Cicero in the Senate

“ FOLLOW Nature, and take not the opinion of the multitude for the guide of your life,”

Such, according to Plutarch, was the response delivered to Marcus Tullius Cicero, when, after his delightful year of travel and study in Greece, he inquired of the Delphic oracle whether he might better devote the portion of life that lay before him — he was then twenty-nine — to literature or to politics. The answer was worded with all the customary ingenuity of the oracle, and though it might have been, and in fact was, thought rather to favor a line of studious retirement, the inquirer was by no means deterred by it from returning forthwith to Rome, and plunging into that exciting career of the law-courts and the Forum, where he had already made a name, and in which, for a full generation to come, he was to play so prominent a part. Yet all through that life of keen action, up to its tragical end, there were intervals, as the world has reason gratefully to remember, when the philosopher reasserted himself. There were forced arrests and solemn pauses in the progress of his fate, when the man of affairs had leisure for reflection, — when the baffled patriot was fain to turn his eyes away from the flux of transitory things, and fix them upon steadfast realities ; and in some one of these, especially toward the last, the fancy may well have occurred to him that there had been a mystical meaning in the deliverance of the antiquated god which he was far from suspecting at the time, and that, all unwilling and unwitting, he had actually in some sort obeyed the oracular injunction.

So, at least, it seems to the student of Cicero’s mundane story, nineteen hundred and thirty years after its close.

He lived much in the eye of the multitude, indeed, and was tickled by its applause, — no man more so ; but he instinctively disdained the many-headed monster, and over and over again, in the course of his public life, he openly and valiantly defied it. While of all the men of antiquity, and notwithstanding his frank and irritable personal vanity, he seems to us the least calculating and poseur, he remains the most entirely natural. We know him a great deal better than we know the men of our own day, who wear conventional masks, and use polite fictions in our presence. We know him better, perhaps, than a man can ever be known before his death. Our sense of intimacy is chiefly due, of course, to the preservation of so many of his private letters ; but it is also true that the charm and value of the letters themselves depend on their inimitable naïveté. Thousands instead of hundreds of them might have come down to us, without affording that complete and brilliant mirror which we now possess of all the beauties and the blemishes of the writer’s inner man. It is only a person of a certain rare moral and mental style, of an almost impossibly nice balance between wit and simplicity, candor and finesse, who can thus luminously reveal himself, even to his closest friends. Thackeray could ; and we who have just closed, with a reluctant sigh, a meagre installment of the correspondence of our fascinating contemporary may get pleasure of a strikingly similar order from dipping yet once again into the letters of the famous Roman orator and statesman to Titus Pomponius Atticus, and others of his intimate friends.

These letters as we possess them — the larger and by far the most interesting portion of them were discovered by Petrarch at Verona in 1345 — begin with the year 68 B. C., 686 of the city of Rome, and the fortieth of the writer’s age. A full decade had elapsed since he consulted the oracle at Delphi. In the interval he had been married to Terentia, a lady of family and fortune, and he was now in the perfect prime of his manhood ; while the period was an incomparably interesting and critical one in the history of the Roman state. Marius had been dead eighteen years and Sulla ten, but the popular and aristocratic factions roughly represented by their names were still struggling for the mastery of Rome, and the hour of subjugation and final dishonor for the old free commonwealth was near at hand. Cnæus Pompeius, born in the same year as Cicero, had fought with great honor in the civil wars, had conquered Spain, entered Rome twice in triumph, and received the title of Great. Julius Cæsar, who was six years younger, and of whom, at seventeen, the great Sulla had significantly said that “ there were many Mariuses in that boy,” was just coming into prominence as a democratic leader. Marcus Junius Brutus (κaì. σú τέκνoν !) was in his eighteenth year, and Cato of Utica, whom he made his political model, and whose daughter Portia he married, was in his twenty-eighth. Vergil was a two-year-old infant at Mantua, while Horace was first to see the light at Venusia, in the Apennines, three years later, and Octavius Augustus, at Velletri, five years later, in the year of Cicero’s own consulship. So much for the coincidences in time of the orator’s life with those of his contemporaries, whom all the world knows well.

Born in the middle rank of life, but of parents personally refined, Cicero’s childhood had been passed in a rural home of singular beauty, and the clever, delicate boy had been thoroughly educated by the very best Latin and Greek masters of the day. At the period when the letters begin, he was not merely the head of the Roman bar, — only Hortensius having the slightest pretension to rival him as a pleader, — but he had held in succession all the great political offices for which his age had thus qualified him. He was quæstor at Lilybæum, in Sicily, at thirty-two. and managed the finances of that beautiful and muchplundered province with a degree of wisdom and fairness which thoroughly endeared him to its inhabitants. He had enjoyed his sojourn upon the island, also, for the opportunity it gave him of cultivating his own antiquarian tastes. The splendid monuments of Grecian art whose ruins overawe us yet were already old in Cicero’s day ; and that bygone day seems to draw wonderfully near our own, when we read of the enthusiastic Roman searching amid the vines and brambles of an abandoned cemetery, until he brings to light, and triumphantly identifies by the device carven upon it, the tomb of the philosopher Archimedes.

Cicero returned from Sicily, as he goodhumoredly admits, exceedingly well pleased with himself and his doings there ; and he tells with delightful relish, albeit at his own expense, the story of his intense mortification and disgust, when, on landing at the then fashionable watering-place of Puteoli (Pozzuoli), he was languidly questioned by an exquisite, whom he met lounging on the beach, about the latest news from Rome. Two years later, after his election to the ædileship of the next year (an office which conferred the superintendence of the public buildings of Rome, and the regulation of certain great games and shows), Cicero revisited Sicily, to collect evidence against Verves, whom he had himself impeached for his frightful maladministration as governor of the island. He was accompanied upon this professional trip by his beloved cousin Lucius, who had studied with him at Athens, and whose early death Cicero feelingly deplores in the first passage of the first letter which we possess from his hand : — “ Just as much pleasure as one man can derive from the sweet disposition of another I had from him. And I know that you [Atticus] will also grieve, both for my sorrow and because you too have lost a friend and connection, graced by every charm of person and manner, and one who loved you, not merely on my showing, but of his own free motion.”

The Atticus to whom this was written, and to whom were addressed about half of the eight hundred odd letters of Cicero which have come down to us, was a rich Roman gentleman, long resident in Greece, where, beside a town-house at Athens, he had immense estates in Epirus. He lived abroad, as we should say, simply because he liked to do so. He was a neutral in Roman politics, a great connoisseur and patron of the fine arts, an Epicurean by philosophical profession, an uncommonly shrewd man of business as well, and “ intimate with all the best Romans (of all shades of opinion) from Sulla to Augustus.” Perhaps it is this very catholicity which causes one slightly to distrust him. Is it possible for so canny a person to have been altogether sincere ? The contrast is great, at all events, between the wary, circumspect, and impartial ways of Atticus and the vehement and outspoken though continually shifting prepossessions, the sanguine temper, and heedless faith in every good fellow he met of Cicero himself. Pomponia, the sister of Atticus, a distinctly unpleasant woman, had married Quintus, the younger brother of Marcus Cicero, and the correspondents had therefore always those interests in common which depend upon close family connection. Domestic affairs hold a prominent place in the first dozen letters, which were all written before the year when Cicero was consul. Quintus and Pomponia have quarreled, and our Cicero is much disturbed. Then they have gone up to the old family place at Arpinum, in the Volscian Mountains, and appear to be getting on better. Perhaps it was the death, at this time, of the elder Cicero, the father of Marcus and Quintus, which for the moment had drawn them together. He was an amiable and maladif gentleman, who lived always in the country, devoting himself to his books, and the embellishment of the ancestral home, and the care of his precarious health. He had no ambition, seemingly, but for his sons, to both of whom he had given fine educations, and every facility for making a figure in the great world. “Tulliola deliciolæ nostræ,”— “ My little darling of a Tullia’s ” name occurs in almost every one of these early letters ; and the deepest joy, and, alas ! the sharpest sorrow, of the father’s life were latent, had he but known it, in these words. “ Tulliola wants that present you promised her, and is dunning me as your bondsman. It will be safer for me to repudiate than to pay on your behalf.” And again : “ Little Tullia is going to have the law of you ! ”

Cicero acquires the villa at Tuseulum at about this time ; and who that remembers that incomparable site, the fresh airs and beautiful vegetation of the Alban mountain side, the great view Romewar d and seaward, can wonder at his raptures over the place ? “ I am so delighted with it that I am delighted with myself the moment I arrive there.” Now he can begin his letters with a flourish equal to his friend’s own : “ Being in my Tusculanum, I can say, as you say, ‘ Being in Ceramicus.’ ” He sends to Atticus lavish commissions for statues, bas-reliefs, and all manner of objets d’art to adorn the villa : “ If you are able to lay your hands on any sort of gymnasiac ¹ ornaments suitable for the place you wot of, pray do not fail to secure them.” “ Agreeably to your instructions, I have provided Lucius Cincius with 200,400 sestertii ” (about $8000) “ to pay for the Megaric Marbles.” “ I am delighted with what you write me of the Hermathena.² It is exactly the sort of ornament for my academy : Hermes being the common emblem of all schools, and Athena of this particular one.” “ The statues which you sent before I have not yet seen. They are at my Formian villa ” (at Caieta, the modern Mola di Gaeta), “ where I am soon going. I shall have them all taken to Tusculum. If there are too many for my purposes, I will adorn Caieta with the overplus.” “ Consider, as you promised, how I am to manage my library.” “ Keep fast hold of your precious books, and do not despair of my being able, one day, to make them mine. If I could, I should be richer than Crassus himself, and should envy no man his houses and lands.”

In the same year, the third of the correspondence, we hear that the little Tullia, then eleven at most, has been betrothed to Calpurnius Piso, the first and by far the worthiest of her three husbands. Also, the grandmother of Atticus has died, and Cicero remarks, with more than a suspicion of irony, that he must leave to Saufeius, a philosopher of the Epicureans, who held that death was no evil, the task of consoling his friend. “ She died,” he proceeds, in the same vein of méchanceté, “ of her grief at the separation from yourself, and her fear lest the Latin festivities should not come up to time, and the proper sacrifices be performed upon the Alban mount.” Cicero’s respect for the fussy old lady was evidently slight, and he was at no pains to affect any such sentiment. Decorum was never his foible.

Cicero now held the last in the ascending grade of civil offices which it was necessary to fill before aspiring to a seat in the Senate. He was a novus homo, an epithet which undoubtedly conveyed something of the same odium that attaches to the word parvenu ; although in the parlance of republican Rome it meant simply that he was the first of his family to hold any of those public offices which qualified for a seat in the Senate. For this reason he had been advised, the first time he was a candidate, to change the name of Cicero, on account of its bucolic association with the cultivation of vetches, and had repelled the suggestion with scorn. " I will make my name,” he boasted, “ as illustrious as the oldest in Rome : ” and it must be owned that he kept his promise handsomely. In this year, therefore, 66 B. C., Cicero was prætor of the city. He presided as chief magistrate at all criminal trials, and now, for the first time, he might not merely occupy a chair of state ³ on public occasions, — which his office of ædile had also enabled him to do, — but he might walk the streets of Rome preceded by two lictors bearing the fasces, or bundles of elm-tree rods, with an axe bound in and projecting from them, which had been among the insignia of high office ever since the hoary days of the kings.

In the middle of the next summer, 65 B. C., Cicero’s forty-third year, we find him beginning systematically to canvass for the supreme dignity of the state, and as usual he pours out everything to Atticus : “I intend to begin shaking hands in the Campus Martius on the 17th of July, about the time that these letters get off. It seems certain that I shall have Galba, Antonius, and Quintus Cornificius for competitors. You may laugh or groan at these names as you will, but here is something to make you smite your brow in anguish : there is talk even of Cæsonius ! ” Nobody knows what Cæsonius had done, but a more familiar name follows, an ominous one indeed for our candidate : “ Catiline will undoubtedly stand, provided the judges decide that the sun does not shine at noonday ! ”

Lucius Sergius Catilina, the future conspirator (“ Quousque tandem, Catilina, abutere patientia nostra ? ”), was at that time accused by Publius Clodius Pulcher — another name of sinister import for Cicero — of misappropriating public funds. He could not be a candidate for the consulate until acquitted of this charge, and we can see what Cicero thought of the evidence against him. Yet in the very next letter he says that he has been asked to defend Catiline, and that he is doubting whether he will do it or no ! " We have the right judges ” (jury), he naively says. He did not, as a matter of fact, undertake the case, but it is like him to have made no secret of his hesitation ; and without doubt, he did, in the course of his life, defend others almost equally bad. Will any great modern lawyer cast a stone at him ?

Political ambition is now his ruling motive, but his warm heart has abundant room for softer and more humane interests. He announces with playful formality that in this year, L. Julius Cæsar and C. Marcus Figulus being consuls, he has been blessed with a boy, and that Terentia is doing well. Also the Hermathena has come, and he is charmed with it. “ I have it so well placed that it lights up the whole gymnasium like a sun.”

The year 690 (64 B. C.) saw Cicero triumphant in his canvass, having been declared consul-elect for the year to come by an overwhelming popular majority. The other successful candidate was Caius Antonius, the second of the competitors named in Cicero’s list, a personally insignificant and rather unprincipled man, uncle of the notorious Mark Antony. These two were inducted into office on the 1st of January, 691. Antonius proved a nonentity in his high position : the glory of the year was all Cicero’s. Before its close, he had received the honorary title of Father of his Country for the extraordinary courage and ability he displayed in discovering and effectually crushing the widespread conspiracy of Catiline. The stately old aristocrat Catulus had saluted him in the Senate as the saviour of the state, and at the close of that proudest of all his days he had gone to his home across the Forum accompanied by throngs of huzzaing citizens, and amid an improvised illumination ; torches blazing on all the house-fronts, and even the Roman women and girls crowding the roofs and craning their necks to get a glimpse of the consular hero.

There are no letters extant of this culminating time. Atticus, who had come from Greece to further his friend’s election, remained in Rome during his year of office, and we may seize the opportunity afforded by this break in the correspondence to gather from other sources a somewhat more precise idea of the state of parties in Rome, the general condition and aspect of the city, and the political and social position of Cicero himself.

Daring the season of anarchy and violence but lately closed, — the period of the Marian and Sullan wars, — the republic had in truth received her deathblow ; but no good patriot — and there were still many in Rome — had more than dimly foreboded, in moments of unusual depression, that it might be so. The crisis of misrule was supposed to be over, the state recovering from the shock she had sustained, and in a fair way to regain her ancient robust health. The optimate, or aristocratic, party in particular, the good conservatives whose stronghold was in the Senate, and with whom Cicero was thoroughly and by profound conviction identified, believed that the unwritten constitution of Rome was a something eternal and indestructible ; and that the salvation of society depended entirely on a restoration of those old constitutional forms, of late so frequently and grossly violated. They saw clearly enough the dangers that threatened the civic order from the encroachments of an irresponsible mob, as manipulated by desperate aristocrats and unscrupulous demagogues ; and they were just now seeking to strengthen their position by a firmer alliance with the middle or equestrian class, which of late, through the enormous increase of wealth due to its peculiar financial opportunities,⁴ had risen to a new importance. This coalition between the upper and middle orders was a principal feature of Cicero’s own darling programme, his panacea for all the ills of the failing commonwealth. He, as well as the great Pompey, — the first man in Rome at that moment, as Cicero was undoubtedly the second, — had sprung from the equestrian class ; and though so closely allied by education, association, and sympathy with the optimates, they owed much of their power over the masses, no doubt, to the fact that they were not of patrician birth. Cicero, in particular, had won the popular heart at the very outset of his forensic career by his fearless defense of some of the victims of Sulla’s tyranny ; and he still held the idle multitude enthralled, whenever he spoke from the rostra, by the incomparable magic of his tongue. Pompey had made great the Roman name abroad in a manner that ministered to the pride of the meanest citizen, and had refrained, seemingly of his own moderation and in the pure interest of law and order, from usurping that dictatorial power which the command of so many victorious legions laid ready to his hand. To afford a further illustration of the disintegration of parties and the subversion of time-honored precedents then rapidly going on, we may observe, in passing, that both Cæsar, who was presently to make Pompey the tool of his own ambition, and Clodius, who was to repudiate his birthright for the sake of more effectually crushing Cicero, to say nothing of the infamous Catiline and most of his crew, were all patricians pur sang, and of the oldest lineage in Rome.

As for the theatre on which these men played their famous parts, — the visible Rome of the last days of the republic, — we fancy that we know something of its general aspect. It was still the “ city of brick ” that Augustus found, and had by no means assumed that air of regal magnificence, never equaled before or since, that far-shining splendor of sculptured façade and gleaming column, doomed to dazzle the eyes and turn the brain of the invading Barbarian. The streets were not yet widened and straightened by the strong hand of imperial improvement. Many even of those which diverged from the Forum were narrow and tortuous ; betraying by their devious and inconvenient course the haste and heedlessness of effect with which Rome had been rebuilt, after its destruction by the Gauls three hundred years before. The houses of the poor were wretched : tall, toppling, roofed with wood, the prey of frequent fires. But the Forum and the Capitol were already nobly adorned. There were long lines of imposing colonnades and statues, in the Greek style, in every circus, theatre, and square. That most excellent of the optimates, Catulus, had received some years before, and was executing with enthusiasm, the commission — his enemies called it the “job” — of enlarging and beautifying the supreme temple of the Capitoline Jove. He was now in process of overlaying its roof with plates of gold ; but opinions were divided about the effect of this innovation, and it was thought in very bad taste, as the elder Pliny tells us, by some of the older folk. The slopes of the Palatine were occupied by sumptuous private dwellings, with porticoes and perrons of richly tinted foreign marbles, one of the finest on the side toward the Forum being that which Cicero himself bought, at about this time, of the future triumvir, M. Crassus. On the other side of the city, in the quarter which embraced the Pincian, or “ hill of gardens,” Lucullus and Sallustius were building on a yet more lavish scale ; and here, there, and everywhere, within the circuit of the walls, there were large open spaces reserved for lawns and groves. On one of the estates on the Palatine, the property of an elder Crassus, there were six magnificent lotustrees, of so extraordinary an age and size that they were held to represent half the value of the place. The Rome of that day must certainly have had a touch of homelier pleasantness about it than the more gorgeous Rome evoked by the great transformation machinery of the Emperors. Outside the city lay a smiling campagna, well wooded still in many parts, and bright with the crops of continuous and highly cultivated farms down to the very border of the sea. The sweeping curves of the Tiber and the Anio did not lack the green shadows cast by abundant leafage ; the mountains on the southern horizon were fair as we see them to-day, — and fairer they could not be ; the great highways, now flanked by miles of half-obliterated ruin, were teeming with multifarious life ; the arches of the great Marcian aqueduct already marched away to the hills in unbroken procession, stepping with all the vigor of youth.

So the memorable year of Cicero’s consulship came to an end. Catiline, the arch-conspirator, had fled to the camp of the insurgents at Fiesole, to fall in arms only a few weeks later, near the modern town of Pistoia, while his principal accomplices had been strangled in prison, in the early, days of December, by Cicero’s own orders. There was a doubt whether the act were legal ; whether the senatorial decree — “ Videant consules ne quid detrimenti respublica capiat,” which was equivalent to the proclamation of martial law — did really confer upon the twin chief magistrates power of life and death over seditious citizens ; and Cicero shows plainly enough, by the heat with which, on various occasions, he argues the question, that he had his own misgivings. Still, there are times when a brave ruler must be prepared to go beyond the law. The act had been loudly and gratefully applauded, not by the professed party of order merely, but by the people en masse, and it had unquestionably staved off a revolution, and for the time being saved the state. Cicero was now a senator of the highest, or consular, rank, and was negotiating for the fine mansion upon the Palatine, to which allusion has already been made, as a residence suitable to his dignity. Of the two provinces to the governorship of one of which he had a right, as ex-consul, he had surrendered the richer, Macedonia, to his colleague, Antonius ; and subsequently, the latter, that of Cisalpine Gaul, or Northern Italy, to Quintus Metellus Celer, with command of the troops that were sent out against Catiline. He was at the summit of his fortune, and a popular idol still, but sundry small specks were appearing in the heaven of his prosperity, and the letters of the ensuing year, 692 (62 B. C.), will show how rapidly these developed.

The first is to Cnæus Pompeius in Asia, and begins with a ceremonious congratulation on his final victory over King Mithridates, and the occupation of Judæa. There follows a passage worded with the same scrupulous politeness, but showing plainly enough that the writer was wincing under a sense of unappreciated merit : —

“ I was gratified by the letter which you sent me ” (in addition to his public dispatch), “ although it contained no very clear indication of your disposition toward myself. There is nothing from which I, personally, derive greater satisfaction than the consciousness of having been of use to my friends ; and if, in any case, there seems to have been no fair return for my devotion, I am quite willing that the balance of benefits conferred should remain upon my side. If my own earnest zeal in your behalf has failed to attach you to me, I still feel confident that we shall be drawn and bound together by the interests of the republic.”

Then, suddenly casting off the buckram which at all times irked him so, “ Let me speak plainly, however,” he goes on, “ about the lack which I feel in your letter, as it is my nature to do, and as our friendship warrants. I did certainly think you owed it, both to me and the republic, to make some acknowledgment of my late services.”

Of all men’s applause for his great consular achievement, Cicero had most desired that of Pompey the Great, the first general in the world, and the recognized head of his own political party. Pompey afar off, reducing Spanish bandits to order and exacting tribute from Eastern satraps, was the hero of Cicero’s imagination ; the man who was to restore the tarnished glories of the commonwealth ; the man with whom, of all others, he most desired to act in concert and appear in close alliance before the world. But the moment, the two came into close contact, there was that in the cold and neutral character of Pompey which repelled the sensitive spirit of the ex-consul, and made havoc with all his illusions. Great he might be, but he was never generous. If he did not exaggerate his own importance, he had a dull dislike of distinction in others. Cicero more than half suspected him at times, even then, of coquetting with the democratic leaders ; and we shall presently find him, in one of his épanchements to Atticus, giving pungent expression to his private sentiments of disappointment and distrust.

When Cicero was merely a little nettled, he was apt, as many of us are, to be unnecessarily stately. In the case of a deeper affront, as the next two letters will show, his self-command was admirable ; his manner at once became simpler and far more truly dignified. He gets a haughty and offensive note from that Metellus Celer who was commanding in the north, saying that he, Metellus, understands that Cicero has been saying sharp things in the Senate about himself and his brother, Metellus Nepos ; and he thinks the position of their family (the Metelli were grandees of the first order) and what they have done for him (Cicero) should have prevented anything of the kind. Is he, the general of a province, commanding an army in the field, to be thus criticised by an upstart ? “ You have not acted rationally,” the angry man goes on to say, " nor ” (another fling at Cicero’s extraction) “ with the courtesy of the old régime, and it will not be wonderful if you come to repent it.”

Seldom has a man been more consummately put in the wrong, upon every point, than was the blustering nobleman by Cicero’s urbane reply. The truth was that Metellus Nepos, the general’s brother, had offered Cicero a gross public affront, of which, however, the effect had been in a great measure foiled by the ready wit of the latter, who proceeds blandly to explain the circumstances. It was customary for a consul, on quitting office at the end of his year, not merely to take a formal oath to the effect that he had conscientiously discharged the duties incumbent on him, but also to address the people from the rostra, giving a sort of review of his policy. When Cicero, who had doubtless meant, and was expected, to make this a brilliant occasion, was about to speak, Metellus Nepos, newly elected a tribune, interposed to prevent his address, on the ground that he had put Roman citizens to death without a trial. The adroit Cicero responded by merely giving a new wording to the oath itself. He swore that he had saved the republic from destruction, and sat down amid thunders of applause ; but it is hardly to be supposed that he failed thereafter, as occasion offered, to employ against his new adversary the terribly keen weapon with which nature had provided him.

“ It will thus appear,” he writes to Metellus Celer, winding up his calm and perspicuous narrative, “ that I have by no means taken the offensive against your brother, but merely repelled his attack ; that I have not been, as you say, fickle toward yourself, but, on the contrary, so faithful that I have persisted in my friendship, even when deprived of your own good offices. And at this very moment, my answer to your all but threatening letter is, that I can not only excuse your indignation, but even approve it. for I know from my own experience the might of brotherly love. All I ask is, that you should judge with equal fairness my very natural anger at being so bitterly, cruelly, and causelessly assailed by one of your family. I hope you will conclude not only that I owe you no apology, but that I might even have invoked for my defense, in such a case, your aid and that of the army you mention.” (Can we not see the slight curl of the writer’s expressive lip, as he neatly rounds this paragraph ?) “ I have always desired your good-will. I have striven hard to make you understand how friendly was my feeling toward yourself. I am in the same mind still, and shall remain so as long as you will permit me. I would sooner cease hating your brother for the love of you than that my dislike of him should impair our good understanding.”

The correspondence with Atticus is now resumed with zest, the next letter to the alter ego bearing the date of January 1, 693, — the day when the new consuls, Calpurnius Piso and Valerius Messala, assumed office. The writer, not unnaturally, has had some little difficulty about raising the money — equivalent to some $150,000 — to pay for the new house on the Palatine. “ As for your uncle Cæcilius.” he dryly observes, " his own relatives cannot get any out of him at less than twelve per cent. I shall have to go to the Jews.” But it is evident that he apprehends no very serious difficulty upon this head. What vexes him far more is a, slanderous rumor, which he implores Atticus to ferret out and contradict, that he, Cicero, is going shares with his late colleague, Antonius, in the profits of the latter’s abominable extortions in Macedonia. “ Pompey.” he writes, “ makes rather a parade of friendship for me just now, and his divorce of Mucia ” (who was a sister of the Metelli) “ is generally approved.” There were whispers about the relations between this lady and the gallant Cæsar, but since Pompey’s next wife (he had five in all) was Cæsar’s daughter Julia, and Cæsar himself, when he presently divorced Pompeia, with the famous flourish about being “ above suspicion,” made haste to espouse Calpurnia, the daughter of one of the new consuls, we may be permitted to suspect that political intrigue went for quite as much as wounded honor in these facile arrangements. Then, idly, casually, — as purblind mortals are forever touching on the subjects fraught with their fate, only to marvel, as they look back, at their own unconscious temerity, — Cicero proceeds to the highly seasoned latest bit of Roman scandal : " I dare say you may have heard that Publius Clodius, the son of Appius, was caught in women’s clothes in Cæsar’s house, while a solemn sacrifice was going on. A maid-servant protected and let him out. It is a miserable, disgraceful affair, and I know you will be very sorry for it.”

If there were one among the gilded youth of that ominous day more disreputable than all the rest, it was this same Publius Clodius Pulcher, whose effeminate beauty belied the real force and tenacity of his character, and who had vindicated his long descent from the ravager of Virginia by so living as to cover his ancient name with a new infamy. His sister Clodia, as bad as he, was also a celebrated beauty, the Lesbia of Catullus’ dulcet lay ; the wife, and almost certainly the murderess two years later, of that Metellus Celer whom we know. The sacrifice in question was the time-honored and mysterious rite of the Bona Dea, or Good Goddess, who gave fruitfulness in marriage, from which all male creatures were scrupulously excluded, and even the busts and statues of men covered during the ceremony. It was performed annually in the house of the Pontifex Maximus, and as Cæsar now held that august office, it devolved upon his wife and mother to conduct the function. Whatever of genuine reverence and sincere attachment to the tenets of the old religion yet survived in Rome appears to have clustered about this carefully guarded service ; and while it seems unnecessary to attribute, as some were inclined to do, the impudent intrusion of Clodius to a special design upon Cæsar’s wife, or to any motive save a general one of prurient curiosity, yet Cæsar made haste, as we have seen, to put the unfortunate lady away ; and his noble mother, Aurelia, is said to have connived at the escape of Clodius, in the vain hope, doubtless, of staying the inevitable scandal.

Cicero himself, in the next letter, after describing the proceedings against Clodius, appears half inclined to wish that the deplorable affair had been allowed to die a natural death. But when the College of Augurs, in its capacity of ecclesiastical court, had taken it up and pronounced the deed a sacrilege, the Senate must needs follow suit, although Piso, the consul, on whom it was incumbent to bring in the bill against Clodius, was pretty well known to be privately on the side of the offender. “ I, myself,” Cicero observes, in his debonair fashion, “ was a perfect Lycurgus in the beginning, but I get cooler every day. It is Cato who keeps urging the thing on. What is the use ? The better sort are apathetic ; the baser defend the culprit. I am afraid great mischief will come out of it all to the republic. . . . As to that friend of yours, — you know whom I mean ” (it was Pompey), — “ of whom you once said that he never begins to praise until he dares no longer blame, he makes a great show of being on my side. He eulogizes me in public, yet shows plainly enough that in his heart he dislikes me. There is no chivalry in the man, no candor, no political magnanimity ; nothing open, brave, and generous. But more of this another time ; for, in the first place, I have really no sufficient proof of what I say ; and then, I dare not trust a letter containing such important matter to a bearer of whom I know nothing, — a terræ filius, a fellow dropped out of the sky. . . . Of course I liked the passages in my oration which you praise, but I did not venture to say so before. Now that you have approved them they seem to me more Attic than ever. . . . Had I anything else to tell you ? Let me see. Oh, yes ! Messala, the consul, has bought Autronius’ house for 3,400,000 sesterces ” (about $136,000). “ What is that to me, do you say ? Why, at least it shows that I made a good bargain for mine.”

It certainly seems to have been a species of fatality which forced Cicero to come to the front in this unsavory business, and to concentrate upon himself all the animosity which the prosecution of Clodius aroused among a certain worthless and yet powerful clique. But there was no help for it. Cato, the incorruptible and impracticable, would absolutely have an example made. Whatever was decent in Rome rallied to that side, while Clodius organized on his own behalf the dregs of the Catilinarian conspirators, together with all the young debauchees of his especial set, who objected to having their amusements interfered with, and who were, unhappily, in a position, many of them, to bribe enormously. The affair became a political one, dividing the optimate and democratic parties, and absorbing the attention of Rome for the entire winter ; while the coming man, Cæsar, under the cover of this unwholesome excitement, was working industriously for his own ends. All the moves and counter-moves, just so far as his restless eye discerned them, are set forth by Cicero to Atticus in a sort of Essence of Parliament, with abundant persiflage, yet with a dramatic power which brings the whole scene before the reader’s eye. Gradually he himself warms up to the business from which he had shrunk, and puts forth his whole power as a speaker. " You know,” he writes playfully to his friend, “ of what thunders I am capable. I need say the less about them; since I think you must have heard me there in Greece.”

As for General Pompeius, now returned from his Oriental wars, and living outside the walls, in the direction of Monte Mario, while he made elaborate preparations for the third and most gorgeous of his triumphal entries into Rome, no power could get out of him a clear expression of opinion on one side or the other. The Senate, as a precaution against bribery at the trial, had voted that the jury in Clodius’ case were to be selected by the prætors, not chosen by lot, as was customary ; and Pompey was asked to speak before a huge public assembly in the Campus Martius on the constitutionality of the measure. “ He delivered,” writes Cicero, “ a long-winded harangue, altogether in a lordly manner, to the effect that he held, and always had held, the authority of the Senate to be paramount in all things ; and when subsequently appealed to in the Senate itself ” (after his triumph) “ to define his position with regard to the sacrilege and the bill which had been introduced, he replied by extolling, in a general way, all the senatorial decrees, remarking, as he sat down beside me, that he believed he had now said all that was necessary, even about my act.”

Surely there is a strangely familiar ring, to one who follows the English politics of to-day, about this majestically ambiguous oratory !

When, after the Ides of March, the trial at last came on, all seemed at first to be going well. The court professed, indeed, to apprehend violence, and required of the Senate a military guard ; and Cicero says briefly of the jury as finally constituted, that a worse lot never assembled around the table of a gaminghell. Still, at the outset, the legal forms were observed. Cicero himself, as principal witness, upset the alibi of Clodius, who proposed to prove that he had been at Interamna on the night of the sacrilege ; and Hortensius, the great lawyer, often the forensic opponent but always the political colleague of Cicero, declared that a “ sword of lead ” would be sharp enough to cut the throat of the accused. Nevertheless, when the decisive day came, the vote stood thirty-one for acquittal, against twenty-five. Nobody had any doubt as to the means by which this iniquitous verdict had been secured. " Was it because you were afraid of being robbed of your pay that you wanted a guard ? ” scornfully inquired of one of the jury the fine old optimate Catulus.

Cicero is disgusted and disheartened, yet for his life he cannot help chuckling over the keenness of his own wit in the numerous verbal duels which came off in the Senate, that spring, between himself and Clodius, after the shameful reinstatement of the latter. His repartees were sufficiently stinging, no doubt, but some of his favorite jokes miss fire for us, and there are some into the full meaning of which we do not care to inquire. " My pretty boy ” (pulchellus ; Pulcher was the family name of Clodius) “ gets up and twits me with frequenting the orgies at Baiæ. A lie ; but what is that to him ? ‘ You make as much of it,’ I replied, ‘ as if I had intruded on a secret rite.’ ‘ So you have bought a palace ! ’ he sneers. ‘ At least I have not bought a jury ! ’ ‘ Jury indeed ! Why, they would n’t believe you on your oath ! ’ ‘ Oh, I beg your pardon ! Twenty-five of them did believe me, but there were thirty-one who would not believe you until they had their money down ! ’ ” A new law concerning bribery was proposed, one clause of which provided that he who had merely promised money was exempt from penalty, but if he could be proved to have paid he should incur a heavy fine. “ I made the remark,” Cicero says, “ that Clodius had obeyed this law by anticipation, it having been his regular practice to promise and not pay.” And so on : “ Quid multa ? ” as Cicero says. There is, however, no mystery henceforth about the deadly spite of Clodius Pulcher against this brilliant debater and facetious correspondent.

A letter of December 7, 693, the last of this year, breathes a very different spirit. It is full of the most earnest and touching protestations of Cicero’s regard for Atticus, and his reliance on the unalterable friendship of the latter. There had been a slight misunderstanding, it appears, between Atticus and Quintus Cicero. Quintus, who was following his brother, step by step, through the regular succession of public offices, had gone as proprætor to Asia Minor, and had invited Atticus to accompany him as legate. Marcus had very much hoped that Atticus would go, for he dreaded, and evidently with good reason, the effect upon the Asiatics of his brother’s hot temper and imperious fashions, and he could have relied on the placid Athenian to tone him down. But Atticus had declined the honor, and Quintus took umbrage at his refusal ; wherefore Marcus uses his utmost powers of persuasion to make up the difference between them.

“ If you will only consider,” he says to his friend, “ that irritable creatures like my brother are often really the best and most placable of men ; that quickness and what I call sensitiveness of disposition are usually the signs of a good heart ; above all, that we are bound to bear patiently one another’s little defects, humors, and even offenses, you will, I hope, feel less disturbed. Try to look at it in this way. It concerns me so deeply, who am fonder of you than of all other men, that my people should both love and be loved by you. . . . I do not think there was ever any disagreement between you and me, except as regards the careers we chose ; my ambition impelling me to contend for public honors, while a different but no less praiseworthy theory of life led you into dignified retirement. . . . I know, oh, I know and thoroughly appreciate, how, in all the vicissitudes of my career, you have shared my joys and sorrows. . . . Now that you are away, I have not only no one to advise me, which you can do better than all others, but I have no one to talk with freely, as it is my delight to do with you. . . . The state of the republic is miserably precarious and infirm. I fancy you must have heard that there has been an almost complete break between the Senate and the knights. Cato is, after all, our true hero. . . . I intend to keep on the very best terms with Pompey. I know what you will say, but I shall be on my guard.” Then follow a few words about the consular candidates, among them almost the first direct mention of Cæsar which occurs in the correspondence ; and then, “ Do you laugh ? Believe me, these are no laughing matters.”

The winter of 694 (60 B. C.) was again a troubled and exciting one. “ The old year,” Cicero writes in January, " saw the fall of two props of the state toward whose maintenance my own solitary efforts had always been directed. The Senate has both flung away its own prerogative and broken its compact with the equestrian order.” Cato was as unmanageable as ever ; honest and loyal, but without a particle of tact or discretion. Pompey continued inscrutable. " We have not so much as the ghost of a statesman. Our friend who might have been one — for Pompey and I are friends, understand — sits and looks at his embroidered toga, and says nothing.”

Pompey was undoubtedly in a somewhat awkward position. In the plenitude of his grandeur, he had promised a distribution of the public lands among the soldiers whom he had disbanded at Brundusium on his return from the East. An agrarian law, known as that of Flavius, had been introduced for the purpose of securing these grants, and Cicero himself had spoken in its favor ; but there was violent opposition to it in the Senate, and the bill was defeated. Then there was one section of the conservative, or optimate, party, represented by Lucullus and Hortensius, whom Cicero sarcastically describes as entirely absorbed in their fish-preserves. “ If they can only get the bearded mullet to come and feed out of their hands, the republic may go ! ” As for the new consuls, “ Metellus ” (Metellus Celer) “ has distinction, and is friendly enough to me ; but Afranius, — oh, heavens ! One must be a philosopher indeed to tolerate him !

. . . What I want more than all things else is that man — yourself — to whom I can confide my every anxiety ; to whom I can talk without fiction, circumlocution, or reserve. My best beloved brother is far away, and Metellus, — Metellus is not a man at all, but an empty waste of sea and shore and sky, as one may say.”

There was good reason, indeed, better than Cicero himself knew, for his growing sense of isolation. Dimly through the chaos of events and the strife of contending interests, he already apprehended the beginnings of two sinister movements : one directed mainly against himself ; the other of broader import, aiming at the subversion of the last lingering liberties of the moribund state. The first was the revengeful design of Clodius to get himself made a tribune of the people (for which purpose he must be adopted into a plebeian family), and so secure a vantage-ground from which he might more easily compass the exile, possibly the death, of Cicero. The other comprised the preliminaries of that famous coalition known in history as the first triumvirate ; an arrangement whereby Cæsar, whom Cicero feared but little as yet, only because he knew him so little, was planning to make use both of the prestige of Pompey and of the colossal wealth of Crassus for the furtherance of his own far-seeing designs. Yet even now Cicero is not so deep in the toils of his political fate as to be unmindful of his literary fame. “ I have sent you,” he writes to Atticus, March 15, 694, “ my own commentary on my consulate in Greek. If there be anything in it which appears to a man of your Attic taste ” (the old joke) “ unclassical or un-Hellenic, I shall not say, as I believe Lucullus said to you at, Panhormus of his history, that he had introduced certain barbarisms and solecisms for the very sake of showing that it was the work of a Roman. No, indeed ! If you detect any slips of that kind, be sure they are there without my knowledge or will. When I have finished the Latin translation, I will send you that too.”

Returning to Rome from a visit, to his Pompeian villa, on the 12th of May, Cicero finds letters from Greece, in which Atticus appears very seriously to have counseled him not to trust Pompey too far ; but our mercurial friend is just now in the mood to take the warning lightly. “ I assure you,” he says, “ that I have bated nothing of my dignity. I have not ventured into another’s camp without a guard ; . . . and if the course I have pursued has perhaps conduced to the tranquillity of my own life, by Heaven ! it concerns the republic much more than it does myself that the attacks of scoundrels upon me should be repelled.” Then he digresses to pleasanter themes. He has had a magnificent gift of books from one Papirius Pætus, who had inherited the same ; and the books are at Athens, having been consigned, probably, to the care of Atticus, who is conjured to look after their safety, and to enjoin it upon his “ friends, clients, guests, freedmen, and slaves that not a leaf be suffered to perish. . . . More and more every day,” he says, " I find relaxation from my forensic labors in studies of this kind.”

Civic interests are paramount with him once more, however, in the beginning of June. The summer appears to have been as active and interesting a time, politically, in old Rome as it is in modern London. Even those who went away “ for a change ” in the spring, as Cicero did in the ensuing year, made a point of returning for the great popular elections at midsummer, when the tribunes were chosen. There has been more sparring in the Senate, and Cicero has been provoked into making an allusion to Clodia (the wife, be it remembered, of Metellus) which will not bear translation. " Not a very consular speech, you will say, and I own it. But ego illam odi, — I do detest that woman ! She at least is unfit to be a consul’s wife. . . . The excitement over the agrarian law seems to have cooled down. You keep touching me up about my familiarity with Pompey. Now pray do not think that I adhere to him in self-defense. The case is simply this : a difference between us would involve a terrible discord in the body politic. . . . He declares openly,” Cicero goes on, always unfortunately susceptible to flattery, “ that while he has fought well for the country, I have saved it. How far this may prove of use to me I do not know. It certainly is of use to the republic. . . . What,” cries the sanguine soul, “ if I were to make a better man even of Cæsar, who has the wind in all his sails just now ! Would that, think you, harm the state ? ”

The most important letter of the remainder of this year is a very long one addressed to Quintus Cicero in his province. Quintus had been governor in Asia since 692, and his term of office had recently been extended by a year ; but Marcus had been made anxious by rumors of the unnecessary severity of his brother’s rule, and his letter of remonstrance and advice is extended until it takes the form of a complete and very noble manual of provincial administration, too elaborate to be analyzed here.

The year 695 (59 B. C.), the fortyninth of Cicero’s age, opens with Julius Cæsar and Calpurnius Bibulus consuls, and with a virtual acknowledgment of the informal alliance between Cæsar, Pompey, and Crassus. But Cicero himself was, for the moment, out of the turmoil. Whether his health, never strong, was such that he absolutely required repose, or whether his friends, who understood better than he did himself, perhaps, the peril in which he stood, had contrived to get him away, we find him in February at the Tusculanum, writing to Atticus in Rome. He has taken up the project, apparently at Atticus’ own suggestion, of composing a work on geography, and seems to have sent to his friend for authorities on the subject. “ I am exceedingly obliged,” he writes, “ for the work of Serapion, of which, between ourselves, I scarcely understand the thousandth part. I have given orders that you are to be paid for it in cash. It is not to be set down under the head of your gifts.” A rumor has reached the absentee that Clodius is going as ambassador to King Tigranes. Cicero is quite willing. He intends to give himself unreservedly to the Muses. “ I shall do my best to satisfy you about the geography, though I can promise nothing. It is a great undertaking, but since you bid me attack it, I will try to have something to show you for this excursion of mine. Tell me, meanwhile, of the aspect of political affairs, and in particular who are to be the next consuls. Not that I am very curious. I have resolved to think nothing whatever about the republic. . . . I have gone over all Terentia’s woodland. Except for the Dodonean oath, I do not see why we should envy you Epirus. By the first of next month, I expect to be either at my Formian or my Pompeian villa. If I am not at the Formian, come to me in Pompeii. It will be a delight to me, and not at all out of your way.”

Tusculum, Pompeii, Terentia’s woodland ! O country of all enchantment ! O shades of ilex, and beech, and pine, with the first breath of the slow Southern spring astir among them, the first anemones kindling on the ground ! Surely there, if anywhere, the vexed statesman might have “ reposed from Rome ” ! But no, the news of the great world and the cares of it pursue him from one resting-place to another, down even to his exquisite retreat at Antium (Porto d’Anzio) on the coast below : Antium, with its fair prospect of the Mediterranean littoral from Ostia to the promontory of Circe ; Antium, where, he tells us in one place, he likes nothing better, when fishing is out of season, than to sit still and count the waves.

A rumor comes that the triumvirs are going to offer Cicero an embassy to King Ptolemy Auletes ; by way, probably, of politely removing him from the scene. “ Now,” he writes, “ I have long wished to see Alexandria and the rest of Egypt, and I should not object to getting away from the men who are tired of me, and remaining till they had begun to feel my loss. But just at this moment, and at the bidding of these individuals, — I think not. In the words of Hector to Andromache, ‘I revere the men of Troy, and the long-robed Trojan dames.’ What would the optimates say of me ? — if, indeed, there are any optimates left ! Surely that I had been bribed to surrender my principles. ‘ First of all I must bear the reproach of Polydamus,’ — I mean our Cato, who, after all, is a man of a hundred thousand. What would be the verdict of history six hundred years hence ? For I regard that far more than I do the tittle-tattle of my contemporaries. By the way, now that Nepos ⁵ is off to his province, who will have the vacant place in the College of Augurs ? This is the only bait with which I could be tempted. You see how highly I rate myself ! But why do I keep harping on these things, when I have resolved to abjure them all that I may give myself wholly to philosophy ! I protest I have ! I wish I had done so from the beginning. . . . Tell me, however,” he adds a few lines later, with his own delightful inconsistency, “ what is doing about Clodius.”

He might well ask. Events were moving fast at Rome, while Cicero strolled along the beach at Antium, reveling in its provincial calm (“ How can there be a place so near Rome where they never even heard of Vatinius ? ”), or marked Terentia’s trees for the woodman. The farce of Clodius’s plebeian adoption had been accomplished and formally proclaimed. The law providing for such cases had been violated in every particular. Fonteius, the adopted father, was a dozen years younger than Clodius ; he was married to a woman of his own station, and likely to have a large family.

Still, the deed had been done with the tacit consent of Cæsar and under the open patronage of Pompey, who had taken the auspices upon the occasion. In vain, as these facts become known to Cicero, does he try to explain them away, and to prove to the satisfaction both of Atticus and himself that Clodius and his works are alike held in contempt by the usurpers. The usurpation itself, as Cicero very well knows, is a thing of the most sombre import, and the thought of it weighs upon his spirit even more than his personal danger. He grows feverishly impatient for the letters of his friend. “ Last evening, as usual, I was on the lookout for your missive, when up comes a messenger with the tidings that your slaves are here. ‘ Any letters ? ‘ I shout, the moment they appear. . . . ‘ No letters.’ ‘What’s that you say ? Nothing from Pomponius ? ’ Then they begin to look scared and to stammer, and finally confess that they did have letters, but have lost them on the road ! What would you have ? I promise you, I was angry ! It was so long since a day had passed without either a useful hint or a pleasant word from you ! ” However, Cicero goes on to say, he has just had a visitor at Antium, who has put him in somewhat better heart about public affairs. It is Curio, a young nobleman who had once been attached to Clodius’s faction, and whom Cicero had then mentioned contemptuously enough as “ a slip of a girl.” Now, however, the youth seems to have waked up to a sense of his political responsibilities, and to be exerting himself actively in the conservative cause. “ He is in great wrath with our haughty kings ” (the triumvirs), “ and he tells me that the other young men of his class are equally incensed, and will not endure it. If there is indeed hope in the rising generation, all may be well.” Then there is a word concerning the family plans. There are to be games at Antium the first week in Hay, which Tullia wants to see. If they stay for these, they will go directly afterward to Tusculum, thence to the old place at Arpinum, and so on to Rome by the first of June. Atticus is once more pressingly entreated with messages from the ladies to join them somewhere, at Antium if possible.

A few days later, the cloud of apprehension has again settled heavily upon the spirit of the writer. The revolution, he says, is accomplished. “ Gayly, and with less grating than might have been anticipated, the wheel of the republic has turned quite over, — with bewildering rapidity, too, thanks to the obstinacy of Cato and the bad faith of those other men.” Once more young Curio runs out from Rome, meets Cicero at the Three Taverns, and tries to persuade him that the triumvirs are becomingvery unpopular. The lad had plainly fallen under the spell of the great man’s personal fascination ; who liked him too, and was always popular with the young, thanks to a something eternally supple and juvenile in himself. But there was a packet from Atticus lying unopened while the young politician discoursed, “ and so,” says Cicero, “ I embraced him and sent him off, and hastened to your letter, from which I learned much more about what is doing than from his talk. So much for viva voce information ! ”

A day or two later : “ Appii Forum, ten A. M. Please to applaud my firmness. I am not going to witness the games at Antium, after all. It would be a blunder in one who wishes to avoid all suspicion of fast living suddenly to appear in the character of a man traveling for pleasure, and rather foolish pleasure, too.”

So he digressed to Formiæ, which lay in the next large curve of the lovely coast, about half-way between the Circean promontory and Cape Misenum. Tullia had lost her treat, but the letters of this time of suspense are full of the gayest and fondest allusions to every member of his family : “ Terentia desires her very best love.” “ Terentia is charmed with your letters.” Also the small Cicero, aged six, that “ honey-sweet child,” that “ excellent little conservative,” sends brief messages in Greek, which he was no doubt beginning to learn. He may even have scrawled his greetings on the paper or the wax, in bulky and uncertain characters.

At Formiæ, Cicero felt himself out of the world at first, but had presently only too much company ; being simply overwhelmed by the attentions of his provincial neighbors, one or two of whom he sketches irresistibly. “ I fancy from what you say that it is rather quiet in Rome just now, but here in the backwoods, — by Heaven ! it is not at all quiet. The backwoods would not tolerate the tyranny you live under. Just you come to Lastrygonia ” (the ancient name of Formiæ), " and you shall hear how men storm ; how indignant they are ; how they detest our friend the Great, whose cognomen is becoming as unpopular as that of Crassus the Rich. I assure you, I have not met a single man who takes these things as tamely as I do.”

“ I seem to be living in a basilica rather than a villa, so beset am I by the men of Formiæ. . . . My nearest neighbor is Caius Arrius. Just at this moment, in fact, he is my bosom-friend, and professes to be staying away from Rome for the mere purpose of talking philosophy with me. On the other side, if you please, is Sebosus, the friend of Catulus. Now which way can I turn ? I swear I would go straight to Arpinum, if I did not think it would be more convenient for you to come to me at Formiæ. But I ’ll not wait beyond May 6, in any case, for you see the sort of bores who take up my time. Oh, if anybody wants to buy the Formian property, let him come on ! He would have a rare chance at a bargain while these men are about ! ”

“ Give me out-and-out rustics,” he says in another letter, “ rather than these provincials with their citified airs. I positively will run away to ‘ the cradle of my race among the ancestral hills ‘ ” (quoting a line of poetry).

After all, and in spite of the country fare and plain fashions of which Cicero had warned him, it was at Arpinum that Atticus decided to visit his friend. Atticus had always a special admiration for Arpinum : the spacious and comfortable though unpretending old manorhouse on its bowery island, between the rushing streams of the Liris and the Fibrenus, with the Cyclopean walls and gateway of the ancient Volscian citadel towering in air from the opposite bank, exactly as they do to-day. But the times are so exciting that even in the brief interval before the friends meet they must still exchange daily letters.

“ I had dined,” writes Cicero on the last day of April, “ and was just falling asleep, when yours concerning the Campanian lands was brought in. Do you ask how I took it ? Well, not so very hard, but it set me thinking sufficiently to banish slumber.” This refers to the passage of a law providing for the free distribution among Cæsar’s troops of the public lands in Campania, in allotments of ten jugere (about six and a half acres) each. Even so, as Cicero observes, it would only support about five thousand of them, and what was to become of the rest ? Pompey, as we know, had proposed an agrarian law for the benefit of his disbanded army, only a year before, but the measure had been defeated. He was no longer the man of the hour. “Well, my mighty Pasha,” cries the lively correspondent, unable to resist a jeer at Pompey, and using one of the many Oriental nicknames which he was fond of bestowing on the hero of the East, “ what will you say now ? ”

Not later than the next day, Cicero recurs to the subject in a much graver tone, having evidently received from Atticus overnight a letter with fuller details. “I think as you do, that the Emir is plotting mischief, and that we have everything to fear ; ” and he adds a Greek phrase, which means, in substance, he is getting up a coup d’état. “ What else can be the meaning of this sudden tightening of the bonds of relationship ” (by Pompey’s marriage with Julia), “ of the Campanian land affair, and the enormous outlay of money ? If this were all, it would be bad enough, but in the nature of things it cannot be all. These arrangements are not in themselves desirable. They” (the triumvirs) “ would never have gone so far, were they not paving the way for something yet more iniquitous. O ye gods ! where will it end ? Well, as you say, at Arpinum we will, not weep over things, for that would belie our philosophy, but discuss them calmly. It is not now, as formerly, my hopefulness that sustains me, but my nonchalance. Moreover, that little strain of self-conceit which is in me (it is well to know one’s faults) is gratified. It used to annoy me to think that the services of the Grand Pasha to his country might seem greater to posterity than mine : but I am relieved of all anxiety on that score.”

That the friends did really meet among the hills we may infer from the short break in the correspondence which now ensues. To the spot where his life began, from that on which it was to end, Cicero proceeded once more, traveling leisurely and with state, no doubt, as rich and important folks are wont to do ; anxious and foreboding of the future, but, after all, with a more buoyant spirit than he would ever carry over those pleasant ways again.

When the letters are resumed, in June, Atticus is far on his way to Epirus, and Cicero, with his family, is back in the grand mansion on the Palatine. The triumvirate is all-powerful. Bibulus. the colleague of Cæsar in the consulate, is a mere cipher. He has shut

himself up in his house, and refuses to sanction the consular enactments ; but to what end ? The wits only laugh at him for sulking, and say that the consuls are Julius and Cæsar. Clodius has thrown off all concealment ; has roughs enough in his pay to organize a riot at any time, if the ends of justice cannot be otherwise defeated ; and swaggers openly about the blow he will deal Cicero as soon as he has won his election to the tribunate in July. Young Curio, indeed, that enthusiastic neophyte, remains loyal, and fights his hero’s battle stoutly ; and Cicero tells Atticus that, in spite of the general intimidation, he finds men talking more freely at the clubs and in society than before he went away. “ Indignation is carrying it over fear, simply because every one is growing desperate ; . . . but I will say no more about the republic. The subject is too painful.” Cicero then alludes to the overtures which Cæsar had made to himself. The future dictator had always liked our friend personally, admiring his genius with a magnanimous cordiality peculiar to the man, and fit to cover a multitude of his sins ; and he would have given much to attach the eloquent senator to his own cause. We have it on Cicero’s own authority that the triumvirate might have been a quatuorvirate, had he so willed. Even now, Cæsar was ready to give him a chance — nay, two chances — of escaping from Rome until the gathering storm should have blown over. Cicero was given to understand that he might either go, at the end of the year, as Cæsar’s own legate to Cisalpine Gaul, or have what was called a “ free embassy,” — a legal fiction, by virtue of which a senator might travel in the provinces, on his own business, at the public expense. “ I have actually this permit by me,” he writes, “ but no one knows anything of it, and I do not intend to use it. I would rather fight than fly.” A little later, “ I am not much perturbed by the threats of Clodius, and the struggle which is impending. I think I shall be able either to meet it with dignity, or to evade it with ease. ‘ Oh, dignity ! ’ methinks I hear you say. ‘ Dignity is as much out of date as acorns were after the discovery of corn. Pray, look out for your safety ! ’ Ah, me ! Why are you not here ? . . . The worst of all, to me, is that my old friend Pompey has covered himself with shame ; ” and Cicero illustrates by a striking anecdote. " The theatre or the circus is the place for really getting at public sentiment. Now, in the gladiatorial shows, both the master and his supporters ⁶ have been riddled with hisses. In the Apollinarian games the tragedian Diphilus attacked Pompey sharply. The phrase, ‘ Nostra miseria tu es, Magnus,’— Thou, O great one, art the cause of our woes, — was encored again and again ; and at ‘ The time is coming when thou wilt bitterly lament thine own exploits,’and other such phrases, there were rounds of applause all over the theatre. Really, you would have said that the passage beginning, ‘ If neither law nor custom restrains thee,’had been written for the occasion, and by a personal foe of Pompey. These words were pronounced amid a perfect frenzy of shouts ; and just as the tumult was subsiding, in walks Cæsar, and after him young Curio. The latter was hailed Saviour of the Republic, just as Pompey used to be. Cæsar was very angry. They say that he sent off letters post-haste to Pompey in Capua.”

Before the end of July, the mobile spirits are flat again. Clodius has won his election. The outlook seems very bad. " Why should I expatiate on public affairs ? All is lost, and things are worse than when you went away by just so much as this : that then the oppression under which the state was laboring appeared, at least, to be agreeable to the lower orders, and, if hateful, still not actually perilous to the better sort ; but now the condition of things has all at once become so odious to all parties that I shudder to think what sort of an explosion may be preparing.”

The sight of Pompey’s increasing subserviency to Cæsar, together with his feeble and shuffling attitude before the people, filled Cicero with mortification, and sickened him by its contrast with the past. " Call it weakness, if you will ; but I could have wept when I was listening to his speech of July 22d on the edicts of Bibulus. He who used to bear himself so magnificently in that place, the darling of the populace, admired by all, now deprecating, depressed, as ill-content with himself, evidently, as others were with him ! It was a sight which none hut Crassus can have cared to see. So fallen from the stars was he ” (" O Lucifer, son of the morning ! ”) " that it seemed to me as if he must have tumbled rather than walked into the triumvirate ; and I experienced the same sort of anguish at the defacement of the image which I had once painted in such glowing colors, and adorned with all the resources of my art, as Apelles must have felt at seeing his Venus defiled with mud, or Protogenes his Ialysus. No one would pretend, since the part he took in Clodius’s adoption, that I owe any allegiance to Pompey ; yet such was once my devotion to him that no amount of injury can wholly exhaust it. Meanwhile, Pompey says, and repeats, that Clodius will do me no personal harm. It would be dangerous to believe him, and I must prepare myself for resistance.”

“ If you had but stayed in Rome ! You would have done so had we guessed how things would go. . . . I try to keep out of politics. I immerse myself in professional business, and work diligently at my cases ; a course which I believe to be not only profitable to my clients, but generally approved. My house is famous and much frequented ; the memories of my consulship are kept alive ; a great deal of zeal is displayed in my behalf. I am so heartened at times that I think I would not, if I could, avoid the coming crisis. What I need now is your advice, your love, your loyalty. Wherefore, fly to me ! Everything will be easier if I have you. My friend Varro ⁷ can do a great deal for me, with you to support him. And there are many things to be got out of Clodius ; many things desirable to be known which you could not fail to know ; many — But how absurd to particularize ! I need you for every reason. All depends, however, on your coming before he enters upon his office.”

The next letter but one ends mournfully enough : “ An immense amount of good-will is shown me, but I am tired of life. All things are so full of all sorts of misery ! A little while ago, I seriously apprehended a massacre. The speech of stout old Q. Considius has dispelled that fear, but a fresh danger has arisen, one that threatens me daily. What would you have ? I am the most unhappy of men, and Catulus the most fortunate, to have died so opportunely with a reputation all untarnished. . . . I should breathe more freely if I could see you.”

Atticus must have yielded to his friend’s passionate entreaties, and returned to Rome ; for, with the exception of one short note, there are no more letters to him during the remnant of this troubled year. Late in October or early in November, Cicero wrote to his brother Quintus, still in Asia, a long epistle, full of affection, as were the letters of both brothers always, but containing fresh remonstrances on the excessive severity of his government, and the overweening influence which Quintus had allowed a certain slave named Statius to establish over him. There is a single paragraph at the close about Marcus’s own affairs. He tries to write hopefully, evidently for his brother’s sake. “ It does not look as though my cause would lack friends. The way in which men come forward with their offers and protestations is quite wonderful. . . . Our old conservative phalanx is staunch and devoted. Pompey and even Cæsar make profuse promises, but I do not trust them to the extent of omitting any precaution.”

In this, as the event speedily proved, he was altogether wise. Clodius was inducted into his new office in December, 696, and before the end of the winter, after several preliminary measures, designed to ingratiate himself with the lower orders, and so strengthen his position, he brought in a bill providing that whoever had put Roman citizens to death without a trial should be prohibited from fire and water ; that is to say, outlawed.

Cicero was not named, but all the world knew that he was attacked. It was open to him even yet to remain and defy his adversary, hiring bravos to fight it out in the streets with the organized bands of Clodius. This is what Cæsar would have done in his place,—what Cicero afterwards professed to wish that he himself had had the nerve to do, or else to take the—to a Roman — always honorable alternative of suicide. But the move could hardly have succeeded. Though Cicero’s friends were active and socially powerful, though deputations poured in from the Italian towns to remonstrate against the attainder of so great a patriot, the coalition against him was too strong. Cato, whose wrath it would have been impossible to silence, had been adroitly got out of Rome, on the pretext of an embassy to Cyprus. Cæsar, when he left for his province at the expiration of his consulate, had virtually abandoned Cicero to his fate, and Pompey, when Cicero went out to him, in his Alban villa, and made a last appeal on the ground of their long alliance, replied coldly and meanly that he could do nothing without the sanction of Cæsar. Plutarch says that Pompey stepped out by a back door of the villa, when he saw Cicero coming, and would not see him at all.

Cicero had already put on the mourning dress, in which those accused of high crimes and misdemeanors were wont to appeal to their fellow-citizens. He now yielded to the entreaties of Atticus, Hortensius, and his family, and decided on leaving Rome. Before he went, moved by some sad and obscure impulse of national piety, he took a small antique image of Minerva, an heirloom in his family, and set it up in the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, as though he would have placed the city of his love, before he left it, under the protection of the Goddess of Wisdom.

No sooner was his flight known than he was publicly accused by name, and forbidden, on pain of death, to remain within four hundred miles of the city. That very night the great house on the Palatine was plundered and burned, and the villas at Tusculum and Formiæ shared the same fate upon the morn. The wife and children, so tenderly cherished and so profusely pampered, were left behind, not merely in pecuniary straits, but in personal danger, for a time at least, from the exile’s implacable foes. Life was not really over at fifty for the Father of his Country, but a person of a less mercurial and sensitive spirit than his might well have bowed his head in momentary despair, under the conviction that it was so.

Harriet Waters Preston.