Recent Memoirs of Cicero

THERE are vast differences in the world’s feeling about the various names which it cannot readily let die. There are conventional immortalities, which are treasured like the antiques in a gallery, — matters of pomp and pride and æsthetic qualification merely ; and there are homelier and more human immortalities, in which — or rather, in whom — our interest is always vivid and personal ; natural and fallible shades, with all their mundane foibles and fascinations still clinging about them, their loves and hates and desires and disdains forever surging within, as Virgil found them in Hades, and showed them to his great disciple there ; faces whose expressions remain after their features have passed away. Dead men of this description, no matter how many ages ago they passed away, will have partisans and foes ; dead women, lovers and traducers, until the remnant of the living shall have been finally joined to the majority of the departed. Their biographies will be rewritten a dozen times in a century, and fresh hubbub of emphatic and dissentient voices will arise after each new telling of their tale. Of all Conspicuous human careers there is not one more certain of its immortality in impassioned human dispute than that of the great Roman orator and statesman, Marcus Tullius Cicero.

We have before us three of the latest versions of his story : 1 the polished essays of M. Gaston Boissier, of the French Academy, collected under the title of Ciceron et ses Amis ; The Life of Cicero, by Mr. Anthony Trollope; and that very considerable portion of Mr. Fronde’s study of Cæsar wherein, systematically and of fell artistic purpose, he blackens the figure of the civic hero, in order that he may enhance the unnatural radiance with which he has chosen to invest that of the military usurper.

Although Mr. Froude professes to treat the career of Cicero only incidentally, and in so far as it was involved in that of a greater man, it is impossible not to give a certain anxious heed to the judgment passed by the eulogist of Henry VIII. on the men and things of the momentous last century of republican Rome. It may be well enough, therefore, to bestow a word at the outset on Mr. Froude’s method, and on the “ impressionist ” manner of writing history in general. To read Mr. Froude upon any subject whatever is to enjoy one of the most exhilarating forms of literary diversion, not to say dissipation. He is animated ; he is intensely graphic ; he is colloquial sometimes, and sometimes he is stately, but he is both after a peculiar and piquant fashion of his own. He knows a great deal, and among other things he knows the art of so distributing and lightening his literary luggage that the reader, at least, is never oppressed by the weight of it. But the true secret of the hold he has of his generation, of the “ large and intelligent audience ” which his advertisement, so to speak, is certain to draw, is the fact that, whatever names he may bestow upon the characters in his piece, he will talk to that audience of themselves. His story of the past is always a parable of the present. He takes the properties of a by-gone period, and dresses up a stage on which to manœuvre the most pressing questions of the hour. He writes out his narrative upon a deeply colored transparency, and bears it aloft in a party procession, with a strong light burning behind. No wonder he is easy reading. The agrarian laws of Rome seem but a dry subject. They come home to every English reader when the Irish question is seen glowing between the lines. The application whether of unlimited sarcasm or of unqualified eulogy to men who have been dust for nineteen hundred years may appear a futile exercise of wit; but dub these men conservative and liberal, and the performance immediately acquires a point. There is no particular harm in this kind of historic pamphleteering, if its motive is once clearly understood. The late Canon Kingsley was a master of the same art, and the most powerful of his romances, Hypatia, which he frankly calls New Foes with an Old Face, has probably never greatly misled any one as to the state of religious parties in Alexandria under the episcopate of Cyril. The method is, perhaps, more appropriate to historical romance than to studies — even short studies — in bona fide history; yet we venture to say that with many, it may be a majority, of those who read Mr. Froude with greatest zest there is little or no question of accepting him as a historical guide.

Concerning this modern fashion of putting forth tracts and pamphlets under the guise of history, M. Boissier writes, in his introductory essay on the letters of Cicero, with the refined good sense which belongs to him as a Frenchman, and constitutes one of his greatest charms as a writer, “ Before commencing the ensuing study, there is one firm resolution which it befits us to take, — that of not too far importing into it the preoccupations of our own time. It is rather common, nowadays, to seek in the history of the past weapons for the conflicts of the present. Success consists in pointed allusions and ingenious parallels. Perhaps the very reason why Roman antiquity is so fashionable just now is that it affords to political parties a convenient and comparatively safe battle-field, where the passions of the day may contend in antique costumes. If the names of Cæsar, Pompey, Cato, and Brutus are aptly cited, those eminent men must not be too proud of the honor. The curiosity which they excite is not quite disinterested, and, when they are mentioned, it is almost invariably for the sake of sharpening an epigram or seasoning a compliment. Against this irregularity I would guard. The illustrious dead whom I have named seem to me to deserve something better at our hands than being made to subserve the quarrels which distract ourselves, and I respect their memory and their repose too much to drag them into the arena of our daily discussions. It ought never to be forgotten that it is an outrage upon history to subordinate it to the fluctuations of partisan interest, and that it should be, in the fine words of Thucydides, a work done for eternity.”

M. Boissier keeps his engagement most honorably, and leaves us impressed by his disinterestedness no less than by his discrimination. As a Frenchman, he is bound, of course, to try the letters of Cicero by the standard of Madame de Sévigné’s and of the Memoirs of St. Simon ; and he finds many things, and so do we, in the picturesque, profuse, unguarded, and inestimably precious correspondence of the most modern and human of Romans which recall those delightful chroniclers of the grand siècle. It seems to us, however, that it is pushing the parallel a little too far when he attempts to read the sad riddle of Tullia’s character by the selfish and unsympathetic one of Madame de Grignan. We know almost nothing about Tullia, save what we are led to divine by the passion of her father’s love and grief. That she was very like himself, in her pride and sensitiveness, her irregular fervor, her quick irritability, and her formidable wit, seems highly probable; and also that, having been the intimate friend and companion of her brilliant father, she should have found it hard to adapt herself to any one of her three husbands : so that, in the matter of her matrimonial infelicities, there may very well have been, as the Pharisees are so fond of saying, “ fault on both sides.” But that she was at once a spoiled beauty and an unmerciful pedant, cold, critical, conceited, and worldly, like the blindly worshiped offspring of Madame de Sévigné, we find it very hard to believe. If only it were possible to know! If only that tomb which was opened some dozen years ago, upon the Appian Way, in land which had belonged to the Tullys, had proved to contain her ashes, we fancy that even those might have told us something. But alas! the swiftly dissolving image proved to be that of a young maiden, still robed in the melancholy pomp of her first season; not that of the woman prematurely aged by sorrow and disappointment, who died in child-bed at thirty-two. What Tullia really was must still remain a matter of fanciful conjecture and purely personal prepossession. But no one, we repeat, could be more modest in even mentioning his prepossessions than M. Boissier, — more strictly conscientious in refusing to follow their lead. And therefore it is that we feel so safe to follow his.

Mr. Trollope, on the other hand, tells us candidly, in his preface, that he has been moved to write Cicero’s life by his warm indignation at the injustice regularly done him by the devotees of Cæsar, including Mommsen, and concluding, for the present, with Mr. Froude. He owns that Cicero is one of his heroes, and affirms his belief that “ there is matter in the earnestness, the pleasantness, the patriotism, and the tragedy of his life to move a reader still, if the story could only be written of him as it is felt.” That the story, in Mr. Trollope’s case, has been not only felt, but long and laboriously studied, and that it was first studied for its intrinsic interest, and not with any ulterior or controversial purpose, is plain to any unprejudiced reader. Mr. Trollope’s preface, in which he thus foretells the drift of his work, is a very admirable piece of writing. It is forcible as an argument, sifting and arranging the evidence as to Cicero’s general uprightness, both of ancient and modern writers, with something of legal science and precision. It is also finer, from a merely literary point of view, than anything else in the book, excepting some bits of translation from the orations, to which we shall refer again. For our own part we have always thought Mr. Trollope a more accomplished littérateur than he pretends to be. He affects homeliness of style, as a gentleman — and it may be a very proud one —sometimes affects rusticity of manner. He is so unwilling to be thought preoccupied with his dignity that he rather impresses himself to be undignified. The easy slouch of his literary gait may have become a second nature by this, but once upon a time it was conscious and cultivated. It has served him admirably in his multifarious novels, enabling him to produce a greater number of readable, sensible, often laughable, and sometimes memorable pages than any other living writer. It is, at any rate, always sound and grammatical English that he writes, and marvelously free from the vices of vagueness and pretension. Sticklers for the dignity of history may think that he overdoes the free and easy a little when he says concerning the loud lamentation made by Cicero in his exile, “ Roman fortitude was but a suit of armor, to be worn on state occasions. If we come across a warrior with his crested helmet and his sword and his spear, we see, no doubt, an impressive object. If we could find him in his night-shirt, the same man would be there, but those who do not look deeply into things would be apt to despise him because the grand trappings were absent. Chance has given us Cicero in his night-shirt. The linen is of such fine texture that we are delighted with it, but we despise the man because he wore a garment such as we wear ourselves, indeed, though when we wear it nobody is then brought in to look at us.” But Mr, Trollope’s plain manner becomes exceedingly effective in a passage like the following, where he is describing the complimentary session of the senate, held before Pompey in the suburbs of Rome, after his return from his Eastern victories, but before his formal triumph, during which interval etiquette forbade the great man to appear within the walls. There had been some debate on the shameful affair of Clodius, and Crassus had spoken first, then Cicero. Mr. Trollope observes that the latter, to judge by his own letter to Atticus ou the subject, had done his best to “ show off ” before Pompey, who was “ sitting next to him, listening, and by no means admiring his admirer as that admirer expected to be admired. Cicero had probably said to himself that they two together, Pompey and Cicero, might suffice to preserve the republic. Pompey, not thinking much of the republic, was probably telling himself that he wanted no brother near the throne. When, of two men, the first thinks himself equal to the second, the second will generally feel himself to be superior to the first. Pompey would have liked Cicero better if his periods had not been so round, nor his voice so powerful.” He, however, who would understand of what Mr. Trollope is capable in the way of elevated English should turn to Appendix D, at the end of his first volume, where he has given us a parallel translation out of what he calls Cicero’s first great political harangue, — the speech he had made in favor of investing Pompey with the supreme command against Mithridates, commonly called the Oration for the Manilian Law, It would be difficult to imagine anything more perfect in the way of Latin prose than this extract beginning, “ Utinam Quirites, virorum fortium atque innocentium copiam tantam haberetis,” etc. But Mr. Trollope has given us a rendering of it so close to the original, and at the same time so beautiful as English, that it may be said to fall below its model only in that matter of verbal melody and rhythm, in which the English language, from its very nature, must always remain inferior to the Latin.

Mr. Froude also gives us some excellent translations out of the letters and orations of Cicero, using strong idiomatic English phrases, and occasionally imitating the Latin brevity more successfully than Mr. Trollope. But even here the watchful Cæsarite contrives ingeniously to introduce the flavor of his prejudice, by marking large omissions in the text, and observing in foot-notes that the gaps are to be supposed filled with empty declamation, or wearisome laudation of the orator’s self. It does not, indeed, require much acumen to perceive that Cicero was a vain man, fond of the praise of others, and over-apt to praise himself. The very school-boy, who owes the great lawyer a grudge for the trouble he gives him in construing, can see that he had that weakness, and feels some natural gratification in the discovery. Neither Mr. Trollope, who lustily claims for himself the position of Cicero’s “ best lover,” nor M. Boissier, who merely obeys the delicate and merciful code of the modern French school of sympathetic criticism, would dream for a moment of gainsaying it. But here, as elsewhere, the two are essentially in accord, and curiously support and supplement one another in their effort to show that it was, after all, more outward exigency than inward conceit which kept Cicero so incessantly busy at the unsatisfying work of self-examination and self-explanation. His lot had fallen upon an evil time, and one that was particularly evil for a political idealist, who also possessed strong social instincts and a keen love of approbation. It was a revolutionary time. Change, destruction, dissolution, were everywhere. There was no question even of patching up matters so as to last the life-time of the actual generation. The deluge was then. The conservative and sentimental, no less than the most reckless innovators, had to be in perpetual motion. Each new position which they took up, and desperately attempted to strengthen, was in its turn undermined by the progress of the flood. Groups gathered for a moment, only to separate with a sauve qui peut. So it came to pass that the man, of all others, most averse, constitutionally, to change had to be constantly shifting his ground; the man most dependent upon sympathy and companionship was always finding himself isolated. Yet he was conscious of fixed principles and loyal affections. He must needs try to make it clear to himself and others how the seeming inconsistency had come about.

Fortunately, through the foresight, in the first instance, of the cool and sagacious friend to whom the larger half of Cicero’s correspondence was addressed, we have preserved to us the very words in which, from day to day for a period of twenty-one years, he embodied his long Apologia. Cornelius Nepos, a contemporary, said that the whole history of the time was in those letters, and all Cicero’s innumerable biographers, from whatever point they have viewed his character, have acknowledged in them their chief source of information. The light they shed is often indirect, and Mr. Trollope and M. Boissier have shown with equal force, each after his own fashion, how misleading these lively chronicles and hot disquisitions would prove to any one who should treat them as premeditated history. The letters to Atticus were the outpourings to a perfectly safe confidant, living at a remote distance, of the contradictory impressions, baffled conclusions, transient “ miffs,” and enormous ups and downs in feeling of a thin-skinned and mercurial man of genius, with a matchless power of expression, at a time of portent and cataclysm such as has been described. To say, as Mr. Froude says somewhere of the letters in general, that Cicero never wrote a line without an eye to posterity is to deny them the very quality which gives them at once their unique value and their principal charm.

But it was not to Atticus only, the discreet, wealthy, worldly gentleman, with his long head, his easy conscience, and his fine taste in art and literature, who knew so well what he was about in preferring Athens to Rome as a residence just then, — it was not to him alone that Cicero was in the habit of dashing off careless and garrulous letters. There are many more, equally imprudent, and therefore equally pleasant reading, addresserd to his young friend and favorite Cælius, the type of the jeunesse dorée of Rome at that bad period ; others to his protégé Trebatius, whom he placed with Cæsar in Gaul; a considerable number to his always unsatisfactory brother Quintus. Yet another side of Cicero’s nature is revealed by the letters to his wife Terrentia, and his beloved slave, and subsequently freedman, Tiro, between whom and himself the relation was so rarely honorable and beautiful. Then there are missives of a more pompous, premeditated, and politic character; feelers advanced, negotiations essayed, situations discussed; fencingmatches in words with almost every one of the prominent actors in the wild drama of the day, — with Lepidus and Trebonius, Brutus, Cassius, and Cato, Pompey, and Cæsar himself. “ Cicero,” says M. Boissier, “ is not the only person with whom this correspondence acquaints us. It is full of curious details concerning all those toward whom he stood in friendly or business relations. They were the most illustrious personages of that time, — those who played the first parts in the revolution which put an end to the Roman republic. No men have ever merited study more than they. It should be observed that there is a defect of Cicero’s which has been of great service to posterity. If the case were Cato’s, for example, how many correspondents we should miss! The virtuous alone would find a place among the writers ; and God knows that at that period their number was not large. Happily, Cicero was less difficult to please, and did not import into the choice of his intimacies the rigid scruples of a Cato. A sort of native benevolence rendered him accessible to people of all shades of opinion; his vanity led him to seek for homage everywhere. He had a foot-hold in all the parties, — a great fault in a politician, and one with which the maliciously disposed of his own time did not fail to reproach him bitterly ; but it is a fault by which we profit, for hence it comes that all parties are represented in his correspondence.”

M. Boissier subsequently devotes a special essay to each of Cicero’s principal intimates, but first he has two extremely interesting chapters on his public and private life. In the former he amply illustrates the manner in which Cicero’s political character was, in the first instance, determined, and his entire destiny shaped, by the very circumstances of his birth. Born in the country and in the middle class, of well-to-do, old-fashioned, plainly living, and highly thinking people, among whom the loftiest traditions of the old Roman state lingered unimpaired far longer than in Rome ; born, nevertheless, with all the instincts, and receiving the education, or more than the education, of an aristocrat, it was inevitable that he should, on entering public life, attach himself to the patrician party, and equally inevitable that he should always be, to some extent, solitary among them. He embraced their cause, for he religiously believed it to be that of national honor and continuity ; but he found it impossible, when he came to hold office, to imitate their unscrupulousness. Alike as quæstor in Western Sicily, in the very beginning of his career, and as governor in Cilicia, twenty-five years later, he felt constrained to treat the natives fairly, and even mercifully, and to refrain from enriching himself. Even Mr. Froude has to confess so much. But here was an implied censure of patrician practice, not likely to be well taken from a parvenu. Cicero lived in Rome as the aristocrats lived. No other style of living was, in fact, possible to the man ; and so, while frankly proclaiming himself a novus homo, he came in for his full share of the odium of the unwashed. Yet most of the prevalent aristocratic vices were intolerably distasteful to him, and no reader of the orations need be told how he could lash them when he chose. No wonder, therefore, that the optimates, too, eyed him somewhat askance. They were proud of his talents, and anxious to retain his services, but they reserved to themselves the right of telling him, if he angered them, that they knew nothing of his name. From Cicero’s native town of Arpinum, and probably from the self-same social class, there had come, a generation before his day, the radical demagogue Marius. The party to which Cicero gave his life-long, if sometimes qualified and self-questioning, adhesion ; for which, though no warrior, he was ready, when the time came, resolutely to die, had fixed itself in temporary security through the ruthless proscriptions, the more than Parisian terror, which had marked the final victory over the mob of the patrician Sylla. And yet Cicero made his début as a great pleader by an impassioned and successful defense of one of the sufferers under those proscriptions, — Sextus Roscius. The next great shock and peril of the conservative or optimate party was that of the Catilinian conspiracy, headed by a renegade of their own order, who had understood how to gather to himself the offscouring of all parties. It was, as all the world knows, the genius, the promptitude, and the intrepidity of Cicero as consul which had crushed aud baffled that conspiracy. But his reward at the hands of the society which he had saved, for the time, was that decree of banishment which he took so lamentably, almost laughably hard, and which was proposed by one patrician, Clodius ; abetted, in secret, beyond a doubt, by another and far greater, by Cæsar himself ; aud blandly acquiesced in by the great and good Pompey, to whom Cicero did homage all his life as his political suzerain, and who was none the less, as Mr. Trollope says, his perpetual “ bugbear, stumbling-block, and mistake.” Is it possible to imagine a more anomalous and distracting political position ? No doubt Cicero went beyond the letter of the law when he ordered the execution of the Catilinian conspirators in the Mamertine prison. (He set an example to all coming ages, by the way, when he compressed the report of that execution into the one polite word, vixerunt. Would that the mouth-pieces of public opinion in our own day could emulate the dignified heathen on the morrow of a judicial homicide !) The moment was one which demanded an ultra measure. It seems wonderful to us yet that it should have been Cicero, the doubter, the theorizer, the self-conscious, the cautious, if not timid, who had the firmness to issue that order and strike that decisive blow. It has often been observed that men of theory and reflection, when forced to act, are apt to be more reckless than those who are habitually men of action, for the very reason, perhaps, that they lack experience in practical consequences. But when Mr. Froude represents Cæsar as shaking his head mournfully over the fate of Cethegus and Lentulus, murmuring, “ Violence, — always violence ! When is this to end ? ” and so girding himself up to all that he proposed to do, we are irresistibly reminded of Admiral Seymour, thoughtfully bombarding Alexandria, for the sake of preserving peace.

“ It may be conceded,” says M. Boissier, " without lowering Cicero too far, that public life did not suit him. The reasons which made him an incomparable writer did not permit him to be an admirable statesman. Those vivacious impressions, those delicate and irritable sensibilities, which were a chief source of his literary talent, forbade him the complete mastery of himself. Things had too great a hold upon him. He must be capable of self-detachment who would control them. His mobile and fertile imagination, causing him to expand on every side at once, rendered him hardly capable of connected plans.

He could never entirely delude himself about men, or stultify himself concerning their enterprises, and he was therefore subject to sudden revulsions of feeling. He often boasted of having foreseen and foretold the future. It was not, we may be sure, in his quality of augur, but by virtue of a sort of fatal perspicacity which showed him the consequences of events, and their evil consequences rather than their good. On the nones of December, when he put an end to Catiline’s accomplices, he understood perfectly the vengeance to which he exposed himself, and he foresaw his exile. He had, therefore, on that day, despite the hesitations with which he has been reproached, more courage than another might have had, who, in a moment of exaltation, would have perceived no danger. . . . Did Cicero belie himself when, after having defended the victims of the aristocracy under Sylla, he defended, after a lapse of thirty years, the victims of the democracy under Cæsar ? Was he not, on the contrary, more consistent than those who, after having bitterly complained of exde themselves, exiled their enemies the moment they came into power ? ”

Thoughtful and subtle analysis like this is not much in Mr. Trollope’s line. He admits, after his own homely and slightly humorous fashion, that Cicero’s training as a lawyer had assisted his native capacity for seeing both sides ; and he does not fail to remind his readers that the practice of a successful lawyer, even in our own day, implies a certain facility in defending both. But he is wholly in earnest, and it seems to us very impressive in passages like the following, where he urges the essential consistency of his hero’s political course :—

“ I think it is made clear, by a study of Cicero’s life and works up to the period of his exile, that an adhesion to the old forms of the Roman government was his guiding principle. I am sure that they who follow me to the close of his career will acknowledge that, after his exile, he lived for this principle, and that he died for it. ‘ Respublica ' — the republic — was the one word which, to his ear, contained a political charm. It was the shibboleth by which men were to be conjured into well-being. The word Constitution is nearly as potent with us. But it is essential that the reader of Roman history and Roman biography should understand that the appellation had in it, for all Roman ears, a thoroughly conservative meaning. Among those who, at Cicero’s period, dealt with politics in Rome, all of whom, no doubt, spoke of the republic as the vessel of state, which was to be defended by all persons, there were four classes. There were those who simply desired the plunder of the state, — the Catilines, the Syllas of the day, and the Anthonys, — men such as Verres had been, and Fonteius, and Autronius. The other three can best be typified each by one man. There was Cæsar, who knew that the republic was gone, past all hope. There was Cato, — “ the dogmatic fool Cato,” as Mommsen calls him, perhaps with some lack of the historian’s dignity, — who was true to the republic, but who could not bend an inch, and was thus as detrimental to any hope of reconstruction as a Catiline or a Cæsar. Cicero was of the fourth class, believing in the republic, intent on saving it, imbued, amid all his doubts, with a conviction that if the optimates or boni — the leading men of the party — would be true to themselves, consuls, censors, and senate would still suffice to rule the world ; but prepared to give and take with those who were opposed to him. It was his idea that political integrity should keep its own hands clean, but should wink at much dirt in the world at large. Nothing, he saw, could be done by Catonic rigor. We can see now that Ciceronic compromises were, and must have been, equally ineffective. The patient was past cure. But in seeking the truth as to Cicero, we have to perceive that, amid all his troubles, frequently in despondency, sometimes overwhelmed by the misery and hopelessness of his condition, he did hold fast by this idea to the end. The frequent expressions made to Atticus in opposition to this belief are to be taken as the murmurs of his mind at the moment, as you shall hear a man swear that all is gone, and see him tear his hair, and shall yet know that there is a deep fund of hope within his bosom. It was the ingratitude of his political friends, his ‘ boni ’ and his optimates,— of Pompey, at their head, — which tried him the sorest; but he was always forgiving them, forgiving Pompey as the head of them, because he knew that were he to be severed from them, then the political world must be closed to him altogether.”

Both Mr. Trollope, in the earlier part of his narrative, and M. Boissier in his chapter on Cicero’s private life, give anxious heed to the long-vexed question of the source of Cicero’s ample income. Nothing could show more plainly how truly this man has been like a living contemporary to each succeeding generation of his biographers than their perennial interest in this never-to-beclosed inquiry. Mr. Forsyth, we remember, felt forced to conclude that Cicero must have taken pay, or at least presents, for his legal services, though this was forbidden by law. M. Boissier inclines to the opinion that all through the period of his public life his resources were fed by bequests; that there was a kind of fashion among the rich Romans of his day (how very convenient a one for him !) for remembering him handsomely in their wills. Mr. Trollope infers, and rather plausibly, from the very expensive education given both to Marcus and his brother Quintus Cicero, that their bourgeois father must have been a much richer man than has been ordinarily supposed, and that the brothers began the world with large inherited wealth. Cicero’s most determined adversaries, in his own and later times, have been slow to accuse him of having enriched himself dishonorably. The evidence is too overwhelming upon the other side. He was too notoriously a man of what must have seemed, in his day, quite fantastic scruples in money matters. There were speculations, sanctioned by the highest Roman respectability, in which he scornfully refused to engage. He would absolutely not soil his hands with the plunder of a province, or even with the regular perquisites of an ex-governor. “ My coming to Asia,” he writes to Atticus, with pardonable pride, “ has not been of the slightest expense to any person ” (Adventus nosier nemini ne minimo quide fuit sumptui) ; or, as Mr. Trollope translates it, “ has cost no man a shilling.” Cicero was sometimes in debt, but easily and cheerfully in debt, as one who knows he can pay, and who always does pay. There was no question with him of deliberate and wholesale bankruptcy, like Cæsar’s. Such being the case, we cannot resist the notion that there is the same sort of impertinence in prying into the sources of Cicero’s wealth that there would be in the case of a contemporary of expensive habits, all whose obligations are met, and whose financial integrity is above suspicion. We know that it was his irritable fastidiousness in money matters which led to the divorce of his wife Terrentia, with whom he had lived comfortably for nineteen years, and to whom he was writing freely and affectionately up to the very eve of the catastrophe. He discovered that, during his lugubrious year of exile, she had not only been speculating freely, — as many Roman ladies did in those days, — but that she had been in league with a former slave of theirs, Philotomous, to cheat him of large sums. His wrath was naturally high, and his remedy was at hand. In a society where divorce was now of daily, almost hourly occurrence, there is no wonder that the remedy should have been applied promptly. Cicero’s standards were probably lax enough in some respects, compared with those of the nineteenth century, but the taint of pecuniary meanness and indirection was one which he could not and would not tolerate. We know how the discovery of it dismayed and disgusted him in the case of another person, whom he was well inclined to love and admire. When, during the course of Cicero’s governorship in Cilicia, it came out that Junius Brutus, — “ our old friend Brutus, whom,” as Mr. Trollope says, “ all English readers have so much admired, because he dared to tell his brother-inlaw, Cassius, that he was ‘ much condemned to have an itching palm,’ ” — that he, the professional patriot, the “ blameless prig,” had been lending money in Salamis, and exacting, through the medium of a vulgar agent named Scaptius, an interest of forty-eight per cent., when twelve per cent. was the extreme limit fixed by law, Cicero wrote to Atticus, in very sickness of soul, that he had looked into the affair, and had ordered the payment of the legal interest only. “ I shall be sorry to have offended him ” (Brutus), he writes, “ but much more so that he should have proved to be other than the man I took him for.”

That the disagreeable impression produced on Cicero’s mind by the results of the Salaminian investigation passed away, and that the time came afterwards when he saw, or thought he saw, in Brutus the only possible saviour of the perishing state, is also known. The multiplied misfortunes of their country under the twofold scourge of foreign and civil war, the ever-broadening sweep of Cæsar’s encroachments, drew the two men closely to one another in the end. After the battle of Pharsalia and the death of Pompey, they both made their submission to the conqueror, and in the four years that passed between Pharsalia and Cæsar’s death they were much together. There was a difference of twenty years in their ages, but Cicero had always a special liking for the society of younger men. It came, no doubt, of his own unconquerable vivacity of spirits. He was never too old, as Mr. Trollope says, to laugh with the Curios and the Cæliuses behind the back of the great men. With the grave, austere, and somewhat pragmatical Brutus there was indeed no question of the sort of joviality to which Cicero referred, when he wrote to Pætus concerning Hirtius and Dolabella, “ They are my pupils in speaking, and my masters in dining.” (Dicendi discipulos habeo, cœnandi magistros.) But Brutus quickened in Cicero the speculative intellect, and stimulated him to literary production. They studied Greek philosophy together. " Both of them,” says M. Boissier, “ had loved and cultivated it from their youth up ; both appeared to love and cultivate it with increased ardor, when the one-man power had expelled them from public affairs. . . . The characteristics of the different passions, the true nature of virtue, the hierarchy of man’s duties ; all those problems which an honest man is sure to propose to himself at some period of his life, and that one in particular before which he so often recoils, but which recurs with terrific obstinacy, and troubles at times the spirit of the most earthy and material, the future after death, — all these were investigated with no display of dialectic, without prejudice of school or engagement of party, with less care for the invention of new ideas than for the finding everywhere some grains of good sense and practical principle. Such is the character of Roman philosophy, at which we had best not sneer; for its rôle has been great in the world, and by it the wisdom of the Greeks, rendered at once more solid and more transparent, has been transmitted to the peoples of the Occident. This philosophy, like the empire, dates from Pharsalia, and it owes much to the triumph of Cæsar, who, by suppressing political life, compelled active minds to seek fresh food for their activity.”

Out of studies like these grew the Tusculan Disputations, in the first of which Cicero essays to prove that death is not an evil. “ What a commonplace it seems,” continues M. Boissier, “ and how hard it is, not to regard these fine disquisitions as mere school exercises, or displays of oratory ! Nothing could be farther from the truth, however, and the generation for which they were written found something very different in them. That generation read them to refresh its courage in the teeth of proscription, and arose from the reading firmer, more composed, better prepared to endure the great misfortunes which it foresaw. Atticus himself, Atticus the egotist, so little disposed to risk his life for any one, found in them an undreamedof energy. ‘ You tell me,’ writes Cicero, ‘ that my first Tusculana has put you in heart. I am very glad of it. There is no better or readier refuge [from what is coming] than that [which I indicate].’ The refuge, of course, was death, and what numbers availed themselves of it! Never has been seen such an incredible contempt of life ; never was death less dreaded. After Cato, suicide became a contagion, a frenzy. The conquered, like Juba, Petreius, and Scipio, knew no other method of escaping the conqueror. Laterensis kills himself for grief that his friend Lepidus should have betrayed the republic. When Scapula can hold out no longer in Cordona, he orders a pyre, and burns himself alive. When Decimus Brutus, a fugitive, hesitates to adopt the heroic remedy, His friend Blasius kills himself before his eyes, for an example. At Philippi it was a veritable delirium. Even those who might have escaped cared not to survive their defeat. Quintilius Varus dons his robes of state, and has himself slain by a slave. Labienus digs his own grave, and kills himself upon the margin. Cato the younger, for fear of being spared, flings off his helmet, and cries out his own name. Cassius, in his impatience, kills himself prematurely. Brutus closes the list by a suicide amazing for its dignity and calm. What a strange and terrible commentary on the Tusculanæ, and how does a general truth, exemplified in the practice of so many brave men, cease to be a commonplace ! ”

All the literary works, the letters and orations apart, which have won for Cicero most renown, the moral and philosophical treatises, the Tusculanæ, and the essays on Friendship and Old Age, were produced during the year preceding Cæsar’s assassination, — the year of Cicero’s grand climacteric, the last but one of his life. Mr. Trollope may be partly right in regarding these productions rather as an effort at distracting his own mind from the miseries and uncertainties of the present, as a series of souvenirs of his student life in Greece, than a formal profession of his own philosophical creed. But what shall be said of the mental vitality, versatility, and fecundity of a man, already old, to whom such authorship was mere recreation ; the pastime of a season of enforced inactivity; a heroic effort to divert his own attention from the consciousness of devastating sorrows, past and present, and the just apprehension of yet more fatal calamities immediately impending ?

Brutus, meanwhile, was passing under the influence of Cassius, aud becoming the centre and soul of the conspiracy which was consummated on the ides of March. Cicero was not privy to that conspiracy, but the perpetrators of the fatal deed appealed first to him for applause when it was done, and they did not appeal in vain. For a brief period he seems to have been deluded by the belief that the idea of his life was vindicated, the republic regenerate, and her wrongs avenged. Then the populace veered; the conspirators were paralyzed; the elements of the second triumvirate made their sinister apparition ; Brutus and Cassius, with their handful of aristocratic adherents, withdrew to Greece, to meet their fate at Philippi. Cicero, who had been considering the question of accompanying them, and who joined them for a single night at Velia, turned back, at the earnest instigation of Brutus himself, to make one more attempt at reviving the dying republican cause at Rome. Even Mr. Froude cannot refuse his admiration to the heroism of that supreme effort. Whether or no, in bygone times, Cicero had ever played a craven part, there was no question of his daring now. He attacked Anthony in the terrible Philippics. He strove to see in “ young Octavius,” or Octavian, as he was beginning to call himself, the rising star of the old Roman party. He tried to win and mould into the sorely needed patriot leader Cæsar’s comely and promising nephew, the “ lad,” as he called him, to the deep despite of the coming man and emperor. We know now that it was all in vain ; that Anthony defied and Octavian betrayed him. He himself suspected that it would be so, in the rare moments when the brave old statesman allowed himself to despond. “ We have killed the king,” he would then say bitterly, “ but the kingdom is with us still. We have taken away the tyrant; the tyranny survives.” “ Looking back,” says Mr. Trollope, “ we wonder that he should have dared to hope. But it is to the presence within gallant bosoms of hope still springing, though almost forlorn, — of hope which has, in its existence, been marvelous, — that the world has been indebted for the most beneficial enterprises. It was not given to Cicero to stem the tide, and prevent the evil coming of the Cæsars; but still, the nature of the life he had led, the dreams of a pure republic, those aspirations have not altogether perished.”

There was but one thing now left for Cicero to do. All had perished which had made his life rich and dear: home and family, friends and honors, cause and country. He had only to meet his own end, and he did it with quiet courage. M. Boissier has touched with so fine and reverent a hand that closing scene that we must give it in his own words. Referring to the remark of Livy, — Cicero’s detractor always, and, when he wrote, the courtier of Augustus, — that of all Cicero’s misfortunes death was the only one which he bore like a man, M. Boissier adds, “ It must be confessed that this is something. . . . His death seems to me to atone for all the weaknesses of his life. It is much for a man like him, who piqued himself on not being a Cato, to have been so firm at that terrible moment. The more timid he was by nature, the more I am touched to find him so steadfast in his death. And so, whenever, in the course of his history, I am tempted to reproach him with his fluctuations and his failures, I think of that last scene, which Plutarch has painted so well. I see him ‘ with hair and beard disordered, and weary countenance, taking his chin in his left hand, with the old familiar gesture, and looking fixedly at his murderers,’ and I dare not be severe. With all his faults, he was an honorable man, ‘ who loved his country,’ as Augustus himself said, in a moment of frankness and remorse.”

How far Cicero was supported in his latest moments by the hope of that personal immortality for which he had argued so eloquently, — how far any one is so supported in his latest moments, — it is useless to inquire. It seems to Mr. Trollope that Cicero received a deep and lasting impression of divine things at the time of his initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries, when he was a student at Athens, and that he was always in some sort a religious man. It has seemed to many, in all the Christian ages, that Cicero was one of those high and isolated minds which received, while the world yet lay in darkness, a certain suffusion from the coming light of Christianity.

When young Octavius had become the Emperor Augustus, he developed virtues and magnanimities of which he had shown no symptoms in his ruthless youth. He was one of those of whom prosperity seems to make ever better and better men; and as his prosperity was unparalleled, so his amelioration was immense. The story that he openly lamented, in his imperial days, having consented to the murder of such a man as Cicero rests upon somewhat doubtful authority. But there is no questioning the evidence of the great inscription of Ancyra, sometimes called the political testament of Augustus, where we have, in his own words, an abstract of his career. We know from Suetonius that he prepared such a statement, and that it was engraved on plates of brass and set in the front of his tomb. We know, from the discovery, at intervals, of fragments in various places, that it must have been widely copied, and that at Angora, in 1863, the entire document was brought to light from among the ruins of a Turkish edifice, which had once been a Greek temple, — and an enormous treasure-trove it was ; and from the studiously deciphered inscription on those marble slabs, we know at last, and must do the royal apologist grace for the grain of conscience that it implies, that he mentions the season of vengeance with which his reign began with a reluctance, brevity, and constraint strikingly in contrast with the tone of confident and stately self-gratulation which characterizes the rest of the document.

To read M. Boissier and Mr. Trollope in connection is like listening to the thorough and amicable discussion of a congenial theme by two men equally accomplished in their subject, but shedding upon it such varying lights as are due to the contrasted character of their individual minds. If M. Boissier preserves an air of greater dispassionateness, and shows himself more subtle and penetrating, as well as more composed and elegant in his phraseology, there is a warmth and heartiness in Mr. Trollope, a sort of careless abundance of information, and a force in his pungent good sense, which renders him a no less delightful annalist than the Academician.

Their united voices are very powerful, and will go farther toward carrying conviction to the unbiased mind than the most brilliant sallies of a perverse and petulant partisanship.