The Roman Way Read online

  Terence never used it. It seems strange at first sight that he did not, but upon consideration reasons appear. A plot intricate enough to supply a full measure of suspense and surprise can be enjoyed only by an intelligent and attentive audience, especially when programmes, outlines, synopses of scenes, all the sources of printed information, have to be dispensed with. Plautus’ audience was not up to that level; Terence’s was—the real audience he wrote for, his little circle of superior people. Plautus had to hold the attention of a holiday crowd, and hold it too, as he says in many a prologue, against such competitors as chattering women and crying babies. No method of playwriting requires so little effort on the part of the spectator as comic irony. Comedies based upon it are merely a succession of funny scenes strung on the thread of a familiar story. There was sound sense in Plautus’ preference for it, and equally good reason for Terence’s rejection. His audience enjoyed using their minds on an ingenious plot. He could dispense with the obviously comic and follow his own strong bent toward character and situation. The germ of the novel lies within his plays. His plots are never poor. Perhaps the best of them is that of the Mother-in-Law, where the suspense is excellently sustained to the very end. Indeed, as the curtain falls the two chief characters pledge each other to keep the solution of the mystery to their own selves. “Don’t let’s have it like the comedies where everyone knows everything,” one of them says.

  It is a good story throughout and the characters are well drawn. Nevertheless when the play was presented to the public it failed. The prologue, spoken at a second presentation, declares the reason was that

  A rope-dancer had caught the gaping people’s mind.

  Yet another prologue—for still another presentation, presumably—says that the theatre was thrown into an uproar by the announcement of a gladiatorial show, and the play could not proceed. Clearly the road of the early dramatist in Rome was not an easy one, but there is never a hint that Plautus found it hard. Perhaps he had the happy faculty of not taking himself too seriously, and merely went along with the crowd when such occasions worked havoc with his play. One feels sure that even so he would have enjoyed the rope-dancer. But the young playwright, hardly more than a boy, felt poignantly the hurt to his feelings and the wrong to his genius. Every one of his prologues contains an attack upon his critics or his public. They are fearfully serious productions, warranted to make any audience restless and any other show irresistibly attractive, but to his own inner circle, those very sober and cultured young men, no doubt they appeared admirably distinguished from the well-worn, old-fashioned method of appeal to the vulgar.

  The marked difference between the two writers is another proof of the Roman character of Roman comedy. Plautus and Terence owed something, no doubt, much perhaps, to their Greek originals, but much more to their own selves. They were Roman writers, not Greek copyists, and the drama they bequeathed to the world which still holds the stage today, is a witness to the extent of our legacy from Rome.

  IV

  Cicero’s Rome

  The Republic

  While Terence was writing his plays a very remarkable man came to Rome. He did not come voluntarily; he was brought there as a hostage and there he had to stay for seventeen years. In all that length of time the city grew to be a home to him instead of a prison, and after he was released he came back again for another long stay. He was Polybius, the Greek historian, and except for Plautus and Terence, what he has to say about Rome is the only contemporary record before Cicero which has come down to us. He was a man of great ability, a true scientist in his love of truth, a keen observer of human affairs, qualified as few could be more to weigh the good and the bad in the great city which even then he saw as the coming mistress of the world. His testimony is over-whelmingly in her favor. He has a profound admiration for the Republic and for the Roman character. To be sure, his keen eyes saw signs of moral weakening after Carthage was conquered; even so, his history is a great testimonial to the city he knew through and through, to Roman uprightness and patriotism, and to the Roman mastery of the art of ruling men.

  He was not a flatterer, trying to win for himself the favor of a powerful nation. When he wrote he was an old man, living far from Rome in his early Greek home. He dared to praise Hannibal, to blame Rome sharply for more than one breach of faith. If the government had been corrupt, he would certainly have known it and certainly recorded it. He never so much as hints at such a condition. His Romans are simple and hardy in ways of life, upright, steadfast, devotedly and disinterestedly patriotic.

  But an enormous change has taken place when next we have a contemporary’s account of the city; the government is corrupt through and through and the people completely indifferent. Only a hundred years—less than that—changed Polybius’ great Republic into one of which we have as black a picture as could well be painted. Indeed, to the historian Sallust, a man with something of Polybius’ passion for accuracy, the change was fully consummated a generation earlier. A foreign prince, so he tells the story, came to Rome at the beginning of the first century to engineer a deal. He was rich and he succeeded, and as he left the town he said, “City in which everything is for sale.”

  That is the city shown in the next authentic record of Rome. It is a remarkable record. During the strange and exciting days when the great Republic was coming to an end and the Empire was looming just ahead, there lived the most distinguished letter-writer the world has ever known, one of Rome’s very great men, Cicero the orator.

  Hundreds of his letters have been preserved, along with many letters from his friends. They are of all sorts: letters of condolence, letters of affection, letters of apology, literary criticism, philosophical discussion, town gossip, business letters, and, outnumbering all the rest a hundred to one, political letters. Such a ratio would be a matter of course to a Roman. The thing of paramount importance, away beyond everything else, was politics. Throughout the great days of the Republic it had been the field both of duty and honor. A good man, a great man—both terms were synonymous with a patriotic man. Goodness apart from patriotism did not exist to the Roman. All the men who counted, whether by birth or property, had been brought up in the tradition that they were bound to be politicians first; whatever else they might take up must be treated as of secondary importance. Our letter-writer in any other age would have had no leanings toward politics. He belonged by nature to the men of thought, not of action. He was a student, a lover of books, a critic and a man of artistic tastes, too, the very last sort of person in our eyes to enter public life. Rome made him into a politician, so devoted to his calling that when events removed him from it he was inconsolable. What of comfort could philosophy, literature, art, give to a Roman forced to lead a private life? Cicero was disgraced and contemptible in his own eyes.

  That was the conception which had enabled the Republic to endure for hundreds of years perpetually encompassed by unnumbered perils. The best brains, the strongest characters, had always been at the absolute disposal of the state. Her service had been at once their chief obligation and their greatest joy.

  A wonderful help in ensuring brave men and men capable of self-sacrifice to manage state affairs was the fact that politics and war were inextricably connected. Any day a successful politician might find himself compelled to desert his constituency, don his armor, and march against a foe whose forces outnumbered his own. The practice of politics in Republican Rome had never been for those in search of an easy berth. It was ever a dangerous pursuit. The odds were that favors voted by the people would have to be paid for on the battlefield.

  It would have been unthinkable to a Roman that high personal courage was not an essential part of the equipment of a politician. Officials, party chiefs, “bosses” big and little, must face an ever present possibility of having to die for their country. Ex-officials were allowed no more comfortable prospects. Consulars, as they called them, men who had been consuls—Rome’s ex-presidents—became oftenest commanders in the wars Rome was alw
ays waging in one or another part of the world. Cicero, pre-eminently a man of peace, sensitive in the extreme and timid, a lover of ease and luxury, in his fastidious culture a typical man of letters, must yet put himself at the head of an army and live for months at a time as a fighting general. It was the price he paid for once having been placed at the head of the state. In none of the many letters he wrote from the seat of war is there a word of complaint against the fate that carried him away from his beloved city and his books and the comforts of his country houses and his pleasant ways of life, to far distant Cilicia and the hardships of a guerilla war. He was merely doing what he had expected when he came forward as candidate for the consulship.

  The high distinction which always attends the fighting forces of a nation at war marked out the Roman politician as well, the distinction which only conspicuous danger and death can give.

  And yet when Cicero was carrying on his Cilician campaign in strict accordance with Rome’s great tradition, the Republic was dying and all but dead. That was in 51 B.C. Nine years before, three powerful party leaders had come together; they agreed to pool their resources and take the government into their own hands. But it was all completely unofficial and no one need take cognizance of it if he chose not. The senate met; the consuls presided; the old respected political forms were strictly adhered to. The fact that Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus held the reins did not seem to matter much, if they kept, as they did, in the background. People got used to the idea of them and when four years later their powerful organization was completed and they began to act openly, honored and honorable patriots could find excellent reasons for acquiescing in their running the city. Indeed, it seemed exceedingly probable that if they did not do so there would be nobody to run it. As regards the senate, once and through so many centuries Rome’s great guide, the only question that could be raised was whether it was more incompetent than it was corrupt or the other way about. Something had happened to Roman morale. The people were safe and at ease. Rome’s enemies were outside Italy now, far away, shut off by mountains or sea, and although civilian commanders were the rule, fighting in other respects had become a matter for professionals. Wealth was pouring into the city from conquered countries; easy money had become possible for a great many and the ideal for most. To have three able men take the responsibility of looking after Rome’s wide interests saved a vast deal of trouble for others. The old Republic had exacted a great deal from her citizens and left them poor. Now people wanted politics at a profit; they were out for a share in the riches they saw around them.

  Politics have seldom offered a better field for that purpose than they did then. Rome had in very truth become the city where everything was for sale. Cicero’s letters make it possible to see the inwardness of the political situation clearly as in hardly any other period of history. Bribery here, there and everywhere, he writes over and over again, not an official exempt, not even the highest. Politics have become a money-making business; votes are bought and sold, so are judges. Everyone knows that there is one sure way to being elected or being acquitted, and nobody cares. One day, Cicero writes, there was read out in the senate an agreement a candidate for the consulship had made with the two consuls to pay each of them a large sum of money in case he was elected, but failed to get for them the offices they wanted when their term was over. The compact called for false oaths not only from the principals but from two ex-consuls as well. “It was regularly drawn up,” Cicero continues, “with the sums promised, and drafts on the bank added, and so on. It does throw a lurid light on the consuls, but it was all the same to Appius Claudius [one of them]—he had nothing to lose by it.”

  The reason for that remark was that in the eyes of all Rome no Claudius had anything left to keep or lose in the way of reputation. Once the Claudii had been citizens Rome was proud of. The Appian Way was the achievement of an ancestor; so was the first water system, and the splendid aqueduct. They had been great people and no house was more aristocratic. The present representatives, however, were not of the antique stamp. Appius, his brother Publius, and their three sisters, all noted for brilliancy and personal beauty, were talked of throughout the city for their reckless ways, their extravagance, dissipation, and worse. There was nothing so bad that Rome was not ready to whisper about them and believe. The cause célèbre of that day and many a day to come centered in Publius, and Caesar’s young wife, Pompeia, was co-respondent.

  As Cicero tells the story it is a cynical drama of corrupt politics. It began at the festival of the Good Goddess, a highly important ceremony in which women alone took part. During the celebration no male could enter the house where it was held. The master must find other lodgings; even pictures and statues of men were banished. Juvenal says no male mouse dared to stay. Caesar was pontifex maximus at the time and his house was chosen for the sacred rite. This suited Clodius, as Cicero always writes the name, exceedingly well. His affair with Pompeia was not coming off, Plutarch thinks because of the strict chaperonage of her mother-in-law, “a very discreet woman,” and here was an occasion when the most vigilant duenna might relax. His smooth boyish beauty fitted well a woman’s dress and he arranged with Pompeia to go to the house disguised as a singing girl and be met at the door by her own maid. No doubt the dare-devil adventure urged him on quite as much as his passion. The maid was on hand as he entered and bidding him wait slipped away to find her mistress. But she was long in coming back and Clodius, who, to be sure, was never one to wait patiently for anything, started to find his lady for himself. But something had gone wrong. Perhaps Pompeia’s courage failed; more probably the very discreet woman had had her suspicions aroused, for as he went through the house her maid ran up to him and called out gaily that he must come and play with her, a custom, Plutarch says, at the festival—it would be pleasant to know what they played at—and upon his drawing back, asked him what was wrong. Clodius had the folly, inconceivable on the part of anyone except his arrogant, reckless self, to speak to her in answer and his voice betrayed him. She shrieked, “A man—a man!” and the fat was in the fire. Great was the to-do. The “sacred things” were covered; the holy rites pronounced null and void; the house ransacked. To no purpose, however; Clodius had been smuggled out by Pompeia’s maid. All the same, he had been recognized and of course next morning the town buzzed with the delightfully horrific scandal.

  The women made the most of it. A tribune was found to impeach the offender for profaning sacred ordinances, and a number of husbands were persuaded to bring forward in addition to this clearly substantiated charge, another which every Roman lady had shuddered at and passed on to her friends, but which obviously could not be clearly substantiated, that he had committed incest with one of his sisters, or indeed, with all three. Clodius contented himself with declaring that he was out of town at the time of the festival and had witnesses to prove it. Caesar put the best face he could on the matter: swore he did not believe a word of it; Clodius had never been in the house; a lot of women’s talk. It was true he divorced Pompeia, but then he was ready with a reason which commended itself to every masculine heart, voiced in the famous saying about Caesar’s wife.

  Clodius, we may well believe, enjoyed himself. A trial for sacrilege was certain, but he knew the way out from that. Cicero was drawn into the affair. He was in a position to testify that Clodius had been in town, for he had called to see him the very evening of the festival. Rumor had it that he was extremely reluctant to move in the matter and that the reason was the lovely Clodia, the most beautiful and notorious of the three sisters. It is certain that he often speaks of her in his letters, and his nickname for her, “our ox-eyed goddess”—elsewhere he mentions her great flashing eyes—would point to some intimacy. At all events, Cicero’s wife, a lady built on the lines of Plautus’ Roman matrons, laid down an ultimatum and Cicero came forward as the chief witness for the prosecution. The enmity he aroused thereby followed him implacably through his life and even after. It was the part of a wise man to avoid giving
offense to people like the Claudii, and the supple politician that lived in Cicero along with several widely divergent characters, was perfectly aware of the fact—but then there was Terentia, a violent lady, says Plutarch.

  One of Cicero’s letters gives a full account of the proceedings: “If you want to know about the trial, the result of it was incredible. The challenging of the jury took place amidst an uproar, since the prosecutor, like a good censor, rejected the knaves, and the defendant, like a kind-hearted trainer of gladiators, set aside all the respectable people. When the jury finally took their seats, a more disreputable lot never got together even in a gambling hall. All the same, these noble talesmen declared that they would not come to court without a guard [in a previous letter Cicero says that Clodius has several gangs of ruffians at his command]. No one thought Clodius would even defend his case.

  “‘Tell me now, ye Muses, how first the fire fell.’ Well, Baldpate [Cicero’s name for Crassus, the richest man in Rome] managed the whole job in a couple of days with the help of just one slave. He sent for everybody, made promises, gave security, paid money down. Some of the jury were even presented with the time—at night—of certain ladies, and some with introductions to young men of good family. Even so, five and twenty of them were brave enough to prefer to risk their lives, but thirty-one were more influenced by famine than fame. Catulus meeting one of them later remarked, ‘Why did you ask for a guard? For fear of having your pocket picked?’ There you have the trial in brief and the reason for the acquittal. But I was the man who revived the fainting courage of patriots. I was speaking before the Senate soon after and by a happy inspiration I introduced into my speech this passage: You are mistaken, Clodius. The jury saved you for the gallows, not for public life. Keep up your heart, senators. We have merely discovered an evil that existed unnoticed. The trial of one villain has revealed many as guilty as himself. But there, I’ve nearly copied the whole speech for you. Up gets the pretty boy and reproaches me with spending my time at Baiae [as we should say at night clubs or at Monte Carlo]. It was a lie and anyhow what did it matter? ‘You’ve bought a house,’ he says. ‘You seem to think it’s the same as buying a jury,’ I answer. ‘They did not credit you on your oath,’ he retorts. To which I answer, ‘Twenty-five credited me. The other thirty-one gave you no credit but took care to get their money first.’ Loud applause and he collapsed.”