Cicero and his friends

by Gaston Boissier

II.

Brutus was thirty-seven years old at the battle of Pharsalia. This was the age of political activity among the Romans. Usually a man had then just been quaestor or aedile; he might look forward to the praetorship and the consulship, and acquired a right to gain them by courageously contending in the Forum or the Curia. The brightest hope of every young man on entering public life was to obtain these high honours at the age appointed by law, the praetorship at forty and the consulship at forty-three, and nothing was thought to give greater distinction than to be able to say, “I was praetor or consul as soon as I had the right to be so (meo anno).” If by good luck, while a man held these offices, fortune favoured him by some considerable war that gave an opportunity of killing five thousand enemies, he obtained a triumph and had nothing more to wish for.

There is no doubt that Brutus had conceived this hope like the rest, and it is certain that his birth and his talents would have permitted him to realize it; Pharsalia upset all these projects. He was not precluded from honours, for he was the friend of him who distributed them; but these honours were now only empty titles, since one man had seized all real power. This man really aimed at being sole master, and admitted no one to share his authority. “He does not even consult his own friends,” says Cicero, “and only takes counsel of himself.”[^[336]] Political life did not exist for the rest, and even those whom the new government employed felt time hang heavy on their hands, especially after the violent agitations of the preceding years. God, according to Virgil’s expression, gave leisure to everybody. Brutus employed this leisure by returning to the studies of his youth, which he had rather interrupted than forsaken. To return to them was to draw still nearer to Cicero.

He had not indeed forgotten him; while following Caesar in Asia he had learnt that his friend, having retired to Brundusium, suffered at once from the threats of the Caesarians, who did not forgive his going to Pharsalia, and from the ill-will of the Pompeians, who blamed him for having returned too quickly. Amidst all this irritation, Cicero, who, as we know, had not much energy, was very downcast. Brutus wrote to him to encourage him. “You have performed actions,” said he, “which will speak of you, notwithstanding your silence, which will live after your death, and which, by the safety of the state, if the state is saved, by its loss, if it is not saved, will for ever bear witness in favour of your political conduct.”[^[337]] Cicero says that in reading this letter he seemed to recover from a long illness, and to open his eyes to the light. When Brutus returned to Rome, their intercourse became more frequent. Knowing each other better they appreciated each other more. Cicero, whose imagination was so lively, whose heart was so youthful, in spite of his sixty years, became entirely enamoured of Brutus. This constant communication with a mind so inquiring and a soul so upright, reanimated and revived his talents. His friend always holds a large place in the fine works that he published at that time, which succeeded each other so rapidly. We see that his heart is full of him, he speaks of him as often as he can, he is never weary of praising him, he wishes to please him before everything; one would almost say that he cares only for the praises and friendship of Brutus.

It was the study of philosophy that united them above all. Both loved and cultivated it from their youth, both seemed to love it more and to cultivate it more ardently when the concentration of the government in one hand had removed them from public life. Cicero, who could not accustom himself to repose, turned all his activity towards it. “Greece is getting old,” he said to his pupils and friends, “let us snatch from her her philosophical glory;”[^[338]] and he at once set about the work. He groped about for some time, and did not immediately hit upon the philosophy that was suitable to his fellow-countrymen. He had been tempted for a moment to direct their attention towards those subtle metaphysical questions that were repugnant to the practical good sense of the Romans. He had translated the Timaeus, that is to say, the most obscure thing in Plato’s philosophy; but he quickly perceived that he was mistaken, and hastened to quit that path in which he would have walked alone. In the Tusculan Disputations he returned to questions of applied morality and did not leave them again. The diverse characters of the passions, the real nature of virtue, the relative rank of duties, all those problems that a virtuous man proposes to himself during his life; above all, that before which he so often draws back, but which always returns with a terrible persistency and troubles at times the most gross and earthly souls, the future after death; this is what he studies without tricks of dialectical skill, without the prejudices of a school, without a preconceived system, and with less anxiety to discover new ideas than to accept practical and sensible principles wherever he found them. Such is the character of Roman philosophy, of which we must be careful not to speak ill, for it has played a great part in the world, and it is through it that the wisdom of the Greeks, rendered at once more solid and yet more clear, has come down to the nations of the West. This philosophy dates from Pharsalia, like the empire, and owes much to the victory of Caesar, who, by suppressing political life, forced inquiring minds to seek other subjects for their activity. Welcomed at first, with enthusiasm, by all minds unoccupied and ill at ease, it became more and more popular in proportion as the authority of the emperors became more oppressive. To the absolute authority that the government exercised over external actions they were glad to oppose the entire self-possession that philosophy gives; to study oneself, to withdraw into oneself was to escape on one side from the tyranny of the master, and in seeking to know oneself the ground to which his power had no access seemed to be enlarged. The emperors understood this well; and were the mortal enemies of a science that was so bold as to limit their authority. Along with history, which recalled disagreeable memories, it soon fell under their suspicion; they were two names, said Tacitus, unpleasing to princes, ingrata principibus nomina.

I have not here to show why all the philosophical works composed at the end of the republic or under the empire have a much greater importance than the books we write now on the same subjects: this has been too well told already for me to have need to return to it.[^[339]] It is certain that during that time when religion was confined to ritual, when its books only contained collections of formulae and the minute regulations of observances, and when it did not go beyond teaching its adepts the science of sacrificing according to the rites, philosophy alone could give to all virtuous and troubled souls which were tossed about without definite aim and were desirous of finding one, that teaching of which they had need. We must not forget, then, when we read an ethical treatise of that time, that it was written not only for lettered idlers who are delighted with fine discourses, but for those whom Lucretius represents as groping after the way of life; we must remind ourselves that these precepts have been practised, that theories became rules of conduct, and that, so to say, all this ethical theory was once alive. Let us take for example the first Tusculan Disputation: Cicero wishes to prove in it that death is not an evil. What a trite remark in appearance, and how difficult it is not to regard all this elaborated treatment as an oratorical exercise and an essay for the schools! It is nothing of the kind however, and the generation for whom it was written found something else in it. Men read it on the eve of the proscriptions to renew their strength, and came from their reading firmer, more resolute, better prepared to support the great misfortunes that they foresaw. Atticus himself, the egotist Atticus, so far removed from risking his life for anybody, found in them the source of an unusual energy. “You tell me,” Cicero writes to him, “that my Tusculans give you courage: so much the better. There is no surer and speedier resource against circumstances than that which I indicate.”[^[340]] This resource was death. How many people accordingly availed themselves of it! Never has a more incredible contempt of life been seen, never has death caused less fear. Since Cato, suicide became a contagion, a frenzy. The vanquished, Juba, Petreius, Scipio, know no other way of escaping the conqueror. Laterensis kills himself through regret when he sees his friend Lepidus betray the republic; Scapula, who can no longer hold out in Cordova, has a funeral pyre constructed, and burns himself alive; when Decimus Brutus, a fugitive, hesitates to choose this heroic remedy, his friend Blasius kills himself before him in order to set him an example. It was a veritable delirium at Philippi. Even those who might have escaped did not seek to survive their defeat. Quintilius Varus put on the insignia of his rank, and had himself killed by a slave; Labeo dug his own grave and killed himself on its brink; Cato the younger, for fear of being spared, threw away his helmet and shouted his name; Cassius was impatient, and killed himself too soon; Brutus closes the list by a suicide, astonishing by its calmness and dignity. What a strange and frightful commentary on the Tusculans, and how clearly this general truth, thus put in practice by so many men of spirit, ceases to be a mere platitude!

We must study in the same spirit the very short fragments that remain of the philosophical works of Brutus. The general thoughts that we find in them will no longer appear insignificant and vague when we think that he who formulated them also intended to put them in practice in his life. The most celebrated of all these writings of Brutus, the treatise On Virtue, was addressed to Cicero, and is worthy of them both. It was a fine work that was especially pleasing because it was felt that the writer was thoroughly convinced of all that he said.[^[341]] An important passage preserved by Seneca survives. In this passage Brutus relates that he had just seen M. Marcellus at Mitylene, the same whom Caesar pardoned later at the request of Cicero. He found him employed in serious studies, easily forgetting Rome and its pleasures, and enjoying in this tranquillity and leisure a happiness that he had never known before. “When I had to leave him,” says he, “and saw that I was going away without him, it seemed to me that it was I who was going into exile, and not Marcellus, who remained there.”[^[342]] From this example he concludes that a man must not complain of being exiled since he can carry all his virtue with him. The moral of the book was that to live happily one need not go outside of oneself. This is another truism, if you like; but, in trying to conform his whole life to this maxim, Brutus made it a living truth. It was not a philosophical thesis that he developed, but a rule of conduct that he proposed to others and took for himself. He was early accustomed to commune with his own thoughts, and to place in this his pleasures and pains. Thence came that freedom of mind that he preserved in the gravest affairs, that contempt for outward things that all his contemporaries remarked, and the ease with which he detached himself from them. On the eve of Pharsalia, when every one was restless and uneasy, he was tranquilly reading Polybius and taking notes while awaiting the moment of combat. After the Ides of March, in the midst of the excitement and fears of his friends, he alone preserved a constant serenity that rather annoyed Cicero. Driven away from Rome and threatened by Caesar’s veterans, he consoled himself for everything by saying: “There is nothing better than to rest upon the memory of one’s good actions, and not to busy oneself with events or men.”[^[343]] This capacity for abstraction from outward things and this self-sufficingness are certainly valuable qualities in a man of reflection and study: it is the ideal that a philosopher proposes to himself; but is it not a danger and a fault in a man of action and a politician? Is it right for a man to hold himself aloof from the opinions of others when the success of the things he undertakes depends upon their opinions? Under pretence of listening to one’s conscience, and resolutely following it, ought a man to take no account of circumstances, and risk himself heedlessly in useless adventures? Indeed, by wishing to keep aloof from the multitude, and preserve himself entirely from its passions, does he not risk the loss of the tie that binds him to it and becoming incapable of leading it? Appian, in the narrative that he gives of the last campaign of the Republican army, relates that Brutus was always self-possessed, and that he kept himself almost aloof from the grave affairs that were discussed. He liked conversation and reading; he visited as a connoisseur the places they passed through, and made the people of the country talk to him: he was a philosopher in the midst of camps. Cassius, on the contrary, occupied solely with the war, never allowing himself to be turned aside, and, so to say, wholly intent upon that end, resembled a fighting gladiator.[^[344]] I suspect that Brutus must have rather disdained that feverish activity entirely confined to ordinary duties, and that this rôle of gladiator made him smile. He was wrong; success in human things belongs to the gladiator, and a man only succeeds by throwing his whole soul into them. As to those speculative men, wrapped up in themselves, who wish to keep outside of and above the passions of the day, they astonish the multitude but do not lead it; they may be sages, they make very bad party leaders.

And further, it is very possible that Brutus, if left to himself, would not have thought of becoming a party leader. He was not hostile to the new government, and Caesar had neglected no opportunity of attaching him to himself by granting him the pardon of some of the very much compromised Pompeians. On his return to Rome he confided to him the government of one of the finest provinces of the empire, Cisalpine Gaul. About the same time the news came of the defeat of the republican army at Thapsus, and the death of Cato. No doubt Brutus felt it very much. He himself wrote and persuaded Cicero to compose the eulogy of his uncle; but we know from Plutarch that he blamed him for refusing Caesar’s clemency. When Marcellus, who had just obtained his pardon, was assassinated near Athens, some persons affected to believe and to say that Caesar might well have been an accomplice in this crime. Brutus hastened to write, with a warmth that surprised Cicero, to exculpate him. He was at that time, then, quite under the spell of Caesar. We may add that he had taken a horror of civil war in Pompey’s camp. It had carried off some of his dearest friends, for instance Torquatus and Triarius, two young men of great promise, whose loss he bitterly regretted. In thinking of the disorders it had caused, and of the victims it had made, he no doubt said with his friend, the philosopher Favonius: “It is better to endure arbitrary power than to revive impious wars.”[^[345]] How, then, did he allow himself to be drawn on to recommence them? By what clever conspiracy did his friends succeed in overcoming his repugnance, in arming him against a man he loved, in involving him in an enterprise that was to throw the world into confusion? This deserves to be related, and Cicero’s letters allow us to catch a glimpse of it.

III.

After Pharsalia, there was no want of malcontents. That great aristocracy that had governed the world so long, could not consider itself beaten after a single defeat. It was so much the more natural that it should wish to make a last effort, as it was well aware that, the first time, it had not fought under favourable conditions, and that, in uniting its cause to Pompey’s, it had placed itself in a bad position. Pompey inspired little more confidence in those who desired liberty than Caesar. It was known that he had a taste for extraordinary powers, and that he liked to concentrate all public authority in his hands. At the commencement of the civil war he had rejected the most just proposals with so much haughtiness, and shown so much ardour in precipitating the crisis, that he seemed rather to wish to get rid of a rival who hampered him than to come to the aid of the threatened republic. His friend Cicero tells us that when the insolence of his associates, and his own persistency in not taking advice from any one, were seen in his camp, it was suspected that a man who took counsel so ill before the battle would wish to make himself master after the victory. That is why so many good citizens, and Cicero among the chief, had hesitated so long to take his part; that is, above all, why intrepid men like Brutus had hastened to lay down their arms after the first defeat. It must be added that, if they were not perfectly satisfied about Pompey’s intentions, it was also possible they might be mistaken about Caesar’s projects. No one was ignorant that he wished for power; but what kind of power? Was it only one of those temporary dictatorships, necessary in free states after a period of anarchy, which suspend liberty but do not annihilate it? Was it a question of repeating the history of Marius and Sulla, whom the republic had survived? In strictness it might be thought so, and nothing prevents us supposing that several of Caesar’s officers, those especially who, when undeceived later, conspired against him, did not think so then.