Assum Igitur

BETWEEN the 1st of January, 710 (44 B. c.), and the fatal 15th of March we have barely a word from Cicero’s pen. There are a couple of notes to that Curius who had been so kind to the beloved freedman Tiro, when he was ill at Patræ, in Achaia, on his way home from the East, in one of which Cicero alludes, in a tone of resigned sarcasm, to what seems to us a comparatively trifling act of aggression on Cæsar’s part, and adds that he wishes he were out of his country for good and all. There is a third letter, dated early in January, to a certain Acilius, in Achaia, recommending Curius to his especial favor. And then there is dead silence until three weeks after the assassination of Cæsar.

The general course of events during that memorable winter is well enough known. Already at the New Year Cæsar was virtually king.¹ He realized as clearly as other usurpers have done the necessity of maintaining his prestige by fresh military successes, and he was presently to depart for the Parthian war. But he had made Antony his colleague in the consulship; Dolabella, somewhat against Antony’s will, was to act as his own substitute while he should be away, and his particular friends, Hirtius and Pansa, were consuls designate for the next year. Brutus and Cassius, too, had been made prætors, with whatever show of popular election was still preserved. The former, Cæsar’s lifelong favorite, received the distinguished post of prætor urbanus. Yet, as though there really lurked a vague suspicion of that intractable pair under Cæsar’s light remark about " misliking the companionship of the pale and lean,” both had also received foreign appointments which would presently remove them from the scene of action, — Brutus the governorship of Macedonia, and Cassius that of Syria. Every few weeks now some new feeler was put forth to test the temper of the people concerning the definite assumption by their master of the title and insignia of that royalty which he already possessed in fact. The first experiment tried by Cæsar was that of not rising from his chair of state when waited on by a deputation of senators. The discourtesy was plainly resented. One morning the statues of the great man were found bedecked with the bandeau of royalty, and during the grand annual function upon the Alban Mount (when will the world behold again so stately a ceremony upon so superb a theatre?), among the shouts that, hailed the Dictator as he passed the word rex was clearly distinguishable. “Not king, but Cæsar,” was the proud reply, and the tribunes felt encouraged to arrest the indiscreet bawlers; but they were promptly rebuked by Cæsar for their officiousness, and informed that it lay with himself to punish the offense.

In February came that indecent festival of the Lupercalia, the carnival of ancient Rome, during which Antony, the consul, who was at least too old for the tomfooleries of the occasion, and who must have been like a Bacchus of Rubens in the traditional costume,

“ thrice did offer him a kingly crown, which he did thrice refuse.” Directly afterward, apropos of the preparations for the Parthian expedition, which were now being pushed rapidly forward, the rumor began to circulate of a passage opportunely discovered in one of the sibylline books, which announced that the Parthians could be subdued by none other than a king; and it was understood that action was to be taken in the Senate, upon the Ides of March, on the propriety of making all safe by investing Cæsar with the necessary dignity before he went away.

So far as we are able to judge, it was this rumor which suddenly brought to a head the smouldering designs against the life of Cæsar. The very silence, during the late winter, of a man like Cicero, so prone to relieve excited feeling by pungent speech, indicates that the exasperation against the Dictator of those who now called themselves the Boni had passed from the sentimental into the dangerous phase. The midnight portents, true offspring of heated brains, and the inflammatory placards, like those which called upon M. Brutus to be worthy of his great ancestor, the king-slayer (who was, however, not his direct ancestor), seem all to belong to the early days of March. But when it comes to a careful search among the authentic records of the most dramatic and notorious of public crimes, we find both the preliminary arrangements and the actual circumstances of the deed involved in a good deal of mystery. Cassius was unquestionably the prime mover of the plot. Brutus, whose sister he had married, required considerable persuasion before he could be induced to engage in it. Cicero was not let into the secret at all. It was not that men doubted his approval of the act; and how enthusiastically he did at first approve it we shall presently see. It was an article in the creed of these men of the past that the assassination of a tyrant is, under certain conditions, a pious and a glorious act. The old Roman constitution distinctly provided for the case. The only doubt would be whether these desperate circumstances had now arrived; and when Plutarch tells us, in his Brutus, that Cicero was excluded from the councils of the conspirators because of the ingrain tendency, which had grown on him with his white hairs, to dally and deliberate, and endlessly to balance the pros and cons of every possible course of action, we perceive the justice of the remark, and cannot doubt that the most picturesque of historians is here speaking the simple truth. What was to be done had to be done quickly. It would never do to let that question of the royal title come up before a subservient Senate, backed by an ostensibly religious sanction. Everything goes to show that the last arrangements were hurriedly made, the rash act clumsily, if boldly, executed, and the subsequent policy of the confederates left altogether to that shaping of circumstance whereby they were so signally betrayed.

They were sixty in all, — some say eighty, — but even the former number seems incredibly large. Their most distinguished recruit, after the two chiefs, was Decimus Brutus, one of Cæsar’s ablest generals, a man whom the latter trusted so implicitly that he had appointed him guardian of the young Octavian, in the will which was afterward read to the populace with such terrible effect. Decimus was actually present at a dinner given by Lepidus, the future triumvir, to Cæsar on the evening of March 14th, during which the conversation turned on the kind of death most to he desired, and Cæsar gave his voice for a sudden one. There was another gathering the same night at the house of Cassius, which may perhaps have broken up with the singing of a favorite old Greek banqueting song, — the spirited scholion of Harmodius and Aristogeiton: —

And so the midnight closed which beset with such phantasms of horror the pillow of Cæsar’s wife, and the March morning dawned, as the early spring mornings now dawn upon Rome.

What was the exact spot where the daggers did their ferocious work ? Pompey’s Curia, of course,—the Senate House, adjoining, or more probably connected by an open portico with, the magnificent theatre which the great rival of Cæsar had built and surrounded by plantations of plane-trees, near the modern Campo di Fiori.

But what portion of the Curia ? The name was plainly applied both to the senate chamber itself and to the portico aforesaid, on which the hall of assembly undoubtedly opened. The story ran like wild-fire over Rome, that afternoon, that Cæsar had been assassinated in full Senate, in the face and eyes of all the Fathers ; and so it would probably have done had he been killed anywhere on the premises which went by Pompey’s name. The tendency even of truthful people, in times of high public excitement, to add a touch of horror in repeating such a tale is all but irresistible. We are not yet a generation removed from that foul deed which was done in the theatre at Washington, whose histrionic perpetrator also made a merit of having nourished his soul on classical precedents ; yet in how many different ways has the sad story been told, and which of us knows just how the thing befell The truth is that men’s own senses play them false at such a time. In this case, moreover, the murderers were never brought to trial, nor was any attempt made properly to sift the evidence concerning the details of their grim achievement. The result is that our three principal authorities for what took place upon the Ides of March — Suetonius, Plutarch, and Appian — are materially at variance with one another, and Plutarch is hardly consistent with himself. He speaks as though the Senate were sitting In the portico, or colonnade, which one would think impossible. “ The very place, too, where the Senate was to meet seemed to be, by divine appointment, favorable to their purpose. It was a portico, one of those adjoining the theatre, with a large exhedra., or recess, in which there stood a statue of Pompey, erected to him by the commonwealth when he adorned that part of the city with the portico and the theatre.”

This appears perfectly explicit, and brings vividly before the mind a place altogether apt for the crime which had been resolved upon; and I am half tempted to question, upon repeated comparison of the three narratives named, whether it were not after all here, outside, in what served as a sort of vestibule to the senate chamber, that the deed was done. Here the conspirators may well have waited, as men lounge in the lobby of the House, until the slaves had set down Cæsar’s litter ; here Tullius Cimber presented his petition, and China gave the preconcerted signal by plucking at the purple robe. It was from his litter,² not from his chair of state, that the doomed man sprang forward at the cold touch of Casca’s steel, the only necessarily mortal wound, so said the physicians, among the twentythree which he received, and that heartsickening “ drawing up ” of the robe was but an instinctive attempt to readjust the drapery deranged by his sudden movement.

The Conscript Fathers, and Cicero among them, were all assembled and waiting the tardy arrival of their perpetual president within a stone’s-throw of the spot, — within easy hearing of the struggle, no doubt, had it not been so terribly brief and silent.³ This would explain why Brutus should have shouted out Cicero’s name when Cæsar had fallen ; and with the rest of the horrified Senate Cicero probably came rushing out, and saw, as he afterward observed to Atticus, “ the righteous end of a tyrant.”

“ They burst forth of the doors,” says Plutarch, “ and flying, filled the people with confusion and mad fear; so that men left their houses, abandoning their tables and their goods, and some came running to the place to see the tragedy, while others, having seen it, fled away.” Suetonius also says that as soon as Cæsar had ceased to breathe “ they all fled, and he lay for some time, until three slaves placed him upon the litter with his arm hanging down, and carried him to his house.” And Appian, too, with a touch of strong feeling: “ They flying like madmen, three servants only stayed by, who, placing the body upon the litter, bore it home, — strangely, since there were but three to carry him who only a little while before had been lord of earth and sea.”

I have dwelt too long, perhaps, on what is after all only a possible theory of the facts concerning Cæsar’s death. I must pass rapidly over the well-known events of the next few days: the retirement of the assassins to the Capitol, accompanied by Cicero, who in vain entreated them at once to convoke the scattered Senate there ; their indecision and divided counsels; the ambiguous reception of Brutus’s noble yet frigid address to the people from the Forum ; the quick recovery of Antony from the panic which had first overtaken him, when he fled the city in a woman’s dress ; his return, and bold seizure not only of the public treasure, but of Cæsar’s enormous private hoards, and of the will whose provisions he used so adroitly; the ominous movement among Cæsar’s veterans quartered in the town ; the popular demonstration against the conspirators which followed the funeral.

From the republican point of view, Cæsar should never have been taken and Antony left; and Cicero, over and above his unconquerable personal aversion for Antony, was enough of a statesman to know it. But Cassius was a haughty soldier, and Brutus an unpractical theorist brought up in the school of Cato. They wished to give their deed the air of an act of divine retribution, single and passionless, and undefaced by aught that might savor of private vengeance or needless cruelty ; and Cicero, stifling his own misgivings, threw himself ardently into their design. It was Antony, after all, who convened the Senate in the temple of Tellus on the 17th of March, and it seems almost as strange to us as it must have done to the senators themselves that Cæsar had been only two days dead when they met. In fact, his body was not yet consumed. The conspirators did not attend the meeting,⁴ but Cicero did, and successfully exerted his eloquence to procure an act of general amnesty for the assassins, at the same time that he supported the measure which ratified all the laws and provisions of the late Dictator.

The truce between the contending parties implied by this twofold legislation was sealed by social civilities. Brutus supped with Antony that night, and Cassius with Lepidus, the Master of the Horse; and Cicero, having thus, as he fondly hoped, assisted in establishing a modus vivendi between the consul and the prætors, and paved the way for a restoration of that old order in which he so superstitiously believed, went out of town, and we find him on the 7th of April staying in the suburban villa of one Matius, an intimate friend of Cæsar, and a man, as will soon appear, of a perspicacity quite superior to that of the deeply engaged partisans by whom he was surrounded.

“I cannot understand it,” Cicero writes impatiently to Atticus, who had remained in Rome. " ‘ If he,’ says Matius, ' with all his genius failed, who will ever succeed ? ’ The fact is, he talks as if all were lost; and so it may be, for aught I know, and Matius apparently would be glad of it! He declares that within three weeks there will be an insurrection in Gaul, vowing at the same time that he has not exchanged a word with a soul except Lepidus since the Ides of March. In fine, he prophesies that we have not yet seen the end. How admirable by contrast appears the conduct of Oppius, who was just as true a friend to Cæsar, but has not said a word which could offend one of the Boni! ” He adds that he is anxious most of all for news of Brutus, and that Matius had told him how Cæsar once said of Brutus, in his epigrammatic way,

“ It makes a vast difference what that man wills, for, whatever it be, he wills it mightily.”

How incessantly Matius and his guest talked about Cæsar (of what else, indeed, could they have talked !) appears from the fact that reference is also made to a remark of Cæsar concerning Cicero himself, which the latter takes pains to explain in a sort of postscript to his letter written later in the same day : “ One allusion in my note you may possibly not have understood. The facts were these : Matius tells me that Cæsar said, at the time when I went to him on behalf of Sestius, and was sitting and waiting till my turn for an audience should come, ' How can I be such a fool as to expect even this facile gentleman to be my friend, when he has to wait my convenience in this fashion ? '" Cicero evidently felt a sting in the word facilem, and we may doubt the wisdom of Matius in repeating the epithet, but the latter had the clairvoyance which enabled him to anticipate with startling precision the verdict of posterity on the melancholy affair of the assassination. He had been with Cæsar in Gaul, in the same year as his own and Cicero’s friend, the lawyer Trebatius. He had remained neutral in the civil war, which he deeply deplored ; but he had a warm personal attachment to the Dictator, and he came forward conspicuously on the occasion of certain memorial games which were celebrated in Cæsar’s honor, during the month of May, at Rome.

The republicans, who were by this time smarting under the sense that they had been fooled by Antony’s craft, were of course highly incensed with Matins ; hut Cicero liked the man, and he sought to qualify, by the suavest phrases at his command, the reproof winch he undertook to give him. “ You are so distinguished a person,” he says, “that your doings cannot escape notice, and the illnatured world will he very apt to represent some of them in a too unfavorable light. If you have heard nothing as yet, I hardly know why I should speak, albeit I defend you on all occasions, just as I know you would defend me were I maligned. But defense is of two kinds. There are some things which I flatly deny ; . . . concerning others, as, for instance, your activity about those games,

I maintain that you acted loyally and manfully. Nevertheless you can hardly fail to see, sagacious as you are, that if Cæsar had been king, as I think he would have been, the question of your duty would have become doubly complicated, both as regards that stanch devotion, which I admit to he praiseworthy when a friend is dead and gone, and as to the obligation, on which many insist, of setting the freedom of your country above the life of the man you love.”

This is delicately put, but the reply of Matiusis noble and straight to the point:

“ I understand perfectly well the insinuations about me that have been current, since Cæsar’s death. It is made a crime that I should mourn my friend and resent the manner of his taking off.

‘ Fatherland before friendship,’ they say, and insist that if their own counsels can but prevail the death of Cæsar will prove a boon to the republic. I may be dull, but I must confess that I have not yet risen to any such height of wisdom. I did not follow Cæsar into the civil war, . . . and for that very reason, when victory declared for my friend,

I was not carried away by the charms of wealth and emolument. My private fortune was even impaired by that law of his, thanks to which many who are now exulting in his death retained their civic rights. I labored just as strenuously to induce him to spare those conquered citizens as I did for my own safety. How then should I, who desired the immunity of all, not he revolted when I see him of whom that grace was won despitefully slain by the very men he pardoned ? ‘ Out upon you.’ they cry, ‘ for venturing to disapprove our deeds ! ’ Who ever heard of such effrontery ? One man may boast of a crime; another may not even regret it with impunity ! The veriest slave has hitherto enjoyed the privilege of grieving, rejoicing, fearing, on his own motion rather than another’s. But the champions of our freedom propose to coerce and intimidate us, even in our sentiments ! Let them do their worst. I am not to be deterred by threats from the line of duty and humanity. I have ever considered an honorable death a thing to be desired rather than avoided ; and if they are incensed at my hoping that they may repent of their deed, all I can say is that I could wish to see the death of Cæsar bitterly lamented by all the world.”

What a keen point of conviction must have pricked through the armor of Cicero’s lifelong prejudices as he read these intrepid words! Already he had begun to whisper to the faithful Atticus a haunting fear that the cruel sacrifice in Pompey’s Curia would prove but an empty ceremony, and that, so far as the good of the commonwealth was concerned, the victim had been slaughtered in vain. “Happen what will,” had been his first exultant cry. “ the Ides of March console me, and that which it lay with our heroes to do they have accomplished most gloriously, most magnificently.” But only three days later it is : “I have no comfort in anything except the Ides of March. What can be more contemptible than to he pursuing the very policy for which we hated him,— sanctioning all his appointments for two years ahead ? I do not see how I can take any active part in politics. To be lauding the tyrannicides to the skies while we defend the acts of the tyrant is a manifest absurdity.” And from Pozzuoli, late in April: “ O my Atticus. I doubt the Ides of March have given us nothing whatever beyond a momentary joy, the reaction from all our rage and grief. ‘ A noble deed, but a futile one,'—that is the way it looks to me. . . . You defend the two Brutuses and Cassius as if I had attacked them, — I, who cannot praise them enough. ’T is the iniquity of affairs, not of men, against which I inveigh. The tyrant is gone, but the tyranny remains.”

“ Think what you will of me, — and I would have you think as well as possible, — nevertheless I take leave to say that if things are to go on like this, the Ides of March were vain. He” (Cæsar) “might never have come back from Parthia at all, or we might have had the courage to resist his enactments; . . . and in any case, when I remember how gracious he always was to me, — damn him ! — and that we are no more free because he is dead, I feel sometimes as if he were not the worst sort of master for a man of my age. Oh, yes, I blush for what I have written, but let it stand.”

It began to appear that the consuls intended, and were prepared, to defend their position by force, and that, so far from taking serene possession of the government, the tyrannicides would have to fight for their cause and their lives. The thought of another civil war was hateful to Cicero. “There is no doubt about it in my own mind,” he wrote while still at Pozzuoli. “ It all looks like fighting. That act was done with the courage of men and the wisdom of babes. . . . But old age is making me bitter, and I rail at everything. My own life is over. Let the young look to it.”

Dolabella, who had wavered at the outset, and even won the exaggerated plaudits of Cicero for pulling down a temporary monument which had been erected to Cæsar in the Forum, had now come to a definite understanding with Antony. He had never paid back Tullia’s dowry, and had no intention of so doing. Yet, as though not unwilling to render a last service to one for whom he had always testified a certain airy regard, the quondam son-in-law, in his capacity of consul, procured for Cicero one of those “ legations ” which enabled a Roman gentleman to travel freely in foreign parts. Cicero kept this permit by him, and was very near making use of it. On the one hand, he felt, as he had said, shut out from the Senate — at least until there should be a change of consuls — by the sinister turn which events were taking; on the other, he had a yearning to see the boy at Athens. Young Cicero had lately gladdened his father’s heart by writing in a more manly strain than formerly, and earnestly promising an amended life ; but his finances were in admired disorder, and could be properly straightened, Cicero thought, only by his own personal influence and authority exercised upon the spot. Moreover, we know from a letter of Decimus to M. Brutus and Cassius, dated in April, at Rome, and intended to put those two on their guard against the duplicity of Antony, that there was a question just then among the republican leaders of the propriety of their all retiring into voluntary exile. After describing an interview with Hirtius, one of the consuls designate, who had been very chary of his pledges for the future, “Thus driven into a corner,” says Decimus Brutus, “ I thought I might as well request free embassies for myself and all the rest of us, so that at least there should be an honorable way open to us of getting out of the country. He said he would make the demand, but I hardly think he will, — men are so spiteful, and we so unpopular. And even if we got our request, I suspect we should presently be declared enemies, and forbidden fire and water" (that is, outlawed). “ If you want my opinion, however, I should say we would better yield to the pressure of circumstances, get out of Italy, and take up our abode in Rhodes or elsewhere. If the prospect improves, we will return to Rome. If no change takes place, we will live in exile. If worse comes to worst, we can still apply the last remedy.” _

Hirtius had hinted to Decimus, during this gloomy interview, that Antony would oppose the taking possession by the three leaders ⁵ of the governorships to which Cæsar had appointed them. A rather insulting proposal was made to Brutus and Cassius to accept in lieu of theirs the charge of the grain supply; and here comes in a letter of Cicero’s, which flashes for one instant a circle of intense illumination on a curious and most interesting scene. The place is his own villa at Antium; the date, June 10th.

“I came here yesterday,” he writes, “to the joy of Brutus. We had a great gathering. Servilia came, and Portia, and Tertulla. Favonius was also present.⁶ The question of our future course was introduced, and I, after thinking it over on the way to Antium, undertook to propose that the grain commission should be accepted.” (Servilia was wild to have Brutus thus disposed of for the moment, — one can imagine for what conflicting reasons.) “ I said that if any harm befell him ” (Brutus) “it would be the end of everything,

I looked upon him as the safeguard of the very republic. At this point of my remarks Cassius entered, and I repeated what I had said before. With blazing eyes, and, as one may say, breathing slaughter, Cassius vowed that to Sicily he would not go. ‘ Do you ask me,’ said he, ' to accept as a favor what was intended for an affront ? ’ ‘ What will you do, then ? ’ I inquired. He said he should go to Achaia” (which was on the way to his province). " ' And you ?’ I asked, turning to Brutus. ‘I will go to Rome, if you think best.’ ‘ I ? Not at all ! It would not be safe. ' But if it were, would you wish me to go ? ’ ' Oh, as to that,’ I cried, 'I could wish that you might continue to act as prætor, and not go to your province at all; but I ’ll not take the responsibility of advising you to trust yourself in the city.’ I then stated the reasons, which will readily occur to you, why I thought the danger would be great. After this there was a good deal of fault-finding, — Cassius being most emphatic, — and they said that precious opportunities had been lost, and were very hard upon Decimus. I could not but agree; still, I advised letting bygones be bygones. Then when I began to offer a few suggestions, — nothing novel, mere commonplaces, — as that the Senate should be convened, the government seized, the zeal of the people strenuously fired and fostered, before I had even touched upon the principal point, the lady of whom you are so fond ⁷ exclaimed, ' Well, that I have never heard any one say ! ’ and I desisted.

“ Cassius will probably go to his province. Servilia has even undertaken that the decree about the grain supply shall be rescinded by the Senate; and our dear Brutus, quite cast down by all this futile talk, remarked that he hoped it would be so. The understanding now is that games are to be celebrated in his name (as prætor), but that he will not be present. I think he would like to go to Asia direct from Antium. . . . Under these circumstances, I am more than ever convinced that the best thing for me will be to fly hence to some spot where ' rumor of the deeds and fame of the sons of Pelops ’ will never reach me more.”

But fate had ordained that the orb of Cicero’s glory, so far from dropping quietly below the waves of the Ægean, should go down, over the shores he loved, in a last blaze of stormy splendor. In the account just quoted of the republican gathering at Antium, no mention whatever is made of the most important person present. A few days later, however, Cicero recurs to the subject, enters into fuller details concerning the resolutions adopted, and then adds: “ Octavian struck me as clever and high-spirited, and his disposition toward our heroes all that could be desired. We must, however, remember his age, his name, his heritage and education, and be cautious how far we trust him. His stepfather,⁸ whom I saw at Astura, was very non-committal. Still I think he should be made much of, if only for the sake of detaching him from Antony.”

No one, apparently, of that excited party at the seaside villa perceived the man of the new era, or suspected the star of empire on the forehead of the handsome youth, who had been waiting at Apollonia in Epirus to join the Parthian expedition of his great-uncle, and who, when he heard of the tragedy at Rome, hurried thither to claim the magnificent inheritance which had already been appropriated by Antony. Not even Cicero, for all his acuteness, divined the ruthless young hand which was to sign his own death-warrant within so short a time. Then, and for months afterward, Octavian treated the venerable statesman with great deference, and listened to his abundant counsels with becoming grace.

Meanwhile the summer weeks were slipping away, and Cicero moved back and forward, much as usual, between Arpinum and the shore, and always believed himself to be going to Greece, but still did not set sail. The studious habits of a long life stood by him now, and gave him many a quiet hour, during which all his anxieties were forgotten. Some of his most exquisite writing, some of that whereby he still holds the heart and assuages the pain of the world, was done during this final period of suspense. He wrote concerning Glory and concerning Fate, both of which essays have perished. He noted down in the Anecdota many personal reminiscences of the great men of his time, which it is almost too exasperating to have lost. He completed and threw into its ultimate form that noble manual of public morals, the De Officiis. He composed and addressed to Atticus those two beautiful treatises which “ Time, the thief,” has condescended to spare, the De Senectute and the De Amicitia, — the one a gem of sane and lofty resignation, the other a magnificent tribute to the power of human love. Listen yet once more to the ringing phrases in which a mail of incomparably rich experience, close upon his grand climacteric, but with spirit all unbroken and faculties undimmed, sums up his affair with life : “ The fourth and last reason why old age is popularly supposed to be a sad and anxious season lies in the nearness of death, which of a truth cannot be very far distant from the old. But alas for him who, in the course of a long life, has not learned to despise death ! For if the soul is to be extinguished, we need not take it into account at all; but if death do but lead us to the beginning of an eternal future, how greatly is it to be desired ! . . . And the old man has at least this advantage over the young, — that he has what the other covets. For the young desire to live long, but the old have done so. ... I will not, therefore, mourn for life, as many even of the wise have done. Nor will I lament that I was born, for I think I have so lived as not to have been born in vain, and I depart out of life as from an inn, not from my home. For it is a halting-place, not a dwelling-place, that nature affords us here. O glorious day. when I shall say farewell to this mixed crowd and come to the great council and assembly yonder !”

The man who could write thus, even though capable in sudden passion of cursing Cæsar in his grave, was in no deep sense of the word embittered by life. What is the Amicitia but a deliberate and splendid tribute, where personal emotion continually burns through the stately phrases attributed to a Fannius or a Scævola, to the faithful devotion of Atticus? “Friendship, united with kindness and charity,” — in this consists the consummation of all things human and divine. It is the best gift of the immortals to men. I know not even if we should except wisdom. . . . That life is not life, as Ennius says, which rests not on mutual affection. What can be sweeter than to have one with whom you dare say all, as to your very self ? What would be the worth of prosperity without a friend to share it ? And hard indeed would it be to endure adversity, were there no one to feel it on your behalf yet more keenly than you feel it on your own.”

In the playful tenderness of the messages which he sends to the family of Atticus at this time, and the zeal with which he labors to have the property of his friend in Epirus protected from the lawlessness of Antony’s soldiery, Cicero surpasses himself. He is naturally rather skeptical when he first hears that his nephew Quintus, after winning for himself in the early spring the appellation of “ Antony’s right hand,” has suffered a conversion to republicanism. Since the tardy divorce of the elder Quintus from Pomponia, the father and son had been living together at Rome ; and the former now offers earnest pledges of fidelity to the party of his brother, while the latter, as Cicero dryly remarks to Atticus, “ proposes to be a perfect Cato. . . . Heaven send he may; it would be good news for all of us ; but — I will say no more.” A little later, however, we find the young man received at Pozzuoli by his “ facile ” uncle ; and however free from the bitterness of age, I think we must own that our friend betrays symptoms of its weakness when we find him writing on the 10th of July, “ Quintus remained with me several days, and would have stayed longer if I had asked him. I cannot begin to tell you how agreeable he made himself in all sorts of ways, and especially in those in which he used to be least satisfactory. He seemed to have experienced a total change through the influence of certain books of my own, which he had constantly in his hand, as well as of my serious conversation and counsels ; and his attitude toward the republic will henceforth, I think, be all that we could desire.”

However ostentatiously studious when his uncle was by, we are constrained to believe that Quintus, junior, lifted his eyebrows and indulged in a yawn when the venerable back was turned. Yet all unstable and incorrigible as he was, the youth did indeed prove himself in the end that nobler son who said, I go not, but afterwards repented and went. He held fast his allegiance from this time forward, and by selling his own life dear in the gallant defense of his father’s must be held to have expiated many sins.

Two days before the date of the last letter, Cicero had visited Brutus on the island of Nesis (now Nisida) in the bay of Naples, where the latter appears to have had a residence. Cassius, then lying off Naples with the ships and the troops which he was taking with him to Syria, was also present, but their talk ran chiefly on the Apollinarian games, which Antony’s brother Caius had just exhibited in Brutus’s name at Rome. Brutus, whose inveterate foible it was to be strenuous on unimportant points and apathetic about the main issue, was deeply chagrined that the games had been advertised for the Nones of July ; that is to say, by the significant new name of the midsummer month, which had replaced the time-honored Quinetilis. “ And it is indeed rather humiliating,” observes Cicero, " for Brutus to be dating from July.” The titular head of the republicans was, however, sedately satisfied with the popular applause which had greeted certain passages breathing hatred to tyrants in the plays which had been given, while the cooler commentator cannot refrain from remarking to his other self, " Yet it vexes and angers me to see the Roman mob wearing its hands out in clapping rather than in defending the republic.”

The understanding had been that Cicero was to leave Italy, for his visit to Athens, in company with Brutus, when the latter should set out for his province. But Brutus continued in the most unaccountable manner to find reasons for delay, and Cicero finally departed alone, and proceeded by sea as far as Vibo, in the south of Italy, where he landed to pay his respects to the same Sicca who had entertained him in his exile, and whence he sent back to Atticus, on the 24th of July, a letter which showed plainly enough how many lingering doubts he yet had about the policy of making the voyage: “ As I live, my friend, I am incessantly asking myself why on earth I have come hither. Why have I left you and those jewels of Italy, my own little villas ? But the parting from yourself is the main point. And what am I running away from? Danger? I do not seriously believe that there is any for me; and if there were, you are doing your best to recall me to it, when you say that my going will be highly applauded, if only I come back before the 1st of January. This, indeed, I shall strain every nerve to do, for I very much prefer living at home in jeopardy to dwelling at my ease in that Athens of yours. Do you, however, keep a sharp eye on the aspect of affairs, and write me how they are tending ; or, better still, come and tell me.

. . . Greeting to Pilia and to toy love and darling, Attica.”

That his mind was really free, at this moment, from any special apprehension or preoccupation about his own fate appears equally from the cheery tone of another letter, written on the same abortive voyage. Before reaching Vibo he had landed at Velia, near which place was the ancestral estate of his and our old friend Trebatius. The lawyer was not. there, but had placed his house at the disposition of Cicero, who was charmed with the situation, and wrote him from the spot : " I liked Velia none the less when I found how much you were beloved there ; although what does that signify ? You are always popular.

. . . But if you take my advice with your customary docility, you will hold on to these paternal acres,—the Velienses, for some reason or other, seem to fear that you will sell, — and never desert the noble river Heles and the house of Papirius. The lotus-trees about the latter are, I know, a great attraction, even to strangers, but if you were to cut them down you would get a much freer view ; and, in short, I think it a very good thing, especially in times like these, to have, not merely a refuge of some sort in a city where you are known and loved, but a house and field of your own in a remote and lovely spot. I may like, my dear Trebatius, to avail myself of this haven yet.”

Cicero goes on for several pages, as we are all apt to do when once started in this strain, and he certainly had some excuse for his testiness. Atticus thought so, at all events, for there is no trace of a lasting cloud upon their grand cordiality. Cicero mentions, toward the end of the same letter, having seen Brutus at Velia. When the latter arrived with two transport ships off the mouth of the little river on which the villa of Trebatius stood, and heard of Cicero’s presence, he came ashore for an interview which proved their last. Brutus passed on with his command to meet the shade of Cæsar at Philippi, and Cicero repaired to Rome.

Once again, in spite of the overshadowing predominance of Antony, he was welcomed on his arrival by a certain show of popular enthusiasm. The Senate met on the day assigned, and the republican opposition was organized. Calpurnius Piso, the father-in-law of Cæsar, made a patriotic address on the 1st of September; Cicero followed him on the morrow with a very noble speech, containing an elaborate review and criticism of Antony’s course during the last five months. This address came afterward to be classed as the first Philippic ; but in truth its tone was studiously moderate in comparison with that of the terrible diatribes which followed. Such as it was, however, the speech of September 2d sufficed clearly to reveal to Antony the person of his most dangerous foe, and to concentrate upon Cicero his deadliest purposes of revenge. Antony retired to Tivoli, and spent six weeks, with all the assistance he could command, in working up, and rendering as insulting and stinging at all points as possible, his reply to the attack in question. Not an inconsiderate speech, not an inconsistent act, not a reckless bonmot, of Cicero’s was forgotten. He was even accused of having been privy to the great conspiracy : but neither then nor at any subsequent time has this charge been considered worthy of serious attention, and Cicero’s manner of disposing of it, though not conciliatory, must be held conclusive : “ If I had been invited to the 15th of March banquet, there would have been no leavings.”

The duel between the two merciless antagonists was now fairly engaged, and the spirit of the old wrestler rose with every round. The second Philippic was merely written out in the study, and afterward published as a sort of pamphlet, but the remaining twelve were delivered in the Senate as occasion arose during the winter sessions of 710-711 (44-43 B. C.) ; Antony being by this time in open rebellion, and civil war raging both in Lombardy and the East. The fourteen Philippics, which might much better be called, as at first they were, the Oration es Antonianæ, will not only remain famous to the end of time as vehicles of ferocious invective, but more nobly famous for the passion of love and loyalty to the old Roman state which throbs through their long periods in pulses of fire, for the resistless force and the consummate splendor of the language in which they are embodied. Their analysis, however, like that of the other public speeches of the great orator, lies outside the modest scope of my own endeavor, which has merely been to obtain a just insight into the character of the man Cicero, through a sympathetic study of his private correspondence.

He left the city in October for one more autumn villeggiatura in those realms of Paradise that lie south of Rome, and the last letters to Atticus belong to this period. There are frequent allusions to Octavian, who at this time was literally at swords’ points with Antony, being in command of a large detachment of republican troops. “ Valde puer ”—He is nothing but a boy — is the key-note to Cicero’s comments upon the man of destiny, whose imperial airs merely amuse the gray-haired statesman ; whose confidence and friendship he cultivates as a matter of policy; for whom he expresses in public a ceremonious regard, but whose suggestions he is apt, in the intimacy of his letters to Atticus, to treat with a sort of fretful indulgence. “Last evening,” he writes from Pozzuoli on the 2d of November, “ I got a letter from Octavian. He has great projects. He has quite won over the legions of Casilinum and Calatia, which is not so very wonderful, since he has given the men five hundred denarii a head.¹⁰ He now proposes to try the other colonies. His evident intention is to conduct a campaign against Antony, and, for all I can see, hostilities may break out any day. Who then is to be our leader ? Think of Octavian’s name and of his unripe years! Fancy his requesting me to give him a private interview at Capua or thereabouts ! So puerile to imagine that such an interview could be private ! I replied that it seemed to me both impracticable and unnecessary. What would you have ? He proclaims himself our head, and expects our support. I have urged his going to Rome, where I think he is already popular with the lower orders, and will, if he prove stanch, have the Boni with him also. But, O Brutus, where are you ? and what a glorious opportunity you have let slip ! ” He has eourage enough, that stripling,” he writes from Arpinum a week afterward, “ but so little authority ! " Three months later, however, even Cicero has dropped the name of Octavian, and is talking of the “boy Cœsar.”

He must have remained at the old homestead very nearly a month, for his last letter to Atticus is dated there early in December. There had been several notes, written at intervals of a few days, and containing clear and minute directions for the final adjustment of his affairs, the settlement of all claims against his estate, and the regular payment of the boy Cicero’s allowance. And finally: “To return, then, to the republic. You have made many sagacious political observations in your day, dear Atticus, but nothing wiser than this in your last letter : ‘ The youth’s power is great, and just at present he is pushing Antony hard; nevertheless we must wait the event.’ . . . Here goes, then, for the hottest of the fire ! It is baser to fall in private than in public, . . . and could I stay away when Marcellus is there ? Not that I care about this, or that it signifies. What I do care for you will presently see. Assum igitur.”

It was thus that Cicero answered to his name upon the roll-call of honor, gathered his robe about him, and stepped proudly down yet once again into the arena of his true victories. We shall miss henceforth His unlimited and uncalculating confidences to Atticus, but we are glad to think that the two old comrades were together during that final winter of desperate fighting in the Senate and on the field. Not that the busy pen had fallen idle. There are letters in abundance, — more than we can conceive his finding time to write: letters of brisk encouragement and vehement faith to Decimus Brutus and Cassius in the field; letters of eloquent reasoning and earnest, even pathetic exhortation to Lucius Plancus, the child of an early friend, who held a command on the Riviera, in Transalpine Gaul, where it was hoped he might offer a successful resistance to Lepidus,¹¹ and who, with Decimus Brutus, had been designated by Cæsar as consul for that year 712 which Cicero would never see. After thanking Plancus very graciously for the profuse expressions of personal regard contained in a letter just received from him, Cicero writes on one occasion: " On the other hand, your profession and promise of loyalty to the republic afford me a far more exquisite pleasure than did the private protestations which preceded it. And so once more, dear Plancus, as in the letter to which you have so handsomely replied, I do not merely exhort, but as a suppliant beseech you to throw yourself with your whole soul and all the force of your being into the cause of the republic. There is no such harvest of glory to be gathered elsewhere; nor is there in the whole range of human affairs aught brighter and nobler than to have deserved well of your country. For up to the present time — the remarkably sound sense and good feeling which you have shown encourage me to speak freely — your success appears to me to have been somewhat a matter of luck ; not won without merit on your part, certainly, but largely helped by fortune and opportunity. But if you are able to succor the state in these most critical days, it will be essentially and entirely your own doing. Words cannot express the loathing in which Mark Antony is held by all save the lowest rabble, nor the hopes which rest upon you and your army; for the sake of which and of your own renown, God grant you may lose no time in fulfilling these high expectations. I admonish you as I would my son; I reason with you as with myself; and, as the truest of your friends, I plead with you on behalf of our common country.”

There are a half dozen other letters no less fervent than this, but the replies of Plancus, though deferential and well worded, are ominously lukewarm. He did, indeed, lire up a little in the course of the spring, when, after the relief of Mutina (the modern Modena), where Decimus Brutus had been besieged, all things during a little while looked well for the republican arms; but his conversion to the winning cause was a foregone conclusion, and as early even as the anniversary of Cæsar’s murder we detect without Surprise an undertone of sternness in the untiring counsels wherewith Cicero continued to ply him.

“ It is your duty,” he writes on the 19th of March, " first of all to repudiate all commerce — distasteful to you, I am sure — with the men who blaspheme the state ; then to stand forward as head, leader, helper, to the Senate and all the Boni; finally, to hold that peace consists not in the mere laying down of arms, but in destroying once for all the fear whether of war or slavery. If you think and act thus, you will be not simply a consul and a consular, but a great consul and a great consular; if otherwise, there will be no dignity in those most illustrious titles, but rather a deep disgrace.”

It was the same story over again with Asinius Pollio, an accomplished gentleman of republican, that is to say aristocratic traditions, who was stationed at Cordova, in Spain, and wrote thence to Cicero how he longed for peace, if only that they might be free to pursue their favorite studies together. For him there were in store long years of literary leisure under Augustus; and he gave little suppers to Vergil and Horace, while Cicero slept in his bloody grave at Formiæ. To Pollio, however, and to Cornificius, the governor of Africa, no less than to the more distinguished generals in the field, Cicero continued to send words of solemn urgency, until the last gleam of hope for the old cause — the cause, indeed, as we now know, of a bygone order — was completely eclipsed. “Vale et vince ”— Farewell and conquer— is the terse formula with which the letters of this period oftenest end.

Unquestionably, too, Cicero wrote often to Brutus, and one would naturally expect this correspondence to be the most interesting of all; but such is by no means the character of the fifteen letters, with about half as many supposed replies, usually published in two separate books, under the head of Epistolæ ad Brutum. They are trite and tame, and shed no new light on the events of the year, which it would seem that the letters of those two men must have done. Their authenticity has indeed been strenuously disputed, and the critics were at one time almost unanimous in rejecting them. Over and above their stiff and colorless character, learned Latinists have found them full of unCiceronian expressions, which would be a stronger argument if Cicero had not freely allowed himself such in some of the brightest and most characteristic of his informal writings. Of late, however, like most things once under the ban, these letters to Brutus have found earnest defenders, and I think that the balance of critical judgment may now be said to incline a little in their favor. I do not myself see why their fond may not be genuine, the trouble with them being that, precisely because of their peculiar significance, they were too much revised by Tiro. In June of the previous year, when he was putting his affairs in order, Cicero had written, in reply to an inquiry of Atticus: “There is no collection of my letters. Tiro has about seventy, and you could furnish a certain number; but these I ought to go carefully over and correct. Some day,

I suppose, they will be published.” The letters to Brutus could not have been among the seventy which Tiro possessed at that time, for the most of them bear a later date, but they would have been likelier, perhaps, than any others to fall into the hands of the trusted freedman after his master’s death ; and, acting on the hint given above, he and young Marcus, as the executors of Cicero, may well have thought themselves justified in pruning and softening them a good deal before giving them to the imperial world. That the existing letters to Atticus passed through no such process is plain, and we may be very thankful for it.

Modena had been relieved, and the day the news came there was rejoicing in Rome, and the mercurial mob, as in times gone by. escorted Cicero from the Senate to his house with shouts of triumph. But the military advantage was not followed up, and, by a singular fatality, the consuls Hirtius and Pansa, who had finally assumed their proper posts of command in the republican army, both fell in battle during the last week of April. In writing to Cornificius in Africa of the double calamity, Cicero lets fall the first word which looks like discouragement on his part:

“ The loss of our colleagues, Hirtius and Pansa, in whose consulate lay the hope of the republic, is especially illomened, coming at this time. The pressure of Antony’s villainy has been lifted from the state for a moment, but is by no means wholly removed. I shall defend the republic after my own fashion as long as may be, though my strength is well-nigh spent. But weariness must not stand in the way of duty and of faith.”

After this the tidings of disaster came thick and fast. Octavian, who had been relied upon to cut off the retreat of Antony toward the Riviera, refused to move. Antony and Lepidus effected a junction. Decimus Brutus was in retreat across Piedmont; his troops were deserting to the enemy ; he was reduced to three hundred followers. Decimus Brutus was dead. Marcus Brutus was indeed master of Greece, and Cassius had starved out Dolabella, and driven him to suicide in Laodicea; but these two captains were far away when Octavian at length flung off the mask, and seized the citadel of the republic.

In the month Sextilis, which was hereafter to be called August, four hundred of Julius Cæsar’s veterans appeared at Rome, demanding the consulate for the grand-nephew, or, as he now chose to designate himself, the son, of the great Dictator. The aggression was at first resisted, but when one of the deputation which had appeared before the Senate struck his sword upon the floor, with the remark, “ If you do not give Cæsar the consulship, this will,” Cicero was ready with the retort, “ Oh, if he makes his claim in that form, no doubt he will get it.” “ These were the words,” says Dio Cassius, “which cost him his life;” but in truth his life was a hundred times forfeit. The last hour of the old cycle had come, the last leaves of the forest were falling, and it was time for the Father of his Country to be gone.

Oetavian now repaired in person to Rome, and on the 23d of September was elected consul by the Senate, and his right to the name of Cæsar confirmed. He then marched forth at the head of eight legions, ostensibly to continue the war against Antony, but in reality to meet the latter and Lepidus at Bologna and arrange terms with them. The celebrated conference which issued in what is known as the Third Triumvirate assembled on the 27th of November; and as a preliminary to a more cordial understanding between the parties, Octavian, whom we may now begin to call Augustus, accepted the hand of Antony s daughter Claudia. The little maiden, who could not have been above ten years of age, bore the name of another implacable foe of Cicero’s ; for that furious tragedy-queen, her mother Fulvia, had been the wife of Clodius Pulcher before she married Antony.

Yet there is no need to ascribe, as some have done, to feminine influence the fact that the objections of the youthful Cæsar were quickly overruled, and the name of Marcus Tullius Cicero put first upon the fatal roll of the proscribed. The name of Quintus was also there, and the two old brothers, all their differences forgotten, were together at the Tusculan villa when the list of the condemned appeared. It seemed worth while making the attempt to escape by sea and join Brutus in Macedonia, and to this end the pair set forth down the Alban hills, carried side by side in two litters, and conversing earnestly all the way. It appeared, however, before they reached the Campagna, that they had not nearly money enough between them for the journey, and Quintus took the risk of returning to Rome for ampler supplies. They did not linger over their parting, nor need we. The hired assassins of the triumvirs were already at work in the city when Quintus arrived ; he fell at once into their hands, and he and his son died bravely together, fighting side by side.

Meanwhile, our Cicero pushed on to Astura, seeing once more, as in a dream, the spot where he had first clasped death to his heart, when he paced its deep shades beside the clinging ghost of Tullia. There he embarked, and coasted along as far as the Circæan cape, where, the weather being very threatening, he landed and slept. In the morning he had half abandoned the voyage. He even walked a little way along the road toward Rome, as though impatient to meet his murderers and anticipate the end. But his attendants, resolved, if possible, on saving their beloved master, persuaded him to reëmbark ; and struggling still against contrary winds, they rounded the point of Gaeta. Formiæ now lay before them, — exquisite Formire, embraced by its guardian capes, one of the sweetest of Cicero’s Italian homes. But the December skies were dark above the villa to-day, the Volscian peaks on the horizon dim, and even the Tyrrhene waves discolored. Here, however, being faint with seasickness and spent with fatigue, the reluctant fugitive would absolutely land, and, flinging himself upon a couch under his own roof once more, he sank into a heavy slumber. From this he was presently roused by his slaves, who, reporting in agonized panic that soldiers were in sight, hurried him almost by force into a litter, and plunged into the thickest of the shrubbery between the villa and the sea. Half-way down the slope they encountered the troop, when Cicero, hearing the clang of arms, looked out, and ordered his men in a loud, clear voice to set down the litter, and offer no resistance. Laying his left hand on his chin, with an unconscious gesture very common to him while speaking, he fixed his eye steadily for a moment on the captain of the band, one Herennius, whom he recognized and called by name. “ Come, then, old soldier, if you know your duty, and strike quickly.” He stretched forth his emaciated neck, the bystanders involuntarily covered their eyes, and the blow fell.

The severed head was set up above the rostra, according to the barbarous fashion not so long gone by, and Fulvia, with half the wolf’s milk curdled in her veins,” drew out the tongue and pierced it with her bodkin, assailing the dead man with such invective as a Roman virago might compass. But the fickle people of the streets, who had sat so many times entranced under the music of that lifeless tongue, lifted up their voices when they saw the ghastly relic, and wept without restraint.

It is a notable fact that no biographer of Cicero, I might almost say no student of his epoch, has ever yet succeeded in remaining indifferent to the man. Over and above the homage due to his transcendent gifts, his name has always retained the power of stirring emotion, of provoking partisanship, of moving to enthusiasm or anger, as though that brilliant, lovable, fallible human creature were still alive, and eloquent, and moving “ in his habit as he lived ” among men. What contradictory judgments have been passed on his course as a statesman, on the disinterestedness or the mere blind obstinacy of his adhesion to the republic ! In how many ways almost ludicrously diverse has his character been conceived and illustrated, from the devout point of view of the quattro-cento humanist to the grotesque point of view of the nineteenth-century imperialist! This he owes in part, I think, to his own grand carelessness of consistency; to that very loyalty to the impulses of a rich and versatile nature which the Delphian god had the insight to enjoin upon him at the outset of his political career. His art itself was natural, even when it appeared most consummate ; for “ art’s highest works,” as Goethe says, “ are also the highest of nature, being produced by man in accordance with true and natural laws.” I shall not therefore advance any theory or attempt any analysis of my own, but leave the unguarded correspondent of Atticus to speak for himself to others, as he has very intelligibly spoken to me. I will quote, however, since it seems to me in its own way conclusive, the briefest summary of his case on record ; the late and perhaps remorseful admission of the man who might have saved him, but whose court we are glad, upon the whole, that he did not live to adorn. Plutarch tells us that a grandson of the Emperor Augustus was one day discovered by the latter poring over a volume of Cicero’s works. The boy instinctively thrust the book under his mantle, but was ordered to produce it; and the emperor, taking it from him, opened it and began himself to read. He became absorbed ; he turned leaf after leaf ; and when at last he gravely handed the volume back to the relieved culprit, it was with the single remark, “ That was a good man, and one who loved his country.”

Harriet Waters Preston.