Cicero
y JOHN FERGUSON CICERO died two thousand years ago, on December 7, 43 BC. We find it hard to form a fair estimate of him. Eighty years ago, when Fronde and Mommsen were glorifying Cmsar as the strong man who, given life, might have saved Rome, Cicero was pushed into the background as an ineffective idealist. Now we are not so sure about strong men, and Michael Grant suspects that we are in danger of breeding Hitlers by prescribing Caesar for school reading. This has not rehabilitated Cicero. On the contrary, it was the signal for Carcopino to launch all the fury of his extensive, if sometimes eccentric, scholar- ship to show him at best a nerveless compromiser and at worst an unscrupulous power-seeker.
He lived in an age of transition. At Rome the facade of political power rested with the old nobility. Mommsen long ago singled out the families which formed the aristocracy within the aristocracy, the Valerii, Fabii, Cornelii, Claudii, /Emilii and Manlii; corresponding to the Ben- tincks, Campbells, Cavendishes, Grenvilles, Pelhams, Russells and Stanhopes of British Whiggism. Rome had long been nominally a democracy. The commons had all the constitu- tional rights they could desire. The power lay with tradition and money.
The nobles had the skill Blake prophesied against in his own day, to `compell the poor to live upon a Crust of bread by ,soft mild arts.' They knew how to let moral duty tune their tongue. They knew that religion was the opiate of the people. Polybius, Plutarch, Varro, Scievola and Cicero himself all praise, often with cynical scepticism, the way in which the State religion stood in the path of revolution, and Augustine attacks the ruling class in like terms. The patronage, pageantry and public holidays with which the empire kept the people quiet were there under the republic. The threat to them lay partly with the power of money held by the business- usiness- men, who on the whole preferred economic to political power, but had been made a dangerous political force by the young Gracchus; partly with the generals, who were coming to see that an efficient battalion could snap its fingers at tradition; partly with their own restless malcon- tents, who had not been tamed and admitted to the Establishment and who might rouse -the commons out of their apathy into a popular dic- tatorship. The greatest danger was from an alliance of all three. This was what happened When Crassus, Pompey and Cwsar joined forces.
Cicero was not even a noble, let alone one of the inner ring. But he was ambitious, and every- thing gave place to •that. No doubt he was genuine enough in his indignation at the crimes of a Verres, but he was prepared to defend equal scoundrels when it suited his particular interests.
His work on ethics insists that what is right is always expedient. It is terrifyingly easy to draw the practical corollary that what seems expedient must be right. Hence he had no firm political position. His contemporaries knew it. Laberius entered a crowded theatre and saw him sitting there. 'Afraid there's no room,' said Cicero. `Oh! I thought you always occupied two seats.'
One thing was certain. He was not a commons man. He called them 'the dregs of Romulus,' the miserable starveling rabble.' This, and his vanity, caused the Right wing to let him in when faced with a threat from their own Left. They knew their man. A year or two before. Cicero had been in amicable communication with Catiline. Now he flayed him with his tongue, proclaimed martial laiN and had the `conspirators' executed. The decisive voice was the conservative aristocrat Cato's, but the nobles were content that Cicero should receive the praise—or the blame. We shall never know the truth about the Catiline affair. Were Sacco and Vanzetti guilty of murder, or only of political extremism? Four years after the e■ecutions the commons were laying flowers on Catiline's grave.
The danger to those in power lay in a coalition of their opponents. Cicero was prepared to offer a programme to combat this, vague and negative, but at least a programme. It began as the celebrated concordia ordinum, an alliance of the old nobility and the new bourgeoisie against revolution. Presently the idea widened. In defend- ing Sestius in 56 ac, he says that there are two parties in politics, those who are gentlemen and, those who are not. The gentlemen are the Estab- lishment and their hangers-on, the upper classes, the squirearchy and the businessmen. Criminality, financial difficulties and a sympathy with the man in the street are the principal bars. Let them band together and aim at peace with honour.
It was useless; those who held the power were too blindly selfish even to see where their own interests lay. Cicero still hoped. He did not want change; he liked the system in which he had reached the top and in which there was plenty of scope for him to show off the oratory at which alone he really excelled. But he saw that he could not rely on the aristocrats. His mind turned to a single leader, a sort of Pericles or Churchill, who by personality and counsel could hold together the forces of conservatism. Perhaps he dreamed of fulfilling the role himself. But however vain, he was not hopelessly unrealistic. He came to cast others for Ffihrer and himself for Polonius, a part for which he was not ill fitted. Only Cmsar he could not stomach as pro- tagonist, It is not easy to say why, for he havered long enough between Pompey and Cmsar. Per- haps deep down he knew that Caesar had a vision and decisiveness he himself lacked. Alongside Pompey he might be a power in the land, along- side Cxsar he would be a vocal nonentity. So he played with Pompey, who let him down, and later with young Octavian, who ruthlessly sacri- ficed him to Antony's hatred.
Cicero's scheme was not unintelligent. The danger to the State lay in a combination of dis- contented nobles, businessmen and military ad- venturers. The State might be saved if the military adventurers were tamed and brought to the side of the upper and middle classes, especially if he had philosophy and oratory at his call. But to the real problems his eyes were closed.
Yet this said, it is easy to underestimate Cicero. He may not have been with the angels, but where were the angels anyway? At least he was not with the devils. He was not unlike Edmund Burke. 'With his virtues and powers were con- joined defects which largely neutralised their influence. He was too literary to be a philo: sopher and too philosophic to be a politician. Pollio shrewdly spoke of him as possessing industry and genius, but lacking courage and self-control. Augustus summed him up as an orator and patriot. But the pleasantest tribute came from Livy. Livy's defects as an historian are numerous and obvious. His republican bias was a source of some amusement to Augustus (once he could afford to be amused). But his judgments of character and personality are generally sound. Of Cicero he wrote, If one weighs his virtues with his faults, he deserves a place in history as a truly great man, and another Cicero would be required to praise him ade- quately.'
Previous page
