Part 3 (1/2)
The meeting between him and Caesar, which came at last, set at rest any personal apprehensions from that quarter. Cicero does not appear to have made any dishonourable submission, and the conqueror's behaviour was n.o.bly forgetful of the past. They gradually became on almost friendly terms. The orator paid the Dictator compliments in the Senate, and found that, in private society, his favourite jokes were repeated to the great man, and were highly appreciated. With such little successes he was obliged now to be content. He had again taken up his residence in Rome; but his political occupation was gone, and his active mind had leisure to employ itself in some of his literary works.
It was at this time that the blow fell upon him which prostrated him for the time, as his exile had done, and under which he claims our far more natural sympathy. His dear daughter Tullia--again married, but unhappily, and just divorced--died at his Tusculan villa. Their loving intercourse had undergone no change from her childhood, and his grief was for a while inconsolable. He shut himself up for thirty days. The letters of condolence from well-meaning friends were to him--as they so often are--as the speeches of the three comforters to Job. He turned in vain, as he pathetically says, to philosophy for consolation.
It was at this time that he wrote two of his philosophical treatises, known to us as 'The True Ends of Life',[1] and the 'Tusculan Disputations', of which more will be said hereafter. In this latter, which he named from his favourite country-house, he addressed himself to the subjects which suited best with his own sorrowful mood under his recent bereavement. How men might learn to shake off the terrors of death--nay, to look upon it rather as a release from pain and evil; how pain, mental and bodily, may best be borne; how we may moderate our pa.s.sions; and, lastly, whether the practice of virtue be not all-sufficient for our happiness.
[Footnote 1: 'De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum'--a t.i.tle hard to translate.]
A philosopher does not always find in himself a ready pupil. It was hardly so in Cicero's case. His arguments were incontrovertible; but he found them fail him sadly in their practical application to life. He never could shake off from himself that dread of death which he felt in a degree unusually vivid for a Roman. He sought his own happiness afterwards, as he had done before, rather in the exciting struggle of public life than in the special cultivation of any form of virtue; and he did not even find the remedy for his present domestic sorrow in any of those general moral reflections which philosophy, Christian as well as pagan, is so ready to produce upon such occasions; which are all so undeniable, and all so utterly unendurable to the mourner.
Cicero found his consolation, or that diversion of thought which so mercifully serves the purpose of consolation, where most men of active minds like his seek for it and find it--in hard work. The literary effort of writing and completing the works which have been just mentioned probably did more to soothe his mind than all the arguments which they contained. He resumed his practice as an advocate so far as to plead a cause before Caesar, now ruling as Dictator at Rome--the last cause, as events happened, that he was ever to plead. It was a cause of no great importance--a defence of Deiotarus, t.i.tulary king of Armenia, who was accused of having entertained designs against the life of Caesar while entertaining him as a guest in his palace. The Dictator reserved his judgment until he should have made his campaign against the Parthians.
That more convenient season never came: for before the spring campaign could open, the fatal ”Ides of March” cut short Caesar's triumphs and his life.
CHAPTER VI.
CICERO AND ANTONY.
It remained for Cicero yet to take a part in one more great national struggle--the last for Rome and for himself. No doubt there was some grandeur in the cause which he once more so vigorously espoused--the recovery of the liberties of Rome. But all the thunders of Cicero's eloquence, and all the admiration of modern historians and poets, fail to enlist our hearty sympathies with the a.s.sa.s.sins of Caesar. That ”consecration of the dagger” to the cause of liberty has been the fruitful parent of too much evil ever since to make its use anything but hateful.
That Cicero was among the actual conspirators is probably not true, though his enemies strongly a.s.serted it. But at least he gloried in the deed when done, and was eager to claim all the honours of a tyrannicide. Nay, he went farther than the actual conspirators, in words at least; it is curious to find him so careful to disclaim complicity in the act. ”Would that you had invited me to that banquet on the Ides of March! there would then have been no leavings from the feast”,--he writes to Ca.s.sius. He would have had their daggers turned on Antony, at all events, as well as on Caesar. He wishes that ”the G.o.ds may d.a.m.n Caesar after he is dead;”
professing on this occasion a belief in a future retribution, on which at other times he was sceptical. It is but right to remember all this, when the popular tide turned, and he himself came to be denounced to political vengeance. The levity with which he continually speaks of the a.s.sa.s.sination of Caesar--a man who had never treated _him_, at any rate, with anything but a n.o.ble forbearance--is a blot on Cicero's character which his warmest apologists admit.
The b.l.o.o.d.y deed in the Capitol was done--a deed which was to turn out almost what Goethe called it--”the most absurd that ever was committed”.
The great Dictator who lay there alone, a ”bleeding piece of earth”, deserted by the very men who had sought of late to crown him, was perhaps Rome's fittest master; certainly not the worst of the many with whom a personal ambition took the place of principle. Three slaves took up the dead body of their master, and carried it home to his house. Poor wretches! they knew nothing about liberty or the const.i.tution; they had little to hope, and probably little to fear; they had only a humble duty to do, and did it. But when we read of them, and of that freedman who, not long before, sat by the dead body of Pompey till he could sc.r.a.pe together wreck from the sh.o.r.e to light some sort of poor funeral-pile, we return with a shudder of disgust to those ”n.o.ble Romans” who occupy at this time the foreground of history.
Caesar had been removed, but it is plain that Brutus and Ca.s.sius and their party had neither the ability nor the energy to make any real use of their b.l.o.o.d.y triumph. Cicero soon lost all hope of seeing in them the liberators of his country, or of being able to guide himself the revolution which he hoped he had seen begun. ”We have been freed”, he writes to Atticus, ”but we are not free”. ”We have struck down the tyrant, but the tyranny survives”. Antony, in fact, had taken the place of Caesar as master of Rome--a change in all respects for the worse. He had surrounded himself with guards; had obtained authority from the Senate to carry out all decrees and orders left by the late Dictator; and when he could not find, amongst Caesar's memoranda, materials to serve his purpose, he did not hesitate to forge them. Cicero had no power, and might be in personal danger, for Antony knew his sentiments as to state matters generally, and more particularly towards himself. Rome was no longer any place for him, and he soon left it--this time a voluntary exile. He wandered from place to place, and tried as before to find interest and consolation in philosophy. It was now that he wrote his charming essays on 'Friends.h.i.+p'
and on 'Old Age', and completed his work 'On the Nature of the G.o.ds', and that on 'Divination'. His treatise 'De Officiis' (a kind of pagan 'Whole Duty of Man') is also of this date, as well as some smaller philosophical works which have been lost. He professed himself hopeless of his country's future, and disgusted with political life, and spoke of going to end his days at Athens.
But, as before and always, his heart was in the Forum at Rome. Political life was really the only atmosphere in which he felt himself breathe vigorously. Unquestionably he had also an earnest patriotism, which would have drawn him back to his country's side at any time when he believed that she had need of his help. He was told that he was needed there now; that there was a prospect of matters going better for the cause of liberty; that Antony was coming to terms of some kind with the party of Brutus,--and he returned.
For a short while these latter days brought with them a gleam of triumph almost as bright as that which had marked the overthrow of Catiline's conspiracy. Again, on his arrival at Rome, crowds rushed to meet him with compliments and congratulations, as they had done some thirteen years before. And in so far as his last days were spent in resisting to the utmost the basest of all Rome's bad men, they were to him greater than any triumph. Thenceforth it was a fight to the death between him and Antony; so long as Antony lived, there could be no liberty for Rome. Cicero left it to his enemy to make the first attack. It soon came. Two days after his return, Antony spoke vehemently in the Senate against him, on the occasion of moving a resolution to the effect that divine honours should be paid to Caesar. Cicero had purposely stayed away, pleading fatigue after his journey; really, because such a proposition was odious to him. Antony denounced him as a coward and a traitor, and threatened to send men to pull down his house about his head--that house which had once before been pulled down, and rebuilt for him by his remorseful fellow-citizens.
Cicero went down to the Senate the following day, and there delivered a well-prepared speech, the first of those fourteen which are known to us as his 'Philippics'--a name which he seems first to have given to them in jest, in remembrance of those which his favourite model Demosthenes had delivered at Athens against Philip of Macedon. He defended his own conduct, reviewed in strong but moderate terms the whole policy of Antony, and warned him--still ostensibly as a friend--against the fate of Caesar.
The speaker was not unconscious what his own might possibly be.
”I have already, senators, reaped fruit enough from my return home, in that I have had the opportunity to speak words which, whatever may betide, will remain in evidence of my constancy in my duty, and you have listened to me with much kindness and attention. And this privilege I will use so often as I may without peril to you and to myself; when I cannot, I will be careful of myself, not so much for my own sake as for the sake of my country. For me, the life that I have lived seems already well-nigh long enough, whether I look at my years or my honours; what little span may yet be added to it should be your gain and the state's far more than my own”.
Antony was not in the house when Cicero spoke; he had gone down to his villa at Tibur. There he remained for a fortnight, brooding over his reply--taking lessons, it was said, from professors in the art of rhetorical self-defence. At last he came to Rome and answered his opponent. His speech has not reached us; but we know that it contained the old charges of having put Roman citizens to death without trial in the case of the abettors of Catiline, and of having instigated Milo to the a.s.sa.s.sination of Clodias. Antony added a new charge--that of complicity with the murderers of Caesar. Above all, he laughed at Cicero's old attempts as a poet; a mode of attack which, if not so alarming, was at least as irritating as the rest. Cicero was not present--he dreaded personal violence; for Antony, like Pompey at the trial of Milo, had planted an armed guard of his own men outside and inside the Senate-house.
Before Cicero had nerved himself to reply, Antony had left Rome to put himself at the head of his legions, and the two never met again.
The reply, when it came, was the terrible second Philippic; never spoken, however, but only handed about in ma.n.u.script to admiring friends. There is little doubt, as Mr. Long observes, that Antony had also some friend kind enough to send him a copy; and if we may trust the Roman poet Juvenal, who is at least as likely to have been well informed upon the subject as any modern historian, this composition eventually cost the orator his life. It is not difficult to understand the bitter vindictiveness of Antony. Cicero had been not merely a political opponent; he had attacked his private character (which presented abundant grounds for such attack) with all the venom of his eloquence. He had said, indeed, in the first of these powerful orations, that he had never taken this line.
”If I have abused his private life and character, I have no right to complain if he is my enemy: but if I have only followed my usual custom, which I have ever maintained in public life,--I mean, if I have only spoken my opinion on public questions freely,--then, in the first place, I protest against his being angry with me at all: or, if this be too much to expect, I demand that he should be angry with me only as with a fellow-citizen”.
If there had been any sort of reticence on this point hitherto on the part of Cicero, he made up for it in this second speech. Nothing can equal its bitter personality, except perhaps its rhetorical power. He begins the attack by declaring that he will not tell all he knows--”in order that, if we have to do battle again hereafter, I may come always fresh-armed to the attack; an advantage which the multiplicity of that man's crimes and vices gives me in large measure”. Then he proceeds:
”Would you like us, then, to examine into your course of life from boyhood? I conclude you would. Do you remember that before you put on the robe of manhood, you were a bankrupt? That was my father's fault, you will say. I grant it--it is a defence that speaks volumes for your feelings as a son. It was your own shamelessness, however, that made you take your seat in the stalls of honourable knights, whereas by law there is a fixed place for bankrupts, even when they have become so by fortune's fault, and not their own. You put on the robe which was to mark your manhood,--on your person it became the flaunting gear of a harlot”.