Dialogues of the Dead Part 16

_Scipio_.--You are endeavouring to confound my cause with yours; but they are exceedingly different. You apprehended a sentence of condemnation against you for some part of your conduct, and, to prevent it, made an impious war on your country, and reduced her to servitude. I trusted the justification of my affronted innocence to the opinion of my judges, scorning to plead for myself against a charge unsupported by any other proof than bare suspicions and surmises. But I made no resistance; I kindled no civil war; I left Rome undisturbed in the enjoyment of her liberty. Had the malice of my accusers been ever so violent, had it threatened my destruction, I should have chosen much rather to turn my sword against my own bosom than against that of my country.

_Caesar_.--You beg the question in supposing that I really hurt my country by giving her a master. When Cato advised the senate to make Pompey sole consul, he did it upon this principle, that any kind of government is preferable to anarchy. The truth of this, I presume, no man of sense will contest; and the anarchy, which that zealous defender of liberty so much apprehended, would have continued in Rome, if that power, which the urgent necessity of the State conferred upon me, had not removed it.

_Scipio_.--Pompey and you had brought that anarchy on the State in order to serve your own ends. It was owing to the corruption, the factions, and the violence which you had encouraged from an opinion that the senate would be forced to submit to an absolute power in your hands, as a remedy against those intolerable evils. But Cato judged well in thinking it eligible to make Pompey sole consul rather than you dictator, because experience had shown that Pompey respected the forms of the Roman const.i.tution; and though he sought, by bad means as well as good, to obtain the highest magistracies and the most honourable commands, yet he laid them down again, and contented himself with remaining superior in credit to any other citizen.

_Caesar_.--If all the difference between my ambition and Pompey's was only, as you represent it, in a greater or less respect for the forms of the const.i.tution, I think it was hardly becoming such a patriot as Cato to take part in our quarrel, much less to kill himself rather than yield to my power.

_Scipio_.--It is easier to revive the spirit of liberty in a government where the forms of it remain unchanged, than where they have been totally disregarded and abolished. But I readily own that the balance of the Roman const.i.tution had been destroyed by the excessive and illegal authority which the people were induced to confer upon Pompey, before any extraordinary honours or commands had been demanded by you. And that is, I think, your best excuse.

_Caesar_.--Yes, surely. The favourers of the Manilian law had an ill grace in desiring to limit the commissions I obtained from the people, according to the rigour of certain absolute republican laws, no more regarded in my time than the Sybilline oracles or the pious inst.i.tutions of Numa.

_Scipio_.--It was the misfortune of your time that they were not regarded. A virtuous man would not take from a deluded people such favours as they ought not to bestow. I have a right to say this because I chid the Roman people, when, overheated by grat.i.tude for the services I had done them, they desired to make me perpetual consul and dictator.

Hear this, and blush. What I refused to accept, you s.n.a.t.c.hed by force.

_Caesar_.--Tiberius Gracchus reproached you with the inconsistency of your conduct, when, after refusing these offers, you so little respected the tribunitian authority. But thus it must happen. We are naturally fond of the idea of liberty till we come to suffer by it, or find it an impediment to some predominant pa.s.sion; and then we wish to control it, as you did most despotically, by refusing to submit to the justice of the State.

_Scipio_.--I have answered before to that charge. Tiberius Gracchus himself, though my personal enemy, thought it became him to stop the proceedings against me, not for my sake, but for the honour of my country, whose dignity suffered with mine. Nevertheless I acknowledge my conduct in that business was not absolutely blameless. The generous pride of virtue was too strong in my mind. It made me forget I was creating a dangerous precedent in declining to plead to a legal accusation brought against me by a magistrate invested with the majesty of the whole Roman people. It made me unjustly accuse my country of ingrat.i.tude when she had shown herself grateful, even beyond the true bounds of policy and justice, by not inflicting upon me any penalty for so irregular a proceeding. But, at the same time, what a proof did I give of moderation and respect for her liberty, when my utmost resentment could impel me to nothing more violent than a voluntary retreat and quiet banishment of myself from the city of Rome! Scipio Africa.n.u.s offended, and living a private man in a country-house at Liternum, was an example of more use to secure the equality of the Roman commonwealth than all the power of its tribunes.

_Caesar_.--I had rather have been thrown down the Tarpeian Rock than have retired, as you did, to the obscurity of a village, after acting the first part on the greatest theatre of the world.

_Scipio_.--A usurper exalted on the highest throne of the universe is not so glorious as I was in that obscure retirement. I hear, indeed, that you, Caesar, have been deified by the flattery of some of your successors. But the impartial judgment of history has consecrated my name, and ranks me in the first cla.s.s of heroes and patriots; whereas, the highest praise her records, even under the dominion usurped by your family, have given to you, is, that your courage and talents were equal to the object your ambition aspired to, the empire of the world; and that you exercised a sovereignty unjustly acquired with a magnanimous clemency. But it would have been better for your country, and better for mankind, if you had never existed.

DIALOGUE x.x.x.

PLATO--DIOGENES.

_Diogenes_.--Plato, stand off. A true philosopher as I was, is no company for a courtier of the tyrant of Syracuse. I would avoid you as one infected with the most noisome of plagues--the plague of slavery.

_Plato_.--He who can mistake a brutal pride and savage indecency of manners for freedom may naturally think that the being in a court (however virtuous one's conduct, however free one's language there) is slavery. But I was taught by my great master, the incomparable Socrates, that the business of true philosophy is to consult and promote the happiness of society. She must not, therefore, be confined to a tub or a cell. Her sphere is in senates or the cabinets of kings. While your sect is employed in snarling at the great or buffooning with the vulgar, she is counselling those who govern nations, infusing into their minds humanity, justice, temperance, and the love of true glory, resisting their pa.s.sions when they transport them beyond the bounds of virtue, and fortifying their reason by the antidotes she administers against the poison of flattery.

_Diogenes_.--You mean to have me understand that you went to the court of the Younger Dionysius to give him antidotes against the poison of flattery. But I say he sent for you only to sweeten the cup, by mixing it more agreeably, and rendering the flavour more delicate. His vanity was too nice for the nauseous common draught; but your seasoning gave it a relish which made it go down most delightfully, and intoxicated him more than ever. Oh, there is no flatterer half so dangerous to a prince as a fawning philosopher!

_Plato_.--If you call it fawning that I did not treat him with such unmannerly rudeness as you did Alexander the Great when he visited you at Athens, I have nothing to say. But, in truth, I made my company agreeable to him, not for any mean ends which regarded only myself, but that I might be useful both to him and to his people. I endeavoured to give a right turn to his vanity; and know, Diogenes, that whosoever will serve mankind, but more especially princes, must compound with their weaknesses, and take as much pains to gain them over to virtue, by an honest and prudent complaisance, as others do to seduce them from it by a criminal adulation.

_Diogenes_.--A little of my sagacity would have shown you that if this was your purpose your labour was lost in that court. Why did not you go and preach chast.i.ty to Lais? A philosopher in a brothel, reading lectures on the beauty of continence and decency, is not a more ridiculous animal than a philosopher in the cabinet, or at the table of a tyrant, descanting on liberty and public spirit! What effect had the lessons of your famous disciple Aristotle upon Alexander the Great, a prince far more capable of receiving instruction than the Younger Dionysius? Did they hinder him from killing his best friend, c.l.i.tus, for speaking to him with freedom, or from fancying himself a G.o.d because he was adored by the wretched slaves he had vanquished? When I desired him not to stand between me and the sun, I humbled his pride more, and consequently did him more good, than Aristotle had done by all his formal precepts.

_Plato_.--Yet he owed to those precepts that, notwithstanding his excesses, he appeared not unworthy of the empire of the world. Had the tutor of his youth gone with him into Asia and continued always at his ear, the authority of that wise and virtuous man might have been able to stop him, even in the riot of conquest, from giving way to those pa.s.sions which dishonoured his character.

_Diogenes_.--If he had gone into Asia, and had not flattered the king as obsequiously as Haephestion, he would, like Callisthenes, whom he sent thither as his deputy, have been put to death for high treason. The man who will not flatter must live independent, as I did, and prefer a tub to a palace.

_Plato_.--Do you pretend, Diogenes, that because you were never in a court, you never flattered? How did you gain the affection of the people of Athens but by soothing their ruling pa.s.sion--the desire of hearing their superiors abused? Your cynic railing was to them the most acceptable flattery. This you well understood, and made your court to the vulgar, always envious and malignant, by trying to lower all dignity and confound all order. You made your court, I say, as servilely, and with as much offence to virtue, as the basest flatterer ever did to the most corrupted prince. But true philosophy will disdain to act either of these parts. Neither in the a.s.semblies of the people, nor in the cabinets of kings, will she obtain favour by fomenting any bad dispositions. If her endeavours to do good prove unsuccessful, she will retire with honour, as an honest physician departs from the house of a patient whose distemper he finds incurable, or who refuses to take the remedies he prescribes. But if she succeeds--if, like the music of Orpheus, her sweet persuasions can mitigate the ferocity of the mult.i.tude and tame their minds to a due obedience of laws and reverence of magistrates; or if she can form a Timoleon or a Numa Pompilius to the government of a state--how meritorious is the work! One king--nay, one minister or counsellor of state--imbued with her precepts is of more value than all the speculative, retired philosophers or cynical revilers of princes and magistrates that ever lived upon earth.

_Diogenes_.--Don't tell me of the music of Orpheus, and of his taming wild beasts. A wild beast brought to crouch and lick the hand of a master, is a much viler animal than he was in his natural state of ferocity. You seem to think that the business of philosophy is to polish men into slaves; but I say, it is to teach them to a.s.sert, with an untamed and generous spirit, their independence and freedom. You profess to instruct those who want to ride their fellow-creatures, how to do it with an easy and gentle rein; but I would have them thrown off, and trampled under the feet of all their deluded or insulted equals, on whose backs they have mounted. Which of us two is the truest friend to mankind?

_Plato_.--According to your notions all government is destructive to liberty; but I think that no liberty can subsist without government. A state of society is the natural state of mankind. They are impelled to it by their wants, their infirmities, their affections. The laws of society are rules of life and action necessary to secure their happiness in that state. Government is the due enforcing of those laws. That government is the best which does this post effectually, and most equally; and that people is the freest which is most submissively obedient to such a government.

_Diogenes_.--Show me the government which makes no other use of its power than duly to enforce the laws of society, and I will own it is ent.i.tled to the most absolute submission from all its subjects.

_Plato_.--I cannot show you perfection in human inst.i.tutions. It is far more easy to blame them than it is to amend them, much may be wrong in the best: but a good man respects the laws and the magistrates of his country.

_Diogenes_.--As for the laws of my country, I did so far respect them as not to philosophise to the prejudice of the first and greatest principle of nature and of wisdom, self-preservation. Though I loved to prate about high matters as well as Socrates, I did not choose to drink hemlock after his example. But you might as well have bid me love an ugly woman, because she was dressed up in the gown of Lais, as respect a fool or a knave, because he was attired in the robe of a magistrate.

_Plato_.--All I desired of you was, not to amuse yourself and the populace by throwing dirt upon the robe of a magistrate, merely because he wore that robe, and you did not.

_Diogenes_.--A philosopher cannot better display his wisdom than by throwing contempt on that pageantry which the ignorant mult.i.tude gaze at with a senseless veneration.

_Plato_.--He who tries to make the mult.i.tude venerate nothing is more senseless than they. Wise men have endeavoured to excite an awful reverence in the minds of the vulgar for external ceremonies and forms, in order to secure their obedience to religion and government, of which these are the symbols. Can a philosopher desire to defeat that good purpose?

_Diogenes_.--Yes, if he sees it abused to support the evil purposes of superst.i.tion and tyranny.

_Plato_.--May not the abuse be corrected without losing the benefit? Is there no difference between reformation and destruction.

_Diogenes_.--Half-measures do nothing. He who desires to reform must not be afraid to pull down.

_Plato_.--I know that you and your sect are for pulling down everything that is above your own level. Pride and envy are the motives that set you all to work. Nor can one wonder that pa.s.sions, the influence of which is so general, should give you many disciples and many admirers.

_Diogenes_.--When you have established your Republic, if you will admit me into it I promise you to be there a most respectful subject.

_Plato_.--I am conscious, Diogenes, that my Republic was imaginary, and could never be established. But they show as little knowledge of what is practicable in politics as I did in that book, who suppose that the liberty of any civil society can be maintained by the destruction of order and decency or promoted by the petulance of unbridled defamation.

_Diogenes_.--I never knew any government angry at defamation, when it fell on those who disliked or obstructed its measures. But I well remember that the thirty tyrants at Athens called opposition to them the destruction of order and decency.

_Plato_.--Things are not altered by names.

_Diogenes_.--No, but names have a strange power to impose on weak understandings. If, when you were in Egypt, you had laughed at the worship of an onion, the priests would have called you an atheist, and the people would have stoned you. But I presume that, to have the honour of being initiated into the mysteries of that reverend hierarchy, you bowed as low to it as any of their devout disciples. Unfortunately my neck was not so pliant, and therefore I was never initiated into the mysteries either of religion or government, but was feared or hated by all who thought it their interest to make them be respected.

_Plato_.--Your vanity found its account in that fear and that hatred. The high priest of a deity or the ruler of a state is much less distinguished from the vulgar herd of mankind than the scoffer at all religion and the despiser of all dominion. But let us end our dispute. I feel my folly in continuing to argue with one who in reasoning does not seek to come at truth, but merely to show his wit. Adieu, Diogenes; I am going to converse with the shades of Pythagoras, Solon, and Bias. You may jest with Aristophanes or rail with Thersites.

DIALOGUE x.x.xI.

ARISTIDES--PHOCION--DEMOSTHENES.

_Aristides_.--How could it happen that Athens, after having recovered an equality with Sparta, should be forced to submit to the dominion of Macedon when she had two such great men as Phocion and Demosthenes at the head of her State?

_Phocion_.--It happened because our opinions of her interests in foreign affairs were totally different; which made us act with a constant and pernicious opposition the one to the other.

_Aristides_.--I wish to hear from you both (if you will indulge my curiosity) on what principles you could form such contrary judgments concerning points of such moment to the safety of your country, which you equally loved.

_Demosthenes_.--My principles were the same with yours, Aristides. I laboured to maintain the independence of Athens against the encroaching ambition of Macedon, as you had maintained it against that of Persia. I saw that our own strength was unequal to the enterprise; but what we could not do alone I thought might be done by a union of the princ.i.p.al states of Greece--such a union as had been formed by you and Themistocles in opposition to the Persians. To effect this was the great, the constant aim of my policy; and, though traversed in it by many whom the gold of Macedon had corrupted, and by Phocion, whom alone, of all the enemies to my system, I must acquit of corruption, I so far succeeded, that I brought into the field of Chaeronea an army equal to Philip's. The event was unfortunate; but Aristides will not judge of the merits of a statesman by the accidents of war.

_Phocion_.--Do not imagine, Aristides, that I was less desirous than Demosthenes to preserve the independence and liberty of my country. But, before I engaged the Athenians in a war not absolutely necessary, I thought it proper to consider what the event of a battle would probably be. That which I feared came to pa.s.s: the Macedonians were victorious, and Athens was ruined.

_Demosthenes_.--Would Athens not have been ruined if no battle had been fought? Could you, Phocion, think it safety to have our freedom depend on the moderation of Philip? And what had we else to protect us, if no confederacy had been formed to resist his ambition?