by Will Durant
We know Catullus more intimately than most Roman poets, because his subject is nearly always himself. These lyric cries of love and hate reveal a sensitive and kindly spirit, capable of generous feeling even for relatives, but unpleasantly self-centered, deliberately obscene, and merciless to his enemies. He published their most private peculiarities, their pederastic propensities, their bodily odor. One of them washes his teeth with urine, after an old Spanish custom;40 another is so foul of breath that if he should open his mouth all persons near him would fall dead.41 Catullus oscillates easily between love and offal, kisses and fundaments; he rivals Martial as a guide to the street-corner urology of Rome, and suggests in his contemporaries and his class a mixture of primitive coarseness with civilized refinement, as if educated Romans, however versed in the literature of Greece, could never quite forget the stable and the camp. Catullus pleads, like Martial, that he must salt his lines with dirt to hold his audience.
He atoned for these faults by the conscientious perfection of his verse. His hendecasyllabics leap with a naturalness and spontaneity that escape the artifices of Horace and occasionally rise above all the graces of Virgil. It took much art to conceal his art, and Catullus more than once refers to the painful toil and care that produced his quick intelligibility and apparent ease. His vocabulary helped him to this end; he molded the words of popular speech into poetry, and enriched the Latin of literature with affectionate diminutives as well as tavern slang. He avoided inversions and obscurities, and gave to his lines a limpid fluidity grateful to the ear. He pored over the poets of Hellenistic Alexandria and ancient Ionia: mastered the smooth technique and varied meters of Callimachus, the lusty directness of Archilochus, the vinous exuberance of Anacreon, the amorous ecstasy of Sappho; indeed, it is largely through him that we must guess how these poets wrote. He learned their lessons so thoroughly that he became, from their pupil, their equal. He did for Latin poetry what Cicero did for Latin prose: he took it as crude potency and lifted it to an art that only Virgil would surpass.
IV. THE SCHOLARS
How were Latin books written, illustrated, bound, published, sold? For school exercises, short letters, transient commercial records, the Romans through antiquity wrote with a stylus upon waxed tablets and erased with the thumb. The oldest literary Latin known to us was written with quill and ink upon paper manufactured in Egypt from the pressed and glued leaves of the papyrus tree. In the first centuries of our era parchment made from the dried skins of animals began to rival papyrus as a receptacle of literature and important documents. A folded sheet of membrane, or vellum, constituted a diploma, or twofold. Usually a literary work was issued as a roll (volumen, “wound up”), and was read by unrolling as the reading progressed. The text was customarily written two or three narrow columnae to a page, often without punctuation of clauses or even separation of words. Some manuscripts were illustrated by ink drawings; Varro’s Imagines, e.g., consisted of 700 portraits of famous men, each picture accompanied by a biographical note. Anyone could publish a manuscript by hiring slaves to make copies, and selling the copies. Rich men had clerks who copied for them any book they wished to own. Since copyists were fed rather than paid, books were cheap. First “printings” were usually of a thousand copies. Booksellers bought wholesale from publishers like Atticus, and sold at retail in arcade bookstalls. Neither publisher nor bookseller gave the author anything except courtesy and occasional gifts; royalties were unknown. Private libraries were now numerous; and about 40 B.C. Asinius Pollio made his great collection the first public library in Rome. Caesar planned a still larger one, and made Varro its director; but this, like so many of his ideas, waited upon Augustus for its fulfillment.
Stimulated by these facilities, Roman literature and scholarship began to equal the industry of the Alexandrians. Poems, pamphlets, histories, textbooks rivaled the Tiber’s floods; every aristocrat adorned his escapades with verse, every lady composed words and music, every general wrote memoirs. It was an age of “outlines”; summaries on every subject struggled to meet the needs of a hurried commercial age. Marcus Terentius Varro, despite many military campaigns, found time during his eighty-nine years (116-26 B.C.) to synopsize nearly every branch of knowledge; his 620 “volumes” (some seventy-four books) constituted a one-man encyclopedia for his time. Fascinated by the pedigrees of words, he wrote an essay On the Latin Language, now our chief guide to early Roman speech. Perhaps in co-operation with the aims of Augustus, he tried in his treatise On Country Life (De Re Rustica, 36 B.C..) to encourage a return to the land as the best refuge from the disorder of civil strife. “My eightieth year,” said his introduction, “warns me that I must pack up and prepare to leave this life”; 42 he would make his last testament a guide to rural happiness and peace. He admired the sturdy women who were delivered of children in the fields and soon resumed work.43 He mourned the low native birth rate that was transforming the population of Rome; “formerly the blessing of children was woman’s pride; now she boasts with Ennius that she ‘would rather face battle three times than bear one child.’” In his Divine Antiquities he concluded that the fertility, order, and courage of a nation require moral commandments supported by religious belief. Adopting the distinction of the great jurist Q. Mucius Scaevola between two kinds of religion—one for philosophers and one for the people 44—he argued that the second must be upheld regardless of its intellectual defects; and though he himself accepted only a vague pantheism,IX he proposed a vigorous attempt to restore the worship of Rome’s ancient deities. Influenced by Cato and Polybius, he in his turn decisively affected the religious policy of Augustus and the pious ruralism of Virgil.
As if to complete the work of the elder Cato in every field, Varro continued the censor’s Origines in his Life of the Roman People—a history of Roman civilization. It is a pity that time has scuttled this and nearly all of Varro’s work, while preserving the schoolboy biographies of Cornelius Nepos. In Rome history was an art, never also a science; not even in Tacitus did it rise to a critical scrutiny and summary of sources. History as rhetoric, however, found in this age a brilliant practitioner—Caius Sallustius Crispus (86-35 B.C.). He played a vigorous role as politician and warrior on Caesar’s side, governed Numidia, stole with skill, and spent a fortune on women; then he retired to a life of luxury and letters in a Roman villa that became famous for its gardens and was to be the home of emperors. His books, like politics, were a continuation of war by other means; his Histories, Jugurthine War, and Catiline were able defenses of the populares, powerful attacks upon the “old guard.” He exposed the moral decay of Rome,X charged the Senate and the courts with placing property rights above human rights, and put into the mouth of Marius a speech asserting the natural equality of all classes and demanding a career open to talent wherever born.46 He deepened his narratives with philosophical commentary and psychological analysis of character, and carved out a style of epigrammatic compactness and vivid rapidity which became a model for Tacitus.
That style, like almost all Roman prose of Sallust’s century and the next, took its color and tone from the oratory of the Forum and the courts. The development of the legal profession, and the growth of a talkative democracy, had widened the demand for public speaking. Schools of rhetoric were multiplying despite governmental hostility; “rhetoricians,” said Cicero, “are everywhere.” Great masters of the art appeared in the first half of the first century before Christ: Marcus Antonius (father of Mark), Lucius Crassus, Sulpicius Rufus, Quintus Hortensius. We may imagine the strength of their lungs when we hear of audiences that overflowed from the Forum into neighboring temples and balconies. The flamboyant eloquence and purchasable conscience of Hortensius made him the darling of the aristocracy and one of Rome’s richest men; he left his heirs 10,000 casks of wine.46b His delivery was so animated that famous actors like Roscius and Aesopus attended the trials at which he pleaded, to perfect their acting by studying his gestures and his delivery. Following the example of old Cato, he revised and
published his speeches—an art which his rival Cicero perfected, and which furthered the influence of rhetoric upon all Roman prose. It was through oratory that the Latin language reached its full height of colorful eloquence, masculine power, and almost Oriental grace. Indeed, the younger orators who came after Hortensius and Cicero condemned the luxurious adornment and passionate turbulence of what they called the “Asianic” style; and Caesar, Calvus, Brutus, and Pollio pledged themselves to a calmer, chaster, sparer “Attic” speech. Here, so long ago, the battle lines formed between “romanticism” and “classicism”—between the emotional and the intellectual view of life and domination of style. Even in oratory, the young classicists complained, the East was conquering Rome.
V. CICERO’S PEN
Proud of his speeches, and aware that they were making literature, Cicero felt keenly the criticism of the “Attic” school, and defended himself in a long series of treatises on oratorical art. In lively dialogues he sketched the history of Roman eloquence and laid down the rules for composition, prose rhythm, and delivery. He did not admit that his own style was “Asian”; he had modeled it, he claimed, upon that of Demosthenes; and he reminded the Atticists that their cold and passionless speech drove audiences to sleep or flight.
The fifty-seven orations that have come down to us from Cicero illustrate all the tricks of successful eloquence. They excel in the passionate presentation of one side of a question or a character, the entertainment of the auditors with humor and anecdote, the appeal to vanity, prejudice, sentiment, patriotism, and piety, the ruthless exposure of the real or reported, public or private, faults of the opponent or his client, the skillful turning of attention from unfavorable points,, the barrage of rhetorical questions framed to make answer difficult or damaging, the heaping up of charges, in periodic sentences whose clauses are lashes, and whose torrent overwhelms. These speeches do not pretend to be fair; they are defamations rather than declamations, briefs that take every advantage of that freedom of abuse which, though forbidden to the stage, was allowed in the Forum and the courts. Cicero does not hesitate to apply to his victims terms like “swine,” “pest,” “butcher,” “filth”; he tells Piso that virgins kill themselves to escape his lechery, and excoriates Antony for being publicly affectionate to his wife. Audiences and juries enjoyed such vituperation, and no one took it too seriously. Cicero corresponded amiably with Piso a few years after the brutal attack of the In Pisonem. It is to be admitted, further, that Cicero’s orations abound rather in egotism and rhetoric than in moral sincerity, philosophical wisdom, or even legal acumen or depth. But what eloquence! Even Demosthenes was not so vivid, vital, exuberantly witty, so full of the salt and tang of the human fray. Certainly no man before or after Cicero spoke a Latin so seductively charming and fluent, so elegantly passionate; this was the zenith of Latin prose. “You have discovered all the treasures of oratory,” said the generous Caesar in dedicating his book On Analogy to Cicero; “and you have been the first to employ them. Thereby you have laid the Roman people under a mighty obligation, and you honor your fatherland. You have gained a triumph to be preferred to that of the greatest generals. For it is a nobler thing to enlarge the boundaries of human intelligence than those of the Roman Empire.”47
The speeches betray the politician; the letters of Cicero bare the man, and make even the politician forgivable. Nearly all of them were dictated to a secretary and never revised by Cicero; most of them were written with no thought of publication; seldom, therefore, has a man’s secret soul been so completely exposed. “He who reads these letters,” said Nepos, “will not much need a history of those times”;48 in them the most vital part of the revolutionary drama is seen from within, all blinds removed. Usually their style is artless and direct and dances with humor and wit;49 their language is an attractive mixture of literary grace and colloquial ease. They are the most interesting of Cicero’s remains; indeed, of all extant Latin prose. It is natural that we should find in so large a correspondence (864 letters, ninety of them to Cicero) occasional contradictions and insincerities. There is no sign here of the religious piety and belief that appear so frequently in Cicero’s essays or in those speeches in which he plays up the gods as his last trump. His private opinion of various men, especially of Caesar, does not always conform with his public protestation.50 His incredible vanity appears more amiably here than in his orations, where he seems to be carrying his own statue with him wherever he goes; he smilingly confesses that “my own applause has the greatest weight with me.”51 He assures us, with charming innocence, that “if ever any man was a stranger to vainglory it is myself.”52 We are amused to find so many letters about money and so much ado about so many homes. Besides modest villas at Arpinum, Asturae, Puteoli, and Pompeii, Cicero had an estate at Formiae valued at 250,000, another at Tusculum worth 500,000, and a palace on the Palatine that cost him 3,500,000 sesterces.XI Such comfort seems outrageous in a philosopher.
But which of us is so virtuous that his reputation could survive the publication of his intimate correspondence? Indeed, as we continue to read these letters, we almost come to like the man. He had no more faults, perhaps no greater vanity, than we; he made the mistake of immortalizing them with perfect prose. At his best he was a hard worker, a tender father, a good friend. We see him in his home, loving his books and his children, and trying to love his wife, the rheumatic and irritable Terentia, whose wealth and eloquence equaled his own. They were too rich to be happy; their worries and quarrels were always in large figures; at last, in their old age, he divorced her over some financial dispute. Soon afterward he married Publilia, who attracted him by having more money than years; but when she showed dislike for his daughter Tullia he sent Publilia away, too. Tullia he loved humanly beyond reason; he grieved almost to madness at her death and wished to build a temple to her as a deity. Pleasanter are the letters to and about Tiro, his chief secretary, who took his dictation in shorthand and managed his finances so ably and honestly that Cicero rewarded him with freedom. Most numerous are the letters to Atticus, who invested Cicero’s savings, extricated him from financial difficulties, published his writings, and gave him excellent unheeded advice. To Atticus, wisely absent in Greece at the height of the revolution, Cicero writes a letter of typical cordiality and charm:
There is nothing of which I so much feel the want as of him with whom I can communicate everything that concerns me; who loves me, who is prudent; to whom I can speak without flattery, dissimulation, or reserve. My brother, who is all candor and kindness, is away. . . . And you, who have so often relieved my cares and anxieties by your counsel, who used to be my companion in public matters, my confidant in all private ones, the partaker of all my words and thoughts—where are you?54
In those turbulent days when Caesar crossed the Rubicon, conquered Pompey, and made himself dictator, Cicero retired for a moment from political life and sought solace in reading and writing philosophy. “Remember,” he begged Atticus, “not to give up your books to anybody, but to keep them, as you promised, for me. I entertain the strongest affection for them, as I now feel disgust for everything else.”55 In his youth, defending the poet Archias in the most modest and amiable of his speeches, he had praised the study of literature as “nourishing our adolescence, adorning our prosperity, and delighting our old age.”56 Now he took his own counsel, and in little more than two years wrote almost a library of philosophy.XII The dissolution of religious belief in the higher classes had left a moral vacuum, by which Rome seemed to be drawn into a disintegration of character and society. Cicero dreamed that philosophy might serve as a substitute for theology in providing for these classes a guide and stimulus to right living. He resolved not to construct one more system, but to summarize the teachings of the Greek sages and offer them as his last gift to his people.57 He was honest enough to confess that he was for the most part adapting, sometimes translating, the treatises of Panaetius, Poseidonius, and other recent Greeks.58 But he transformed the dull prose of his models
into limpid and graceful Latin, enlivened his discourse with dialogue, and passed quickly over the deserts of logic and metaphysics to the living problems of conduct and statesmanship. Like Lucretius he had to invent a philosophical terminology; he succeeded, and put both language and philosophy heavily in his debt. Not since Plato had wisdom worn such prose.
It was from Plato above all that his ideas stemmed. He did not relish the dogmatism of the Epicureans, who “talk of divine things with such assurance that you would imagine they had come directly from an assemblage of the gods”; nor yet that of the Stoics, who so labor the argument from design that “you would suppose even the gods had been made for human use”59—a theory that Cicero himself, in other moods, would not find incredible. His starting point is that of the New Academy—a lenient skepticism which denied all certainties and found probability sufficient for human life. “In most things,” he writes, “my philosophy is that of doubt.60 . . . May I have your leave not to know what I do not know?”61 “Those who seek to learn my personal opinion,” he says, “show an unreasonable degree of curiosity”; 62 but his coyness soon yields to his talent for expression. He scorns sacrifices, oracles, and auguries, and devotes an entire treatise to disproving divination. Against the widespread cult of astrology he asks if all the men slain at Cannae had been born under the same star.63 He even doubts that a knowledge of the future would be a boon; the future may be as unpleasant as much else of the truth that we so recklessly chase. He vainly thinks to make short work of old beliefs by laughing them out of court: “When we call corn Ceres and wine Bacchus we use a common figure of speech; but do you imagine that anybody is so insane as to believe that the thing he feeds upon is a god?”63a Nevertheless, he is as skeptical of atheism as of any other dogma. He rejects the atomism of Democritus and Lucretius; it is as unlikely that unguided atoms—even in infinite time—could fall into the order of the existing world as that the letters of the alphabet should spontaneously form the Annales of Ennius.64 Our ignorance of the gods is no guarantee of their nonexistence; and indeed, Cicero argues, the general agreement of mankind establishes a balance of probability in favor of Providence. He concludes that religion is indispensable to private morals and public order and that no man of sense will attack it.65 Hence, while writing against divination, he continued to fulfill the functions of official augur. It was not quite hypocrisy; he would have called it statesmanship. Roman morals, society, and government were bound up with the old religion and could not safely let it die. (The emperors would reason so in persecuting Christianity.) When his beloved Tullia died, Cicero inclined more strongly than ever to the hope of personal immortality. Many years before, in the “Dream of Scipio” with which he ended his Republic, he had borrowed from Pythagoras, Plato, and Eudoxus a complex and eloquent myth of a life beyond the grave, in which the good great dead enjoyed eternal bliss. But in his private correspondence—even in the letters that condoled with bereaved friends—there is no mention of an afterlife.
