Read Ebook: Cicero and his friends by Boissier Gaston Jones Adnah David Translator

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 893 lines and 138545 words, and 18 pages

, BY ADNAH DAVID JONES

LONDON WARD, LOCK & CO., LIMITED

PAGE

INTRODUCTION:

CICERO'S LETTERS 1 Importance of private correspondence in ancient times. Characteristics of Cicero's letters, 1

CICERO IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LIFE:

ATTICUS 123

i. His reasons for not entering public life, 124. His life at Athens, 127. His life in Rome, 132 ii. His character in private life, 134 iii. His character in public life, 147

CAELIUS:

THE ROMAN YOUTH IN THE TIME OF CAESAR 159 i. Family and education of Caelius, 160. Influence of women at Rome, 163. Clodia, 166 ii. Character of Caelius, 176. Joins Caesar's party, 184 iii. Caesar had no genuine friends, 191. Reasons of Caelius' enmity to him, 197. His death, 206

CAESAR AND CICERO:

BRUTUS:

HIS RELATIONS WITH CICERO 303 i. His family, education, and character, 304. His friendship with Cicero, 308. Roman ideas of governing the provinces, 311. Joins Pompey, 317 ii. Brutus's prospects of high office destroyed by the battle of Pharsalia. Turns to philosophy. Cicero does the same and produces his philosophical works, 318 iii. Formation of a new Republican party, 329. Influences brought to bear on Brutus in order to implicate him in the conspiracy against Caesar, 330 iv. Causes of the failure of Brutus and his party, 339

OCTAVIUS:

THE POLITICAL TESTAMENT OF AUGUSTUS 359 The Ancyran Inscription, 361 i. The narrative intentionally incomplete, 364. Light thrown by it on the internal government of Augustus, 368. Relations of Augustus with his soldiers, 369. With the people, 372. With the senate, 373. His policy in reconstructing public buildings, 377 ii. The preamble of the Edict of proscription and the Ancyran Inscription, together, contain the political life of Augustus, 381. Permanent effect of his policy on the government of the empire, 386 iii. Publication of Cicero's letters, 388

CICERO AND HIS FRIENDS

INTRODUCTION

CICERO'S LETTERS

No history is more readily studied now-a-days than that of the last years of the Roman Republic. Learned works have recently been published upon this subject in France, England, and Germany, and the public has read them with avidity. The importance of the subjects which were then debated, the dramatic character of the events, and the grandeur of the characters warrant this interest; but the attraction we feel for this singular epoch is better explained by the fact that it is narrated for us in Cicero's letters.

A contemporary said that he who read these letters would not be tempted to seek the history of that time elsewhere, and in fact we find it much more living and true in them than in regular works composed expressly to teach it to us. What more would Asinius Pollio, Livy, or Cremutius Cordus teach us if we had them preserved? They would give us their personal opinion; but this opinion is for the most part open to suspicion because it comes from persons who could not tell the whole truth, from men like Livy, who wrote at the court of the emperors, or who hoped, like Pollio, to get their treason pardoned, by blackening the character of those whom they had betrayed. Instead of receiving a ready-made opinion it is better to make one for ourselves, and the perusal of Cicero's letters enables us to do this. It throws us into the midst of the events, and lets us follow them day by day. We seem to see them pass before our eyes, notwithstanding the eighteen centuries that intervene, and we find ourselves in the unique position of being sufficiently near the facts to see their real character, and sufficiently distant to judge them dispassionately.

The correspondence of political men of our time, when it is published, is far from having the same importance, because the exchange of sentiment and thought is not made so much by means of letters now as it was then. We have invented new methods. The immense publicity of the press has advantageously replaced those cautious communications which could not reach beyond a few persons. Now-a-days the newspapers keep a man informed of what is doing in the world, whatever unfrequented place he may have retired to. As he learns events almost as soon as they happen, he receives the excitement as well as the news of them, and has no need of a well-informed friend to apprise him of them. To seek for all that the newspapers have destroyed and replaced among us would be an interesting study. In Cicero's time letters often took their place and rendered the same services. They were passed from hand to hand when they contained news men had an interest in knowing; and those of important persons which made known their sentiments were read, commented on, and copied. A politician, who was attacked, defended himself by them before people whose esteem he desired to preserve, and through them men tried to form a sort of public opinion in a limited public when the Forum was silent, as in Caesar's time. The newspapers have taken up this duty now and make a business of politics, and as they are incomparably more convenient, rapid, and diffused, they have taken from correspondence one of its principal subjects.

It is true that private affairs remain for it, and we are tempted to think at first that this subject is inexhaustible, and that with the sentiments and affections of so many kinds that fill our home life it would always be rich enough. Nevertheless, I think that private correspondence becomes every day shorter and less interesting, where it is only a question of feeling and affection. That constant and agreeable intercourse which filled so large a place in the life of former times, tends almost to disappear, and one would say that by a strange chance the facility and rapidity of intercourse, which ought to give it more animation, have been injurious to it. Formerly, when there was no post, or when it was reserved for the emperor's use, as with the Romans, men were obliged to take advantage of any opportunity that occurred, or to send their letters by a slave. Then writing was a serious affair. They did not want the messenger to make a useless journey; letters were made longer and more complete to avoid the necessity of beginning again too often; unconsciously they were more carefully finished, by the thought we naturally give to things that cost trouble and are not very easy. Even in the time of Madame de S?vign?, when the mails started only once or twice a week, writing was still a serious business to which every care was given. The mother, far from her daughter, had no sooner sent off her letter than she was thinking of the one she would send a few days later. Thoughts, memories, regrets gathered in her mind during this interval, and when she took up her pen "she could no longer govern this torrent." Now, when we know that we can write when we will, we do not collect material as Madame de S?vign? did, we do not write a little every day, we no longer seek to "empty our budget," or torment ourselves in order to forget nothing, lest forgetfulness should make the news stale by coming too late. While the periodical return of the post formerly brought more order and regularity into correspondence, the facility we have now for writing when we will causes us to write less often. We wait to have something to say, which is seldomer than one thinks. We write no more than is necessary; and this is very little for a correspondence whose chief pleasure lies in the superfluous, and we are threatened with a reduction of that little. Soon, no doubt, the telegraph will have replaced the post; we shall only communicate by this breathless instrument, the image of a matter-of-fact and hurried society, which, even in the style it employs, tries to use a little less than what is necessary. With this new progress the pleasure of private correspondence, already much impaired, will have disappeared for ever.

But when people had more opportunities for writing letters, and wrote them better, all did not succeed equally. Some dispositions are fitter for this work than others. People whose minds move slowly, and who have need of much reflection before writing, make memoirs and not letters. The sober-minded write in a regular and methodical manner, but they lack grace and warmth. Logicians and reasoners have the habit of following up their thoughts too closely; now, one ought to know how to pass lightly from one subject to another, in order that the interest may be sustained, and to leave them all before they are exhausted. Those who are solely occupied with one idea, who concentrate themselves on it, and will not leave it, are only eloquent when they speak of it, which is not enough. To be always agreeable, and on all subjects, as a regular correspondence demands, one must have a lively and active imagination which receives the impressions of the moment and changes abruptly with them. This is the first quality of good letter writers; I will add to it, if you like, a little artifice. Writing always requires a certain effort. To succeed in writing we must aim at success, and the disposition to please must precede the wish to do so. It is natural enough to wish to please that great public for whom books are written, but it is the mark of a more exacting vanity to exert one's powers for a single person. It has often been asked since La Bruy?re, why women succeed better than men in this kind of writing? Is it not because they have a greater desire to please and a natural vanity which is, so to say, always under arms, which neglects no conquest, and feels the need of making efforts to please everybody?

If I wished to find another example of this agreeable variety and these rapid changes, I should not turn to Pliny or to those who, like him, wrote their letters for the public, I should come down to Madame de S?vign?. She, like Cicero, has a very lively and versatile imagination; she gives way to her first emotions without reflection; she is caught by things present, and the pleasure she is enjoying always seems the highest. It has been remarked that she took pleasure everywhere, not through that indolence of mind that attaches us to the place where we are, to avoid the trouble of changing, but by the vivacity of her character which gave her up entirely to the pleasures of the moment. Paris does not charm her so much as to prevent her liking the country, and no one of that age has spoken about nature better than this woman of fashion who was so much at ease in drawing-rooms, and seemed made for them. She escapes to Livry the first fine day to enjoy "the triumph of May," to "the nightingale, the cuckoo, and the warbler that begin the spring in the woods." But Livry is still too fashionable, she must have a more complete solitude, and she cheerfully retires under her great trees in Brittany. This time her Paris friends think she will be wearied to death, having no news to repeat or fine wits to converse with. But she has taken some serious moral treatise by Nicole with her; she has found among those neglected books whose last refuge, like that of old furniture, is the country, some romance of her young days which she reads again secretly, and in which she is astonished still to find pleasure. She chats with her tenants, and just as Cicero preferred the society of the country people to that of the provincial fashionables, she likes better to talk with her gardener Pilois than with "several who have preserved the title of esquire in the parliament of Rennes." She walks in her Mall, in those solitary alleys where the trees covered with fine-sounding mottoes almost seem as though they were speaking to each other; she finds, in fact, so much pleasure in her desert that she cannot make up her mind to leave it; nevertheless no woman likes Paris better. Once back there she surrenders herself wholly to the pleasures of fashionable life. Her letters are full of it. She takes impressions so readily that we might almost tell in perusing them what books she has just been reading, at what conversations she has been present, what drawing-rooms she has just left. When she repeats so pleasantly to her daughter the gossip of the court we perceive that she has just been conversing with the graceful and witty Madame de Coulanges, who has repeated it to her. When she speaks so touchingly of Turenne she has just left the H?tel de Bouillon, where the prince's family are lamenting his broken fortunes as well as his death. She lectures, she sermonizes herself with Nicole, but not for long. Let her son come in and tell her some of those gay adventures of which he has been the hero or the victim, she recounts boldly the most risky tales on condition of saying a little later, "Pardon us, Monsieur Nicole!" When she has been visiting La Rochefoucauld everything turns to morality; she draws lessons from everything, everywhere she sees some image of life and of the human heart, even in the viper broth that they are going to give Madame de la Fayette who is ill. Is not this viper, which though opened and skinned still writhes, like our old passions? "What do we not do to them? We treat them with insult, harshness, cruelty, disdain; we wrangle, lament, and storm, and yet they move. We cannot overcome them. We think, when we have plucked out their heart, that they are done with and we shall hear no more of them. But no; they are always alive, they are always moving." This ease with which she receives impressions, and which causes her to adopt so quickly the sentiments of the people she visits, makes her also feel the shock of the great events she looks on at. The style of her letters rises when she narrates them, and, like Cicero, she becomes eloquent unconsciously. Whatever admiration the greatness of the thoughts and the liveliness of expression in that fine piece of Cicero upon Caesar that I quoted just now may cause me, I am still more touched, I admit, by the letter of Madame de S?vign? on the death of Louvois, and I find more boldness and brilliancy in that terrible dialogue which she imagines between the minister who demands pardon and God who refuses it.

Another danger, and one still greater, of this excess of imagination which cannot control itself is that it may give us the lowest and most false opinion of those who yield to it. Perfect characters are only found in novels. Good and evil are so intermingled in our nature that the one is seldom found without the other. The strongest characters have their weaknesses, and the finest actions do not spring only from the most honourable motives. Our best affections are not entirely exempt from selfishness; doubts and wrongful suspicions sometimes trouble the firmest friendships, and it may happen at certain moments that cupidity and jealousy, of which one is ashamed the next day, flit rapidly through the mind of the most honourable persons. The prudent and clever carefully conceal all those feelings which cannot bear the light; those whose quick impressions carry them away, like Cicero, speak out, and they are very much blamed. The spoken or written word gives more strength and permanence to these fugitive thoughts; they were only flashes; they are fixed and accentuated by writing; they acquire a clearness, a relief and importance that they had not in reality. Those momentary weaknesses, those ridiculous suspicions which spring from wounded self-esteem, those short bursts of anger, quieted as soon as reflected on, those unjust thoughts that vexation produces, those ambitious fits that reason hastens to disavow, never perish when once they have been confided to a friend. One of these days a prying commentator will study these too unreserved disclosures, and will use them, to draw a portrait of the indiscrete person who made them, to frighten posterity. He will prove by exact and irrefutable quotations that he was a bad citizen and a bad friend, that he loved neither his country nor his family, that he was jealous of honest people, and that he betrayed all parties. It is not so, however, and a wise man will not be deceived by the artifice of misleading quotations. Such a man well knows that we must not take these impetuous people literally or give too much credence to what they say. We must save them from themselves, refuse to listen to them when they are led astray by passion, and especially must we distinguish their real and lasting feelings from all those exaggerations which are merely passing. For these reasons every one is not fitted to thoroughly understand these letters, every one cannot read them as they should be read. I mistrust those learned men who, without any acquaintance with men or experience of life, pretend to judge Cicero from his correspondence. Most frequently they judge him ill. They search for the expression of his thought in that commonplace politeness which society demands, and which no more binds those who use it than it deceives those who accept it. Those concessions that must be made if we wish to live together they call cowardly compromises. They see manifest contradictions in those different shades a man gives to his opinions, according to the persons he is talking with. They triumph over the imprudence of certain admissions, or the fatuity of certain praises, because they do not perceive the fine irony that tempers them. To appreciate all these shades, to give things their real importance, to be a good judge of the drift of those phrases which are said with half a smile, and do not always mean what they seem to say, requires more acquaintance with life than one usually gets in a German university. If I must say what I think, I would rather trust a man of the world than a scholar in this matter, for a delicate appreciation.

Cicero is not the only person whom this correspondence shows us. It is full of curious details about all those who had friendly or business relations with him. They were the most illustrious persons of the time, and they played the chief parts in the revolution that put an end to the Roman Republic. No one deserves to be studied more than they. It must be remarked here, that one of Cicero's failings has greatly benefited posterity. If it were a question of some one else, of Cato for instance, how many people's letters would be missing in this correspondence! The virtuous alone would find a place in it, and Heaven knows their number was not then very great. But, happily, Cicero was much more tractable, and did not bring Cato's rigorous scruples into the choice of his friends. A sort of good-nature made him accessible to people of every opinion; his vanity made him seek praise everywhere. He had dealings with all parties, a great fault in a politician, for which the shrewd people of his time have bitterly reproached him, but a fault that we profit by; hence it happens that all parties are represented in his correspondence. This obliging humour sometimes brought him into contact with people whose opinions were the most opposite to his, and he found himself at certain times in close relations with the worst citizens whom he has at other times lashed with his invectives. Letters that he had received from Antony, Dolabella, and Curio still remain, and these letters are full of expressions of respect and friendship. If the correspondence went further back we should probably have some of Catiline's, and, frankly, I regret the want of them; for if we wish to judge of the state of a society as of the constitution of a man, it is not enough to examine the sound parts, we must handle and probe to the bottom the unsound parts. Thus, all the important men of that time, whatever their conduct may have been, or to whatever party they may have belonged, had dealings with Cicero. Memorials of all are found in his correspondence. A few of their letters still exist, and we have a large number of those that Cicero wrote to them. The private details he gives us about them, what he tells us of their opinions, their habits, and character, allows us to enter freely into their life. Thanks to him, all those persons indistinctly depicted by history resume their original appearance; he seems to bring them nearer to us and to make us acquainted with them; and when we have read his correspondence we can say that we have just visited the whole Roman society of his time.

The end we have in view in this book is to study closely a few of these personages, especially those who were most involved in the great political events of that period. But before beginning this study it is necessary to make a firm resolution not to bring to it considerations which belong to our own time. It is too much the custom now-a-days to seek arms for our present struggles in the history of the past. Smart allusions and ingenious parallels are most successful. Perhaps Roman antiquity is so much in fashion only because it gives political parties a convenient and less dangerous battle-field where, under ancient costumes, present-day passions may struggle. If the names of Caesar, Pompey, Cato, and Brutus are quoted on all occasions, these great men must not be too proud of the honour. The curiosity they excite is not altogether disinterested, and when they are spoken of it is almost always to point an epigram or set off a flattery. I wish to avoid this mistake. These illustrious dead seem to me to deserve something better than to serve as instruments in the quarrels that divide us, and I have sufficient respect for their memory and their repose not to drag them into the arena of our every-day disputes. It should never be forgotten that it is an outrage to history to subject it to the changing interest of parties, and that it should be, according to the fine expression of Thucydides, a work made for eternity.

These precautions being taken, let us penetrate with Cicero's letters into the Roman society of that great period, and let us begin by studying him who offers himself so gracefully to do us the honours.

CICERO IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LIFE

I CICERO'S PUBLIC LIFE

Cicero's public life is usually severely judged by the historians of our time. He pays the penalty of his moderation. As this period is only studied now with political intentions, a man like him who tried to avoid extremes fully satisfies nobody. All parties agree in attacking him; on all sides he is laughed at or insulted. The fanatical partisans of Brutus accuse him of timidity, the warmest friends of Caesar call him a fool. It is in England and amongst us that he has been least abused, and that classical traditions have been more respected than elsewhere; the learned still persist in their old habits and their old admirations, and in the midst of so many convulsions criticism at least has remained conservative. Perhaps also the indulgence shown to Cicero in both countries comes from the experience they have of political life. When a man has lived in the practice of affairs and in the midst of the working of parties, he can better understand the sacrifices that the necessities of the moment, the interest of his friends and the safety of his cause may demand of a statesman, but he who only judges his conduct by inflexible theories thought out in solitude and not submitted to the test of experience becomes more severe towards him. This, no doubt, is the reason why the German scholars use him so roughly. With the exception of M. Abeken, who treats him humanely, they are without pity. Drumann especially overlooks nothing. He has scrutinized his works and his life with the minuteness and sagacity of a lawyer seeking the grounds of a lawsuit. He has laid bare all his correspondence in a spirit of conscientious malevolence. He has courageously resisted the charm of those confidential disclosures which makes us admire the writer and love the man in spite of his weaknesses, and by opposing to each other detached fragments of his letters and discourses he has succeeded in drawing up a formal indictment, in which nothing is omitted and which almost fills a volume. M. Mommsen is scarcely more gentle, he is only less long. Taking a general view of things he does not lose himself in the details. In two of those compact pages full of facts, such as he knows how to write, he has found means to heap on Cicero more insults than Drumann's whole volume contains. We see particularly that this pretended statesman was only an egotist and a short-sighted politician, and that this great writer is only made up of a newspaper novelist and a special-pleader. Here we perceive the same pen that has just written down Cato a Don Quixote and Pompey a corporal. As in his studies of the past he always has the present in his mind, one would say that he looks for the squireens of Prussia in the Roman aristocracy, and that in Caesar he salutes in advance that popular despot whose firm hand can alone give unity to Germany.

How much truth is there in these fierce attacks? What confidence can we place in this boldness of revolutionary criticism? What judgment must we pronounce on Cicero's political conduct? The study of the facts will teach us.

Three causes generally contribute to form a man's political opinions--his birth, his personal reflections, and his temperament. If I were not speaking here of sincere convictions only, I would readily add a fourth, which causes more conversions than the others, namely interest, that is to say, that leaning one has almost in spite of oneself to think that the most advantageous course is also the most just, and to conform one's opinion to the position one holds or wishes for. Let us try and discover what influence these causes had upon Cicero's conduct and political preferences.

At Rome, for a long time past, opinions had been decided by birth. In a city where traditions were so much respected the ideas of parents were inherited as well as their property or their name, and it was a point of honour to follow their politics faithfully; but in Cicero's time these customs were beginning to decay. The oldest families had no scruple in failing in their hereditary engagements. At that time many names which had become illustrious by defending popular interests are found in the senatorial party, and the most audacious demagogue of that time bore the name of Clodius. Besides, Cicero would never at any time have found political direction in his birth. He belonged to an unknown family, he was the first of his race to engage in public affairs, and the name he bore did not commit him in advance to any party. In fact, he was not born at Rome. His father lived in one of those little country municipia of which the wits readily made fun, because doubtful Latin was spoken and fine manners were not well known in them, but which, none the less, were the strength and honour of the Republic. That rude but brave and temperate people who inhabited the neglected cities of Campania, Latium, and the Sabine country, and among whom the habits of rural life had preserved something of the ancient virtue, was in reality the Roman people. That which filled the streets and squares of the great city, spent its time in the theatre, took part in the riots of the Forum, and sold its votes in the Campus Martius, was only a collection of freedmen and foreigners among whom only disorder, intrigue, and corruption could be learnt. Life was more honest and healthy in the municipia. The citizens who inhabited them remained for the most part strangers to the questions that were debated in Rome, and the rumour of public affairs did not reach them. They were sometimes seen on the Campus Martius or the Forum, when it was a question of voting for one of their fellow-citizens, or of supporting him by their presence before the tribunals; but usually they troubled themselves little about exercising their rights, and stayed at home. They were none the less devoted to their country, jealous of their privileges, even when they made no use of them, proud of their title of Roman citizens, and much attached to the Republican Government that had given it them. For them the Republic had preserved its prestige because, living at a distance, they saw less of its weaknesses and always recalled its ancient glory. Cicero's childhood was spent in the midst of these rural populations, as backward in their ideas as in their manners. He learnt from them to love the past more than to know the present. This was the first impression and the first teaching he received from the places as from the people among whom his early years were passed. Later, he spoke with emotion of that humble house that his father had built near the Liris, and which recalled the house of the old Curius by its stern simplicity. I fancy that those who lived in it must have thought themselves carried back a century, and that in causing them to live among the memorials of the past, it gave them the inclination and taste for old-fashioned things. If Cicero owed anything to his birth it was this. He may have gained in his family respect for the past, love of his country, and an instinctive preference for the Republican Government, but he found in it no precise tradition, no positive engagement with any party. When he entered political life he was obliged to decide for himself, a great trial for an irresolute character! And in order to choose among so many conflicting opinions it was necessary early to study and reflect.

Cicero did not act thus. He knew the public he addressed; he knew that that grave and sensible race, so quick to seize the practical side of things, would be ill-satisfied with these fancies, and so he does not lose himself in these dreams of the ideal and the absolute. He does not presume to make laws for the universe; he is thinking especially of his own country and his own times, and although he appears to be drawing up the plan of a perfect republic, that is to say, one that cannot exist, it is plain that his eyes are fixed on a constitution which does really exist. The following are very nearly his political theories. Of the three forms of government usually distinguished, none altogether pleases him when it is isolated. I need not speak of the absolute government of a single man, he died in order to oppose that.

Cicero's temperament, I think, had still more to do with his political preferences than his birth or his reflections. There is no more to learn about the weaknesses of his character; they have been laid bare with delight, they have even been wilfully exaggerated, and since Montaigne it is the usual thing to laugh at them. I need not repeat, then, what has been said so often, that he was timid, hesitating, and irresolute. I admit with everybody that nature made him a man of letters rather than a politician, but I do not think that this admission does him so much harm as might be thought. The mind of the man of letters is often more perfect, more comprehensive, broader than that of the politician, and it is precisely this breadth that cramps and thwarts him when he undertakes public affairs. We ask ourselves what qualities are necessary for a statesman; would it not be wiser to seek those it is good for him to lack, and does not political capacity show itself sometimes in its limitations and exclusions? A man of action who ought to decide quickly may be hampered by the number of contradictory reasons a too close and penetrating view of things may present to him. A too vivid imagination, showing him many plans at once, prevents him fixing on any. Determination often comes from narrowness of mind, and is one of the greatest virtues in a politician. A very sensitive conscience, by making him too particular in the choice of his allies, would deprive him of powerful support. He must distrust those generous impulses which lead him to do justice even to his enemies: in the furious struggle for power a man runs the risk of disarming himself and allowing an advantage to be taken if he has the misfortune to be just and tolerant. There is nothing that may not become a danger for him, even to that natural uprightness, the first quality of a statesman. If he is too sensitive to the excesses and acts of injustice of his party he will serve it feebly, if his fidelity is to be unshaken he must not only excuse, he should be able to shut his eyes to them. These are some of the imperfections of heart and mind by which he gains his successes. If it be true, as I believe it is, that the politician often succeeds in the government of a state through his defects, and that the literary man fails by his very qualities, it is paying the latter almost a compliment to say he is not fit for the management of affairs.

We may say then without discrediting Cicero, that he was not altogether fit for public life. The causes which made him an incomparable writer did not allow him to be a good politician. That openness to impressions, that delicate and irritable sensitiveness, the principal sources of his literary talent, did not leave him sufficiently master of his will. Particular events had too great a hold on him, and a man must be able to detach himself from these in order to control them. His versatile and fertile imagination, by drawing his attention to all sides at once, rather incapacitated him for forming well-connected plans. He could not delude himself enough about men or enterprises, and thus he was subject to sudden fits of irresolution. He often boasted of having foreseen and predicted the future. It was certainly not in his position of augur, but by a kind of troublesome perspicacity, that showed him the consequences of events, and the bad ones rather than the good. On the nones of December, when he executed Catiline's accomplices, he did not forget the vengeance to which he exposed himself, and he foresaw his exile: that day then, notwithstanding the irresolution he has been reproached with, he had more courage than another who in a moment of excitement would not have seen the danger. One cause of his inferiority and weakness was that he was moderate, moderate by constitution rather than principle, that is to say, with that nervous and irritable impatience which at last employs violence to defend moderation. In political struggles all excess can seldom be avoided. Usually parties are unjust in their complaints when they are beaten, cruel in their reprisals when they conquer, and ready to do without scruple, as soon as they are able, what they blame in their enemies. If any in the victorious party perceive they are going too far and dare to say so, they inevitably irritate everybody against them. They are accused of timidity and vacillation, they are called weak and changeable; but is this reproach well deserved? Did Cicero contradict himself when, after defending the unfortunate men whom the aristocracy oppressed under Sulla, he defended, thirty years later, the victims of the democracy under Caesar? Was he not, on the contrary, more consistent than those who, after bitterly complaining of being exiled, exiled their enemies as soon as they had the power? We must, however, admit that if this lively sense of justice is honourable in a private man it may become dangerous in a politician. Parties do not like those who refuse to join in their excesses, and in the midst of general licence set up the claim of alone remaining within bounds. It was Cicero's misfortune not to have that firm resolution which fixes a man in his opinions, and to pass from one opinion to another, because he saw clearly the good and evil of all. A man must be very self-reliant to try and do without others. This isolation takes for granted a decision and energy that were wanting in Cicero. If he had resolutely attached himself to one party he would have found in it traditions and fixed principles, firm friends and steady leading, and need only have allowed himself to be led. On the other hand, by endeavouring to walk alone he risked making all the rest his enemies while he himself had no clearly marked out line of conduct. A glance at the chief events of his political life is sufficient to show that this was the origin of a part of his misfortunes and his faults.

Cicero spoke thus at a few paces from the man who had ordered the proscriptions, and in the presence of those who had carried them out and profited by them. We can imagine the effect his words must have produced. They expressed the secret feelings of all, they relieved the public conscience, forced to keep silence, and humiliated by its silence. Thus the democratic party showed the most lively sympathy, from that time, for the eloquent young man who protested so courageously against a hateful rule. The remembrance of this preserved the popular favour for him so faithfully even to the time of his consulship. Every time he sought an office the citizens hastened in crowds to the Campus Martius to record their votes for him. No politician of that time, and there were many more eminent than he, so easily reached the highest dignities. Cato suffered more than one check, Caesar and Pompey needed coalitions and intrigues to succeed. Cicero is almost the only one whose candidatures succeeded the first time, and who never had to recur to the means usually required for success. In the midst of those scandalous bargains which gave honours to the richest, notwithstanding those deeprooted traditions which seemed to reserve them for the noblest, Cicero, who had no claims of birth and but a small fortune, always defeated all the rest. He was appointed quaestor, aedile; he obtained the urban praetorship, which was the most honourable; he attained the consulship the first time he sought for it, as soon as the law permitted him to aspire to it, and none of these dignities cost anything either to his honour or his fortune.

Does this mean that Cicero should be struck off the list of political orators? If this name is given to every man whose speech has some influence on the affairs of his country, who sways the mob, or convinces honest people, it seems difficult to refuse it to Cicero. He knew how to talk to the multitude and make himself listened to. At times he mastered it in its most furious outbursts. He made it accept and even applaud opinions contrary to its preferences. He seemed to drag it out of its apathy, and to call up in it for a short time an appearance of energy and patriotism. He is not to blame if his successes were not followed up, if after these grand triumphs of eloquence brute force remained master. At least he did with his words all that words could then do. I admit, however, that what was wanting in his character was wanting also in his political eloquence. It is nowhere sufficiently resolute, decided, practical. It is too much taken up with itself, and not enough with the questions it is treating. It does not attack them boldly on their salient points. It is involved in pompous phrases, instead of trying to speak that clear and precise language which is the language of public business. When we examine it closely, and begin to analyze it, we find that it is chiefly composed of a good deal of rhetoric and a little philosophy. All those agreeable and smart arguments, all those artifices of debate, and also all that ostentation of pathos that we find in it, come from rhetoric. Philosophy has furnished those grand commonplaces developed with talent, but not always germane to the subject. There is too much artifice and method about it. A concise and simple statement would be more suitable to the discussion of affairs than these subtleties and emotions; these long philosophical tirades would be advantageously replaced by a clear and judicious exposition of the orator's principles and of the general ideas that regulate his conduct. Unfortunately, as I have said, Cicero preserved, on reaching the rostrum, the habits he had acquired at the bar. He attacks, with the arguments of an advocate, that agrarian law, so honest, moderate, and wise, which was proposed by the tribune Rullus. In the fourth Catilinarian Oration he had to discuss this question, one of the gravest that can be placed before a deliberative assembly, namely, how far is it permitted to deviate from legality in order to save one's country? He has not even approached it. It is painful to see how he hangs back from it, how he flies from and avoids it, to develop small reasons and lose himself in a vulgar pathos. The grave and serious kind of eloquence evidently was not that which Cicero preferred, and in which he felt most at ease. If you wish to know the real tendency of his talents, read, immediately after the fourth Catilinarian Oration, the speech for Muraena, delivered at the same time. There is none more agreeable in the collection of his speeches, and we wonder how a man who was consul, and who had then so many affairs on his hands, found his mind sufficiently free to joke with so much ease and point; the truth is, there he was in his element. Accordingly, although he was consul or consular, he returned to the bar as often as he could. It was to oblige his friends, he said. I think that he wished still more to please himself; he appears happy, and his animation and wit expand so freely, when he has some agreeable and lively case to plead. Not only did he never miss an opportunity of appearing before the judges, but as much as possible he threw his political discourses into the form of ordinary pleadings. Everything turned into personal questions with him. The discussion of ideas usually leaves him cold. He had to contend against some one in order to let us see him at his best. The finest speeches he delivered in the Forum or the senate are eulogies or invectives. In them he is unrivalled; in them, according to one of his expressions, his eloquence rises and triumphs; but however fine invectives and eulogies may be, they are not altogether our ideal of political eloquence, and we demand something else of it now-a-days. All that can be said in justification of Cicero's speeches is, that they were perfectly appropriate to his time, and that their character is explained by the circumstances in which they were delivered. Eloquence did not then guide the state as in the best times of the republic. Other influences had replaced it; in the elections, money and the intrigues of the candidates, in out-door discussions, the occult and terrible power of the popular societies, and above all the army, which, since Sulla, raised or overthrew every government. Eloquence feels itself powerless in the midst of these forces which overpower it. How can it still preserve the commanding accent, the imperious and resolute tone of one who knows his power? Need it appeal to reason and logic, and try and force itself upon men's convictions by a close and forcible argument, when it knows that the questions it is treating are decided otherwise? M. Mommsen maliciously remarks, that in most of his great political speeches Cicero pleads causes already victorious. When he published the Verrine Orations, the laws of Sulla on the composition of the tribunals had just been abolished. He well knew that Catiline had decided to leave Rome when he pronounced the first Catilinarian Oration, in which he so feelingly adjures him to go away. The second Philippic, which seems so bold when we think of it as spoken to the face of the all-powerful Antony, was only made public at the moment when Antony was flying to Cisalpine Gaul. Of what use then were all these fine speeches? They did not cause decisions to be taken, since these decisions were already taken; but they caused them to be accepted by the multitude, they stirred public opinion and excited it in their favour: this was something. It was necessary to accept the facts of the situation; speech no longer governed, eloquence could no longer hope to direct events, but it acted on them indirectly, it tried to produce those great movements of opinion that prepare or complete them; "it does not secure votes and acts, it arouses the emotions." If this moral effect is the only end it had in view at the time, Cicero's eloquence, by its copiousness and splendour, by its brilliancy and pathos, was well calculated to attain it.

At first he had put his eloquence at the service of the popular party; we have seen that it was in the ranks of this party that he made his first political appearance; but although he faithfully served it for seventeen years, I am inclined to think that he did not always do so heartily. The excesses of the aristocratic government threw him towards democracy, but he must have found democracy not much wiser, especially when it was victorious. It sometimes gave him terrible clients to defend. He had to plead the cause of factious and seditious persons who were always troubling the public peace. One day he even pleaded, or was on the point of pleading, for Catiline. It is probable that all this was painful to him, and that the violent excesses of democracy tempted him more than once to separate from it. Unfortunately he did not know where to go if he left it, and if the plebeians offended him by their violence, the aristocracy, by its arrogance and prejudices, did not any more attract him. Since in existing parties he did not find any which exactly corresponded to his convictions, and which altogether suited his disposition, he had no other resource than to form one for himself. This is what he tried to do. When he felt that the brilliancy of his eloquence, the offices he had filled, the popularity that surrounded him, made him an important person, in order to assure his future, to take a higher and more permanent position in the republic, to free himself from the requirements of his former protectors, in order not to be forced to stretch out his hand to his old enemies, he sought to create a new party, composed of the moderate men of all parties, and of which he was to be the head. But he very well understood that he could not create this party in a moment and produce it from nothing. It was necessary first to find a nucleus around which the new recruits that he expected should group themselves. He thought he had found it in that class of citizens to which he belonged by his birth, and who were called the knights.

Rome always lacked what we now call the middle and citizen class. In proportion as the small farmers left their friends to go and live in the city, and "as those hands which had worked at the corn and the vine were only occupied in applauding at the theatre and the circus," the gap became greater between the opulent aristocracy which possessed almost all the public wealth, and that indigent and famished people that was continually recruited from the slaves. The sole intermediaries were the knights. This name, at the time we are considering, was not only used to describe the citizens to whom the state gave a horse , and who voted separately in the elections; it was also given to all those who possessed the equestrian income qualification, that is to say, those whose fortune exceeded 400,000 sesterces . We may well believe that the nobility behaved haughtily to these obscure plebeians whom chance or economy had enriched; it kept these parvenus at a distance; dealt out its disdain to them as liberally as to the poor people of the plebs, and obstinately closed the entrance to public dignities to them. When Cicero was appointed consul it was thirty years since a new man, whether knight or plebeian, had attained the consulship. Removed from political life by the jealousy of the great nobles, the knights were obliged to turn their energies elsewhere. Instead of wasting time in useless candidatures, they busied themselves in making their fortunes. When Rome had conquered the world, it was the knights especially who profited by these conquests. They formed an industrious and enlightened class, they were already in easy circumstances, and able to make loans, and thought they could speculate in the conquered countries for their own profit. Penetrating wherever the Roman arms were carried, they became merchants, bankers, farmers of the taxes, and amassed immense riches. As Rome was no longer the Rome of the Curii and the Cincinnati, and dictators were no longer taken from the plough, their wealth gave them consideration and importance. From that time they were spoken of with more respect. The Gracchi, who wished to make them allies in the struggle they were waging with the aristocracy, caused it to be decided that the judges should be taken from their ranks. Cicero went further; he tried to make them the foundation of the great moderate party he wished to create. He knew that he could count on their devotedness. He belonged to them by birth; he had shed over them the splendour that surrounded his name; he had never neglected to defend their interests before the tribunals or in the senate. He also reckoned that they would be grateful to him for wishing to augment their importance and call them to a great political future.

Coalitions of this kind, unfortunately, seldom long survive the circumstances that give rise to them. When the interests that a common danger had united began to feel themselves secure, they recommenced their old quarrels. The plebeians, who were no longer afraid, felt their old animosity against the nobility revive. The nobles began again to envy the wealth of the knights. As to the knights, they had none of those qualities that were necessary to make them the soul of a political party, as Cicero had hoped. They were more occupied with their private affairs than with those of the republic. They had not the strength of numbers, like the plebeians, and were wanting in those great traditions of government that maintained so long the authority of the nobility. Their only guiding principle was that instinct usual with men of large fortunes, which led them to prefer order to liberty. They sought, before all things, a strong power which could defend them, and Caesar had in the end no more devoted followers than they. In this break-up of his party, Cicero, who could not stand alone, asked himself on which side he ought to place himself. The fright that Catiline had given him, the presence of Caesar and Crassus in the ranks of the democracy, prevented his return to that party, and he finally attached himself to the nobility, notwithstanding his repugnance. From the date of his consulship he resolutely turned towards this party. We know how the democracy avenged itself for what it considered a betrayal. Three years after it condemned its old head, now become its enemy, to exile, and only consented to recall him to cast him at the feet of Caesar and Pompey, whose union had made them masters of Rome.

The gravest political crisis that Cicero passed through, after the great struggles of his consulship, was certainly that which terminated in the fall of the Roman republic at Pharsalia. We know that he did not willingly engage in this terrible conflict, of which he foresaw the issue, and that he hesitated for nearly a year before deciding on his course. It is not surprising that he hesitated so long. He was no longer young and obscure as when he pleaded for Roscius. He had a high position and an illustrious name that he did not wish to compromise, and a man may be allowed to reflect before he risks fortune, glory, and perchance life on a single cast. Besides, the question was not so simple nor the right so clear as they seem at first sight. Lucan, whose sympathies are not doubtful, yet said that it could not be known on which side justice lay, and this obscurity does not seem to be altogether dissipated, since, after eighteen centuries of discussion, posterity has not yet succeeded in coming to an agreement. It is curious that, among us, in the seventeenth century, at the height of monarchical government, the learned all pronounced against Caesar without hesitation. Magistrates of the high courts, men cautious and moderate by their offices and character, who approached the king and were not sparing of flattery, took the liberty of being Pompeians and even furious Pompeians in private. "The First President," says Guy-Patin, "is so much on Pompey's side, that one day he expressed his joy that I was so, I having said to him, in his fine garden at B?ville, that if I had been in the senate when Julius Caesar was killed, I would have given him the twenty-fourth stab." On the contrary, it is in our own days, in a democratic epoch, after the French Revolution, and in the name of the revolution and the democracy, that the side of Caesar has been upheld with the greatest success, and that the benefit humanity has reaped from his victory has been set in its clearest light.

I have no intention to re-open this debate, it is too fertile in stormy discussions. I only wish here to deal with so much of it as is indispensable to explain Cicero's political life. There are, I think, two very different ways of looking at the question: our own first, namely, that of people unconcerned in these quarrels of a former age, who approach them as historians or philosophers, after time has cooled them, who judge them less by their causes than by their results, and who ask themselves, above all, what good or evil they have done in the world; then that of contemporaries, who judge of them with their passions and prejudices, according to the ideas of their time, in their relation to themselves, and without knowing their remote consequences. I am going to place myself solely at this latter point of view, although the other seems to me grander and more profitable; but as my only design is to ask from Cicero an explanation of his political actions, and as one cannot reasonably require of him that he should have divined the future, I shall confine myself to showing how the question was stated in his time, what reasons were alleged on both sides, and in what manner it was natural for a wise man who loved his country to appreciate those reasons. Let us forget, then, the eighteen centuries that separate us from these events, let us suppose ourselves at Formiae or Tusculum during those long days of anxiety and uncertainty that Cicero passed there, and let us hear him discuss, with Atticus or Curio, the reasons that the two parties urged to draw him into their ranks.

Caesar, however, does not seem to have been very much prepossessed with this part of champion of the democracy. We do not find, on reading his memoirs, that he speaks very much of the people's interests. The phrase just quoted is almost the only one in which they are mentioned. Elsewhere he is more frank. At the beginning of the civil war, when he set forth his reasons for commencing it, he complained that he was refused the consulship, that his province was taken from him, that he was torn from his army; he says not a word of the people, of their unrecognized rights, of their crushed liberty. This was, however, the moment to speak of them in order to justify an enterprise that so many people, and those the most honest, condemned. What did he demand in the final conditions he laid before the senate before marching on Rome? His consulship, his army, his province; he defended his personal interests, he bargained for himself, it never came into his mind to demand any guarantee for that people whose defender he called himself. Around him, in his camp, one thought no more of the people than they did of themselves. His best friends, his bravest generals, had no pretension to be reformers or democrats. They did not think, in following him, that they were going to give liberty to their fellow-citizens; they wished to avenge their outraged chief, and to win power for him. "We are the soldiers of Caesar," said they with Curio. They had no other title, they knew no other name. When some one came to speak to those old centurions who had seen Germany and Britain, who had taken Alesia and Gergovia, of abandoning Caesar and passing over to the side of the laws and the republic, they did not reply that they were defending the people and their rights. "We," said they, "shall we quit our general who has given all of us our ranks, shall we take arms against an army in which we have served and been victorious for thirty-six years? We will never do it!" These men were no longer citizens but soldiers. After thirty-six years of victories, they had lost the traditions of civil life and the taste for it; the rights of the people had become indifferent to them, and for them glory took the place of liberty. Cicero and his friends thought that these surroundings were not those of a popular chief who came to restore liberty to his fellow-citizens, but those of an ambitious man who came to establish absolute power by arms, and they were not mistaken. Caesar's conduct after the war proves this more than all the rest. How did he use his victory? What benefits did he confer on the people whose interests he pretended to defend? I do not speak of what he was able to do for their comfort and their pleasures, the sumptuous feasts, the public meals that he gave, the corn and oil that he so generously distributed to the poorest, the 400 sesterces that he paid each citizen on the day of his triumph: if these alms satisfied the plebeians of that time, if they consented to sacrifice their liberty at that price, I pardon Cicero for not having more esteem for them, and for not putting himself on their side; but if they demanded something else, if they wished for a more complete independence, for a larger share in the affairs of their country, for new political rights, they did not obtain them, and Caesar's victory, notwithstanding his promises, rendered them neither freer nor more powerful. Caesar humiliated the aristocracy, but only for his own advantage. He took the executive power out of the hands of the senate, but only to put it in his own. He established equality between all the orders, but it was an equality of servitude, and all were henceforth reduced to the same level of obedience.

I know that after he had silenced the public speakers, deprived the people of the right of voting, and united in himself all public authority, the senate that he had appointed, having exhausted flattery, solemnly awarded to him the name of Liberator, and voted the erection of a Temple of Liberty. If it is against this liberty that Cicero and his friends are accused of having taken up arms, I do not think it is worth the trouble to defend them from this charge.

Let us call things by their real name. It was for himself and not for the people that Caesar worked, and Cicero, in opposing him, thought he was defending the republic and not the privileges of the aristocracy.

But did this republic deserve to be defended? Was there any hope of preserving it? Was it not manifest that its ruin was inevitable? This is the greatest charge that is made against those who followed Pompey's party. I admit it is not easy to answer it. The evil that Rome suffered, and which showed itself in those disorders and that violence of which Cicero's letters give us such a sad picture, was not of a kind to be averted by a few wise reforms. It was ancient and profound. It became worse every day without any law being able to prevent or arrest it. Could one hope to cure it with those slight changes that the boldest proposed? Of what use was it to diminish, as was wished, the privileges of the aristocracy and to augment the rights of the plebeians? The sources of public life themselves were seriously impaired. The evil came from the way in which the citizenship was acquired.

For a long time Rome had drawn her strength from the country people. It was from the rustic tribes, the most honoured of all, that those valiant soldiers who had conquered Italy and subdued Carthage had come; but this agricultural and warlike people, who had so well defended the republic, could not defend themselves against the encroachments of the great estates. Enclosed little by little by those immense domains where cultivation is easiest, the poor peasant had for a long time struggled against misery and the usurers; then, discouraged in the struggle, he had ended by selling his field to his rich neighbour, who coveted it to round off his estate. He had tried then to become a tenant farmer, a metayer, a hired labourer on the property where he had been for so long the master, but there he met with the competition of the slave, a more frugal worker, who did not stand out for his wages, who did not make terms, who might be treated as one liked. Thus, driven twice from his fields, both as owner and as tenant farmer, without work or resources, he had been forced to migrate to the city. At Rome, however, life was not more easy for him. What could he do there? There was little trade, and usually it was not in the hands of the free men. In countries where slavery flourishes, work is looked down upon. To die of hunger without doing anything, is regarded by the free man as a privilege and an honour. Besides, each noble had men of all trades among his slaves, and as such a number of workmen were too many for himself alone, he hired them out to those who had none, or made them keep shop in a corner of his house for his own profit. Here again slave competition killed free labour. Happily at this time Marius opened the ranks of the army to the poorest citizens . These unfortunate men, finding no other resource, became soldiers. For lack of something better to do, they achieved the conquest of the world, subjugated Africa, Gaul, and the East, visited Britain and Germany, and the greater number of them, the bravest and best, were killed in these distant expeditions. During this time, the vacancies left in the city by those who departed and did not return were ill filled. Since Rome had become powerful, people from all parts of the world came to her, and we may well suppose they were not always the most respectable.

Several times she had endeavoured to defend herself against these invasions of foreigners; but it was useless to make severe laws to remove them, they always returned to hide themselves in that immense city without a police, and, once settled there, the more prosperous, by means of their money, the others by means of base services or cunning, succeeded in obtaining the title of citizens. Those who received it more naturally, and without needing to demand it, were the freedmen. No doubt the law did not grant them all political rights at once; but after one or two generations all these reservations disappeared, and the grandson of him who had ground at the mill and who had been sold in the slave-market voted the laws and elected the consuls like a Roman of the old stock. It was of this mixture of freedmen and foreigners, that was formed what at this time was called the Roman people, a wretched people who lived on the bounty of private persons or the alms of the state, who had neither memories nor traditions, nor political capacity, nor national character, nor even morality, for they were ignorant of that which makes up the honour and dignity of life in the lower classes, namely, work. With such a people a republic was no longer possible. This is, of all governments, that which demands the greatest integrity and political judgment in those who enjoy it. The more privileges it confers the more devotedness and intelligence it demands. People who did not use their rights, or only used them to sell them, were not worthy to preserve them. That absolute power which they had invited by their votes, which they had received with applause, was made for them; and one understands that the historian who studies from afar the events of the past, when he sees liberty disappear from Rome, consoles himself for its fall by saying that it was deserved and inevitable, and that he pardons or even applauds the man who, in overturning it, was only an instrument of necessity or justice.

But the men who lived then, who were attached to the republican government by tradition and memories, who recalled the great things it had done, who owed to it their dignities, position, and renown, could they think like us and resign themselves as easily to its fall? Firstly, this government existed. They were familiarized to its defects, since they had lived with them so long. They suffered less from them, through the long habit of enduring them. On the other hand, they did not know what this new power that wished to replace the republic would be. Royalty inspired the Romans with an instinctive repugnance, especially since they had conquered the East. They had found there, under this name, the most odious of governments, the most complete slavery in the midst of the most refined civilization, all the pleasures of luxury and the arts, the finest expansion of intellect with the heaviest and basest tyranny; princes accustomed to play with the fortune, honour, and life of men, a species of cruel spoilt children, such as are only now to be found in the African deserts. This picture did not attract them, and whatever disadvantages the republic had, they asked themselves if it was worth while to exchange them for those that royalty might have. Besides, it was natural that the fall of the republic should not appear to them so near and so sure as it does to us. It is with states as with men, for whom we find, after their death, a thousand causes of death which nobody suspected during their life-time. While the machinery of this ancient government was still working it could not be seen how disorganized it was. Cicero has, sometimes, moments of profound despair, in which he announces to his friends that all is lost; but these moments do not last, and he quickly regains his courage. It seems to him that a firm hand, an eloquent voice, and the agreement of good citizens can repair all, and that liberty will easily remedy the abuses and faults of liberty. He never perceives the whole gravity of danger. In the worst days, his thoughts never go beyond the schemers and the ambitious men who disturb the public repose; it is always Catiline, Caesar, or Clodius whom he accuses, and he thinks that all will be saved if one can succeed in overcoming them. He was mistaken, Catiline and Clodius were only the symptoms of a deeper evil that could not be cured; but is he to be blamed for entertaining this hope, chimerical as it was? Is he to be blamed for having thought that there were other means of saving the republic than the sacrifice of liberty? An honest man and a good citizen ought not to accept these counsels of despair at first. It is useless to tell him that the decrees of destiny condemn to perish the constitution that he prefers and that he has promised to defend, he does well not to believe it entirely lost until it is actually overthrown. We may call such men, if we like, blind or dupes; it is honourable in them not to be too perspicacious, and there are errors and illusions that are worth more than a too easy resignation. Real liberty existed no longer at Rome, as I believe, the shadow only remained, but the shadow was still something. One cannot bear a grudge against those who attached themselves to it and made desperate efforts not to allow it to perish, for this shadow, this semblance, consoled them for lost liberty and gave them some hope of regaining it. This is what honest men like Cicero thought, who, after mature reflection, without enthusiasm, without passion, and even without hope, went to find Pompey again; this is what Lucan makes Cato say in those admirable lines which seem to me to express the feelings of all those who, without concealing from themselves the sad state of the republic, persisted in defending it to the last: "As a father who has just lost his child takes pleasure in conducting his obsequies, lights with his own hands the funeral pyre, leaves it with regret, as tardily as he can; so, Rome, I will not forsake thee until that I have held thee dead in my arms. I will follow to the end thy very name, O Liberty, even when thou shalt be no more than a vain shadow!"

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet