Life and Times of Marcus Tullius Cicero
By , Author of “ History of Trial by Jury,” etc. New York: Charles Scribner & Co.
MR. FORSYTH was induced to write this work by the belief that the time had come when another Life of Cicero than Middleton’s famous work might be acceptable to the public. We are glad that such is his belief; for we cannot have too many books on the last days of the Roman Republic, if they are written by competent men, — and there can be no doubt as to Mr. Forsyth’s competency to write on those memorable times. But we do not think that his work, pleasing and useful as it is, will exclude that of Middleton from libraries that are collected for use rather than show. Middleton’s book may be, as it has been called, “ a lying legend in honor of St. Tully”; but it is an able work for all that, and does honor to the eighteenth century. It has many faults, yet it shows an amount of ability that we do not often find in the historical works of our time. It was written when Roman history was but little understood, when men gravely spoke of the Rumelian legend, and ranked it as an historical fact with the crossing of the Rubicon by Cæsar. The dullest graduate of to-day knows much about Rome that would have astonished Conyers Middleton, precisely as the dullest of our soldiers knows much about war that would have astonished Napoleon ; but the graduate is as much beneath Middleton as the soldier is beneath Napoleon. We must test Middleton’s Cicero by the literary standard of Middleton’s age ; and thus tested, no one qualified to give an opinion on the subject can hesitate to say that it is a production of great excellence. Were Middleton now living, he would have written a far better work on Cicero and his Times than Mr. Forsyth has written ; but we cannot say, much as we admire Mr. Forsyth’s work, that we believe that he, had he lived a hundred and twenty years ago, would have written a better work than Middleton’s. To the man who can afford time for the reading of but one of those Lives, we should say, “ Read Mr, Forsyth’s,” — for it is by far the more accurate, and therefore the more useful, life of the great Roman orator. But Mr. Forsyth excels Dr. Middleton in accuracy for prettymuch the same reason that he can make the journey to Rome in less than half the time it required Middleton to make it. The labors of others have cleared the way for historians as well as for travellers ; and to praise historians for their superior accuracy would be about as sagacious as it would be to praise travellers for their superior speed. We feel grateful to the writers of former times, and we hold it to be the duty of all to do those writers justice, even if their books should cease to be authorities. Who would think contemptuously of Newton because he never saw a steamship ?
Mr. Forsyth aims to give his readers some account of Cicero’s private and domestic life, and in this respect his book has a positive superiority to Middleton’s. It is agreeable to read of the vie privée of great men, and it is especially so in the case of such a man as Cicero, who belonged to a people long since extinct, and who was himself “ the bright, consummate flower ” of a civilization which exists only in books, or in monuments, or in ruins,—a civilization of which it has wisely been said, that it is the better for the world that it can never know it again, “ for it was rotten at the core, though most glorious in the complexion.” But, when all has been said of Cicero’s private life that can be said of it, we find ourselves going back to Cicero the statesman, the orator, and the actor in some of the mightiest movements that ever have shaken the world, and which continue to color our own private lives at the end of almost two thousand years. If you would write a book on Roman life and society, as such things were in the last century of the Republic, Catulus, or any other member of the class of optimates, would serve your purpose as well as Cicero. Men of the same station live very much alike as to essentials. But no Roman can be named who matches Cicero in some most important respects as a public man, — as consul, as proconsul, as orator, as philosopher, as statesman, and as mere politician. His history, therefore, is the history of Rome through many eventful years ; and when he is murdered, we feel that the curtain really has dropped because the great Republican drama is at an end. That sad scene is the last scene of the fifth act of a tragedy that had been in course of performance through five centuries. We cannot separate such a man from his times. His private life is as nothing in comparison with his public life. Private life belongs to comedy, and Cicero’s history is a tragedy, from first to last; and in reading any biography of him that is prepared, we feel that we are reading Roman history, — and that is written only in blood.
The part that Cicero had in the Roman Revolution, in that long procession of events which terminated in the establishment of the Empire, if not a lofty one, was nevertheless such as to render his history painfully interesting. We see a man who was far above his contemporaries in moral excellence, and who sought to live well, tried by circumstances beyond human strength. Cicero lived a century too early, or a century too late. He would have been at his ease as the contemporary and friend of Paulus Æmilius, but it was not in his nature to be on fair terms with such men as Caesar and Pompeius, much less with Antonius. Had he lived a century later, he might have been a calm philosopher and scholar under the Imperial system. He was, of all men that ever lived, of equal eminence for ability, the least adapted for a revolutionary age ; and yet it was his fortune to live in the time of the greatest of all revolutions, and in its very focus, and to be a prominent actor therein. It was as if Fortune had had a spite against his house, and had concentrated all her vengeance on his head, by way of rendering vain the most various and splendid talents that ever were bestowed upon mortal man. Had Cicero’s sense borne any proportion to his intellectual powers, had he been endowed with a just portion of that tact which is a more useful thing than genius in a world where they win sixpences, he would have retired from public life on his return from exile. But something very like vanity forbade that. He had been too great to be able to imitate the sensible course of his friend, “ the voluptuous, but august Lucullus.” He would keep the field which he had won, and in which his part had been so brilliant ; and the result was, that he never knew a happy hour. But his miseries made him immortal. Who would have cared for him, had he passed the last dozen years of his life at his Formian villa ? The remark of Montesquieu, that that people are happy whose annals are tiresome, is strictly true ; but we do not care to read those annals, while those periods in which men were unhappy concentrate the attention of both writers and readers. In Rome’s revolutionary age men were as happy as they are in times of pestilence ; and Cicero was the greatest sufferer of them all, because he was possessed of a sensitiveness that no other Roman ever knew. It is his history, quite as much as that of either Pompeius or Cæsar, that gives a biographical character to the history of the Republic’s closing days, and renders its study so fascinating, and this without reference to his private life, some passages of which have a rather ludicrous air, —his marrying a young wife, for example, after divorcing an old one.
Mr. Forsyth tells Cicero’s public life, without neglecting his promise in other respects. He, like other English writers on Rome, possesses a great advantage over Germans, his superiors in mere learning, perhaps, inasmuch as he is familiar with affairs, and English political life is a constant commentary on Roman political life. Without subscribing to all his conclusions, we can commend his volumes to those who would be assisted to an understanding of that splendid struggle in which the Roman aristocracy went down, but not without inflicting such wounds on their foes as rendered despotism an absolute necessity.