The Life of Cicero, vol 1 | Page 9

days, and,
later on, the second Punic war, threatening as they were in their
incidents to the power of Rome, provided the Republic with that
vitality which kept it so long in existence. Then came Marius, dominant
on one side as a tribune of the people, and Sylla, as aristocrat on the
other, and the civil wars between them, in which, as one prevailed or
the other, Rome was mastered. How Marius died, and Sylla reigned for
three bloody, fatal years, is outside the scope of our purpose--except in
this, that Cicero saw Sylla's proscriptions, and made his first essay into
public life hot with anger at the Dictator's tyranny.
It occurs to us as we read the history of Rome, beginning with the early
Consuls and going to the death of Caesar and of Cicero, and the
accomplished despotism of Augustus, that the Republic could not have
been saved by any efforts, and was in truth not worth the saving. We
are apt to think, judging from our own idea of liberty, that there was so
much of tyranny, so little of real freedom in the Roman form of
government, that it was not good enough to deserve our sympathies.
But it had been successful. It had made a great people, and had
produced a wide-spread civilization. Roman citizenship was to those
outside the one thing the most worthy to be obtained. That career which
led the great Romans up from the state of Quaestor to the Aedile's,
Praetor's, and Consul's chair, and thence to the rich reward of
provincial government, was held to be the highest then open to the
ambition of man. The Kings of Greece, and of the East, and of Africa
were supposed to be inferior in their very rank to a Roman Proconsul,

and this greatness was carried on with a semblance of liberty, and was
compatible with a belief in the majesty of the Roman citizen. When
Cicero began his work, Consuls, Praetors, Aediles, and Quaestors were
still chosen by the votes of the citizens. There was bribery, no doubt,
and intimidation, and a resort to those dirty arts of canvassing with
which we English have been so familiar; but in Cicero's time the male
free inhabitants of Rome did generally carry the candidates to whom
they attached themselves. The salt of their republican theory was not as
yet altogether washed out from their practice.
The love of absolute liberty as it has been cultivated among modern
races did not exist in the time of Cicero. The idea never seems to have
reached even his bosom, human and humanitarian as were his
sympathies, that a man, as man, should be free. Half the inhabitants of
Rome were slaves, and the institution was so grafted in the life of the
time that it never occurred to a Roman that slaves, as a body, should be
manumitted. The slaves themselves, though they were not, as have
been the slaves whom we have seen, of a different color and presumed
inferior race, do not themselves seem to have entertained any such idea.
They were instigated now and again to servile wars, but there was no
rising in quest of freedom generally. Nor was it repugnant to the
Roman theory of liberty that the people whom they dominated, though
not subjected to slavery, should still be outside the pale of civil
freedom. That boon was to be reserved for the Roman citizen, and for
him only. It had become common to admit to citizenship the inhabitants
of other towns and further territories. The glory was kept not altogether
for Rome, but for Romans.
Thus, though the government was oligarchical, and the very essence of
freedom ignored, there was a something which stood in the name of
liberty, and could endear itself to a real patriot. With genuine patriotism
Cicero loved his country, and beginning his public life as he did at the
close of Sylla's tyranny, he was able to entertain a dream that the old
state of things might be restored and the republican form of
government maintained. There should still be two Consuls in Rome,
whose annual election would guard the State against regal dominion.
And there should, at the same time, be such a continuance of power in
the hands of the better class--the "optimates," as he called them--as
would preserve the city from democracy and revolution. No man ever

trusted more entirely to popular opinion than Cicero, or was more
anxious for aristocratic authority. But neither in one direction nor the
other did he look for personal aggrandizement, beyond that which
might come to him in accordance with the law and in subjection to the
old form of government.
It is because he was in truth patriotic, because his dreams of a Republic
were noble