Lectures and Essays

by Goldwin Smith

It is not doubtful that Caesar was a type of the sensuality of his age. His worshippers even feel it necessary to gird at characters deficient in sensual passion with a friskiness which is a little amusing when you connect it with the spectacles and the blameless life of a learned professor. So gifted a nature will absorb a good deal of mere sensual vice, it is true, but a sensualist could hardly be a pure and noble organ of humanity. In this I have the Positivists with me. Even in Caesar's lifetime the world had a taste of the vicissitudes of empire while he was revelling in the palace of Cleopatra and leaving affairs to Antony and Dolabella. Perhaps the satiety of the voluptuary had something to do with the recklessness with which at the last he neglected to guard his life. He was the greatest patron of gladiatorial shows and signalized his accession to power by magnificent scenes of carnage in the arena—a strange dawn for the day of a new civilization. Must we not a little doubt the consistency of his policy and even his insight when we find him after all this enacting sumptuary laws?

Still Caesar was a very great man and he played a dazzling part, as all men do who come just at the fall of an old system, when society is as clay in the hands of the potter, and found a new system in its place, while the less dazzling task of making the new system work, by probity and industry, and of restoring the shattered allegiance of a people to its institutions, descends upon unlaurelled heads. But that the men of his time were bound to recognise in him a Messiah, to use the phrase of the Emperor of the French, and that those who opposed him were Jews crucifying their Saviour, is an impression which I venture to think will in time subside. No golden scales were hung out in heaven to shew the republicans that the balance of Divine will had turned, and that their duty was submission. "Momentumque fuit mutatus Curio rerum—" The only sign vouchsafed to them was the conversion of an unprincipled debauchee.

They have, therefore, a fair claim to be judged each upon the merits of his case, and not in the lump as enemies of the human race; and to judge them fairly is a good exercise in historical morality. The three principal names in the party are those of Cato, Cicero, and Marcus Brutus. Pompey, though the nominal chief of the republicans, may rather, as Dr Mommsen truly says, be called the first military monarch of Rome. There is a vigorous portrait of him, from the republican point of view, by Lucan, who, though detestable as an epic poet, sometimes in his political passages, and especially in his characters, shews himself the countryman of Tacitus. Pompey is there described with truth as combining the desire of supreme power with a lingering respect for the constitution. The great aristocrat is painted as simple in his habits of life, and his household as uncorrupted by the fortunes of its lord—the last relics of the control imposed by the spirit of the republic on private luxury, which was soon to be released by the Empire from all restraint and carried to the most revolting height.

Marcus Cato was the one man whom, living and dead, Caesar evidently dreaded. The Dictator even assailed his memory in a brace of pamphlets entitled Anti-Cato, of the quality of which we have one or two specimens, in Plutarch, from which we should infer that they were scurrilous and slanderous to the last degree; a proof that even Caesar could feel fear, and that in Caesar, too, fear was mean. Dr Mommsen throws himself heartily into Caesar's antipathy, and can scarcely speak of Cato without something like loss of temper. The least uncivil thing which he says of him, is that he was a Don Quixote, with Favonius for his Sancho. The phrase is not a happy one, since Sancho is not the caricature but the counterfoil of Don Quixote; Don Quixote being spirit without sense and Sancho sense without spirit. Imperialism, if it could see itself, is in fact a world of Sanchos and it would not be the less so if every Sancho of the number were master of the whole of physical science, and used it to cook his food. Of the two court poets of Caesar's successor, one makes Cato preside over the spirits of the good in the Elysian fields, while the other speaks with respect, at all events, of the soul which remained unconquered in a conquered world—"Et cuneta terrarum subacta praeter atrocem animum Catonis." Paterculus, an officer of Tiberius and a thorough Caesarian, calls Cato a man of ideal virtue ("homo virtuti simillimus") who did right not for appearance sake, but because it was not in his nature to do wrong. When the victor is thus overawed by the shade of the vanquished, the vanquished can hardly have been a "fool." Contemporaries may be mistaken as to the merits of a character, but they cannot well be mistaken as to the space which it occupied in their own eyes. Sallust, the partizan of Marius and Caesar, who had so much reason to hate the senatorial party, speaks of Caesar and Cato as the two mighty opposites of his time, and in an elaborate parallel ascribes to Caesar the qualities which secure the success of the adventurer; to Cato those which make up the character of the patriot. It is a mistake to regard Cato the younger as merely an unseasonable repetition of Cato the elder. His inspiration came not from a Roman, but from a Greek school, which, with all its errors and absurdities, and in spite of the hypocrisy of many of its professors, really aimed highest in the formation of character; and the practical teachings and aspirations of which, embodied in the Reflections of Marcus Aurelius, it is impossible to study without profound respect for the force of moral conception and the depth of moral insight which they sometimes display. Cato went to Greece to sit at the feet of a Greek teacher in a spirit very different from the national pride of his ancestor. It is this which makes his character interesting: it was an attempt at all events to grasp and hold fast a high rule of life in an age when the whole moral world was sinking in a vortex of scoundrelism, and faith in morality, public or private, had been lost. Of course the character is formal, and in some respects even grotesque. But you may trace formalism, if you look closely enough, in every life led by a rule; in everything in fact between the purest spiritual impulse on one side and abandoned sensuality on the other.

Attempts to revive old Roman simplicity of dress and habits in the age of Lucullus, were no doubt futile enough: yet this is only the symbolical garb of the Hebrew prophet. The scene is in ancient Rome, not in the smoking-room of the House of Commons. The character as painted by Plutarch, who seems to have drawn from the writings of contemporaries, is hard of course, but not cynical. Cato was devoted to his brother Caepio, and when Caepio died, forgot all his Stoicism in the passionate indulgence of his grief, and all his frugality in lavishing gold and perfumes on the funeral. Caesar in "Anti-Cato" accused him of sifting the ashes for the gold, which, says Plutarch, is like charging Hercules with cowardice. Where the sensual appetites are repressed, whatever may be the theory of life, the affections are pretty sure to be strong, unless they are nipped by some such process as is undergone by a monk. Cato's resignation of his fruitful wife to a childless friend, revolting as it is to our sense, betokens not so much brutality in him as coarseness of the conjugal relations at Rome. Evidently the man had the power of touching the hearts of others. His soldiers, though he has given them no largesses, and indulged them in no license, when he leaves them, strew their garments under his feet. His friends at Utica linger at the peril of their lives to give him a sumptuous funeral. He affected conviviality like Socrates. He seems to have been able to enjoy a joke too at his own expense. He can laugh when Cicero ridicules his Stoicism in a speech; and when in a province he meets the inhabitants of a town turning out, and thinks at first that it is in his own honour, but soon finds that it is in honour of a much greater man, the confidential servant of Pompey, at first his dignity is outraged, but his anger soon gives place to amusement. That his public character was perfectly pure, no one seems to have doubted; and there is a kindliness in his dealings with the dependants of Rome which shews that had he been an emperor he would have been such an emperor as Trajan—a man whom he probably resembled, both in the goodness of his intentions and in the limited powers of his mind. Impracticable, of course, in a certain sense he was; but his part was that of a reformer, and to compromise with the corruption against which he was contending would have been to lose the only means of influence, which, having no military force and no party, he possessed—the unquestioned integrity of his character. He is said by Dr. Mommsen to have been incapable of even conceiving a policy. By policy I suppose is meant one of those brilliant schemes of ambition with which some literary men are fond of identifying themselves, fancying, it seems, that thereby they themselves after their measure play the Caesar. The policy which Cato conceived was simply that of purifying and preserving the Republic. So far, at all events, he had an insight into the situation, that he knew the real malady of the State to be want of public spirit, which he did his best to supply. And the fact is, that he did more than once succeed in a remarkable way in stemming the tide of corruption. Though every instinct bade him struggle to the last, he had sense enough to see the state of the case, and to advise that, to avert anarchy, supreme power should be put into the hands of Pompey, whose political superstition, if not his loyalty, there was good reason to trust. When at last civil war broke out, Cato went into it like Falkland, crying "peace;" he set his face steadily against the excesses and cruelties of his party; and when he saw the field of Dyrrhaeium covered with his slain enemies, he covered his face and wept. He wept a Roman over Romans, but humanity will not refuse the tribute of his tears. After Pharsalus he cherished no illusion, as Dr Mommsen himself admits, and though he determined himself to fall fighting, he urged no one else to resistance: he felt that the duty of an ordinary citizen was done. His terrible march over the African desert shewed high powers of command, as we shall see by comparing it with the desert march of Napoleon. Dr. Mommsen ridicules his pedantry in refusing, on grounds of loyalty, to take the commandership-in-chief over the head of a superior in rank. Cato was fighting for legality, and the spirit of legality was the soul of his cause. But besides this, he was himself without experience of war; and by declining the nominal command he retained the real control. He remained master to the last of the burning vessel. Our morality will not approve of his voluntary death; but then our morality would give him a sufficient motive for living, even if he was to be bound to the car of the conqueror. Looking to Roman opinion, he probably did what honour dictated; and those who prefer honour to life are not so numerous that we can afford to speak of them with scorn. "The fool," says Dr Mommsen, when the drama of the republic closes with Cato's death—"The fool spoke the Epilogue" Whether Cato was a fool or not, it was not he that spoke the Epilogue. The Epilogue was spoken by Marcus Aurelius, whose principles, political as well as philosophical, were identical with those for which Cato gave his life. All that time the Stoic and Republican party lived, sustained by the memory of its martyrs, and above them all by that of Cato. At first it struggled against the Empire; at last it accepted it, and when the world was weary of Caesars, assumed the government and gave humanity the respite of the Antonines. The doctrine of continuity is valid for all parties alike, and the current of public virtue was not cut off by Pharsalus. On the whole, remote as the character of Cato is in some respects from our sympathies, absurd as it would be if taken as a model for our imitation, I recognise it as a proof of the reality and indestructibility of moral force, even when pitted against the masters of thirty legions.

Against Cicero, again, Dr. Mommsen is so bitter, he is so determined to suppress as well as to degrade him, that it would be difficult even to make out from his pages who and what the once divine Tully was. Much of Dr. Mommsen's dashing criticism on Cicero's writings appears just, though we might trust the critic more if we did not find him in the next page evading the unwelcome duty of criticising Caesar's "Bellum Civile," under cover of some sentimental remarks about the difference between hope and fulfilment in a great soul. Cicero was no philosopher, in the highest sense of the term; yet it is not certain that he did not do some service to humanity by promulgating, in eloquent language, a pretty high and liberal morality, which both modified monkish ethics, and, when monkish ethics fell, and brought down Christian ethics in their fall, did something to supply the void. The Orations, even the great Philippic, I must confess I could never enjoy. But all orations, read long after their delivery, are like spent missiles, wingless and cold: they retain the deformities of passion, without the fire. A speech embodying great principles may live with the principles which it embodies; otherwise happy are the orators whose speeches are lost. The Letters it is not so easy to give up, especially when we consider of how many graceful and pleasant compositions of the same kind, of how many self-revelations, which have brought the hearts of men nearer to each other, those letters have been the model. That, however, which pleases most in Cicero is that he is, for his age, a thoroughly and pre- eminently civilized man. He hates gladiatorial shows; he despises even the tasteless pageantry of the Roman theatre; he heartily loves books; he is saving up all his earnings to buy a coveted library for his old age; he has a real enthusiasm for great writers; he breaks through national pride, and feels sincerely grateful to the Greeks as the authors; of civilization, rogues though he knew them to be in his time; he mourns, albeit with an apology, over the death of a slave; his slaves evidently are attached to him, and are faithful to him at the last; he writes to his favourite freedman with all the warmth of equal friendship. In his writings—in the "De Legibus," for instance—you will find principles of humanity far more comprehensive than those by which the policy of the empire was moulded. His tastes were pure and refined, and though he multiplied his villas, and decorated them with cost and elegance, it is certain that he was perfectly free alike from the prodigal ostentation and from the debauchery of the time indeed his vast intellectual industry implies a temperate life. For the game- preserving tendencies of the great oligarchs, he had a hearty dislike and contempt; in spite of the ill-looking, though obscure, episode of his divorce from his wife Terentia, he was evidently a man of strong family affections, the natural adjuncts of moral purity; he is inconsolable for the death of his daughter, spends days in melancholy wandering in the woods, and finds consolation only in erecting a temple to the beloved shade. His faults of character, both in private and public, are glaring, and the only thing to be said in excuse of his vanity is that it is so frank, and says plainly, "Puff me," not "Puff me not." As a political adventurer of the higher class, pushing his way under an aristocratic government by his talents and his training, received in course of time into the ranks of the aristocracy, yet never one of them, he will bear comparison with Burke. He resembles Burke, too, in his religious constitutionalism and reverence for the wisdom of political ancestors and perhaps his hope of creating a party at once conservative and reforming, by a combination of the moneyed interest with the aristocracy, was not much more chimerical than Burke's hope of creating a party at once conservative and reforming out of the materials of Whiggism. Each of the two men affected a balanced, and in the literal sense, a trimming policy, as opposed to one of abstract principle, Burke, perhaps, from temperament, Cicero from necessity. Impeachments at Rome in Cicero's time were no doubt the regular stepping-stones of rising politicians; nevertheless, the accuser of Verres may fairly be credited with some, at least, of the genuine sentiment which impelled the accuser of Warren Hastings. We must couple with the Verrines the admirable letter of the orator to his brother Quintus on the government of a province, and his own provincial administration, which, as was said before, appears to have been excellent. Cicero rose, not as an adherent of the aristocracy, but as their opponent, and the assailant, a bold assailant, of the tyranny of Sulla. He was brought to the front in politics, as Sallust avers, by his merit, in spite of his birth and social position, when the mortal peril of the Catilinarian conspiracy was gathering round the state, and necessity called for the man, and not the game-preserver. His conduct in that hour of supreme peril is ridiculously overpraised by himself. Not only so, but he begs a friend in plain terms to write a history of it and to exaggerate. Now, it is denounced as brutal tyranny and judicial murder. But those who hold this language have new lights on the subject of Catiline. I confess that on me these new lights have not dawned; I still believe Catiline to have been a terrible anarchist, coming forth from the abyss of debauchery, ruin, and despair, which lay beneath: the great fortunes of Rome. The land of Caesar Borgia has produced such men in more than one period of history. The alleged illegality of the execution was made the stalking- horse of a party move, and scrupulous legality found a champion and an avenger in Clodius. On his return from exile, Cicero was received with the greatest enthusiasm by the whole population of Italy, a fact which Dr. Mommsen is inclined to explain away, but which we should, perhaps, accept as the key to some other facts in Cicero's history. The Italians were probably the most respectable of the political elements, and it seems they not only looked up to their fellow-provincial with pride, but saw in him a statesman who was saving their homesteads from a reign of terror. That Cicero had the general support of the Italians was quite enough to make his adherence an object of serious consideration to Caesar, though Dr. Mommsen persists in interpolating into the relations of the two men the contempt which he feels, and which he fancies Caesar must have felt, for an advocate. Surely, however, it is a mistake to think that oratory was not even in those days a real power at Rome. Can a greater platitude be conceived than railing at a statesman of antiquity for having been a rhetorician? Was not Pericles a rhetorician? Was not Caesar himself a rhetorician? Did he not learn rhetoric from the same master as Cicero? Some day we may be ruled by political science; but rhetoric was, at all events, an improvement on mere force. The situation at Rome had now become essentially military; and Cicero having no military force at his command could not really control the situation.

His attempts to control it exposed him to all the miscarriages and all the indignities which such an attempt is sure to entail. He was a vessel of earthenware, or rather of very fragile porcelain, swimming among vessels of brass. Self-respect would perhaps have prescribed retirement from public life; but, to say nothing of his egotism, he had done too much to retire. Egotistical he was in the highest degree, and that failing made all his humiliations doubly ignominious; but still, I think, if you judge him candidly, you wilt see that he really loved his country, and that his greatest object of desire was, as he himself says, to live in the grateful memory of after-times; not the highest of all aims, but higher than that of the political adventurer. When the civil war came, his perplexity was painful, and he betrayed it with his usual want of reticence. In that, as in other respects, his character is the direct opposite of that of the "gloomy sporting man," whose ways Louis Napoleon, it is said, avowed that he had studied during his exile in England, and followed with profit as a conspirator in France. Cicero and Cato knew too well that Pompey had "licked the sword of Sulla;" but they knew also, by long experience of his political character, that he shrank from doing the last violence to the constitution. On the other hand, all men expected that Caesar, who had formerly given himself out as the political heir of Marius, who had restored the trophies of Marius, and had undertaken the conquest of Gaul, evidently as a continuation of the victories of Marius, descending upon Italy with an army partly consisting of barbarians and trained in the most ferocious warfare, would renew the Marian reign of terror. This fear put all Italy at first on Pompey's side. Caesar had not yet revealed his nobler and more glorious self. Even Curio told Cicero, in an interview, the object of which was to draw Cicero to the Caesarian side, that Caesar's clemency was merely policy, not in his nature. The best security against the bloody excesses of a victorious party at that moment, undoubtedly, was the presence of Marcus Cato in the camp of Pompey. After Pharsalus, Cicero submitted like many men of sterner mould. This departure of the advocate from the Pompeian camp is surrounded by Dr. Mommsen with circumstances of ridicule, for which, on reference to what I suppose to be the authorities, I can find no historical foundation. The fiercer Pompeians very nearly killed him for refusing to stay and command them; his life was in fact only saved by the intrepid moderation of Cato; and this is surely not a proof that they deemed his presence worthless. Once more, orators were not ridiculous in the eyes of antiquity. Cicero accepted, and, in a certain sense, served under the dictatorate of Caesar; though he afterwards rejoiced when it was overthrown, and the constitution, the idol of his political worship, was restored; just as we may suppose a French constitutionalist, not of stern mould, yet not dishonest, accepting and serving under the empire, yet rejoicing at the restoration of constitutional government. In the interval, between the death of Caesar and Philippi, he was really the soul and the main support of the Restoration. I have said what I think of the Philippics; but there can be no doubt that they told, or that Brutus and Cassius thought them, worth at least a legion.

Cicero met death with a physical courage, which there is no reason to believe that he wanted in life. His cowardice was political; his fears were for his position and reputation. If Cato survived in the tradition of public virtue, so did Cicero in the tradition of culture, which saved the empire of the Caesars from being an empire of Moguls. The culture of a republic saved Caesar himself from being a mere Timur, and set him after his victory to reforming calendars and endowing science, instead of making pyramids of heads. Is it absurd to suppose that the great soldier, who was also a great man of letters, had more respect for intellect without military force than his literary admirers, and that he really wished to adorn his monarchy by allying to it the leading man of intellect of the time?

Our accounts of Marcus Brutus are not very clear. Appian confounds Marcus with Decimus; and it appears not unlikely that "Et tu Brute," if it was said at all, was said to Decimus, who was a special favourite of Caesar, and was named in his will. Marcus seems to have been a man of worth after his fashion; a patriot of the narrow Roman type, reproduced in later days by Fletcher of Saltoun, whose ideal republic was an oligarchy, and who did not shrink from proposing to settle the proletariat difficulty by making the common people slaves. This is quite compatible with the fact revealed to us in the letters of Cicero, that Brutus was implicated, through his agents, in the infamous practice of lending money to provincials at exorbitant interest, and abusing the power of the Imperial Governments to exact the debt. One can imagine a West Indian slave-owner, dealing with negroes through his agent according to the established custom, and yet being a good citizen in England.

Cicero, though he suffered from the imperious temper of Brutus, speaks of him as one of those, the sight of whom banished his fears and anxieties for the republic. That the most famous and most terrible act of this man's life was an act of republican fanaticism, not of selfish ambition, is proved by his refusing, with magnanimous imprudence, to make all sure, as the more worldly spirits about him suggested, by cutting off Antony and the outer leading partisans of Caesar, and by his permitting public honours to be done to the corpse of the man whom he had immolated to civil duty. One almost shrinks from speaking of the death of Caesar; so much modern nonsense on both sides has been talked about this, the most tragic, the most piteous, and at the same time the most inevitable event of ancient story. Peculiar phases of society have their peculiar sentiments, with reference to which events must be explained. The greased cartridges were the real account of the Indian mutiny. Caesar was slain because he had shown that he was going to assume the title of king. Cicero speaks the literal truth, when he says: that the real murderer was Antony, and the fatal day the day of the Lupercalia, when Antony offered and Caesar faintly put aside the crown. A dictator they would have borne, a king they would not bear, neither then nor for ages afterwards; because the title of king to their minds spoke not of a St. Louis, or an Edward I., or even a Louis XIV., but of the unutterable degradation of the Oriental slave. To use a homely image, if you put your leg in the way of a cannon ball which seems spent, but is still rolling, you will suffer by the experiment. This is exactly what Caesar, in the giddiness of victory and supremacy, did, and the consequence was as certain as it was deplorable. The republican sentiment seemed to him to have entirely lost its force, so that he might spurn it with impunity; whereas, it had in it still enough of the momentum gathered through centuries of republican training and glory to destroy him, to restore the republic for a brief period, and to make victory doubtful at Phillipi. He began by celebrating a triumph over his fellow-citizens, against the generous tradition of Rome: in that triumph he displayed pictures of the tragic deaths of Cato and other Roman chiefs, which disgusted even the populace; he sported with the curule offices, the immemorial objects of republican reverence, so wantonly that he might almost as well have given a consulship to his horse; he flooded the Senate with soldiers and barbarians; he forced a Roman knight to appear upon the stage: at last, craving, as natures destitute of a high controlling principle do crave, for the form as well as the substance of power, he put out his hand to grasp a crown. The feeling on that subject was not only of terrible strength, but was actually embodied in a law by which the state solemnly armed the hand of the private citizen against any man who should attempt to make himself a king. How completely Caesar's insight failed him is proved by the general acquiescence or apathy with which his fall was received, the subdued tone in which even his warm friend Marius speaks of it, and the readiness with which his own soldiers and officers served under the restored republic. We have nothing to do here with any problem of modern ethics respecting military usurpation and tyrannicide, two things which must always stand together in the court of morality. Tyrannicide, like suicide, was the rule of the ancient world, and would have been acknowledged by Caesar himself, before he grasped supreme power, as an established duty. And certainly morality would stretch its bounds to include anything really necessary to protect the Greek and Italian republics, with the treasures which they bore in them for humanity, from the barbarous lust of power which was always lying in wait to devour them. I have said that the spirits of Cato and Cicero lived and worked after their deaths. So I suspect did that of Brutus. The Caesars had no God, no fear of public opinion at home, no general sentiment of civilized nations to control their tyranny. They had only the shadow of a hand armed with a dagger. One shrewd observer of the times at least, if I mistake not, had profited by the lesson of Caesar's folly and fate. To the constitutional demeanour and personal moderation of Augustus the world owes an epoch of grandeur of a certain kind, and an example of true dignity in the use of power. And Augustus, I suspect, had studied his part at the foot of Pompey's statue.