Part 3 (1/2)

Stoicism was brought to Rome by Panaetius of Rhodes, the intimate friend of Scipio, a mild and tactful Greek whose Rhodian birth gave him perhaps some advantage in a.s.sociating with the old allies of his state. He came to Rome at a critical moment, when even the best men were drifting into pure material self-seeking; and the results of his teaching were during two centuries so wholesome and inspiring that we may almost think of him as a missionary. The ground had been prepared for him in some sense by Polybius, who introduced him to Scipio and his circle, and who was then engaged in writing his history. From Polybius the Romans, the best of them at least, first learnt to realise their own empire and the great change it had wrought in the world; to think about what they had done and the qualities that enabled them to do it. From Panaetius they were to learn a philosophical creed which might direct and save them in the future, which might serve as ballast in public and private life, just when the s.h.i.+p was beginning to drift in moral helplessness. He was the founder of a school of practical wisdom, singularly well adapted to the Roman character and intellect, which were always practical rather than speculative; and far better suited to ordinary human life than the old rigid and austere Stoic ethics, of which the younger Cato was the only eminent Roman disciple. From what we know of Panaetius' ethical teaching,--and in the first two books of Cicero's work, _de Officiis_, we have a fairly complete view of it,--we do not find the old doctrine that absolute wisdom and justice are the only ends to pursue, and everything else indifferent; a doctrine which put the old-fas.h.i.+oned Stoic out of court in public life. The relative element, the useful, played a great part in the teaching of Panaetius. Though his system is based on the highest principles to which moral teaching could then appeal, it did not exclude the give and take, the compromise without which no practical man of affairs can make way, nor yet the wealth and bodily comforts that secure leisure for thought.[172]

Panaetius' mission was carried on by another Rhodian philosopher, the famous Posidonius, who lived long enough to know Cicero himself and many of his contemporaries; a man less inspiring perhaps than Panaetius, but of greater knowledge and attainment; a traveller, geographer, and a man of the world, whose writings on many subjects, though lost to us, really lie at the back of a great part of the Roman literary output of his time.[173] He was the disciple of Panaetius; envoy from Rhodes to Rome in the terrible year 86; and later on the inmate of Roman families, and the admired friend of Cicero Pompeius, and Varro. Philosophy was only one of the many pursuits of this extraordinary man, whose literary and historical influence can be traced in almost every leading Roman author for a century at least; but his philosophical importance was during his lifetime perhaps predominant. The generation that knew him was rich in Stoics; for example, Aelius Stilo, the master of Varro, ”doctissimus eorum temporum,” as Gellius calls him;[2] Rutilius, who was mentioned just now as having written memoirs; and among others probably the great lawyer Mucius Scaevola. Cato, as we have seen, was not a follower of the Roman school of Stoicism, but of the older and uncompromising doctrine; but Cicero, though never a professed Stoic, was really deeply influenced, and towards the end of his life almost fascinated, by a creed which suited his humanity while it stimulated his instinct for righteousness.[174] And, like Cicero, many other men of serious character felt the power of Stoicism almost unconsciously, without openly professing it.

Stoicism then was in several ways congenial to the Roman spirit, but in one direction it had an inspiring influence which has been of lasting moment to the world. Up to the time of Panaetius and the Scipionic circle the Roman idea and study of law had been of a crabbed practical character, wanting in breadth of treatment, dest.i.tute of any philosophical conception of the moral principles which lie behind all law and government. The Stoic doctrine of universal law ruling the world--a divine law, emanating from the universal Reason--seems to have called up life in these dry bones. It might be held by a Roman Stoic that human law comes into existence when man becomes aware of the divine law, and recognises its claim upon him. Morality is thus identical with law in the widest sense of the word, for both are equally called into being by the Right Reason, which is the universal primary force.[175] It is not possible here to show how this grand and elevating idea of law may have affected Roman jurisprudence, but we will just notice that the first quasi-philosophical treatment of law is found following the age of Panaetius and the Scipionic circle; that the phrase _ius gentium_ then begins to take the meaning of general principles or rules common to all peoples, and founded on ”natural reason”;[176] and that this led by degrees to the later idea of the Law of Nature, and to the cosmopolitanism of the Roman legal system, which came to embrace all peoples and degrees in its rational and beneficent influence. If the Greek had a genius for beauty, and the Jew for righteousness, the Roman had a genius for law; and the power of Stoicism in enn.o.bling and enriching his native conception of it is probably not to be easily over-estimated.

Thus behind the stormy scenes of public life in this period there is a process going on which will be of value not only to the Roman Empire but to modern civilisation. It was carried on more especially by two men of the highest character, Q. Mucius Scaevola, Cicero's adviser in his early days, and often his model in later life; and Servius Sulpicius Rufus, his exact contemporary and lifelong friend. Neither Scaevola nor Sulpicius were, so far as we know, professed disciples of Stoicism; but that they applied perhaps half unconsciously the principles of Stoicism to their own legal studies is almost certain.

The combination of legal training and Stoic influence (whether direct or unconscious) seems to have been capable of bringing the Roman aristocratic character to a high pitch of perfection; and it will be pleasant to take this friend of Cicero, whose public career we can clearly trace, and one or two of whose letters we still possess, as our example of a really well spent life in an age when time and talent were constantly abused and wasted.

Sulpicius and Cicero were born in the same year, 106; they went hand in hand in early life, and remained friends till their deaths in 43, Sulpicius dying a few months before Cicero. They were both attached in early youth to the Scaevola just mentioned, the first of the great series of scientific Roman lawyers. But the consuls.h.i.+p of Cicero made a wide divergence in their lives. In that year Sulpicius was a candidate for the consuls.h.i.+p and failed; and then, resigning further attempts to obtain the highest honour, he retired for the next twelve years into private life, devoting himself to the work which has made his name immortal. His writings are lost; nothing remains of them but a few chance fragments and allusions; but he was reckoned the second of the great writers on legal subjects, and it is probable that he contributed as much as any of them to the work of making Roman law what it has been as a power in the world, a factor in modern civilisation. For he treated it, as his friend said of him,[177] with the hand and mind of an artist, laying out his whole subject and distributing it into its const.i.tuent parts, by definition and interpretation making clear what seemed obscure, and distinguis.h.i.+ng the false from the true in legal principle. In the splendid panegyric p.r.o.nounced on him in the senate after his death,[178] Cicero again emphatically declared him to be unrivalled in jurisprudence. In beautiful but untranslatable language he claims that he was ”non magis iuris consultus, quam iust.i.tiae,”--an encomium which all great lawyers might well envy; he aimed rather at enabling men to be rid of litigation than at encouraging them to engage in it.

From such pa.s.sages we might conjecture, even if we knew nothing more about him, that Sulpicius was a man of very fine clay, of real _humanitas_ in the widest sense of that expressive word; and this is entirely borne out in other ways.[179] Emerging at last from retirement, he stood again for the consuls.h.i.+p in 52 B.C., and was elected. The year of his office, 51, was the first in which the enemies of Caesar, with Cato at their head, began to attack his position and clamour for his recall from his command; this violent hostility Sulpicius tried, not without temporary success, to restrain, and the fact that a man of so just a mind should have taken this line is one of the best arguments for the reasonableness of Caesar's cause.[180] When war broke out he was greatly perplexed how to act; his breadth of view made decision difficult, and he seems to have been at all times more a student than a man of action. With some heart-burnings he joined Caesar in the struggle, and accepted from him the government of Achaia; it was at this time that he wrote the famous letter of consolation to Cicero on the death of his beloved daughter Tullia, which is full of true feeling and kindliness, though evidently composed with effort, if not with difficulty. After Caesar's death he of course acted with Cicero against Antony, and in the spring of 43, making always for peace and good-will, he gave his life for his country in a way that claims our admiration more really than the suicide of Cato the professional Stoic; he headed an emba.s.sy to Antony, though dangerously ill at the time, and died in this last effort to obtain a hearing for the voice of justice. He has a _monumentum aere perennius_ in the speech of his old friend urging the senate to vote him a public funeral and a statue, as one who had laid down his life for his country.

We must now turn to consider how the mischievous side of the new Greek culture, in combination with other tendencies of the time, found its way into weak points in the armour of the Roman aristocracy.

The pursuit of ease and pleasure, to which the attainment of wealth and political power were too often merely subordinated, is a leading characteristic of the time. It is seen in many different forms, in many different types of character; but at the root of the whole corruption is the spirit of the coa.r.s.er side of Epicureanism. As with Roman Stoicism, so too with Roman Epicureanism, it is not so much the professed holding of philosophical tenets that affected life; in the case of the latter system, it was the coincidence of its popularity with the decay of the old Roman faith and morality, and with the abnormal opportunities of self-indulgence. Cato as a professed Stoic, Lucretius as an enthusiastic Epicurean, stand quite apart from the ma.s.s of men who were actuated one way or the other by these philosophical creeds. The majority simply played with the philosophy, while following the natural bent of their individual character; but such dilettanteism was often quite enough to affect that character permanently for good or evil.

”Epicureanism popularised inevitably turns to vice.” Was it really popular at Rome? Cicero tells us in a valuable pa.s.sage[181] that one Amafinius had written on it, and that a great number of copies of his book were sold, partly because the arguments were easy to follow, partly because the doctrine was pleasant, and partly too because men failed to get hold of anything better. The date of this Amafinius is uncertain, but it is probable that Cicero is here speaking of the latter part of the second century B.C.; and he goes on to say that other writers took up the same line of teaching, and established it over the whole of Italy (Italiam totam occupaverunt). If this was in the time of the Social and Civil Wars, of the proscriptions, of increasing crime and self-seeking, we can well understand that the doctrine was popular. We have a remarkable example of it in the life of a public man of Cicero's own time, the object of the most envenomed invective that he ever uttered.[182] We cannot believe a t.i.the of what he says about this man, Calpurnius Piso, consul in 58; but in this particular matter of the damage done him by Epicurean teaching we have independent evidence which confirms it. Piso, then a young man, made acquaintance with a Greek of this school of thought, learnt from him that pleasure was the sole end of life, and failing to appreciate the true meaning and bearing of the doctrine, fell into the trap. It was a dangerous doctrine, Cicero says, for a youth of no remarkable intelligence; and the tutor, instead of being the young man's guide to virtue, was used by him as an authority for vice.[183] This Greek was a certain Philodemus, a few of whose poems are preserved in the _Greek Anthology_; and a glance at them will show at once how dangerous such a man would be as the companion of a Roman youth. He may not himself have been a bad man--Cicero indeed rather suggests the contrary, calling him _vere huma.n.u.s_--but the air about him was poisonous. In his pupil, if we can trust in the smallest degree the picture drawn of him by Cicero, we may see a specimen of the young men of the age whose talents might have made them useful in the world, but for the strength of the current that drew them into self-indulgence.

Not only the pursuit of pleasure, but its correlative, the avoidance of work and duty, can be abundantly ill.u.s.trated in this age; and this too may have had a subtle connexion with Epicurean teaching, which had always discouraged the individual from distraction in the service of the State, as disturbing to the free development of his own virtue.

Sulla did much hard work, but made the serious blunder of retiring to enjoy himself just when his new const.i.tutional machinery needed the most careful watching and tending. Lucullus, after showing a wonderful capacity for work and a greater genius for war than perhaps any man of his time, retired from public life as a millionaire and a quietist, to enjoy the wealth that has become proverbial, and a luxury that is astonis.h.i.+ng, even if we make due allowance for the exaggeration of our accounts of it. To his library we have already been introduced; those who would see him in his banqueting-hall, or rather one of the many in his palace, may turn to the fortieth chapter of Plutarch's most interesting _Life_ of him, and read the story there told of the dinner he gave to Cicero and Pompeius in the ”Apollo” dining-room.[184]

The same cynical carelessness about public affairs and neglect of duty, as compared with private ease or advantage, seems to have been characteristic of the ordinary senator. Active and busy in his own interest, he was indifferent to that of the State. There are distinct signs that the attendance in the senate was not good. When Cicero was away in Cilicia his correspondent writes of difficulties in getting together a sufficient number even for such important business as the settlement of provincial governments.[185] On the other hand, much private business was done, and many jobs perpetrated, in a thin senate; in 66 a tribune proposed that no senator should be dispensed from the action of a law unless two hundred were present.[186] It was in such a thin senate, we may be sure, that the virtuous Brutus was dispensed from the law which forbade lending to foreign borrowers in Rome, and thus was enabled to lend to the miserable Salaminians of Cyprus at 48 per cent, and to recover his money under the bond.[187]

Writing to his brother in December 57, Cicero speaks of business done in a senate full for the time of year, which was midwinter, just before the Saturnalia, when only two hundred were present out of about six hundred. In February 54, a month when the senate had always much business to get through, it was so cold one day that the few members present clamoured for dismissal and obtained it.[188] And when the senate did meet there was a constant tendency to let things go. No reform of procedure is mentioned as even thought of, at a time when it was far more necessary than in our Parliament; business was talked about, postponed obstructed, and personal animosities and private interests seem, so far as we can judge from the correspondence of the time, to have been predominant. With wearisome iteration the letters speak of nothing done, of business postponed, or of the pa.s.sing of some senatus consultum, the utter futility of which is obvious even now.[189] Even the magistrates seem to have been growing careless; we hear of a praetor presiding in the court de repetundis who had not taken the trouble to acquaint himself with the text of the law which governed its procedure;[190] and that praetors were worse than careless about their action in civil cases is proved by another law of the same tribune Cornelius mentioned just now, ”that praetors should abide by the rules laid down in their edicts.”[191]

But all these futilities, and much of the same kind outside of the senate, together with the quarrels of individuals, the chances and incidents of elections, and all such gossip as forms the staple commodity of the society papers of to-day, were a source of infinite delight to another type of pleasure-loving public man, the last to be ill.u.s.trated here.

If the older n.o.ble families were apathetic and idle, there were plenty of young men, rising most often from the cla.s.s below, whose minds were intensely active--active in the pursuit of pleasure, but pleasure in the comparatively harmless form of amus.e.m.e.nt and excitement. One of these, the son of a banker at Puteoli, Marcus Caelius Rufus, stands out as a living portrait in his own letters to Cicero, of which no fewer than seventeen are preserved.[192] Of his early years too we know a good deal, told us in the speech in defence of him spoken by Cicero in the year 56; and these combined sources of information make him the most interesting figure in the life of his age. M. Boissier has written a delightful essay on him in his _Ciceron et ses amis_, and Professor Tyrrell has done the like in the introduction to the fourth volume of his edition of Cicero's letters; but they have treated him less as a type of the youth of his day than as the friend and pupil of Cicero. Caelius will always repay fresh study; he was amusing and interesting to his contemporaries, and so he will be for ever to us. He is a veritable Proteus--you never know what shape he will take next;

Omnia transformat sese in miracula rerum----

we can trace no less than six such transformations in the story of his life. And this instability, let us note at once, was not the restlessness of a jaded _roue_, but the coruscation of a clever mind wholly without principle, intensely interested in his _monde_, in the life in which he moved, with all its enjoyment and excitement.

Caelius' father brought his son to Cicero, as soon as he had taken his toga virilis, to study law and oratory, and Cicero was evidently attracted by the bright and lively boy; he never deserted him, and the last letter of Caelius to his old preceptor was written only just before his own sad end. But Cicero was not the man to keep an unstable character out of mischief; he loved young men, especially clever ones, and was apt to take an optimistic view of them, as he did of his own son and nephew. Caelius, always attracted by novelty, left Cicero and attached himself to Catiline; and for this vagary, as well as for his own want of success in controlling his pupil, Cicero rather awkwardly and amusingly apologises in the early chapters of his speech in his defence. Wild oats must be sown, he says; when a youth has given full fling to his propensities to vice, they will leave him, and he may become a useful citizen,--a dangerous view of a preceptor's duty, which reminds us of the treatment, of the boy Nero by his philosopher guardian long afterwards.[193]

Caelius escaped the fate of Catiline and his crew only to fall into the hands of another clique not less dangerous for his moral welfare.

He became one of a group of brilliant young men, among whom were probably Catullus and Calvus the poets, who were lovers, and pa.s.sionate lovers, of the infamous Clodia; they were needy, she found them money, and they hovered about her like moths about a candle. In such a life of pa.s.sion and pleasure quarrels were inevitable. If the Lesbia of Catullus be Clodia, as we may believe, she had thrown the poet over with a light heart. It was apparently of his own free will that Caelius deserted her: in revenge she turned upon him with an accusation of theft and attempt to poison. What truth there was in the charges we do not really know, but Cicero defended him successfully, and in this way we come to know the details of this unsteady life.

In grat.i.tude, and possibly in shame, Caelius now returned to his old friend, and abandoned the whole ring of his vicious companions for diligent practice in the courts, where he obtained considerable fame as an orator. A fragment of a speech of his preserved by Quintilian shows, as Professor Tyrrell observes, wonderful power of graphic and picturesque utterance.[194] Cicero, writing of him after his death,[195] says that he was at this time on the right side in politics, and that as tribune of the plebs in 56 he successfully supported the good cause, and checked revolutionary and seditious movements. All was going well with him until Cicero went as governor to Cilicia in 51. Cicero seems to have felt complete confidence in him, and invited him to become his confidential political correspondent; fifteen out of his seventeen letters were written in this capacity. These letters show us the man as clearly as if we had his diary before us. Caelius is no idle scamp or lazy Epicurean; his mind is constantly active: nothing escapes his notice: the minutest and most sordid things delight him. He is bright, happy, witty, frivolous, and doubtless lovable. It is amusing to see how Cicero himself now and again catches the infection, and tries (in vain) to write in the same frivolous manner.[196] Caelius has some political insight; he sees civil war approaching, but he takes it all as a game, and on the eve of events which were to shake the world he trifles with the symptoms as though they were the silliest gossip of the capital.[197] In none of these letters is there the smallest vestige of principle to be found. On the very eve of civil war he tells Cicero[198] that as soon as war breaks out the right thing to do is to join the stronger side. Judging Caesar's side to be the stronger, he joined it accordingly, and did his best to induce Cicero to do the same. As M. Boissier happily says, he never cared to ”menager ses transitions.”

He had, however, to discover that if to change over to Caesar was the safer course, to turn a political somersault once more, to try and undermine the work of the master, meant simply ruin. We have the story of his sixth and last transformation from Caesar himself, who was not, however, in Italy at the time.[199] Credit in Italy had been seriously upset by the outbreak of Civil War, and Caesar had been at much pains to steady it by an ordinance which has been alluded to in the last chapter.[200] In 48 Caelius was praetor; in the master's absence he suddenly took up the cause of the debtors, and tried to evoke appeals against the decisions of his colleague Trebonius,--a great lawyer and a just man. Failing in this, he started as a downright revolutionary, proposing first the abolition of house-rent, and finally the abolition of all debts; and Milo, in exile at Ma.s.silia, was summoned to help him to raise Italy against Caesar. This was too much, and both were quickly caught and killed as they were stirring up gladiators and other slave-bands among the latifundia of South Italy.

Caelius' letters give us a chance of seeing what that life of the Forum really was which so fascinated the young men of the day, and some of the old, such as Cicero himself. We can see these children playing on the very edge of the crater, like the French n.o.blesse before the Revolution. In both cases there was a semi-consciousness that the eruption was not far off,--but they went on playing. What was it that so greatly amused and pleased them?

What Caelius is always writing of is mainly elections and canva.s.sing, accusations and trials, games and shows. Elections he treats as pure sport, as a kind of enjoyable gambling, or as a means of spiting some one whom you want to annoy. With elections accusations were often connected: if a man were accused before his election he could not continue to stand; if condemned after it he was disqualified; here were ways in which personal spite might deprive him of success at the last moment.[201] Accusations, too were of course the best means by which an ambitious young man could come to the front. The whole number of trials mentioned by Caelius is astonis.h.i.+ng; sometimes there is such a complication of them as is difficult to follow. Every one is ready to lay an accusation, without the smallest regard for truth. Young Appius Claudius accuses Servilius, and makes a mess of the attack, while the praetor mismanages the conduct of the trial, so that nothing comes of it; but finally Appius is himself accused by the Servilii _de vi_, in order to keep him from further attacks on Servilius![202]

Appius the father quarrelled with Caelius and egged on others to accuse him, though he was curule aedile at the time. ”Their impudence was so boundless that they secured that an information should be laid against me for a very serious crime (under the Scantinian law).

Scarcely had Pola got the words out of his mouth, when I laid an information under the same law against the censor, Appius. I never saw a more successful stroke!”[203]

Of the games, and the panthers to be exhibited at them, about which Caelius is for ever worrying his friend in Cilicia, we shall see something in another chapter. There is plenty of other gossip in these letters, and gossip often about unsavoury matters which need not be noticed here. It lets in a flood of light upon the causes of the general incompetence and inefficiency; the life of the Forum was a demoralising one: