The Life of Cicero, vol 1 | Page 8

must be admitted that he was a vane, turning on a pivot finer than
those on which statesmen have generally been made to work. He had
none of the fixed purpose of Caesar, or the unflinching principle of
Cato. They were men cased in brass, whose feelings nothing could hurt.
They suffered from none of those inward flutterings of the heart,
doubtful aspirations, human longings, sharp sympathies, dreams of
something better than this world, fears of something worse, which
make Cicero so like a well-bred, polished gentleman of the present day.
It is because he has so little like a Roman that he is of all the Romans
the most attractive.
Still there may be doubt whether, with all the intricacies of his
character, his career was such as to justify a further biography at this
distance of time. "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?" asks
Hamlet, when he finds himself stirred by the passion thrown into the
bare recital of an old story by an itinerant player. What is Cicero to us
of the nineteenth century that we should care so much for him as to
read yet another book? Nevertheless, Hamlet was moved because the

tale was well told. There is matter in the earnestness, the pleasantness,
the patriotism, and the tragedy of the man's life to move a reader
still--if the story could only be written of him as it is felt! The difficulty
lies in that, and not in the nature of the story.
The period of Cicero's life was the very turning-point of civilization
and government in the history of the world. At that period of time the
world, as we know it, was Rome. Greece had sunk. The Macedonian
Empire had been destroyed. The kingdoms of the East--whether
conquered, or even when conquering, as was Parthia for awhile--were
barbaric, outside the circle of cultivation, and to be brought into it only
by the arms and influence of Rome. During Caesar's career Gaul was
conquered; and Britain, with what was known of Germany, supposed to
be partly conquered. The subjugation of Africa and Spain was all but
completed. Letters, too, had been or were being introduced. Cicero's
use of language was so perfect that it seems to us to have been almost
necessarily the result of a long established art of Latin literature. But, in
truth, he is the earliest of the prose writers of his country with whose
works we are familiar. Excepting Varro, who was born but ten years
before him, no earlier Latin prose writer has left more than a name to us;
and the one work by which Varro is at all known, the De Re Rustica,
was written after Cicero's death. Lucretius, whose language we regard
as almost archaic, so unlike is it to that of Virgil or Horace, was born
eight years after Cicero. In a great degree Cicero formed the Latin
language--or produced that manipulation of it which has made it so
graceful in prose, and so powerful a vehicle of thought. That which he
took from any Latin writer he took from Terence.
And it was then, just then, that there arose in Rome that unpremeditated
change in its form of government which resulted in the self-assumed
dictatorship of Caesar, and the usurpation of the Empire by Augustus.
The old Rome had had kings. Then the name and the power became
odious--the name to all the citizens, no doubt, but the power simply to
the nobility, who grudged the supremacy of one man. The kings were
abolished, and an oligarchy was established under the name of a
Republic, with its annual magistrates--at first its two Consuls, then its
Praetors and others, and occasionally a Dictator, as some current event
demanded a concentration of temporary power in a single hand for a
certain purpose.

The Republic was no republic, as we understand the word; nor did it
ever become so, though their was always going on a perpetual struggle
to transfer the power from the nobles to the people, in which something
was always being given or pretended to be given to the outside class.
But so little was as yet understood of liberty that, as each plebeian
made his way up into high place and became one of the magistrates of
the State, he became also one of the oligarchical faction. There was a
continued contest, with a certain amount of good faith on each side, on
behalf of the so-called Republic--but still a contest for power. This
became so continued that a foreign war was at times regarded as a
blessing, because it concentrated the energies of the State, which had
been split and used by the two sections--by each against the other. It is
probably the case that the invasion of the Gauls in earlier