Ancient States and Empires / For Colleges and Schools

by John Lord

His fall. Accomplishments and character of Cicero.

But he had now reached the culminating height of his political greatness, and his subsequent career was one of sorrow and disappointment. Intoxicated by his elevation,—for it was unprecedented at Rome, in his day, for a man to rise so high by mere force of eloquence and learning, without fortune, or family, or military exploits,—he became conceited and vain. In the civil troubles which succeeded the return of Pompey, he was banished from the country he had saved, and there is nothing more pitiful than his lamentations and miseries while in exile. His fall was natural. He had opposed the demoralising current which swept every thing before it. When his office of consul was ended, he was exposed to the hatred of the senators whom he had humiliated, of the equites whose unreasonable demands he had opposed, of the people whom he disdained to flatter, and of the triumvirs whose usurpation he detested. No one was powerful enough to screen him from these combined hostilities, except the very men who aimed at the subversion of Roman liberties, and who wished him out of the way; his friend Pompey showed a mean, pusillanimous, and calculating selfishness, and neither Crassus nor Cæsar liked him. But in his latter days, part of which were passed in exile, and all without political consideration, he found time to compose those eloquent treatises on almost every subject, for which his memory will be held in reverence. Unlike Bacon, he committed no crime against the laws; yet, like him, fell from his high estate in the convulsions of a revolutionary age, and as Bacon soothed his declining years with the charms of literature and philosophy, so did Cicero display in his writings the result of long years of study, and unfold for remotest generations the treasures of Greek and Roman wisdom, ornamented, too, by that exquisite style, which, of itself, would have given him immortality as one of the great artists of the world. He lived to see the utter wreck of Roman liberties, and was ultimately executed by order of Antonius, in revenge for those bitter philippics which the orator had launched against him before [pg 530] the descending sun of his political glory had finally disappeared in the gloom and darkness of revolutionary miseries.

Pompey.

But we resume the thread of political history in those tangled times. Cicero was at the highest of his fame and power when Pompey returned from his Asiatic conquests, the great hero of his age, on whom all eyes were fixed, and to whom all bent the knee of homage and admiration. His triumph, at the age of forty-five, was the grandest ever seen. It lasted two days. Three hundred and twenty-four captive princes walked before his triumphal car, followed by spoils and emblems of a war which saw the reduction of one thousand fortresses. The enormous sum of twenty thousand talents was added to the public treasury.

His policy.

Pompey was, however, greater in war than in peace. Had he known how to make use of his prestige and his advantages, he might have henceforth reigned without a rival. He was not sufficiently noble and generous to live without making grave mistakes and alienating some of his greatest friends, nor was he sufficiently bad and unscrupulous to abuse his military supremacy. He pursued a middle course, envious of all talent, absorbed in his own greatness, vain, pompous, and vacillating. His quarrels with Crassus and Lucullus severed him from the aristocratic party, whose leader he properly was. His haughtiness and coldness alienated the affections of the people, through whom he could only advance to supreme dominion. He had neither the arts of a demagogue, nor the magnanimity of a conqueror.

Cæsar.

It was at this crisis that Cæsar returned from Spain as the conqueror of the Lusitanians. Caius Julius Cæsar belonged to the ancient patrician family of the Julii, and was born B.C. 100, and was six years younger than Pompey and Cicero. But he was closely connected with the popular party by the marriage of his aunt Julia with the great Marius, and his marriage with Cornelia, the daughter of Cinna, one of the chief opponents of Sulla. He early served in the army of the East, but devoted his earliest [pg 531] years to the art of oratory. His affable manners and unbounded liberality made him popular with the people. He obtained the quæstorship at thirty-two, the year he lost his wife, and went as quæstor to Antistius Vetus, into the province of Further Spain. On his return, the following year, he married Pompeia, the granddaughter of Sulla, of the Cornelia gens, and formed a union with Pompey. By his family connections he obtained the curule ædileship at the age of thirty-five, and surpassed his predecessors in the extravagance of his shows and entertainments, the money for which he borrowed. At thirty-seven he was elected Pontifex Maximus, so great was his popularity, and the following year he obtained the prætorship, B.C. 62, and on the expiration of his office he obtained the province of Further Spain. His debts were so enormous that he applied for aid to Crassus, the richest man in Rome, and readily obtained the loan he sought. In Spain, with an army at his command, he gained brilliant victories over the Lusitanians, and returned to Rome enriched, and sought the consulship. To obtain this, he relinquished the customary triumph, and, with the aid of Pompey, secured his election, and entered into that close alliance with Pompey and Crassus which historians call the first triumvirate. It was merely a private agreement between the three most powerful men of Rome to support each other, and not a distinct magistracy.

The consulship of Cæsar.

As consul, Cæsar threw his influence against the aristocracy, to whose ranks he belonged, both by birth and office, and caused an agrarian law to be passed, against the fiercest opposition of the Senate, by which the rich Campanian lands were divided for the benefit of the poorest citizens—a good measure, perhaps, but which brought him forward as the champion of the people. He next gained over the equites, by relieving them, by a law which he caused to be passed, of one-third of the sum they had agreed to pay for the farming of the taxes of Asia. He secured the favor of Pompey by causing all his acts in the East to be confirmed. At the expiration of his consulship he [pg 532] obtained the province of Gaul, as the fullest field for the development of his military talents, and the surest way to climb to subsequent greatness. At this period Cicero went into exile without waiting for his trial—that miserable period made memorable for aristocratic broils and intrigues, and when Clodius, a reckless young noble, entered into the house of the Pontifex Maximus, disguised as a woman, in pursuit of a vile intrigue with Cæsar's wife.