The Life of Cicero, vol 1 | Page 3

with pity." But Cicero had
never dreamed of Caesar's murder. The words of the passage are as
follows: "Hunc primum mortalem esse, deinde etiam multis modis
extingui posse cogitabam." "I bethought myself in the first place that
this man was mortal, and then that there were a hundred ways in which

he might be put on one side." All the latter authorities have, I believe,
supposed the "hunc" or "this man" to be Pompey. I should say that this
was proved by the gist of the whole letter--one of the most interesting
that was ever written, as telling the workings of a great man's mind at a
peculiar crisis of his life--did I not know that former learned editors
have supposed Caesar to have been meant. But whether Caesar or
Pompey, there is nothing in it to do with murder. It is a
question--Cicero is saying to his friend--of the stability of the Republic.
When a matter so great is considered, how is a man to trouble himself
as to an individual who may die any day, or cease from any accident to
be of weight? Cicero was speaking of the effect of this or that step on
his own part. Am I, he says, for the sake of Pompey to bring down
hordes of barbarians on my own country, sacrificing the Republic for
the sake of a friend who is here to-day and may be gone to-morrow? Or
for the sake of an enemy, if the reader thinks that the "hunc" refers to
Caesar. The argument is the same. Am I to consider an individual when
the Republic is at stake? Mr. Froude tells us that he reads "the words
with sorrow and yet with pity." So would every one, I think,
sympathizing with the patriot's doubts as to his leader, as to his party,
and as to his country. Mr. Froude does so because he gathers from them
that Cicero is premeditating the murder of Caesar!
It is natural that a man should be judged out of his own mouth. A man
who speaks much, and so speaks that his words shall be listened to and
read, will be so judged. But it is not too much to demand that when a
man's character is at stake his own words shall be thoroughly sifted
before they are used against him.
The writer of the biographical notice in the Encyclopedia Britannica on
Cicero, sends down to posterity a statement that in the time of the first
triumvirate, when our hero was withstanding the machinations of
Caesar and Pompey against the liberties of Rome, he was open to be
bought. The augurship would have bought him. "So pitiful," says the
biographer, "was the bribe to which he would have sacrificed his honor,
his opinions, and the commonwealth!" With no more sententious
language was the character of a great man ever offered up to public
scorn. And on what evidence? We should have known nothing of the
bribe and the corruption but for a few playful words in a letter from
Cicero himself to Atticus. He is writing from one of his villas to his

friend in Rome, and asks for the news of the day: Who are to be the
new consuls? Who is to have the vacant augurship? Ah, says he, they
might have caught even me with that bait;[6] as he said on another
occasion that he was so much in debt as to be fit for a rebel; and again,
as I shall have to explain just now, that he was like to be called in
question under the Cincian law because of a present of books! This was
just at the point of his life when he was declining all offers of public
service--of public service for which his soul longed--because they were
made to him by Caesar. It was then that the "Vigintiviratus" was
refused, which Quintilian mentions to his honor. It was then that he
refused to be Caesar's lieutenant. It was then that he might have been
fourth with Caesar, and Pompey, and Crassus, had he not felt himself
bound not to serve against the Republic. And yet the biographer does
not hesitate to load him with infamy because of a playful word in a
letter half jocose and half pathetic to his friend. If a man's deeds be
always honest, surely he should not be accused of dishonesty on the
strength of some light word spoken in the confidence of familiar
intercourse. The light words are taken to be grave because they meet
the modern critic's eye clothed in the majesty of a dead language; and
thus it comes to pass that their very meaning is misunderstood.
My friend Mr. Collins speaks, in his charming little volume on Cicero,
of "quiet evasions" of the