Before the Assassination

THE darkest year of Cicero’s life was the year, or, more strictly speaking, the period of between ten and eleven months, which he passed at Brindisi, after his return from Dyrrachium. It was far worse than the year of his exile, which he bore so ill, when he was all the time either lamenting that he had not died yesterday, or protesting that he would die to-morrow. Then he could and did hope — even while he professed to despair — that the tyranny of the moment would presently be overpast, and he himself completely restored to the keen delights, the congenial conflicts, the great and satisfying activities of his Roman life. Then, though worsted for the moment by his political adversaries, he had never so much as dreamed of a foe in his own household. He knew, or thought he knew, himself to be a man exceptionally happy in his private relations ; with a wife on whom he leaned, a daughter whom he adored, and a brother whom he trusted implicitly, beside the lifelong friend who lent him a hand in every emergency, and from whom he had no reserves. Now every week that passed added something to the proof that the wife of almost thirty years had taken advantage of his free-handed recklessness in money matters to overreach and systematically swindle him ; the brother whom he had so generously associated with all his own success, and whose freaks of surly illtemper he had been at such tender pains to soothe and palliate, had quarreled fiercely with him, and was base enough to be trying to do him a deadly mischief with the man on whom, alas, they were all to depend henceforth for the very breath of their civic life.

Cicero’s daughter and his friend, indeed, were still and always true: the daughter passionately, the friend calmly, considerately, and wisely. But the marriage which Terentia had arranged for Tullia during her father’s absence in the East had justified all Cicero’s misgivings, Dolabella had good manners in society; he was not without natural good feeling, as he showed when Tullia died ; but he was a man more entirely and, as one may say, triumphantly unprincipled than it is easy now to conceive. He had married Tullia quite simply for her dowry, as the easiest way of raising a considerable sum of money, and he seized and spent the installments of the same even before they were due: so that but for the untiring goodness of Atticus she would have been, in Cicero’s enforced absence, positively distressed for money; while to a woman of the fastidious mental and personal refinement which we surely divine in Tullia, life with a man of Dolabella’s rooted vices had proved, as her father had foreseen it would, intolerably repugnant.

Politically, that winter of 707 (48-47 B. c.) was to Cicero and men like him, with whom the abstract love of country had been a species of religion, a period of black suspense. Cæsar had followed Pompey into Egypt, and Pompey was dead; but a great mystery hung over the subsequent movements of the conqueror, — if indeed he were conquering still. We know now that he had to meet an unexpectedly desperate resistance on the part of the republican army and its allies in Egypt, and that he had to encounter Cleopatra; but meanwhile for six months — from December, 706, to June, 707 — not a letter or dispatch from the great general was received in Italy. Should he come back victorious, who could say what the ultimate fate might be, even of those republican leaders who had laid down their arms after Pharsalia: of Cicero, who had returned to Brindisi; of Cassius, who had surrendered the fleet; of Brutus, who had, in some sort, made personal submission ? But if Cæsar never came back at all, the doom of these men was sure. Cato would never forget, nor the sons of Pompey forgive.

If we add to so many sources of anxiety and doubt the fact that the climate of Brindisi appears to have been as unwholesome then as it is now, and peculiarly poisonous to Cicero, the miserably morbid condition both of body and mind which the letters of this time betray is, I think, fully accounted for. A great and last reaction was to follow; a final upgathering of all the man’s intellectual and moral forces, when his philosophy, so called, took shape, and he taught himself, and did his best to teach other Romans, how to support life without hope, as well as to face death without fear. We like to believe of Cicero, as we would like others to believe of ourselves, that the nobler self was the true self. At all events, we shall not do him the presumable injustice of quoting extensively from the dreary letters of the Brindisi time. A very few short extracts will suffice.

It was in December, 706, that the rumor first reached Marcus that Quintus had sent his son to Cæsar, not merely to make his own peace, but to undermine, if possible, the credit of the brother to whom he owed so much. “ I am told,” Cicero writes to Atticus, " that Cæsar and all his friends repudiated his insinuations, but that he still persists on all occasions in saying the most vindictive things about me. It is the bitterest of all my present troubles, and the most incredible thing that ever happened to me.” On the 3d of January, 707, we find Cicero making naive avowal of a proceeding at which we stand aghast, but which evidently infringed no code of honor prevailing at the time. A large packet had arrived from Quintus. “ I opened it to see if there were any letters for me, and found none, but one for Vatinius and one for Ligurius, which I caused to be delivered. Directly afterward they both came to me in hot indignation, crying out upon the baseness of the man. They then proceeded to read me their letters, in which all manner of opprobrium was heaped upon me. Ligurius was raving. He said he knew that Cæsar disliked Quintus, but that he had shown him consideration, and even supplied him with money, entirely for my sake. Under these painful circumstances I wished to know what he had written to other people. I thought it would be most injurious to him if this villainy of his should get about, for I know his disposition.” (One wonders if Cicero thought more leniently of Pomponia at that moment than he had done when starting for Cilicia.) " So I send the letters to you,” — having, of course, read them himself, — “ and if you think it will serve his cause to have them forwarded, why, forward them. They 'll not harm me ; and as to their having been opened, Pomponia, I believe, has his seal.”

The mixture, in this and the letter next to be quoted, of striking magnanimity with what all our own training compels us to consider meanness is amazing. We have to console ourselves as best we can by reflecting that if a perfectly well-bred man of the last century B. C. could open letters not addressed to himself, the world must have made some progress.

On the 8th of March, by which time it had become tolerably certain that Cæsar had sustained no permanent check, Cicero writes to Atticus: “You betray some anxiety as to what reason I may be able to give Cæsar for having left Italy at all. I see no need of any new reason. I have written to him repeatedly, and I have said the same thing to many others, —that I could not have endured the odium of staying behind even had I desired to do so, and much more to the same effect. The last thing which I should wish would be for him to think that I had acted on any judgment save my own, in a matter of such importance. And so when I got a letter from Cornelius Balbus the younger, saying that he ” (Cæsar)

“ thought that my brother Quintus had ‘ sounded the trumpet’ — those were his words — for ray departure, I, who did not then know what Quintus was writing about me to all the world, though he had been extremely taunting and unpleasant to my face, nevertheless wrote to Csesar as follows : —

“ ' I am no less concerned on my brother Quintus’s behalf than on my own; but I am hardly in a position just now to recommend him to you. So much, however, I do beg you to believe, that he never did anything to shake my allegiance or weaken my attachment to you, but rather to cement our union ; and that he was my companion merely, not my leader, when I went away. Deal with him in other respects as your own humanity and regard for himself may dictate, but do not, I most earnestly entreat you, allow me to stand in his way with you.’ ”

There are a few letters to Terentia of this period ; all very short, and stiff, and cold. It is plain that the matter of their divorce was already under consideration, though not effected till the ensuing year ; that the husband and wife had agreed each to provide by will for Tullia and her children, but that Cicero found great difficulty in keeping Terentia to her word. He declined to receive a visit from her at Brindisi, but Tullia did come to him in June ; and the saddest letter of the whole year, in view of the calamity that was coming, and which Cicero seems half to have foreboded, is that in which he bitterly reproaches himself for having been too much distracted in mind to get the full comfort of his daughter’s presence :—

“ My dear Tullia came to me on the 4th of June, bringing your three letters, and telling me all about your great goodness and devotion to herself. Yet I did not enjoy as I ought to have done the nobility, sweetness, and filial affection of the rarest girl alive, so unspeakably did it distress me to see that fine creature involved in misery through no sin of her own, but by my unpardonable fault.”

A greater rascal than Tullia’s husband, Cicero elsewhere opines, was never born. “ And to think ” we find him writing in July, “ of a son-in-law of mine moving for a general repudiation of debts ! “ For Dolabella had followed the bright example of Clodius, and gotten himself adopted into a plebeian family, that, as tribune of the people, he might be able to further the radical measure aforesaid. Yet all the while he was exerting himself to smooth matters between Cicero and Cæsar; and outside, in the world of men, Dolabella and Cicero never ceased to be on friendly terms. It is only less wonderful than the opening of Quintus’s letters.

It was authentically known, soon after this, that Cæsar had completed the cirele of his victories by beating Pharnaces and the Pompeian remnant in Asia, and that he was coming home by way of Achaia. Cicero had a passing thought of sending his son to meet the Imperator on his arrival, but eventually decided on the manlier course of going in person ; “ not altogether without hope,” says Plutarch, “ and yet in some fear of making experiment of the temper of an enemy and a conqueror before so many witnesses.” But “Cæsar, as soon as he saw him coming, a good way before the rest of the company, came down from his chariot and saluted him, and, leading the way, conversed with him alone for some furlongs.”

So that trying moment was well over, thanks to the superb address of the master of the world, and the relief of both men was doubtless great. For Cæsar had come prepared to be very conciliatory to the more illustrious of the old optimates ; and they, — what better hope, what other hope, had they now, either for themselves or their country, than in him ?

There began then for Cicero, with the opening of the year 708, another and an altered life in Rome. What sort of peace he had first made with himself, based on what renunciations, fortified by what resolutions, may best be gathered from the letters of this time to his learned friend Varro, who had commanded two Pompeian legions during the first Spanish campaign, surrendered to Cæsar at Cordova, and was now living in retirement on his estates, absorbed in literary pursuits.

“ You must know that, on my return to the city, I made my peace with those old friends, my books : not that we had ever quarreled, but that I felt a little abashed in their presence. For it seemed to me as if I had been disloyal to their precepts when I condescended to mix myself in the turmoil of affairs with associates who afterward proved so treacherous. But my books have forgiven me and restored me to our old intimacy, assuring me at the same time that you, who never swerved from them, have been a wiser man than I. After such a reconciliation, I feel encouraged to hope that when you and I meet we may be able to make light both of our present anxieties and our forebodings for the future. " And in April, toward the close of that second African campaign of Cæsar’s, which ended with the battle of Thapsus and the suicide of Cato: “ You have my reasons for remaining in Rome ; and little by little the daily habit of my life here has dulled the edge of my sensibility. But if I were you, I should stay quietly where you are, until the present excitement is over and we know how this affair has ended. For ended I believe it to be, but much must still depend on the mood of the victor and the turn of events. I have my own ideas about the matter, but still I wait to see. One thing, however, remains for us,—to live in those common studies, which once we pursued for pleasure solely. but now in self-defense. If anybody wants to employ us, I will not say as architects, but as mere workmen in the rebuilding of the republic, why, we must not only not demur, but accept the commission joyfully. If, on the other hand, there is no call for our services, we can, at all events, read and write politics, and discuss questions of morals and of law ; influencing the fortunes of the state, if not in the Forum and Senate-House, by our books and our letters, like the learned men of old. Such, at least, is my idea, but I very much wish that you would write me how your own inclination lies, and what you propose to do.”

How much was meant by these brave resolves ; how strong the rebound, at, sixty-one, of Cicero’s intellectual energy ; what teeming reflections and speculations were his, which would find vent, even though the orator were constrained to be dumb, appears from his extraordinary literary activity of the present, year. He began his elaborate essay De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum. — On the Highest Good and Evil. He wrote a history of Roman eloquence, the De Claris Oratoribus, which he dedicated to Marcus Brutus, — now governor, under Cæsar, of Cisalpine Gaul, — reviewing the political situation in a noble and outspoken preface. He wrote an analysis of the various kinds of eloquence, a sort of manual of public speaking, in the form of dialogues between himself and his son, and projected and composed the introductory essay to a volume of translations from the great Greek orators; and he wrote the panegyric on Cato, to which allusion has already been made. All through the winter, also, Cicero went much into society, and seems to have enjoyed it with almost youthful zest. Oppius and Balbus, Hirtius and Dolabella, and other prominent Cæsarites were living in town, and entertaining at a more magnificent rate than ever before. They all wanted Cicero and his wit at their sumptuous banquets, and he, on his part, professes to have turned epicure, if not Epicurean, and to have enjoyed the same thoroughly. “ Don’t talk to me,” he writes gayly to Papirius Pætus, “ of your two-penny pilot-fish and your spiced and potted sardines ! I used to condescend to such things once, but it’s all altered now. Hirtius and Dolabella are my masters in the art of dining, and my disciples in that of speaking. Surely you must have heard, if you get any news at all, how they are forever spouting in my house, and I supping at theirs. ... I have eaten more peacocks than you ever ate pigeons.” All the letters to Pætus are marked by a charming humor, and the figure itself of the wealthy old patrician, who made so amusing a parade of his own frugality, and had kept out of politics as consistently as Atticus himself, comes out in a most attractive light. “ I must confess.” runs the earliest letter to Pætus which we possess of this year, “ that I seem just now to be treated with no little consideration by numbers of people, but no one of them all is more congenial to me than you. Not so much because of your old and stanch friendship, which is a great thing indeed, perhaps the greatest of all, but many others have shown me the like. What renders you so attractive, so altogether grateful and delightful, to me is a something peculiar to yourself. It is the quality of your wit, which is not Attic, but even more spicy, — the real old pungent Roman humor. You might not think it, but I get a wonderful pleasure out of bons-mots that smack of the soil. They began to go out when foreign fashions were first introduced into the city, and now, since the advent of these men in breeches from beyond the Alps, hardly a trace remains of the sweet old-fashioned gayety.”

Cicero’s tone with Pætus is always comparatively light, even when he touches on grave matters. “ I ask no questions about the future,” he says in another letter, “for, in the first place, it is by sheer luck that I have lived for the last four years, —if there be either life or luck in surviving the republic! — and, moreover, I fancy I can pretty well foresee the course of events. The right of the stronger will prevail, and arms will always be the stronger. I must content myself with what is given. The man who cannot ought to die. They are measuring the land about Veii and Capua ” (for distribution among Cæsar’s veterans). “ The latter place is not far from Tusculum, but I have no fear. I shall take my ease while I can, and hope it may last. If it fall out otherwise,” he adds with delicate irony. “ why, having made up my mind to live nobly, like a hero and a sage, I can surely have no ground of complaint against him who enables me to fulfill my resolution ! ”

With the opening of spring, Cicero went, as of old, into the country; and never had his beloved villas or his childhood’s home appeared to him so fair. Now the letters to Atticus recommence, the first being dated from the ancestral Arpinum : “ It is ten days since we parted, and I am scribbling this note before light, being off for Anagni, which I shall reach to-day. Thence I shall go for one day to Tusculum, and this will bring us to the 28th, which was the day appointed. If only I could fly at once to the arms of my dear Tullia and your Attica’s kiss of welcome ! ”

Later in the season, after a longer stay at the Tusculanum, he writes, “ On my soul, Atticus, not this villa in which I revel, not the very Islands of the Blest, can console me for so many days’ absence from yourself.” And from Antium, by the summer sea, “ Nothing could be sweeter than the solitude of this place ; . . . nothing lovelier than the house, the shore, the view seaward, the whole situation. But having nothing else to say, and being very sleepy. I will enlarge on this theme no more.”

All this time Cicero was writing industriously, and often engaging Atticus to clear up for him, in the libraries of Rome, some doubtful point of history. In the halcyon mood of the moment, he could even write of the brother who had wronged him, cavalierly indeed, but without the bitterness of last year : “ Quintus the father shows not the quarter nor the thousandth part of a grain of common sense, exulting as he does over the fact that his son and Statius have become priests of Pan,¹ and so brought a double disgrace upon the family. Philotimus is another.”

Cæsar was now once more, for a short time, in the city. The embers of republican resistance in the East had been thoroughly stamped out, and the pang endured by the elder men of seeing him celebrate his fourfold triumph, — the triumph of a Roman over Romans. His generosity to his soldiers had been more than kingly, and his temper was very gracious. He was planning for the ensuing winter a final campaign again the sons of Pompey in Spain, but he laid his masterly hand, meanwhile, to the administration of home affairs, and seemed in a fair way to reduce their unspeakable chaos to a new and brilliant Older. We are dazzled even now by the spectacle of his versatility, when we see how he found time and complaisance to reply quietly in his Anti-Cato to Cicero’s daring panegyric ; and we half understand the acquiescence of the populace in his divine pretensions, when we find him setting the stars in order an passant, and bringing the lagging new year up to time by flinging two additional months into the autumn of 708.

Cicero, having concluded his own peace, or rather arranged the terms of his truce with the master, began exerting himself to bring about the reconciliation and restoration of certain of his less practicable friends who were still in exile. Doubtless he craved for himself the moral support no less than the congenial society of these men; but also he had not yet abandoned the hope that they might influence to some extent the policy of Cæsar. There was Marcus Marcellus, consul with Sulpicius in 705, who had resented with so much spirit Cæsar’s first decisive aggressions ; who, ever since Pharsalia, had been living proudly at Mitylene; and who was one of the very few men against whom Cæsar undoubtedly cherished a deepseated grudge. Marcellus was cousin to half the patricians in Rome; and when the entire Senate had solicited his recall, and Cæsar had finally granted it., Cicero broke his resolution to speak no more in public, and thanked the autocrat in that exceedingly graceful and flattering address, the Pro Marcello, whose authenticity, after long dispute, seems now to be fully established. The spell being broken, he presently undertook the formal defense of Quintus Ligarius, afterwards one of the conspirators against Cæsar, who, as governor of Asia, had made an obstinate resistance there, and was now impeached for having refused to surrender the government of the province to one Tubero, a kinsman of Cicero’s own. We seem to see the slight shrug of Cæsar’s lordly shoulders when he heard who was to be counsel for Ligarius. “ There is no doubt,” he observed, — or so we have it in Plutarch, — “ that Ligarius is a bad man and my enemy, but why should we not give ourselves the pleasure of hearing Cicero plead once more ? ” He thought himself proof against the witchery of that silver tongue, but he was mistaken. When, after a subtle passage, of which the purport may be condensed into those words of Portia’s, —

“ And earthly power doth then show likest God’s,

When mercy seasons justice,” — Cicero passed on to an affecting mention of Pharsalia and Pompey’s fate, the nervous thrill became too strong for Pompey’s conqueror. He changed color, bowed his head, and pardoned his own future assassin.

It was a triumph for Cicero, though not like those of days gone by, when he had swayed the conscript fathers in Senate assembled: and we are not surprised to find him, in the first glow of complacency, extolling Cæsar’s clemency to Cæcina, a learned knight of old Etruscan lineage, who had opposed the usurper valiantly, both with sword and pen, but was willing to be reconciled now.

“ As for Cæsar,” our friend writes from Rome, in the last days of July, “ he is by nature mild and merciful. . . . Moreover, the one thing which he admires above all others is a commanding talent of the order of your own. . . . The bitterest enemy of the cause which Pompey sustained, bravely, indeed, but with inadequate preparations, does not say of us that we acted either as had citizens or as base men ; and I have many a time had occasion to admire the dignity and impartiality of Cæsar himself in this regard. He never speaks even of Pompey otherwise than most respectfully. You will object that he acted harshly enough. Nay, that was the doing of war and of victory, not of Cæsar. And just see what a welcome he gave me ! He has made Cassius his legate, Brutus prefect of Gaul and Sulpicius of Greece, and Marcellus, against whom he was peculiarly incensed, he has restored to all his dignities. What is the natural inference ? ”

And Cæcina replies warmly from his exile in Sicily : “ I do not wish, in my trouble, either to stultify myself or grossly to impose on your kindness. In either case, my excuse would have to be that it has been the constant habit of your life to exert yourself so untiringly for your friends that not only do they never think of asking help elsewhere, but they demand your services as their right.”

Cicero’s divorce was now consummated, and that of Tullia arranged, although the child that was coming was to be born, probably by way of establishing its legitimacy, under Dolabella’s roof. Divorce, as we know, was of daily occurrence in Rome, but the society which approved it seems equally to have exacted re-marriage with the least possible delay; so that nothing short of death, we may presume, could have spared poor Tullia a fourth husband from among the Roman nobility. Terentia married at least twice again, and lived, some say, to her hundredth year; but to Cicero, with his exceptionally refined and affectionate disposition, the first thought of separation had been full of distress. I never could have resolved on such a step,” he wrote as late as in October of this year, to Plancius, who had been so good to him in his exile, “ if I had not found my home affairs, when I came back, in quite as desperate a condition as those of the state.” Once the scruple silenced, however, and the resolution taken, he had enjoyed, as we have seen, a rather peculiar lightness of spirit; and it is deplorably natural that he should have taken the silliest step of his entire life in choosing a successor to Terentia. Already in the summer, Atticus is proposing candidates for the vacant place ; but Cicero rejects with vehemence the idea of paying court to a daughter of Pompey, and says of another lady, whom he is kind enough not to name, that she is the greatest fright ever beheld. Nevertheless, before the close of the year, we find him espousing Publilia, a beautiful heiress of about eighteen, and a ward of his own. There is reason to suppose that the step was deeply distasteful to both of Cicero’s children, and that the young wife, as might have been foreseen, showed herself angrily jealous, from the very first, of his devotion to his daughter; but the situation presently resolved itself, and that most tragically. Tullia was confined in January, and as soon as possible — too soon, perhaps — was removed to the villa at Tusculum, where she immediately sank and died. From that hour, Cicero would have none of the vain young woman who had resented his darling’s ascendency ; and though barely two months wedded, they lived together no more.

He must have been nearly beside himself in the first dark days of that supreme bereavement. Atticus took him away from Tusculum, and placed at his disposal — for it was long before he could endure society — a quiet lodge of his own, outside the walls of Rome. “ A house in the midst of gardens,” — this is all we know of the place. The spiritual conflict sustained there was too desperate for any written record, but that Cicero came out of it in some sort victorious, profoundly sad, indeed, and stripped of his last untimely illusions about life, though resolute and calm, appears plainly from the tone of the letters when they recommence. In March we find him at Astura, that gem of an island set in the sweetest of all bays, with the villa-crowned and pine-shadowed heights of Antium in view on the one hand, and on the other the misty glories of the Circean cape. “ What you say,” he writes to Atticus, “about your longing to have me surmount this grief is like you, and I call you to witness that I have not been false to myself. I suppose that I read over, while I was in your house, every word ever written by any man concerning the mastery of sorrow, but my grief was mightier than all consolation. And then I did what no one, surely, ever did before: I undertook to administer comfort to myself in writing. I will send you the book when my amanuenses have copied it out. You may rest assured that no such Treatise of Consolation was ever written before. All day long I write, producing nothing of importance, yet distracted for the time being, — not much, for the power of my grief is mighty; nevertheless, I do get a certain relief, and I strive with all my might to recover, if not the reality, at least, the outward appearance of composure. Sometimes, indeed, the very effort seems a sin, and then again I feel that it would be a sin not to make it. . . . I told you about Brutus’s letter. It was very wise, but did not help me much. . . . Do not let Pilia distress herself too greatly. My grief should suffice for us all.”

“ Pray see that Apuleius, whom I cannot wholly refuse, is put off from day to day. At present I need speak to no one. I can make my way early into the tangled depths of the forest, and wander there all day, if I will. Solitude, as you say, is the best friend.”

“ I fancied from the beginning of your letter that you had some great piece of news to communicate, though little care I what happens in Spain ; but I immediately perceived that you were only replying to what I had previously said, in your remarks about my public life. You tell me that my home is in the forum. But I have lost both forum and home. No, Atticus, my life is done, — quite done. I knew it in my heart long ago, and now that this last link is broken I confess it freely.”

Soon, however, under the kindly law no mourner can evade, the cares of this world begin to intrude upon Cicero’s trance of sorrow. Both his own testamentary dispositions and those of Terentia have again to be altered on behalf of Tullia’s orphan boy, and the lady is as impracticable as ever; makes trouble about the witnesses, makes trouble about everything. “ Was the like ever known ? ” Cicero writes to Atticus. “ She rejects the persons named because she thinks they will wish to know the terms of the wills. Very well; I have no objection. Why cannot she simply do what I have done ? I am willing that my will should be read by anybody she may name. She will see that I could not have acted more generously by our grandson.”

But his momentary anger fades away, and a few days later we find him writing gently: “ What you say about Terentia is quite true, and you express my own feeling. The obligation is a very sacred one. And at any rate, if there is to be any wrong, let it be hers, not mine.”

Young Marcus was at this time importuning his father to be allowed to go and serve under Cæsar in Spain. Cicero hated the thought of a son of his own engaged in a war of extermination against the sons of Pompey, but what ground had he for refusing ? He suggests to Marcus that it might not be altogether agreeable to find himself anticipated in Cæsar’s confidence and outranked on Cæsar’s staff by his unfriendly and unscrupulous cousin Quintus. “ Sed tamen remisi.” (“ However, I gave my consent.”) But the lad — for he was not yet twenty-one, and plainly boyish for his years — decided that after all he would rather go to Athens, if he could have an establishment there, like certain other young Romans of fashion, Cicero was only too glad to accept the alternative, and to Athens Marcus went in the course of the spring, very handsomely provided, ostensibly to pursue a philosophical course, but really to a life of idleness and dissipation. His was the prevailing and unmistakable type of the great man’s son in all ages; and long afterward, under Augustus, we find him renowned for his heroic potations. But that which most of all served to distract the thoughts of the bereaved father and revive his energies was the project he had formed of commemorating Tullia’s name and graces in such a monument as even the world of Cecilia Metella had not yet seen. The best artists were to be employed, the most beautiful site selected. Filial piety first draws his thoughts to the river-island at Aipinum. " What an ideal spot for a true apotheosis !” But no; Arpinum is too remote and obscure. He thinks of Ostia, and often of Astura, pervaded as its groves must ever be henceforth by Tullia’s yearning shade. But in view of the stormy epoch which he forebodes only too surely, Cicero cannot bear to think of his daughter’s “ fane ” exposed to the rude chances of internecine war. He would prefer, upon the whole, a site inside of Rome, in some one of the gardens along the Tiber banks ; and of these he names so many as practicable for his purpose that we come to picture the now sullen river as bprdered for its entire length, within the city wall, by luxuriant greenery.

Atticus, the wary, trembles to think of the ruinous expense involved in his friend s project, but Cicero will listen to no prudential discussions. “Do not be alarmed at the price put upon the gardens. I can do very well without silver-plate, or sumptuous clothes, or a variety of pleasant houses, but this thing I must have.”

“You ask me what is the utmost I am prepared to give, and how much more I will pay for those gardens of Drusus. I have never said that I would pay any more. I have in mind an ancient villa of Coponius’, not very large, and a noble one belonging to Silius ; but I do not know what either estate produces, and I suppose one ought to know, Nevertheless, I would pay an unreasonable price for either; that is, I would pay what they are worth to me just now. . . . Do me the justice to acknowledge that I am in my right. I am exceedingly anxious to buy, yet I will not, in the headlong eagerness of my grief, run counter to your advice.”

It is plain enough that Atticus continued to put Cicero off, quietly and no doubt conscientiously throwing obstacles in the way of his acquiring one piece of property after another. No traces of the monument have ever been discovered, and whether it was even begun we do not know. If it were, it may well have been leveled, during the next few years, by the fury of Antony.

Some time in March, as we learn from one of the letters of this month to Atticus, the mother of Publilia requests, perhaps demands, to he allowed at least to come with her daughter and pay Cicero a visit; but lie curtly refuses to see them, and soon there begin to be allusions to the best manner of repaying the little bride’s handsome dowry, In connection with these final efforts after reconciliation, however, and undertaking at one time to promote them, we catch fleeting, tantalizing glimpses of another woman, of whom we would give much to know more. It is one Cærellia, a learned lady of seventy, a correspondent of Cicero’s, and a great admirer of his philosophical works, of which she always appears to have advance copies. She was wealthy, also, for she had lent Cicero money, which, after her indiscreet interference on Publilia’s behalf, he dryly requests Atticus to repay. But what would we not give for a few of the notes which had aforetime passed between him and this clever old creature, to whom we instinctively attribute something approaching one of the French types of the grand siècle !

A few more weeks of strict retirement, and the letters of condolence begin to come from the friends of Cicero at a distance. Dolabella writes, and we see from the tone of Cicero’s reply that the faithless husband had been shocked and sorry when the sad news came. Cæsar writes from Spain, on the eve of his last great victory; for the decisive battle of Munda was fought a year, almost to a day, before the fatal Ides of March. Once more we marvel at the man’s universality, conquering the world, yet neglecting no slightest conventional obligation. Nevertheless, this letter is mentioned coldly. With the shock of the winter, the end had indeed come to the last of Cicero’s flattering dreams. The glamour had gone forever from the affairs of this world, public as well as private. The literary work to which he set himself in the ensuing summer was to prove, in the first of the Questiones Tusculanæ, that death is no evil; nor have two millenniums of Christianity advanced the world so far but we come to the reading of that chapter to-day with a faint expectation of finding our own hope confirmed by his pathetic words.

Two of the letters of the later spring deserve especial citation, — that of Servius Sulpicius, now governor, as we have seen, of Achaia, and Cicero’s reply.

“ When the news came, " Sulpicius writes from Athens in April, “ of your daughter Tullia’s death, I was indeed most deeply and painfully moved. I felt that we had sustained a common calamity, and that my sympathy, if I had been there to express it, might have been some support to you. It is a sad and miserable sort of comfort, at best, which any friend can give, especially those nearest friends of all, who are smitten by the same blow as yourself, and so choked by their own grief, when they attempt to speak, that they seem rather to require consolation themselves than to be in a condition to offer it. Yet certain thoughts have come to me, which I will try to put into as few words as may be; not because I think they would be likely to escape you, but because grief may have blinded you to their force. Why, after all, should you be so profoundly cast down ? Consider for a moment how fate has dealt with us. We have already lost what ought to be no less dear to a man than his children, — our country, our pride, our dignities, all. What can one more blow add to a sorrow like ours, or how is it possible for spirits exercised as ours have been not to grow callous and indifferent to what may yet be in store ? Is it for her you grieve? Yet surely even you must have thought sometimes, as I have often done, that theirs is not the hardest fate just now who have been permitted to pass painlessly out of life. What great inducement had she to live, in times like these ? What fact ? What hope ? What solace of the soul ? . . . And I would mention another thought which has fortified me no little, and may possibly have power to soothe your anguish. On my way back from Asia, sailing from Ægina to Megara, I began to take in the view of the regions round about. Ægina was behind me, Megara before, the Piræus on my right, Corinth on my left, — all those glorious cities of the olden time lay there before my eyes in heaps of helpless ruin. And I said to myself, 'Why should we petty creatures mourn the death of any one of ourselves, and how should not our life be brief, when one look of ours can embrace the lifeless remains of so many mighty commonwealths ? Collect yourself, Servius, and remember that you are born a man.’ . . . But I am ashamed to go on in this strain, for it seems as though I doubted your own self-command. One thing more I will say, and then have done. We have seen you sustain high fortune very nobly, and win great renown by your bearing in prosperity. Show us that you can equally endure adversity, that your burden has not unduly crushed you ; for we would fain not find you wanting in this one of all the virtues. As soon as I hear that you are calmer I will write you about our affairs and the condition of the province.”

Who will talk of Roman hardness after this? The answer of the bereaved father is absolutely simple and unaffected, but in no wise unworthy : —

“ I do indeed wish, dear Servius, that you could have been with me in my heavy misfortune. . . . You have really helped me, not only by what you say and the way in which you Seem almost to assume my grief, but by the very authority which you use. I know it would be base in me not to bear my trouble in the way you so wisely indicate, and yet, when I think how I lack the consolations which all those others had whose example I try to follow, I am sore oppressed at times, and almost overpowered.” Maximas, Paullus, Gallus, Cato, — they all, he says, when stricken in their home affections, could lose themselves in the life of the state, but for him that resource is withdrawn. “And once,” he adds, after a few words of irrepressible bitterness over the civic disgrace that had befallen them all, “ I had one to fly to, in whom I could rest, in whose sweet society I could, lay aside every care; hut when this last stab was dealt me, all the old wounds began to bleed afresh.” He adds, later on, that he is longing to see Sulpicius, most of all that they may take counsel together about the true bearing to be assumed under the altered conditions of their life. “ Everything has to be subordinated to the will of one man, — a wise and generous man, indeed, I do not deny it; no foe to me, as I have had good proof, and exceedingly friendly to yourself. Nevertheless, it is a subject for serious consideration what line we are to take, not of action, — there is no question of that, — but of acquiescence in the concessions of his bounty.”

Certainly the old wound was aching again when he wrote that final sentence, as also when he began a letter to Atticus from the Tusculanum, in July, with the incisive words: “ So Brutus says, does he, that Cæsar will rally to the optimates ? Excellent news ! But where will he find any, unless he have the grace to hang himself ? ”

Cicero had had a great shrinking from the sight of Tusculum, and had written, May 15, from Civita Lavinia, on the way thither: “ I suppose I shall conquer my feeling, and proceed hence to the Tusculan villa. Either I must relinquish that estate once for all, — for my grief will never change, unless it becomes sharper yet, — or I may as well go there now as ten years hence ; nor can the associations of that place be any more overpowering than the memories which here beset me, night and day. ' But I had thought,’you say, ‘ that letters were your solace.’ In a case like this, I fear they are the very reverse. I might better have been made of sterner stuff. The cultivated mind is always too sensitive and soft.”

Cicero did go to Tusculum, and in the end remained there for some weeks. Atticus paid him a visit there, and later he had the society of Marcus Brutus, with whom he was beginning to be much in sympathy in many ways, and who had also a villa on the same noble hillside. The father’s period of open mourning was over, and his regrets were henceforth buried in his heart. He returned to the world, and his letters resumed their ordinary tone.

Before Cicero left Tusculum for Arpinum, the startling news had arrived from Atticus that Marcellus had been murdered on the eve of setting out for Rome, to avail himself, at last, of Cæsar’s reluctant pardon. Cæsar was freely accused of instigating the deed, but Brutus did not believe the charge, nor did Cicero, nor need we. It would have been unlike all that we know of Cæsar’s character, while the actual assassin had private grounds of hatred, and killed himself after dispatching his foe. But none the less was the noble ex-consul an irreparable loss to the party which even yet would fain have imposed some check upon Cæsar.

There had been a question of Cicero’s addressing to Cæsar an open letter ; primarily of congratulation, of course, but also offering certain suggestions concerning the policy of the conqueror. Atticus had been much in favor of the plan, and a rough draft of such a letter appears to have been prepared and submitted to the inspection of Cæsar’s particular friends. They, however, had found so much to criticise in the general attitude of the writer, and had suggested so many changes, that Cicero, who had never had much heart in the project, threw it up in disgust. “ As to that matter,”he says to Atticus, “ of addressing a formal epistle to Cæsar, I swear that I find it next to impossible. It is not the sense of ignominy that deters me, as perhaps it ought, for I see no particular ignominy in acquiescence when one has reason to he ashamed even of living. No, it is not that; I should think better of myself if it were. I did actually begin once, and I could think of nothing whatever to say ! The suggestions addressed by learned and eloquent men to Alexander had no particular influence on the course of events. . . . I did indeed manage to hew out of the oak some semblance of an image ; but wherever I ventured to hint at anything of the nature of reform, the passage was immediately condemned. I am glad of it. Had the letter been sent, I should assuredly have repented. Do you not yourself know that the aforesaid pupil of Aristotle, by nature as remarkable for modesty as for genius, became haughty, cruel, and ungovernable in temper, the moment he had received the title of king ? And do you suppose that the man whose statue has been set up beside that of Romulus is going to take it kindly when I advise moderation?” And a few days later we find the following ironical reference to the same sore subject: “I have passed final sentence on the letter to Cæsar. They do say, indeed, that he has professed his intention of putting off the Parthian expedition until affairs are more settled here, which is precisely what I advised. However, I told him that he might do as he liked, which, of course, was what he was waiting for! He would never have thought of proceeding without my permission ! Oh, for Heaven’s sake, let us away with all vain pretense, and at least secure a semi-independence by living in retirement and holding our peace ! ” ²

In the autumn, however, Cicero removed as usual to Rome, and was present, at the opening of the Senate, and, as augur, at the consecration of a temple which Cæsar had built and dedicated to Mars. He called the triumph which followed the return from Spain “ a ridiculous display,” and he chafed at the sight of Cæsar’s body-guard, and even at his high-handed manner of prosecuting city improvements. “ All is quiet here,” he wrote to Cornificius, the governor of Africa, “ but you would prefer to see a little honorable and healthful activity.” And later, in a letter to the same, we find these ominous words: “ Many things go on here which you would not like ; some which are not over-pleasing. I think, to Cæsar himself. But it is always the way after a civil war. Not only must the arch-victor’s will be done, but the caprices must also be observed of those who have helped to win the victory.”

The conspiracy against Cæsar was a coalition between two separate parties of malcontents, — the remnant of the old conservatives, who found it practically impossible, despite all their efforts, to adapt themselves to a state of personal subserviency and civic inaction, and the ambitious generals who had accompanied Cæsar on his campaigns, and were not satisfied with their share of the spoil. Our old acquaintance, Caius Cassius, whom we first encountered fighting gallantly in Cilicia, but of whom we learned, so to speak, in infancy that the fault of inferiority “ is not in our stars, but in ourselves,” may be regarded as the type of the second class of conspirators, as Marcus Brutus was the great exemplar of the first. Early in the year 709, before the death of Tullia, there had been a particularly lively interchange of letters between Cassius and Cicero, who, it appears, had known each other from boyhood. For the most part, I think, the deeper we dip into authentic Roman history and the contemporary writers of Cæsar’s time, the more striking do we find the main veracity of that great Shakespearean drama from which most of us derived our first clear impressions of the year 54 B. c. The author of the tragedy of Julius Cæsar not only knew all that was to be known in his time about the men of that great year, but he came much nearer than some scholars will admit to knowing all that is now to be known. Not even the stupendous labors of Mommsen have availed materially to modify the outlines of his Brutus, his Antony, nor yet his Cæsar. But the real Cassius, if not positively misrepresented, appears to have been more, and in some respects other, than the instigator of Brutus in the play. For one thing, he was decidedly literary and speculative in his turn, and had lately suffered a conversion from Stoicism to Epicureanism, whereon Cicero comments in the letters aforesaid with abundance of pleasant banter. He employs a pompous profusion of philosophical terms, both Latin and Greek, appending, in parentheses, “as your new friends say.” “ You are, of course, aware that Catius Insuber, the Epicurean, bestowed the name of spectra on those ” (invisible images) “ which Gargettius, and Democritus before him, had called ϵιδωλɑ Now, even supposing a man to be able to conjure up these spectres before his eyes when he pleases, I fail to see how they can touch the mind. You will have to enlighten me, when you come, as to whether your spectre is so far subject to my control as to come rushing at me the moment I think of you (which would not be so remarkable, indeed, in your case, who are ensconced in my heart of hearts) ; but will the ϵιδωλον, say, of the island of Britain fly to my arms when I begin thinking of that ? ”

“ It is hardly possible,” Cicero says, in another letter, “ to be in earnest about anything without running some risk.

‘ Then let us have a good laugh,’ methinks I hear you say. By Heaven, it is not so easy ! Still, what other distraction have we from our present annoyances ? ‘ Where, then, is philosophy ? ’ Well, mine is in the gymnasium, and yours is in the kitchen ! ”

The later letters to Atticus of the year 709 afford some vivid glimpses of the troubled family affairs of the Ciceros. It appears to have dawned upon the rather mean mind of young Quintus, during that summer in Spain, that he was not, after all, furthering his own cause particularly by his persistent vilification of his uncle. Moreover, being on rather bad terms with his father just then, he perceived that it might be convenient to him, on his return, to have access to his uncle’s purse. That Cicero was under no delusion about the disinterestedness of the young lieutenant’s motives will appear from the following letter, dated at Tuseulum in July : —

“ I had been up before dawn writing against the Epicureans, and I had also dashed off a word to yourself on the same spurt and by the same lamp, and dispatched it. I then went back to bed, but was awakened at sunrise by the arrival of a letter from your sister’s son. . . . It begins insultingly enough, though possibly that was unintentional:

'Whatever unhandsome things men may say of you, I’ — etc. He insinuates that there is a great deal of hard talk about me which he, Quintus, does not countenance! Did you ever hear of such impudence ? The rest you can read for yourself, for I have sent you the letter. You will conclude, I fancy, that the rascal has been moved to write me by the highly eulogistic manner in which, as I hear on all hands, Brutus invariably speaks of me; and I dare say he will write you, also, — something for you to pass on to me. What he may have said to his father about me I do not know. He alludes to his mother in the most pious terms. ' I could have wished.’ he says, ‘ for the utmost enjoyment of your society, that I might have been allowed a house of my own, and so I wrote you once before, but you did not see fit to answer the letter. I shall not be able to see much of you, as it is, for that house is out of the question for me.’ He refers, of course, to the differences between his parents. Now aid me, Atticus, with your counsels. Shall I let him know that I see through his blague, and kick the fellow out altogether, or shall I temporize ?”

Having failed by this delicate strategy to secure a separate establishment, young Quintus appears to have decided, after his return from Spain, that he might as well go with Cæsar on that Parthian expedition which the fates had already prohibited. Cool as ever, he applied to his uncle for an outfit, who gave him a mauvais quart d’heure, which Cicero describes with much humor to Atticus : —

“ Quintus burst in upon me one day, and I inquired to what I owed the honor. ' How can you ask ? ’ says he. ' I have a journey before me, — a difficult and dangerous journey to the seat of war.’ 'And what do you wish ? ’ 'I should like to have my debts paid, and something beside for my traveling expenses.’ At this point, I adopted your style of eloquence; that is to say, I held my tongue. He proceeded : ' I am very much disturbed about my uncle ’ ’’ (meaning Atticus). " ' How so ? ’ ' He is angry with me.’ ' Why do you suffer that? ’ I inquired. I refrained from saying, ' How do you come to deserve it?’ ' I do not intend to suffer it,’ he replied. ' I shall remove the cause.’ ' A la bonne heure,' says I ; ' but, if it be not indiscreet to inquire, what is the cause ? ’ ' Merely that both he and my mother were displeased at my hesitation about marrying. But nothing makes any difference now. I shall comply with their wishes.’ ' Quite right,’ I observed, ' and I wish you much happiness. And when is it to be ? ’ “ Having accepted the situation,’ he answered, 'I do not in the least care when.’ ' Then,’ said I, 'I would recommend that it take place before you go away. It would gratify your father, too.’ ' Very well,’ he answered, ' I will he guided by your advice.’ And so the conversation ended.”

It must have been about this time that Cicero pleaded his last cause before Cæsar. He defended, from the charge of conspiracy against the ruler, Deiotarus, king of Armenia, — at whose court, the reader may remember, the two young Ciceros had been placed, with their tutor, Dionysius, when Cicero was in Cilicia. Deiotarus was not immediately acquitted, but Cæsar promised to postpone judgment on the case until he should be able to collect further information, on the way to Parthia; and, propitiated, as he may well have been, by the flattering tenor of the plea for Deiotarus, he graciously proposed to pay Cicero a visit at his villa in Pozzuoli. Nothing shows more clearly how completely royal were the habits which Cæsar had insensibly adopted than the manner in which this hospitality was both asked and accorded, and our last quotation for the year 55 B. c. shall be from the host’s letter to Atticus after the affair was over : —

POZZUOLI, December 18, 709. " I have had a somewhat troublesome guest; however, all passed off well. When he arrived at Philippus’s [the stepfather of Augustus], — on the evening of the second day of the Saturnalia, — the villa was so crowded with soldiers that they could hardly be kept out of the dining-room where Cæsar was to sup. There were two thousand men. I was at my wits’ end to know how I should manage the next day, but Barba Cassius came to the rescue, and gave me a detachment of troops. A camp was pitched in the fields, and the villa was protected. Cæsar stayed with Philippus till one o’clock of the third day of the Saturnalia, and refused himself to every one. I fancy he was going over accounts with Balbus. After that, he took a walk upon the beach, and had his bath. . . . I gave him a capital dinner, well served, and ' seasoned, if you will, with good discourse.’ His lesser freedmen and slaves had all they wanted, and the higher officers were elegantly entertained. To make a long story short, I behaved like a man. ’T is not the sort of guest whom you entreat to call again, on his way back. Once is quite enough. No serious topic was introduced at table. The talk was entirely literary. What would you have ? He was evidently quite satisfied.”

Harriet Waters Preston.