The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order · Marcus Tullius Cicero
INTRODUCTION
62, and ending with the appearance of the young Octavian on the scene and the formation of the Triumvirate in B.C. 43, of whose victims Cicero was one of the first and most illustrious. It is by his conduct and speeches during this period that Cicero's claim to be a statesman and a patriot must be judged, and by his writings in the same period that his place in literature must chiefly be assigned. Before B.C. 63 his biography, if we had it, would be that of the advocate and the official, no doubt with certain general views on political questions as they occurred, but not yet committed definitely to a party, or inclined to regard politics as the absorbing interest of his life. In his early youth his hero had been his fellow townsman Marius, in whose honour he composed a poem about the time of taking the _toga virilis_. But it was as the successful general, and before the days of the civil war. And though he served in the army of Sulla in the Marsic war (B.C. 90-88), he always regarded his cruelties with horror, however much he may have afterwards approved of certain points of his legislation.
It was not till the consulship that he became definitely a party man[1] and an Optimate, and even then his feelings were much distracted by a strong belief--strangely ill-founded--that Pompey would be as successful as a statesman as he had been fortunate as a general. For him he had also a warm personal attachment, which never seems to have wholly died out, in spite of much petulance of language. This partly accounts for the surrender of B.C. 56, and his acquiescence in the policy of the triumvirs, an acquiescence never hearty indeed, as far as Cæsar and Crassus were concerned, but in which he consoled himself with the belief that nothing very unconstitutional could be done while Pompey was practically directing affairs at Rome. [Sidenote: The various nature of the Correspondence.]
It is through this period of political change and excitement that the correspondence will take us, with some important gaps indeed, but on the whole fullest when it is most wanted to shew the feelings and motives guiding the active politicians of the day, or at any rate the effect which events had upon one eager and acute intellect and sensitive heart. One charm of the correspondence is variety. There is almost every sort of letter. Those to Atticus are unstudied, spontaneous, and reflect the varying moods of the writer. At times of special excitement they follow each other day by day, and sometimes more than once in the same day; and the writer seems to conceal nothing, however much it might expose him to ridicule, and to the charge of fickleness, weakness, or even cowardice. Those addressed to other friends are sometimes familiar and playful, sometimes angry and indignant. Some of them are careful and elaborate state papers, others mere formal introductions and recommendations. Business, literature, and philosophy all have their share in them; and, what is so rare in ancient literature, the family relations of the writer, his dealings with wife, son, and daughter, brother and nephew, and sons-in-law, are all depicted for us, often with the utmost frankness.
After reading them we seem to know Cicero the man, as well as Cicero the statesman and orator. The eleven letters which precede the consulship are happily, from this point of view, addressed to Atticus. For it was to Atticus that he wrote with the least concealment, and with the confidence that any detail, however small, which concerned himself would be interesting to his correspondent. It is well, therefore, that, though we thus come into his life when it was more than half over, we should at once hear his genuine sentiments on whatever subjects he may be speaking. Besides his own, we have about ninety letters to Cicero from some of the chief men of the day--Pompey, Cæsar, Cato, Brutus, Antony, and many others. They are of very various excellence. The best of them are by much less known men. Neither Pompey nor Cæsar were good letter-writers, or, if the latter was so, he was too busy to use his powers. [Sidenote: Cicero's position previous to the beginning of the Correspondence in B.C. 68.] [Sidenote: Quæstor, B.C. 75.]
The letters begin, then, in B.C. 68, when Cicero was in his thirty-seventh year. He was already a man of established reputation both as a pleader and a writer. Rhetorical treatises (B.C. 86), translations from Xenophon and Plato (B.C. 84), and from the poems of Aratus (B.C. 81), had given evidence of a varied literary interest and a promise of future eminence, while his success as an advocate had led to the first step in the official _cursus honorum_ by his becoming a quæstor in B.C. 75. The lot assigned Lilybæum as his sphere of work, and though the duties of a quæstor in Sicily were not such as to bring a man's name much before the Roman public, Cicero plumes himself, as was not unusual with him, on the integrity and energy which he displayed in his administration. He has indeed the honesty to tell against himself the story of the acquaintance who, meeting him at Puteoli on his return journey, asked him what day he had left Rome and what was the news there. When he answered rather crossly that he had just come from Sicily, another acquaintance put in with "Why, of course. Didn't you know he has just been quæstor _at Syracuse_!" At any rate he had done sufficiently well in Lilybæum to give him his next step, the ædileship to which he was elected B.C. 70, and to induce the Sicilians to apply to him, when in that year they desired the prosecution of the extortionate Verres. His energy and success in this business raised him, without question, to the first rank of advocates, and pledged him to a righteous policy in regard to the government of the provinces.
Marcus and his brother Quintus were the first of their family to do so, and both had to depend on character and ability to secure their elections. But though the father did nothing for his sons by holding curule office himself, he did the best for their education that was possible. Cicero calls him _optimus et prudentissimus_, and speaks with gratitude of what he had done for his sons in this respect. They were sent early to Rome to the house of C. Aculeo, a learned jurisconsult, married to a sister of Helvia; and attended--with their cousins, the sons of Aculeo--the best schools in the city.[2] The young Marcus shewed extraordinary ability from the first, and that avidity for reading and study which never forsook him. As a young man he diligently attended the chambers of renowned jurisconsults, especially those of the elder and younger Scævola, Crassus, and Antonius, and soon found that his calling in life was oratory. It was not till he was twenty-eight years old, however--when he had already written much and pleaded many cases--that he went on a visit of between two and three years to Greece, Asia, and Rhodes, to study in the various schools of rhetoric and philosophy, and to view their famous cities (B.C. 79-77). It was after his return from this tour that his age (he was now thirty-one) made the seeking of office at Rome possible. From that time his election to the several offices--quæstorship, ædileship, prætorship, consulship--followed without any repulse, each in the first year of his age at which he was legally capable of being elected.
He had doubtless made the acquaintance of Titus Pomponius, afterwards called Atticus, early in life. But it seems that it was their intimacy at Athens (B.C. 79), where Atticus, who was three years his senior, had been residing for several years, that began the very close and warm friendship which lasted with nothing but the slightest and most passing of clouds till his death. His brother Quintus was married to Pomponia, a sister of Atticus; but the marriage turned out unfortunately, and was a strain upon the friendship of Cicero and Atticus rather than an additional bond. This source of uneasiness meets us in the very first letter of the correspondence, and crops up again and again till the final rupture of the ill-assorted union by divorce in B.C. 44. Nothing, however, had apparently interrupted the correspondence of the two friends, which had been going on for a long time before the first letter which has been preserved. [Sidenote: Cicero the successful Advocate.] [Sidenote: Death of Cicero's Father.]
The eleven letters, then, which date before the consulship, shew us Cicero in full career of success as an advocate and rising official, not as yet apparently much interested in party politics, but with his mind, in the intervals of forensic business, engaged on the adornment of the new villa at Tusculum, the first of the numerous country residences which his growing wealth or his heightened ideas of the dignity of his position prompted him to purchase. Atticus is commissioned to search in Athens and elsewhere for objects of art suitable for the residence of a wealthy Roman, who at the same time was a scholar and man of letters. He is beginning to feel the charm of at any rate a temporary retreat from the constant bustle and occupations of the city. Though Cicero loved Rome, and could hardly conceive of life unconnected with its business and excitements,[3] and eagerly looked for news of the city in his absence, yet there was another side to his character. His interest in literature and philosophy was quite as genuine as his interest in the forum and senate-house. When the season came for temporarily withdrawing from the latter, he returned to the former with eager passion.
But Tusculum was too near Rome to secure him the quiet and solitude necessary for study and composition. Thus, though he says (vol. i., p. 4), "I am so delighted with my Tusculan villa that I never feel really happy till I get there," he often found it necessary, when engaged in any serious literary work, to seek the more complete retirement of Formiæ, Cumæ, or Pompeii, near all of which he acquired properties, besides an inheritance at Arpinum.[4] But the important achievements in literature were still in the future. The few letters of B.C. 68-67 are full of directions to Atticus for the collection of books or works of art suitable to his house, and of matters of private interest. They are also short and sometimes abrupt. The famous allusion to his father's death in the second letter of this collection, contained in a single line--_pater nobis decessit a.d. 111 Kal. Decembris_--followed by directions to Atticus as to articles of _vertu_ for his villa, has much exercised the minds of admirers, who do not like to think Cicero capable of such a cold-hearted sentence. It is certainly very unlike his usual manner.[5] He is more apt to exaggerate than understate his emotions; and in the first letter extant he speaks with real feeling of the death of a cousin.
Elsewhere--as we have seen--he refers to his father with respect and gratitude. How then are we to account for such a cold announcement? Several expedients have been hit upon. First, to change _decessit_ to _discessit_, and to refer the sentence to the father's quitting Rome, and not life; in which case it is not easy to see why the information is given at all. Second, to suppose it to be a mere answer to a request for the information on the part of Atticus; in which case the date must refer to some previous year, or the letter must be placed considerably later, to allow of time for Atticus to hear of the death and to write his question. In favour of the first is the fact that Asconius (§ 82) says that Cicero lost his father when he was a candidate for the consulship (B.C. 64). Some doubt has been thrown upon the genuineness of the passage in Asconius; and, if that is not trustworthy, we have nothing else to help us. On the whole I think we must leave the announcement as it stands in all its baldness. Cicero's father had long been an invalid, and Atticus may have been well aware that the end was expected. He would also be acquainted with the son's feelings towards his father, and Cicero may have held it unnecessary to enlarge upon them. It is possible, too, that he had already written to tell Atticus of the death and of his own feelings, but had omitted the date, which he here supplies. Whatever may be the true explanation--impossible now to recover--everything we know of Cicero forbids us to reckon insensibility among his faults, or reserve in expressing his feelings among his characteristics.
So far Cicero had risen steadily and without serious difficulty up the official ladder. But the stress was now to come. The old families seem not to have been so ready to oppose the rise of the _novus homo_ to the prætorship. It was the consulship on which they tried to keep a tight hand. Accordingly, immediately after the year of his prætorship, we find him anxiously looking out for support and inquiring who are likely to be his competitors. The interesting point in regard to this is his connexion with Catiline. In his speech in the senate delivered in the following year (_in toga candida_, B.C. 64) he denounced Catiline in the most violent language, accusing him of every conceivable crime; yet in B.C. 65 he not only contemplated being elected with him without any expression of disgust, but even considered whether he should not undertake his defence on some charge that was being brought against him--perhaps for his conduct during the Sullan proscriptions. To whitewash Catiline is a hopeless task; and it throws a lurid light upon the political and moral sentiments of the time to find Cicero even contemplating such a conjunction.
After this, for two years, there is a break in the correspondence. Atticus had probably returned to Rome, and if there were letters to others (as no doubt there were) they have been lost. A certain light is thrown on the proceedings of the year of candidature (B.C. 64) by the essay "On the duties of a candidate," ascribed to his brother Quintus, who was himself to be a candidate for the prætorship in the next year (B.C. 63). We may see from this essay that Pompey was still regarded as the greatest and most influential man at Rome; that Catiline's character was so atrocious in the eyes of most, that his opposition was not to be feared; that Cicero's "newness" was a really formidable bar to his election, and that his chief support was to be looked for from the individuals and companies for whom he had acted as counsel, and who hoped to secure his services in the future. The support of the nobles was not a certainty. There had been a taint of _popularity_ in some of Cicero's utterances, and the writer urges him to convince the consulars that he was at one with the Optimates, while at the same time aiming at the conciliation of the equestrian order. This was, in fact, to be Cicero's political position in the future. The party of the Optimates--in spite of his disgust at the indifference and frivolity of many of them--was to be his party: his favourite constitutional object was to be to keep the equites and the senate on good terms: and his greatest embarrassment was how to reconcile this position with his personal loyalty to Pompey, and his views as to the reforms necessary in the government of the provinces.
Any movement, therefore, on the side of the popular party had now his opposition with which to reckon. He professes to have known very early in his year of office that some more than usually dangerous movement was in contemplation. We cannot well decide from the violent denunciation of Catiline contained--to judge from extant fragments--in the speech _in toga candida_, how far Cicero was really acquainted with any definite designs of his. Roman orators indulged in a violence of language so alien from modern ideas and habits, that it is difficult to draw definite conclusions. But it appears from Sallust that Catiline had in a secret meeting before the elections of B.C. 64, professed an intention of going all lengths in a revolutionary programme and, if that was the case, Cicero would be sure to have had some secret information on the subject. But his hands were partly tied by the fact that the _comitia_ had given him a colleague--C. Antonius--deeply implicated in Catiline's policy, whatever it was. Pompey, whom he regarded as the champion of law and order, was in the East: and Catiline's candidature--and it was supposed his policy also--had had the almost open support of the richest man in Rome, M. Licinius Crassus, and of the most influential man of the _populares_, C. Iulius Cæsar.
In the house of one or the other of them, indeed, the meeting at which Catiline first unfolded his purposes was believed to have been held. Still Catiline had not been guilty of any overt act which enabled Cicero to attack him. He had, indeed, been informed, on very questionable authority, that Catiline had made a plot to assassinate him while holding the elections, and he made a considerable parade of taking precautions for his safety--letting it be seen that he wore a cuirass under his toga, and causing his house to be guarded by the younger members of his party. The elections, according to Plutarch, had at least been once postponed from the ordinary time in July, though this has been denied.[7] At any rate it was not till they had taken place and Catiline had been once more rejected, that any definite step is alleged to have been taken by him, such as Cicero could lay hold of to attack him. On the 20th of October, in the senate, Cicero made a speech warning the Fathers of the impending danger, and on the 21st called upon Catiline for an explanation in their presence.
But, after all, even the famous meeting of the 5th of November, in the house of M. Porcius Læca, betrayed to Cicero by Fulvia, the mistress of Q. Curius, would not have sufficed as grounds for the denunciation of the first extant speech against Catiline (7th of November), if it had not been for something else. For some months past there had been rumours of risings in various parts of Italy; but by the beginning of November it was known that C. Manlius (or Mallius) had collected a band of desperadoes near Fæsulæ, and, having established there a camp on the 27th of October, meant to advance on Rome. Manlius had been a centurion in Sulla's army, and had received an allotment of confiscated land in Etruria; but, like others, had failed to prosper. The movement was one born of discontent with embarrassments which were mostly brought about by extravagance or incompetence. But the rapidity with which Manlius was able to gather a formidable force round him seems to shew that there were genuine grievances also affecting the agricultural classes in Etruria generally. At any rate there was now no doubt that a formidable disturbance was brewing; the senate voted that there was a _tumultus_, authorized the raising of troops, and named commanders in the several districts affected.
It was complicity in this rising that Cicero now sought to establish against Catiline and his partisans in Rome. The report of the meeting in the house of Læca gave him the pretext for his first step--a fiery denunciation of Catiline in the senate on the 7th of November. Catiline left Rome, joined the camp of Manlius, and assumed the ensigns of _imperium_. That he was allowed thus to leave the city is a proof that Cicero had as yet no information enabling him to act at once. It was the right of every citizen to avoid standing a trial by going into exile. Catiline was now under notice of prosecution for _vis_, and when leaving Rome he professed to be going to Marseilles, which had the _ius exilii_. But when it was known that he had stopped short at Fæsulæ, the senate at once declared both him and Manlius _hostes_, and authorized the consuls to proceed against them. The expedition was intrusted to Antonius, in spite of his known sympathy with Catiline, while Cicero was retained with special powers to protect the city. The result is too well known to be more than glanced at here. Catiline's partisans were detected by letters confided to certain envoys of the Allobroges, which were held to convict them of the guilt of treason, as instigating Catiline to march on Rome, and the senate of the Allobroges to assist the invasion by sending cavalry to Fæsulæ.
The murder of Tiberius Gracchus had been _ex post facto_ approved by the senate in B.C. 133-2. In the case of Gaius Gracchus, in B.C. 121, the senate had voted _uti consul Opimius rempublicam defenderet_, and in virtue of that the consul had authorized the killing of Gaius and his friends: thus for the first time exercising _imperium sine provocatione_. Opimius had been impeached after his year of office, but acquitted, which the senate might claim as a confirmation of the right, in spite of the _lex_ of Gaius Gracchus, which confirmed the right of _provocatio_ in all cases. In B.C. 100 the tribune Saturninus and the prætor Glaucia were arrested in consequence of a similar decree, which this time joined the other magistrates to the consuls as authorized to protect the Republic: their death, however, was an act of violence on the part of a mob. Its legality had been impugned by Cæsar's condemnation of Rabirius, as _duovir capitalis_, but to a certain extent confirmed by the failure to secure his conviction on the trial of his appeal to the people. In B.C. 88 and 83 this decree of the senate was again passed, in the first case in favour of Sulla against the tribune Sulpicius, who was in consequence put to death; and in the second case in favour of the consuls (partisans of Marius) against the followers of Sulla. Again in B.C. 77 the decree was passed in consequence of the insurrection of the proconsul Lepidus, who, however, escaped to Sardinia and died there.
In every case but one this decree had been passed against the popular party. The only legal sanction given to the exercise of the _imperium sine provocatione_ was the acquittal of the consul Opimius in B.C. 120. But the jury which tried that case probably consisted entirely of senators, who would not stultify their own proceedings by condemning him. To rely upon such precedents required either great boldness (never a characteristic of Cicero), or the most profound conviction of the essential righteousness of the measure, and the clearest assurance that the safety of the state--the supreme law--justified the breach of every constitutional principle. Cicero was not left long in doubt as to whether there would be any to question his proceeding. On the last day of the year, when about to address the people, as was customary, on laying down his consulship, the tribune Q. Cæcilius Metellus Nepos forbade him to speak, on the express ground that he "had put citizens to death uncondemned"--_quod cives indemnatos necavisset_. Cicero consoled himself with taking the required oath as to having observed the laws, with an additional declaration that he had "saved the state." Nevertheless, he must have felt deeply annoyed and alarmed at the action of Metellus, for he had been a _legatus_ of Pompey, and was supposed to represent his views, and it was upon the approbation and support of Pompey, now on the eve of his return from the East, that Cicero particularly reckoned.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.