What shows plainly that the judgment of contemporaries on the events which pass before them is not the same as that of posterity is, that the friends of Caesar, when they wished to gain over Cicero, did not employ the argument that seems the best to us. The chief reason that is appealed to now to justify Caesar’s victory is that, on the whole, if by it Rome lost some of her privileges, it was for the advantage of the rest of the world that she was despoiled. What does it matter that a few thousand men, who did not make a very good use of their political liberty, were deprived of it, if by the same stroke almost the entire world was rescued from pillage, slavery, and ruin? It is certain that the provinces and their inhabitants, so roughly treated by the proconsuls of the republic, found themselves better off under the régime inaugurated by Caesar. His army was open to all foreigners; he had with him Germans, Gauls, and Spaniards. They helped him to conquer, and naturally profited by his victory: and this was, without his wishing it perhaps, the revenge of the conquered nations. These nations were not anxious to recover their independence; they had lost the taste for it with their defeat. Their ambition was quite the reverse: they wished to be allowed to become Romans. Up till then, however, that proud and greedy aristocracy, who held power, and who meant to use the human race for the benefit of their pleasures or their grandeur, had obstinately refused to raise them to a level with themselves, no doubt in order to preserve the right of treating them according to their caprice. In overthrowing the aristocracy, Caesar overthrew the barrier that closed Rome to the rest of the nations. The empire made the entire world Roman; it reconciled, says a poet, and blended under one name, all the nations of the universe. These are surely great things, and it does not become us to forget them, us the sons of the vanquished, called by Caesar to partake in his victory. But who, in Cicero’s time, thought it would be thus? who could foresee and indicate these remote consequences? The question did not present itself then as it does to us who study it from a distance. Caesar does not anywhere allege the interest of the conquered among the reasons he gives for his enterprise. The senate never claimed to be the representative of the Roman nationality, threatened by an invasion of the barbarians, and it does not appear that the provinces rose in favour of him who came to defend them; on the contrary, they were almost equally divided between the two rivals. If the West fought on Caesar’s side, all the East repaired to Pompey’s camp, which proves that when the struggle commenced its consequences were unknown even to those who were to profit by them, and whose interest should have made them clear-sighted. Besides, even if Cicero had suspected the benefits that the world was going to draw from Caesar’s triumph, can we think that this reason would have sufficed to decide him? He was not one of those whose love for the whole of humanity excuses them from serving their country. He would have resigned himself with difficulty to the sacrifice of his liberty, under the pretence that this sacrifice would profit the Gauls, the Britons, and the Sarmatians. No doubt he was not indifferent to the interest of the world, but that of Rome touched him closer. His temper was gentle and humane, he had written in beautiful works that all nations are only one and the same family, he had made himself loved in the province he had governed; nevertheless, when Caesar opened the city and even the senate to the strangers who accompanied him, he showed himself very discontented, and attacked these barbarians with his most cruel raillery. He saw plainly that those Spaniards and Gauls who were walking proudly about the Forum were triumphing over Rome. His Roman pride revolted at this sight, and I see no reason to blame him for it. If he could divine or even catch a glimpse of the general emancipation of the conquered nations which was preparing, he understood also that this emancipation would bring with it the loss of the original, distinct, and independent existence of his country. It was natural that a Roman should not wish to pay this price even for the prosperity of the world.
Putting aside this reason, another, specious if not true, was much used to entice the irresolute. They were told that the republic and liberty were not interested in the war, that it was simply a struggle between two ambitious men who were contending for power. In this assertion there was a certain amount of truth capable of misleading thoughtless minds. Personal questions certainly held a large place in this contest. The soldiers of Caesar fought solely for him, and Pompey had in his suite many friends and creatures whom thirty years of prosperity and power had gained for him. Cicero himself gives us to understand, several times, that it was his old friendship for Pompey that led him into his camp. “It is to him and to him alone that I sacrifice myself,” said he, when he was preparing to leave Italy.[[50]] There are moments in which he seems to take pleasure in limiting the subject of this quarrel he is about to engage in, and when, writing to his friends, he repeats to them what Caesar’s partisans said—“It is a conflict of ambition, regnandi contentio est.”[[51]] But we must be careful when reading his correspondence of this period, and must read it with caution. Never was he more irresolute. He changes his opinion every day, he attacks and defends all parties, so that by skilfully putting together all the words let fall in this discontent and uncertainty, one may find in his letters grounds for charges against everybody. These are only the sallies of a restless and frightened mind, of which we must not make too much use either against others or against himself. Here, for instance, when he asserts that the republic has nothing to do in the contest, he does not say what he really thinks. It is only one of those pretexts that he invents to justify his hesitation in his friends’ eyes and his own. So rare is it to be quite sincere, I do not say with others only but with oneself! We are so ingenious in proving to ourselves that we have a thousand reasons for doing what we do without reason, or through interest or caprice! But when Cicero wishes to be frank, when he has no motive to delude himself or deceive others, he speaks in another manner. Then the cause of Pompey becomes really that of justice and right, that of honest men and of liberty. Without doubt, Pompey had rendered very indifferent services to the republic before being led by circumstances to defend it. He could not be trusted entirely, and his ambition was to be feared. In his camp he affected the airs of a sovereign; he had his flatterers and his ministers. “He is a little Sulla,” said Cicero, “who dreams also of proscriptions, sullaturit, proscripturit.”[[52]] The republican party would certainly have taken another defender if it had been free to choose; but at the time when Caesar assembled his troops, this party, which had neither soldiers nor generals, was really forced to accept Pompey’s aid. It accepted it as that of an ally whom one distrusts and watches, who, perhaps, will become an enemy after the victory, but with whom one cannot dispense during the fight. Besides, although Pompey might not altogether secure liberty, it was known that it ran fewer risks with him than with Caesar. He was ambitious doubtless, but more ambitious of honours than of power. Twice he had been seen to arrive at the gates of Rome with an army. The democracy called him, to make himself king, he had only to will it, and twice he had disbanded his troops and laid down the fasces. He had been made sole consul, that is to say, almost dictator, and at the end of six months he had voluntarily taken a colleague. These precedents made sincere republicans believe that after the victory he would content himself with sonorous titles and pompous eulogies, and that his services would be repaid, without danger to any one, with laurels and the purple. In any case, if he had demanded something else, we may be certain that he would have been refused, and that he would have found adversaries in the greater number of those who had become his allies. There were in his camp many persons who were not his friends, and who cannot be suspected of having taken arms to win a throne for him. Cato distrusted him, and had always opposed him. Brutus, whose father he had killed, hated him. The aristocracy did not pardon him for having restored the power of the tribunes, and for having united with Caesar against it. Is it likely that all these eminent persons, experienced in affairs, were the dupes of this indifferent politician who never deceived anybody, and that, without knowing it, they worked for him alone? or must we admit, which is still less likely, that they knew it, and that they voluntarily abandoned their country, risked their fortunes, and gave their lives to serve the interests and the ambition of a man whom they did not love? Assuredly, for them, something else was in question. When they went over sea, when they decided, notwithstanding their repugnance, to begin a civil war, when they came to put themselves under the orders of a general against whom they had so many reasons for ill-will, they did not intend to intervene solely in a personal quarrel, but to come to the help of the republic and of that liberty which were threatened. “But here,” people say, “you are deceived again. These names, liberty and republic, delude you. It was not liberty that was defended in Pompey’s camp, it was the oppression of the people by a caste. They wished to maintain the privileges of a burdensome and unjust aristocracy. They fought to preserve for it the right to oppress the plebs, and to crush the world.” At that rate the friends of liberty ought to keep for Caesar the sympathies they generally accord to Pompey, for he is the liberal and the democrat, the man of the people, the successor of the Gracchi and of Marius. This is indeed the part he assumed from the day when, almost a child, he had braved Sulla. Praetor and consul, he had appeared to serve the popular cause with devotion, and at the moment when he marched on Rome, abandoned by the senate, he still said, “I come to deliver the Roman people from a faction that oppresses it.”[[53]]
How much truth is there in this pretence that he makes of being the defender of the democracy? What ought to be thought of it, I do not say by a patrician, who naturally thought much ill of the people, but by an enemy of the nobility, by a new man like Cicero? Whatever anger the disdain of the aristocracy had caused to Cicero, whatever impatience he had felt at always finding in his way, in his candidatures, one of those nobles to whom “honours came while they slept,” I do not find that his ill-humour had ever led him to pretend that the people was oppressed;[[54]] and I suppose that when it was asserted before him that Caesar took up arms to restore him his liberty, he asked how long it was since he had lost it, and what new privileges they wished to add to those he already possessed? He called to mind that the people possessed a legal organization, had their own magistrates to whom they appealed from the decisions of others, magistrates inviolable and sacred, whom the law armed with the enormous power of staying the action of the government by their interference, and of interrupting political life; that they had the liberty of speech and of the rostrum, the right of voting, in which they trafficked for a living, and finally, free access to all grades of the magistracy, and he had only to cite his own case to demonstrate that it was possible for a man without birth and almost without fortune to attain even the consulship. Such success in truth was rare. The equality laid down in the law disappeared in practice. The consular records of that period contain scarcely any but illustrious names. A few great families seem to have established themselves in the highest dignities of the state; they guarded the avenues to them, and allowed no one to approach; but was it necessary, in order to break down the obstacles that the cleverness of a few ambitious men opposed to the regular working of the institutions, to destroy these institutions themselves? was the evil so great that it was necessary to have recourse to the radical remedy of absolute power? Was it impossible to think that it would be more surely cured by liberty than by despotism? Had it not been seen by recent examples that a strong current of popular opinion was sufficient to overturn all this aristocratic resistance? The laws gave the people the means of recovering their influence if they willed it energetically. With the liberty of voting and of speaking in the public assembly, with the intervention of the tribunes and the invincible strength of numbers, they must always end in being masters. It was their own fault if they left the power to others, and they deserved the degradation in which the nobility held them, since they made no effort to free themselves. Cicero had small esteem for the common people of his time; he thought them careless and apathetic by nature. “They demand nothing,” said he, “they desire nothing”;[[55]] and every time he saw them stirring in the Forum he suspected that the liberality of some ambitious men had worked this miracle. He was not, therefore, led to think it necessary to accord them new rights when he saw them use their ancient rights so little or so ill, and so he did not regard the pretext put forth by Caesar for taking up arms as serious. He never consented to look upon him as the successor of the Gracchi coming to emancipate the oppressed plebs; the war which was preparing never seemed to him to be the renewal of the ancient struggles between the people and the aristocracy, of which Roman history is full. In fact, an assembly of ruined nobles, like Dolabella, Antony, and Curio, marching under the leadership of him who boasted of being the son of the gods and of kings, little deserved the name of the popular party, and there was something else at stake than the defence of the privileges of birth in a camp to which so many knights and plebeians had repaired, and which reckoned among its chiefs Varro, Cicero, and Cato, that is to say, two burgesses of small fortune of Arpinum and Reate, and the descendant of the peasant of Tusculum.
Caesar, however, does not seem to have been very much prepossessed with this part of champion of the democracy. We do not find, on reading his memoirs, that he speaks very much of the people’s interests. The phrase just quoted is almost the only one in which they are mentioned. Elsewhere he is more frank. At the beginning of the civil war, when he set forth his reasons for commencing it, he complained that he was refused the consulship, that his province was taken from him, that he was torn from his army; he says not a word of the people, of their unrecognized rights, of their crushed liberty. This was, however, the moment to speak of them in order to justify an enterprise that so many people, and those the most honest, condemned. What did he demand in the final conditions he laid before the senate before marching on Rome? His consulship, his army, his province; he defended his personal interests, he bargained for himself, it never came into his mind to demand any guarantee for that people whose defender he called himself. Around him, in his camp, one thought no more of the people than they did of themselves. His best friends, his bravest generals, had no pretension to be reformers or democrats. They did not think, in following him, that they were going to give liberty to their fellow-citizens; they wished to avenge their outraged chief, and to win power for him. “We are the soldiers of Caesar,” said they with Curio.[[56]] They had no other title, they knew no other name. When some one came to speak to those old centurions who had seen Germany and Britain, who had taken Alesia and Gergovia, of abandoning Caesar and passing over to the side of the laws and the republic, they did not reply that they were defending the people and their rights. “We,” said they, “shall we quit our general who has given all of us our ranks, shall we take arms against an army in which we have served and been victorious for thirty-six years? We will never do it!”[[57]] These men were no longer citizens but soldiers. After thirty-six years of victories, they had lost the traditions of civil life and the taste for it; the rights of the people had become indifferent to them, and for them glory took the place of liberty. Cicero and his friends thought that these surroundings were not those of a popular chief who came to restore liberty to his fellow-citizens, but those of an ambitious man who came to establish absolute power by arms, and they were not mistaken. Caesar’s conduct after the war proves this more than all the rest. How did he use his victory? What benefits did he confer on the people whose interests he pretended to defend? I do not speak of what he was able to do for their comfort and their pleasures, the sumptuous feasts, the public meals that he gave, the corn and oil that he so generously distributed to the poorest, the 400 sesterces (£3 4s.) that he paid each citizen on the day of his triumph: if these alms satisfied the plebeians of that time, if they consented to sacrifice their liberty at that price, I pardon Cicero for not having more esteem for them, and for not putting himself on their side; but if they demanded something else, if they wished for a more complete independence, for a larger share in the affairs of their country, for new political rights, they did not obtain them, and Caesar’s victory, notwithstanding his promises, rendered them neither freer nor more powerful. Caesar humiliated the aristocracy, but only for his own advantage. He took the executive power out of the hands of the senate, but only to put it in his own. He established equality between all the orders, but it was an equality of servitude, and all were henceforth reduced to the same level of obedience.
I know that after he had silenced the public speakers, deprived the people of the right of voting, and united in himself all public authority, the senate that he had appointed, having exhausted flattery, solemnly awarded to him the name of Liberator, and voted the erection of a Temple of Liberty. If it is against this liberty that Cicero and his friends are accused of having taken up arms, I do not think it is worth the trouble to defend them from this charge.
Let us call things by their real name. It was for himself and not for the people that Caesar worked, and Cicero, in opposing him, thought he was defending the republic and not the privileges of the aristocracy.
But did this republic deserve to be defended? Was there any hope of preserving it? Was it not manifest that its ruin was inevitable? This is the greatest charge that is made against those who followed Pompey’s party. I admit it is not easy to answer it. The evil that Rome suffered, and which showed itself in those disorders and that violence of which Cicero’s letters give us such a sad picture, was not of a kind to be averted by a few wise reforms. It was ancient and profound. It became worse every day without any law being able to prevent or arrest it. Could one hope to cure it with those slight changes that the boldest proposed? Of what use was it to diminish, as was wished, the privileges of the aristocracy and to augment the rights of the plebeians? The sources of public life themselves were seriously impaired. The evil came from the way in which the citizenship was acquired.
For a long time Rome had drawn her strength from the country people. It was from the rustic tribes, the most honoured of all, that those valiant soldiers who had conquered Italy and subdued Carthage had come; but this agricultural and warlike people, who had so well defended the republic, could not defend themselves against the encroachments of the great estates. Enclosed little by little by those immense domains where cultivation is easiest, the poor peasant had for a long time struggled against misery and the usurers; then, discouraged in the struggle, he had ended by selling his field to his rich neighbour, who coveted it to round off his estate. He had tried then to become a tenant farmer, a metayer, a hired labourer on the property where he had been for so long the master, but there he met with the competition of the slave, a more frugal worker, who did not stand out for his wages, who did not make terms, who might be treated as one liked.[[58]] Thus, driven twice from his fields, both as owner and as tenant farmer, without work or resources, he had been forced to migrate to the city. At Rome, however, life was not more easy for him. What could he do there? There was little trade, and usually it was not in the hands of the free men. In countries where slavery flourishes, work is looked down upon. To die of hunger without doing anything, is regarded by the free man as a privilege and an honour. Besides, each noble had men of all trades among his slaves, and as such a number of workmen were too many for himself alone, he hired them out to those who had none, or made them keep shop in a corner of his house for his own profit. Here again slave competition killed free labour. Happily at this time Marius opened the ranks of the army to the poorest citizens (capite censi). These unfortunate men, finding no other resource, became soldiers. For lack of something better to do, they achieved the conquest of the world, subjugated Africa, Gaul, and the East, visited Britain and Germany, and the greater number of them, the bravest and best, were killed in these distant expeditions. During this time, the vacancies left in the city by those who departed and did not return were ill filled. Since Rome had become powerful, people from all parts of the world came to her, and we may well suppose they were not always the most respectable.
Several times she had endeavoured to defend herself against these invasions of foreigners; but it was useless to make severe laws to remove them, they always returned to hide themselves in that immense city without a police, and, once settled there, the more prosperous, by means of their money, the others by means of base services or cunning, succeeded in obtaining the title of citizens. Those who received it more naturally, and without needing to demand it, were the freedmen. No doubt the law did not grant them all political rights at once; but after one or two generations all these reservations disappeared, and the grandson of him who had ground at the mill and who had been sold in the slave-market voted the laws and elected the consuls like a Roman of the old stock. It was of this mixture of freedmen and foreigners, that was formed what at this time was called the Roman people, a wretched people who lived on the bounty of private persons or the alms of the state, who had neither memories nor traditions, nor political capacity, nor national character, nor even morality, for they were ignorant of that which makes up the honour and dignity of life in the lower classes, namely, work. With such a people a republic was no longer possible. This is, of all governments, that which demands the greatest integrity and political judgment in those who enjoy it. The more privileges it confers the more devotedness and intelligence it demands. People who did not use their rights, or only used them to sell them, were not worthy to preserve them. That absolute power which they had invited by their votes, which they had received with applause, was made for them; and one understands that the historian who studies from afar the events of the past, when he sees liberty disappear from Rome, consoles himself for its fall by saying that it was deserved and inevitable, and that he pardons or even applauds the man who, in overturning it, was only an instrument of necessity or justice.
But the men who lived then, who were attached to the republican government by tradition and memories, who recalled the great things it had done, who owed to it their dignities, position, and renown, could they think like us and resign themselves as easily to its fall? Firstly, this government existed. They were familiarized to its defects, since they had lived with them so long. They suffered less from them, through the long habit of enduring them. On the other hand, they did not know what this new power that wished to replace the republic would be. Royalty inspired the Romans with an instinctive repugnance, especially since they had conquered the East. They had found there, under this name, the most odious of governments, the most complete slavery in the midst of the most refined civilization, all the pleasures of luxury and the arts, the finest expansion of intellect with the heaviest and basest tyranny; princes accustomed to play with the fortune, honour, and life of men, a species of cruel spoilt children, such as are only now to be found in the African deserts. This picture did not attract them, and whatever disadvantages the republic had, they asked themselves if it was worth while to exchange them for those that royalty might have. Besides, it was natural that the fall of the republic should not appear to them so near and so sure as it does to us. It is with states as with men, for whom we find, after their death, a thousand causes of death which nobody suspected during their life-time. While the machinery of this ancient government was still working it could not be seen how disorganized it was. Cicero has, sometimes, moments of profound despair, in which he announces to his friends that all is lost; but these moments do not last, and he quickly regains his courage. It seems to him that a firm hand, an eloquent voice, and the agreement of good citizens can repair all, and that liberty will easily remedy the abuses and faults of liberty. He never perceives the whole gravity of danger. In the worst days, his thoughts never go beyond the schemers and the ambitious men who disturb the public repose; it is always Catiline, Caesar, or Clodius whom he accuses, and he thinks that all will be saved if one can succeed in overcoming them. He was mistaken, Catiline and Clodius were only the symptoms of a deeper evil that could not be cured; but is he to be blamed for entertaining this hope, chimerical as it was? Is he to be blamed for having thought that there were other means of saving the republic than the sacrifice of liberty? An honest man and a good citizen ought not to accept these counsels of despair at first. It is useless to tell him that the decrees of destiny condemn to perish the constitution that he prefers and that he has promised to defend, he does well not to believe it entirely lost until it is actually overthrown. We may call such men, if we like, blind or dupes; it is honourable in them not to be too perspicacious, and there are errors and illusions that are worth more than a too easy resignation. Real liberty existed no longer at Rome, as I believe, the shadow only remained, but the shadow was still something. One cannot bear a grudge against those who attached themselves to it and made desperate efforts not to allow it to perish, for this shadow, this semblance, consoled them for lost liberty and gave them some hope of regaining it. This is what honest men like Cicero thought, who, after mature reflection, without enthusiasm, without passion, and even without hope, went to find Pompey again; this is what Lucan makes Cato say in those admirable lines which seem to me to express the feelings of all those who, without concealing from themselves the sad state of the republic, persisted in defending it to the last: “As a father who has just lost his child takes pleasure in conducting his obsequies, lights with his own hands the funeral pyre, leaves it with regret, as tardily as he can; so, Rome, I will not forsake thee until that I have held thee dead in my arms. I will follow to the end thy very name, O Liberty, even when thou shalt be no more than a vain shadow!”[[59]]