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| Transcriber's Note:                                |
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| Latin word "demuntiat" in Footnote 222 has been    |
| corrected as "denuntiat" and the Latin words "At"  |
| and "audient" in Footnote 253 have been corrected  |
| as "Ut" and "audiunt" respectively after checking  |
| with reliable sources.                             |
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THE

LIFE OF CICERO


BY

ANTHONY TROLLOPE


_IN TWO VOLUMES_

VOL. II.


NEW YORK

HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE

1881




CONTENTS OF VOLUME II.


                                         PAGE
 CHAPTER I.

 HIS RETURN FROM EXILE                      7

 CHAPTER II.

 CICERO, AETAT. 52, 53, 54.                 38

 CHAPTER III.

 MILO                                      59

 CHAPTER IV.

 CILICIA                                   76

 CHAPTER V.

 THE WAR BETWEEN CAESAR AND POMPEY         110

 CHAPTER VI.

 AFTER THE BATTLE                         129

 CHAPTER VII.

 MARCELLUS, LIGARIUS, AND DEIOTARUS       147

 CHAPTER VIII.

 CAESAR'S DEATH                            172

 CHAPTER IX.

 THE PHILIPPICS                           195

 CHAPTER X.

 CICERO'S DEATH                           231

 CHAPTER XI.

 CICERO'S RHETORIC                        249

 CHAPTER XII.

 CICERO'S PHILOSOPHY                      277

 CHAPTER XIII.

 CICERO'S MORAL ESSAYS                    304

 CHAPTER XIV.

 CICERO'S RELIGION                        321


 APPENDIX                                 333

 INDEX                                    337




THE

LIFE OF CICERO.




CHAPTER I.

_HIS RETURN FROM EXILE._


Cicero's life for the next two years was made conspicuous by a series of
speeches which were produced by his exile and his return. These are
remarkable for the praise lavished on himself, and by the violence with
which he attacked his enemies. It must be owned that never was abuse
more abusive, or self-praise uttered in language more laudatory.[1]
Cicero had now done all that was useful in his public life. The great
monuments of his literature are to come. None of these had as yet been
written except a small portion of his letters--about a tenth--and of
these he thought no more in regard to the public than do any ordinary
letter-writers of to-day. Some poems had been produced, and a history of
his own Consulship in Greek; but these are unknown to us. He had already
become the greatest orator, perhaps, of all time--and we have many of
the speeches spoken by him. Some we have--those five, namely, telling
the story of Verres--not intended to be spoken, but written for the
occasion of the day rather than with a view to permanent literature. He
had been Quaestor, AEdile, Praetor, and Consul, with singular and
undeviating success. He had been honest in the exercise of public
functions when to be honest was to be singular. He had bought golden
opinions from all sorts of people. He had been true to his country, and
useful also--a combination which it was given to no other public man of
those days to achieve. Having been Praetor and Consul, he had refused the
accustomed rewards, and had abstained from the provinces. His speeches,
with but few exceptions, had hitherto been made in favor of honesty.
They are declamations against injustice, against bribery, against
cruelty, and all on behalf of decent civilized life. Had he died then,
he would not have become the hero of literature, the marvel among men of
letters whom the reading world admires; but he would have been a great
man, and would have saved himself from the bitterness of Caesarean
tongues.

His public work was in truth done. His further service consisted of the
government of Cilicia for a year--an employment that was odious to him,
though his performance of it was a blessing to the province. After that
there came the vain struggle with Caesar, the attempt to make the best of
Caesar victorious, the last loud shriek on behalf of the Republic, and
then all was over. The fourteen years of life which yet remained to him
sufficed for erecting that literary monument of which I have spoken, but
his public usefulness was done. To the reader of his biography it will
seem that these coming fourteen years will lack much of the grace which
adorned the last twenty. The biographer will be driven to make excuses,
which he will not do without believing in the truth of them, but
doubting much whether he may beget belief in others. He thinks that he
can see the man passing from one form to another--his doubting devotion
to Pompey, his enforced adherence to Caesar, his passionate opposition to
Antony; but he can still see him true to his country, and ever on the
alert against tyranny and on behalf of pure patriotism.

At the present we have to deal with Cicero in no vacillating spirit, but
loudly exultant and loudly censorious. Within the two years following
his return he made a series of speeches, in all of which we find the
altered tone of his mind. There is no longer that belief in the ultimate
success of justice, and ultimate triumph of the Republic, which glowed
in his Verrine and Catiline orations. He is forced to descend in his
aspirations. It is not whether Rome shall be free, or the bench of
justice pure, but whether Cicero shall be avenged and Gabinius punished.
It may have been right--it was right--that Cicero should be avenged and
Gabinius punished; but it must be admitted that the subjects are less
alluring.

His first oration, as generally received, was made to the Senate in
honor of his return. The second was addressed to the people on the same
subject. The third was spoken to the college of priests, with the view
of recovering the ground on which his house had stood, and which Clodius
had attempted to alienate forever by dedicating it to a pretended
religious purpose. The next, as coming on our list, though not so in
time, was addressed again to the Senate concerning official reports made
by the public soothsayers as interpreters of occult signs, as to whether
certain portents had been sent by the gods to show that Cicero ought not
to have back his house. Before this was made he had defended Sextius,
who as Tribune had been peculiarly serviceable in assisting his return.
This was before a bench of judges; and separated from this, though made
apparently at the same time, is a violent attack upon Vatinius, one of
Caesar's creatures, who was a witness against Sextius. Then there is a
seventh, regarding the disposition of the provinces among the Propraetors
and Proconsuls, the object of which was to enforce the recall of Piso
from Macedonia and Gabinius from Syria, and to win Caesar's favor by
showing that Caesar should be allowed to keep the two Gauls and
Illyricum. To these must be added two others, made within the same
period, for Caelius and Balbus. The close friendship between Cicero and
the young man Caelius was one of the singular details of the orator's
life. Balbus was a Spaniard, attached to Caesar, and remarkable as having
been the first man not an Italian who achieved the honor of the
Consulship.

It has been disputed whether the first four of these orations were
really the work of Cicero, certain German critics and English scholars
having declared them to be "parum Ciceronias"--too little like Cicero.
That is the phrase used by Nobbe, who published a valuable edition of
all Cicero's works, after the text of Ernesti, in a single volume. Mr.
Long, in his introduction to these orations, denounces them in language
so strong as to rob them of all chance of absolute acceptance from those
who know the accuracy of Mr. Long's scholarship.[2] There may probably
have been subsequent interpolations. The first of the four, however, is
so closely referred to by Cicero himself in the speech made by him two
years subsequently in the defence of Plancius, that the fact of an
address to the Senate in the praise of those who had assisted him in his
return cannot be doubted; and we are expressly told by the orator that,
because of the importance of the occasion, he had written it out before
he spoke it.[3] As to the Latinity, it is not within my scope, nor
indeed within my power, to express a confident opinion; but as to the
matter of the speech, I think that Cicero, in his then frame of mind,
might have uttered what is attributed to him. Having said so much, I
shall best continue my narrative by dealing with the four speeches as
though they were genuine.

[Sidenote: B.C. 57, aetat. 50.]

Cicero landed at Brundisium on the 5th of August, the day on which his
recall from exile had been enacted by the people, and there met his
daughter Tullia, who had come to welcome him back to Italy on that her
birthday. But she had come as a widow, having just lost her first
husband, Piso Frugi. At this time she was not more than nineteen years
old. Of Tullia's feelings we know nothing from her own expressions, as
they have not reached us; but from the warmth of her father's love for
her, and by the closeness of their friendship, we are led to imagine
that the joy of her life depended more on him than on any of her three
husbands. She did not live long with either of them, and died soon