Ancient Rome Part 10

Yet it is said that Cra.s.sus never showed himself so great as in this disaster. Pa.s.sing along the ranks, he shouted, 'This grief touches me, and none besides, but by your success alone can the honour and glory of Rome be preserved inviolate and unconquered.

If you pity me for the loss of a gallant son, prove it by your fury against the enemy. Take from them their triumph, punish their ferocity, do not be cast down by our loss. Great aims are never realized without some suffering. Lucullus did not overthrow Tigranes without bloodshed, nor Scipio Antiochus; our ancestors lost a thousand ships off the coast of Sicily, and in Italy many dictators and generals; but never did these defeats prevent them from crushing the conquerors. It is not by good luck, but by endurance and courage in the face of peril, that Rome has risen to its height of power.'

Plutarch, x.x.xix. 26.

Faulty generalship had brought the Roman army into a position whence no courage could save it. In the second day's battle a terrible defeat was sustained: no less than thirty thousand Romans perished in the disaster of Carrhae (53). Cra.s.sus himself was killed in a parley afterwards.

It is said that a few days after the battle, before the news of it had reached him, the Parthian king was witnessing a performance of the Bacchae of Euripides in which there is a scene where one of the dancers comes in bearing a bleeding head. The actor who took this part carried the head of Cra.s.sus, which he cast, amid shouts of joy, at the king's feet.

Such was the tragic end of the millionaire Cra.s.sus. The news of his death and defeat came to Rome but caused no excitement there. The city was more interested in the street brawls of Clodius and Milo. The politicians were watching the growing conflict between Caesar and Pompeius. Cra.s.sus had dropped out of the Triumvirate. The stage was cleared for the great duel.

XII

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Of none of the men of his own time do we know so much as of Marcus Tullius Cicero. His contemporaries we know from the accounts given and judgements pa.s.sed by others: Cicero we know from his own. He was the first speaker of his age, and his speeches deal largely with the politics and people of his time, as he defended or attacked the men and their acts. Cicero was anything but impartial; yet it is from what he says that much of our picture of Caesar and Cra.s.sus, Pompeius, Antonius, Catiline, Clodius, Cato, Brutus and a host of others are drawn. In all the long gallery of portraits he has painted none is so sharp and vivid as his own. It comes to us not only through his speeches but through all his writings--and he wrote admirably on many philosophical and semi-philosophical subjects--and above all through his letters. These letters are addressed for the most part to his intimate friend the banker Pomponius Atticus, but also to others including most of the prominent men of his time, and to his daughter Tullia, to whom he was devotedly attached. They give a day-to-day picture of the life of Rome and also of the man who wrote them. Cicero was immersed, like most men of his time, in politics. He rose, to his own ineffable delight (a delight which he expresses again and again with childlike complacency), to be consul. But the explanation of a character that at times amused and at times exasperated his contemporaries, and has caused the same mixture of feelings to much later admirers, is that he was, in his essence, an artist. He wanted, as do many artists, to be and do other things. He was more vain of his dubious success in politics than of the splendour of his oratory or the beauty of his writing. In action he was timid, uncertain, and quite unable to cope with the great currents of his time, sn.o.bbish and constantly mistaken in his judgements of people, and alternately elated and despairing in his view of public events. When he takes up his pen he is a master.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CICERO]

Cicero was in some ways typical of the new men in Rome. He was born at Arpinum, where his family belonged to the Italian middle cla.s.s. His parents were sufficiently well-to-do for the young man to receive an excellent education, completed, like that of other well-bred young men of the time, by attending lectures in Athens on literature and philosophy. His father's death brought him a fortune that though not large was sufficient, together with a small estate at Arpinum and a house in Rome.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ARPINUM.

Cicero's birthplace]

But Cicero had no mind for a life of fashionable idleness. For a middle-cla.s.s provincial there was little chance in politics, so long as Sulla's laws stood. He therefore turned to the law courts. There he soon made himself a great name, the more distinguished since he kept up the old custom of refusing fees. A wealthy marriage increased his consequence. His honesty and ability made him respected by all sorts of people. Cicero used his gifts in the most honourable way by defending the people of the provinces, who before his time had hardly ever got a hearing, against the rapacity of some of the Roman tax collectors.

A case which made his name known throughout the Roman world was the prosecution of Caius Verres which he undertook on behalf of the people of Sicily. Verres, once an officer in Marius's army, was a man of notoriously bad character. Like other praetors he looked on his governorship simply as an opportunity to make money for himself and his friends; it was freely said, even in Rome, that his misrule was ruining Sicily. And Sicily was one of the chief granaries of Rome. The greatest excitement was aroused over the case because the Democratic party took it up as a means of discrediting the Government; and at the same time brought in a Bill for the reform of the law courts by making the jurors not senators only, but, as before Sulla's time, men belonging to the Equestrian Order. This frightened the Conservatives: they saw that much hung on the case of Verres. Quintus Hortensius, the most famous advocate of his time, agreed to defend him.

Cicero went to Sicily to collect evidence. He was quick to feel, in all his sensitive nerves, the tense atmosphere of excitement gathering round the case. It was to make or mar him. His genius rose delighted to the great occasion. He understood, as the Conservatives did not, the feelings that were dumbly stirring the mind of the ordinary decent Roman, and could give them voice. As the evidence he had collected was unrolled the story of the greed of Verres and the suffering of the people of Sicily was laid bare step by step. Excitement and anger against the cla.s.s in power who did and defended such things grew and grew. Each day an enormous crowd thronged the Forum and at times its feelings made it positively dangerous. One witness told how a Roman citizen had been crucified: his appeal, 'Civis Roma.n.u.s sum--I am a Roman citizen', had fallen on deaf ears. At this the hearers were stirred to such rage that Verres was only saved from being torn to pieces by the adjournment of the hearing. After fourteen days the defendants realized that their case was lost; no judge dared acquit Verres. He fled the city and was never heard of again. Cicero was the hero of the hour.

The man who appears and feels himself a hero when addressing a great crowd, who can work their feelings and his own into tempestuous enthusiasm, is often a weak reed, swayed by every impulse and incapable of the long slow effort required to carry a purpose into action. This was the case with Cicero. When speaking he was carried away by his own pa.s.sion. Then he appeared to know exactly what he thought. Alone, however, he was moody, a prey to fearful doubt and depression, one day full of enthusiasm, the next despairing. He was at once vain and timid; uncertain of himself and turned this way and that by the praise or blame of others. His great desire was to be admired by every one. His comparatively humble origin made him feel any attention from the n.o.bles far more flattering than it was.

In a good sense as well as in a bad he was a Conservative. His study of history made him feel full of respect for any inst.i.tution that had lasted a long time, and for men belonging to ancient families. He felt this even at a time when his writings and speeches were making him known throughout Italy and admired by men whose praise was worth having. The rich men and many of the aristocrats were far inferior to Cicero in brains and character; yet he longed and strove to get into 'society'.

Society at the time was extravagant, frivolous, vicious, and hard-hearted. Cicero was modest and frugal in his personal habits, serious in the bent of his mind, a man of high moral principle and tender domestic affections. Yet nothing pleased him more than an invitation to one of the houses of the smart set; nothing vexed him more than to be thought old-fashioned or middle-cla.s.s in his ideas.

All these feelings made him regard his own election to the consulship, and the support he received as candidate from the n.o.ble Conservatives, as the most wonderful affair. Yet the real reason why the Conservatives supported him was not that they loved Cicero but that they loathed Catiline, the third strong candidate, and were prepared to go to great lengths to keep him out. Antonius, who was elected as Cicero's colleague, though a friend of Cra.s.sus, was considered to be harmless.

This consulship was the turning point in Cicero's life. He had always wanted to stand well with all parties. Now he was compelled to take his place definitely on the Conservative side. More than that, it finally caused him to lose his sense of balance altogether and to think of himself as a statesman: a part for which he was ill fitted. He was so much impressed with his own importance that he bought a vast house on the Palatine. To do so he had to borrow money and thus got into debt.

Before he had been free, after his consulship he became entangled and embarra.s.sed.

This was the case with many of the leading politicians and men of all parties, and hampered their actions in countless ways. In order to win popular favour they spent huge sums on shows and gave feasts and presents to the populace. They lived altogether in a way expensive and showy beyond their means. To do this they had to borrow money at exorbitant terms, and were thus helplessly in the power of the rich men who lent to them. Caesar at this time was fearfully in debt and constantly in difficulties on this account. So were innumerable fashionable young aristocrats. The Roman laws of debt were still extremely harsh and all acted against the unfortunate debtor. Prices were steadily rising: the vast wealth of the few made the lot of the many increasingly hard. While Lucullus was in the East there had been a serious financial crisis in Rome, and the effects of this lasted for a long time.

As a consequence of this state of things a vast number of people of all cla.s.ses were stirred to wild excitement and enthusiasm when Catiline, who was determined to be consul and by no means inclined to sit down under one rebuff, set out a programme of which the chief item was a wiping off of a large part of all outstanding debts. The poorer people were on his side in this almost to a man. So were a great many needy aristocrats, especially among the younger men. The rich, on the other hand, especially the cla.s.s of Knights, to which most of the big financiers and trading houses belonged, were furious. They were ready to throw all their influence and the great power of the purse on to the side of the Conservatives, who cried that Catiline's programme meant revolution. On both sides the wildest excitement and the most extreme bitterness of feeling was stirred up.

Catiline was a man of low character, and of very bad record, quite reckless. But he was by no means without ability. There was something to be said for his programme if nothing for the man who proposed it.

Certainly the law of debt needed to be reformed. The rich did not argue against it: they fell into a panic. They saw that popular feeling and popular votes would be on Catiline's side. But they had money and could bribe. They did bribe so effectively that when it came to the election he was beaten again.

The alarm of the propertied cla.s.ses did not, however, die down, or the excitement of the disappointed. People had talked of revolution and civil war so loud and long during the elections that they began to believe in it. Cicero had been going about for days with a cuira.s.s under his toga. He really believed that grave plots were on foot. He spent his time listening to spies and informers. One day he came down to the Senate with a very long face declaring that he 'knew all'. He produced no proofs, but most people were too much excited to ask for proofs. The word plot was enough. A state of siege was proclaimed in the city.

Soon afterwards news came that a follower of Catiline had actually got some soldiers together in Etruria. Catiline, however, was still in Rome.

He attended a meeting of the Senate. On his bench he sat alone, shunned by all the other senators, who applauded loudly while Cicero thundered against him. At last Catiline, unable to bear it any longer, got up, marched out of the Senate House, and left Rome. Cicero did not dare to have him arrested. There were as yet no solid proofs against him. A few days later proofs came. Catiline's supporters in Rome lost their heads without him. They were foolish enough to ask some amba.s.sadors of the Allobroges--a tribe of Gauls, then in the city with a pet.i.tion to the Senate--whether their people would send soldiers to a.s.sist a rising.

Cicero now seemed to have the Catilinarians in his hand. They were ready, some of them, to bring the Gauls into Italy! That was enough.

There was a wild outburst of feeling. All sorts of prominent people, including Caesar, were said to be implicated. Catiline had escaped, but all his close a.s.sociates were arrested and brought up for trial by the Senate. Cicero hurried on the proceedings. He was terrified by the wild pa.s.sion that swept all cla.s.ses, the senators no less than the howling mobs outside. After two days' debate the question of what should be done to the conspirators was put to the vote. The first senator voted for death. All the others who followed voted for death until it came to Caesar. Caesar knew of the rumours going about and the risk of his own position as leader of the party to which Catiline had belonged.

Nevertheless with great courage he voted against the death penalty.

Every Roman citizen, he urged, had the right to appeal to his fellows.

To put men to death without trial was illegal. Cato, however, made a powerful plea on the other side. Death was decreed. As Caesar left the Senate House a group of knights threatened him with swords.

Next day Cicero, accompanied by a solemn procession of senators, saw the executions carried out. Caesar was not in the procession. A huge crowd escorted Cicero back to his home. They declared, and he proudly believed, that he had saved the country. Plutarch thus describes

_Cicero's Day of Triumph_

Cicero pa.s.sed through the Forum and, reaching the prison, handed over Lentulus to the officer with orders to put him to death; then he brought down Cethegus and the rest separately for execution.

And when he saw many of the conspirators still standing together in the Forum, ignorant of what had happened and waiting for darkness in the belief that the men were alive and could be rescued, he cried to them with a loud voice, 'They lived,' Thus Romans signify death if they wish to avoid words of ill omen.

Evening had already come when he returned through the Forum to his house on the Palatine, no longer attended by the citizens with silence or even with restraint, but received everywhere with shouts and clapping of hands, and saluted as saviour and founder of his country. The streets were bright with the gleam of all the torches and links that were placed at the doors, and the women displayed lights from the roofs that they might see the hero and do him honour, as he made his stately progress escorted by the n.o.blest in Rome; most of whom had conducted great wars and entered the city in triumphal processions and added whole tracts of sea and land to the empire, and who now agreed as they marched along that the Roman people was indebted to many leaders and generals of their day for wealth and spoil and power, but to Cicero alone for safety and life, because he had freed it from so vast and terrible a danger. For it was not thought so wonderful that he had crushed the conspiracy and punished the conspirators, but that he had quenched the most serious insurrection ever known with very little suffering, and without domestic strife and disturbance.

Plutarch, lvii. 22. ---- 2-5.

The circ.u.mstances of Cicero's exile and return are described by Plutarch in pa.s.sages that give a lively picture of the life of the time:

Cicero, convinced that he must go into exile or leave the question to be decided by armed conflict with Clodius, determined to ask Pompeius for help; but he had purposely gone away and was now staying at his villa in the Alban hills. Accordingly, Cicero first sent Piso, his son-in-law, to make an appeal, and afterwards went himself. When Pompeius knew that he had come, he did not wait to see him (for he was terribly ashamed to face the man who had engaged in hard struggles on his behalf and often shaped his policy to please him), but at the request of Caesar, whose daughter he had married, he was false to those obsolete services, and, slipping out by a back door, managed to evade the interview.

Thus betrayed by Pompeius and left without support, Cicero put himself in the hands of the consuls. Gabinius was harsh and unrelenting, but Piso spoke more gently to him, bidding him withdraw and let Clodius have his day, endure the changed times, and become once more the saviour of his country, which his enemy had filled with strife and suffering. After this answer Cicero consulted his friends, and Lucullus urged him to remain in the a.s.surance that he would prevail, but others advised him to go into exile; for the people would feel his loss when it had enough of the mad recklessness of Clodius. He accepted this council, and taking to the Capitol the image of Minerva, a prized possession which had long stood in his house, he dedicated it with the inscription, 'To Minerva, guardian of Rome,' Then, having got an escort from his friends, he left the city secretly at night, and journeyed by land through Lucania, wishing to reach Sicily.

31. ---- 2-5.

As a matter of fact the immediate danger from Catiline had been exaggerated. People came to see this in a very few months. Catiline raised a few hundred men and was killed fighting. The real danger lay not in him but in the economic and political condition of Rome and Italy. Its causes were the mismanagement, corruption, and feebleness of the Government; the flaunting vulgarity and profiteering of the rich; the misery of the poor. Cicero had done nothing to meet these evils: he had no plan for doing so; he hardly realized that they were there. Men had called him 'Father of his country'. That great day was ever in his mind. As he thought of it his vanity swelled and swelled until the year of his consulship seemed to him the greatest in the annals of Rome. He bored every one by talking incessantly of it on all occasions. He dreamed of this and saw nothing of the dark tides rising round. He watched helplessly the growing power of Pompeius, Cra.s.sus, and Caesar, and did not understand what Rome was coming to. Caesar was always friendly and gracious to him, for he had a mind which could appreciate Cicero's genius as a writer: but Cicero distrusted Caesar.

He had meantime made a deadly enemy of Clodius who, by playing on disorder, was making himself more and more dangerous in Rome. Clodius was charged with sacrilege. He defended himself by saying that on the day on which he was said to have been present, in female clothes, at the Women's Festival being celebrated in the house of Caesar's wife, he was in fact not in the city. Cicero swore that he had seen him. Thanks to bribery Clodius was acquitted. He never forgave Cicero. Soon after this, in the first year of the Triumvirate (59), he secured his banishment from the city for a year.

Cicero, after a visit to Greece, retired to his villa at Tusculum. He would have been wiser had he settled down there and devoted himself to the writing of which he was a consummate master. But after sixteen months in the country he returned to Rome.

_The Return_

It is said that the people never pa.s.sed a measure with such unanimity, and the Senate rivalled it by proposing a vote of thanks to those cities that had given help to Cicero in exile, and by restoring at the public expense his house, with the villa and buildings, which Clodius had destroyed. Thus Cicero returned in the sixteenth month after his banishment, and so great was the rejoicing in cities and the general enthusiasm in greeting him that he fell short of the truth when he declared afterwards that he was brought to Rome on the shoulders of Italy. Cra.s.sus, too, who had been his enemy before his exile, was glad to meet him and make proposals for reconciliation, saying that he did it to please his son Publius, who was an admirer of Cicero.

33. ---- 4-5.

When Clodius was murdered in the streets by Milo, Cicero undertook the latter's defence in a very famous speech, which we still possess. Milo, however, was condemned. In the province of Cilicia to which he was soon afterwards appointed governor, Cicero showed himself an honest and upright administrator. When he returned to Rome, however, his conduct showed a helpless weakness. Between Pompeius and Caesar he for long did not know how to choose. Both seemed to him in a measure wrong. In his own letters he said to one of his friends at this time, 'Whither shall I turn? Pompeius has the more honourable cause, but Caesar manages his affairs with the greatest address and is most able to save himself and his friends. In short, I know whom to avoid but not whom to seek.' In the end, since he thought that Caesar failed, when he entered Rome, to treat him with proper distinction and courtesy, he joined Pompeius at Dyrrachium.

There, however, he made himself very unpopular by criticism of everything done or left undone. He took no part in the battle of Pharsalia, being in poor health: after it, instead of joining Cato, who was carrying on the war in Africa, he sailed to Brundisium. When Caesar returned from Egypt he set out to join him. Caesar hailed him with the greatest kindness and respect. Cicero, however, soon withdrew to Tusculum, where he busied himself with writing. His private affairs vexed him, however. He divorced his wife Terentia and married a rich young woman whose fortune paid off some of his debts. But his days were clouded by a heavy grief: his beloved daughter Tullia died.

After Caesar's murder Octavius treated him graciously. Marcus Antonius, however, who divided the power of the State with Octavius, was detested by Cicero, who did all in his power to increase the growing dissensions between the two. Against Antonius he wrote a series of most envenomed speeches which he called Philippics in imitation of those of Demosthenes against Philip of Macedon. In this, however, he paved the way to his own doom. Antonius and Octavius patched up their quarrels, formed the Second Triumvirate with Lepidus, and carried through a terrible proscription.

Cicero's was one of the names on Antonius's list, placed there mainly by the wish of his wife Fulvia, who hated the man who had spoken evil of her husband. Cicero was killed in his own villa at the age of sixty-four, and his head set up in Rome above the rostrum from which he had so often delivered pa.s.sionate speeches.