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"WHAT Will History say of me six hundred years hence?" So wrote Cicero, unburdening his heart to his friend Atticus in such confidential correspondence as surely was never known before or since; but, in this particular question, merely expressing the very natural anxiety of every man who feels that his name and acts will become historical. More than thrice the six hundred years have passed, and, in Cicero's case, History has hardly yet made up its mind. He has been lauded and abused, from his own times down to the present, in terms as extravagant as are to be found in the most passionate of his own orations both his accusers and his champions have caught the trick of his rhetorical exaggeration more easily than his eloquence. Modern German critics like Drumann and Mommsen have attacked him with hardly less bitterness, though with more decency, than Dio Cassius. Bishop Middleton, on the other hand, in his elaborate Biography, is as blind to his faults as though he were delivering a panegyric in the Rostra at Rome. Perhaps it is the fond partiality of the learned Bishop's view, displayed in those pleasant volumes which are still to this day the great storehouse of materials on the subject, which has produced a reaction in the minds of sceptical and disputatious Germans, and of our own delightful but paradoxical De Quincey. It is impossible not to sympathise in some degree with the Athenian who was tired of always hearing Aristides extolled as the Just;' and there was certainly a strong temptation to pick holes in a man's character who was perpetually, during his lifetime and for eighteen centuries after his death, having a trumpet sounded before him to an

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nounce him as the prince of patriots as well as philosophers; worthy indeed, as Erasmus thought, to be canonised as a saint of the Catholic Church, but for the single drawback of his not having been a Christian.

There was quite room, therefore, for a Life of Cicero such as Mr Forsyth has given us; written, not in the spirit of an advocate, but with the impartiality of an historian. He has placed before us once more the facts of that eventful life-in itself a history of those fifty years which saw the last flashes of Roman true grandeur, the last gasps of Roman liberty-clearly, and with sufficient fulness of detail, and in a style which will attract a far larger circle of readers than the limited world of scholars. Not that his work is unscholarly-far from it; but the writer's scholarship, as well as his acquaintance with both Roman and English law, is modestly and skilfully worked into the fabric of the story. We have thus the life of the great orator and statesman brought more vividly before English readers, who may fairly be assumed to be but moderately conversant with the intrigues of Roman politicians, or the intricacies of Roman legislation. In truth, the state of parties at Rome, at this crisis of her history, is so perplexing even to careful students, as to add largely to the difficulty of pronouncing any fair judgment upon the political conduct of Cicero. If our own conclusions are sometimes less favourable than Mr Forsyth's, we fully recognise the fairness and clearness with which he states the facts. Certainly the great Roman orator, in his most imaginative visions of future fame, never dreamt that his life would be written by a "British barrister"-a foreign curi

osity which he thought would produce quite a sensation at Rome;* but he would have no reason to complain of his treatment.

In one respect, the times of Cicero, in spite of their complicated politics, should have more interest for a modern reader than most of what is called Ancient History. Forget the date but for a moment, and there is scarcely anything ancient about them. The scenes and actors are modern- terribly modern; far more so than the middle ages of Christendom. Between the times of our own Plantagenets and Georges, for instance, there is a far wider gap, in all but years, than between the consulships of Cæsar and Napoleon. The habits of life, the ways of thinking, the family affections, the tastes of the Romans of Cicero's day, were in many respects wonderfully like our own; the political jealousies and rivalries have repeated themselves again and again in the last two or three centuries of Europe: their code of political honour and morality, debased as it was, was not much lower than that which was held by some great statesmen a generation or two before us. Let us be thankful if the most frightful of their vices were the exclusive shame of paganism.

It was in an old but humble country-house, near the town of Arpinum, under the Volscian hills, that Mareus Tullius Cicero was born, one hundred and six years before the Christian era. The family was of ancient equestrian dignity, but, as none of its members had hitherto borne any office of state, it did not rank as "noble." His grandfather and his father had borne the same three names-the last an inheritance from some forgotten ancestor, who had either been successful in the cultivation of vetches (cicer), or, as less complimentary traditions said, had a wart

of that shape upon his nose. The grandfather was still living when the little Cicero was born; a stout old conservative, who had successfully resisted the attempt to introduce vote by ballot† into his native town, and hated the Greeks (who were just then coming into fashion) as heartily as his English representative, fifty years ago, might have hated a Frenchman. "The more Greek a man knew," he protested, "the greater rascal he turned out." The father was a man of quiet habits, taking no part in even local politics, given to books, and to the enlargement and improvement of the old family house, which, up to his time, seems not to have been more than a modest grange. The situation was beautiful and romantic; and the love for it, which grew up with the young Cicero as a child, he never lost in the busy days of his manhood. It was in his eyes, he said, what Ithaca was to Ulysses, "A rough, wild nurse-land, but whose crops are men."

There was an aptness in the quotation; for at Arpinum, a few years before, was born that Caius Marius, seven times consul, who had at least the virtue of manhood in him, if he had few besides.

But the quiet country gentleman was ambitious for his son. Cicero's father, like Horace's, determined to give him the best education in his power; and of course the best education was to be found in Rome, and the best teachers there were Greeks. So to Rome young Marcus was sent in due time, with his younger brother Quintus. They lodged with their uncle - in - law, Aculeo, a lawyer of some distinction, who had a house in rather a fashionable quarter of the city, and moved in good society; and the two boys attended the Greek lectures with their town cousins. Greek was as necessary a part of

a Roman gentleman's education in those days as Latin and French are with us now; like Latin, it was the key to literature (for the Romans had as yet, it must be remembered, nothing worth calling literature of their own); and, like French, it was the language of refinement and the play of polished society. Let us hope that by this time the good old grandfather was gathered peacefully into his urn; it might have broken his heart to have seen how enthusiastically his grandson Marcus threw himself into this newfangled study; and one of those letters of his riper years, stuffed full of Greek terms and phrases even to affectation, would have drawn anything but blessings from the old gentleman if he had lived to hear them read.

Young Cicero went through the regular curriculum-grammar, rhe toric, and the Greek poets and historians. Like many other youthful geniuses, he wrote a good deal of poetry of his own, which his friends, as was natural, thought very highly of at the time, and of which he himself retained the same good opinion to the end of his life, as would have been natural to few men except Cicero. But his more important studies began after he had assumed the "white gown" which marked his emergence from boyhood into more responsible life -at sixteen years of age. He then began a special education for the bar. It could scarcely be called a profession, for an advocate's practice at Rome was gratuitous; but it was the best training for public life; it was the ready means, to an able and eloquent man, of gaining that popular influence which would secure his election in due course to the great magistracies which formed the successive steps to political power. Mr Forsyth shows how the mode of studying law at Rome bore a very considerable resemblance to the preparation for the English bar. Our modern law-student purchases his admission to the chambers of some special pleader or conveyancer, where he is supposed to learn his

future business by copying precedents and answering cases, and he also attends the public lectures at the Inns of Court. So at Rome the young aspirant was to be found (but at a much earlier hour than would suit the Temple or Lincoln's Inn) in the open hall of some great jurist's house, listening to his opinions given to the throng of clients who crowded there every morning; while his more zealous pupils would accompany him in his stroll in the Forum, and attend his pleadings in the courts or his speeches on the Rostra, either taking down on their tablets, or storing in their memories, his dicta upon legal questions. In such wise Cicero became the pupil of Mucius Scævola, whose house was called "the oracle of Rome"scarcely ever leaving his side, as he himself expresses it; and after that great lawyer's death, attaching himself in much the same way to a younger cousin of the same name and scarcely less reputation. Besides this, to arm himself at all points for his proposed career, he read logic with Diodotus the Stoic, studied the action of Æsop and Roscius-then the stars of the Roman stage-declaimed aloud like Demosthenes in private, made copious notes, practised translation to form a written style, and read day and night. He trained severely as an intellectual athlete; and if none of his contemporaries attained such splendid success, perhaps none worked so hard for it. He made use, too, of special advantages which were open to him,-little appreciated, or at least seldom acknowledged, by the men of his day-the society and conversation of elegant and accomplished women. In Scævola's domestic circle, where the mother, the daughters, and the granddaughters successively seem to have been such charming talkers that language found new graces from their lips, the young advocate learnt some of his not least valuable lessons. "It makes no little difference," said he in his riper years, "what style of expression one be

comes familiar with in the associations of daily life."

But no man could be completely educated for a public career at Rome until he had been a soldier. By what must seem to us a mistake in the Republican system-a mistake which we have seen made more than once in the present American war-political offices of state were necessarily combined with military command. Prætor or consul, however hopelessly civilian in tastes and antecedents, might be sent to conduct a campaign in Italy_or abroad at a few hours' notice. If a man was a heaven-born general, all went well; if not, he had usually a chance of learning in the school of defeat. It was desirable, at all events, that he should have seen what war was in his youth. Young Cicero served his first campaign, at the age of nineteen, under the father of a man whom he was to know only too well in after life-Pompey the Great-and in the division of the army which was commanded by Sylla as lieutenant-general. He bore arms only for a year or two, and probably saw no very arduous service, or we should certainly have heard of it from himself; and he never was in camp again until he took the chief command as proconsul in Cilicia. He was at Rome, leading a quiet student-life-happily for himself, too young to be forced or tempted into an active part during the bloody feuds of Sylla and the younger Marius.

He seems to have made his first appearance as an advocate when he was about twenty-five, in some suit of which we know nothing. Two years afterwards he undertook his first defence of a prisoner on a capital charge, and secured by his eloquence the acquittal of Sextus Roscius on a very vague accusation of having murdered his father. That there was "not a tittle of evidence" against him was, as Mr Forsyth thinks-and probably he is right-a very minor consideration with a jury of highly intelligent Roman citizens. What kind of con

siderations, besides the rhetoric of counsel, did usually sway these gentlemen, we shall see hereafter. In consequence of this decided success, briefs came in upon the young pleader almost too quickly. Like many other successful orators, he had to combat some natural deficiencies: he had inherited from his father a somewhat delicate constitution; his lungs were not powerful, and his voice required careful management; and the loud declamation and vehement action which he had adopted from his modelsand which were necessary conditions of success in a large arenahe found very hard work. He left Rome for a while, and retired for rest and change to Athens.

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The six months which he spent there, though busy and studious, must have been very pleasant ones. To one like Cicero, Athens was at once classic and holy ground. It combined all those associations and attractions which we might expect to find in a visit to the capitals of Greece and of Italy, and a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Poetry, rhetoric, philosophy, religion-all, to his eyes, had their cradle there. was the home of all that was literature to him; and there were the Eleusinian mysteries which are mysteries still, but which undoubtedly contained whatever faith in the Invisible and Eternal rested in the mind of an enlightened pagan. There can be little doubt but that Cicero took this opportunity of initiation. His brother Quintus and one of his cousins were with him at Athens; and there also he renewed his acquaintance with an old schoolfellow, Titus Pomponius, who lived so long in the city, and became so thoroughly Athenian in his tastes and habits, that he is better known to us, as he was to his contemporaries, by the surname of Atticus, which was given him half in jest, than by his more sonorous Roman name. It is to the accidental circumstance of his being so long an absentee, and the correspondence which was maintained between the

two friends, with occasional intervals, for something like four-and-twenty years, that we are indebted for a more full and reliable insight into the character of Cicero than of any other of the great minds of antiquity; nearly four hundred of his letters to Atticus, written in all the familiar confidence of private friendship by a man by no means reticent as to his personal feelings, having been preserved to us. Atticus's replies are lost; it is said that he was prudent enough, after his friend's unhappy death, to reclaim and destroy them. They would perhaps have told us, in his case, not very much that we care to know beyond what we know already. Rich, luxurious, with elegant tastes and easy morality-a true Epicurean, as he boasted himself to be-he had nevertheless a kind heart and an open hand. He has generally been called selfish, somewhat unfairly; at least his selfishness never took the form of indifference or unkindness to others. His vocation was certainly not patriotism; but the worldly wisdom which kept well with men of all political colours, and eschewed the wretched intrigues and bloody feuds of Rome, stands out in no unfavourable contrast with the conduct of many of her soi-disant patriots. If he declined to take a side himself, men of all parties resorted to him in their adversity; and the man who befriended the younger Marius in his exile, protected the widow of Antony, gave shelter on his estates to the victims of the triumvirate's proscription, and was always ready to offer his friend Cicero both his house and his purse whenever the political horizon clouded round him, we hold to have been as good a citizen as the noisiest clamourer for "liberty" in the Forum, or the readiest hand with the dagger. He kept his life and his property safe through all those years of peril and proscription, with less sacrifice of principle than many who had made louder professions, and died-by a singular act of voluntary starvation, to make short work with an incur

able disease-at a ripe old age; a godless Epicurean, no doubt, but not the worst of them.

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We must return to Cicero, and deal somewhat briefly with the next few years of his life, of which ample details will be found in Mr Forsyth's pages. He extended his foreign tour for two years, visiting the chief cities of Asia Minor, remaining for a short time at Rhodes to take lessons once more from his old tutor Molo the rhetorician, and everywhere availing himself of the lectures of the most renowned Greek professors, to correct and improve his own style of composition and delivery. Soon after his return to Rome, he married. Of the character of his wife Terentia very different views have been taken. In all her husband's letters she is mentioned in terms of apparently the most sincere affection. He calls her repeatedly his "darling"- the delight of his eyes" "the best of mothers; yet he procured a divorce from her, for no distinctly assigned reason, after a married life of thirty years, during which we find no trace of any serious domestic unhappiness. The imputations on her honour made by Plutarch, and repeated by others, seem utterly without foundation; and Cicero's own share in the transaction is not improved by the fact of his marrying as soon as possible an almost girl, with whom he did not live a year before a second divorce released him. Terentia is said also to have had an imperious temper; but the only ground for this assertion seems to have been that she quarrelled occasionally with her sister-in-law Pomponia, daughter of Atticus and wife of Quintus Cicero; but as Pomponia, by her own brother's account, showed her own temper very disagreeably to her husband, the feud between the ladies was more likely to have been her fault than Terentia's. But the very low notion of the marriage relations entertained by both the later Greeks and Romans help to throw some light upon a proceed