BOOKS.
RAMSAY'S PRO CLUENTIO.* THE authorities of the Clarendon Press have done wisely in including in their series of classical text-books this admirable specimen of editing. Like other distinguished scholars, Professor Ramsay was content with giving expression to but a very small part of the great learning which he had acquired, though, thanks to the affectionate care with which his successor in the Glasgow Chair of Humanity has edited his remains, the monuments of his labours are less inadequate than they would otherwise have been. The Pro Metal°, however, was published in his life-time, and maybe taken as expressing his idea of what such a book should be. It was written, as he says, chiefly for the benefit of younger scholars, though he expresses a modest hope, which has certainly been realized, that it might be found useful by those who were more advanced. Comparing it with the edition of the Mostellaria lately noticed in this journal, we find it far superior, as being far more complete with regard fo the interpretation of the text. It does not display, of course, the same amount of recondite learning, for the use of which, indeed, there is not the same call in dealing with Cicero as in dealing with Plautus. But the exceedingly difficult and complicated questions of Roman law involved in the case are treated with clearness and precision, and the tangled web of the story told in the Oration is made plain.
Among the " private " orations of Cicero, the Pro Cluentio is certainly pre-eminent, both for the interest of the subject and for the consummate skill of rhetoric and argument which it exhibits. Blair, in his Lectures on Rhetoric, selects it as a model of judicial oratory, and analyzes it with considerable care ; Niebuhr recommended it as specially suitable for the purposes of the classical student, ranking it with the De Corona of Demos- thenes. As Professor Ramsay says in his preface,—
. It was composed and delivered when Cicero was in the very prime of life and intellectual vigour, before his mind had been harassed, his temper soured, his courage shaken, and his energies impaired by the anxieties, disappointments, dangers, and misfortunes which beset his declining years. Ho had, at the time, the strongest motives for exer- tion. His success in public life had been uninterrupted, but the great prize was not yet won. He had mounted high on the path of political distinction, but the topmost pinnacle yet rose steep before him, and this ho could not hope to reach, except by maintaining and increasing that reputation as an orator to which alone he owed the favour of his countrymen and his previous triumphs."
The story itself is one which few causes celebres surpass in strangeness and variety of interest. The affair of Cluentius was not of public concern, yet it is in the closest connection with Roman history. The critical time to which it belongs, a period extending from the Social war down to the days when the end of the Republic was fast approaching, the picture which it presents of the corruption of the Roman judicature and the utter feeble- ness of the law ; the revelations which it makes of a world that is almost unknown to us from other sources, the social life of the provincial towns, these amid other features combine to make it well worthy of attention. Its main outlines may be thus sketched.
The principal characters are three in number,—Saasia, the pro- secutor ; Oppianicus, her deceased husband, dead some years before the trial took place ; Cluentius, her sou, the accused. They were all natives of Larinum, a town of Apulia, the scene of most of the events which culminated in the trial. Cluentius had been long alienated from his mother. An unpardonable wrong which this woman had done to her daughter, nothing less than seducing from her the husband to whom she had herself given her, had caused a permanent feud. This quarrel was aggravated by subsequent events. Sassia had wearied of the husband whom she had stolen from her daughter, and had looked with favour on the man who rid her of him. This man was Oppianicus. A partizan of Sulla, he had, on the triumph of that chief, exercised a reign of terror in Larinum. When he proceeded to give further proofs of his devotion by removing the only obstacle which remained between them, that is, by murdering two out of his three children (Sassia would not hear of there being so many heirs in a family), she rewarded him with her hand. Soon he came into collision with Cluentius. The priests of Mars of Larinum were slaves belonging to the town, and doubtless a valuable property. Oppianicus, banished from the society of Larinum for a series of crimes which we have not space to enumerate, took up their cause and maintained their rights to Roman citizenship. The town engaged Cluentius as their advo-
• Cicero pro Clurntio. With Intreduction and Notes by William Ramsay. M.A., formerly Protesnor of Humanity in the University of Glasgow. Edited by George G. Hannay, 31.A., Profmor of Humanity in the University of Glasgow. Ozford: The Clarendon Press. ltult.
cate. Oppianicus attempted to poison his opponent. Cluentius, who had long endured his wrongs in silence, felt that he must act. He indicted the accomplices of Oppianicus; and when those were found guilty, Oppianicus himself. A strange trial followed. The guilt of the man was manifest, but he had money. He entered into communication with one Staienus, a juror, who pro- mised to buy the requisite majority of his colleagues. The price was fixed, and Oppianicus handed over the sum. But the juror thought it a grand opportunity of doing a stroke of business for himself. In short, he kept the money, and told the colleagues to whom he had promised their price that it was not forthcoming. When the day for giving the verdict arrived, Staienus and his friends pronounced the astonished defendant guilty ; and though some of the respectable jurors voted the other way, he was con- demned. His punishment was neither fine nor imprisonment, much less death, merely banishment from the capital and its precincts. Two or three years afterwards he died of a fall from his horse. Then Sassia, whose hatred of her son had been gathering strength, conceived the idea that she might thus be able to contrive his destruction. She accused Cluentius of having compassed the death of his step-father, as well as of other crimes. Her first attempt failed. The slaves whom she tortured refused to give evidence. Two years afterwards she renewed it. She had taken one of the slaves into high favour, and be had committed a rob- bery and an atrocious murder in her house. She forced from him a confession of his former guilt, or forged it ; cut out his tongue that he might not recant, and hurried him to the cross. On the strength of this evidence she indicted her son ; and it was on this occasion that Cicero delivered his great speech. Cluentius, in fact, was in danger. The trial in which he had figured as pro- secutor against Oppianicus had become notorious. The judge and more than one of the jurors had suffered some loss either in public repute or in purse from having taken part in it. It was com- monly believed that there had been foul play, as indeed there had been. The truth was, as we are informed on other occasions by the orator himself, that there had been bribery on both sides. The prosecutor had outbid the accused. The very sum which he had paid was well known. " How many miles is your farm from the city??" one of the jurors had been asked, when attending as a witness in another case. " Something less than fifty-three," was his answer. " The very sum," shouted the audience, catching at the equivoque between millia passuum and millia sestertium. Oppianicus had offered 40,000; Cluentius hand- somely outbid him. " I threw dust in the eyes of the jurors," said the great advocate, speaking of the case at a subsequent time; but it is probable that substantial justice was done, that Oppiani- cus, though scarcely punished, had been rightly checked in his course of crime, and that an infamous attempt of Sassia on the life of her son was defeated. On these points the counsel for the accused had doubtless a case of overwhelming strength. He detailed in terribly graphic detail the long series of crimes which had made Oppianicus the common horror of his native town. And he drew a picture, not easily to be matched for force, of the un- natural Sassia. Her journey across Italy from the Upper Sea to Rome and her proceedings in the capital are described with great power. His neighbours at Aquinas and Fabrateria had told him, he says, about it :—
" They had heard that some woman was going from Larinum, from the very shores of the Upper Sea to Rome, with a great retinue and much wealth, that she might make the more sure of destroying the son whom she had put on trial for his life. There was not one of them, I may say, but thought that every spot where she had passed should be purified ; not one but believed that the earth, which is the mother of us all, was polluted by the footsteps of a mother so steeped in crime. So it was that in no town was she allowed to abide ; where there were so many to entertain, there was not one but fled the contagion of her presence. She trusted herself to darkness and to solitude rather than to any town or any host. And does she think that any of us know not what now she is doing, what she is contriving, even what she is pur- posing? We know to whom she has applied, to whom she has promised her wealth, whose honour she has sought to sap with her bribes. We know, too, of those nightly sacrifices, though she deems them secret, and of those impious vows, those vows with which she even calls the gods to witness her crimes, nor knows that the favour of Heaven is gained by piety and religion and righteous prayers, not by impure superstition, and that it cannot be won by the slaughter of victims to give accom- plishment to crime."
The orator then turned with prodigious effect to the company of " witnesses to character" which had assembled to support the accused. Larinum and the neighbouring towns had sent most of their principal citizens, who, with the customary abandonment of Southern demeanour, were shedding copious tears. " Few," cried Cicero, as he turned to the array, " few, methinks, are so loved by one as this man is loved by all of these." The great display of eloquence did not fail of success ; Cluentius was acquitted.
The sketch we have given necessarily omits a vast amount of picturesque detail, which makes the story one of the most interest- ing in ancient, not to say modern, jurisprudence. Nor have we enlarged on the valuable opportunity of studying the theory and practice of the Roman law which it affords. The accused could have employed, it seems, had he been willing, a curious technical objection to the law under which he was indicted. The real strength of the attack upon him lay in the odious recollections of the corrupt practices at the trial of Oppianicus. And there was a chapter in the law which took cognizance of such an offence, but it was specially limited to members of the Senate, and therefore did not apply to Cluentius. This, again, illustrates those changes in the jurisdiction which form so important a chapter in the later history of the Republic. And, more marked than all else, stands out the feebleness of the law, a feebleness which it would be wholly false to call mercy. It is strange, indeed, after reading of the massacres of Marius and Sulla, to see how so atrocious a series of crimes as were crowded into the career of Oppianicus was visited with a mild sentence of banishment. The spectacle of thousands of citizens massacred without a scruple on the one hand, and of an atrocious villain murdering scores of victims with comparative impunity on the other, is not uniustruc- tive, horrible as it is. We can wonder no longer that men turned with longing to a stronger rule. They were tired of politics, which were, indeed, a bloody game, and they wanted to be safe in their beds. The whole subject is profoundly interesting, and the student could not have a better guide than he will find here.
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