The Life of Cicero, Volume One. Anthony Trollope
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practice. This would not be the place for such an argument. Nor do I say that, by rules of absolute right and wrong, Cicero was right; but he was as right, at any rate, as the modern barrister. And in reaching the high-minded conditions under which he worked, he had only the light of his own genius to guide him. When compare the clothing of the savage race with our own, their beads and woad and straw and fibres with our own petticoats and pantaloons, we acknowledge the progress of civilization and the growth of machinery. It is not a wonderful thing to us that an African prince should not be as perfectly dressed as a young man in Piccadilly. But, when we make a comparison of morals between our own time and a period before Christ, we seem to forget that more should be expected from us than from those who lived two thousand years ago.
There are some of those pleadings, speeches made by Cicero on behalf of or against an accused party, from which we may learn more of Roman life than from any other source left to us. Much we may gather from Terence, much from Horace, something from Juvenal. There is hardly, indeed, a Latin author from which an attentive reader may not pick up some detail of Roman customs. Cicero's letters are themselves very prolific. But the pretty things of the poets are not quite facts, nor are the bitter things of the satirist; and though a man's letters to his friend may be true, such letters as come to us will have been the products of the greater minds, and will have come from a small and special class. I fear that the Newgate Calendar of the day would tell us more of the ways of living then prevailing than the letters of Lady Mary W. Montagu or of Horace Walpole. From the orations against Verres we learn how the people of a province lived under the tyranny inflicted upon them; and from those spoken in defence of Sextus Amerinus and Aulus Cluentius, we gather something of the horrors of Roman life—not in Rome, indeed, but within the limits of Roman citizenship.
It is, however, as a man of letters that Cicero will be held in the highest esteem. It has been his good-fortune to have a great part of what he wrote preserved for future ages. His works have not perished, as have those of his contemporaries, Varro and Hortensius. But this has been due to two causes, which were independent of Fortune. He himself believed in their value, and took measures for their protection; and those who lived in his own time, and in the immediately succeeding ages, entertained the same belief and took the same care. Livy said that, to write Latin well, the writer should write it like Cicero; and Quintilian, the first of Latin critics, repeated to us what Livy had asserted.[27] There is a sweetness of language about Cicero which runs into the very sound; so that passages read aright would, by their very cadences, charm the ear of listeners ignorant of the language. Eulogy never was so happy as his. Eulogy, however, is tasteless in comparison with invective. Cicero's abuse is awful. Let the reader curious in such matters turn to the diatribes against Vatinius, one of Cæsar's creatures, and to that against the unfortunate Proconsul Piso; or to his attacks on Gabinius, who was Consul together with Piso in the year of Cicero's banishment. There are wonderful morsels in the philippics dealing with Antony's private character; but the words which he uses against Gabinius and Piso beat all that I know elsewhere in the science of invective. Junius could not approach him; and even Macaulay, though he has, in certain passages, been very bitter, has not allowed himself the latitude which Roman taste and Roman manners permitted to Cicero.
It may, however, be said that the need of biographical memoirs as to a man of letters is by no means in proportion to the excellence of the work that he has achieved. Alexander is known but little to us, because we know so little of the details of his life. Cæsar is much to us, because we have in truth been made acquainted with him. But Shakspeare, of whose absolute doings we know almost nothing, would not be nearer or dearer had he even had a Boswell to paint his daily portrait. The man of letters is, in truth, ever writing his own biography. What there is in his mind is being declared to the world at large by himself; and if he can so write that the world at large shall care to read what is written, no other memoir will, perhaps, be necessary. For myself I have never regretted those details of Shakspeare's life which a Boswell of the time might have given us. But Cicero's personality as a man of letters seems especially to require elucidation. His letters lose their chief charm if the character of the man be not known, and the incidents of his life. His essays on rhetoric—the written lessons which he has left on the art of oratory—are a running commentary on his own career as an orator. Most of his speeches require for their understanding a knowledge of the circumstances of his life. The treatises which we know as his Philosophy—works which have been most wrongly represented by being grouped under that name—can only be read with advantage by the light of his own experience. There are two separate classes of his so-called Philosophy, in describing which the word philosophy, if it be used at all, must be made to bear two different senses. He handles in one set of treatises, not, I think, with his happiest efforts, the teaching of the old Greek schools. Such are the Tusculan Disquisitions, the Academics, and the De Finibus. From reading these, without reference to the idiosyncrasies of the writer, the student would be led to believe that Cicero himself was a philosopher after that sort. But he was, in truth, the last of men to lend his ears
"To those budge doctors of the stoic fur."
Cicero was a man thoroughly human in all his strength and all his weakness. To sit apart from the world and be happy amid scorn, poverty, and obscurity, with a mess of cabbage and a crust, absolutely contented with abstract virtue, has probably been given to no man; but of none has it been less within the reach than of Cicero. To him ginger was always hot in the mouth, whether it was the spice of politics, or of social delight, or of intellectual enterprise. When in his deep sorrow at the death of his daughter, when for a time the Republic was dead to him, and public and private life were equally black, he craved employment. Then he took down his Greek manuscripts and amused himself as best he might by writing this way or that. It was a matter on which his intellect could work and his energies be employed, though the theory of his life was in no way concerned in it. Such was one class of his Philosophy. The other consisted of a code of morals which he created for himself by his own convictions, formed on the world around him, and which displayed itself in essays, such as those De Officiis—on the duties of life; De Senectute, De Amicitia—on old age and friendship, and the like, which were not only intended for use, but are of use to any man or woman who will study them up to this day. There are others, treatises on law and on government and religion, which have all been lumped together, for the misguidance of school-boys, under the name of Cicero's Philosophy. But they, be they of one class or the other, require an understanding of the man's character before they can be enjoyed.
For these reasons I think that there are incidents in the life, the character, and the work of Cicero which ought to make his biography interesting. His story is fraught with energy, with success, with pathos, and with tragedy. And then it is the story of a man human as men are now. No child of Rome ever better loved his country, but no child of Rome was ever so little like a Roman. Arms and battles were to him abominable, as they are to us. But arms and battles were the delight of Romans. He was ridiculed in his own time, and has been ridiculed ever since, for the alliterating twang of the line in which he declared his feeling:
"Cedant arma togæ; concedat laurea linguæ."
But the thing said was thoroughly good, and the better because the opinion was addressed to men among whom the glory of arms was still in ascendant over the achievements of intellectual enterprise. The greatest men have been those who have stepped out from the mass, and gone beyond their time—seeing things, with eyesight almost divine, which have hitherto been hidden from the crowd. Such was Columbus when he made his way across the Western Ocean; such were Galileo and Bacon; such was Pythagoras, if the ideas we have of him be at all true. Such also was Cicero. It is not given to the age in which such men live to know them. Could their age even recognize them, they would not overstep their age as they do. Looking back at him now, we can see how like a Christian was the man—so like, that in essentials we can hardly see the difference. He could love another as himself—as nearly as a man may do; and he taught such love as a doctrine.[28] He believed in the existence of one supreme God.[29] He believed that man would rise again and live forever in some heaven.[30] I am conscious that I cannot much promote this view of Cicero's character by quoting isolated passages from his works—words which taken alone may be interpreted in one sense or another, and which should be read, each with its context, before their due meaning can be understood. But I may perhaps succeed in explaining to a reader what it is that I hope to do in the following pages,