CICh1110.*

DIE world has seen many greater men than Cicero, but few more eminent, very few indeed, if one may make a collective estimate of his eminence in many departments of life. He was a statesman, not great indeed, but certainly conspicuous, for the year of his consu- late the first personage in the world, and for nearly a quarter of a century a noticeable man, always standing near the rulers of the world, and himself a factor of appreciable importance in the political calculations of the day. As an orator, he contends for the first place among the groat speakers of antiquity, and will be allowed, by common consent, at least to have won the second prize. He stands in the first rank of Roman literature, and, in the department of philosophy, is, if we except Lucretius, who is gener- ally regarded in another aspect, its only noteworthy representa- tive. All this gives to a writer who sets himself such a task as Mr. Collins has undertaken materials only too abun- aut ; and then there is the enormous mass of his correspond- ence, with all its discoveries, meditated or unconscious, of his private and public character, and its detailed pictures of the social and political life of Rome. Almost every important point, too, has been made the subject of fierce controversy. Roman politics do not run so much as do those of Greece in parallel lines with our own ; and hence we have nothing here that quite corre- sponds with the antagonism between Mitford and Grote ; still the character of Cicero has been fought over as fiercely as those of Pericles or Clews by writers of every kind, from Dr, Middleton, to whom he seems the noblest of heroes, to Moinniseu, who cannot find words to express his contempt.

One turns at once to see what Mr. Collins has to say of the great crisis in Cicero's political life, the day in which he had to decide what was to be done with the accomplices of Catiline. lie writes:— "Unquestionably they deserved death, if ever political criminals deserved it : the lives and liberties of good citizens were in danger ; it was necessary to strike deep and strike swiftly at a conspiracy which extended no man know how widely, and in which men like Julius Caesar goaognevdo.y dT hbey consulsl Piollwaereen,

and Orassus were strongly suspected of h had boon armed with extra constitutional resolution of the Senate in the comprehensive formula that they ' were to look to it that the State suffered no damage.' Still, without going so far as to mill this unexampled proceeding, as the Gorman critic Momm- see does, 'an act of the most brutal tyranny,' it is easy to understand how Mr. Forsyth, bringing a calm and dispassionate legal judgment to bear upon

* Ancient Classic's for English Readers. Cicero. By the Rev. W. Lucas Collins, arse Edinburgh and Loudon Blackwood and Sons. ,871. the ease, finds it impossible to reconcile it with our ideas of dignified and even-handed justice. It was the hasty instinct of self-preservation, the act of a weak government uncertain of its very friends, under the influence of terror,—a terror for which, no doubt, there were abundant grounds. When Cicero stood on tho prison steps, where he had waited to receive the report of those who were making sure work with the prisoners within, and announced their fate to the assembled crowd below in the single word ' Vixerunt' (a euphemism which we can only weakly translate into They have lived their life '), no doubt he felt that he and the Republic held theirs from that moment by a firmer tenure ; no doubt very many of those who heard him felt that they could breathe again,

n ow that the grasp of Catilino's assassins was, for the moment at all . vents, off their throats ; and the crowd who followed the consul home were sincere enough when they hailed such a vigorous avenger as the

Father of his Country.'I But none the less it was that which politicians have called worse than a crime,—it was a political blunder ; and Cicero came to find it so in after years ; though—partly from his immense self- appreciation, and partly from an honest determination to stand by his sot and deed in all its consequences—he never suffered the shadow of such a confession to appear in his most intimate correspondence. He claimed for himself ever afterwards the sole glory of having saved the State by such prompt and decided action ; and in this he was fully borne out by the facts : justifiable or unjustifiable, the act was his ; and there were burning hearts at Rome which dared not speak out against the popular consul, but set it down to his solo account against the day of retribution."

Mommsen's language is preposterous, especially when compared with that which ho holds about the deeds of other men. For our- aelvee, we should be disposed to praise rather than, with Mr. Collins, to apologize. It was almost a mockery, as no man knew better than Cicero himself, to seek for justice on Roman citizens through the processes of law. In Rome the sword was never blunt except when it was wielded by the hands of Justice. It was fear- fully cruel against a vanquished party, witness the proscriptions which had filled the Forum with heaps of corpses when Sulla and Marius were alternately masters of the capital ; it was pitilessly keen against foreign enemies or rebellious provincials, witness the million or so of human lives which Gaul lost in the process of being " pacified " by Cams ; but against murderers and traitors at home it was " borne in vain." Cicero found himself

in much the same position in which honest law-abiding citizens sometimes find themselves amongst the half-organized societies of the Now World. When judges are hopelessly powerless or corrupt, Vigilance Committees become necessary. If history recorded no worse crime than the execution of the fierce ruffians who, with Lentulus and Cethegus, were strangled in the Tullianum, its pages would be much whiter than they are. " He saw the

right," says Mr. Collins, in his very fair and candid estimate of Cicero's character, "and desired to follow it, but his good intentions were too often frustrated by a want of firmness and decision." His faults as a statesman were those obvious and irri- tating faults which often make us unjust to great good qualities. His vanity, for instance, puts out of sight his disinterestedness. And yet he was disinterested. It is enough to think what he might have teen if he had attached himself unscrupulously to either of the men who were struggling for the supreme power iu the State. Either would have purchased him at any price he chose to ask. At first, perhaps, he had dreams of being himself the leading -spirit of a renovated republic ; but afterwards lie stood aloof, in an honest belief that to swell the power either of Pompey or emu. would not be to serve the Commonwealth. Into Caesar's design he

must have penetrated as soon as ho came to discern the power of the man, and Pompey, who might have seemed his natural ally, ho know too well, knew him to be what Tacitus says that lie was, when compared with Sulk, occultior non melior.

" lie wanted manliness," says Mr. Collins very truly, in sum- ming up his character. Few of the ancients, perhaps, come up to our standard of that quality, with all its stern repression of the feelings. Their frequent tears are alone enough to condemn them, and Cicero's tears were very near the surface. He could shed them copiously and promptly for his clients, and they came in a more genuine and even ready flow when he was thinking of him- aelf. The baseness of his behaviour in exile has always been the scandal of his admirers and the opportunity of his detractors. All that we can say about it is that we do not know what exile was to a Roman, we can only guess, from seeing that it seemed an adequate punishment for any amount of villany and crime. Verres, for instance, plunders everything divine and human in a province, crucifies Roman citizens, commits, in short, every enormity that can be conceived, and he is considered to have expiated his crimes when he withdraws with all his property, spoils included, to some retirement in the provinces. Cicero may be pardoned for having bewailed a fate which had brought upon him a treatment

far harsher than what had befallen such a criminal as Verres.

Mr. Collins discusses a question that has puzzled his biogra- phers, the sources of his wealth, and is probably right iu conclud-

ing that, notwithstanding his boast that he had never received anything as an advocate, presents, which practically amounted to payment, were made to him. He reminds us that rictus, one of his clients, presented him with a handsome library, and conjec- tured that " this was not a solitary instance of the quiet evasion of the Ciceronian law." It would have been apposite to compare a similar difficulty, which has never, as far as we know, met with a satisfactory solution, with regard to the property, respectable in amount, though nothing like the vast wealth of Cicero, which Edmund Burke contrived to amass.

One of the best parts in Mr. Collins's book is that which treats of Cicero's oratorical achievements. He probably consults the tastes of his readers by abstaining from any detailed criticism of his eloquence ; but he gives excellent sketches of some of the most famous orations, and illustrates them with some remarkably spirited translations. Excellent, too, and compressing a great amount of matter into a small space, are the summaries of his ethical and philosophical treatises, while the chapter on " Cicero's Religion" discusses a somewhat obscure subject with much acuteness and good sense. We cannot do better, by way of doing justice both to the work and to its subject, than quote the concluding passage:—

" But whatever might have been the theological side, if one may so express it, of Cicero's religion, the moral aphorisms which meet us hero and there in his works have often in them a teaching which comes near the tone of Christian ethics. The words of Potrarch are hardly too strong, 'You would fancy sometimes it was not a Pagan philosopher, but a Christian apostle who was speaking' These are but a few out of many which might be quoted Strive ever for the truth, and so reckon as that not thou art mortal, but only this thy body ; for thou art not that which this outward form of thine shows forth, but each man's mind, that is the real man,—not the shape which can be traced with the finger.' ' Yea, rather, they live who have escaped from the bonds of their flesh as from a prison-house.' `Follow after justice and duty ; such a life is the path to heaven, and into you assembly of those who have once lived, and now, released from the body, dwell in that place.' Where, in any other heathen writer, shall we find such noble words as those which close the apostrophe in the Tusculans ' 2—' One single day well spent, and in accordance with thy precepts, were bettor to be chosen than an immortality of sin I' He is addressing himself, it is true, to Philosophy ; but his philosophy is here little less than the Wisdom of Scripture : and the spiritual aspiration is the samo—only uttered under greater diffi- culties—as that of the Psalmist when he exclaims, Ono day in thy courts is better than a thousand I' Wo may or may not adopt Erasmus's view of his inspiration—or rather, inspiration is a word which has more than one definition, and this would depend upon which definition we take; but we may well sympathize with the old scholar when ho says

I fool a better man for reading Cicero.' "