Proud of his speeches, and aware that they were making literature, Cicero felt keenly the criticism of the “Attic” school, and defended himself in a long series of treatises on oratorical art. In lively dialogues he sketched the history of Roman eloquence and laid down the rules for composition, prose rhythm, and delivery. He did not admit that his own style was “Asian”; he had modeled it, he claimed, upon that of Demosthenes; and he reminded the Atticists that their cold and passionless speech drove audiences to sleep or flight.
The fifty-seven orations that have come down to us from Cicero illustrate all the tricks of successful eloquence. They excel in the passionate presentation of one side of a question or a character, the entertainment of the auditors with humor and anecdote, the appeal to vanity, prejudice, sentiment, patriotism, and piety, the ruthless exposure of the real or reported, public or private, faults of the opponent or his client, the skillful turning of attention from unfavorable points,, the barrage of rhetorical questions framed to make answer difficult or damaging, the heaping up of charges, in periodic sentences whose clauses are lashes, and whose torrent overwhelms. These speeches do not pretend to be fair; they are defamations rather than declamations, briefs that take every advantage of that freedom of abuse which, though forbidden to the stage, was allowed in the Forum and the courts. Cicero does not hesitate to apply to his victims terms like “swine,” “pest,” “butcher,” “filth”; he tells Piso that virgins kill themselves to escape his lechery, and excoriates Antony for being publicly affectionate to his wife. Audiences and juries enjoyed such vituperation, and no one took it too seriously. Cicero corresponded amiably with Piso a few years after the brutal attack of the In Pisonem. It is to be admitted, further, that Cicero’s orations abound rather in egotism and rhetoric than in moral sincerity, philosophical wisdom, or even legal acumen or depth. But what eloquence! Even Demosthenes was not so vivid, vital, exuberantly witty, so full of the salt and tang of the human fray. Certainly no man before or after Cicero spoke a Latin so seductively charming and fluent, so elegantly passionate; this was the zenith of Latin prose. “You have discovered all the treasures of oratory,” said the generous Caesar in dedicating his book On Analogy to Cicero; “and you have been the first to employ them. Thereby you have laid the Roman people under a mighty obligation, and you honor your fatherland. You have gained a triumph to be preferred to that of the greatest generals. For it is a nobler thing to enlarge the boundaries of human intelligence than those of the Roman Empire.”47
The speeches betray the politician; the letters of Cicero bare the man, and make even the politician forgivable. Nearly all of them were dictated to a secretary and never revised by Cicero; most of them were written with no thought of publication; seldom, therefore, has a man’s secret soul been so completely exposed. “He who reads these letters,” said Nepos, “will not much need a history of those times”;48 in them the most vital part of the revolutionary drama is seen from within, all blinds removed. Usually their style is artless and direct and dances with humor and wit;49 their language is an attractive mixture of literary grace and colloquial ease. They are the most interesting of Cicero’s remains; indeed, of all extant Latin prose. It is natural that we should find in so large a correspondence (864 letters, ninety of them to Cicero) occasional contradictions and insincerities. There is no sign here of the religious piety and belief that appear so frequently in Cicero’s essays or in those speeches in which he plays up the gods as his last trump. His private opinion of various men, especially of Caesar, does not always conform with his public protestation.50 His incredible vanity appears more amiably here than in his orations, where he seems to be carrying his own statue with him wherever he goes; he smilingly confesses that “my own applause has the greatest weight with me.”51 He assures us, with charming innocence, that “if ever any man was a stranger to vainglory it is myself.”52 We are amused to find so many letters about money and so much ado about so many homes. Besides modest villas at Arpinum, Asturae, Puteoli, and Pompeii, Cicero had an estate at Formiae valued at 250,000, another at Tusculum worth 500,000, and a palace on the Palatine that cost him 3,500,000 sesterces.XI Such comfort seems outrageous in a philosopher.
But which of us is so virtuous that his reputation could survive the publication of his intimate correspondence? Indeed, as we continue to read these letters, we almost come to like the man. He had no more faults, perhaps no greater vanity, than we; he made the mistake of immortalizing them with perfect prose. At his best he was a hard worker, a tender father, a good friend. We see him in his home, loving his books and his children, and trying to love his wife, the rheumatic and irritable Terentia, whose wealth and eloquence equaled his own. They were too rich to be happy; their worries and quarrels were always in large figures; at last, in their old age, he divorced her over some financial dispute. Soon afterward he married Publilia, who attracted him by having more money than years; but when she showed dislike for his daughter Tullia he sent Publilia away, too. Tullia he loved humanly beyond reason; he grieved almost to madness at her death and wished to build a temple to her as a deity. Pleasanter are the letters to and about Tiro, his chief secretary, who took his dictation in shorthand and managed his finances so ably and honestly that Cicero rewarded him with freedom. Most numerous are the letters to Atticus, who invested Cicero’s savings, extricated him from financial difficulties, published his writings, and gave him excellent unheeded advice. To Atticus, wisely absent in Greece at the height of the revolution, Cicero writes a letter of typical cordiality and charm:
There is nothing of which I so much feel the want as of him with whom I can communicate everything that concerns me; who loves me, who is prudent; to whom I can speak without flattery, dissimulation, or reserve. My brother, who is all candor and kindness, is away. . . . And you, who have so often relieved my cares and anxieties by your counsel, who used to be my companion in public matters, my confidant in all private ones, the partaker of all my words and thoughts—where are you?54
In those turbulent days when Caesar crossed the Rubicon, conquered Pompey, and made himself dictator, Cicero retired for a moment from political life and sought solace in reading and writing philosophy. “Remember,” he begged Atticus, “not to give up your books to anybody, but to keep them, as you promised, for me. I entertain the strongest affection for them, as I now feel disgust for everything else.”55 In his youth, defending the poet Archias in the most modest and amiable of his speeches, he had praised the study of literature as “nourishing our adolescence, adorning our prosperity, and delighting our old age.”56 Now he took his own counsel, and in little more than two years wrote almost a library of philosophy.XII The dissolution of religious belief in the higher classes had left a moral vacuum, by which Rome seemed to be drawn into a disintegration of character and society. Cicero dreamed that philosophy might serve as a substitute for theology in providing for these classes a guide and stimulus to right living. He resolved not to construct one more system, but to summarize the teachings of the Greek sages and offer them as his last gift to his people.57 He was honest enough to confess that he was for the most part adapting, sometimes translating, the treatises of Panaetius, Poseidonius, and other recent Greeks.58 But he transformed the dull prose of his models into limpid and graceful Latin, enlivened his discourse with dialogue, and passed quickly over the deserts of logic and metaphysics to the living problems of conduct and statesmanship. Like Lucretius he had to invent a philosophical terminology; he succeeded, and put both language and philosophy heavily in his debt. Not since Plato had wisdom worn such prose.
It was from Plato above all that his ideas stemmed. He did not relish the dogmatism of the Epicureans, who “talk of divine things with such assurance that you would imagine they had come directly from an assemblage of the gods”; nor yet that of the Stoics, who so labor the argument from design that “you would suppose even the gods had been made for human use”59—a theory that Cicero himself, in other moods, would not find incredible. His starting point is that of the New Academy—a lenient skepticism which denied all certainties and found probability sufficient for human life. “In most things,” he writes, “my philosophy is that of doubt.60 . . . May I have your leave not to know what I do not know?”61 “Those who seek to learn my personal opinion,” he says, “show an unreasonable degree of curiosity”; 62 but his coyness soon yields to his talent for expression. He scorns sacrifices, oracles, and auguries, and devotes an entire treatise to disproving divination. Against the widespread cult of astrology he asks if all the men slain at Cannae had been born under the same star.63 He even doubts that a knowledge of the future would be a boon; the future may be as unpleasant as much else of the truth that we so recklessly chase. He vainly thinks to make short work of old beliefs by laughing them out of court: “When we call corn Ceres and wine Bacchus we use a common figure of speech; but do you imagine that anybody is so insane as to believe that the thing he feeds upon is a god?”63a Nevertheless, he is as skeptical of atheism as of any other dogma. He rejects the atomism of Democritus and Lucretius; it is as unlikely that unguided atoms—even in infinite time—could fall into the order of the existing world as that the letters of the alphabet should spontaneously form the Annales of Ennius.64 Our ignorance of the gods is no guarantee of their nonexistence; and indeed, Cicero argues, the general agreement of mankind establishes a balance of probability in favor of Providence. He concludes that religion is indispensable to private morals and public order and that no man of sense will attack it.65 Hence, while writing against divination, he continued to fulfill the functions of official augur. It was not quite hypocrisy; he would have called it statesmanship. Roman morals, society, and government were bound up with the old religion and could not safely let it die. (The emperors would reason so in persecuting Christianity.) When his beloved Tullia died, Cicero inclined more strongly than ever to the hope of personal immortality. Many years before, in the “Dream of Scipio” with which he ended his Republic, he had borrowed from Pythagoras, Plato, and Eudoxus a complex and eloquent myth of a life beyond the grave, in which the good great dead enjoyed eternal bliss. But in his private correspondence—even in the letters that condoled with bereaved friends—there is no mention of an afterlife.
Knowing the skepticism of his age, he based his moral and political treatises on purely secular grounds, independent of supernatural sanctions. He begins (in De Finibus) by inquiring for the road to happiness, and hesitantly agrees with the Stoics that virtue alone suffices. Therefore (in De Officiis) he examines the way of virtue, and by the charm of his style succeeds for a time in making duty interesting. “All men are brothers,” he writes, and “the whole world is to be considered as the common city of gods and men.”66 The most perfect morality would be a conscientious loyalty to this whole. More immediately a man owes it to himself and society, first of all, to establish a sound economic basis to his life, and then to fulfill his duties as a citizen. Wise statesmanship is nobler than the subtlest philosophy.67
Monarchy is the best form of government when the monarch is good, the worst when he is bad—a truism soon to be illustrated in Rome. Aristocracy is good when the really best rule; but Cicero, as a member of the middle class, could not quite admit that the old entrenched families were the best. Democracy is good when the people are virtuous, which, Cicero thought, is never; besides, it is vitiated by the false assumption of equality. The best form of government is a mixed constitution, like that of pre-Gracchan Rome: the democratic power of the assemblies, the aristocratic power of the Senate, the almost royal power of the consuls for a year. Without checks and balances monarchy becomes despotism, aristocracy becomes oligarchy, democracy becomes mob rule, chaos, and dictatorship. Writing five years after Caesar’s consulate, Cicero cast a dart in his direction:
Plato says that from the exaggerated license which people call liberty, tyrants spring up as from a root . . . and that at last such liberty reduces a nation to slavery. Everything in excess is changed into its opposite. . . . For out of such an ungoverned populace one is usually chosen as leader . . . someone bold and unscrupulous . . . who curries favor with the people by giving them other men’s property. To such a man, because he has much reason for fear if he remains a private citizen, the protection of public office is given, and continually renewed. He surrounds himself with an armed guard, and emerges as a tyrant over the very people who raised him to power.68
Nevertheless, Caesar won; and Cicero thought it best to bury his discontent in melodious platitudes on law, friendship, glory, and old age. Silent leges inter arma, he said—“laws are silent in time of war”; but at least he could muse on the philosophy of law. Following the Stoics, he defined law as “right reason in agreement with nature”;69 i.e., law seeks to make orderly and stable the relations that rise out of the social impulses of men. “Nature has inclined us to love men” (society), “and this is the foundation of law.”70 Friendship should be based not upon mutual advantage but upon common interests cemented and limited by virtue and justice; the law of friendship should be “neither to ask dishonorable things, nor to do them if asked.”71 An honorable life is the best guarantee of a pleasant old age. An indulgent and intemperate youth delivers to age a body prematurely worn out; but a life well spent can leave both body and mind sound to a hundred years; witness Masinissa. Devotion to study may make one “unaware of the stealthy approach of old age.”72 Age as well as youth has its glories—a tolerant wisdom, the respectful affection of children, desire and ambition’s fever cooled. Age may fear death, but not if the mind has been formed by philosophy. Beyond the grave there will be, at the best, a new and happier life; and at the worst there will be peace.73
All in all, Cicero’s essays in philosophy are meager in result. Like his statesmanship they clung too anxiously to orthodoxy and tradition. He had all the curiosity of a scientist and all the timidity of a bourgeois; even in his philosophy he remained a politician, reluctant to offend any vote. He collected the ideas of others, and balanced pros and cons so well that we come out from his sessions by the same door wherein we went. Only one thing redeems these little books—the simple beauty of their style. How pleasant Cicero’s Latin is, how easy to read, how smoothly and clearly the stream of language flows! When he narrates events he catches some of the vivacity that made his speeches chain attention; when he describes a character it is with such skill that he mourns that he has no time to be Rome’s greatest historian;74 when he lets himself go he flowers into the balanced clauses and crashing periods which he had learned from Isocrates, and with which he had made the Forum resound. His ideas are those of the upper classes, but his style aims to reach the people; for them he labors to be clear, toils to make his truisms thrilling, and salts abstractions with anecdote and wit.
He re-created the Latin language. He extended its vocabulary, forged from it a flexible instrument for philosophy, fitted it to be the vehicle of learning and literature in western Europe for seventeen hundred years. Posterity remembered him more as an author than as a statesman. When, despite all his reminders, men had almost forgotten the glory of his consulate, they cherished his conquests in letters and eloquence. And since the world honors form as well as substance, art as well as knowledge and power, he achieved, of all Romans, a fame second only to Caesar’s. It was an exception that he could never forgive.
I Lucretius never uses this word, but calls his primordial particles primordia, elementa, or semina (seeds).
II Cf. the “indeterminacy” ascribed to the electrons by some physicists of our time.
III “There are many seeds of things that support our life; and on the other hand there must be many flying about that make for disease and death.”27
IV The words Epicurean and Stoic will be used in these volumes as meaning a believer in the metaphysics and ethics of Epicurus, or of Zeno; epicurean and stoic as meaning one who practices, or avoids, soft living and sensual indulgence.
V Cf.p. 135.
VI No one has yet transformed Catullus’ poems into equivalent English verse. The foregoing is an almost literal translation of
Passer, deliciae meae puellae,
quicum ludere, quern in sinu tenere,
cui primum digitum dare adpetenti
et acris solet incitari morsus,
cum desiderio meo nitenti
carum nescio quid libet iocari. . . ,33
VII Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
rumoresque senum severiorum
omnes unius aestimemus assis.
Soles occidere et redire possunt;
nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.
Da mi basia mille, deinde centum
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum. . . ,34
VIII Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,
ut te postremo donarem munere mortis. . . .
Accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu,
atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.38
IX “The soul of the world is God, and its parts are the true divinities.”45
X Varro claims that Sallust “was taken in adultery by Annius Milo, soundly beaten with thongs, and permitted to escape only after paying a sum of money”;46a but this, too, may be politics.
XI This last sum had been raised by a loan from a client; we do not know if it was repaid. Forbidden by law to receive fees, lawyers received loans instead. Another way of being paid was to be remembered in a client’s will. Through bequests of this sort or another Cicero inherited 20,000,000 sesterces in thirty years.53 The constitution of man always rewrites the constitutions of states.
XII De Republica, 54 B.C..; De Legibus, 52; Academica, De Consolatione, and De Finibus, 45; De Natura Deorum, De Divinatione, De Fato, De Virtutibus, De Officiis, De Amicitia, De Senectute, De Gloria, Disputationes Tusculanae, all 44 B.C.. In these same two years, 45-44, Cicero wrote five books on oratory.