Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero

by W. Warde Fowler

"Though I never doubted that the Roman people, considering your eminent services to the Republic and the splendid position of your family, would enthusiastically elect you consul by a unanimous vote, yet I felt extreme delight when the news reached me; and I pray the gods to render your official career fortunate, and to make the administration of your office worthy of your own position and that of your ancestors…. And would that it had been in my power to have been at home to see that wished-for day, and to have given you the support which your noble services and kindness to me deserved! But since the unexpected and unlooked-for accident of my having to take a province has deprived me of that opportunity, yet, that I may be enabled to see you as consul actually administering the state in a manner worthy of your position, I earnestly beg you to take care to prevent my being treated unfairly, or having additional time added to my year of office. If you do that, you will abundantly crown your former acts of kindness to me."[150]

This Aemilius Paullus, like Spinther and many others, belonged to a respectable but somewhat characterless type of aristocrat; these formed a considerable and a powerful section of the senate, where they were an obstacle to reform and administrative efficiency. They were really a survival from the old type of Roman noble, which had done excellent work in its day; men in whom the individual had been kept in strict subordination to the State, and whose personal idiosyncrasies and ambitions only excited suspicion. But towards the end of the Republican period the individual had free play; at no time in ancient history do we meet with so many various and interesting kinds of individuality, even among the nobilitas itself. This is not merely the result of the abundant literature in which their traits have come down to us; it was a fact of the age, in which the idea of the State had fallen into the background, and the individual found no restraint on his thoughts and little on his actions, no hindrance to the development of his capacity either for good or evil. Sulla, Catiline, Pompeius, Cato, Clodius, Caesar, all have their marked characteristics, familiar to all who read the history of the Roman revolution. Caesar is the most remarkable example of strong character among the men of high aristocratic descent, and it is interesting to notice how entirely he was without the exclusive tendency which we associate with aristocrats. He was intimate with men of all ranks; his closest friends seem to have been men who were noble. While the high aristocrats looked down as a rule on Cicero the novus homo, and for some years positively hated him[151], Caesar, though differing from him toto coelo in politics, was always on pleasant terms of personal intercourse with him; he had a charm of manner, a literary taste, and a genuine admiration for genius, which was invariably irresistible to the sensitive "novus homo." With Pompey, though he trusted him politically as he never trusted Caesar, Cicero was never so intimate. They had not the same common interests; Cicero could laugh at Pompey behind his back, but hardly once in his correspondence does he attempt to raise a jest about Caesar.

Thus in the governing or senatorial aristocracy we find men of a great variety of character, from the old-fashioned nobilis, exclusive in society and obstructive in politics, to the man of individual genius and literary ability, whether of blue blood like Caesar, or like Cicero the scion of a municipal family which has never gained or sought political distinction. But for the purposes of this chapter we may discern and discuss two main types of character in this aristocracy: first, that on which the new Greek culture had worked to advantage, not destroying the best Roman qualities, but drawing them into usefulness in new ways; secondly, that on which the same culture had worked to its harm by taking advantage of weak points in the Roman armour, sapping the true Roman quality without substituting any other excellence. We will briefly trace the growth of these two types, and take an example of each among Cicero's intimate friends, not from the famous personages familiar to every one, but from eminent and interesting men of whom the ordinary student knows comparatively little.

Ever since the Hannibalic war, and probably even before it, Roman nobles had felt the power of Greek culture; they had begun to think, to learn about peoples who were different from themselves in habits and manners, and to advance, the best of them at least, in wisdom and knowledge; and this is true in spite of the unquestioned fact that it was in this same era that the seeds were sown of moral and political degeneracy. We shall have abundant opportunity of noting the effects of this degeneracy in the last age of the Republic, but it is pleasant to dwell for a moment on that more wholesome Greek influence which enticed the finer minds among the Roman nobility into a new region of culture, stimulating thought and strengthening the springs of conduct.

Even the old Cato himself, most rigid of Roman conservatives, was not unmoved by this influence,[152] and it was to him that Rome owed the introduction of Ennius, the greatest literary figure of that age, into Roman society[153]. But the first genuine example of the new culture, of the Hellenic enthusiasm of the age, is to be found in Aemilius Paullus, the conqueror of Macedonia, a true Roman aristocrat who was delighted to learn from Greeks. Plutarch's Life of this man is a valuable record of the tendencies of the time. After his failure to obtain a second consulship, Plutarch tells us[154] that he retired into private life, devoting himself to religious duties and to the education of his children, training these in the old Roman habits in which he had himself been trained, but also in Greek culture, and that with even greater enthusiasm. He had about them Greek teachers, not only of grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy, but of the fine arts, and even of out-door pursuits, such as hunting (to which the Romans were not greatly addicted), and of the care of horses and dogs; and he made a point of being present himself at all their exercises, bodily and mental. The result of this wholesome Xenophontic education is seen in his son, the great Scipio Aemilianus, who was adopted into the family of the Scipios in the lifetime of his father. Whatever view we may take of this great man's conduct in war and politics, there can hardly be a doubt that the Romans themselves were right in treasuring his memory as one of the best of their race. When we put all the facts of his life together, from his early youth, of which his friend Polybius has left us a most beautiful picture,[155] to his sudden and probably violent death in the maturity of his powers, we are compelled to believe that he was really a man of wide sympathies, a strong sense of justice which guided him steadily through good report and ill, perfect purity of life, and hatred of all that was low and bad, whether in rich or poor. He was not, like his father, a Roman aristocrat patronising Greek culture;[156] in him we see a perfectly natural and mature combination of the noblest qualities of the Roman and the wholesomest qualities of the Greek. "It was an awakening truth," says a great authority, "in the minds of Romans like Scipio, that intellectual culture must be built upon a foundation of moral rectitude: and such a foundation they could find in the storehouse of their own domestic traditions."[157] When Cicero, who held him to be the greatest of Romans, wrote his dialogue on the State (de Republica), with the new idea pervading it of the moral and political ascendancy of a single man, he made Scipio the hero and the one ascendant figure in his work, and ended it with an imitation of the Platonic "myth," in the form of a "dream of Scipio."

Scipio gathered round him a circle of able and cultured men, both Roman and Greek, including almost every living Roman of ability, and among the Greeks the historian Polybius and the philosopher Panaetius, of whom we shall have more to learn in the course of this volume. Of this circle the best and ablest men of Cicero's earlier days were mentally the children, and his own views both of literature and politics were largely formed upon the Scipionic tradition. Indeed to understand the mental and moral furniture of the Roman mind in the Ciceronian age, it is absolutely necessary to study that of the generation which made that mind what it was; but here space can only be found to point out how the enlightenment of the Scipionic circle opened out new ways in manners, in literature, in philosophical receptivity, and lastly in the study of the law, which was destined to be Rome's greatest contribution to civilisation.

Manners, the demeanour of the individual in social intercourse, are a valuable index, if not an entirely conclusive one, of the mental and moral tone of society in any age. Ease and courteousness of bearing mean, as a rule, that the sense of another's claims as a human being are always present to the mind. Whatever be the shortcomings of the last age of the Republic, we must give due credit to the fact that in their outward demeanour towards each other the educated men of that age almost invariably show good breeding. It is true enough that public vituperation, in senate or law-courts, was a fact of every day, and the wealth of violent personal abuse which a gentleman like Cicero could expend on one whom for the time he hated, or who had done him some wrong, passes all belief.[158] But the history of this vituperation is a curious one; it was a traditional method of hostile oratory, and sprang from an old Roman root, the tendency to defamation and satire, which may itself be attributed in part to the Italian custom of levelling abuse at a public man (e.g. at his triumph) in order to avert evil from him.[159] To single out a man's personal ugliness, to calumniate his ancestry in the vilest terms,—these were little more than traditional practices, oratorical devices, which the rhetorical education of the day encouraged, and which no one took very seriously.[160] But we are concerned in this chapter mainly with private life; and there we find almost universal consideration and courtesy. In the whole of the Ciceronian correspondence there is hardly a letter that does not show good breeding, and there are many that are the natural result of real kindly feeling and true sympathy.

A good example of the best type of Roman manners is to be found in Plutarch's Life of Gaius Gracchus, the younger contemporary of Scipio, who had married his sister. Plutarch draws a picture of him so vivid that by common consent it is ascribed to the memoirs of some one who knew him. "In all his dealings with men," says the biographer, "he was always dignified yet always courteous"; that is, while he inspired respect, men felt also that he would do anything in his power for them. That this was said of him by a Roman, and not invented for him by Plutarch, seems probable because the combination is one peculiarly Roman; so Livy, when he wishes to describe the finest type of Roman character, says that a certain man was "haud minus libertatis alienae quam suae dignitatis memor."[161] This same combination meets us also in the little pictures of the social life of cultivated men which Cicero has left us in some of his dialogues. There the speakers are usually of the nobility, often distinguished members of senatorial families, as in the de Oratore, where the chief personae are Crassus, Antonius, and Scaevola, the conservative triumvirate of the day. They all seem grave, or but seldom gently jocular, respectful to each other, and perhaps a trifle tedious; they never quarrel, however deeply they may differ, and we may guess that they did not hold their opinions strongly enough to urge them to open rupture. We seem to see the same grave faces, with rather noses and large mouths, which meet us in the sculptures of Augustus' Ara Pacis,[162]—full of dignity, but a little wanting in animation.

There is one singular exception to the good manners of the period; but as the result rather of affectation than of nature, it may help to prove our rule. Again and again in Plutarch's Life of Cato the younger the mention of his rudeness proves the strength of the tradition about him. It was said that this lost him the consulship, as he declined to make himself agreeable in the style expected from candidates[163]. Even in a letter to Cicero, an old friend, though not actually rude, he is absurdly patronising and impertinent to a man many years his senior, and writes in very bad taste. Probably the enmity between him and Caesar arose or was confirmed in this way, as Cato always made a point of being rudest to those whom he most disliked. He fancied that he was imitating his great ancestor, and asserting the virtue of good old Roman bluntness against modern Greek affectation; he did not in the least see that he was himself a curious example of Roman affectation, shown up by the real amenities of intercourse, for which Romans had largely to thank Greece[164].

In literature too the average capacity of this aristocracy was high, though the greatest literary figures of the age, if we except Caesar, do not, strictly speaking, belong to it; Cicero was a novus homo, and Lucretius and Catullus were not of the senatorial order. But the new education, as we shall see later on, was admirably calculated to train men in the art of speaking and writing, if not in the habit of independent thinking; and among the nobles who reaped the full fruits of this education every one could write in Latin and probably also in Greek, and if he aimed at public distinction, could speak without disgracing himself in the senate and the courts. Oratory was, in fact, the staple product of the age, and the chief raison d'être of its literary activity. Long ago the practice had begun of writing out successful speeches delivered in the senate, in the courts, or at funerals; the means of publication were easy, as a consequence of the number of Greek slaves who could act as copyists, and thus oratory formed the basis of a prose literature which is essentially Roman,[165] rooted in the practical necessities of the life of the Roman noble, though deeply tinged with the Greek ideas and forms of expression acquired in the process of education in vogue. Treatises on rhetoric, the art of effective expression in prose, form an important part of it; two of them still survive from the time of Sulla,—the Rhetorica ad Herennium of an unknown author, and Cicero's early treatise de Inventione. Later on Cicero wrote his admirable dialogue de Oratore and other works on the same subject, ending with his Brutus, a catalogue raisonnée, invaluable to us, of all the great Roman orators down to his own time.