only an able lawyer, he was also an upright administrator whose memory Asia never forgot. When the farmers of the taxes attacked his quaestor Rutilius, guilty of having wished to prevent them ruining the province, he defended him with an admirable eloquence and vigour that no threat could shake. He refused to leave Rome at the time of the first proscriptions, and abandon his clients and their business, although he knew the fate that was awaiting him. Wounded at the funeral of Marius, he was dispatched a few days later near the temple of Vesta.[[310]] However, such men were not exceptional at Rome. In the best times of the republic, the complete citizen had to be at once agriculturist, soldier, administrator, financier, advocate, and even jurist. There were no specialists then, and we should be forced to make now-a-days four or five different persons out of one ancient Roman; but in the period of which we are now speaking, these diverse aptitudes that were then required in a single man were separated: each man gave himself to a special science, and we can begin to divide men of study from men of action. It is difficult to say whether the reason of this was that men had lost the energy of their character; or perhaps we should think that since the masterpieces of Greece had been made known, and each science had become more complicated, one man could not any longer bear the burden of all united? However this may be, if Sulpicius was above the Scaevolas as a lawyer, he was far from having their firmness as a citizen. Praetor or consul, he was never anything more than a man of learning and chamber practice. In circumstances that require resolution, every time it was necessary to decide and to act, he was ill at ease. We feel that this honest and gentle soul was not made to be the first magistrate of a republic in a period of revolution. His fondness for always playing the part of conciliator and arbitrator in that time of violence ended by exciting laughter. Cicero himself, although he was his friend, quizzes him a little, when he shows us this great peacemaker starting off with his little secretary, after having looked over all his lawyers’ rules, to intervene between the parties at the time these parties only desired to destroy one another.

Caesar had always thought that Sulpicius was not of a character to oppose him vigorously, and had early worked to attach him to himself. He began by making an ally in his house, and a powerful ally. It was a matter of common talk at Rome, that the worthy Sulpicius allowed himself to be led by his wife Postumia; Cicero, who likes to repeat scandals, several times tells us this. Now, Postumia’s reputation was not spotless, and Suetonius places her name on the list of those women who were loved by Caesar. She is one of a very numerous company; but this fickle man, who passed so quickly from one mistress to another, had this singular privilege, that all the women whom he abandoned, remained none the less his devoted friends. They forgave his infidelities, they continued to take an interest in all his successes, they put those immense resources of ingenuity and persistency which belong only to a woman who is in love, at the service of his policy. It was no doubt Postumia who decided Sulpicius to work for Caesar during the whole time that he was consul, and to oppose the vehemence of his colleague Marcellus who wished another governor of Gaul to be appointed. However, notwithstanding all his weaknesses, Sulpicius was none the less a sincere republican, and when the war had broken out, he declared against Caesar, and left Italy. After the defeat, he submitted like the rest, and he had resumed his usual occupations, when Caesar sought him out in his retreat in order to appoint him governor of Greece. It was certainly impossible to find a government that suited him better. A residence in Athens, at all times agreeable to the rich Romans, must have been especially so at this time when that city was the asylum of so many illustrious exiles. Sulpicius could at the same time have the pleasure of hearing the most celebrated rhetoricians and philosophers of the world, and could talk of Rome and the republic with eminent persons like Marcellus and Torquatus, and thus satisfy all his tastes at once. Nothing could have been more pleasing, we should have thought, to this scholar and man of letters, whom chance had made a statesman, than the exercise of extensive power, without danger, combined with the most refined intellectual pleasures in one of the grandest and most beautiful countries in the world. We should, therefore, have thought that Caesar had done the most agreeable thing for him, in sending him on duty to that city where the Romans usually went for pleasure. Yet it does not seem that Sulpicius appreciated these advantages. He had scarcely arrived in Greece, when he was discontented at having gone, and longed to depart. Evidently it was not the country that displeased him, he would not have thought himself better off anywhere else; but he regretted the republic. After having so timidly defended it, he could not console himself for its fall, and blamed himself for serving him who had overturned it. These feelings are clearly expressed in a letter that he wrote to Cicero from Greece. “Fortune,” he tells him, “has taken from us our most precious possessions; we have lost our honour, our dignity, and our country.... In the times in which we live, those are most happy who are dead.”[[311]]

When a timid and moderate man like Sulpicius dared speak thus, what must others not have said and thought! We can guess this when we see how Cicero writes to the greater number of them. Although he is addressing officials of the new government, he does not take the trouble to hide his opinions; he freely expresses his regrets, because he well knows they are shared by those to whom he is writing. He speaks to Servilius Isauricus, the proconsul of Asia, as to a man whom the absolute power of one does not satisfy, and who wishes some restraints to be put on it.[[312]] He tells Cornificius, the governor of Africa, that affairs are going ill at Rome, and that many things happen there which would pain him.[[313]] “I know what you think of the lot of honest people, and of the misfortunes of the republic,” he writes to Furfanius, the proconsul of Sicily, in recommending an exile to him.[[314]] These persons, however, had accepted important offices from Caesar: they shared his power, they passed for his friends; but all the favours they had received from him had not thoroughly attached them to his cause. They made their reservations while serving him, and only half gave themselves up to him. Whence could this opposition come, that the new government met with among men who had at first agreed to take a share in it? It proceeded from different motives which it is easy to point out. The first, perhaps the most important, was that this government, even while loading them with honours, could not give them what the old republic would have given them. With the establishment of the monarchy an important change in all public employments was accomplished: the magistrates became subordinate officials. Formerly, those elected by the popular vote had the right to act as they pleased within the sphere of their functions. A fertile power of initiative inspired every rank of this hierarchy of republican dignitaries. From the aedile to the consul all were supreme within their own limits. They could not be so under an absolute government. Instead of governing on their own account, they were only the channels, so to say, by which the will of a single man acted to the ends of the earth. Certainly public security gained much by the cessation of those conflicts of authorities, which had continually troubled it, and it was a great advantage for the provinces that absolute power had been taken away from their greedy governors. Nevertheless, if the governed profited by these reforms, it was natural that the governors should be discontented with them. From the moment that they were only entrusted with the execution of the orders of another man the importance of their functions diminished, and this sovereign and absolute authority whose weight they always felt, finally vexed even the most submissive. If ambitious men complained of the diminution of their power, honest people did not get accustomed so easily as might have been expected to the loss of their liberty. In proportion as they left Pharsalia behind, their regrets became more lively. They began to get over the surprise of the defeat, and gradually recovered from the fear it had caused them. During the moments that immediately follow those great disasters in which men have expected to perish, they give themselves up entirely to the pleasure of living, but this pleasure is one of those to which men accustom themselves so quickly, and which are taken so much as a matter of course, that they soon cease to be sensible of it. All those terrified people who on the morrow of Pharsalia desired only tranquillity, when it had been given them, wished for something else. As long as men are uncertain of their life, they do not trouble themselves to know if they shall live free, but when once life is assured, the desire for liberty returns to all hearts, and those who served Caesar felt it like the rest. Caesar, we know, partly satisfied this desire, but this satisfaction did not last long. It is as difficult to halt on the road to liberty as on that to absolutism. One favour granted makes men desire another, and men think less of enjoying what they have obtained than of lamenting what they lack. It was thus that Cicero, who had welcomed Caesar’s clemency with transports of joy, and who saluted the return of Marcellus as a sort of restoration of the republic, soon changed his opinion and language. As we get on further in his correspondence, he becomes more bitter and more revolutionary. He who had so severely condemned those who “after having disarmed their hands did not disarm their hearts,”[[315]] had his own heart filled with the bitterest resentment. He said on every opportunity that all was lost, that he blushed to be a slave, that he was ashamed to live. He attacked with his pitiless raillery the most useful measures and the most just acts. He laughed at the reform of the calendar, and pretended to appear scandalized at the enlargement of Rome. He went further. On the day that the senate ordered Caesar’s statue to be placed beside those of the ancient kings, he could not avoid making a cruel allusion to the manner in which the first of these kings had perished. “I am very glad,” said he, “to see Caesar so near to Romulus!”[[316]] And yet it was scarcely a year since, in his speech for Marcellus, he had implored him in the name of the country to watch over his life, and had said with much feeling, “Your safety is ours!”

Caesar, then, had only malcontents around him. The moderate republicans, on whom he reckoned to aid him in his work, could not resign themselves to the loss of the republic. The exiles whom he had recalled to Rome were more humiliated by his clemency than grateful for it, and did not give up their resentment. His own generals, whom he loaded with riches and honours, without being able to satisfy their cupidity, reproached him for his ingratitude, and even plotted his death. The common people, at last, of whom he was the idol, and who had so cheerfully granted all his demands, the people themselves began to withdraw from him; they no longer welcomed his victories with the same applause as formerly, and seemed to be afraid that they had made him too great. When his statue was placed beside those of the kings, the multitude, who saw it pass, remained mute, and we know that the news of this unusual silence was spread by the messengers of the allied kings and nations in all the countries of the world, and caused it to be believed everywhere that a revolution was at hand.[[317]] In the provinces of the East, where the last soldiers of Pompey were hiding, the fire of civil war, which was smouldering rather than extinct, constantly revived, and these perpetual alarms, without leading to serious danger, prevented the public tranquillity becoming settled. At Rome, Cicero’s works, in which he celebrated the glories of the republic, were read with enthusiasm; anonymous pamphlets, which had never been more violent or more numerous, were eagerly sought. As happens on the eve of great crises, every one was discontented with the present, unquiet about the future, and prepared for the unforeseen. We know in how tragical a manner this strained situation terminated. The stab of Brutus’ dagger was not altogether, as has been said, an unpremeditated incident and a chance; it was the general uneasiness of men’s minds which led to and which explains such a terrible catastrophe. The conspirators were but little over sixty in number, but they had all Rome for their accomplice.[[318]] All this disquietude and rancour, those bitter regrets for the past, those disappointed ambitions, this baffled cupidity, this open or secret hatred, those bad or generous passions of which men’s hearts were full, armed their hands, and the Ides of March were only the deadly explosion of so much stored-up anger. Thus events frustrated all Caesar’s projects. He did not find safety in his clemency, as he thought; he failed in that work of conciliation that he had attempted with the applause of the world: he did not succeed in disarming parties. This glory was reserved for a man who had neither his breadth of genius, nor his generosity of character—for the crafty and cruel Octavius. This is not the only time that history shows us the sad spectacle of the success of ordinary men where the greatest have failed; but in enterprises of this nature success depends above all on circumstances, and it must be admitted that they singularly favoured Augustus. Tacitus tells us the principal cause of his good fortune, when he says, speaking of the establishment of the empire: “There was almost no one left who had seen the republic.”[[319]] The men over whom Caesar aspired to reign, on the contrary, had all seen it. Many cursed it when it troubled the tranquillity of their lives by its storms and agitations; almost all regretted it as soon as they had lost it. There is, notwithstanding the perils to which it exposes men, a singular charm and attraction in the habit and exercise of liberty which cannot be forgotten when once it has been known. It was against this inextinguishable memory that the genius of Caesar was shattered. But after the battle of Actium, the men who had looked upon the grand scenes of liberty, and who had seen the republic, no longer existed. A civil war of twenty years, the most murderous of all those that have ever depopulated the world, had destroyed them almost all. The recollections of the new generation did not go further back than Caesar. The first sounds it had heard were the acclamations that saluted the conqueror of Pharsalia, of Thapsus, and of Munda; the first spectacle that had struck its eyes was that of the proscriptions. It had grown up among pillage and massacres. During twenty years it had daily trembled for its property or its life. It thirsted for security, and was ready to sacrifice everything for repose. Nothing attracted it towards the past, as the contemporaries of Caesar had been attracted. On the contrary, all the memories of the past which survived only attached it more to the government under which it lived, and when by chance it turned its eyes backwards it found many subjects for fear without any subject for regret. It was only under these circumstances that absolute power could peaceably succeed the republic.

BRUTUS

HIS RELATIONS WITH CICERO

We should not know Brutus without Cicero’s letters. As he has never been spoken of with composure, and as political parties have been accustomed to screen their hatred or their hopes under his name, the true features of his character were early effaced. Amid the heated discussions that his mere name raises, while some, like Lucan, exalt him almost to heaven, and others, like Dante, resolutely place him in hell, it was not long before he became a sort of legendary personage. To read Cicero brings us back to the reality. Thanks to him, this striking but indistinct figure, that admiration or terror have immoderately enlarged, becomes more defined and takes human proportions. If it loses in grandeur by being viewed so close, at least it gains something by becoming true and living.

The connection between Cicero and Brutus lasted ten years. The collection of letters they wrote to each other during this interval must have been voluminous, since a grammarian quotes the ninth book of them. They are all lost, with the exception of twenty-five which were written after the death of Caesar.[[320]] Notwithstanding the loss of the rest, Brutus still holds such a large place in the surviving works of Cicero, and especially in his correspondence, that we find in it all the elements necessary for becoming well acquainted with him. I am going to collect these references, and to re-write, not the narrative of Brutus’ entire life, which would oblige me to dwell upon very well-known events, but only the history of his relations with Cicero.

I.