Which of these suppositions is the true one we do not know, and we never shall know. What, however, is certain is that Cicero’s evidence appeared at once to be the death-blow to Clodius. Clodius’s defenders perceived this so clearly that they all rose in their seats, hurling threats and insults at Cicero, hoping to intimidate him and to obliterate the impression made by his evidence. Cicero retorted in the same key. One section of the public, that favourable to Clodius, supported the advocates. An uproar ensued. The judges rose from their seats, and formed a circle round Cicero, as if to defend him. It seemed for one moment that the partisans were coming to blows. In short, the whole affair was a scandal, but one which made Clodius’s position even more grave. Everyone realised that he considered himself lost. Was it, in truth, possible that the jury should hesitate between Cicero’s asseveration and that of Causinius? Clodius himself, as soon as the uproar had quieted down, realised that he could not accuse Cicero, a man of such authority, of lying. Indeed, he did not deny that the fact was as stated; but he said that after having spoken with Cicero he had immediately left Rome for Terni. To which it was easy to reply that in three hours one cannot cover a distance of ninety thousand passi; and this reply did not admit of answer, confutation, or sophistication. The falseness of the alibi was the gravest of proofs against Clodius, and that which was bound to compromise his cause most gravely in the opinion of the public and of the judges.
On the evening of the day on which Cicero gave his evidence, there was not a soul in Rome who did not think that the great orator had dealt the youthful and turbulent patrician his coup de grâce. But Cicero’s evidence, the tumult and threats which had succeeded, the self-assurance of the Conservatives, who were now confident of securing a conviction, only intensified the bitterness of public feeling. Strange rumours and whispers began to circulate through Rome, originating no one knew where. It was said that, on the day the verdict was given, blood would flow amid scenes of terrible violence. Some of the judges took fright and asked the Senate for the protection of an armed bodyguard, which the Senate gave them. Round Cicero the Conservative party organised a kind of permanent demonstration, arranging that he should be accompanied everywhere by a number of friends ready to defend him. The idea was to persuade the public in every possible way that Clodius intended to sneak away, or even to use violence, so sure was he of conviction, to shackle the free judgment of the Court. That conviction was a certainty was the general opinion. In the midst of these rumours, fears, and suspicions the case drew rapidly to a close. In the crowded Forum, surrounded by the swords of the bodyguard supplied by the Senate for the protection of the judges, the Court finally pronounced its verdict—but how different it was from that which was universally expected. By thirty-one votes to twenty-five Clodius was acquitted!
The surprise, the scandal, the jubilation, the amusement, according to each man’s disposition and party, were great in Rome when this result was announced. In truth, whoever, after the lapse of so many centuries, reads the history of the trial will find no difficulty in believing Cicero when he accuses Crassus of having secured Clodius’s acquittal by the exercise of pressure and corruption. In no other way can be explained the fact that a Roman Court of law, forced to choose between Cicero and Causinius, believed Causinius. Nevertheless, it is certain that Clodius was much helped in this struggle by the political mistakes of the Conservative party, by their blind relentlessness, and by the obstinacy with which they had endeavoured for so long to bring about, to the detriment of Clodius, a change in the method of choosing the judges. At this epoch, justice in Rome was much too much exposed to the influence of politics. If, however, the times were disturbed, if the parties were divided by acute discord and men’s minds inflamed by the memories of a terrible civil war, the sense of justice was, nevertheless, not yet so much blunted by party passions as to allow the dominant party to abuse their own power beyond a certain point. Clodius might be a man little deserving of public interest; but there were many persons in Rome to whom it was repugnant that, even for the purpose of punishing a sacrilege, recourse should be had to means so unusual, revolutionary, and extreme.
So the Popular party, with the support of the general sentiment of legality, had succeeded in checkmating the Conservative party, the Sullan association. The checkmate in itself was, however, not a serious one, because the trial of Clodius had not been so important and complex that his acquittal could seriously weaken the strength of the Conservative party. The indirect consequences, on the other hand, were most serious. The first was that Clodius went over body and soul to the Popular party, and became the boldest and most violent of its leaders. If the Conservative party had followed Cicero’s advice and abandoned Clodius to the infamy which his act must have brought upon him, there would have been an end of Clodius. The man who had profaned the mysteries of the Bona Dea would not have dared to show himself any more in public. By persecuting him as it did, and by giving him the chance of posing before the public as the victim of its persecutions, this unpopular party saved his career, or at least helped to enable him to continue to play a part in the political world of Rome, and a part fraught with danger to the State. Clodius, realising that, after the trial, he could no longer hope for anything from the Conservative party in which he had grown up and in whose ranks he had fought, turned to the Popular party; and, in order to make that party forget his origin, his relations, and the Bona Dea scandal, became the most violent and turbulent of its chiefs. It is this trial which has made of Clodius the famous demagogue of whom history tells, who in a few years contributed so much, with his agitations, his laws, his violent acts, and his enmities, to the destruction of the little order and concord that were left in the Republic. The most violent of his enmities was that which he entertained for Cicero. From this trial dates the deadly enmity between the two, which was not the least of the causes of the great disorder into which the Republic fell, which gave birth to the civil war.
The trial of Clodius is, then, one of the events which paved the way for the catastrophe of the Republic. What an object lesson it is for political parties! In the excitement of the struggle, such parties reck nothing, while they deal each other slashing blows, of the hatred and rancour which they sow broadcast. But this hatred and rancour undermine in men’s minds the sentiments of concord, loyalty, moderation, tolerance, and equity, without which the social order cannot in the long run subsist; it is one of the most potent causes of the great catastrophes of history. A revolution is usually only the ultimate effect of a long succession of violent acts, affronts, and injustices which have exasperated the public mind, in which feelings of rancour accumulate and ferment until one day they explode.
III
THE TRIAL OF PISO
Nearly a century had passed since the trial of Verres, and more than eighty years since the trial of Clodius. The quarrels of the Roman aristocracy, which had given birth to those two extraordinary and sensational trials, had kindled the spark of two dreadful civil wars, in the course of which the Empire had narrowly escaped complete dissolution. Gradually, however, order had been re-established. From the midst of the discords of the aristocracy, one family had emerged and succeeded in acquiring preponderating influence: the family of the Cæsars. First, Augustus for forty-two years, and, for the three years succeeding his death, his stepson and adopted son Tiberius, had governed the State as principes, or life-presidents, accumulating in their own hands powers of the most diverse kinds—the supreme command of the legions, the presidency of the Senate, the high-priesthood, the surveillance of the most important provinces—and at the same time making every effort to keep the ancient machinery of republican government working with as little friction as possible under such widely different conditions and in control of an empire of so much vaster extent. No law had laid it down that this power should be hereditary; but the force of circumstances—the exhaustion of the ancient nobility, the weakness of the Senate, the dying out of all the parties and all the powerful cabals which for centuries had bulked so large in the Republic—made of this family, little by little, the mistress of the Empire’s destinies.
If, however, the violent disputes of parties no longer raged in the Senate; if blows were no longer exchanged in the Forum when the election of the magistrates or the discussion of the laws was toward; if the threat of civil war no longer hovered continually over the heads of all, concord was not, for all that, re-established in the ranks of the aristocracy which surrounded Cæsar’s family and which ought to have helped that family to govern the immense Empire. Men’s feelings were as much divided as ever, though for different motives. Tiberius, the second princeps in three years chosen by the Senate as successor of Augustus, was hated by one section of the Roman aristocracy, which judged him too old-fashioned—too closely bound to the traditions of the old nobility and of his family, the Claudii; too stern, hard, and rigid; too much out of sympathy with the new customs and new refinements that were beginning to flow from Egypt into Italy; too close-fisted and too keen a professor of a scrupulous and strict financial policy; worst of all, too cautious in his foreign policy.
An old warrior, who had passed the best years of his life fighting on the Rhine and the Danube against the barbarians, a consummate diplomat, head and shoulders above all his contemporaries in matters of war and diplomacy, Tiberius had convinced himself that Rome had not strength enough to extend her empire beyond the Rhine and the Danube, and that, therefore, she ought to rest content with the empire which she had already won, which was, after all, vast enough for a tiny aristocracy like that which was seated at Rome. The malcontents, however,—and there were many of these, especially among the younger generation,—not only did not recognise Tiberius’s wisdom, but imputed this sagacious prudence of his to inexperience, to fear, or to envy of the young and brilliant Germanicus.