Cicero spoke thus at a few paces from the man who had ordered the proscriptions, and in the presence of those who had carried them out and profited by them. We can imagine the effect his words must have produced. They expressed the secret feelings of all, they relieved the public conscience, forced to keep silence, and humiliated by its silence. Thus the democratic party showed the most lively sympathy, from that time, for the eloquent young man who protested so courageously against a hateful rule. The remembrance of this preserved the popular favour for him so faithfully even to the time of his consulship. Every time he sought an office the citizens hastened in crowds to the Campus Martius to record their votes for him. No politician of that time, and there were many more eminent than he, so easily reached the highest dignities. Cato suffered more than one check, Caesar and Pompey needed coalitions and intrigues to succeed. Cicero is almost the only one whose candidatures succeeded the first time, and who never had to recur to the means usually required for success. In the midst of those scandalous bargains which gave honours to the richest, notwithstanding those deeprooted traditions which seemed to reserve them for the noblest, Cicero, who had no claims of birth and but a small fortune, always defeated all the rest. He was appointed quaestor, aedile; he obtained the urban praetorship, which was the most honourable; he attained the consulship the first time he sought for it, as soon as the law permitted him to aspire to it, and none of these dignities cost anything either to his honour or his fortune.
It is worthy of remark, that when he was appointed praetor he had not delivered any political speech. Up to the age of forty years he was only what we call an advocate, and had not felt the need of being anything else. Forensic eloquence then led to everything; a few brilliant successes before the tribunals were sufficient to carry a man to public dignities, and nobody thought of asking Cicero for any other proof of his capacity for public business, when they were about to commit the highest interests of his country to his charge, and to invest him with the supreme authority. However, if this long time passed at the bar was not detrimental to his political career, I think it caused some injury to his talents. All the reproaches we may address to the advocate of to-day, wrongly, no doubt, were well deserved by the advocate of those times. It may be said of him with truth, that he took all cases indifferently, that he changed his opinion with each suit, that he used all his art in and made his fame by finding good reasons for supporting every sophism. The young man who devoted himself to oratory in the ancient schools, never heard it said that it was necessary to be convinced, and proper only to speak conscientiously. He was taught that there are different kinds of cases, those which are honest and those which are not so (genera causarum sunt honestum, turpe, etc.).[[43]] It was not thought necessary to add that the latter were to be avoided. On the contrary, by exaggerating the merit of success in these, he acquired the taste for undertaking them by preference. After he had been taught how to defend and save the guilty, he was, without hesitation, also taught how to bring discredit on an honest man. Such was the education received by the pupil of the rhetoricians, and when he had quitted their schools he did not lack opportunity of applying their precepts. For instance, he did not make the mistake of being moderate and restrained in his attacks. By constraining himself to be just he would have deprived himself of an element of success with that fickle and passionate mob which applauded satirical portraits and violent invective. He was not more prejudiced in favour of truth than of justice. It was a precept of the schools to invent, even in criminal causes, racy and imaginary details that diverted the audience (causam mendaciunculis adspergere).[[44]] Cicero quotes with great commendation some of these agreeable little lies which perhaps cost the honour or the life of some unfortunate people who were unlucky enough to have too witty opponents, and as he had himself a fertile imagination in this way, he did not stint himself in having recourse to this easy means of success. Nothing was more indifferent to the ancient advocate than being inconsistent with himself. It was said that the orator Antonius never would write any of his speeches, lest some one should take it into his head to compare his late with his present opinion. Cicero had not these scruples. He contradicted himself all his life, and was never uneasy about it. One day, when he too openly stated the contrary to what he had formerly upheld, as he was pressed to explain these sudden changes, he answered without perturbation: “You are mistaken if you think that you find the expression of our personal opinions in our speeches; they are the language of the cause and the case, and not that of the man and the orator.”[[45]] This at least is a sincere avowal; but how much do the orator and the man not lose by thus suiting their language to circumstances! They learnt to be careless of putting order and consistency in their lives, to dispense with sincerity in their opinions, and conviction in their speech, to make the same expenditure of talent for untruth as for truth, to consider only the needs of the moment, and the success of the case in hand. These are the lessons that the bar of that age taught Cicero. He remained at it too long, and when he quitted it at forty to make his first essay in political oratory, he could not shake off the bad habits acquired there.
Does this mean that Cicero should be struck off the list of political orators? If this name is given to every man whose speech has some influence on the affairs of his country, who sways the mob, or convinces honest people, it seems difficult to refuse it to Cicero. He knew how to talk to the multitude and make himself listened to. At times he mastered it in its most furious outbursts. He made it accept and even applaud opinions contrary to its preferences. He seemed to drag it out of its apathy, and to call up in it for a short time an appearance of energy and patriotism. He is not to blame if his successes were not followed up, if after these grand triumphs of eloquence brute force remained master. At least he did with his words all that words could then do. I admit, however, that what was wanting in his character was wanting also in his political eloquence. It is nowhere sufficiently resolute, decided, practical. It is too much taken up with itself, and not enough with the questions it is treating. It does not attack them boldly on their salient points. It is involved in pompous phrases, instead of trying to speak that clear and precise language which is the language of public business. When we examine it closely, and begin to analyze it, we find that it is chiefly composed of a good deal of rhetoric and a little philosophy. All those agreeable and smart arguments, all those artifices of debate, and also all that ostentation of pathos that we find in it, come from rhetoric. Philosophy has furnished those grand commonplaces developed with talent, but not always germane to the subject. There is too much artifice and method about it. A concise and simple statement would be more suitable to the discussion of affairs than these subtleties and emotions; these long philosophical tirades would be advantageously replaced by a clear and judicious exposition of the orator’s principles and of the general ideas that regulate his conduct. Unfortunately, as I have said, Cicero preserved, on reaching the rostrum, the habits he had acquired at the bar. He attacks, with the arguments of an advocate, that agrarian law, so honest, moderate, and wise, which was proposed by the tribune Rullus. In the fourth Catilinarian Oration he had to discuss this question, one of the gravest that can be placed before a deliberative assembly, namely, how far is it permitted to deviate from legality in order to save one’s country? He has not even approached it. It is painful to see how he hangs back from it, how he flies from and avoids it, to develop small reasons and lose himself in a vulgar pathos. The grave and serious kind of eloquence evidently was not that which Cicero preferred, and in which he felt most at ease. If you wish to know the real tendency of his talents, read, immediately after the fourth Catilinarian Oration, the speech for Muraena, delivered at the same time. There is none more agreeable in the collection of his speeches, and we wonder how a man who was consul, and who had then so many affairs on his hands, found his mind sufficiently free to joke with so much ease and point; the truth is, there he was in his element. Accordingly, although he was consul or consular, he returned to the bar as often as he could. It was to oblige his friends, he said. I think that he wished still more to please himself; he appears happy, and his animation and wit expand so freely, when he has some agreeable and lively case to plead. Not only did he never miss an opportunity of appearing before the judges, but as much as possible he threw his political discourses into the form of ordinary pleadings. Everything turned into personal questions with him. The discussion of ideas usually leaves him cold. He had to contend against some one in order to let us see him at his best. The finest speeches he delivered in the Forum or the senate are eulogies or invectives. In them he is unrivalled; in them, according to one of his expressions, his eloquence rises and triumphs; but however fine invectives and eulogies may be, they are not altogether our ideal of political eloquence, and we demand something else of it now-a-days. All that can be said in justification of Cicero’s speeches is, that they were perfectly appropriate to his time, and that their character is explained by the circumstances in which they were delivered. Eloquence did not then guide the state as in the best times of the republic. Other influences had replaced it; in the elections, money and the intrigues of the candidates, in out-door discussions, the occult and terrible power of the popular societies, and above all the army, which, since Sulla, raised or overthrew every government. Eloquence feels itself powerless in the midst of these forces which overpower it. How can it still preserve the commanding accent, the imperious and resolute tone of one who knows his power? Need it appeal to reason and logic, and try and force itself upon men’s convictions by a close and forcible argument, when it knows that the questions it is treating are decided otherwise? M. Mommsen maliciously remarks, that in most of his great political speeches Cicero pleads causes already victorious. When he published the Verrine Orations, the laws of Sulla on the composition of the tribunals had just been abolished. He well knew that Catiline had decided to leave Rome when he pronounced the first Catilinarian Oration, in which he so feelingly adjures him to go away. The second Philippic, which seems so bold when we think of it as spoken to the face of the all-powerful Antony, was only made public at the moment when Antony was flying to Cisalpine Gaul. Of what use then were all these fine speeches? They did not cause decisions to be taken, since these decisions were already taken; but they caused them to be accepted by the multitude, they stirred public opinion and excited it in their favour: this was something. It was necessary to accept the facts of the situation; speech no longer governed, eloquence could no longer hope to direct events, but it acted on them indirectly, it tried to produce those great movements of opinion that prepare or complete them; “it does not secure votes and acts, it arouses the emotions.”[[46]] If this moral effect is the only end it had in view at the time, Cicero’s eloquence, by its copiousness and splendour, by its brilliancy and pathos, was well calculated to attain it.
At first he had put his eloquence at the service of the popular party; we have seen that it was in the ranks of this party that he made his first political appearance; but although he faithfully served it for seventeen years, I am inclined to think that he did not always do so heartily. The excesses of the aristocratic government threw him towards democracy, but he must have found democracy not much wiser, especially when it was victorious. It sometimes gave him terrible clients to defend. He had to plead the cause of factious and seditious persons who were always troubling the public peace. One day he even pleaded, or was on the point of pleading, for Catiline. It is probable that all this was painful to him, and that the violent excesses of democracy tempted him more than once to separate from it. Unfortunately he did not know where to go if he left it, and if the plebeians offended him by their violence, the aristocracy, by its arrogance and prejudices, did not any more attract him. Since in existing parties he did not find any which exactly corresponded to his convictions, and which altogether suited his disposition, he had no other resource than to form one for himself. This is what he tried to do. When he felt that the brilliancy of his eloquence, the offices he had filled, the popularity that surrounded him, made him an important person, in order to assure his future, to take a higher and more permanent position in the republic, to free himself from the requirements of his former protectors, in order not to be forced to stretch out his hand to his old enemies, he sought to create a new party, composed of the moderate men of all parties, and of which he was to be the head. But he very well understood that he could not create this party in a moment and produce it from nothing. It was necessary first to find a nucleus around which the new recruits that he expected should group themselves. He thought he had found it in that class of citizens to which he belonged by his birth, and who were called the knights.
Rome always lacked what we now call the middle and citizen class. In proportion as the small farmers left their friends to go and live in the city, and “as those hands which had worked at the corn and the vine were only occupied in applauding at the theatre and the circus,”[[47]] the gap became greater between the opulent aristocracy which possessed almost all the public wealth, and that indigent and famished people that was continually recruited from the slaves. The sole intermediaries were the knights. This name, at the time we are considering, was not only used to describe the citizens to whom the state gave a horse (equites equo publico), and who voted separately in the elections; it was also given to all those who possessed the equestrian income qualification, that is to say, those whose fortune exceeded 400,000 sesterces (£3200). We may well believe that the nobility behaved haughtily to these obscure plebeians whom chance or economy had enriched; it kept these parvenus at a distance; dealt out its disdain to them as liberally as to the poor people of the plebs, and obstinately closed the entrance to public dignities to them. When Cicero was appointed consul it was thirty years since a new man, whether knight or plebeian, had attained the consulship. Removed from political life by the jealousy of the great nobles, the knights were obliged to turn their energies elsewhere. Instead of wasting time in useless candidatures, they busied themselves in making their fortunes. When Rome had conquered the world, it was the knights especially who profited by these conquests. They formed an industrious and enlightened class, they were already in easy circumstances, and able to make loans, and thought they could speculate in the conquered countries for their own profit. Penetrating wherever the Roman arms were carried, they became merchants, bankers, farmers of the taxes, and amassed immense riches. As Rome was no longer the Rome of the Curii and the Cincinnati, and dictators were no longer taken from the plough, their wealth gave them consideration and importance. From that time they were spoken of with more respect. The Gracchi, who wished to make them allies in the struggle they were waging with the aristocracy, caused it to be decided that the judges should be taken from their ranks. Cicero went further; he tried to make them the foundation of the great moderate party he wished to create. He knew that he could count on their devotedness. He belonged to them by birth; he had shed over them the splendour that surrounded his name; he had never neglected to defend their interests before the tribunals or in the senate. He also reckoned that they would be grateful to him for wishing to augment their importance and call them to a great political future.
All these combinations of Cicero seemed at first to succeed very happily; but, to tell the truth, the merit of this success was chiefly due to circumstances. This great coalition of the moderates upon which he congratulated himself as his finest work, almost succeeded under the influence of fear. A social revolution seemed imminent. The dregs of all the old parties, wretched plebeians and ruined nobles, old soldiers of Marius, and proscribers of Sulla, had united under the leadership of a bold and able chief, who promised them a new distribution of public wealth. The existence of this party compelled those whom it threatened to unite also in order to defend themselves. Fear was more efficacious than the finest speeches would have been, and in this sense we may say that Cicero was perhaps more indebted for this union which he regarded as the main point of his policy to Catiline rather than to himself. Community of interests, then, brought about, at least for a time, a reconciliation of the aims of various classes. The richest, and consequently the most seriously endangered, namely the knights, were naturally the soul of the new party. By their side the honest plebeians who did not wish political reforms to be exaggerated took their stand, as well as those nobles whose threatened pleasures drew them from their apathy, who would have allowed the republic to perish without defending it, but who did not wish their lampreys and fish-ponds touched. The new party had not to look about long for a head. Pompey was in Asia, Caesar and Crassus secretly favoured the conspiracy. Besides these there was no greater name than Cicero’s. This explains that great wave of public opinion which carried him into the consulship. His election was almost a triumph. I shall say nothing of his consulship, of which he has had the misfortune to speak too much himself. I do not wish to underrate the victory that he gained over Catiline and his accomplices. The danger was serious; even his enemy Sallust affirms it. Behind the plot were hidden ambitious politicians ready to profit by events. Caesar knew well that the reign of anarchy could not last long. After some pillaging and massacres, Rome would have recovered from her surprise, and honest folks, being driven to activity by despair, would have again got the upper hand. Only it is probable that then one of those reactions that usually follow great anarchy would have taken place. The remembrance of the ills from which they had escaped with such difficulty would have disposed many people to sacrifice the liberty which exposed them to so many perils, and Caesar held himself ready to offer them the sovereign remedy of absolute power. By cutting the evil at the root, by surprising and punishing the conspiracy before it broke out, Cicero perhaps delayed the advent of monarchical government at Rome for fifteen years. He was not wrong, then, in boasting of the services he rendered at that time to his country’s liberty, and we must acknowledge, with Seneca, that if he has praised his consulship without measure he has not done so without reason.[[48]]
Coalitions of this kind, unfortunately, seldom long survive the circumstances that give rise to them. When the interests that a common danger had united began to feel themselves secure, they recommenced their old quarrels. The plebeians, who were no longer afraid, felt their old animosity against the nobility revive. The nobles began again to envy the wealth of the knights. As to the knights, they had none of those qualities that were necessary to make them the soul of a political party, as Cicero had hoped. They were more occupied with their private affairs than with those of the republic. They had not the strength of numbers, like the plebeians, and were wanting in those great traditions of government that maintained so long the authority of the nobility. Their only guiding principle was that instinct usual with men of large fortunes, which led them to prefer order to liberty. They sought, before all things, a strong power which could defend them, and Caesar had in the end no more devoted followers than they. In this break-up of his party, Cicero, who could not stand alone, asked himself on which side he ought to place himself. The fright that Catiline had given him, the presence of Caesar and Crassus in the ranks of the democracy, prevented his return to that party, and he finally attached himself to the nobility, notwithstanding his repugnance. From the date of his consulship he resolutely turned towards this party. We know how the democracy avenged itself for what it considered a betrayal. Three years after it condemned its old head, now become its enemy, to exile, and only consented to recall him to cast him at the feet of Caesar and Pompey, whose union had made them masters of Rome.[[49]]
III.
The gravest political crisis that Cicero passed through, after the great struggles of his consulship, was certainly that which terminated in the fall of the Roman republic at Pharsalia. We know that he did not willingly engage in this terrible conflict, of which he foresaw the issue, and that he hesitated for nearly a year before deciding on his course. It is not surprising that he hesitated so long. He was no longer young and obscure as when he pleaded for Roscius. He had a high position and an illustrious name that he did not wish to compromise, and a man may be allowed to reflect before he risks fortune, glory, and perchance life on a single cast. Besides, the question was not so simple nor the right so clear as they seem at first sight. Lucan, whose sympathies are not doubtful, yet said that it could not be known on which side justice lay, and this obscurity does not seem to be altogether dissipated, since, after eighteen centuries of discussion, posterity has not yet succeeded in coming to an agreement. It is curious that, among us, in the seventeenth century, at the height of monarchical government, the learned all pronounced against Caesar without hesitation. Magistrates of the high courts, men cautious and moderate by their offices and character, who approached the king and were not sparing of flattery, took the liberty of being Pompeians and even furious Pompeians in private. “The First President,” says Guy-Patin, “is so much on Pompey’s side, that one day he expressed his joy that I was so, I having said to him, in his fine garden at Bâville, that if I had been in the senate when Julius Caesar was killed, I would have given him the twenty-fourth stab.” On the contrary, it is in our own days, in a democratic epoch, after the French Revolution, and in the name of the revolution and the democracy, that the side of Caesar has been upheld with the greatest success, and that the benefit humanity has reaped from his victory has been set in its clearest light.
I have no intention to re-open this debate, it is too fertile in stormy discussions. I only wish here to deal with so much of it as is indispensable to explain Cicero’s political life. There are, I think, two very different ways of looking at the question: our own first, namely, that of people unconcerned in these quarrels of a former age, who approach them as historians or philosophers, after time has cooled them, who judge them less by their causes than by their results, and who ask themselves, above all, what good or evil they have done in the world; then that of contemporaries, who judge of them with their passions and prejudices, according to the ideas of their time, in their relation to themselves, and without knowing their remote consequences. I am going to place myself solely at this latter point of view, although the other seems to me grander and more profitable; but as my only design is to ask from Cicero an explanation of his political actions, and as one cannot reasonably require of him that he should have divined the future, I shall confine myself to showing how the question was stated in his time, what reasons were alleged on both sides, and in what manner it was natural for a wise man who loved his country to appreciate those reasons. Let us forget, then, the eighteen centuries that separate us from these events, let us suppose ourselves at Formiae or Tusculum during those long days of anxiety and uncertainty that Cicero passed there, and let us hear him discuss, with Atticus or Curio, the reasons that the two parties urged to draw him into their ranks.