The Life of Cicero, Volume One. Anthony Trollope
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but was usual. He claims to have kept himself exempt from whatever meanness there may have been in so receiving such fees—exempt, at any rate, from the fault of having broken the law. He has not been believed. There is no evidence to convict him of falsehood, but he has not been believed, because there have not been found palpable sources of income sufficient for an expenditure so great as that which we know to have been incident to the life he led. But we do not know what were his father's means. Seeing the nature of the education given to the lad, of the manner in which his future life was prepared for him from his earliest days, of the promise made to him from his boyhood of a career in the metropolis if he could make himself fit for it, of the advantages which costly travel afforded him, I think we have reason to suppose that the old Cicero was an opulent man, and that the house at Arpinum was no humble farm, or fuller's poor establishment.
CHAPTER III.
THE CONDITION OF ROME.
It is far from my intention to write a history of Rome during the Ciceronian period. Were I to attempt such a work, I should have to include the doings of Sertorius in Spain, of Lucullus and Pompey in the East, Cæsar's ten years in Gaul, and the civil wars from the taking of Marseilles to the final battles of Thapsus and Munda. With very many of the great events which the period includes Cicero took but slight concern—so slight that we can hardly fail to be astonished when we find how little he had to say of them—he who ran through all the offices of the State, who was the chosen guardian of certain allied cities, who has left to us so large a mass of correspondence on public subjects, and who was essentially a public man for thirty-four years. But he was a public man who concerned himself personally with Rome rather than with the Roman Empire. Home affairs, and not foreign affairs, were dear to him. To Cæsar's great deeds in Gaul we should have had from him almost no allusion, had not his brother Quintus been among Cæsar's officers, and his young friend Trebatius been confided by himself to Cæsar's care. Of Pharsalia we only learn from him that, in utter despair of heart, he allowed himself to be carried to the war. Of the proconsular governments throughout the Roman Empire we should not learn much from Cicero, were it not that it has been shown to us by the trial of Verres how atrocious might be the conduct of a Roman Governor, and by the narratives of Cicero's own rule in Cilicia, how excellent. The history of the time has been written for modern readers by Merivale and Mommsen, with great research and truth as to facts, but, as I think with some strong feeling. Now Mr. Froude has followed with his Cæsar, which might well have been called Anti-Cicero. All these in lauding, and the two latter in deifying, the successful soldier, have, I think, dealt hardly with Cicero, attributing to his utterances more than they mean; doubting his sincerity, but seeing clearly the failure of his political efforts. With the great facts of the Roman Empire as they gradually formed themselves from the fall of Carthage, when the Empire began,[52] to the establishment of Augustus, when it was consummated, I do not pretend to deal, although by far the most momentous of them were crowded into the life of Cicero. But in order that I may, if possible, show the condition of his mind toward the Republic—that I may explain what it was that he hoped and why he hoped it—I must go back and relate in a few words what it was that Marius and Sulla had done for Rome.
Of both these men all the doings with which history is greatly concerned were comprised within the early years of Cicero's life. Marius, indeed, was nearly fifty years of age when his fellow-townsman was born, and had become a distinguished soldier, and, though born of humble parents, had pushed himself to the Consulate. His quarrel with Sulla had probably commenced, springing from jealousy as to deeds done in the Jugurthine war. But it is not matter of much moment, now that Marius had proved himself to be a good and hardy soldier, excepting in this, that, by making himself a soldier in early life, he enabled himself in his latter years to become the master of Rome.
Sulla, too, was born thirty-two years before Cicero—a patrician of the bluest blood—and having gone, as we say, into public life, and having been elected Quæstor, became a soldier by dint of office, as a man with us may become head of the Admiralty. As Quæstor he was sent to join Marius in Africa a few months before Cicero was born. Into his hands, as it happened, not into those of Marius, Jugurtha was surrendered by his father-in-law, Bocchus, who thought thus to curry favor with the Romans. Thence came those internecine feuds, in which, some twenty-five years later, all Rome was lying butchered. The cause of quarrelling between these two men, the jealousies which grew in the heart of the elder, from the renewed successes of the younger, are not much to us now; but the condition to which Rome had been brought, when two such men could scramble for the city, and each cut the throats of the relatives, friends, and presumed allies of the other, has to be inquired into by those who would understand what Rome had been, what it was, and what it was necessarily to become.
When Cicero was of an age to begin to think of these things, and had put on the "toga virilis," and girt himself with a sword to fight under the father of Pompey for the power of Rome against the Italian allies who were demanding citizenship, the quarrel was in truth rising to its bitterness. Marius and Sulla were on the same side in that war. But Marius had then not only been Consul, but had been six times Consul; and he had beaten the Teutons and the Cimbrians, by whom Romans had feared that all Italy would be occupied. What was not within the power of such a leader of soldiers? and what else but a leader of soldiers could prevail when Italy and Rome, but for such a General, had been at the mercy of barbaric hordes, and when they had been compelled to make that General six times Consul?
Marius seems to have been no politician. He became a soldier and then a General; and because he was great as a soldier and General, the affairs of the State fell into his hands with very little effort. In the old days of Rome military power had been needed for defence, and successful defence had of course produced aggressive masterhood and increased territory. When Hannibal, while he was still lingering in Italy, had been circumvented by the appearance of Scipio in Africa and the Romans had tasted the increased magnificence of external conquest, the desire for foreign domination became stronger than that of native rule. From that time arms were in the ascendant rather than policy. Up to that time a Consul had to become a General, because it was his business to look after the welfare of the State. After that time a man became a Consul in order that he might be a General. The toga was made to give way to the sword, and the noise of the Forum to the trumpets. We, looking back now, can see that it must have been so, and we are prone to fancy that a wise man looking forward then might have read the future. In the days of Marius there was probably no man so wise. Cæsar was the first to see it. Cicero would have seen it, but that the idea was so odious to him that he could not acknowledge to himself that it need be so. His life was one struggle against the coming evil—against the time in which brute force was to be made to dominate intellect and civilization. His "cedant arma togæ" was a scream, an impotent scream, against all that Sulla had done or Cæsar was about to do. The mischief had been effected years before his time, and had gone too far ahead to be arrested even by his tongue. Only, in considering these things, let us confess that Cicero saw what was good and what was evil, though he was mistaken in believing that the good was still within reach.
Marius in his way was a Cæsar—as a soldier, undoubtedly a very efficient Cæsar—having that great gift of ruling his own appetites which enables those who possess it to conquer the appetites of others. It may be doubted whether his quickness in stopping and overcoming the two great hordes from the north, the Teutons and the Cimbrians, was not equal in strategy to anything that Cæsar accomplished in Gaul. It is probable that Cæsar learned much of his tactics from studying the man[oe]uvres of Marius. But Marius was only a General. Though he became hot in Roman politics, audacious and confident, knowing how to use and how to disregard various weapons of political power as they had been handed down by tradition and law, the "vetoes" and the auguries, and the official dignities, he used them, or disregarded them, in quest only of power for himself. He was able to perceive how vain was law in such a period as that in which he lived; and that, having risen by force of arms, he must by force of arms keep his place or lose his life. With him, at least, there was no idea of Roman liberty, little probably of Roman glory, except so far as military glory and military power go together.