Anthony Trollope

“ Let Africanus be praised loudly, who destroyed Carthage and Numantia, the two cities which were most hostile to Rome. Let Paulus be regarded as great—he whose triumph that great King Perses adorned. Let Marius be held in undying honor, who twice saved Italy from foreign yoke. Let Pompey be praised above all, whose noble deeds are as wide as the sun's course. Perhaps among them there may be a spot, too, for me; unless, indeed, to win provinces to which we may take ourselves in exile is more than to guard that city to which the conquerors of provinces may return in safety. ”

“ It is said that he was unjust even to Atticus, accusing even Atticus of lukewarmness. What if he did so—for an hour? Is that an affair of ours? Did Atticus quarrel with him? Let any reader of these words who has lived long enough to have an old friend, ask himself whether there has never been a moment of anger in his heart—of anger of which he has soon learned to recognize the injustice? He may not have written his anger, but then, perhaps, he has not had the pen of a Cicero. Let those who rebuke the unmanliness of Cicero's wailings remember what were his sufferings. ”

“ Not by human wisdom, O ye judges, but by chance, and by the aid, as it were, of the gods themselves, an event has come to pass by which the hatred now felt for your order, and the infamy attached to the judgment seat, may be appeased; for an opinion has gone abroad, disgraceful to the Republic, full of danger to yourselves—which is in the mouths of all men not only here in Rome but through all nations—that by these courts as they are now constituted, a man, if he be only rich enough, will never be condemned, though he be ever so guilty. ”

“ Or it may be that the man of our day, with all these advantages, does not keep himself clean—that so many go astray that public opinion shall almost seem to tremble in the balance. Even with us this and that abomination becomes allowable because so many do it. With the Romans, in the time of Cicero, greed, feeding itself on usury, rapine, and dishonesty, was so fully the recognized condition of life that its indulgence entailed no disgrace. But Cicero, with eyes within him which saw farther than the eyes of other men, perceived the baseness of the stain. ”

“ To carry on the old trade of Prætor, Consul, Proconsul, and Imperator, so as to get what he could of power and wealth and dignity in the scramble, was, I think, Cæsar's purpose. The rest grew upon him. As Shakspeare, sitting down to write a play that might serve his theatre, composed some Lear or Tempest—that has lived and will live forever, because of the genius which was unknown to himself—so did Cæsar, by his genius, find his way to a power which he had not premeditated. A much longer time is necessary for eradicating an idea from men's minds than a fact from their practice. ”

“ To rob is base; but if you rob enough, robbery will become heroism, or, at any rate, magnificence. With Cæsar his debts have been accounted happy audacity; his pillage of Gaul and Spain, and of Rome also, have indicated only the success of the great General; his cruelty, which in cold-blooded efficiency has equalled if not exceeded the blood-thirstiness of any other tyrant, has been called clemency.82 I do not mean to draw a parallel between Cæsar and Cicero. No two men could have been more different in their natures or in their career. ”

“ If it is a piece of good-fortune to gain a crown without trouble, fortune never did more for mortal than it did for Pompeius; but on those who lack courage the gods lavish every favor and every gift in vain." I must say here that, while I acknowledge the German historian's research and knowledge without any reserve, I cannot accept his deductions as to character. I do not believe that Pompey found any diadem at his feet, or thought of any diadem, nor, according to my reading of Roman history, had Marius or had Sulla; nor did Cæsar. ”

“ Our hair is made to stand on end when we remember that men had to pick their steps in such a State as this, and to live if it were possible, and, if not, then to be ready to die. We come in upon the fag-end of the proscription, and see, not the bloody wreath of Sulla as he triumphed on his Marian foes, not the cruel persecution of the ruler determined to establish his order of things by slaughtering every foe, but the necessary accompaniments of such ruthless deeds—those attendant villanies for which the Jupiter Optimus Maximus of the day had neither ears nor eyes. ”

“ For any heartfelt conviction as to what might be best for his country or his countrymen, in what way he might most surely use his power for the good of the citizens generally, we must, I think, look in vain to that Pompey whom history has handed down to us. But, of all matters which interested Cicero, the governance of men interested him the most. How should the great Rome of his day rise to greater power than ever, and yet be as poor as in the days of her comparative insignificance? ”

“ Cicero was a man thoroughly human in all his strength and all his weakness. To sit apart from the world and be happy amid scorn, poverty, and obscurity, with a mess of cabbage and a crust, absolutely contented with abstract virtue, has probably been given to no man; but of none has it been less within the reach than of Cicero. To him ginger was always hot in the mouth, whether it was the spice of politics, or of social delight, or of intellectual enterprise. ”

“ The government of Rome had been an oligarchy for many years, though much had been done by the citizens to reduce the thraldom which an oligarchy is sure to exact. To that oligarchy Cicero was bound by all the convictions, by all the practices, and by all the prejudices of his life. When he speaks of a Republic he speaks of a people and of an Empire governed by an oligarchy; he speaks of a power to be kept in the hands of a few—for the benefit of the few, and of the many if it might be—but at any rate in the hands of a few. ”

“ With an oligarchy there will be other, perhaps graver, faults; but with an oligarchy there will be salt, though it be among a few. There will be a Cicero now and again—or at least a Cato. From the dead, stagnant level of personal despotism there can be no rising to life till corruption paralyzes the hands of power, and the fabric falls by its own decay Of this no proof can be found in the world's history so manifest as that taught by the Roman Empire. ”

“ Gradually growing from the little nest of robbers established on the banks of the Tiber, the people of Rome learned how to spread their arms over all the known world, and to conquer and rule, while they drew to themselves all that the ingenuity and industry of other people had produced. To do this, there must have been not only courage and persistence, but intelligence, patriotism, and superior excellence in that art of combination of which government consists. ”

“ We see the workings of his conscience, and, as we remember that Scipio's dream of his, we feel sure that he had, in truth, within him a recognition of a future life.
In discussing the character of a man, there is no course of error so fertile as the drawing of a hard and fast line. We are attracted by salient points, and, seeing them clearly, we jump to conclusions, as though there were a light-house on every point by which the nature of the coast would certainly be shown to us. ”

“ To plunder a province, to drive usury to the verge of personal slavery, to accept bribes for perjured judgment, to take illegal fees for services supposed to be gratuitous, was so much the custom of the noble Romans that we hardly hate his dishonest greed when displayed in its ordinary course. But because Cicero's honesty was abnormal, we are first surprised, and then, suspecting little deviations, rise up in wrath against him, because in the midst of Roman profligacy he was not altogether a Puritan in his money matters. ”

“ Every freeman should have given a vote according to his conscience. But in what country—the millennium not having arrived in any—has this been achieved? Though voting in England has not always been pure, we have not wished to do away with the votes of freemen and to submit everything to personal rule. Nor did Cicero.
He knew that much was bad, and had himself seen many things that were very evil. He had lived through the dominations of Marius and Sulla, and had seen the old practices of Roman government brought down to the pretence of traditional forms. ”

“ He is a coward to the critics because they have written without giving themselves time to feel the true meaning of his own words. If we had only known his acts and not his words—how he stood up against the judges at the trial of Verres, with what courage he encountered the responsibility of his doings at the time of Catiline, how he joined Pompey in Macedonia from a sense of sheer duty, how he defied Antony when to defy Antony was probable death—then we should not call him a coward! It is out of his own mouth that he is condemned. ”

“ It occurs to us as we read the history of Rome, beginning with the early Consuls and going to the death of Cæsar 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. ”

“ He might recognize the fact that comfort would combine itself with innocence, or disease and want with lust and greed. In this there was little need of a conscience—hardly, perhaps, room for it. But when ambition came, with all the opportunities that chance, audacity, and intellect would give—as it did to Sylla, to Cæsar, and to Augustus—then there was nothing to restrain the men. There was to such a man no right but his power, no wrong but opposition to it. ”

“ Hannibal seems always to be the master. Trebia, Thrasymene and Cannæ, year after year, threaten complete destruction to the State. Then comes the great Scipio; and no doubt, if we must mark an era of Roman greatness, it would be that of the battle of Zama and the submission of Carthage, 201 years before Christ. But with Scipio there springs up the idea of personal ambition; and in the Macedonian and Greek wars that follow, though the arm of Rome is becoming stronger every day, and her shoulders broader, there is already the glamour of her decline in virtue. ”

“ In the history of Rome at this time we find men of mark whose characters, as we read, become clear to us, or appear to become clear. Of Marius and of Sulla we have a defined idea. Cæsar, with his imperturbable courage, absence of scruples, and assurance of success, comes home to us. Cicero, I think, we certainly may understand. Catiline, Cato, Antony, and Brutus have left their portraits with us. ”

“ But you, Rullus, and those who are with you, have been mistaken grievously in supposing that you will be regarded as friends of the people in your attempts to subvert the Republic in opposition to a Consul who is known in very truth to be the people's friend I call upon you, I invite you to meet me in the assembly. Let us have the people of Rome as a judge between us. Let us look round and see what it is that the people really desire. We shall find that there is nothing so dear to them as peace and quietness and ease. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That which has been wrongly called democracy was conspiracy—not a conspiracy of democrats such as led to our Commonwealth, or to the American Independence, or to the French Revolution; but conspiracy of a few nobles for the better assurance of the plunder, and the power, and the high places of the Empire. Of any tendency toward democracy no man has been less justly accused than Cicero, unless it might be Cæsar. ”

“ To doubt—to tremble with anxiety—to vacillate hither and thither between this course and the other as to which may be the better—to complain within one's own breast that this or that thing has been an injustice—to hesitate within one's self, not quite knowing which way honor may require us to go—to be indignant even at fancied wrongs—to rise in wrath against another, and then, before the hour has passed, to turn that wrath against one's self—that is not to be a coward. ”

“ It is possible that the world may have been wrong as to a period of Roman history with which it has thought itself to be well acquainted; but the world now has nothing to go by but the facts as they have come down to it. The writers of the ages since have combined to speak of Cicero with respect and admiration. They have combined, also, to speak of Catiline with abhorrence. They have agreed, also, to treat those other rebels, the Gracchi, after such a fashion that, in spite of their sedition, a sweet savor, as I have said, attaches itself to their names. ”

“ If Cicero had been a man given to fear, as has been said of him, he must have passed a wretched life at this period. As far as I can judge of his words and doings throughout his life, he was not harassed by constitutional timidity. He feared to disgrace his name, to lower his authority, to become small in the eyes of men, to make political mistakes, to do that which might turn against him. In much of this there was a falling off from that dignity which, if we do not often find it in a man, we can all of us imagine ”

“ It was then that he might have been fourth with Cæsar, and Pompey, and Crassus, had he not felt himself bound not to serve against the Republic. And yet the biographer does not hesitate to load him with infamy because of a playful word in a letter half jocose and half pathetic to his friend. If a man's deeds be always honest, surely he should not be accused of dishonesty on the strength of some light word spoken in the confidence of familiar intercourse. The light words are taken to be grave because they meet the modern critic's eye clothed in the majesty of a dead language ”