James Leigh Strachan-Davidson

“ Cicero was not a man of cool and cautious temperament, afraid to commit himself to opinions, accurately weighing and discounting probabilities beforehand, or occupying by anticipation the province of the philosophical historian. From the letters of such a one we should have learnt comparatively little. We have to deal with a man of lively mind, quick to receive impressions, rushing to conclusions, garrulous in expression, and sensitively responsive to the prevailing temper or drift of opinion. In communing with Atticus he never pauses to make his writing self-consistent or plausible. ”

“ The struggle with Rome had ended more than 200 years before Cicero was born; after generations of gallant resistance the Volscians of Arpinum were reduced to the lowly position of "citizens without the right of suffrage," living under Roman law and serving in the Roman legions without political privileges either in their own town or in the capital. But the races predestined to political greatness possess the faculty of forgetting that which it is best not to remember ”

“ In the next generation the Romans deliberately set aside the wisdom of their ancestors, and adopted a system of harsh and rigid exclusion in the place of the liberal practice of gradually elevating aliens to the citizenship, by which the greatness of Rome had been built up. The punishment for this political crime came upon them when, a century after the enfranchisement of Arpinum, their Italian allies, after having in vain sought the citizenship by peaceful agitation, at length resolved to demand it at the point of the sword. ”

“ He was pleading before a bench of senators, newly re-established in the law-courts by Sulla, who would not be likely to tolerate from a young man of equestrian family anything which implied disapproval of the Restoration or disrespect towards the government. Nevertheless, with the instinct of a great pleader, Cicero seems to have felt the pulse of the jury as he proceeded. He begins by protesting that he will touch on politics only so far as is absolutely necessary for his case; he ends by claiming that he may speak not only for his client but for himself. ”

“ In the midst of the confusion, when the city was full of gangs of assassins hunting down their victims for the sake of the blood-money promised by the government, Sextus Roscius, a wealthy citizen of Ameria, who had served in Sulla's army and had come to Rome after his victory, was murdered in the street as he returned home from supper. The assassins were neighbours and distant kinsmen who had been on bad terms with the murdered man. These men next applied to Chrysogonus, a favourite freedman of the Dictator, and induced him to get the name of Roscius inserted in the Proscription list. ”

“ The statesman who came from a country-town in Italy was perhaps more than compensated for the lack of ancestral connection with the city of Rome, by the keen interest which his fellow-townsmen and neighbours took in his political career, by their pride and delight in his exploits, and by their anxiety for the reputation which reflected credit on their native place. ”

“ Most laudable, or rather I should say lovable, is this feeling of good neighbourship, which keeps the constant fashion of the olden time, not shadowed by thoughts of evil, not practised in untruths, not veneered with false colours, undisciplined in the arts of the suburb and of the city. ”

“ Reasons "plentiful as blackberries" crowd through his mind as he writes, and the reasons of to-day will often not fit in with those of yesterday. There is no reticence, no economy of statement; every passing fancy, every ebullition of temper, every varying mood of exultation and depression, every momentary view of men and things, finds itself accurately mirrored in these letters. ”

“ The noblest men in Rome were brought to the bar on the charge of having "incited the allies to revolt." One of the victims was the orator Gaius Cotta. "His exile," writes Cicero, [16] "just at the time when I was most anxious to hear him was the first untoward incident in my career." Cicero had to content himself with listening to the political harangues of the magistrates. ”

“ Of Sulla himself, whose carelessness and indifference allows creatures like Chrysogonus to batten on the Commonwealth, Cicero speaks with an apparent respect which really covers the sharpest censure. "Rascally freedmen," he says, [23] "always try to throw the responsibility for their misdeeds on their patron; but all the world knows that many things have been done, of which Sulla is only half aware. ”

“ Teutones and saved Rome in this her first conflict with the German race. Along with the full Roman franchise the Arpinates now enjoyed a considerable measure of local self-government. They were an organised community, capable of deciding local questions for themselves, and with their local politics and parties. We get an interesting glimpse of Arpinum in the second century B.C. from a passing notice which Cicero [4] gives of his family two generations back. ”

“ And why not? when we remember that the wise man of old is said to have rejected immortality that he might see Ithaca once more. The early years of Cicero were spent partly in his native hills, partly in Rome. ”

“ Elsewhere [19] he relates that he was ambitious to imitate the two leaders of the bar (for Cotta had now been restored by Sulla) , but of the two he considered Hortensius the better model.
Next year Cicero had the opportunity of establishing once for all his own position as a great advocate. During Sulla's reign of terror, 80 B.C. legalised murder had been an everyday occurrence in Rome, and it was not easy to confine the slaughter within the precise limits which the Dictator ordained. ”

“ The lot gave him as his province the western portion of Sicily with Lilybæum for his headquarters. The other side of the island (though one prætor ruled the whole) had a separate quæstor who resided at Syracuse. ”