C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Critical and Biographical Introduction by William Cranston Lawton (18531941)
By Marcus Tullius Cicero (10643 B.C.)
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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 ill-deserved 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
Cicero’s quæstorship was passed in Sicily, 75–4
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
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
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
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
The events of the year 52 well illustrate the unfitness of Cicero for politics in such an age. Rome was full of street brawls, which Pompey could not check. The orator’s old enemy Clodius, at the head of his bravos, was slain by a fellow ruffian Milo in January. At Milo’s trial in April Cicero defended him, or attempted to do so. A court-room encircled by a yelling mob and guarded by Pompey’s legions caused him to break down altogether. As afterward written out at leisure, the speech is a masterpiece of special pleading. The exiled Milo’s criticism on it is well known: “I’m glad you never delivered it: I should not now be enjoying the mullets of Marseilles.”
The year 51–50 Cicero spent, most unwillingly, as proconsular governor in far-off Cilicia. Though really humane and relatively honest, he accumulated in these few months a handsome sum in “gifts” from provincials and other perquisites. Even Cicero was a Roman.
Meantime the civil war had all but broken out at home. Cicero hesitated long, and the correspondence with Atticus contains exhaustive analyses of his motives and temptations. His naïve selfishness and vanity at times in these letters seem even like self-caricature. Yet through it all glimmers a vein of real though bewildered patriotism. Still the craving for a triumph—he had fought some savage mountain clans in Asia Minor!—was hardly less dominant.
Repairing late and with many misgivings to Pompey’s camp in Epirus, Cicero seems to have been there a “not unfeared, half-welcome” and critical guest. Illness is his excuse for absence from the decisive battle. He himself tells us little of these days. As Plutarch relates the tale, after Pompey’s flight to Egypt Cicero refused the supreme command, and was thereupon threatened with death by young Gneius Pompey; but his life was saved by Cato.
One thing at least is undisputed. The last man to decide for Pompey’s cause, he was the first to hurry back to Italy and crave Cæsar’s grace! For many months he waited in ignoble retirement, fearing the success of his deserted comrades even more than Cæsar’s victory. It is this action that gives the coup de grace to Cicero’s character as a hero. With whatever misgivings, he had chosen his side. Whatever disturbing threats of violent revenge after victory he heard in Pompey’s camp, he awaited the decisive battle. Then there remained, for any brave man, only constancy in defeat—or a fall upon his sword.
Throughout Cæsar’s brief reign,—or long dictatorship,—from 48 to 44, Cicero is the most stately and the most obsequious of courtiers. For him who would plead for clemency, or return thanks for mercy accorded, at a despot’s footstool, there are no more graceful models than the ‘Pro Ligario’ and the ‘Pro Marcello.’ Cæsar himself realized, and wittily remarked, how irksome and hateful such a part must be to the older, vainer, more self-conscious man of the twain.
Midway in this period Cicero divorced his wife after thirty years of wedlock, seemingly from some dissatisfaction over her financial management, and soon after married a wealthy young ward. This is the least pleasing chapter of his private life, but perhaps the mortification and suffering it entailed were a sufficient penalty. His only daughter Tullia’s death in 45
Whatever the reason, Cicero was certainly not in the secret of Cæsar’s assassination. Twice in letters to members of the conspiracy in later months he begins: “How I wish you had invited me to your glorious banquet on the Ides of March.” “There would have been no remnants,” he once adds. That is, Antony would not have been left alive.
We have now reached the last two years—perhaps the most creditable time—in Cicero’s eventful life. This period runs from March 15th, 44
This last period is however among the most creditable, perhaps the most heroic, in Cicero’s career. Its chief memorials are the fourteen extant orations against Antony. The comparative sincerity of these ‘Philippics,’ and the lack of private letters for much of this time, make them important historical documents. The only one which ranks among his greatest productions—perhaps the classic masterpiece of invective—is the ‘Second Philippic.’ This was never delivered at all, but published as a pamphlet. This unquestioned fact throws a curious light on passages like—“He is agitated, he perspires, he turns pale!” describing Antony at the (imaginary) delivery of the oration. The details of the behavior of Catiline and others may be hardly more authentic. The ‘Ninth Philippic’ is a heartfelt funeral eulogy on that same Sulpicius whom he had ridiculed in the ‘Pro Murena.’
A fragment from one of Livy’s lost books says, “Cicero bore with becoming spirit none of the ills of life save death itself.” He indeed perished not only bravely but generously, dissuading his devoted slaves from useless resistance, and extending his neck to Antony’s assassins. Verres lived to exult at the news, and then shared his enemy’s fate, rather than give up his Greek vases to Antony! Nearly every Roman, save Nero, dies well.
Upon Cicero’s political career our judgment is already indicated. He was always a patriot at heart, though often a bewildered one. His vanity, and yet more his physical cowardice, caused some grievous blots upon the record. His last days, and death, may atone for all—save one. The precipitate desertion of the Pompeians is not to be condoned.
The best English life of Cicero is by Forsyth; but quaint, dogged, prejudiced old Middleton should not be forgotten. Plutarch’s Cicero “needs no bush.”
Cicero’s oratory was splendidly effective upon his emotional Italian hearers. It would not be so patiently accepted by any Teutonic folk. His very copiousness, however, makes him as a rule wonderfully clear and easy reading. Quintilian well says: “From Demosthenes’s periods not a word can be spared, to Cicero’s not one could be added.”
Despite the rout of Verres and of Catiline, the merciless dissection of Clodia, and the statelier thunders of the ‘Philippics,’ Cicero was most successful and happiest when “defending the interests of his friends.” Perhaps the greatest success against justice was the ‘Pro Cluentio,’ which throws so lurid a light on ante-Borgian Italian criminology. This speech is especially recommended by Niebuhr to young philologues as a nut worthy of the strongest teeth. There is a helpful edition by Ramsay, but Hertland’s ‘Murena’ will be a pleasanter variation for students wearying of the beaten track followed by the school editions. Both the failure of the ‘Pro Milone’ and the worldwide success of the ‘Pro Archia’ bid us repeat the vain wish, that this humane and essentially modern nature might have fallen on a gentler age. Regarding his whole political life as an uncongenial rôle forced on him by fate, we return devout thanks for fifty-eight orations, nearly all in revised and finished literary form! Fragments of seventeen, and titles of still thirty more, yet remain. From all his rivals, predecessors, pupils, not one authentic speech survives.
The best complete edition of the orations with English notes is by George Long, in the Bibliotheca Classica. The ‘Philippics’ alone are better edited by J. R. King in the Clarendon Press series. School editions of select speeches are superabundant. They regularly include the four Catilinarians, the Manilian, and the pleas before the dictator, sometimes a selection from the ‘Philippics’ or Verrine orations.
There is no masterly translation comparable with the fine work done by Kennedy for Demosthenes. The Bohn version is respectable in quality.
Among Cicero’s numerous works on rhetoric the chief is the ‘De Oratore.’ Actually composed in 55
In Cicero’s ‘Brutus,’ written in 46
The opposition just mentioned comes out more clearly in the ‘Orator.’ This portrays the ideal public speaker. His chief accomplishments are summed up in versatility,—the power to adapt himself to any case and audience. An interesting passage discusses the rhythms of prose. This book has been elaborately edited by J. E. Sandys. In these three dialogues Cicero says everything of importance, at least once; and the other rhetorical works in the Corpus may be neglected here, the more as the most practical working rhetoric among them all, the ‘Auctor ad Herennium,’ is certainly not Cicero’s. It is probably by Cornificius, and is especially important as the first complete prose work transmitted to us in authentic Latin form. (Cato’s ‘De Re Rustica’ has been “modernized.”)
The later history of the Ciceronian correspondence is a dark and much contested field. (The most recent discussion, with bibliography, is by Schanz, in Iwan Müller’s Handbuch, Vol. viii., pp. 238–243.) Probably Cicero’s devoted freedman Tiro laid the foundations of our collections. The part of Petrarch in recovering the letters during the “Revival of Learning” was much less than has been supposed.
The letters themselves are in wild confusion. There are four collections, entitled ‘To Atticus,’ ‘To Friends,’ ‘To Brother Marcus,’ ‘To Brutus’: altogether over eight hundred epistles, of which a relatively small number are written to Cicero by his correspondents. The order is not chronological, and the dates can in many cases only be conjectured. Yet these letters afford us our chief sources for the history of this great epoch,—and the best insight we can ever hope to have into the private life of Roman gentlemen.
The style of the cynical, witty Cælius, or of the learned lawyer Sulpicius, differs perceptibly in detail from Cicero’s own; yet it is remarkable that all seem able to write clearly if not gracefully. Cicero’s own style varies very widely. The letters to Atticus are usually colloquial, full of unexplained allusions, sometimes made intentionally obscure and pieced out with a Greek phrase, for fear of the carrier’s treachery! Other letters again, notably a long ‘Apologia’ addressed to Lentulus after Cicero’s return from exile, are as plainly addressed in reality to the public or to posterity as are any of the orations.
Prof. R. Y. Tyrrell has long been engaged upon an annotated edition of all the letters in chronological order. This will be of the utmost value. An excellent selection, illustrating the orator’s public life chiefly, has been published by Professor Albert Watson. This volume contains also very full tables of dates, bibliography of all Cicero’s works, and in general is indispensable for the advanced Latin student. The same letters annotated by Professor Watson have been delightfully translated by G. E. Jeans. To this volume, rather than to Forsyth’s biography, the English reader should turn to form his impressions of Cicero at first hand. It is a model of scholarly—and also literary—translation.
The “New Academy,” to which Cicero inclined in philosophy, was skeptical in its tendencies, and regarded absolute truth as unattainable. This made it easier for Cicero to cast his transcriptions in the form of dialogues, revealing the beliefs of the various schools through the lips of the several interlocutors. Thus the ‘De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum’ sets forth in three successive conversations the ideas of Epicureans, of Stoics, and of the Academy, on the Highest Good. It is perhaps the chief of these treatises,—though we would still prefer to have even those later compendiums of the Greek schools through which Cicero probably cited the chief philosophers at second hand! J. S. Reid, an eminent English scholar, has spent many years upon this dialogue, and his work includes a masterly translation.
With a somewhat similar plan, the three books of the ‘De Natura Deorum’ contain the views of the three schools on the Divine Beings. The speakers are Cicero’s Roman contemporaries. This rather sketchy work has been annotated by J. B. Mayor in his usual exhaustive manner. The now fragmentary dialogue entitled ‘The Republic,’ and its unfinished supplement ‘The Laws,’ were composed and named in avowed rivalry with Plato’s two largest works, but fail to approach the master. The Roman Constitution is defended as the ideal mingling of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. The student of pure literature can for the most part neglect these, and others among the hastily written philosophic works, with the explicit approval of so indefatigable a student as Professor B. L. Gildersleeve.
The chief fragment preserved of the ‘Republic’ is the ‘Dream of Scipio.’ Its dependence on the vision at the close of Plato’s ‘Republic’ should be carefully observed. It may be fairly described as a free translation and enlargement from Greek originals, of which Plato’s passage is the chief. Plagiarism was surely viewed quite otherwise then than now. Still, the Roman additions and modifications are interesting also,—and even as a translator Cicero is no ordinary cicerone! Moreover, in this as in so many other examples, the Latin paraphrase had a wider and more direct influence than the original. It has been accepted with justice ever since, as the final and most hopeful pagan word in favor of the soul’s immortality. The lover of Chaucer will recall the genial paraphrase of ‘Scipio’s Dream’ in the ‘Parlament of Foules’ (stanzas 5–12). We give below, entire, in our quotations from Cicero, the masterly version of the ‘Dream,’ prepared by Prof. T. R. Lounsbury for his edition of Chaucer’s poems. The speaker is the younger Scipio Africanus, and his visit to Africa as a subaltern here described was in 149
Cicero shared in full the Roman tendency to give a practical, an ethical turn to all metaphysical discussion. This is prominent in the popular favorite among his larger volumes, the ‘Tusculan Disputations.’ In each of the five related books a thesis is stated negatively, to be triumphantly reversed later on:—
(1) “Death seems to me an evil.”
(2) “I think pain the greatest of all evils.”
(3) “Misery seems to me to befall the wise man.”
(4) “It does not appear to me that the wise man can be secure from distress of mind.”
(5) “Character does not seem to me sufficient for happiness in life.”
The original portion of this work is relatively large, and many Roman illustrations occur. Dr. Peabody has included the Tusculans, the two brief essays next mentioned, and the ‘De Officiis,’ in his excellent series of versions (Little, Brown and Company).
The little dialogue on ‘Old Age’ is perhaps most read of all Cicero’s works. Its best thoughts, it must be confessed, are freely borrowed from the opening pages of Plato’s ‘Republic.’ Still, on this theme of universal human interest, the Roman also offers much pleasant food for thought. The moderation of the Greek is forgotten by Cicero, the professional advocate and special pleader, who almost cries out to us at last:—
Perhaps the most practical among Roman Manuals of Morals is the treatise on Duties (‘De Officiis’), in three books. Here the personal experience of sixty years is drawn upon, avowedly for the edification of young Marcus, the author’s unworthy son. This sole Ciceronian survivor of Antony’s massacres lived to be famous for his capacity in wine-drinking, and to receive officially, as consul under Augustus, the news of Antony’s final defeat and death—a dramatic revenge.
Most of these philosophic treatises were composed near the end of Cicero’s life, largely in one marvelously productive year, 45–4
Such were Cicero’s distractions, when cut off from political life and oratory, and above all when bereft by Tullia’s death. The especial ‘Consolatio,’ composed to regain his courage after this blow, must head the list of lost works. It took a most pessimistic view of human life, for which it was reproved by Lactantius. Another perished essay, the ‘Hortensius,’ introducing the whole philosophic series, upheld Milton’s thesis, “How charming is divine philosophy,” and first turned the thoughts of Augustine to serious study.
Cicero’s poems, chiefly translations, are extant in copious fragments. They show metrical facility, a little taste, no creative imagination at all. A final proof of his unresting activity is his attempt to write history. Few, even among professional advocates, could have less of the temper for mere narration and truth. Indeed, reasonable disregard for the latter trammel is frankly urged upon a friend who was to write upon the illustrious moments of Cicero’s own career!
We said at first that the caprice of fate had exaggerated some sides of Cicero’s activity, by removing all competitors. In any case, however, his supremacy among Italian orators, and in the ornate discursive school of eloquence generally, could not have been questioned.
Yet more: as a stylist, he lifted a language hitherto poor in vocabulary, and stiff in phrase, to a level it never afterward surpassed. Many words he successfully coined, chiefly either by translation or free imitation of Greek originals. His clear, copious, rhythmical phrase was even more fully his own creation. Indeed, at the present moment, four or five great forms of living speech testify to Cicero’s amazing mastery over both word and phrase. The eloquence of Castelar, Crispi, and Gambetta, of Gladstone and of Everett, is shot through and through, in all its warp and woof, with golden Ciceronian threads. The ‘Archias’ speaks to any appreciative student of Western Europe, as it were, in a mother tongue which dominates his vernacular speech. Human language, then, has become a statelier memorial of Cicero than even his vanity can ever have imagined.
(After writing the substance of this paragraph, I was glad to find myself in close agreement with Mackail’s words in his masterly little ‘Latin Literature,’ page 62.)
The chief encyclopædia of facts and citations for this period is the cumbrous old ‘Geschichte Roms, oder Pompeius Cæsar Cicero und ihre Zeitgenossen’ of W. Drumann (Königsberg: 1834–44). The plan is ideally bad, being a series of family chronicles, while these three men are more completely isolated from their families and kin than any other great trio in all Roman history! The book is however an exhaustive, inexhaustible, little acknowledged, but still worked quarry of erudition. The Baiter and Kayser text and Watson’s Select Letters also have copious chronological tables for Cicero’s entire life. To the modern biographies mentioned above should be added one by G. L. Strachan-Davidson, in the ‘Heroes of Antiquity Series.’ Boissier’s delightful ‘Cicéron et ses Amis’ is accessible also in an English translation by A. D. Jones.
The very legible Oxford text edition appears to be complete for the orations and letters, but not for the rhetorical and philosophical works, for which the Tauchnitz or Teubner text is still necessary.
The Loeb series, Latin and English on opposite pages, includes the ‘Letters to Atticus,’ ‘De Officiis,’ and ‘De Finibus.’ A ‘Golden Treasury’ volume contains the versions of ‘De Senectute’ and ‘De Amicitia’ By Shuckburgh. There is also a competent translation by Shuckburgh of all the letters.