The Life of Cicero. Volume II.

The last of these works is the Orator. We have passed in review the De Oratore, and the Brutus; or, De Claris Oratoribus. We have now to consider that which is commonly believed to be the most finished piece of the three. Such seems to have become the general idea of those scholars who have spoken and written on the subject. He himself says that there are in all five books. There are the three De Oratore; the fourth is called the Brutus, and the fifth the Orator.265 In some MSS. this work has a second title, De Optimo Genere Dicendi – as though the five books should run on in a sequence, the first three being on oratory in general, the fourth as to famous orators, while the last concluding work is on the best mode of oratory. Readers who may wish to carry these in their minds must exclude for the moment from their memory the few pages which he wrote as a preface to the translations from Æschines and Demosthenes. The purport is to show how that hitherto unknown hero of romance may be produced – the perfect orator.

Here as elsewhere we shall find the greatest interest lies in a certain discursive treatment of his subject, which enables him to run hither and thither, while he always pleases us, whatever attitude he may assume, whatever he may say, and in whatever guise he may speak to us. But here, in the last book, there does seem to be some kind of method in his discourse. He distinguishes three styles of eloquence – the simple, the moderate, and the sublime, and explains that the orator has three duties to perform. He must learn what on any subject he has to say; he must place his arguments in order, and he must know how to express them. He explains what action should achieve for the orator, and teaches that eloquence depends wholly on elocution. He tells us that the philosophers, the historians, and the poets have never risen to his ideas of eloquence; but that he alone does so who can, amid the heat and work of the Forum, turn men's minds as he wishes. Then he teaches us how each of the three styles should be treated – the simple, the moderate, and the sublime – and shows us how to vary them. He informs us what laws we should preserve in each, what ornaments, what form, and what metaphors. He then considers the words we should use, and makes us understand how necessary it is to attend to the minutest variety of sound. In this matter we have to acknowledge that he, as a Roman, had to deal with instruments for listening infinitely finer than are our British ears; and I am not sure that we can follow him with rapture into all the mysteries of the Pœon, the Dochmius, and the Dichoreus. What he says of rhythm we are willing to take to be true, and we wonder at the elaborate study given to it; but I doubt whether we here do not read of it as a thing beyond us, by descending into which we should be removing ourselves farther from the more wholesome pursuits of our lives.

There are, again, delightful morsels here. He tells us, for instance, that he who has created a beautiful thing must have beauty in his soul,266– a charming idea, as to which we do not stop to inquire whether it be true or not. He gives us a most excellent caution against storing up good sayings, and using them from the storehouse of our memory: "Let him avoid these studied things, not made of the moment, but brought from the closet."267 Then he rises into a grand description of the perfect orator: "But that third man is he, rich, abundant, dignified, and instructed, in whom there is a divine strength. This is he whose fulness and culture of speech the nations have admired, and whose eloquence has been allowed to prevail over the people.268 * * * Then will the orator make himself felt more abundantly. Then will he rule their minds and turn their hearts. Then will he do with them as he would wish."269

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

At last we come to the Topica; the last instructions which Cicero gives on the subject of oratory. The Romans seem to have esteemed much the lessons which are here conveyed, but for us it has but little attraction. He himself declares it to have been a translation from Aristotle, but declares also that the translation has been made from memory. He has been at sea, he says, in the first chapter, and has there performed his task, and has sent it as soon as it has been done. There is something in this which is unintelligible to us. He has translated a treatise of Aristotle from memory – that is, without having the original before him – and has done this at sea, on his intended journey to Greece!271 I do not believe that Cicero has been false in so writing. The work has been done for his young friend Trebatius, who had often asked it, and was much too clever when he had received it not to recognize its worth. But Cicero has, in accordance with his memory, reduced to his own form Aristotle's idea as to "invention" in logic. Aristotle's work is, I am informed, in eight books: here is a bagatelle in twenty-five pages. There is an audacity in the performance – especially in the doing it on board ship; but we must remember that he had spent his life in achieving a knowledge of these things, and was able to write down with all the rapidity of a practised professor the doctrines on the matter which he wished to teach Trebatius.

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XII

CICERO'S PHILOSOPHY

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

He was too honest, too wise, too civilized, too modern for that. He knew, no one better, that the pleasure of the world was pleasant, and that the ills are the reverse. When his wife betrayed him, he grieved. When his daughter died, he sorrowed. When his foe was strong against him, he hated him. He avoided pain when it came near him, and did his best to have everything comfortable around him. He was so far an Epicurean, as we all are. He did not despise death, or pain, or grief. He was a modern-minded man – if I make myself understood – of robust tendencies, moral, healthy, and enduring; but he was anything but a philosopher in his life. Let us remember the way in which he laughs at the idea of bringing philosophy into real life in the De Oratore. He is speaking of the manner in which the lawyers would have had to behave themselves in the law courts if philosophy had been allowed to prevail: "No man could have grieved aloud. No patron would have wept. No one would have sorrowed. There would have been no calling of the Republic to witness; not a man would have dared to stamp his foot, lest it should have been told to the Stoics."274 "You should keep the books of the philosophers for your Tusculan ease," he had said in the preceding chapter; and he speaks, in the same page, of "Plato's fabulous State."

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

Nor is the reason for this far to seek, though the character which could avail itself of such a reason requires a deep insight. To him literature had been everything. We have seen with what attention he had studied oratory – rhetoric rather – so as to have at his fingers'-ends the names of those who had ever shone in it, and the doctrines they had taught. We know how well read he was in Homer and the Greek tragedians; how he knew by heart his Ennius, his Nævius, his Pacuvius, and the others who had written in his own tongue. As he was acquainted with the poets and rhetoricians, so also was he acquainted with those writers who have handled philosophy. His incredible versatility was never at fault. He knew them all from the beginning, and could interest himself in their doctrines. He had been in the schools at Athens, and had learned it all. In one sense he believed in it. There was a great battle of words carried on, and in regard to that battle he put his faith in this set or in the other. But had he ever been asked by what philosophical process he would rule the world, he would have smiled. Then he would have declared himself not to be an Academician, but a Republican.

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

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

In describing the Academica, the first of these works in point of time, it is necessary to explain that by reason of an alteration in his plan of publishing, made by Cicero after he had sent the first copy to Atticus, and by the accident that the second part has been preserved of the former copy and the first part of the second, a confusion has arisen. Cicero had felt that he might have done better by his friends than to bring Hortensius, Catulus, and Lucullus discussing Greek philosophy before the public. They were, none of them, men who when alive had interested themselves in the matter. He therefore rewrote the essays, or altered them, and again sent them forth to his friend Varro. Time has been so far kind to them as to have preserved portions of the first book as altered, and the second of the four which constituted the first edition. It is that which has been called Lucullus. The Catulus had come first, but has been lost. Hortensius and Cicero were the last two. We may perceive, therefore, into what a length of development he carried his purpose. It must be of course understood that he dictated these exercises, and assisted himself by the use of all mechanical means at his disposal. The men who worked for him were slaves, and these slaves were always willing to keep in their own hands the good things which came to them by the exercise of their own intelligence and adroitness. He could not multiply his own hands or brain, but he could multiply all that might assist them. He begins by telling Varro that he has long since desired to illustrate in Latin letters the philosophy which Socrates had commended, and he asks Varro why he, who was so much given to writing, had not as yet written about any of these things. As Varro boasted afterward that he was the author of four hundred and ninety books, there seems to be a touch of irony in this. Be that as it may, Varro is made to take up the gauntlet and to rush away at once amid the philosophers. But here on the threshold, as it were, of his inquiries, we have Cicero's own reasons given in plain language: "But now, hit hard by the heavy blow of fortune, and freed as I am from looking after the State, I seek from philosophy relief from my pain." He thinks that he may in this way perhaps best serve the public, or even "if it be not so, what else is there that he may find to do?"275 As he goes on, however, we find that what he writes is about the philosophers rather than philosophy.

Then we come to the Lucullus. It seems odd that the man whose name has come down to us as a by-word for luxury, and who is laden with the reproach of overeating, should be thus brought forward as a philosopher. It was perhaps the subsequent feeling on Cicero's part that such might be the opinion of men which induced him to alter his form – in vain, as far as we are concerned. But Lucullus had lived with Antiochus, a Greek philosopher, who had certain views of his own, and he is made to defend them through this book.

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