A persuasive orator and a brilliant writer, Cicero was wanting in the qualities which go to make up the statesman, that rarest of all characters on the stage of human history. He lacked foresight and judgment, not of individual character and particular acts, but of the spirit of the age and the tendency of events. The example of the past was ever before him. He could not see that the past was gone irrevocably with the ancient loyalty and virtue. Never sure that he was right, he lacked the firmness to adhere to the course he had once taken. In the closing period, indeed, of his career, in his terrible denunciations of Antony, and his adherence to the cause of the Senate, he showed a moral courage and a strength of will great enough to redeem many errors and to excuse much adulation. But for the rest, all through his life,

more thoroughly known to us from the correspondence which has been so amply preserved, than that of any other statesman or writer of antiquity, - his weakness and vanity and irresolution are everywhere apparent and everywhere painful. "He bore none of his calamities as a man should," said Livy, "except his death."

With a vigorous understanding and a good memory, he had also that vivid imagination which lends so great a charm to eloquence. Instar sui generis, it is difficult to compare him either with ancient or modern orators. No one has disputed his claim to be the greatest wit of antiquity; and there was a freshness in his thought and style which we should hardly expect in our day from an overworked advocate or the harrassed leader of a party. But, as he says himself in the Tusculan Disputations, it is with the mind as with the soil, the most fruitful must be cultivated, otherwise it will produce nothing. And he never forgot the boast of Solon, that he grew old in daily learning; or the precept of Aristotle, that as the horse is made for running or the ox for ploughing, so man is created, as it were a mortal god, for activity and knowledge. As Pliny said of him, he was indeed a light in the field of learning; and the laurel he really won was worth more than the triumphs he sighed for, by as much as it is nobler to extend the circle of intellectual activity than the

bounds of an empire. And if, as Plato said, and he was fond of repeating, one bond binds together all knowledge, Cicero, more than any of the ancients, had exhausted, at least in ambition, all branches of study: to use his own words, "he wrote more books than others could read." What the elder Scipio Africanus said of himself was true of Cicero: he was never less idle than during his leisure, and never less alone than when solitary. It is common to charge him with selfishness; but, for our part, we can find but little of that weakness in him. His nature was too much Greek and too little Roman to live for himself. Though he must have read in Euripides how the poet hated the wise man who was not wise for his own benefit, he acted rather upon the precept of Plato, that we are not to live for ourselves, but for our country and our friends.

But, with his immense mental activity and his commanding fame, there were two things which neutralized his great power. He hated war: nothing, as Pliny said, was more repugnant to him; and he could not in the least understand the future. It was said of his prophecies in the civil wars, that the contrary of what he had predicted almost always occurred. Unlike Cæsar, therefore, comprehending neither the present nor the future, he had no practical influence upon the course of events. Seeking the causes of the political decline, not in the general corruption, but in the ambition of single men; blind to the fact that it was not the popular or patrician party that sought for mastery, but Cæsar and Pompey,―he clamored for the execution of the criminal, in order, by so extirpating the crime, to secure the Constitution and save the State. Catiline was killed, but the ferment was worse than before. Cæsar perished, but slavery lived. The remembrance of the Gracchi, of Sulpicius and Marius and Sulla, made Cicero none the wiser. He was never weary of preaching death to usurpers, and never weary of exulting in their fall, though he saw that tyranny survived the tyrants; that whosoever conquered, the Republic was dead.

Yet, in considering the life of Cicero, while we cannot but pity him for his delusion, we are also not to forget the condi

VOL. LXXIX. — 5TH S. VOL. XVII. NO. I.

6

tion of the age in which he lived, when every Roman legate felt himself above monarchs, and even Cato found it not out of place that a city like Antioch should greet him as king; his disgust being only that they intended the same honor for a freedman of Pompey. Nor are we to forget the fact, that, if worse than Sulla, Cæsar could affirm that one might do violence to the law in order to assure his supremacy; and yet if even Cæsar, with his vast genius for affairs, with his steady reliance upon his genius and his destiny, "the greatest name in history," as Mr. Merivale claims, could not find his way out of that terrible labyrinth of political contradictions and moral death in which the Republic was breathing out its life, it was not likely that any one else could find it;-if Cæsar, moreover, could declare to the assembled senate that the immortality of the soul was a vain chimera, yet could crawl up the steps of the Capitoline Temple on his knees, to appease the Nemesis which frowns upon earthly prosperity, there was not much to be hoped for the superstition of the masses, when religion had so wholly died out of the hearts of their leaders.

Notwithstanding his political ambition and his philosophical tendencies, it was to the character of a perfect orator that Cicero mainly aspired; for in oratory - triumphant at last over that relentless prejudice which, in the midst of the Punic wars, dictated a decree expelling all philosophers and rhetoricians from the city was found not merely the best avenue to the great distinctions of the State, but to that power over men which was as the water of life to the thirsty Roman soul. Taught by the best teachers of his age, - by Scævola, in that stern science of jurisprudence whose original records were but the simple laws of the Twelve Tables, which, with regard to the source and principles of equity, as he himself makes Crassus say in the De Oratore, were worth more than the libraries of all the philosophers; so well by the poet Archias in belles lettres, that, if he had not been called to other tasks by his restless ambition and the exigencies of the times, posterity might have compared him with Virgil; by Phædrus and Philo and Diodotus in the doctrines of the Epicureans and the Academy and the Porch, - there is a touching beauty

and nobility in the fervor and courage with which, at the age of twenty-six, reckless of danger, with no presentiment as yet of the bloody experience that was to come, he leaped from the ranks to challenge Sulla himself to combat as it were, in the cause of Roscius, the mere defending of whom was itself an accusation of the dictator. And from this first youthful success, all through that long train of orations which followed the accusation of Verres, which have remained to this day almost unrivalled monuments of eloquence, the controlling purpose of his life was to obtain oratorical success: but, to obtain it, let us always generously remember in spite of his vanity and pride, in the cause of justice against despotism, of learning against superstition, of morality and honor against barbarism and corruption, as ready to grapple with Hortensius, when no one else dared to dispute that great orator's title of King of the Forum, as he was to brave the Scipios and the Metelli, though backed by a swollen and defiant aristocracy; ever bold enough to laugh at the menaces, and ever pure enough to scorn the bribes, of cities and provinces and kingdoms, bidding for existence at the hands of the Roman rabble. He had seen Marius enter upon his seventh consulship, and had witnessed the bloody proscriptions of Sulla at the battle of Mitylene he had detected the rising genius of Cæsar, and watched the unfolding of the talent of Pompey in the war against the Cilician pirates. But there was nothing in all the terrors of the time which he was not willing to face, the whirlwind that was gathering over the State, the rushing tides of corruption that were sweeping away all private virtue, if so be he might uphold that sacred inheritance, the accumulated treasure of nearly seven hundred years of conquest and rule, that ark of the constitution in which were garnered the liberties of Rome. It was for this purpose and with this hope, not as has been so unjustly charged in order to make his oratorical genius subservient to his political ambition, that he came forward to recommend Pompey for the conduct of the war against Mithridates,—that veteran chief who for twenty years had set at defiance the whole power of Rome, and defeated army after army of its

best legions, men who had marched under the eagles of Marius against the Cimbri, and fought the Samnites under Sulla.

a

But the time soon came when dispassionate reasoning and polished wit were powerless; when a fiercer invective and a louder tone were wanted to make the orator heeded amidst the roar of the multitude that surged so madly up against the rostra. Beneath all the luxury of the nobles, and all the turbulence of the people, lurked the terrible elements of revolution and ruin. The lighter graces of his earlier efforts disappeared; and when the chief conspirator-so well described in the brief words of Sallust, "Magnâ vi et animi et corporis, sed ingenio malo pravoque. . . .. alieni appetens, sui profusus, ardens in cupiditatibus, satis eloquentiæ, sapientiæ parum"-fell fighting for his crime, he insisted, with a vehemence that amazes us upon the sacrifice of his associates, sacrifice required by every consideration that bound a Roman to defend his country; by the faith that animated the Decii, and kept Cocles at his post on the Sublician bridge; by the honor that sent Regulus back to Carthage; and by the justice that in the dictatorship of Cincinnatus, plunged the sword of Servilius into the body of Spurius Ahala. Yet Pompey spoke no more than the truth when he paid him the compliment of saying, that he should have conquered Mithridates in vain if Cicero had not preserved the Capitol for his triumph. It can hardly be doubted now, however, that Cæsar-obedient to the principle which Cicero himself so well lays down in the De Officiis, "Sic multa quæ honesta naturâ videntur esse, temporibus fiunt non honesta"-took a wiser because calmer view of the question in all its bearings. The laws of the Romans were never sanguinary. The bloody code of Lycurgus was repugnant to their nature. The prerogatives of a Roman citizen were equally his pride and his protection; and those prerogatives seemed incomplete till guaranteed by immunity from capital punishment save in extreme cases, and those only to be determined by the voice of the people. Exile was the severest punishment that could be inflicted upon a Roman citizen. Cicero himself, when evil fell upon him, so sadly forgetting at once his philosophy and his manhood, preferred death at Rome to existence in Macedonia.