Part 2 (2/2)

Let him tell the story of his own reception. If he tells it (as he does more than once) with an undisguised pride, it is a pride with which it is impossible not to sympathise. He boasted afterwards that he had been ”carried back to Rome on the shoulders of Italy;” and Plutarch says it was a boast he had good right to make.

”Who does not know what my return home was like? How the people of Brundusium held out to me, as I might say, the right hand of welcome on behalf of all my native land? From thence to Rome my progress was like a march of all Italy. There was no district, no town, corporation, or colony, from which a public deputation was not sent to congratulate me.

Why need I speak of my arrival at each place? how the people crowded the streets in the towns; how they flocked in from the country--fathers of families with wives and children? How can I describe those days, when all kept holiday, as though it were some high festival of the immortal G.o.ds, in joy for my safe return? That single day was to me like immortality; when I returned to my own city, when I saw the Senate and the population of all ranks come forth to greet me, when Rome herself looked as though she had wrenched herself from her foundations to rush to embrace her preserver. For she received me in such sort, that not only all s.e.xes, ages, and callings, men and women, of every rank and degree, but even the very walls, the houses, the temples, seemed to share the universal joy”.

The Senate in a body came out to receive him on the Appian road; a gilded chariot waited for him at the city gates; the lower cla.s.s of citizens crowded the steps of the temples to see him as he pa.s.sed; and so he rode, escorted by troops of friends, more than a conqueror, to the Capitol.

His exultation was naturally as intense as his despair had been. He made two of his most florid speeches (if indeed they be his, which is doubtful), one in the Senate and another to the people a.s.sembled in the Forum, in which he congratulated himself on his return, and Rome on having regained her most ill.u.s.trious citizen. It is a curious note of the temper and logical capacities of the mob, in all ages of the world alike, that within a few hours of their applauding to the echo this speech of Cicero's, Clodius succeeded in exciting them to a serious riot by appealing to the ruinous price of corn as one of the results of the exile's return.

For nearly four years more, though unable to shake Cicero's recovered position in the state--for he was now supported by Pompey--Clodius and his partisans, backed by a strong force of trained gladiators in their pay, kept Rome in a state of anarchy which is almost inexplicable. It was more than suspected that Cra.s.sus, now utterly estranged from Pompey, supplied out of his enormous wealth the means of keeping on foot this lawless agitation. Elections were overawed, meetings of the Senate interrupted, a.s.sa.s.sinations threatened and attempted. Already men began to look to military rule, and to think a good cause none the worse for being backed by ”strong battalions”. Things were fast tending to the point where Pompey and Caesar, trusty allies as yet in profession and appearance, deadly rivals at heart, hoped to step in with their veteran legions. Even Cicero, the man of peace and const.i.tutional statesman, felt comfort in the thought that this final argument could be resorted to by his own party. But Clodius's mob-government, at any rate, was to be put an end to somewhat suddenly. Milo, now one of the candidates for the consuls.h.i.+p, a man of determined and unscrupulous character, had turned his own weapons against him, and maintained an opposition patrol of hired gladiators and wild-beast fighters. The Senate quite approved, if they did not openly sanction, this irregular champions.h.i.+p of their order. The two parties walked the streets of Rome like the Capulets and Montagues at Verona; and it was said that Milo had been heard to swear that he would rid the city of Clodius if he ever got the chance. It came at last, in a casual meeting on the Appian road, near Bovillae. A scuffle began between their retainers, and Clodius was killed--his friends said, murdered. The excitement at Rome was intense: the dead body was carried and laid publicly on the Rostra. Riots ensued; Milo was obliged to fly, and renounce his hopes of power; and the Senate, intimidated, named Pompey--not indeed ”Dictator”, for the name had become almost as hateful as that of King--but sole consul, for the safety of the state.

Cicero had resumed his practice as an advocate, and was now called upon to defend Milo. But Pompey, either from some private grudge, or in order to win favour with the populace, determined that Milo should be convicted.

The jury were overawed by his presence in person at the trial, and by the occupation by armed soldiers of all the avenues of the court under colour of keeping order. It was really as great an outrage upon the free administration of justice as the presence of a regiment of soldiers at the entrance to Westminster Hall would be at a modern trial for high treason or sedition. Cicero affected to see in Pompey's legionaries nothing more than the maintainers of the peace of the city. But he knew better; and the fine pa.s.sage in the opening of his speech for the defence, as it has come down to us, is at once a magnificent piece of irony, and a vindication of the rights of counsel.

”Although I am conscious, gentlemen, that it is a disgrace to me to show fear when I stand here to plead in behalf of one of the bravest of men;--and especially does such weakness ill become me, that when Milo himself is far more anxious about the safety of the state than about his own, I should be unable to bring to his defence the like magnanimous spirit;--yet this strange scene and strangely const.i.tuted court does terrify my eyes, for, turn them where I will, I look in vain for the ancient customs of the Forum, and the old style of public trials. For your tribunal to-day is girt with no such audience as was wont; this is no ordinary crowd that hems us in. Yon guards whom you see on duty in front of all the temples, though set to prevent violence, yet still do a sort of violence to the pleader; since in the Forum and the count of justice, though the military force which surrounds us be wholesome and needful, yet we cannot even be thus freed from apprehension without looking with some apprehension on the means. And if I thought they were set there in hostile array against Milo, I would yield to circ.u.mstances, gentlemen, and feel there was no room for the pleader amidst such a display of weapons. But I am encouraged by the advice of a man of great wisdom and justice--of Pompey, who surely would not think it compatible with that justice, after committing a prisoner to the verdict of a jury, then to hand him over to the swords of his soldiers; nor consonant with his wisdom to arm the violent pa.s.sions of a mob with the authority of the state. Therefore those weapons, those officers and men, proclaim to us not peril but protection; they encourage us to be not only undisturbed but confident; they promise me not only support in pleading for the defence, but silence for it to be listened to. As to the rest of the audience, so far as it is composed of peaceful citizens, all, I know, are on our side; nor is there any single man among all those crowds whom you see occupying every point from which a glimpse of this court can be gained, looking on in anxious expectation of the result of this trial, who, while he approves the boldness of the defendant, does not also feel that the fate of himself, his children, and his country, hangs upon the issue of to-day”.

After an elaborate argument to prove that the slaying of Clodius by Milo was in self-defence, or, at the worst, that it was a fate which he well deserved as a public enemy, he closes his speech with a peroration, the pathos of which has always been admired:

”I would it had been the will of heaven--if I may say so with all reverence for my country, for I fear lest my duty to my client may make me say what is disloyal towards her--I would that Publius Clodius were not only alive, but that he were praetor, consul, dictator even, before my eyes had seen this sight! But what says Milo? He speaks like a brave man, and a man whom it is your duty to protect--'Not so--by no means', says he.

'Clodius has met the doom he well deserved: I am ready, if it must be so, to meet that which I do not deserve'. ... But I must stop; I can no longer speak for tears; and tears are an argument which he would scorn for his defence. I entreat you, I adjure you, ye who sit here in judgment, that in your verdict you dare to give utterance to what I know you feel”.

But the appeal was in vain, or rather, as far as we can ascertain, was never made,--at least in such powerful terms as those in which we read it. The great advocate was wholly unmanned by the scene before him, grew nervous, and broke down utterly in his speech for the defence. This presence of a military force under the orders of Pompey--the man in whom he saw, as he hoped, the good genius of Rome--overawed and disturbed him.

The speech which we read is almost certainly not that which he delivered, but, as in the previous case of Verres, the finished and elaborate composition of his calmer hours. Milo was convicted by a large majority; in fact, there can be little doubt but that he was legally guilty, however political expediency might, in the eyes of Cicero and his party, have justified his deed. Cato sat on the jury, and did all he could to insure an acquittal, showing openly his voting-paper to his fellow jurors, with that scorn of the ”liberty of silence” which he shared with Cicero.

Milo escaped any worse penalty by at once going into voluntary banishment at Ma.r.s.eilles. But he showed more practical philosophy than his advocate; for when he read the speech in his exile, he is said to have declared that ”it was fortunate for him it was not spoken, or he should never have known the flavour of the red mullet of Ma.r.s.eilles”.

The removal of Clodius was a deliverance upon which Cicero never ceased to congratulate himself. That ”battle of Bovillae”, as he terms it, became an era in his mental records of only less significance than his consuls.h.i.+p.

His own public life continued to be honourable and successful. He was elected into the College of Augurs, an honour which he had long coveted; and he was appointed to the government of Cilicia. This latter was a greatness literally ”thrust upon him”, and which he would gladly have declined, for it took him away in these eventful days from his beloved Rome; and to these grand opportunities for enriching himself he was, as has been said, honourably indifferent. The appointment to a distant province was, in fact, to a man like Cicero, little better than an honourable form of exile: it was like conferring on a man who had been, and might hope one day to be again, Prime Minister of England, the governor-generals.h.i.+p of Bombay.

One consolation he found on reaching his new government--that even in the farthest wilds of Cilicia there were people who had heard of ”the consul who saved Rome”. And again the astonished provincials marvelled at a governor who looked upon them as having rights of their own, and neither robbed nor ill-used them. He made a little war, too, upon some troublesome hill-tribes (intrusting the command chiefly to his brother Quintus, who had served with distinction under Caesar in Gaul), and gained a victory which his legions thought of sufficient importance to salute him with the honoured t.i.tle of ”imperator”. Such military honours are especially flattering to men who, like Cicero, are naturally and essentially civilians; and to Cicero's vanity they were doubly delightful. Unluckily they led him to entertain hopes of the further glory of a triumph; and this, but for the revolution which followed, he might possibly have obtained. As it was, the only result was his parading about with him everywhere, from town to town, for months after his return, the lictors with laurelled fasces, which betokened that a triumph was claimed--a pompous inc.u.mbrance, which became, as he confessed, a grand subject for evil-disposed jesters, and a considerable inconvenience to himself.

CHAPTER V.

CICERO AND CAESAR.

The future master of Rome was now coming home, after nearly ten years'

absence, at the head of the victorious legions with which he had struck terror into the Germans, overrun all Spain, left his mark upon Britain, and ”pacified” Gaul. But Cicero, in common with most of the senatorial party, failed to see in Julius Caesar the great man that he was. He hesitated a little--Caesar would gladly have had his support, and made him fair offers; but when the Rubicon was crossed, he threw in his lot with Pompey. He was certainly influenced in part by personal attachment: Pompey seems to have exercised a degree of fascination over his weakness. He knew Pompey's indecision of character, and confessed that Caesar was ”a prodigy of energy;” but though the former showed little liking for him, he clung to him nevertheless. He foreboded that, let the contest end which way it would, ”the result would certainly be a despotism”. He foresaw that Pompey's real designs were as dangerous to the liberties of Rome as any of which Caesar could be suspected. ”_Sullaturit animus_”, he says of him in one of his letters, coining a verb to put his idea strongly--”he wants to be like Sulla”. And it was no more than the truth. He found out afterwards, as he tells Atticus, that proscription-lists of all Caesar's adherents had been prepared by Pompey and his partisans, and that his old friend's name figured as one of the victims. Only this makes it possible to forgive him for the little feeling that he showed when he heard of Pompey's own miserable end.

Cicero's conduct and motives at this eventful crisis have been discussed over and over again. It may be questioned whether at this date we are in any position to pa.s.s more than a very cautious and general judgment upon them. We want all the ”state papers” and political correspondence of the day--not Cicero's letters only, but those of Caesar and Pompey and Lentulus, and much information besides that was never trusted to pen or paper--in order to lay down with any accuracy the course which a really unselfish patriot could have taken. But there seems little reason to accuse Cicero of double-dealing or tr.i.m.m.i.n.g in the worst sense. His policy was unquestionably, from first to last, a policy of expedients. But expediency is, and must be more or less, the watchword of a statesman. If he would practically serve his country, he must do to some extent what Cicero professed to do--make friends with those in power. ”_Sic vivitur_”--”So goes the world;” ”_Tempori serviendum est_”--”We must bend to circ.u.mstances”--these are not the n.o.blest mottoes, but they are acted upon continually by the most respectable men in public and private life, who do not open their hearts to their friends so unreservedly as Cicero does to his friend Atticus. It seemed to him a choice between Pompey and Caesar; and he probably hoped to be able so far to influence the former, as to preserve some shadow of a const.i.tution for Rome. What he saw in those ”dregs of a Republic”,[1] as he himself calls it, that was worth preserving;--how any honest despotism could seem to him more to be dreaded than that prost.i.tuted liberty,--this is harder to comprehend. The remark of Abeken seems to go very near the truth--”His devotion to the commonwealth was grounded not so much upon his conviction of its actual merits, as of its fitness for the display of his own abilities”.

[Footnote 1: ”Faex Romuli”.]

But that commonwealth was past saving even in name. Within two months of his having been declared a public enemy, all Italy was at Caesar's feet.

Before another year was past, the battle of Pharsalia had been fought, and the great Pompey lay a headless corpse on the sea-sh.o.r.e in Egypt. It was suggested to Cicero, who had hitherto remained constant to the fortunes of his party, and was then in their camp at Dyrrachium, that he should take the chief command, but he had the sense to decline; and though men called him ”traitor”, and drew their swords upon him, he withdrew from a cause which he saw was lost, and returned to Italy, though not to Rome.

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