The oration pro Cælio[[822]] is the most entertaining in the whole collection. It contains a rich fund of anecdote, seasoned with witty observations; a knowledge of human nature illustrated in a piquant and humorous style, expressed in a tone of most gentlemanlike yet playful eloquence, and interspersed with passages of great beauty. It presents a marked contrast to the coarse personal abuse which defaces the otherwise powerful invective against L. Piso, which was delivered in the following year.[[823]]
The list, though many more marvellous specimens are omitted, must be closed with the oration in defence of T. Annius Milo. On this occasion Cicero lost his wonted self-possession. When the court opened, Pompey was presiding on the bench, and he had caused the Forum to be occupied with soldiers. The sight, added, perhaps, to the consciousness that he was advocating a bad cause, struck Cicero with alarm; his voice trembled, his tongue refused to give utterance to the conceptions which he had formed. The judges were unmoved; and Milo remained in his self-imposed exile at Marseilles. When Cicero left the court his courage and calmness returned. He penned the oration which is now extant. He had little or no proof or evidence to offer, and therefore, as an argumentative work, it is unconvincing; but for force, pathos, and the externals of eloquence, it deserves to be reckoned amongst his most wonderful efforts. When the exiled Milo read it, he is said to have exclaimed, “O, Cicero, if you had pleaded so, I should not be eating such capital fish here!” The author himself and his contemporaries thought this his finest oration; probably its deficiencies were concealed by its eloquence and ingenuity. It appears that the oration which he actually delivered was taken down in writing by reporters, and was extant in the time of Asconius Pedianus, the most ancient commentator on Cicero’s orations.[[824]] Its feebleness proved the correctness of the judgment of antiquity.
The oratory of Cicero was essentially judicial: he was himself conscious that his talents lay in that direction, and he saw that in that field was the best opportunity for displaying oratorical power. Even his political orations are rather judicial than deliberative. He was not born for a politician. He possessed not that analytical character of mind which penetrates into the remote causes of human action, nor the synthetical power which enables a man to follow them out to their farthest consequences; he had not that comprehensive grasp of mind which can dismiss at once all points of minor importance and useless speculation, and, seizing all the salient points, can bring them to bear together upon questions of practical expediency. Of the three qualities necessary for a statesman he possessed only two, honesty and patriotism: he had not political wisdom.
Hence, in the finest specimens of his political harangues, his Catilinarians and Philippics, and that in support of the Manilian law, we look in vain for the calm, practical weighing of the subject which is necessary in addressing a deliberative assembly. This was not the habit of his mind. He was only lashed to action by circumstances of great emergency; but even then he is still an advocate—all is excitement, personal feeling, and party spirit: he deals in invective and panegyric, and the denunciation of the enemies of his country; and the parts which especially call forth our admiration differ in nothing from those which we admire in his judicial orations. Nevertheless, so irresistible was the influence which he exercised upon the minds of his hearers, that all his political speeches were triumphs. His panegyric on Pompey,[[825]] in the speech for the Manilian law, carried his appointment as commander-in-chief of the armies of the East. The consequence of the oration de Provinciis Consularibus continued to Cæsar his administration of Gaul. He crushed in Catiline one of the most formidable traitors that had ever menaced the safety of the republic. Antony’s fall followed the complete exposure of his debauchery in private life, and the factiousness of his public career.[[826]]
Of the Catilinarians, the first and fourth were delivered in the senate, the second and third in the presence of the people. Every one knows the burst of indignation which the consul, rising in his place, aims at the audacious conspirator who dared to pollute with his presence the temple of the deity, and the most august assembly of the Roman people. In less than twenty-four hours Catiline had left Rome, and the conspiracy had become a war. In four words Cicero announced this to the assembled Romans the day after he had addressed the senate. The third is a piece of self-complacent but pardonable egotism. Success has overwhelmed him—he sees that all eyes are turned upon himself—he is the hero of his own story; still he demands no reward but the approbation of his fellow-citizens, and reminds them that to the gods alone their gratitude is due.
Two days pass away, and after Cæsar and Cicero had spoken, Cicero again addresses the senate, and recommends that measure which was the beginning of his troubles, the condemnation of the conspirators. The zeal of the senate made the act their own, but Cicero paid the penalty. The position which Cicero occupies on this occasion invests his speech with more dignity than is displayed in any of the preceding. He is the chief magistrate of the republic, performing the duty of pronouncing a capital sentence on the guilty. The excitement of the crisis is subsiding; and he has the more composure, because he knows that he carries with him the sympathies of the senate and people.
The Philippics, so named after the orations of Demosthenes, are fourteen in number. Cicero commenced his attack[[827]] upon the object of his implacable hatred with a defence of the laws of Cæsar, which Antony wished to repeal. He followed it up with the celebrated second oration, in which he demolished the character of Antony; a speech which Juvenal pronounced to be his chef-d’œuvre, but which Niebuhr thought was undeserving of being so highly exalted. He delivered the remaining twelve in the course of the succeeding year; they were the last monuments of his eloquence; he never spoke again. The fourteenth is a brilliant panegyric, but nothing more; the gallant army of Octavius received their deserved applause; but in this political crisis the orator could not discern or even catch a glimpse of the future destinies of his country.
In his rhetorical works, Cicero left a legacy of practical instruction to posterity. The treatise “De Inventione,” although it displays genius, is merely interesting as the juvenile production of a future great man; and the author himself alludes to it as a rude and unfinished production.[[828]] Of the Rhetorical Hand-Book, in four sections, addressed to Herennius, it is unnecessary to speak, as it is now universally pronounced spurious.[[829]] The De Oratore, Brutus sive de claris Oratoribus, and Orator ad M. Brutum,[[830]] are the result of his matured experience. They form together one series; the principles are first laid down; their developments are carried out and illustrated; and lastly, in the Orator, he places before the eyes of Brutus the model of ideal perfection. In his treatment of this subject, he shows a mind imbued with the spirit of Plato: he invests it with dramatic interest, and transports the reader into the scene which he so graphically describes. The conversation contained in the first of these works has been already described. The scene of the second is laid on the lawn of Cicero’s palace at Rome: Cicero, Atticus and M. Brutus are the dramatis personæ; and their taste receives inspiration from a statue of Plato which adorns the garden. In the third, Cicero himself, at the request of M. Brutus, paints, as Plato would have done, the portrait of a faultless orator.
Three more short treatises must be added—(1.) The dialogue, De Partitione Oratoria,[[831]] an elementary book, written for his son. (2.) The De Optimo Genere Oratorum,[[832]] a short preface to a translation of the Greek oration, De Corona. (3.) The Topica,[[833]] i. e., a treatise on the commonplaces of judicial oratory.