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BLACKWOOD'S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No. CCCXXI.

JULY, 1842.

VOL. LII.

CICERO.
7. Dε Quincey.

IN drawing attention to a great question of whatsoever nature connected with Cicero, there is no danger of missing our purpose through any want of reputed interest in the subject. Nominally, it is not easy to assign a period more eventful, a revolution more important, or a personal career more dramatic, than that period that revolution-that career, which, with almost equal right, we may describe as all essentially Ciceronian, by the quality of the interest which they excite. For the age, it was fruitful in great men; but amongst them all, if we except the sublime Julian leader, none as regards splendour of endowments stood upon the same level as Cicero. For the revolution, it was that unique event which brought ancient civilization into contact and commerce with modern: since, if we figure the two worlds of Paganism and Christianity under the idea of two great continents, it is through the isthmus of Rome imperialized that the one has virtually communicated with the other. Civil law and Christianity, the two central forces of modern civilization, were upon that isthmus of time ripened into potent establishments. And through those two establishments, combined with the antique literature, as through so many organs of metempsychosis, did the pagan world pass onwards, whatever portion of its own life was fitted for surviving its own peculiar forms. Yet, in a revolution thus unexampled, for grandeur of results, the only great actor who stood upon the authority of his character was Cicero. All others, from Pompey, Curio, Domitius, Cato, down to the final parti

VOL. LII. NO. CCCXXI.

sans at Actium, moved by the authority of arms; "tantum auctoritate valebant, quantum milite:" and they could have moved by no other. Lastly, as regards the personal biography, although the same series of trials, perils, and calamities, would have been in any case interesting for themselves, yet undeniably they derive a separate power of affecting the mind from the peculiar merits of the individual concerned. Cicero is one of the very few pagan statesmen who can be described as a thoughtfully conscientious man.

It is not, therefore, any want of splendid attraction in our subject from which we are likely to suffer. It is of this very splendour that we complain, as having long ago defeated the simplicities of truth, and preoccupied the minds of all readers with ideas politically romantic. All tutors, schoolmasters, academic authorities, together with the collective corps of editors, critics, commentators, have a natural bias in behalf of a literary man who did so much honour to literature, and who, in all the storms of his difficult life, manifested so much attachment to the pure literary interest. Readers of sensibility acknowledge the effect from any large influence of deep halcyon repose, when relieving the agitations of history; as, for example, that which arises in our domestic annals from interposing between two bloody reigns, like those of Henry VIII. and his daughter Mary, the serene morning of a childlike king, destined to an early grave, yet in the mean time occupied with benign counsels for propagating religion or for protecting the poor. Such a repose, the same luxury of rest for the mind,

is felt by all who traverse the great circumstantial record of those tumultuous Roman times, viz. the Ciceronian epistolary correspondence. Upon coming suddenly into deep lulls of angry passions-here, upon some scheme for the extension of literature by a domestic history, or by a comparison of Greek with Roman jurisprudence; there, again, upon some ancient problem from the quiet fields of philosophy-literary men are already prejudiced in favour of one who, in the midst of belligerent partisans, was the patron of intellectual interest. But amongst Christian nations this prejudice has struck deeper: Cicero was not merely a philosophier; he was one who cultivated ethics; he was himself the author of an ethical system, composed with the pious purpose of training to what he thought just moral views his only son. This system survives, is studied to this day, is honoured perhaps extravagantly, and has repeatedly been pronounced the best practical theory to which pagan principles were equal.

Were

It only upon this impulse, it was natural that men should receive a clinamen, or silent bias, towards Cicero, as a moral authority amongst disputants whose arguments were legions. The author of a moral code cannot be sup posed indifferent to the moral relations of his own party views. If he erred, it could not be through want of meditation upon the grounds of judgment, or want of interest in the results. So far Cicero has an advantage. But he has more lively advantage in the comparison by which he benefits, at every stage of his life, with antagonists whom the reader is taught to believe dissolute, incendiary, almost desperate citizens. Verres in the youth of Cicero, Catiline and Clodius in his middle age, Mark Antony in his old age, have all been left to operate on the modern reader's feelings precisely through that masquerade of misrepresentation which invariably accompanied the political eloquence of Rome. The monstrous caricatures from the forum, or the senate, or the democratic rostrum, which were so confessealy distortions, by original design, for attaining the ends of faction, have imposed upon scholars pretty generally as faithful portraits. Recluse scholars are rarely politicians; and in the timid horror of German literati at this day, when they read of real brickbats and paving

stones, not metaphorical, used as figures of speech by a Clodian mob, we British understand the little comprehension of that rough horseplay proper to the hustings, which can yet be available for the rectification of any continental judgment. "Play, do you call it?" says a German commentator; "why, that brickbat might break a man's leg; and this paving-stone would be sufficient to fracture a skull." Too true: they certainly might do so. But, for all that, our British experience of elec tioneering "rough-and-tumbling" has long blunted the edge of our moral anger. Contested elections are unknown to the continent-hitherto even to those nations of the continent which boast of representative governments. And with no experience of their inconveniences, they have as yet none of the popular forces in which such contests originate. We, on the other hand, are familiar with such scenes. What Rome saw upon one sole hustings, we see repeated upon hundreds. And we all know, that the bark of electioneering mobs is worse than their bite. Their fury is without malice, and their insurrectionary violence is without system. Most undoubtedly the mobs and seditions of Clodius are entitled to the same benefits of construction. And with regard to the graver charges against Catiline or Clodius, as men sunk irredeemably in sensual debaucheries, these are exaggerations which have told only from want of attention to Roman habits. Such charges were the standing material, the stock in trade, of every orator against every antagonist. Cicero, with the same levity as every other public speaker, tossed about such atrocious libels at random. And with little blame where there was really no discretion allowed. Not are they true? but will they tell? was the question. Insolvency and monstrous debauchery were the two ordinary reproaches on the Roman hustings. No man escaped them who was rich enough, or had expectations notorious enough, to win for such charges any colourable plausibility. Those only were unmolested in this way who stood in no man's path of ambition; or who had been obscure (that is to say, poor) in youth; or who, being splendid by birth or connexions, had been notoriously occupied in distant campaigns. The ob

ject in such calumnies was, to produce a momentary effect upon the populace; and sometimes, as happened to Cæsar, the merest falsehoods of a partisan orator were adopted subsequently for truths by the simple-minded soldiery. But the misapprehension of these libels in modern times originates in erroneous appreciation of Roman oratory. Scandal was its proper element. Senate or law-tribunal, forum or mob rostrum, made no difference in the licentious practice of Roman eloquence. And, unfortunately, the calumnies survive; whilst the state of things, which made it needless to notice them in reply, has entirely perished. During the transitional period between the old Roman frugality and the luxury succeeding to foreign conquest, a reproach of this nature would have stung with some severity; and it was not without danger to a candidate. But the age of growing voluptuousness weakened the effect of such importations: and this age may be taken to have commenced in the youth of the Gracchi, about 100 years before Pharsalia. The change in the direction of men's sensibilities since then, Was as marked as the change in their habits. Both changes had matured themselves in Cicero's days; and one natural result was, that few men of Sense valued such reproaches, (incapable, from their generality, of specific refutation,) whether directed against friends or enemies. Cæsar, when assailed for the thousandth time by the old fable about Nicomedes the sove reign of Bithynia, no more troubled himself to expose its falsehood in the Senate, than when previously dispersed over Rome through the libellous facetice of Catullus. He knew that the object of such petty malice was simply to tease him; and for himself to lose any temper, or to manifest anxiety, by a labour so hopeless as any effort towards the refutation of an unlimited childishly to collude with his enemies. He treated the story, therefore, as if it had been true; and showed that, even under that assumption, it would not avail for the purpose before the house. Subsequently, Suetonius, as an express collector of anecdotage and pointed personalities against great men, has revived many of these scurrilous jests; but his authority, at the distance of two generations, can add nothing to the credit of calumnies originally founded on plebeian envy, or

scandal, was

the jealousy of rivals. We may pos-
sibly find ourselves obliged to come
back upon this subject. And at this
point, therefore, we will not further
pursue it than by remarking, that no
one snare has proved so fatal to the
sound judgment of posterity upon
public men in Rome, as this blind
credulity towards the oratorical bil-
lingsgate of ancient forensic license,
or of παρρησία electioneering. Libels,
whose very point and jest lay in their
extravagance, have been received for
historical truth with respect to many
amongst Cicero's enemies. And the
reaction upon Cicero's own character
has been naturally to exaggerate that
imputed purity of morals, which has

availed to raise him into what is called
a pattern man."

66

The injurious effect upon biographic
literature of all such wrenches to the
truth, is diffused every where. Fénélon,
or Howard the philanthropist, may
serve to illustrate the effect we mean,
when viewed in relation to the stern

simplicity of truth. Both these men
have long been treated with such uni-
formity of dissimulation, "petted" (so
to speak) with such honeyed false-
hoods, as beings too bright and seraphic
for human inquisition, that now their
real circumstantial merits, quite as
much as their human frailties, have
faded away in this blaze of fabling
idolatry, Sir Isaac Newton, again,
for about one entire century since his
death in 1727, was painted by all
biographers as a man so saintly in
temper-so meek-so detached from
worldly interest, that, by mere strength
of potent falsehood, the portrait had
ceased to be human, and a great
man's life furnished no interest to
posterity. At length came the odious
truth, exhibiting Sir Isaac in a cha-
racter painful to contemplate, as a
fretful, peevish, and sometimes even
malicious, intriguer; traits, however,
in Sir Isaac already traceable in the
sort of chicanery attending his subor
nation of managers in the Leibnitz
controversy, and the publication of
the Commercium Epistolicum. For the
present, the effect has been purely to
Shock and to perplex. As regards
moral instruction, the lesson comes

too late: it is now defeated by its in-
consistency with our previous training
in steady theatrical delusion.

We do not make it a reproach to
Cicero, that his reputation with pos-
terity has been affected by these or

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similar arts of falsification. Eventually this has been his misfortune. Adhering to the truth, his indiscreet eulogists would have presented to the world a much more interesting picture; not so much the representation of "vir bonus cum malâ fortunâ compositus," which is, after all, an ordinary spectacle for so much of the conflict as can ever be made public; but that of a man generally upright, matched as in single duel with a standing temptation to error, growing out of his public position; often seduced into false principles by the necessities of ambition, or by the coercion of self-consistency; and often, as he himself admits, biassed finally in a public question by the partialities of friendship. The violence of that crisis was overwhelming to all moral sensibilities: no sense, no organ, remained true to the obligations of political justice principles and feelings were alike darkened by the extremities of the political quarrel: the feelings obeyed the personal engagements: and the principles indicated only the position of the individual-as between the senate struggling for interests and the democracy struggling for rights.

So far nothing has happened to Cicero which does not happen to all men entangled in political feuds. There are few cases of large party dispute which do not admit of contradictory delineations, as the mind is previously swayed to this extreme or to that. But the peculiarity in the case of Cicero is-not that he has be nefited by the mixed quality or the doubtfulness of that cause which he adopted, but that the very dubious character of the cause has benefited by him. Usually it happens, that the individual partisan is sheltered under the authority of his cause. But here the whole merits of the cause have been predetermined and adjudged by the

authority of the partizan. Had Ciccro been absent, or had Cicero prac. tised that neutrality to which he often inclined, the general verdict of posterity on the great Roman civil war would have been essentially different from that which we find in history. At present the error is an extreme one; and we call it such without hesitation, because it has maintained itself by imperfect reading, even of such documents as survive, and by too general an oblivion of the important fact, that these surviving documents (meaning the contemporary documents) are pretty nearly all ex parte.*

To judge of the general equity in the treatment of Cicero considered as a political partisan, let us turn to the most current of the regular biographies. Amongst the infinity of slighter sketches, which naturally draw for their materials upon those which are most elaborate, it would be useless to confer a special notice upon any. We will cite the two which at this moment stand foremost in European literature —that of Conyers Middleton, now about one century old, as the memoir most generally read; that of Bernhard Abeken,t (amongst that limited class of memoirs which build upon any political principles,) accidentally the latest.

Conyers Middleton is a name that cannot be mentioned without an expression of disgust. We sit down in perfect charity, at the same table, with sceptics in every degree. To us, simply in his social character, and supposing him sincere, a sceptic is as agreeable as another. Anyhow he is better than a craniologist, than a punster, than a St Simonian, than a Jeremy. Bentham-cock, or an anticorn-law lecturer. What signifies a name? Free-thinker he calls himself? Good-let him "free-think" as fast as he can; but let him obey the ordinary laws of good faith. No sneering,

Even here there is a risk of being misunderstood. Some will read this term ex parte in the sense, that now there are no neutral statements surviving. But such statements there never were. The controversy moving for a whole century in Rome before Pharsalia, was not about facts, but about constitutional principles; and as to that question there could be no neutrality. From the nature of the case, the truth must have lain with one of the parties; compromise, or intermediate temperament, was inapplicable. What we complain of as overlooked is, not that the surviving records of the quarrel are partisan records, (that being a mere necessity,) but in the forensic use of the term ex parte, that they are such without benefit of equilibrium or modification from the partizan statements in the opposite interest.

* Cicero in Seinen Briefen, VoN BERNHARD RUDOLF ABEKEN, Professor am Raths-Gymnas,, zu Osnabrüch, Hanover, 1835.

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