The Life of Cicero Volume II Part 11

Cicero in it tells us of Cato and of Marcellus, and therefore we must suppose that it was written when they were alive. Indeed, he so compares Caesar and Marcellus as he could not have done had they not both been alive. But Cato and Marcellus died B.C. 46, and how then could the treatise have been written in B.C. 45? It should, however, be remembered that a written paper may be altered and rewritten, and that the date of authors.h.i.+p and that of publication cannot be exactly the same. But the time is of but little matter to those who can take delight in the discourse. He begins by telling us how he had grieved when, on his return from Cilicia, he had heard that Hortensius was dead. Hortensius had brought him into the College of Augurs, and had there stood to him in the place of a parent. And he had lamented Hortensius also on behalf of Rome. Hortensius had gone. Then he goes on to say that, as he was thinking of these things while walking in his portico, Brutus had come to him and Pomponius Atticus. He says how pleasantly they greeted each other; and then gradually they go on, till Atticus asks him to renew the story he had before been telling. "In truth, Pomponius," he says, "I remember it right well, for then it was that I heard Deiotarus, that truest and best of kings, defended by our Brutus here," Deiotarus was that Eastern king whose defence by Cicero himself I have mentioned when speaking of his pleadings before Caesar. Then he rushes off into his subject, and discusses at length his favorite idea. It must still be remembered that neither here are to be traced any positive line of lessons in oratory. There is no beginning, no middle, and no end to this treatise. Cicero runs on, charming us rather by his language than by his lessons. He says of Eloquence that "she is the companion of peace, and the a.s.sociate of ease."[258] He tells us of Cato, that he had read a hundred and fifty of his speeches, and had "found them all replete with bright words and with great matter; * * * and yet no one in his days read Cato's speeches!"[259] This, of course, was Cato the elder. Then we hear how Demosthenes said that in oratory action was everything: it was the first thing, the second, and the third. "For there is nothing like it to penetrate into the minds of the audience--to teach them, to turn them, and to form them, till the orator shall be made to appear exactly that which he wishes to be thought.[260] * * * The man who listens to one who is an orator believes what he hears; he thinks everything to be true, he approves of all."[261] No doubt! In his power of describing the orator and his work Cicero is perfect; but he does not describe the man doing that which he is bound to do by his duty.

He tells us that nothing is worse than half a dozen advocates--which certainly is true.[262] Further on he comes to Caesar, and praises him very highly. But here Brutus is made to speak, and tells us how he has read the Commentaries, and found them to be "bare in their beauty, perfect in symmetry, but unadorned, and deprived of all outside garniture."[263] They are all that he has told us, nor could they have been described in truer words. Then he names Hortensius, and speaks of him in language which is graceful and graphic; but he reserves his greatest strength for himself, and at last, declaring that he will say nothing in his own praise, bursts out into a string of eulogy, which he is able to conceal beneath dubious phrases, so as to show that he himself has acquired such a mastery over his art as to have made himself, in truth, the best orator of them all.[264]

Perhaps the chief charm of this essay is to be found in the lightness of the touch. It is never heavy, never severe, rarely melancholic. If read without reference to other works, it would leave on the reader's mind the impression that though now and again there had come upon him the memory of a friend who had gone, and some remembrance of changes in the State to which, as an old man, he could not give his a.s.sent; nevertheless, it was written by a happy man, by one who was contented among his books, and was pleased to be reminded that things had gone well with him. He writes throughout as one who had no great sorrow at his heart. No one would have thought that in this very year he was perplexed in his private affairs, even to the putting away of his wife; that Caesar had made good his ground, and, having been Dictator last year, had for the third time become Consul; that he knew himself to be living, as a favor, by Caesar's pleasure. Cicero seems to have written his Brutus as one might write who was well at ease. Let a man have taught himself aught, and have acquired the love of letters, it is easy for him then, we might say, to carry on his work. What is it to him that politicians are cutting each other's throats around him? He has not gone into that arena and fought and bled there, nor need he do so. Though things may have gone contrary to his views, he has no cause for anger, none for personal disappointment, none for personal shame; but with Cicero, on every morning as he rose he must have remembered Pompey and have thought of Caesar. And though Caesar was courteous to him, the courtesy of a ruler is hard to be borne by him who himself has ruled.

Caesar was Consul; and Cicero, who remembered how majestically he had walked when a few years since he was Consul by the real votes of the people, how he had been applauded for doing his duty to the people, how he had been punished for stretching the laws on the people's behalf, how he had refused everything for the people, must have had bitter feelings in his heart when he sat down to write this conversation with Brutus and with Atticus. Yet it has all the cheerfulness which might have been expected from a happy mind. But we must remark that at its close--in its very final words--he does allude with sad melancholy to the state of affairs, and that then it breaks off abruptly. Even in the middle of a sentence it is brought to a close, and the reader is left to imagine that something has been lost, or that more might have been added.

The last of these works is the Orator. We have pa.s.sed in review the De Oratore, and the Brutus; or, De Claris Oratoribus. We have now to consider that which is commonly believed to be the most finished piece of the three. Such seems to have become the general idea of those scholars who have spoken and written on the subject. He himself says that there are in all five books. There are the three De Oratore; the fourth is called the Brutus, and the fifth the Orator.[265] In some MSS.

this work has a second t.i.tle, De Optimo Genere Dicendi--as though the five books should run on in a sequence, the first three being on oratory in general, the fourth as to famous orators, while the last concluding work is on the best mode of oratory. Readers who may wish to carry these in their minds must exclude for the moment from their memory the few pages which he wrote as a preface to the translations from aeschines and Demosthenes. The purport is to show how that hitherto unknown hero of romance may be produced--the perfect orator.

Here as elsewhere we shall find the greatest interest lies in a certain discursive treatment of his subject, which enables him to run hither and thither, while he always pleases us, whatever att.i.tude he may a.s.sume, whatever he may say, and in whatever guise he may speak to us. But here, in the last book, there does seem to be some kind of method in his discourse. He distinguishes three styles of eloquence--the simple, the moderate, and the sublime, and explains that the orator has three duties to perform. He must learn what on any subject he has to say; he must place his arguments in order, and he must know how to express them. He explains what action should achieve for the orator, and teaches that eloquence depends wholly on elocution. He tells us that the philosophers, the historians, and the poets have never risen to his ideas of eloquence; but that he alone does so who can, amid the heat and work of the Forum, turn men's minds as he wishes. Then he teaches us how each of the three styles should be treated--the simple, the moderate, and the sublime--and shows us how to vary them. He informs us what laws we should preserve in each, what ornaments, what form, and what metaphors. He then considers the words we should use, and makes us understand how necessary it is to attend to the minutest variety of sound. In this matter we have to acknowledge that he, as a Roman, had to deal with instruments for listening infinitely finer than are our British ears; and I am not sure that we can follow him with rapture into all the mysteries of the Poeon, the Dochmius, and the Dich.o.r.eus.

What he says of rhythm we are willing to take to be true, and we wonder at the elaborate study given to it; but I doubt whether we here do not read of it as a thing beyond us, by descending into which we should be removing ourselves farther from the more wholesome pursuits of our lives.

There are, again, delightful morsels here. He tells us, for instance, that he who has created a beautiful thing must have beauty in his soul,[266]--a charming idea, as to which we do not stop to inquire whether it be true or not. He gives us a most excellent caution against storing up good sayings, and using them from the storehouse of our memory: "Let him avoid these studied things, not made of the moment, but brought from the closet."[267] Then he rises into a grand description of the perfect orator: "But that third man is he, rich, abundant, dignified, and instructed, in whom there is a divine strength. This is he whose fulness and culture of speech the nations have admired, and whose eloquence has been allowed to prevail over the people.[268] * * *

Then will the orator make himself felt more abundantly. Then will he rule their minds and turn their hearts. Then will he do with them as he would wish."[269]

But in the teeth of all this it did not please Brutus himself. "When I wrote to him," he said to Atticus, "in obedience to his wishes, 'De Optimo Genere Dicendi,' he sent word, both to you and me, that that which pleased me did not satisfy him."[270] "Let every man kiss his own wife," says Cicero in his letter in the next words to those we have quoted; and we cannot but love the man for being able to joke when he is telling of the rebuff he has received. It must have been an additional pang to him, that he for whom he had written his book should receive it with stern rebuke.

At last we come to the Topica; the last instructions which Cicero gives on the subject of oratory. The Romans seem to have esteemed much the lessons which are here conveyed, but for us it has but little attraction. He himself declares it to have been a translation from Aristotle, but declares also that the translation has been made from memory. He has been at sea, he says, in the first chapter, and has there performed his task, and has sent it as soon as it has been done. There is something in this which is unintelligible to us. He has translated a treatise of Aristotle from memory--that is, without having the original before him--and has done this at sea, on his intended journey to Greece![271] I do not believe that Cicero has been false in so writing.

The work has been done for his young friend Trebatius, who had often asked it, and was much too clever when he had received it not to recognize its worth. But Cicero has, in accordance with his memory, reduced to his own form Aristotle's idea as to "invention" in logic.

Aristotle's work is, I am informed, in eight books: here is a bagatelle in twenty-five pages. There is an audacity in the performance--especially in the doing it on board s.h.i.+p; but we must remember that he had spent his life in achieving a knowledge of these things, and was able to write down with all the rapidity of a practised professor the doctrines on the matter which he wished to teach Trebatius.

This later essay is a recapitulation of the different sources to which an orator, whether as lawyer, advocate, philosopher, or statesman, may look for his arguments. That they should have been of any great use to Trebatius, in the course of his long life as attorney-general about the court of Augustus, I cannot believe. I do not know that he rose to special mark as an orator, though he was well known as a counsellor; nor do I think that oratory, or the powers of persuasion, can be so brought to book as to be made to submit itself to formal rules. And here they are given to us in the form of a catalogue. It is for modern readers perhaps the least interesting of all Cicero's works.

There is left upon us after reading these treatises a general idea of the immense amount of attention which, in the Roman educated world, was paid to the science of speaking. To bring his arguments to bear at the proper moment--to catch the ideas that are likely to be rising in the minds of men--to know when the sympathies may be expected and when demanded, when the feelings may be trusted and when they have been too blunted to be of service--to perceive from an instinctive outlook into those before him when he may be soft, when hard, when obdurate and when melting--this was the business of a Roman orator. And this was to be achieved only by a careful study of the characters of men. It depended in no wise on virtue, on morals, or on truth, though very much on education. How he might please the mult.i.tude--this was everything to him. It was all in all to him to do just that which here in our prosaic world in London we have been told that men ought not to attempt. They do attempt it, but they fail--through the innate honesty which there is in the hearts of men. In Italy, in Cicero's time, they attempted it, and did not fail. But we can see what were the results.

The attention which Roman orators paid to their voices was as serious, and demanded the same restraint, as the occupations of the present athlete. We are inclined to doubt whether too much of life is not devoted to the purpose. It could not be done but by a people so greedy of admiration as to feel that all other things should be abandoned by those who desire to excel. The actor of to-day will do it, but it is his business to act; and if he so applies himself to his profession as to succeed, he has achieved his object. But oratory in the law court, as in Parliament, or in addressing the public, is only the means of imbuing the minds of others with the ideas which the speaker wishes to implant there. To have those ideas, and to have the desire to teach them to others, is more to him than the power of well expressing them. To know the law is better than to talk of knowing it. But with the Romans so great was the desire to s.h.i.+ne that the reality was lost in its appearance; and so p.r.o.ne were the people to indulge in the delight of their senses that they would sacrifice a thing for a sound, and preferred lies in perfect language to truth in halting syllables. This feeling had sunk deep into Cicero's heart when he was a youth, and has given to his character the only stain which it has. He would be patriotic: to love his country was the first duty of a Roman. He would be honest: so much was indispensable to his personal dignity. But he must so charm his countrymen with his voice as to make them feel while they listened to him that some G.o.d addressed them. In this way he became permeated by the love of praise, till it was death to him not to be before the lamps.

The "perfect orator" is, we may say, a person neither desired nor desirable. We, who are the mult.i.tude of the world, and have been born to hold our tongues and use our brains, would not put up with him were he to show himself. But it was not so in Cicero's time; and this was the way he took to sing the praises of his own profession and to magnify his own glory. He speaks of that profession in language so excellent as to make us who read his words believe that there was more in it than it did in truth hold. But there was much in it, and the more so as the performers reacted upon their audience. The delicacy of the powers of expression had become so great, that the powers of listening and distinguis.h.i.+ng had become great also. As the instruments became fine, so did the ears which were to receive their music. Cicero, and Quintilian after him, tell us this. The latter, in speaking of the nature of the voice, gives us a string of epithets which it would be hopeless to attempt to translate: "Nam est et candida, et fusca, et plena, et exilis, et levis, et aspera, et contracta, et fusa, et dura, et flexibilis, et clara, et obtusa; spiritus etiam longior, breviorque."[272] And the remarkable thing was, that every Roman who listened would understand what the orator intended, and would know too, and would tell him of it, if by error he had fallen into some cadence which was not exactly right. To the modes of raising the voice, which are usually divided into three--the high or treble, the low or ba.s.s, and that which is between the two, the contralto and tenor--many others are added. There are the eager and the soft, the higher and the lower notes, the quicker and the slower. It seems little to us, who know that we can speak or whisper, hammer our words together, or drawl them out. But then every listener was critically alive to the fact whether the speaker before him did or did not perform his task as it should be done. No wonder that Cicero demanded who was the optimus orator. Then the strength of body had to be matured, lest the voice should fall to "a sick, womanly weakness, like that of an eunuch." This must be provided by exercise, by anointing, by continence, by the easy digestion of the food--which means moderation; and the jaws must be free, so that the words must not strike each other. And as to the action of the orator, Cicero tells us that it should speak as loudly and as plainly as do the words themselves. In all this we find that Quintilian only follows his master too closely. The hands, the shoulders, the sides, the stamping of the foot, the single step or many steps--every motion of the body, agreeing with the words from his mouth, are all described.[273] He attributes this to Antony--but only because, as he thinks of it, some movement of Antony's has recurred to his memory.

To make the men who heard him believe in him was the one gift which Cicero valued; not to make them know him to be true, but to believe him to be so. This it was, in Cicero's time, to be the optimus orator.

Since Cicero's time there has been some progress in the general conduct of men. They are less greedy, less cruel, less selfish--greedy, cruel, and selfish though they still are. The progress which the best among us have made Cicero in fact achieved; but he had not acquired that theoretic aversion to a lie which is the first feeling in the bosom of a modern gentleman; therefore it was that he still busied himself with finding the optimus orator.

CHAPTER XII.

_CICERO'S PHILOSOPHY._

It will have been observed that in the list given in the previous chapter the works commonly published as Cicero's Philosophy have been divided. Some are called his Philosophy and some his Moral Essays. It seems to be absurd to put forward to the world his Tusculan Inquiries, written with the declared object of showing that death and pain were not evils, together with a moral essay, such as that De Officiis, in which he tells us what it may become a man of the world to do. It is as though we bound up Lord Chesterfield's letters in a volume with Hume's essays, and called them the philosophy of the eighteenth century. It might be true, but it would certainly be absurd. There might be those who regard the letters as philosophical, and those who would so speak of the essays; but their meaning would be diametrically opposite. It is so with Cicero, whose treatises have been lumped together under this name with the view of bringing them under one appellation. It had been found necessary to divide his works and to describe them. The happy man who first thought to put the De Natura Deorum and the De Amicitia into boards together, and to present them to the world under the name of his philosophy, perhaps found the only t.i.tle that could unite the two. But he has done very much to mislead the world, and to teach readers to believe that Cicero was in truth one who endeavored to live in accordance with the doctrine of any special school of philosophy.

He was too honest, too wise, too civilized, too modern for that. He knew, no one better, that the pleasure of the world was pleasant, and that the ills are the reverse. When his wife betrayed him, he grieved.

When his daughter died, he sorrowed. When his foe was strong against him, he hated him. He avoided pain when it came near him, and did his best to have everything comfortable around him. He was so far an Epicurean, as we all are. He did not despise death, or pain, or grief.

He was a modern-minded man--if I make myself understood--of robust tendencies, moral, healthy, and enduring; but he was anything but a philosopher in his life. Let us remember the way in which he laughs at the idea of bringing philosophy into real life in the De Oratore. He is speaking of the manner in which the lawyers would have had to behave themselves in the law courts if philosophy had been allowed to prevail: "No man could have grieved aloud. No patron would have wept. No one would have sorrowed. There would have been no calling of the Republic to witness; not a man would have dared to stamp his foot, lest it should have been told to the Stoics."[274] "You should keep the books of the philosophers for your Tusculan ease," he had said in the preceding chapter; and he speaks, in the same page, of "Plato's fabulous State."

Then why, it may be asked, did he write so many essays on philosophy--enough to have consumed the energies of many laborious years? There can be no doubt that he did write the Philosophy, though we have ample reason to know that it was not his philosophy. All those treatises, beginning with the Academica--written when he was sixty-two, two years only before his death, and carried on during twelve months with indomitable energy--the De Finibus, the Tusculan Disputations, the De Natura Deorum, the De Divinatione, and the De Fato--were composed during the time named. To those who have regarded Cicero as a philosopher--as one who has devoted his life to the pursuits of philosophy--does it not appear odd that he should have deferred his writing on the subject and postponed his convictions till now? At this special period of his life why should he have rushed into them at once, and should so have done it as to be able to leave them aside at another period? Why has all this been done within less than two years? Let any man look to the last year of his life, when the Philippics were coming hot from his brain and eager from his mouth, and ask himself how much of Greek philosophy he finds in them. Out of all the sixty-four years of his life he devoted one to this philosophy, and that not the last, but the penultimate; and so lived during all these years, even including that one, as to show how little hold philosophy had upon his conduct.

[Greek: Aideomai Troas]. Was that Greek philosophy? or the eager exclamation of a human spirit, in its weakness and in its strength, fearing the breath of his fellow-men, and yet knowing that the truth would ultimately be expressed by it?

Nor is the reason for this far to seek, though the character which could avail itself of such a reason requires a deep insight. To him literature had been everything. We have seen with what attention he had studied oratory--rhetoric rather--so as to have at his fingers'-ends the names of those who had ever shone in it, and the doctrines they had taught. We know how well read he was in Homer and the Greek tragedians; how he knew by heart his Ennius, his Naevius, his Pacuvius, and the others who had written in his own tongue. As he was acquainted with the poets and rhetoricians, so also was he acquainted with those writers who have handled philosophy. His incredible versatility was never at fault. He knew them all from the beginning, and could interest himself in their doctrines. He had been in the schools at Athens, and had learned it all.

In one sense he believed in it. There was a great battle of words carried on, and in regard to that battle he put his faith in this set or in the other. But had he ever been asked by what philosophical process he would rule the world, he would have smiled. Then he would have declared himself not to be an Academician, but a Republican.

It was with him a game of play, ornamented with all the learning of past ages. He had found the schools full of it at Athens, and had taken his part in their teaching. It had been pleasant to him to call himself a disciple of Plato, and to hold himself aloof from the straitness of the Stoics, and from the mundane theories of the followers of Epicurus. It had been well for him also to take an interest in that play. But to suppose that Cicero, the modern Cicero, the Cicero of the world--Cicero the polished gentleman, Cicero the soft hearted, Cicero the hater, Cicero the lover, Cicero the human--was a believer in Greek philosophy--that he had taken to himself and fed upon those shreds and tatters and dry sticks--that he had ever satisfied himself with such a mode of living as they could promise to him--is indeed to mistake the man. His soul was quiveringly alive to all those instincts which now govern us. Go among our politicians, and you shall find this man and the other, who, in after-dinner talk, shall call himself an Epicurean, or shall think himself to be an Academician. He has carried away something of the learning of his college days, and remembers enough of his school exercises for that; but when he has to make a speech for or against Protection, then you will find out where lies his philosophy.

And so it was with Cicero during this the penultimate year of his life.

He poured forth during this period such an amount of learning on the subject, that when men took it up after the lapse of centuries they labelled it all as his philosophy. When he could no longer talk politics, nor act them--when the Forum was no longer open to him, nor the meetings of the people or of the Senate--when he could no longer make himself heard on behalf of the State--then he took to discussions on Carneades. And his discussions are wonderful. How could he lay his mind to work when his daughter was dead, and write in beautiful language four such treatises as came from his pen while he was thinking of the temple which was to be built to her memory? It is a marvel that at such a period, at such an age, he should have been equal to the labor. But it was thus that he amused himself, consoled himself, distracted himself.

It is hard to believe that, in the sad evening of his life, such a power should have remained with him; but easier, I think, than to imagine that in that year of his life he had suddenly become philosophical.

In describing the Academica, the first of these works in point of time, it is necessary to explain that by reason of an alteration in his plan of publis.h.i.+ng, made by Cicero after he had sent the first copy to Atticus, and by the accident that the second part has been preserved of the former copy and the first part of the second, a confusion has arisen. Cicero had felt that he might have done better by his friends than to bring Hortensius, Catulus, and Lucullus discussing Greek philosophy before the public. They were, none of them, men who when alive had interested themselves in the matter. He therefore rewrote the essays, or altered them, and again sent them forth to his friend Varro.

Time has been so far kind to them as to have preserved portions of the first book as altered, and the second of the four which const.i.tuted the first edition. It is that which has been called Lucullus. The Catulus had come first, but has been lost. Hortensius and Cicero were the last two. We may perceive, therefore, into what a length of development he carried his purpose. It must be of course understood that he dictated these exercises, and a.s.sisted himself by the use of all mechanical means at his disposal. The men who worked for him were slaves, and these slaves were always willing to keep in their own hands the good things which came to them by the exercise of their own intelligence and adroitness. He could not multiply his own hands or brain, but he could multiply all that might a.s.sist them. He begins by telling Varro that he has long since desired to ill.u.s.trate in Latin letters the philosophy which Socrates had commended, and he asks Varro why he, who was so much given to writing, had not as yet written about any of these things. As Varro boasted afterward that he was the author of four hundred and ninety books, there seems to be a touch of irony in this. Be that as it may, Varro is made to take up the gauntlet and to rush away at once amid the philosophers. But here on the threshold, as it were, of his inquiries, we have Cicero's own reasons given in plain language: "But now, hit hard by the heavy blow of fortune, and freed as I am from looking after the State, I seek from philosophy relief from my pain." He thinks that he may in this way perhaps best serve the public, or even "if it be not so, what else is there that he may find to do?"[275] As he goes on, however, we find that what he writes is about the philosophers rather than philosophy.

Then we come to the Lucullus. It seems odd that the man whose name has come down to us as a by-word for luxury, and who is laden with the reproach of overeating, should be thus brought forward as a philosopher.

It was perhaps the subsequent feeling on Cicero's part that such might be the opinion of men which induced him to alter his form--in vain, as far as we are concerned. But Lucullus had lived with Antiochus, a Greek philosopher, who had certain views of his own, and he is made to defend them through this book.

Here as elsewhere it is not the subject which delights us so much as the manner in which he handles certain points almost outside the subject: "How many things do those exercised in music know which escape us! Ah, there is Antiope, they say; that is Andromache."[276] What can be truer, or less likely, we may suppose, to meet us in a treatise on philosophy, and, therefore, more welcome? He is speaking of evidence: "It is necessary that the mind shall yield to what is clear, whether it wish it or no, as the dish in a balance must give way when a weight is put upon it.[277] * * * You may snore, if you will, as well as sleep," says Carneades; "what good will it do you?"[278] And then he gives the guesses of some of the old philosophers as to the infinite. Thales has said that water is the source of everything. Anaximander would not agree to this, for he thought that all had come from s.p.a.ce. Anaximenes had affirmed that it was air. Anaxagoras had remarked that matter was infinite. Xenophanes had declared that everything was one whole, and that it was a G.o.d, everlasting, eternal, never born and never dying, but round in his shape! Parmenides thought that it was fire that moved the earth. Leucippus believed it to be "plenum et inane." What "full and empty" may mean I cannot tell; but Democritus could, for he believed in it--though in other matters he went a little farther! Empedocles sticks to the old four elements. Herac.l.i.tus is all for fire. Melissus imagines that whatever exists is infinite and immutable, and ever has been and ever will be. Plato thinks that the world has always existed, while the Pythagoreans attribute everything to mathematics.[279] "Your wise man,"

continues Cicero, "will know one whom to choose out of all these. Let the others, who have been repudiated, retire."

"They are all concealed, these things--hidden in thick darkness, so that no human eye can have power enough to look up into the heavens or down on to the earth. We do not know our own bodies, or the nature or strength of their component parts. The doctors themselves, who have opened them and looked at them, are ignorant. The Empirics declare that they know nothing; because, as soon as looked at, they may change. * * *

Hicetas, the Syracusan, as Theophrastus tells us, thinks that the heavens and the sun and the moon and the stars all stand still, and that nothing in all the world moves but the earth. Now what do you, followers of Epicurus, say to this?"[280] I need not carry the conversation on any farther to show that Cicero is ridiculing the whole thing. This Hicetas, the Syracusan, seems to have been nearer the mark than the others, according to the existing lights, which had not shone out as yet in Cicero's days. "But what was the meaning of it all? Who knows anything about it? How is a man to live by listening to such trash as this?" It is thus that Cicero means to be understood. I will agree that Cicero does not often speak out so clearly as he does here, turning the whole thing into ridicule. He does generally find it well to say something in praise of these philosophers. He does not quite declare the fact that nothing is to be made of them; or, rather, there is existing in it all an under feeling that, were he to do so, he would destroy his character and rob himself of his amus.e.m.e.nt. But we remember always his character of a philosopher, as attributed to Cato, in his speech during his Consuls.h.i.+p for Murena. I have told the story when giving an account of the speech. "He who cuts the throat of an old c.o.c.k when there is no need, has sinned as deeply as the parricide when breaking his father's neck,"[281] says Cicero, laughing at the Stoics. There he speaks out the feelings of his heart--there, and often elsewhere in his orations. Here, in his Academica, he is eloquent on the same side. We cannot but rejoice at the plainness of his words; but it has to be acknowledged that we do not often find him so loudly betraying himself when dealing with the old discussions of the Greek philosophers.

Very quickly after his Academica, in B.C. 45, came the five books, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, written as though with the object of settling the whole controversy, and declaring whether the truth lay with the Epicureans, the Stoics, or the Academics. What, at last, is the good thing, and what the evil thing, and how shall we gain the one and avoid the other? If he will tell us this, he will have proved himself to be a philosopher to some purpose. But he does nothing of the kind. At the end of the fifth book we find Atticus, who was an Epicurean, declaring to Quintus Cicero that he held his own opinion just as firmly as ever, although he had been delighted to hear how well the Academician Piso had talked in Latin. He had hitherto considered that these were things which would not sound well unless in the Greek language.

It is again in the form of a dialogue, and, like all his writings at this time, is addressed to Brutus. It is in five books. The first two are supposed to have been held at c.u.mae, between Cicero, Torquatus, and Triarius. Here, after a prelude in favor of philosophy and Latin together, Torquatus is allowed to make the best excuse he can for Epicurus. The prelude contains much good sense; for, whether he be right or not in what he says, it is good for every man to hold his own language in respect. "I have always thought and said that the Latin language is not poor as it is supposed to be, but even richer than the Greek."[282] "Let us learn," says Torquatus, who has happened to call upon him at c.u.mae with Triarius, a grave and learned youth, as we are told, "since we have found you at your house, why it is that you do not approve of Epicurus--he who, alive, seems to have freed the minds of men from error, and to have taught them everything which could tend to make them happy."[283] Then Torquatus goes to work and delivers a most amusing discourse on the wisdom of Democritus and his great disciple.

The words fly about with delightful power, so as to leave upon our minds an idea that Torquatus is persuading his audience; for it is Cicero's peculiar gift, in whosesoever mouth he puts his words, to make him argue as though he were the victor. We feel sure that, had he in his hand held a theory contrary to that of Torquatus, had he in truth cared about it, he could not have made Torquatus speak so well. But the speaker comes to an end, and a.s.sures his hearers that his only object had been to hear--as he had never heard before--what Cicero's own opinion might be on the matter.

The second book is a continuation of the same meeting. The word is taken up by Cicero, and he refutes Torquatus. It seems to us, however, that poor Epicurus is but badly treated--as has been generally the case in the prose works which have come down to us. We have, indeed, the poem of Lucretius, and it is admitted that it contains fine pa.s.sages. But I was always told when young that the writing of it had led him to commit suicide--a deed on his part which seems to have been painted in black colors, though Cato and Brutus, the Stoics, did the same thing very gloriously. The Epicureans are held to be sensualists, because they have used the word "pleasure" instead of "happiness," and Cicero is hard upon them. He tells a story of the dying moments of Epicurus, quoting a letter written on his death-bed. "While I am writing," he says, "I am living my last hour, and the happiest. I have so bad a pain in my stomach that nothing can be worse. But I am compensated for it all by the joy I feel as I think of my philosophical discourses."[284] Cicero then goes on to declare that, though the saying is very n.o.ble, it is unnecessary; he should not, in truth, have required compensation. But whenever an opinion is enunciated, the reader feels it to be unnecessary. He does not want opinion. He is satisfied with the language in which Cicero writes about the opinions of others, and with the amusing manner in which he deals with things of themselves heavy and severe.

In the third book he, some time afterward, discusses the Stoic doctrine with Cato at the Tusculan villa of Lucullus, near to his own. He had walked over, and finding Cato there by chance, had immediately gone to work to demolish Cato's philosophical doctrines. He tells us what a glutton Cato was over his books, taking them even into the Senate with him. Cicero asks for certain volumes of Aristotle, and Cato answers him that he would fain put into his hand those of Zeno's school.

We can see how easily Cato falls into the trap. He takes up his parable, and preaches his sermon, but he does it with a marvellous enthusiasm, so that we cannot understand that the man who wrote it intended to demolish it all in the next few pages. I will translate his last words of Cato's appeal to the world at large: "I have been carried farther than my intention. But in truth the admirable order of the system, and the incredible symmetry of it, has led him on. By the G.o.ds, do you not wonder at it? In nature there is nothing so close packed, nor in art so well fitted. The latter always agrees with the former--that which follows with that which has gone before. Not a stone in it all can be moved from its place. If you touch but one letter it falls to the ground. How severe, how magnificent, how dignified stands out the person of the wise man, who, when his reason shall have taught him that virtue is the only good, of a necessity must be happy! He shall be more justly called king than Tarquin, who could rule neither himself nor others; more rightly Dictator than Sulla, the owner of the three vices, luxury, avarice, and cruelty; more rightly rich than Cra.s.sus, who, had he not in truth been poor, would never have crossed the Euphrates in quest of war. All things are justly his who knows how to use them justly. You may call him beautiful whose soul is more lovely than his body. He is free who is slave to no desire. He is unconquered for whose mind you can forge no chains; you need not wait with him for the last day to p.r.o.nounce him happy. If this be so, then the good man is also the happy man. What can be better worth our study than philosophy, or what more heavenly than virtue?"[285] All of this was written by Cicero in most elaborate language, with a finish of words polished down to the last syllable, because he had nothing else wherewith to satisfy the cravings of his intellect.

The fourth book is a continuation of the argument "Which when he had said he (made) an end.--But I (began)."[286] With no other introduction Cicero goes to work and demolishes every word that Cato had said. He is very courteous, so that Cato cannot but admit that he is answered becomingly; but, to use a common phrase, he does not leave him a leg to stand upon. Although during the previous book Cato has talked so well that the reader will think that there must be something in it, he soon is made to perceive that the Stoic budge is altogether shoddy.

The fifth and last book, De Finibus, is supposed to recount a dialogue held at Athens, or, rather, gives the circ.u.mstances of a discourse pretended to have been delivered there by Pupius Piso to the two Ciceros, and to their cousin Lucius, on the merits of the old Academy and the Aristotelian Peripatetics; for Plato's philosophy had got itself split into two. There was the old and the new, and we may perhaps doubt to which Cicero devoted himself. He certainly was not an Epicurean, and he certainly was not a Stoic. He delighted to speak of himself as a lover of Plato. But in some matters he seems to have followed Aristotle, who had diverged from Plato, and he seems also to have clung to Carneades, who had become master of the new Academy. But, in truth, to ascertain the special doctrine of such a man on such a subject is vain.

As we read these works we lose ourselves in admiration of his memory; we are astonished at the industry which he exhibits; we are delighted by his perspicuity; and feel ourselves relieved amid the crowd of names and theories by flashes of his wit; but there comes home to us, as a result, the singular fact of a man playing with these theories as the most interesting sport the world had produced, but not believing the least in any of them. It was not that he disbelieved; and perhaps among them all the tenets of the new Academy were those which reconciled themselves the best to his common-sense. But they were all nothing to him but an amus.e.m.e.nt.

In this book there are some exquisite bits. He says, speaking of Athens, that, "Go where you will through the city, you place your footsteps on the vestiges of history."[287] He says of a certain Demetrius, whom he describes as writing books without readers in Egypt, "that this culture of his mind was to him, as it were, the food by which his humanity was kept alive."[288] And then he falls into the praise of our love for our neighbors, and introduces us to that true philosophy which was the real guide of his life. "Among things which are honest," he says, "there is nothing which s.h.i.+nes so brightly and so widely as that brotherhood between men, that agreement as to what may be useful to all, and that general love for the human race. It comes from our original condition, in which children are loved by their parents; and then binding together the family, it spreads itself abroad among relations, connections, friends, and neighbors. Then it includes citizens and those who are our allies. At last it takes in the whole human race, and that feeling of the soul arises which, giving every man his own, and defending by equal laws the rights of each, is called justice."[289] It matters little how may have been introduced this great secret which Christ afterward taught, and for which we look in vain through the writings of all the philosophers. It comes here simply from Cicero himself in the midst of his remarks on the new Academy, but it gives the lesson which had governed his life: "I will do unto others as I would they should do unto me." In this is contained the rudiments of that religion which has served to soften the hearts of us all. It is of you I must think, and not of myself. Hitherto the schools had taught how a man should make himself happy, whether by pleasure, whether by virtue, or whether by something between the two. It seems that it had never as yet occurred to a man to think of another except as a part of the world around him. Then there had come a teacher who, while fumbling among the old Greek lessons which had professed to tell mankind what each should do for himself, brings forth this, as it were, in preparation for the true doctrine that was to come: "Ipsa caritas generis humani!"--"That love of the human race!" I trust I may be able to show, before I have finished my work, that this was Cicero's true philosophy. All the rest is merely with him a play of words.

Our next work contains the five books of the Tusculan Disputations, addressed to Brutus: Tusculanarum Disputationum, ad M. Brutum, libri i., ii., iii., iv., and v. That is the name that has at last been decided by the critics and annotators as having been probably given to them by Cicero. They are supposed to have been written to console himself in his grief for the death of Tullia. I have great doubt whether consolation in sorrow is to be found in philosophy, but I have none as to the finding it in writing philosophy. Here, I may add, that the poor generally suffer less in their sorrow than the rich, because they are called upon to work for their bread. The man who must make his pair of shoes between sunrise and the moment at which he can find relief from his weary stool, has not time to think that his wife has left him, and that he is desolate in the world. Pulling those weary threads, getting that leather into its proper shape, seeing that his st.i.tches be all taut, so that he do not lose his place among the shoemakers, so fills his time that he has not a moment for a tear. And it is the same if you go from the lowest occupation to the highest. Writing Greek philosophy does as well as the making of shoes. The nature of the occupation depends on the mind, but its utility on the disposition. It was Cicero's nature to write. Will any one believe that he might not as well have consoled himself with one of his treatises on oratory? But philosophy was then to his hands. It seems to have cropped up in his latter years, after he had become intimate with Brutus. When life was again one turmoil of political fever it was dropped.

In the five of the Books of the Tusculan Disputations, still addressed to Brutus, he contends: 1. That death is no evil; 2. That pain is none; 3. That sorrow may be abolished; 4. That the pa.s.sions may be conquered; 5. That virtue will suffice to make a man happy. These are the doctrines of the Stoics; but Cicero does not in these books defend any school especially. He leans heavily on Epicurus, and gives all praise to Socrates and to Plato; but he is comparatively free: "Nullius adductus jurare in verba magistri,"[290] as Horace afterward said, probably ridiculing Cicero. "I live for the day. Whatever strikes my mind as probable, that I say. In this way I alone am free."[291]

Let us take his dogmas and go through them one by one, comparing each with his own life. This, it may be said, is a crucial test to which but few philosophers would be willing to accede; but if it shall be found that he never even dreamed of squaring his conduct with his professions, then we may admit that he employed his time in writing these things because it did not suit him to make his pair of shoes.

Was there ever a man who lived with a greater fear of death before his eyes--not with the fear of a coward, but with the a.s.surance that it would withdraw him from his utility, and banish him from the scenes of a world in sympathy with which every pulse of his heart was beating? Even after Tullia was dead the Republic had come again for him, and something might be done to stir up these faineant n.o.bles! What could a dead man do for his country? Look back at Cicero's life, and see how seldom he has put forward the plea of old age to save him from his share of the work of attack. Was this the man to console himself with the idea that death was no evil? And did he despise pain, or make any attempt at showing his disregard of it? You can hardly answer this question by looking for a man's indifference when undergoing it. It would be to require too much from philosophy to suppose that it could console itself in agony by reasoning. It would not be fair to insist on arguing with Cato in the gout. The clemency of human nature refuses to deal with philosophy in the hard straits to which it may be brought by the malevolence of evil.

But when you find a man peculiarly on the alert to avoid the recurrence of pain, when you find a man with a strong premeditated antipathy to a condition as to which he pretends an indifference, then you may fairly a.s.sert that his indifference is only a matter of argument. And this was always Cicero's condition. He knew that he must at any rate lose the time pa.s.sed by him under physical annoyance. His health was good, and by continued care remained so to the end; but he was always endeavoring to avoid sea-sickness. He was careful as to his baths, careful as to his eyes, very careful as to his diet. Was there ever a man of whom it might be said with less truth that he was indifferent as to pain?

The third position is that sorrow may be abolished. Read his letters to Atticus about his daughter Tullia, written at the very moment he was proving this. He was a heart-broken, sorrow-stricken man. It will not help us now to consider whether in this he showed strength or weakness.