MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO

(106-43 B. C.)

BY WILLIAM CRANSTON LAWTON

HE outward life, the political career, of Marcus Tullius Cicero, is to nearly all students of history a tragic and pathetic story. He seems peculiarly unfitted to the people and the time in which his lot was cast. His enlightened love for the traditions of the past, his passionate sentiment of patriotism, his forceful eloquence as a debater in the Senate or as an orator in the Forum,— these qualities of a Burke or a Webster stand out violently dissevered from the lurid history of his time. This humane scholarly life was flung into the midst of the wildest century in all Rome's grim annals; the hundred years of civic turmoil and bloodshed, from the elder Gracchus's murder to the death of Cleopatra.

And yet such was the marvelous activity, the all-sided productiveness, of the Ciceronian intellect, that perhaps no human mind has ever so fully exploited all its powers. Moreover, in each intellectual field which he entered, the chances of time have removed nearly every Roman rival, leaving us no choice save to accept Cicero's guidance. There was many another orator, and history of eloquence. There were other practical treatises on rhetoric. Many a notable correspondence was actually preserved and published, though now lost. Even his free transcriptions from Greek philosophical treatises— hastily conned and perhaps imperfectly understood-have acquired, through the disappearance of the Greek scrolls themselves, an illdeserved authority as to the tenets of the Epicurean and other schools.

Before and above all else, Cicero was a pleader. Out of that activity grew his ill-starred political activity, while his other literary tastes were essentially but a solace in times of enforced retirement. With the discussion of his oratory, therefore, we may best combine a rapid outline of his life.

By their common birthplace, Arpinum, and by a slight tie of kinship, Cicero was associated with Marius; and he began life, like Disraeli, with radical sympathies. He was the elder son of a wealthy Roman citizen, but no ancestor had ennobled the family by attaining curule office. After a most thorough course of training in Latin and Greek, Cicero began to "practice law." The pleader in ancient Rome was supposed to receive no fee, and even more than

with us, found his profession the natural stepping-stone to political honors.

At the age of twenty-six, Cicero (in 80 B. C.) defended his first important client in a criminal case. In the closing days of the Sullan proscriptions, young Roscius, of Ameria in Umbria, was charged with murdering his own father in Rome. A pair of Roscius's kinsmen were probably the real culprits, and had arranged with Chrysogonus, a wealthy freedman and favorite of the Dictator, to insert the dead man's name among the outlawed victims and to divide the confiscated estate. The son was persecuted because he resisted this second outrage. Cicero says he is himself protected by his obscurity, though no other advocate has dared to plead for the unlucky youth. In our present text there are some audacious words aimed at Sulla's measures: they were probably sharpened in a later revision. The case was won, against general expectation. Cicero may have played the hero that day: certainly the brief remainder of Sulla's life was spent by the young democratic pleader traveling in the East, "for his health," as Plutarch adds, truly enough. At this time his style was chastened and his manner moderated by the teachers of Athens, and especially by Molo in Rhodes.

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Cicero's quæstorship was passed in Sicily, 75-4 B. C. Here he knit close friendships with many Greek provincials, and did a creditable piece of archæological work by rediscovering Archimedes's tomb. His impeachment of Verres for misgovernment in Sicily was in 70 B. C. This time the orator runs a less desperate risk. Since Sulla's death the old constitution has languidly revived. Speech was comparatively free and safe. The "knights" or wealthy middle class,— Cicero's own,-deprived by Sulla of the right to sit as the jurors in impeachment trials like Verres's, partially regain the privilege in this very year. The overwhelming mass of evidence made Verres flee into exile, and Hortensius, till then leader of the Roman bar, threw up the case in despair. Nevertheless Cicero published, the stately series of orations he had prepared. They form the most vivid picture, and the deadliest indictments ever drawn, of Roman provincial government,—and of a ruthless art-collector. Cicero instantly became the foremost among lawyers. Moreover, this success made Cicero a leader in the time of reaction after Sulla, and hastened his elevation to posts where only men of sterner nature could be fully and permanently successful.

Pompey, born in the same year, was at this time leading the revolt against Sulla's measures. The attachment now formed, the warmer hearted Cicero never wholly threw off. The young general's later foreign victories are nowhere so generously set forth as in Cicero's too-rhetorical plea "for the Manilian Law," in 66 B. C.

Pompey was then wintering in the East, after sweeping piracy in a single summer from the Mediterranean. This plea gave him the larger command against Mithridates. Despite the most extravagant laudation, however, Pompey remains, here as elsewhere, one of those large but vague and misty figures that stalk across the stage of history without ever once turning upon us a fully human face. Far more distinct than he, there looms above him the splendid triumphal pageant of Roman imperialism itself.

Cicero's unrivaled eloquence won him not only a golden shower of gifts and legacies, but also the prætorship and consulship at the earliest legal age. Perhaps some of the old nobles foresaw and prudently avoided the Catilinarian storm of 63 B. C. The common dangers of that year, and the pride of assured position, may have hastened the full transfer of Cicero's allegiance to the old senatorial faction. Tiberius Gracchus, boldly praised in January, has become for Cicero a notorious demagogue; his slayers instead are the undoubted patriots, in the famous harangues of November. These latter, by the way, were certainly under the file three years afterward, -and it is not likely that we read any Ciceronian speech just as it was delivered. If there be any thread of consistency in Cicero's public career, it must be sought in his long but vain hope to unite the nobility and the equites, in order to resist the growing proletariat.

The eager vanity with which Cicero seized the proud title. "Father of the fatherland" is truly pathetic. The summary execution of the traitors may have been prompted by that physical timidity so often associated with the scholarly temperament. Whether needless or not, the act returned to plague him.

The happiest effort of the orator in his consular year was the famous plea for Murena. This consul-elect for 62 was a successful soldier. Catiline must be met in the spring "in the jaws of Etruria.» Cicero's dearest friend, Servius Sulpicius Rufus, a defeated candidate, accused Murena of bribery. The conditions of Roman politics, the character of Sulpicius, the tone of Cicero himself, bid us adjudge Murena probably guilty. Cicero had supported Sulpicius, but now feels it is no time to "go behind the returns,' or to replace a bold soldier by a scholarly lawyer.

To win his case Cicero must heap ridicule upon his own profession in his friend's person, and upon Stoic philosophy, represented by Cato, Sulpicius's chief advocate. This he did so successfully that Cato himself exclaimed with a grim smile, "What a jester our consul is!" Cicero won his case-and kept his friends. This speech is cited sixteen times by Quintilian, and is a model of forensic ingenuity, wit, and grace. Its patriotism may be plausibly defended, but

hardly its moral standards.

The next year produced the famous and successful defense of Cluentius, probably guilty of poisoning, and also the most delightful of all Cicero's speeches, the oration for the poet Archias. Whether the old Greek's claim to Roman citizenship was beyond cavil we neither know nor greatly care. The legal argument is suspiciously brief. The praise of literature and the scholarly life, however, has re-echoed ever since, and still reaches all hearts. Brother Quintus, sitting in judgment as prætor, is pleasantly greeted.

This is the culmination in Cicero's career of success. Some boastful words uttered in these days make us doubt if he remembered Solon's and Sophocles's maxim, "Count no life happy before its close." The fast-growing power of Cæsar presently made the two successful generals Pompey and Crassus his political tools. Cicero refused to enter, on similar conditions, the cabal later known as the "First Triumvirate." Cæsar, about to depart for his long absence in Gaul, might well regard the patriotic and impulsive orator as the most serious source of possible opposition in his absence. Marcus refused, himself, to go along to Gaul a-soldiering, though Brother Quintus accepted a commission and served creditably. At last, reluctantly, Cæsar suffered Cicero's personal enemy Clodius to bring forward a decree outlawing "those who had put Roman citizens to death without trial" (March, 58 B. C.). Cicero meekly withdrew from Rome, was condemned by name in absence, and his town house and villas pillaged.

As to the cowardice of this hasty retreat, none need use severer words than did the exile himself. It is the decisive event in his career. His uninterrupted success was ended. His pride could never recover fully from the hurt. Worst of all, he could never again pose, even before his own eyes, as the fearless hero-patriot. In short, Cæsar, the consummate master of action and of men, had humanely but decisively crippled the erratic yet patriotic rhetorician.

In little more than a year the bad conduct of Clodius, the personal good-will of the "triumvirs," and the whirligig of politics, brought round Cicero's return from Greece. His wings were however effectively clipped. After a brief and slight flutter of independence, he made full, even abject, submission to the dominant Cæsarian faction. This was in 56 B. C. The next five years, inglorious politically, were however full of activity in legal oratory and other literary work. In his eloquent defense of Cælius Rufus, charged with an attempt to poison Clodia, Cicero perforce whitewashes, or at least paints in far milder colors than of old, Catiline, Cælius's lifelong friend! A still less pleasing feature is the abusive attack on the famous and beautiful Clodia, probably the "Lesbia" of