Chapter I
HIS RETURN FROM EXILE

Cicero's life for the next two years was made conspicuous by a series of speeches which were produced by his exile and his return. These are remarkable for the praise lavished on himself, and by the violence with which he attacked his enemies. It must be owned that never was abuse more abusive, or self-praise uttered in language more laudatory. ¹ Cicero had now done all that was useful in his public life. The great monuments of his literature are to come. None of these had as yet been written except a small portion of his letters – about a tenth – and of these he thought no more in regard to the public than do any ordinary letter-writers of to-day. Some poems had been produced, and a history of his own Consulship in Greek; but these are unknown to us. He had already become the greatest orator, perhaps, of all time – and we have many of the speeches spoken by him. Some we have – those five, namely, telling the story of Verres – not intended to be spoken, but written for the occasion of the day rather than with a view to permanent literature. He had been Quæstor, Ædile, Prætor, and Consul, with singular and undeviating success. He had been honest in the exercise of public functions when to be honest was to be singular. He had bought golden opinions from all sorts of people. He had been true to his country, and useful also – a combination which it was given to no other public man of those days to achieve. Having been Prætor and Consul, he had refused the accustomed rewards, and had abstained from the provinces. His speeches, with but few exceptions, had hitherto been made in favor of honesty. They are declamations against injustice, against bribery, against cruelty, and all on behalf of decent civilized life. Had he died then, he would not have become the hero of literature, the marvel among men of letters whom the reading world admires; but he would have been a great man, and would have saved himself from the bitterness of Cæsarean tongues.

His public work was in truth done. His further service consisted of the government of Cilicia for a year – an employment that was odious to him, though his performance of it was a blessing to the province. After that there came the vain struggle with Cæsar, the attempt to make the best of Cæsar victorious, the last loud shriek on behalf of the Republic, and then all was over. The fourteen years of life which yet remained to him sufficed for erecting that literary monument of which I have spoken, but his public usefulness was done. To the reader of his biography it will seem that these coming fourteen years will lack much of the grace which adorned the last twenty. The biographer will be driven to make excuses, which he will not do without believing in the truth of them, but doubting much whether he may beget belief in others. He thinks that he can see the man passing from one form to another – his doubting devotion to Pompey, his enforced adherence to Cæsar, his passionate opposition to Antony; but he can still see him true to his country, and ever on the alert against tyranny and on behalf of pure patriotism.

At the present we have to deal with Cicero in no vacillating spirit, but loudly exultant and loudly censorious. Within the two years following his return he made a series of speeches, in all of which we find the altered tone of his mind. There is no longer that belief in the ultimate success of justice, and ultimate triumph of the Republic, which glowed in his Verrine and Catiline orations. He is forced to descend in his aspirations. It is not whether Rome shall be free, or the bench of justice pure, but whether Cicero shall be avenged and Gabinius punished. It may have been right – it was right – that Cicero should be avenged and Gabinius punished; but it must be admitted that the subjects are less alluring.

His first oration, as generally received, was made to the Senate in honor of his return. The second was addressed to the people on the same subject. The third was spoken to the college of priests, with the view of recovering the ground on which his house had stood, and which Clodius had attempted to alienate forever by dedicating it to a pretended religious purpose. The next, as coming on our list, though not so in time, was addressed again to the Senate concerning official reports made by the public soothsayers as interpreters of occult signs, as to whether certain portents had been sent by the gods to show that Cicero ought not to have back his house. Before this was made he had defended Sextius, who as Tribune had been peculiarly serviceable in assisting his return. This was before a bench of judges; and separated from this, though made apparently at the same time, is a violent attack upon Vatinius, one of Cæsar's creatures, who was a witness against Sextius. Then there is a seventh, regarding the disposition of the provinces among the Proprætors and Proconsuls, the object of which was to enforce the recall of Piso from Macedonia and Gabinius from Syria, and to win Cæsar's favor by showing that Cæsar should be allowed to keep the two Gauls and Illyricum. To these must be added two others, made within the same period, for Cælius and Balbus. The close friendship between Cicero and the young man Cælius was one of the singular details of the orator's life. Balbus was a Spaniard, attached to Cæsar, and remarkable as having been the first man not an Italian who achieved the honor of the Consulship.

It has been disputed whether the first four of these orations were really the work of Cicero, certain German critics and English scholars having declared them to be "parum Ciceronias" – too little like Cicero. That is the phrase used by Nobbe, who published a valuable edition of all Cicero's works, after the text of Ernesti, in a single volume. Mr. Long, in his introduction to these orations, denounces them in language so strong as to rob them of all chance of absolute acceptance from those who know the accuracy of Mr. Long's scholarship.² There may probably have been subsequent interpolations. The first of the four, however, is so closely referred to by Cicero himself in the speech made by him two years subsequently in the defence of Plancius, that the fact of an address to the Senate in the praise of those who had assisted him in his return cannot be doubted; and we are expressly told by the orator that, because of the importance of the occasion, he had written it out before he spoke it.³ As to the Latinity, it is not within my scope, nor indeed within my power, to express a confident opinion; but as to the matter of the speech, I think that Cicero, in his then frame of mind, might have uttered what is attributed to him. Having said so much, I shall best continue my narrative by dealing with the four speeches as though they were genuine.

b. c. 57, ætat. 50.

Cicero landed at Brundisium on the 5th of August, the day on which his recall from exile had been enacted by the people, and there met his daughter Tullia, who had come to welcome him back to Italy on that her birthday. But she had come as a widow, having just lost her first husband, Piso Frugi. At this time she was not more than nineteen years old. Of Tullia's feelings we know nothing from her own expressions, as they have not reached us; but from the warmth of her father's love for her, and by the closeness of their friendship, we are led to imagine that the joy of her life depended more on him than on any of her three husbands. She did not live long with either of them, and died soon after the birth of a child, having been divorced from the third. I take it, there was much of triumph in the meeting, though Piso Frugi had died so lately.

The return of Cicero to Rome was altogether triumphant. It must be remembered that the contemporary accounts we have had of it are altogether from his own pen. They are taken chiefly from the orations I have named above, though subsequent allusions to the glory of his return to Rome are not uncommon in his works. But had his boasting not been true, the contradictions to them would have been made in such a way as to have reached our ears. Plutarch, indeed, declares that Cicero's account of the glory of his return fell short of the truth.

It may be taken for granted that with that feeble monster, the citizen populace of Rome, Cicero had again risen to a popularity equal to that which had been bestowed upon him when he had just driven Catiline out of Rome. Of what nature were the crowds who were thus loud in the praise of their great Consul, and as loud afterward in their rejoicings at the return of the great exile, we must form our own opinion from circumstantial evidence. There was a mass of people, with keen ears taking artistic delight in eloquence and in personal graces, but determined to be idle, and to be fed as well as amused in their idleness; and there were also vast bands of men ready to fight – bands of gladiators they have been called, though it is probable that but few of them had ever been trained to the arena – whose business it was to shout as well as to fight on behalf of their patrons. We shall not be justified in supposing that those who on the two occasions named gave their sweet voices for Cicero were only the well-ordered, though idle, proportion of the people, whereas they who had voted against him in favor of Clodius had all been assassins, bullies, and swordsmen. We shall probably be nearer the mark if we imagine that the citizens generally were actuated by the prevailing feelings of their leaders at the moment, but were carried into enthusiasm when enabled, without detriment to their interests, to express their feelings for one who was in truth popular with them. When Cicero, after the death of the five conspirators, declared that the men "had lived" – "vixerunt" – his own power was sufficient to insure the people that they would be safe in praising him. When he came back to Rome, Pompey had been urgent for his return, and Cæsar had acceded to it. When the bill was passed for banishing him, the Triumvirate had been against him, and Clodius had been able to hound on his crew. But Milo also had a crew, and Milo was Cicero's friend. As the Clodian crew helped to drive Cicero from Rome, so did Milo's crew help to bring him back again.

Cicero, on reaching Rome, went at once to the Capitol, to the temple of Jupiter, and there returned thanks for the great thing that had been done for him. He was accompanied by a vast procession who from the temple went with him to his brother's house, where he met his wife, and where he resided for a time. His own house in the close neighborhood had been destroyed. He reached Rome on the 4th of September, and on the 5th an opportunity was given to the then hero of the day for expressing his thanks to the Senate for what they had done for him. His intellect had not grown rusty in Macedonia, though he had been idle. On the 5th, Cicero spoke to the Senate; on the 6th, to the people. Before the end of the month he made a much longer speech to the priests in defence of his own property. Out of the full heart the mouth speaks, and his heart was very full of the subject.

His first object was to thank the Senate and the leading members of it for their goodness to him. The glowing language in which this is done goes against the grain with us when we read continuously the events of his life as told by himself. His last grievous words had been expressions of despair addressed to Atticus; now he breaks out into a pæan of triumph. We have to remember that eight months had intervened, and that the time had sufficed to turn darkness into light. "If I cannot thank you as I ought, O Conscript Fathers, for the undying favors which you have conferred on me, on my brother, and my children, ascribe it, I beseech you, to the greatness of the things you have done for me, and not to the defect of my virtue." Then he praises the two Consuls, naming them, Lentulus and Metellus – Metellus, as the reader will remember, having till lately been his enemy. He lauds the Prætors and the Tribunes, two of the latter members having opposed his return; but he is loudest in praise of Pompey – that "Sampsiceramus," that "Hierosolymarius," that "Arabarches" into whose character he had seen so clearly when writing from Macedonia to Atticus – that "Cn. Pompey who, by his valor, his glory, his achievements, stands conspicuously the first of all nations, of all ages, of all history." We cannot but be angry when we read the words, though we may understand how well he understood that he was impotent to do anything for the Republic unless he could bring such a man as Pompey to act with him. We must remember, too, how impossible it was that one Roman should rise above the falsehood common to Romans. We cannot ourselves always escape even yet from the atmosphere of duplicity in which policy delights. He describes the state of Rome in his absence. "When I was gone, you" – you, the Senate – "could decree nothing for your citizens, or for your allies, or for the dependent kings. The judges could give no judgment; the people could not record their votes; the Senate availed nothing by its authority. You saw only a silent Forum, a speechless Senate-house, a city dumb and deserted." We may suppose that Rome was what Cicero described it to be when he was in exile, and Cæsar had gone to his provinces; but its condition had been the result of the crushing tyranny of the Triumvirate rather than of Cicero's absence.

Lentulus, the present Consul, had been, he says, a second father, almost a god, to him. But he would not have needed the hand of a Consul to raise him from the ground, had he not been wounded by consular hands. Catulus, one of Rome's best citizens, had told him that though Rome had now and again suffered from a bad Consul, she had never before been afflicted by two together. While there was one Consul worthy of the name, Catulus had declared that Cicero would be safe. But there had come two, two together, whose spirits had been so narrow, so low, so depraved, so burdened with greed and ignorance, "that they had been unable to comprehend, much less to sustain the splendor of the name of Consul. Not Consuls were they, but buyers and sellers of provinces." These were Piso and Gabinius, of whom the former was now governor of Macedonia, and the latter of Syria. Cicero's scorn against these men, who as Consuls had permitted his exile, became a passion with him. His subsequent hatred of Antony was not as bitter. He had come there to thank the assembled Senators for their care of him, but he is carried off so violently by his anger that he devotes a considerable portion of his speech to these indignant utterances. The reader does not regret it. Abuse makes better reading than praise, has a stronger vitality, and seems, alas, to come more thoroughly from the heart! Those who think that genuine invective has its charms would ill spare Piso and Gabinius.

He goes back to his eulogy, and names various Prætors and officers who have worked on his behalf. Then he declares that by the view of the present Consul, Lentulus, a decree has been passed in his favor more glorious than has been awarded to any other single Roman citizen – namely that from all Italy those who wished well to their country should be collected together for the purpose of bringing him back from his banishment – him, Cicero. There is much in this in praise of Lentulus, but more in praise of Cicero. Throughout these orations we feel that Cicero is put forward as the hero, whereas Piso and Gabinius are the demons of the piece. "What could I leave as a richer legacy to my posterity," he goes on to say, opening another clause of his speech, "than that the Senate should have decreed that the citizen who had not come forward in my defence was one regardless of the Republic." By these boastings, though he was at the moment at the top of the ladder of popularity, he was offending the self-importance of all around him. He was offending especially Pompey, with whom it was his fate to have to act.⁴ But that was little to the offence he was giving to those who were to come many centuries after him, who would not look into the matter with sufficient accuracy to find that his vanity deserved forgiveness because of his humanity and desire for progress. "O Lentulus," he says, at the end of the oration, "since I am restored to the Republic, as with me the Republic is itself restored, I will slacken nothing in my efforts at liberty; but, if it may be possible, will add something to my energy." In translating a word here and there as I have done, I feel at every expression my incapacity. There is no such thing as good translation. If you wish to drink the water, with its life and vigor in it, you must go to the fountain and drink it there.

On the day following he made a similar speech to the people – if, indeed, the speech we have was from his mouth or his pen – as to which it has been remarked that in it he made no allusion to Clodius, though he was as bitter as ever against the late Consuls. From this we may gather that, though his audience was delighted to hear him, even in his self-praise, there might have been dispute had he spoken ill of one who had been popular as Tribune. His praise of Pompey was almost more fulsome than that of the day before, and the same may be said of his self-glorification. Of his brother's devotion to him he speaks in touching words, but in words which make us remember how untrue to him afterward was that very brother. There are phrases so magnificent throughout this short piece that they obtain from us, as they are read, forgiveness for the writer's faults. "Sic ulciscar facinorum singula." Let the reader of Latin turn to chapter ix. of the oration and see how the speaker declares that he will avenge himself against the evil-doers whom he has denounced.