Gaston Boissier

“ How was a man so taken up with himself and so careful of his interests able to enjoy so fully the pleasures of friendship, which seem at first sight, to exact devotedness and self-forgetfulness? How did he succeed in making the moralists, who assert that egotism is the death of true affection, belie themselves? [154]
This is still one of those problems of which the life of Atticus is full, and it is the most difficult to solve. Seen from a distance, even through the praises of Cicero, Atticus does not seem attractive, and one would not be tempted to choose him for a friend. ”

“ Caesar, on his part, dedicated his treatise De Analogia to Cicero, and on this occasion said to him in splendid phrases: “You have discovered all the resources of eloquence, and are the first to use them. In virtue of this you have deserved well of the Roman name, and you do honour to our country. You have obtained the most illustrious of all honours, and a triumph preferable to those of the greatest generals, for it is better to extend the boundaries of the mind than to enlarge the limits of the empire!” ”

“ People who did not use their rights, or only used them to sell them, were not worthy to preserve them. That absolute power which they had invited by their votes, which they had received with applause, was made for them; and one understands that the historian who studies from afar the events of the past, when he sees liberty disappear from Rome, consoles himself for its fall by saying that it was deserved and inevitable, and that he pardons or even applauds the man who, in overturning it, was only an instrument of necessity or justice. ”

“ He was still quite young when the aged Sulla, who had no reason to like him, met him at Athens. He took so much pleasure in hearing him read Greek and Latin verses and talk about literature, that he would not leave him, and wished by all means to take him back with him to Rome. Long after, Augustus felt the same charm; he was never tired of hearing Atticus talk, and when he could not go to see him, he wrote to him every day simply to receive his answers, and thus to continue, in some sort, those long conversations with which he was so delighted. ”

“ The republic did not perish by the audacity of its enemies alone, but also by the apathy of its partisans. The sad spectacle it offered for fifty years, the public sale of dignities, the scandalous violence that took place on the Forum every time a new law was discussed, the battles that at each new election stained the Campus Martius with blood, those armies of gladiators needed for self-defence, all those shameful disorders, all those base intrigues in which the last strength of Rome was used up, had completely discouraged honest men. ”

“ No one liked that excitement of public life which statesmen complain of when they possess it, and never cease to regret when they have lost it, more than he. We must not believe him too readily when he says that he is tired of the stormy discussions of the senate; that he seeks a country where they have not heard of Vatinius or Caesar, and where they do not trouble themselves about agrarian laws; that he has an anxious craving to go and forget Rome under the agreeable shades of Arpinum, or in the delightful neighbourhood of Formiae. ”

“ We treat them with insult, harshness, cruelty, disdain; we wrangle, lament, and storm, and yet they move. We cannot overcome them. We think, when we have plucked out their heart, that they are done with and we shall hear no more of them. But no; they are always alive, they are always moving.” This ease with which she receives impressions, and which causes her to adopt so quickly the sentiments of the people she visits, makes her also feel the shock of the great events she looks on at. The style of her letters rises when she narrates them, and, like Cicero, she becomes eloquent unconsciously. ”

“ On all sides his friendship is demanded, his support solicited, men put themselves under his protection. His Philippics, which, happily, he had not time to revise, are scattered through the whole world, very nearly as he spoke them, and with the vivacity of the first sketch, preserve traces of the interruptions and applause of the people. These passionate harangues carry everywhere the passion of these grand popular scenes. They are read in the provinces, they are devoured in the armies, and from the most distant countries evidence of the admiration they excite arrives to Cicero! ”

“ His life has a special interest for us. He was not, like Brutus, a brilliant exception among his contemporaries; on the contrary, he quite belongs to his time; he lived as others lived around him. All the young men of that time, the Curios, the Dolabellas, resemble him. They are all, like him, corrupted early, little concerned about their dignity, prodigal of their wealth, friends of facile pleasures; they all throw themselves into public life as soon as they can, with a restless ambition and great needs to satisfy, and with few scruples and no beliefs. ”

“ Royalty inspired the Romans with an instinctive repugnance, especially since they had conquered the East. They had found there, under this name, the most odious of governments, the most complete slavery in the midst of the most refined civilization, all the pleasures of luxury and the arts, the finest expansion of intellect with the heaviest and basest tyranny; princes accustomed to play with the fortune, honour, and life of men, a species of cruel spoilt children, such as are only now to be found in the African deserts. ”

“ Cicero dragged him into the case. Traces of the dismay that seized the audience when they heard this dreaded name are perceptible in his speech. The accusers were dumfoundered, the multitude remained silent. The young orator alone seemed tranquil and self-possessed. He smiled, he joked, he dared to jeer at those terrible men whom no one else dared look in the face, because in doing so they thought of the two thousand heads of knights and senators they had cut off. He does not altogether respect the master himself. That surname, “the happy,” that his flatterers had given him gave rise to a pun. ”

“ It must have been a great relief to that mind usually so undecided and uncertain to see the truth so clearly, to be no longer perplexed by shadows, to have such a complete confidence in the justice of his cause, and after so much doubt and obscurity at last to fight in clear daylight. We feel that his mind is at ease! how much freer and more lively he is! what ardour there is in this old man, and what eagerness for the fight! None of the young men about him show so much decision as he, and he himself is assuredly younger than when he strove against Catiline or Clodius. ”

“ I mistrust those learned men who, without any acquaintance with men or experience of life, pretend to judge Cicero from his correspondence. Most frequently they judge him ill. They search for the expression of his thought in that commonplace politeness which society demands, and which no more binds those who use it than it deceives those who accept it. Those concessions that must be made if we wish to live together they call cowardly compromises. They see manifest contradictions in those different shades a man gives to his opinions, according to the persons he is talking with. ”

“ Was it impossible to think that it would be more surely cured by liberty than by despotism? Had it not been seen by recent examples that a strong current of popular opinion was sufficient to overturn all this aristocratic resistance? The laws gave the people the means of recovering their influence if they willed it energetically. With the liberty of voting and of speaking in the public assembly, with the intervention of the tribunes and the invincible strength of numbers, they must always end in being masters. ”

“ He saw that the popular party had more taste for social reforms than for political liberties, and he thought, with reason, that a democratic monarchy would not be repugnant to it. By multiplying dissensions, by becoming the secret accomplice of Catiline and Clodius, he wearied timid republicans of a too troubled liberty and prepared them to sacrifice it willingly to repose. He hoped in this way that the republic, shaken by these daily attacks, which exhausted and tired out its most intrepid defenders, would at last fall without violence and without noise. ”

“ Having once felt his ground, he was more sure of his steps and walked with confidence.
Such was the position of Cicero during Caesar’s dictatorship; we see clearly that it was not so humble as has been asserted, and that, in a time of despotism, he was able to render some services to liberty. These services have been generally ill appreciated, and I am not surprised at it. It is with men something as it is with works of art: when we see them at a distance we are only struck with the bold situations and well-drawn attitudes; the details and finer shades escape us. ”

“ A man of wit and pleasure, indifferent to principles, sceptical in opinion, accustomed to live in a frivolous and polished society, Cato could scarcely appear to him anything else than fanatical and brutal. As there was nothing that he put above refinement and politeness of manners, an elegant vice suited him better than a savage virtue. Cato, on the contrary, although he was not a stranger to literary culture and the spirit of society, had none the less remained at bottom an old-fashioned Roman. ”

“ All the evil came because Augustus thought more of the present than of the future. He was an able man, full of resources in escaping from embarrassing and difficult situations; he was not in reality a great politician, for it seems that his view seldom extended beyond the difficulties of the moment. Placed face to face with a people who bore the kingship uneasily, and who were not fit for anything else, he invented this sort of disguised kingship, and allowed all the forms of the old government to exist by its side without endeavouring to conform them to it. ”

“ Never has a more incredible contempt of life been seen, never has death caused less fear. Since Cato, suicide became a contagion, a frenzy. The vanquished, Juba, Petreius, Scipio, know no other way of escaping the conqueror. Laterensis kills himself through regret when he sees his friend Lepidus betray the republic; Scapula, who can no longer hold out in Cordova, has a funeral pyre constructed, and burns himself alive; when Decimus Brutus, a fugitive, hesitates to choose this heroic remedy, his friend Blasius kills himself before him in order to set him an example. ”

“ Prejudices seem to become narrower and more inflexible when they have but a short time to live. We know how our émigrés, face to face with a victorious revolution, used up their last strength in foolish struggles for precedence. In the same way the Roman nobility, at the moment when the power was slipping from it, seemed to make a point of exaggerating its defects, and of discouraging by its disdain the respectable people who offered themselves to defend it. Cicero felt himself drawn towards it by his taste for refinement of manners and elegant pleasures ”

“ It is no longer the custom to turn oneself into an administrator or a general at fifty, and these things seem to us to demand a special vocation and a long apprenticeship; history shows us that it was otherwise at Rome. Had they not just seen the voluptuous Lucullus, on his way to command the army of Asia, learn the art of war during the voyage, and conquer Mithridates on his arrival? As to administration, a rich Roman learnt it in his own home. ”

“ It was precisely the uncertainty that the interested falsehoods of Augustus had thrown upon the real nature and limits of the power of the earlier Caesars that rendered their tyranny insupportable. When a government boldly states its principles we know how to behave towards it; but what course is to be followed, what language held when the forms of liberty are united with the reality of despotism, when absolute power hides under republican fictions? In the midst of this obscurity every course has danger and threatens ruin. Men are ruined by independence, they may also be ruined by servility ”

“ We are right then in saying that we find the same qualities in Cicero’s speeches as in his letters, but they are more evident in his letters, because he is freer and gives more play to his feelings. When he writes to any of his friends, he does not reflect so long as when he is to address the people; he gives his first impressions, and gives them with life and passion as they rise in him. He does not take the trouble to polish his style; all that he writes has usually such a graceful air, something so easy and simple that we cannot suspect preparation or artifice. ”