The Roman Way Page 6
Yes, but nothing happened. Well-meaning citizens would applaud, but when it came to doing anything that meant personal effort, not to say inconvenience and even possible danger, that was another matter. Not long after this impressive demonstration of patriotic feeling, Clodius was elected to high office.
To the modern reader of the record it seems incredible that anyone, let alone those shrewd, competent Romans, should have believed that such a state of things could go on and on and a republic in which no one trusted either the electorate or the courts could in the nature of things endure. But so it was. Not even Cicero, superman that he was, read the handwriting on the wall. To be sure, he is perpetually saying that this or that piece of perfidy has dealt a death-wound to the state, but he never for a moment believes it. The laws are disregarded; the courts are despised; armed gangs face each other in the forum; the elections are a farce; the man with the largest purse always gets in, and nobody cares. Why should they? Life goes on most comfortably and agreeably in the great city, more so by far than ever in the world before. A violent change in government or in anything else is inconceivable. Business is good; great fortunes are made quickly in the provinces; at home it is not hard to keep the rank and file contented. Citizens of a republic where every man has a vote have easy ways open to them for getting money, and even wide-spread unemployment, when it occurs, no longer threatens danger. The people are kept contented not only by cheap food but also by the Roman equivalent of free tickets to the theatres and the major league games. Let the courts and the Big Three carry on as they like; nothing is really important but a pleasant, easy life which sensible people can have if they choose. Cicero, during a temporary lapse of his ruling passion, writes his brother: “Anything more corrupt than the men and times of today cannot be conceived. And so since no pleasure can be got of politics, I don’t see why I should fret myself. I find my pleasures in literature and my favorite pursuits and the leisure of my country houses and, most of all, in our boys.”
Ten years after that letter was written the Republic was ended; Antony and Augustus were dividing between them the Roman world; Cicero’s headless body was lying on the seashore. In one of his letters he says that it is easy to know how to pull the ropes in a bad cause, but hard in a good cause, and “it is a difficult art to rule a republic.”
V
Cicero Himself
Of most famous people we know only the imposing façade. We have no key to open the door and let us enter. Cicero belongs to the very few who have left the key behind.
The general outline of what he did is familiar to us all: he was one of the two greatest orators of antiquity and everything else about him is in comparison negligible. This is the traditional idea of him, and from one point of view it is quite true. Today, after two thousand years, there are speeches of his which still live; the roll of their grand periods can still stir an emotion, and nothing else that he wrote has this power of independent life. His treatises, his politics, philosophy, rhetoric, have gone the way of all the books that decorate the library and are never read. And yet, even so, they have a claim upon the world’s respect and admiration: few writings have had as many and as devoted readers. To run through the most famous of them now, the essay on Old Age, on Friendship, is to feel the impatience a perpetual mental “Of course” always awakens, but once these truisms were strangely new and it was Cicero who made them common. For centuries he was the main channel by which Greek standards reached mankind. He had the power so to write them down that people everywhere read and believed them. He harnessed Greek thought to his heavy Roman car and the huge shapeless mass of men Rome was to form to civilized ways, caught a glimpse of what would else have soared far above them.
This achievement hardly needs illustration; it is acknowledged. Also, quotations of truisms are less enlightening than boring. Yet a few may perhaps be permitted. Some remembrance is due to the standards Cicero set, the effect he had upon this stubborn world. The gentleman, the English gentleman, who has meant much to many generations, may well have had his beginning in, certainly he was fostered by, the English schoolboys’ strenuous drilling in Cicero. Our orator knew a great deal about the matter—which is not to say that he always lived up to his knowledge. His orations are not specimens of gentlemanly restraint, but there he followed, as he was bound to do, the customs of the courts. In his letters, where he is really himself, he always shows a perfect good breeding.
The fundamental precept of the gentleman, that if in a bargain one of the parties is to come out worsted, he must be the one, is laid down uncompromisingly in one of his essays. Liberality in spending, too, he knew was part of the code; he is firm against economy that might be a cover for meanness. In political matters if gentlemen take different sides, there can be no heat of controversy between them, however burning the question; they are well-bred men first and always, politicians and opponents second. And never, under any provocation, must a gentleman (N.B., not a lawyer) allow himself to refer to his antagonist’s private life. Such points of conduct rank with the most important in his eyes. Among the terrible charges he brings against Mark Antony in the Second Philippic is the one of violating the gentleman’s code: “He has quoted openly a letter he said I once wrote him! What man knowing even a little the ways of honorable men, ever because of some later offence, quoted a letter written by one who was at that time a friend?” Words like these were seeds in fruitful soil when they became part of the Englishman’s education.
To teach mankind so effectively that the teacher ceases to be needed because the lessons have permanently affected men’s fundamental convictions, is a very great achievement. Nevertheless it is a second-rate achievement. The greatest writers do not enter into the general consciousness and then cease to be. We cannot drain them dry and pass on, revived but never called back to find refreshment there. They belong in the city which was built
to music, therefore never built at all,
and therefore built forever.
Plato does not merely fill a shelf in our libraries. But Cicero is the man in Plato’s parable of the poet who cannot be admitted to the temple, “being uninspired and having no touch of madness in his soul.” In his greatest orations, there is fire. When he pleaded for unfortunate men or the unfortunate Republic—to him the most precious thing on earth, he writes a friend—he had passion and the power to put it into great words. But in the austere regions of the impersonal it failed and died.
He was not a typical Roman, but he had the training given all Romans by the most practical and efficient city the world had ever seen or was to see for two thousand years, and the undivided mind which thought demands was not only never his, he did not want it. He wanted to be doing something and if in a crowd, so much the better. Alone, unoccupied, he was bored. “I am so driven from pillar to post I can hardly find time for these few lines and even that I must snatch from important matters.” The surface complaint does not conceal the deep satisfaction. In all the letters from Rome this tired-business-man attitude is to the fore, and in the country, in one of his delightful villas, the case is hardly better: “Writing is impossible. My house is a public hall, it is so crowded with the village people. Of course, the small fry don’t bother me after ten o’clock, but Arrius lives next door, or, more truly, with me. On the other side is Sebosus!” In the next letter: “Just as I was writing these words in comes Sebosus and I had hardly time to sigh when there was Arrius saying good morning. This is going out of town!” All the same, when the bores spare him and leisure enfolds him, the result is not happier and certainly the letters are duller. “Nothing could be pleasanter than this solitude. All is more charming than you can imagine, the shore, the sea view, the hillocks, and everything. But they don’t deserve a longer letter—and I have nothing else to say—and I am very sleepy—.” Something more exciting than nature and meditation was necessary to keep Cicero awake. He wanted the movement of the great world; he wanted political life and a foremost part in it.
He achieved
his ambition: he was the most important man in Rome when he put down Catiline’s conspiracy, and for nearly twenty years he fought in the vanguard of all the political fighting, a great figure, thundering denunciations in the forum, pleading with passion against injustice, firing a feeble senate to stand by the state, a devoted republican, a patriot of the antique Roman stamp.
That is the façade, stately, imposing: and if it were not for his letters that is all we should see, as it is all we see of the heroes of history everywhere. But of these many letters, which number over eight hundred, more than half are written to a man with whom he was on terms of closest intimacy. He had nothing to hide from Atticus; with him he put up no pretense; he was content to appear just what he was. In his letters to other friends he remembered and would have them remember that he was one of Rome’s leading men, moved, as Rome’s leaders had ever been, by loftiest motives. To them he is sure that “only the honorable is the truly profitable,” that “true worth is always victorious,” that “nothing is expedient but what is right,” but he never writes in this strain to Atticus. With him he is completely at ease. He can talk as he wants about everything and make jokes of matters he would feel bound in writing anyone else to take with decorous solemnity.
Of the letters Atticus wrote Cicero not a single one has been preserved and the so-called life of Atticus which has come down is hardly more than a long-drawn encomium. It is known, however, that he kept his large property intact through all the political convulsions of the times, and that he lived to be an old man, in those days quite as signal a triumph of worldly wisdom, and with the added light thrown by Cicero’s correspondence he stands out clearly, a cool-headed man of business, whose standards were the expedient and the profitable and who made it comfortable for people to dispense with all pretensions to any other standards in his company. “There is no one, not even myself, with whom I talk as freely as with you,” Cicero writes him. With this key Cicero unlocked his heart and the contents lie open for inspection.
He tells him that his son-in-law has been left property by a lady; he is to share with two others a third of her estate, but upon condition that he change his name. “It’s a nice point,” is Cicero’s cheerful comment, “if it’s the right thing for a noble to change his name under a woman’s will—but we can decide that more scientifically when we know how much a third of a third amounts to.”
He sets down with complete candor what many have felt and few been willing to say: “When I write you praising any of your friends I do wish you would let them know. I mentioned lately in a letter Varro’s kindness to me and you answered you were glad to hear it. But I had much rather you had written him that he was doing all I wished—not that he was, but to make him do it.”
His oratorical effects—“the mature outcome of my talent, the finished product of my industry,” when he speaks of them to others—to Atticus become delightfully something to poke fun at: “All that purple patch I so often use to decorate my speeches—the passage about fire and sword. You know the paints I have on my pallet. Ye Gods, how I showed off! You know how I can thunder. This time it was so loud I expect you heard it right over there.”
When he must come to terms with Caesar whom he hated and had denounced over and over again as the destroyer of everything good in the state, he can find very fine words to dress up his motives for other friends: “To speak of him who has all the power in his hands—just as I used to think it was my duty to speak freely, since through me freedom still lived, now that it is lost I do not think I have any right to say a word against his wishes. In the opinion of those philosophers who alone grasp the true meaning of Virtue, the wise man will prefer nothing to the avoidance of wrong doing.” But to Atticus he puts it differently: “As to the letter to Caesar, what view ought I to have taken except what I thought he wanted? What other purpose had my letter save to kow-tow to him? Do you suppose I should have been at a loss for words if I had wanted to tell him what I really thought? But what will the conservatives say? [This in another letter.] That I have been bribed to change my opinions? And what will history be saying of me six hundred years hence? That is a thing I fear much more than the petty gossip of today. Perhaps you will say, ‘Hang dignity. It’s prehistoric. Look after your own safety.’ Oh, why aren’t you here! Perhaps I am blinded by my passion for high ideals.”
When his actions invade the realm of the Moral Duties, on which he wrote a famous treatise, he has the comfortable assurance that Atticus knows the ways of a politician in handling constituents must be judged by some other standard and he never has to bother how to cloak them nicely. His son-in-law, Dolabella, has become politically important, and Cicero writes him a long letter of glowing commendation: “Though I take the greatest pleasure in the glory you have won, I confess the crown of my joy is that in the popular opinion my name is associated with yours. Lucius Caesar said to me, ‘My dear Cicero, I congratulate you on the influence you have with Dolabella. He is the first consul since yourself who can really be called a consul.’ Why then exhort you and set distinguished examples before you? There is none more distinguished than your own.” Cicero sends Atticus a copy of this letter and comments: “What a shameless fellow Dolabella is. He has lost your good graces for the same reason that he has made a bitter enemy of me.”
Mark Antony writes to ask a favor and Cicero sends a charming answer: “Your friendly letter makes me feel that I am receiving a favor, not giving one. Of course I grant your request, my dear Antony. I wish you had made it in person. Then you could have seen the affection I have for you.” Atticus gets a copy of both letters with the remark: “Antony’s request is so unprincipled, so disgraceful and so mischievous, that one almost wishes for Caesar back again.”
Occasionally, but very rarely, he mixes his Atticus style with his style of grandeur: “Two of my shops have fallen down. People call it a calamity, but I am not even annoyed. O Socrates, I can never thank you enough. Ye Gods, how insignificant all such things are to me. However, I have got a plan of rebuilding which will make my loss a profit.” One can see Atticus first dismayed at the news, next a bit irritated by Socrates, and finally relieved by the profitable plan. Cicero had a way of drawing upon Atticus’ resources as if they were his own.
But on the whole one closes the volumes with a sense of disappointment. These intimate letters, written at one of the most interesting moments of history about one of the two nations most interesting to us in all antiquity, are nearly always very dull. They are not history, they are daily life, nonconsecutive, full of trivialities, repetitions. Often they are hardly to be called letters; memoranda, rather, hastily jotted down, the day-book of a busy man. Personal concerns fill them. The great city into which everything in the world, civilized and barbarian, was pouring, becomes Cicero’s own little stage monopolized by his own drama. He is too hard-pressed for anything else. Here is a political matter which must be decided at once, or a matter of buying a house, or of choosing a husband for Tulia, or of getting some money for Terentia. Will Atticus write back instantly what he advises. That is the way nine-tenths of the letters are written and it is the reason why he who was not commonplace hardly ever wrote a letter that was anything else. Elevation, power, distinction, were saved up for the orations. He may be writing from Athens (he had lodgings on the Acropolis!), or from Delos, “the marvelous isle,” or from strange cities and lonely mountain camps in the unknown east: as far as the letters are concerned he might as well be in his house on the Palatine. There is never the least sign of interest in his surroundings. He is in a hurry. The messenger must be despatched and let him get on to the next piece of work. He is a man of big business.
But through all this mass of unassorted detail a singularly convincing picture emerges of the writer, and in the midst of the tiresome trivialities comes every now and then a comment, a story, a description, which suddenly stirs to life that far-away dead city.
If only Cicero had not been such a keen politician! The political life over-shadows the social
to such a degree that while there are dozens of letters discussing in deadly detail the chances for election of this or that long, long ago forgotten candidate, or the effects of some, ages since, dead and buried measure, only a sentence here and there, at the best a few stray passages, throw a little light on the way of the world as the smart society of Ciceronian Rome pursued it.
Luxury is plain to see. Cicero pays nine hundred dollars for some statues “of Megaric marble,” on Atticus’ advice, and bids him also “send the figures of Hermes in Pentelic marble with bronze heads, which you wrote about, for the gymnasium and colonnade. I have fallen in love with them. Don’t hesitate. My purse is long enough.” What the house with gymnasium and colonnade must have been like, can be seen in a letter about his brother’s house: “All’s right on your estate—nothing left to do but the baths and a promenade and the aviary. The paved colonnade gives dignity. The columns have been polished and the handsome curve of the ceiling will make it an excellent summer room. I will see to the stuccoing. In the bathroom I moved the stove to the corner of a dressing room because it was so placed that the steam pipe was directly under the bedrooms. Your landscape gardener has won my praise; he has enveloped everything in ivy—even the Greek statues seem advertising it. It’s the coolest, greenest retreat. Statues, wrestling ground, fish pond, water system—all are fine. Really, an edifice worthy of Caesar—and there is no more fastidious connoisseur.” His brother was in Gaul with Caesar, and it may be assumed Cicero knew he could be depended upon “when I write praising any of my friends, to let them know.” The letter ends with one of those touches of nature: “I love your boy, but I am allowing him to leave me, because when he is away from his mother the amount he eats appalls me.”