Latin Literature Part 3

_c.u.m suis vivat valeatque moechis Quos simul complexa tenet trecentos Nullum amans vere, sed identidem[2] omnium Ilia rumpens--_

so the hard clear verse flashes out, to melt away in the dying fall, the long-drawn sweetness of the last words of all--

_Nec meum respectet ut ante amorem Qui illius culpa cecidit, velut prati Ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam Tactus aratro est._

Foremost among the other lyrics of Catullus which have a personal reference are those concerned with his journey to Asia, and the death in the Troad of the deeply loved brother whose tomb he visited on that journey. The excitement of travel and the delight of return have never been more gracefully touched than in these little lyrics, of which every other line has become a household word, the _Iam ver egelidos refert tepores_, and the lovely _Paene insularum Sirmio insularumque_, whose cadences have gathered a fresh sweetness in the hands of Tennyson. But a higher note is reached in one or two of the short pieces on his brother's death, which are lyrics in all but technical name. The finest of these has all the delicate simplicity of an epitaph by the best Greek artists, Leonidas or Antipater or Simonides himself; and with this it combines the specific Latin dignity, and a range of tones, from the ocean-roll of its opening hexameter, _Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus_, to the sobbing wail of the _Atque in perpehtum frater ave atque vale_ in which it dies away, that is hardly equalled except in some of Shakespeare's sonnets.

It is in these short lyrics of personal pa.s.sion or emotion that the genius of Catullus is most eminent; but the same high qualities appear in the few specimens he has left of more elaborate lyrical architecture, the _Ode to Diana_, the marriage-song for Mallius and Vinia, and the _Atys_.

The first of these, brief as it is, has a breadth and grandeur of manner which--as in the n.o.ble fragment of Keats' _Ode to Maia_--lift it into the rank of great masterpieces. The epithalamium, on the other hand, with which the book of lyrics ends, while very simple in structure, is large in scale. It is as much longer than the rest of the lyrics as the marriage-song which stands at the end of _In Memoriam_ is than the other sections of that poem. In the charm of perfect simplicity it equals the finest of his lyrics; but besides this, it has in its clear ringing music what is for this period an almost unique premonition of the new world that rose out of the darkness of the Middle Ages, the world that had invented bells and church-organs, and had added a new romantic beauty to love and marriage. With a richness of phrase that recalls the Song of Solomon, the verses clash and swing: _Open your bars, O gates! the bride is at hand! Lo, how the torches shake out their splendid tresses!... Even so in a rich lord's garden-close might stand a hyacinth-flower. Lo, the torches shake out their golden tresses; go forth, O bride! Day wanes; go forth, O bride!_ And the verse at the end, about the baby on its mother's lap--

_Torqutatus volo parvulus Matris e gremio suae Porrigens teneras ma.n.u.s Dulce rideat ad patrem Semihiante labello--_

is as incomparable; not again till the Florentine art of the fifteenth century was the picture drawn with so true and tender a hand.

Over the _Atys_ modern criticism has exhausted itself without any definite result. The accident of its being the only Latin poem extant in the peculiar galliambic metre has combined with the nature of the subject[3] to induce a tradition about it as though it were the most daring and extraordinary of Catullus' poems. The truth is quite different. It stands midway between the lyrics and the idyls in being a poem of most studied and elaborate artifice, in which Catullus has chosen, not the statelier and more familiar rhythms of the hexameter or elegiac, but one of the Greek lyric metres, of which he had already introduced several others into Latin. As a _tour de force_ in metrical form it is remarkable enough, and probably marks the highest point of Latin achievement in imitation of the more complex Greek metres. As a lyric poem it preserves, even in its highly artificial structure, much of the direct force and simplicity which mark all Catullus' best lyrics.

That it goes beyond this, or that--as is often repeated--it transcends both the idyls and the briefer lyrics in sustained beauty and pa.s.sion, cannot be held by any sane judgment.

How far elaboration could lead Catullus is shown in the long idyllic poem on the _Marriage of Peleus and Thetis_. Here he entirely abandons the lyric manner, and adventures on a new field, in which he does not prove very successful. The poem is full of great beauties of detail; but as a whole it is cloying and yet not satisfying. For a few lines together Catullus can write in hexameter more exquisitely than any other Latin poet. The description in this piece of the little breeze that rises at dawn, beginning _Hic qualis flatu placidum mare matutino_, like the more famous lines in his other idyllic poem--

_Ut flos in septis secretum nascitur hortis, Ignotus pecori, nullo contusus aratro, Quem mulcent aurae, firmat sol, educat imber; Multi illum pueri, multae optavere puellae--_

has an intangible and inexpressible beauty such as never recurs in the more mature art of greater masters. But Catullus has no narrative gift; his use of the hexameter is confined to a limited set of rhythms which in a poem about the length of a book of the _Georgics_ become hopelessly monotonous; and it finally stops, rather than ends, when the writer (as is already the case with the reader) grows tired of it. It is remarkable that the poet who in the lightness and speed of his other metres is unrivalled in Latin, should, when he attempts the hexameter, be more languid and heavy, not only than his successors, but than his contemporaries. Here, as in the elaborate imitations of Callimachus with which he tested his command of the Latin elegiac, he is weak because he wanders off the true line, not from any failure in his own special gift, which was purely and simply lyrical. When he uses the elegiac verse to express his own feeling, as in the attacks on political or personal enemies, it has the same direct lucidity (as of an extraordinarily gifted child) which is the essential charm of his lyrics.

It is just this quality, this clear and almost terrible simplicity, that puts Catullus in a place by himself among the Latin poets. Where others labour in the ore of thought and gradually forge it out into sustained expression, he sees with a single glance, and does not strike a second time. His imperious lucidity is perfectly unhesitating in its action; whether he is using it for the daintiest flower of sentiment--_fair pa.s.sions and bountiful pities and loves without stain_--or for the expression of his fiery pa.s.sions and hatreds in some flagrant obscenity or venomous insult, it is alike straight and reckless, with no scruple and no mincing of words; in Mr. Swinburne's curiously true and vivid phrase, he "makes mouths at our speech" when we try to follow him.

With the death of Catullus and Calvus, an era in Latin poetry definitely ends. Only thirteen or fourteen years later a new era begins with the appearance of Virgil; but this small interval of time is sufficient to mark the pa.s.sage from one age--we might almost say from one civilisation --to another. During these years poetry was almost silent, while the Roman world shook with continuous civil war and the thunder of prodigious armies. The school of minor Alexandrian poets still indeed continued; the "warblers of Euphorion" with their smooth rhythms and elaborate _finesse_ of workmans.h.i.+p are spoken of by Cicero as still numerous and active ten years after Catullus' death. But their artifice had lost the gloss of novelty; and the enthusiasm which greeted the appearance of the Eclogues was due less perhaps to their intrinsic excellence than to the relief with which Roman poetry shook itself free from the fetters of so rigorous and exhausting a convention.

CICERO.

Meanwhile, in the last age of the Republic, Latin prose had reached its full splendour in the hands of the most copious and versatile master of style whom the Graeco-Roman world had yet produced. The claims of Cicero to a place among the first rank of Roman statesmen have been fiercely canva.s.sed by modern critics; and both in oratory and philosophy some excess of veneration once paid to him has been replaced by an equally excessive depreciation. The fault in both estimates lay in the fact that they were alike based on secondary issues. Cicero's unique and imperishable glory is not, as he thought himself, that of having put down the revolutionary movement of Catiline, nor, as later ages thought, that of having rivalled Demosthenes in the _Second Philippic_, or confuted atheism in the _De Natura Deorum_. It is that he created a language which remained for sixteen centuries that of the civilised world, and used that language to create a style which nineteen centuries have not replaced, and in some respects have scarcely altered. He stands in prose, like Virgil in poetry, as the bridge between the ancient and modern world.

Before his time, Latin prose was, from a wide point of view, but one among many local ancient dialects. As it left his hands, it had become a universal language, one which had definitely superseded all others, Greek included, as the type of civilised expression.

Thus the apparently obsolete criticism which ranked Cicero together with Plato and Demosthenes, if not above them, was based on real facts, though it may be now apparent that it gave them a wrong interpretation. Even h.e.l.lenists may admit with but slight reluctance that the prose of the great Attic writers is, like the sculpture of their contemporary artists, a thing remote from modern life, requiring much training and study for its appreciation, and confined at the best to a limited circle. But Ciceronian prose is practically the prose of the human race; not only of the Roman empire of the first and second centuries, but of Lactantius and Augustine, of the mediaeval Church, of the earlier and later Renaissance, and even now, when the Renaissance is a piece of past history, of the modern world to which the Renaissance was the prelude.

The life of Cicero as a man of letters may be divided into four periods, which, though not of course wholly distinct from one another, may be conveniently treated as separate for the purpose of criticism. The first is that of his immature early writings--poems, treatises on rhetoric, and forensic speeches--covering the period from his boyhood in the Civil wars, to the first consuls.h.i.+p of Pompeius and Cra.s.sus, in 70 B.C. The second, covering his life as an active statesman of the first prominence, begins with the Verrine orations of that year, and goes down to the consuls.h.i.+p of Julius Caesar, in 59 B.C. These ten years mark his culmination as an orator; and there is no trace in them of any large literary work except in the field of oratory. In the next year came his exile, from which indeed he returned within a twelvemonth, but as a broken statesman. From this point to the outbreak of the Civil war in 50 B.C., the third period continues the record of his great speeches; but they are no longer at the old height, nor do they occupy his full energy; and now he breaks new ground in two fields with works of extraordinary brilliance, the _De Oratore_ and the _De Republica_. During the heat of the Civil war there follows a period of comparative silence, but for his private correspondence; then comes the fourth and final period, perhaps the most brilliant of all, the four years from 46 B.C. to his death in 43 B.C. The few speeches of the years 46 and 45 show but the ghost of former splendours; he was turning perforce to other subjects. The political philosophy of the _De Republica_ is resumed in the _De Legibus_; the _De Oratore_ is continued by the history of Roman oratory known as the _Brutus_. Then, as if realising that his true work in life was to mould his native language into a vehicle of abstract thought, he sets to work with amazing swiftness and copiousness to reproduce a whole series of Greek philosophical treatises, in a style which, for flexibility and grace, recalls the Greek of the best period--the _De Finibus_, the _Academics_, the _Tusculans_, the _De Natura Deorum_, the _De Divinatione_, the _De Officiis_. Concurrently with these, he continues to throw off further manuals of the theory and practice of oratory, intended in the first instance for the use of the son who proved so thankless a pupil, the _Part.i.tiones Oratoriae_, the _Topica_, the _De Optimo Genere Oratorum_. Meanwhile, the Roman world had again been plunged into civil war by the a.s.sa.s.sination of Caesar. Cicero's political influence was no longer great, but it was still worth the while of younger and more unscrupulous statesmen to avail themselves of his eloquence by a.s.sumed deference and adroit flattery. The series of fourteen speeches delivered at Rome against Marcus Antonius, between September, 44, and April, 43 B.C., were the last outburst of free Roman oratory before the final extinction of the Republic. That even at the time there was a sense of their unreality--of their being rhetorical exercises to interest the capital while the real issues of the period were being fought out elsewhere--is indicated by the name that from the first they went under, the _Philippics_. In the epoch of the _Verrines_ and the _Catilinarians_ it had not been necessary to find t.i.tles for the weapons of political warfare out of old Greek history. Yet, in spite of this unreality, and of the decline they show in the highest oratorical qualities, the _Philippics_ still remain a n.o.ble ruin of eloquence.

Oratory at Rome had, as we have already seen, attained a high degree of perfection when Cicero entered on public life. Its golden age was indeed, in the estimation of some critics, already over; old men spoke with admiring regret of the speeches of the younger Scipio and of Gaius Gracchus; and the death of the great pair of friendly rivals, Cra.s.sus and Antonius, left no one at the moment who could be called their equal. But admirable as these great orators had been, there was still room for a higher formal perfection, a more exhaustive and elaborate technique, without any loss of material qualities. Closer and more careful study led the orators of the next age into one of two opposed, or rather complementary styles, the Attic and Asiatic; the calculated simplicity of the one being no less artificial than the florid ornament of the other.

At an early age Cicero, with the intuition of genius, realised that he must not attach himself to either school. A fortunate delicacy of health led him to withdraw for two years, at the age of seven and twenty, from the practice at the bar, in which he was already becoming famous; and in the schools of Athens and Rhodes he obtained a larger view of his art, both in theory and practice, and returned to Rome to form, not to follow, a style. Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, the foremost representative of the Asiatic school, was then at the height of his forensic reputation. Within a year or two Cicero was recognised as at least his equal: it is to the honour of both, that the eclipse of Hortensius by his younger rival brought no jealousy or alienation; up to the death of Hortensius, about the outbreak of the Civil war, they remained good friends. Years afterwards Cicero inscribed with his name the treatise, now lost, but made famous to later ages by having been one of the great turning-points in the life of St. Augustine[4], which he wrote in praise of philosophy as an introduction to the series of his philosophical works.

The years which followed Cicero's return from the East were occupied, with the single break of his quaestors.h.i.+p in Sicily, by hard and continuous work at the bar. His speeches of this date, being non- political, have for the most part not been preserved. The two still imperfectly extant, the _Pro Roscio Comoedo_ of 76, and the _Pro Tullio_ of 72 B.C., form, together with two other speeches dating from before his visit to the East, the _Pro Quinctio_ and _Pro Roscio Amerino_, and, with his juvenile treatise on rhetoric known as the _De Inventione_, the body of prose composition which represents the first of his four periods.

These early speeches are carefully composed according to the scholastic canons then in vogue, the hard legal style of the older courts alternating with pa.s.sages of carefully executed artificial ornament.

Their chief interest is one of contrast with his matured style; for they show, no doubt with much accuracy, what the general level of oratory was out of which the great Ciceronian eloquence sprang.

In 70 B.C., at the age of thirty-six, Cicero at last found his great chance, and seized it. The impeachment of Verres for maladministration in the government of Sicily was a political trial of great const.i.tutional importance. It was undertaken at the direct encouragement of Pompeius, who had entered on his first or democratic consulate, and was indirectly a formidable attack both on the oligarchic administration of the provinces and on the senatorian jury-panels, in whose hands the Sullan const.i.tution had placed the only check upon misgovernment. The defence of Verres was undertaken by Hortensius; the selection of Cicero as chief counsel for the prosecution by the democratic leaders was a public recognition of him as the foremost orator on the Pompeian side. He threw himself into the trial with all his energy. After his opening speech, and the evidence which followed, Verres threw up his defence and went into exile. This, of course, brought the case to an end; but the cause turned on larger issues than his particular guilt or innocence. The whole of the material prepared against him was swiftly elaborated by Cicero into five great orations, and published as a political doc.u.ment. These orations, the _Second Action against Verres_ as they are called, were at once the most powerful attack yet made on the working of the Sullan const.i.tution, and the high-water mark of the earlier period of Cicero's eloquence. It was not till some years later that his oratory culminated; but he never excelled these speeches in richness and copiousness of style, in ease and lucidity of exposition, and in power of dealing with large ma.s.ses of material. He at once became an imposing political force; perhaps it was hardly realised till later how incapable that force was of going straight or of bearing down opposition. The series of political and semi-political speeches of the next ten years, down to his exile, represent for the time the history of Rome; and together with these we now begin the series of his private letters. The year of his praetors.h.i.+p, 66 B.C., is marked by the two orations which are on the whole his greatest, one public and the other private. The first, the speech known as the _Pro Lege Manilia_, which should really be described as the panegyric of Pompeius and of the Roman people, does not show any profound appreciation of the problems which then confronted the Republic; but the greatness of the Republic itself never found a more august interpreter. The stately pa.s.sage in which Italy and the subject provinces are called on to bear witness to the deeds of Pompeius breathes the very spirit of an imperial race.

Throughout this and the other great speeches of the period "the Roman People" is a phrase that keeps perpetually recurring with an effect like that of a bourdon stop. As the eye glances down the page, _Consul Populi Romani, Imperium Populi Romani, Fortuna Populi Romani_, glitter out of the voluminous periods with a splendour that hardly any other words could give.

The other great speech of this year, Cicero's defence of Aulus Cluentius Habitus of Larinum on a charge of poisoning, has in its own style an equal brilliance of language. The story it unfolds of the ugly tragedies of middle-cla.s.s life in the capital and the provincial Italian towns is famous as one of the leading doc.u.ments for the social life of Rome.

According to Quintilian, Cicero confessed afterwards that his client was not innocent, and that the elaborate and impressive story which he unfolds with such vivid detail was in great part an invention of his own.

This may be only bar gossip; true or false, his defence is an extraordinary masterpiece of oratorical skill.

The manner in which Cicero conducted a defence when the cause was not so grave or so desperate is well ill.u.s.trated by a speech delivered four years later, the _Pro Archia_. The case here was one of contested citizens.h.i.+p. The defendant, one of the Greek men of letters who lived in great numbers at Rome, had been for years intimate with the literary circle among the Roman aristocracy. This intimacy gained him the privilege of being defended by the first of Roman orators, who would hardly, in any other circ.u.mstances, have troubled himself with so trivial a case. But the speech Cicero delivered is one of the permanent glories of Latin literature. The matter immediately at issue is summarily dealt with in a few pages of cursory and rather careless argument; then the scholar lets himself go. Among the many praises of literature which great men of letters have delivered, there is none, ancient or modern, more perfect than this; some of the sentences have remained ever since the abiding motto and blason of literature itself. _Haec studia, adolescentiam agunt, senectutem oblectant, secundas res ornant, adversis perfugium ac solatium praebent, delectant domi, non impediunt foris, pernoctant n.o.bisc.u.m, peregrinantur, rusticantur;_ and again, _Nullam enim virtus aliam mercedem laborum periculorumque desiderat, praeter hanc laudis et gloriae; qua quidem detracta, iudices, quid est quod in hoc tam exiguo vitae curriculo, et tam brevi, tantis nos in laboribus exerceamus?

Certe, si nihil animus praesentiret in posterum, et si quibus regionibus vitae spatium circ.u.mscriptum est, eisdem omnes cogitationes terminaret suas, nec tantis se laboribus frangeret, neque tot curis vigiliisque angeretur, neque teties de vita ipsa dimicaret_. Strange words these to fall from a pleader's lips in the dusty atmosphere of the praetor's court! _non fori, neque iudiciali consuetudine_, says Cicero himself, in the few words of graceful apology with which the speech ends. But, in truth, as he well knew, he was not speaking to the respectable gentlemen on the benches before him. He addressed a larger audience; posterity, and the civilised world.

The _Pro Archia_ foreshadows already the change which was bound to take place in Cicero's life, and which was precipitated by his exile four years later. More and more he found himself forced away from the inner circle of politics, and turned to the larger field where he had an undisputed supremacy, of political and ethical philosophy clothed in the splendid prose of which he had now obtained the full mastery. The roll of his great speeches is indeed continued after his return from exile; but even in the greatest, the _Pro Sestio_, the _Pro Caelio_, the _De Provinciis Consularibus_ of 56, or the _In Pisonem_ and _Pro Plancio_ of 55 B.C., something of the old tone is missing; it is as though the same voice spoke on a smaller range of notes and with less flexibility of cadence. And now alongside of the speeches begins the series of his works on oratory and philosophy, with the _De Oratore_ of 55, and the _De Republica_ of 54 B.C.

The three books _De Oratore_ are perhaps the most finished examples of the Ciceronian style. The subject (which cannot be said of all the subjects he deals with) was one of which, over all its breadth and in all its details, he was completely master; and, thus left unhampered by any difficulties with his material, he could give full scope to his brilliant style and diction. The arrangement of the work follows the strict scholastic divisions; but the form of dialogue into which it is thrown, and which is managed with really great skill, avoids the tediousness incident to a systematic treatise. The princ.i.p.al persons of the dialogue are the two great orators of the preceding age, Lucius Cra.s.sus and Marcus Antonius; this is only one sign out of many that Cicero was more and more living in a sort of dream of the past, that past of his own youth which was still full of traditions of the earlier Republic.

The _De Oratore_ was so complete a masterpiece that its author probably did not care to weaken its effect by continuing at the time to bring out any of the supplementary treatises on Roman oratory for which his library, and still more his memory, had acc.u.mulated immense quant.i.ties of material. In the treatise _De Republica_, which was begun in 54 B.C., though not published till three years later, he carried the achievement of Latin prose into a larger and less technical field--that of the philosophy of politics. Again the scene of the dialogue is laid in a past age; but now he goes further back than he had done in the _De Oratore_, to the circle of the younger Scipio. The work was received, when published, with immense applause; but its loss in the Middle Ages is hardly one of those which are most seriously to be deplored, except in so far as the second and fifth books may have preserved real information on the early history of the Roman State and the development of Roman jurisprudence. Large fragments were recovered early in the present century from a palimpsest, itself incomplete, on which the work of Cicero had been expunged to make room for the commentary of St. Augustine on the Psalms. The famous _Somnium Scipionis_, with which (in imitation of the vision of Er in Plato's _Republic_) the work ended, has been independently preserved. Though it flagrantly challenges comparison with the unequalled original, it has, nevertheless, especially in its opening and closing pa.s.sages, a grave dignity which is purely Roman, and characteristically Ciceronian. Perhaps some of the elaborate fantasies of De Quincey (himself naturally a Ciceronian, and saturated in the rhythms and cadences of the finest Latin prose) are the nearest parallel to this piece in modern English. The opening words of Scipio's narrative, _c.u.m in Africam venissem, Mania Manilio consuli ad quartam legionem tribunus_, come on the ear like the throb of a great organ; and here and there through the piece come astonis.h.i.+ng phrases of the same organ-music: _Ostendebat autem Karthaginem de excelso et pleno stellarum inl.u.s.tri et claro quodam loco.... Quis in reliquis orientis aut obeuntis solis, ultimis aut aquilonis austrive partibus, tuum nomen audiet?... Deum te igitur scito esse, siquidem deus est, qui viget, qui sent.i.t, qui meminit, qui providet_--hardly from the lips of Virgil himself does the n.o.ble Latin speech issue with a purer or a more majestic flow.

During the next few years the literary activity of Cicero suffered a check. The course of politics at Rome filled him with profound disappointment and disgust. Public issues, it became more and more plain, waited for their determination, not on the senate-house or the forum, but on the sword. The shameful collapse of his defence of Milo in 52 B.C.

must have stung a vanity even as well-hardened as Cicero's to the quick; and his only important abstract work of this period, the _De Legibus_, seems to have been undertaken with little heart and carried out without either research or enthusiasm. His proconsulate in Cilicia in 51 and 50 B.C. was occupied with the tedious details of administration and petty warfare; six months after his return the Civil war broke out, and, until permitted to return to Rome by Caesar in the autumn of 47 B.C., he was practically an exile, away from his beloved Rome and his more beloved library, hating and despising the ignorant incompetence of his colleagues, and looking forward with almost equal terror to the conclusive triumph of his own or the opposite party. When at last he returned, his mind was still agitated and unsettled. The Pompeian party held Africa and Spain with large armies; their open threats that all who had come to terms with Caesar would be proscribed as public enemies were not calculated to restore Cicero's confidence. The decisive battle of Thapsus put an end to this uncertainty; and meanwhile Cicero had resumed work on his _De Legibus_, and had once more returned to the study of oratory in one of the most interesting of his writings, the _Brutus de claris Oratoribus_, in which he gives a vivid and masterly sketch of the history of Roman oratory down to his own time, filled with historical matter and admirable sketches of character.

The spring of 45 B.C. brought with it two events of momentous importance to Cicero: the final collapse of the armed opposition to Caesar at the battle of Munda, and the loss, by the death of his daughter Tullia, of the one deep affection of his inner life. Henceforth it seemed as if politics had ceased to exist, even had he the heart to interest himself in them. He fell back more completely than ever upon philosophy; and the year that followed (45-44 B.C.) is, in mere quant.i.ty of literary production, as well as in the abiding effect on the world of letters of the work he then produced, the _annus mirabilis_ of his life. Two at least of the works of this year, the _De Gloria_ and the _De Virtutibus_, have perished, though the former survived long enough to be read by Petrarch; but there remain extant (besides one or two other pieces of slighter importance) the _De Finibus_, the _Academics_, the _Tusculans_, the _De Natura Deorum_, the _De Divinatione_, the _De Fato_, the _De Officiis_, and the two exquisite essays _De Senectute_ and _De Amicitia_.

It is the work of this astonis.h.i.+ng year which, on the whole, represents Cicero's permanent contribution to letters and to human thought. If his philosophy seems now to have exhausted its influence, it is because it has in great measure been absorbed into the fabric of civilised society.

Ciceronianism, at the period of the Renaissance, and even in the eighteenth century, meant more than the impulse towards florid and sumptuous style. It meant all that is conveyed by the Latin word _humanitas;_ the t.i.tle of "the humaner letters," by which Latin was long designated in European universities, indicated that in the great Latin writers--in Cicero and Virgil preeminently--a higher type of human life was to be found than existed in the literature of other countries: as though at Rome, and in the first century before Christ, the political and social environment had for the first time produced men such as men would wish to be, at all events for the ideals of Western Europe. To less informed or less critical ages than our own, the absolute contribution of Cicero to ethics and metaphysics seemed comparable to that of the great Greek thinkers; the _De Natura Deorum_ was taken as a workable argument against atheism, and the thin and wire-drawn discussions of the _Academics_ were studied with an attention hardly given to the founder of the Academy. When a sounder historical method brought these writings into their real proportion, it was inevitable that the scale should swing violently to the other side; and for a time no language was too strong in which to attack the reputation of the "phrase-maker," the "journalist,"

whose name had once dominated Europe. The violence of this attack has now exhausted itself; and we may be content, without any exaggerated praise or blame, to note the actual historical effect of these writings through many ages, and the actual impression made on the world by the type of character which they embodied and, in a sense, created. In this view, Cicero represents a force that no historian can neglect, and the importance of which it is not easy to overestimate. He did for the Empire and the Middle Ages what Lucretius, with his far greater philosophic genius, totally failed to do--created forms of thought in which the life of philosophy grew, and a body of expression which alone made its growth in the Latin-speaking world possible; and to that world he presented a political ideal which profoundly influenced the whole course of European history even up to the French Revolution. Without Cicero, the Middle Ages would not have had Augustine or Aquinas; but, without him, the movement which annulled the Middle Ages would have had neither Mirabeau nor Pitt.

The part of Cicero's work which the present age probably finds the most interesting, and the interest of which is, in the nature of things, perennial, has been as yet left unmentioned. It consists of the collections of his private letters from the year 68 B.C. to within a few months of his death. The first of these collections contains his letters to the friend and adviser, t.i.tus Pomponius Atticus, with whom, when they were not both in Rome, he kept up a constant and an extremely intimate correspondence. Atticus, whose profession, as far as he had one, was that of a banker, was not only a man of wide knowledge and great political sagacity, but a refined critic and an author of considerable merit. The publis.h.i.+ng business, which he conducted as an adjunct to his princ.i.p.al profession, made him of great use to Cicero by the rapid multiplication in his workshops of copies of the speeches or other writings for which there was an immediate public demand. But the intimacy was much more than that of the politician and his confidential adviser, or the author and his publisher. Cicero found in him a friend with whom he could on all occasions be perfectly frank and at his ease, and on whose sober judgment and undemonstrative, but perfectly sincere, attachment his own excitable and emotional nature could always throw itself without reserve. About four hundred of the letters were published by Atticus several years after Cicero's death. It must always be a source of regret that he could not, or, at all events, did not, publish the other half of the correspondence; many of the letters, especially the brief confidential notes, have the tantalising interest of a conversation where one of the speakers is inaudible. It is the letters to Atticus that place Cicero at the head of all epistolary stylists. We should hardly guess from the more formal and finished writings what the real man was, with his excitable Italian temperament, his swift power of phrase, his sensitive affections.

The other large collection of Cicero's letters, the _Epistolae ad Familiares_, was preserved and edited by his secretary, Tiro. They are, of course, of very unequal value and interest. Some are merely formal doc.u.ments; others, like those to his wife and family in book xiv., are as intimate and as valuable as any we possess. The two smaller collections, the letters to his brother Quintus, and those to Marcus Brutus, of which a mere fragment is extant, are of little independent value. The _Epistolae ad Familiares_ include, besides Cicero's own letters, a large number of letters addressed to him by various correspondents; a whole book, and that not the least interesting, consists of those sent to him during his Cilician proconsulate by the brilliant and erratic young aristocrat, Marcus Caelius Rufus, who was the temporary successor of Catullus as the favoured lover of Clodia. Full of the political and social gossip of the day, they are written in a curiously slipshod but energetic Latin, which brings before us even more vividly than Cicero's own the familiar language of the upper cla.s.ses at Rome at the time.

Another letter, which can hardly be pa.s.sed over in silence in any history of Latin literature, is the n.o.ble message of condolence to Cicero on the death of his beloved Tullia, by the statesman and jurist, Servius Sulpicius Rufus, who carried on in this age the great tradition of the Scaevolae.

It is due to these priceless collections of letters, more than to any other single thing, that our knowledge of the Ciceronian age is so complete and so intimate. At every point they reinforce and vitalise the more elaborate literary productions of the period. The art of letter- writing suddenly rose in Cicero's hands to its full perfection. It fell to the lot of no later Roman to have at once such mastery over familiar style, and contemporary events of such engrossing and ever-changing interest on which to exercise it. All the great letter-writers of more modern ages have more or less, consciously or unconsciously, followed the Ciceronian model. England of the eighteenth century was peculiarly rich in them; but Horace Walpole, Cowper, Gray himself, would willingly have acknowledged Cicero as their master.

Caesar's a.s.sa.s.sination on the 15th of March, 44 B.C., plunged the political situation into a worse chaos than had ever been reached during the Civil wars. For several months it was not at all plain how things were tending, or what fresh combinations were to rise out of the welter in which a vacillating and incapable senate formed the only const.i.tutional rallying-point. In spite of all his long-cherished delusions, Cicero must have known that this way no hope lay; when at last he flung himself into the conflict, and broke away from his literary seclusion to make the fierce series of attacks upon Antonius which fill the winter of 44-43 B.C., he may have had some vague hopes from the Asiatic legions which once before, in Sulla's hands, had checked the revolution, and some from the power of his own once unequalled eloquence; but on the whole he seems to have undertaken the contest chiefly from the instinct that had become a tradition, and from his deep personal repugnance to Antonius. The fourteen _Philippics_ add little to his reputation as an orator, and still less to his credit as a statesman. The old watchwords are there, but their unreality is now more obvious; the old rhetorical skill, but more coa.r.s.ely and less effectively used. The last _Philippic_ was delivered to advocate a public thanksgiving for the victory gained over Antonius by the consuls, Hirtius and Pansa. A month later, the consuls were both dead, and their two armies had pa.s.sed into the control of the young Octavia.n.u.s. In autumn the triumvirate was const.i.tuted, with an armed force of forty legions behind it. The proscription lists were issued in November. On the 7th of December, after some aimless wandering that hardly was a serious effort to escape, Cicero was overtaken near Formiae by a small party of Antonian troops. He was killed, and his head sent to Rome and displayed in the senate-house.

There was nothing left for which he could have wished to live. In the five centuries of the Republic there never had been a darker time for Rome. Cicero had outlived almost all the great men of his age. The newer generation, so far as they had revealed themselves, were of a type from which those who had inherited the great traditions of the Republic shrank with horror. Caesar Octavia.n.u.s, the future master of the world, was a delicate boy of twenty, already an object of dislike and distrust to nearly all his allies. Virgil, a poet still voiceless, was twenty-seven.

VII.

PROSE OF THE CICERONIAN AGE: CAESAR AND SALl.u.s.t.

Fertile as the Ciceronian age was in authors.h.i.+p of many kinds, there was only one person in it whose claim to be placed in an equal rank with Cicero could ever be seriously entertained; and this was, strangely enough, one who was as it were only a man of letters by accident, and whose literary work is but among the least of his t.i.tles to fame--Julius Caesar himself. That anything written by that remarkable man must be interesting and valuable in a high degree is obvious; but the combination of literary power of the very first order with his unparallelled military and political genius is perhaps unique in history.

It is one of the most regrettable losses in Latin literature that Caesar's speeches and letters have almost completely perished. Of the latter several collections were made after his death, and were extant in the second century; but none are now preserved, except a few brief notes to Cicero, of which copies were sent by him at the time to Atticus. The fragments of his speeches are even less considerable; yet, according to the unanimous testimony both of contemporary and of later critics, they were unexcelled in that age of great oratory. He used the Latin language with a purity and distinction that no one else could equal. And along with this quality, the _mira elegantia_ of Quintilian, his oratory had some kind of severe magnificence which we can partly guess at from his extant writings--_magnifica et generosa_, says Cicero; _facultas dicendi imperatoria_ is the phrase of a later and able critic.

Of Caesar's other lost writings little need be said. In youth, like most of his contemporaries, he wrote poems, including a tragedy, of which Tacitus drily observes that they were not better than those of Cicero. A grammatical treatise, _De a.n.a.logia_, was composed by him during one of his long journeys between Northern Italy and the headquarters of his army in Gaul during his proconsulate. A work on astronomy, apparently written in connection with his reform of the calendar, two pamphlets attacking Cato, and a collection of apophthegms, have also disappeared. But we possess what were by far the most important of his writings, his famous memoirs of the Gallic and Civil Wars.

The seven books of _Commentaries on the Gallic War_ were written in Caesar's winter quarters in Gaul, after the capture of Alesia and the final suppression of the Arvernian revolt. They were primarily intended to serve an immediate political purpose, and are indeed a defence, framed with the most consummate skill, of the author's whole Gallic policy and of his const.i.tutional position. That Caesar was able to do this without, so far as can be judged, violating, or even to any large degree suppressing facts, does equal credit to the clear-sightedness of his policy and to his extraordinary literary power. From first to last there is not a word either of self-laudation or of innuendo; yet at the end we find that, by the use of the simplest and most lucid narration, in which hardly a fact or a detail can be controverted, Caesar has cleared his motives and justified his conduct with a success the more complete because his tone is so temperate and seemingly so impartial. An officer of his staff who was with him during that winter, and who afterwards added an eighth book to the _Commentaries_ to complete the history of the Gallic proconsulate, has recorded the ease and swiftness with which the work was written. Caesar issued it under the unpretending name of _Commentarii_--"notes"--on the events of his campaigns, which might be useful as materials for history; but there was no exaggeration in the splendid compliment paid it a few years later by Cicero, that no one in his senses would think of recasting a work whose succinct, perspicuous, and brilliant style--_pura et inl.u.s.tris brevitas_--has been the model and the despair of later historians.

The three books of _Commentaries on the Civil War_ show the same merits in a much less marked degree. They were not published in Caesar's lifetime, and do not seem to have received from him any close or careful revision. The literary incompetence of the Caesarian officers into whose hands they fell after his death, and one or more of whom must be responsible for their publication, is sufficiently evident from their own awkward attempts at continuing them in narratives of the Alexandrine, African, and Spanish campaigns; and whether from the carelessness of the original editors or from other reasons, the text is in a most deplorable condition. Yet this is not in itself sufficient to account for many positive misstatements. Either the editors used a very free hand in altering the rough ma.n.u.script, or--which is not in itself unlikely, and is borne out by other facts--Caesar's own prodigious memory and incomparable perspicuity became impaired in those five years of all but superhuman achievement, when, with the whole weight of the civilised world on his shoulders, feebly served by second-rate lieutenants and hampered at every turn by the open or pa.s.sive opposition of nearly the whole of the trained governing cla.s.ses, he conquered four great Roman armies, secured Egypt and Upper Asia and annexed Numidia to the Republic, carried out the unification of Italy, reestablished public order and public credit, and left at his death the foundations of the Empire securely laid for his successor.