Catullus, xcvi. (by S. T. I).
Lastly, we come to the man of letters who has given his name to this period of literature, which indeed draws more than half its interest from him and from his works. Marcus Tullius Cicero was an Italian, and had little of the Roman character in his make; he came from the town of Arpinum, among the foothills of the Apennines some sixty miles south-east of Rome. He made his way into Roman society by his social and conversational powers, and by his capacity for friendship, and into the field of politics by his great gift of oratory, which was now indispensable for public men. As a “new man” he never was really at home with the high aristocracy, but he was a man of many friends for all that, and reckoned among them all the great men of his time, including both Cæsar and Pompey. His best and truest friend, who worked for him all his life with unsparing care, was a man of business who stood outside of politics, Pomponius Atticus; and of Cicero’s letters to this faithful friend and adviser nearly four hundred survive to prove the reality of that lifelong devotion. Some five hundred letters to and from other correspondents are also extant, and the whole collection forms the most fascinating record of a great man’s life and thoughts that has come down to us from classical antiquity.
Since Mommsen wrote his famous History of Rome, in which he was almost ignored, Cicero has often been treated with contempt as a shallow thinker, deriving all his inspiration from Greek originals, and as a feeble statesman, brilliant only as an orator. It is true that there is a want of grit in much that Cicero wrote: he was the child of his age, never tired of writing and talking, little used to profound thinking, and rarely acting with independent vigour. But he has two claims on the gratitude of posterity which should never be forgotten. First, he made Latin into the most perfect language of prose that the world as yet has known. The echoes of his beautiful style can be heard centuries afterwards in the Latin fathers of Christianity, especially St. Augustine and Lactantius, and they are still audible in the best French and Italian prose-writers of to-day. Secondly, of all Romans Cicero is the one best known to us as an individual human being: and few indeed who have had the chance to become really familiar with him can fail to love him as his own friends loved him. He was not the stuff of which strong statesmen are made; he was too dependent on the support and approval of others to inspire men with zeal for a cause—especially for a losing cause. His own consulship was brilliant, for he was able to combine the best elements in the State in the cause of order as against anarchy—anarchy which threatened the very existence of Rome as a city; and at the end of his life he showed the same ability to use a strong combination to good purpose in the political field. But he was not of such strong growth as to mark out a line of his own, and at some unhappy moments of his life his weakness is apt to move our pity, if not our contempt.
But with all his weak points Cicero is one of the best and greatest of all Romans. His gifts were rich, and he used them well. We know him as a man of pure life in an impure age, and as one who never used his gifts or opportunities to do harm to others, whether political enemies or helpless provincials. We know him, too, as a faithful husband and a devoted father. And lastly, we know that he was not lacking in courage when the assassin overtook him—the last of a long list of great men of that age to die a violent death.
CHAPTER VIII
AUGUSTUS—THE REVIVAL OF THE ROMAN SPIRIT
The death of Julius Cæsar seemed to plunge the world once more into darkness. We have evidence enough of the general feeling of horror and despair,—a despair hard to realise in our days, when settled and orderly government saves us from all serious anxiety about our lives and property. Power fell into the hands of a far more unscrupulous man than Cæsar, the Mark Antony of Shakespeare’s play; but he had a rival in Cæsar’s nephew and adopted son, afterwards known as Augustus. Civil war, of course, followed: first, war between these two and the murderers of Julius, and then war between the two victors. Antony, who had in a division of the Empire taken the eastern half, and married Cleopatra, the beautiful queen of Egypt, was crushed at the naval battle of Actium: the Empire became once more united, and hope began to spring up afresh.
Instead of following the melancholy history of these years (44 to 31 B.C.) let us try to realise the need of a complete change in men’s minds and in the ways of government, if the Roman Empire was to be preserved, and Mediterranean civilisation with it. We can best do this by learning something of the two men who more than all others brought about the change: Virgil, the greatest of Roman poets, and Augustus, the most fortunate and discerning of Roman statesmen. Augustus began a new system of government, based, no doubt, on the ideas of Julius, which lasted, gradually developing itself, till the fifth century of our era. Virgil, the poet of the new Roman spirit, kept that spirit alive into the Middle Ages, and rightly read, he keeps it still before us.
If Virgil had lived in an ordinary age, when the flow of events was smooth and unruffled, he might have been a great poet, but hardly one of the world’s greatest. But he lived in a crisis of the history of civilisation, and he was called to do his part in it. For a century before he wrote, the one great fact in the world was the marvellous growth of the Roman dominion. When he was born, seventy years before the Christian era, Rome was the only great civilised power left, and a few years later it looked as if she had not even a barbarian rival to menace her, except the Parthians far away in the East. The Roman was everywhere, fighting, trading, ruling; nothing of importance could be done without the thought—What will Rome say to it?
Yet just as Virgil was growing to manhood it became obvious, as we have seen, that this great power was in reality on the verge of breaking up. She had abandoned justice and duty, and given herself to greed and pleasure. Her government was rapacious: she was sucking the life-blood of the nations. She had lost her old virtues of self-sacrifice, purity of family life, reverence for the divine. The rulers of the world had lost the sense of duty and discipline; they were divided into jarring political factions, and had felt the bitterness of civil war, in which men killed each other in cold blood almost for the sake of killing. But with Julius Cæsar’s strong hand and generous temper it must have seemed to many that a better time was coming, and among these was the young poet from Mantua under the rampart of the Alps.
No one who knows Virgil’s poems well can have any doubt that all his hopes for himself and his family, for Italy and the Empire, were bound up with the family of the Cæsars. The sub-alpine region in which he was born and bred had been for ten years of his boyhood and youth under the personal rule of the great Julius, and had supplied him with the flower of that famous army that had conquered first Gaul and then the world. It is possible that the poet owed his position as a Roman citizen to the enlightened policy of Cæsar. Even now we cannot read without a thrill of horror the splendid lines in which he records the eclipse of the sun and the mourning of all nature when the great man was murdered by so-called patriots.[12] With such patriots, with the rapacious republican oligarchy, he could have had no sympathy, and there is not a trace of it in his poems. When, during the civil wars that followed the murder, he was turned out of his ancestral farm near Mantua to make room for veteran soldiers, he owed the recovery of it to the master of those soldiers, the second Cæsar, whom henceforward he regarded not only as his own protector and friend, but as the one hope of the Empire.