The Roman Way

by Edith Hamilton

  Sometimes we get a glimpse of the vast slave world which did all the work and provided all the amusements. “Do send me two of your library slaves,” Cicero writes Atticus, “to help glue pages, and tell them to bring bits of parchment for title-pieces. I say, you have bought a fine troupe of gladiators. I hear they fight splendidly. If you had cared to hire them out you would have cleared expenses on those two shows. Enough of that—but, as you love me, remember the library slaves.”

  Of the shows themselves, the most conspicuous feature of the life as we see it, Cicero speaks only once in detail, an often quoted passage: “The games were of course most magnificent, but they would not have been to your taste. I infer that from my own feelings. Why, they were not as attractive even as games on a moderate scale often are. For what pleasure can there be in the sight of six hundred mules in the Clytemnestra or of three thousand bowls in the Trojan Horse? Two wild-beast hunts a day for five days—magnificent, of course. But what possible pleasure can it be to a man of culture when a puny human being is mangled by a tremendously powerful beast, or a splendid beast transfixed by a spear? And even if it is a spectacle, you’ve seen it all often, and there was nothing new that I saw. The last day came the elephants—very impressive, but the crowd took no pleasure in them. Indeed, there was a kind of compassion—a feeling that the huge creatures have some sort of fellowship with humans.” Gladiatorial contests Cicero rather inclined to—from moral considerations. People call them cruel, he says, and perhaps they are, as conducted today. But certainly the spectators receive an incomparable training in despising suffering and death.

  All through the letters there are allusions to the love the great, luxurious, corrupt and vice-ridden city had for passing prohibitions against luxury, corruption and vice. There is an amusing passage in a letter from a young scoffer Cicero was very fond of, Caelius Rufus, where Cicero is urged to come home to divert himself with the censor’s activities: “He’s performing prodigies in the matter of pictures and statues. Seems to feel his censorship is to be a kind of soap. Hurry home and join the laugh. Appius busy with pictures and statues!” It was of course delightful. Appius was Clodia’s brother and the man who had bribed the consuls.

  Only a very mild and limited edition of the chronique scandaleuse of the day is to be found. The decorum of the letters is amazing in that day and in that city. There is hardly a suggestion of impropriety even. A sample of his scandal-mongering—there are not above half a dozen in all—is a story he tells Atticus about an unfortunate gentleman who had his baggage searched and among his goods “were found five diminutive busts of Roman ladies—married, all of them! One was Brutus’ sister, another, Lepidus’ wife. He won’t fret.” This is as far as Cicero will go in the way of an off-color story, and yet he wrote at a time when Rome was full of the vilest vice and the foulest talk. In an age notable for indecency, when Cicero was at his ease and writing just as he felt, he was invariably decent-minded. The scandalous tales passed him by all unheeded. In that respect his letters might have been written by Gladstone to John Bright. “I like modesty in speech,” he once wrote. “The Stoics say that nothing is shameful or obscene in the saying of it. Wise men will call a spade a spade. Well, I shall keep as I always have, to Plato’s reserves.” He goes back to the Greek for his example; all the same, one catches a glimpse of a grave, disciplined restraint which through the centuries had ordered Roman life.

  Dinner parties figure largely in the letters. On one occasion Cicero finds himself in very questionable company, “where next me reclined Cytheris [respectable women sat at table]. At such a dinner, say you, was Cicero! Upon my oath, I never dreamed she would be there. However, even when I was young I was never tempted by anything of that sort, much less now that I am old. But I do dearly love a dinner party where I may talk on anything and everything.” What he has to eat there is of much less importance; still he never professes to be indifferent to that, either. “I do like high-class food and of a delicate quality,” he writes, “but even if you persist in putting me off with the kind of dinner your good mother gives, I won’t refuse.” The standards of what one ought to have at a party are truly exalted: “Behold my audacity,” he tells the same friend. “I have given a dinner to Hirtius without a peacock!”

  His own private life figures very little. He divorced his wife when he was sixty and their daughter was old enough to have been married three times, but he never alludes to the divorce or to anything that led up to it. There are many letters to Terentia which are full of affection. “To think that you of all people, noble, faithful, upright, generous, as you are, should have fallen into misery because of me. Nothing is or ever has been dearer to me than you are,” he writes her during his exile. “Tullius sends his best love to his wife Terentia and to his sweetest daughter Tullia, the two darlings of his heart.” Such a beginning is quite usual in his letters, but gradually the tone grows cool and the last of all is rather a written order than a letter: “I think I shall arrive at my Tusculan villa on the 7th. See that everything is ready. I may have several others with me. If there is no basin for the bath, provide one and all else necessary. Goodbye.” Terentia was not a submissive lady, and the divorce followed soon after. A few months later he had married a rich young ward of his and in as many weeks was bitterly regretting his rashness. He tells Atticus: “Publilia writes that her mother is coming to see me and that she will, too, if I will let her. She begs me urgently and humbly to do so and to answer her. You see what a nuisance it is. I answered that I was even worse than when I told her I wanted to be alone and she must not think of coming. I thought if I did not answer she would come; now I don’t think she will. But I want you to find out how long I can stay here without being caught.” Of course in Rome of easy divorces the marriage was soon ended.

  Cicero’s reason for wanting to be let alone was that that sweetest daughter of his had just died. He had only two children and his son was never very satisfactory. But Tullia was all that he could desire and he gave her his most devoted love. When she died, about two years before he did, he was utterly desolate. “While she lived,” he wrote a friend, “I always had a sanctuary to flee to, a haven of rest. I had one whose sweet converse could help me to drop all the burden of my anxieties and sorrows.” For months after, his letters to Atticus show a broken-hearted man. “I don’t speak to a soul. In the morning I hide myself in the wood where it is wild and thick and I don’t come out till evening. After you I have not a better friend than solitude. I fight against tears as much as I can, but as yet I am not equal to the struggle.” It was the deepest personal sorrow of his life.

  Through the letters great figures pass perpetually, great still to us today. Mark Antony, “a wretched, insignificant subordinate of Caesar’s,” Pompey from his height of aloof superiority calls him; “the toy captain,” Cicero dubs him jeeringly to Atticus, “who carries round with him that actress Cytheris [the lady of the dinner party?] and in an open litter too. Indeed, they say he had seven litters with him full of his vile creatures, men and women both.” Pompey appears often, contradicting on one page what was said on the page before, now the great statesman and superlatively great general who had been the leading man in Rome for years, and then at the crisis of his life when he faced Caesar to see which would rule the world, suddenly showing himself neither a statesman nor a general, as devoid of resolution as of common sense. “His way is to want one thing and say another,” that engaging young scamp, Caelius Rufus, writes Cicero, “and yet he’s not clever enough to hide what he wants. But,” he adds gaily, “he’s undergoing a reducing treatment at Bauli and is so extremely hungry, even I am sorry for him.”

  It will be seen that the letters puncture balloons; magnificence has a way of collapsing. The noblest Roman of them all bears no resemblance whatever to the personage we have watched so often on the stage. Cicero hears that Brutus is to marry Portia, and a good thing, too—the only way to stop the gossip. He goes to Greece and finds that Brutus is insisting that the people
of Salamis shall pay him forty-eight percent on the money he has loaned them. “I can’t go back on my own edict fixing twelve percent as the rate, even for Brutus,” he writes Atticus. “A letter from Brutus”—this shortly after Caesar’s assassination. “I enclose a copy. One must confess it’s of rather a dubious description—still he does show some sparks of manly courage.”

  Brutus’ mother at any rate was not deficient in that respect. One day in his country house, shortly after Caesar’s death, Cicero is present at a meeting of three great ladies, Servilia, Tertulla and Portia, Brutus’ mother, sister and wife. They talk over the situation: both Brutus and Cassius have been insulted by receiving from the senate appointments to insignificant offices, Cassius’ being merely to buy corn in Sicily. As they deliberate, “in came Cassius with flashing eyes and declared he would not go to Sicily.” Whereupon Servilia promised she would take the matter in hand herself: “Servilia says she will cut the corn supply business out of the senatorial decree.” It is a curious little picture of those elusive persons, the Roman women. Obviously, Servilia knew that she had the senate in her pocket.

  The great Augustus, first Emperor of Rome, the autocrat whose word was final throughout the civilized world, appears a very human young man before the splendid trappings of royalty covered him up. Cicero shakes his head over him many a time. “It’s a grave question how far one can trust one of his age and bringing up,” he writes a few months after Caesar’s death. “His father-in-law whom I saw at Astura thinks he is not to be trusted at all.” “He’s such a boy,” this in a letter dated a year before Augustus handed Cicero over to Antony to be murdered. “He thinks he can call the Senate right away. Who will come? Yet the country towns are enthusiastic about the lad. Crowds to meet him and cheer him. Would you ever have believed it?” “A praiseworthy youth who had better be rewarded—and removed,” is his final pronouncement. That remark was repeated to Augustus; three months later he agreed to Cicero’s assassination.

  Cleopatra, unfortunately, enters rarely and only once at any length. To Cicero she was not precisely the queen

  Whom everything becomes, to chide, to laugh,

  To weep—

  “Cleopatra. How I detest the woman. You know she lived just across the river from me for several months. Anything more insolent—.” Clearly a royal snub had been administered. Something on Cicero’s part royalty had deemed presumptuous. It is a pity the interview has been lost. Cicero was not the man to submit in silence. A consular of Rome and a petty barbarian potentate would have been his evaluation of the opposing forces.

  So at the touch of the letters, magnificence even in the most magnificent vanishes. The stately personages great tragedy has made live for us upon exalted heights, through these day-by-day records come down to the same levels where we live ourselves. Yet it is true that every one of them, Pompey, the solemnly inefficient, Brutus, the usurer, Portia, the indiscreet, Antony, the waster, even the insolent queen, were able to rise to greatness on occasion. If they could not maintain it during their lives they could reach it in the way they died, perhaps a matter of hardly less importance.

  VI

  Caesar and Cicero

  Caesar, the greatest man Rome produced, as we all believe with perhaps no very definite notion why, is seen less distinctly than any of the other notable personages Cicero discusses with his friends. That is our great loss, for Caesar was not given to explaining himself. A book, no matter on what subject, could hardly be less personal than his Gallic War. It is the one example in literature of an impersonal autobiography. Caesar figures on nearly every page, but in exactly the same way as all the other characters do. In a narrative which shows him overcoming incredible obstacles, facing almost insuperable odds, carrying overwhelming responsibilities, in perpetual danger of defeat and death—through all the account of what must have filled him with joy and grief and despair and triumph, there are only two exceptions to the perfect detachment of the record, only two passages, both very brief, in which there is a trace of personal feeling.

  The first is merely a sentence, at the end of the account of his first campaign: “The Senate, informed of these successes by Caesar’s letters, decreed a thanksgiving of fifteen days, a number never allowed to any general before.” The statement is almost naïve enough to be Cicero’s. A little ray of light shoots from it into that inscrutable thing, Caesar’s heart. He was proud of that thanksgiving; he loved being more honored than any man before. With the words he comes down for a moment from the unhuman heights on which he sets himself.

  In the second passage, which belongs to the narrative of the war, the emotion is unmistakable. Once a man he loved was sent by him into what proved to be the extremest peril, and Caesar suffered so much, the story bears the impress. “A young man,” he describes him, “of great merit and politeness and of a singular integrity,” was despatched as envoy to the German camp, where he was seized and held. For all Caesar knew, they killed him. He attacked and routed them, and then “the young man, bound with a triple chain, dragged along by his keepers in their flight, fell in with Caesar himself as he pursued the Germans. Nor was the victory itself more grateful to the general than his good fortune in rescuing his intimate and familiar friend and to have the success of the day no way diminished by the loss of one he esteemed so highly.”

  With the words, the polite and meritorious young man vanishes from history, and in all the rest of Caesar’s writings, the seven books of the Gallic War and the three of the Civil War (often judged not his) there is nothing comparable to his story. Even the annihilation of a legion and the rescue of another just on the point of annihilation are recounted with no more feeling than if the narrator were a historian of deeds done centuries before him.

  It is not to be supposed that he followed a deliberate plan to leave himself out. He had one thing alone in his mind, his campaigns, and he thought of himself only as he was concerned in them. Certainly he wrote without an idea that he would ever have a reader who would think of anything else. He was always a man of few words; about himself he did not talk at all. A result of this reticence was that legend became extremely busy with him; indeed, it took possession of him not long after his death when his first biographer gratified a curious world. For years he was the most talked-of man in Rome and the stories, of course, grew always bigger and usually blacker. It is the greater pity that Cicero, who knew him from boyhood and was the one man among his contemporaries with ability enough to understand him, should mention him only briefly and rarely. No clear picture of him can be drawn from the letters. The truth is that Cicero did not try to see him clearly and was always shifting his point of view. But not his feelings; they remained the same: he never liked him. That is as plain to see as is Caesar’s liking for him. Up to the crossing of the Rubicon the letters mention Caesar’s name oftenest because of some service he has done or wishes to do Cicero. Caesar wanted his friendship and Cicero never gave it to him.

  And yet Cicero was a good friend. Perhaps more than any other quality, the letters show his warmth of heart and the many people he was able to spend it upon. Expressions of devoted affection are common. He writes a man for whom he had got a post abroad: “‘How hard to please are those who love’—at first I was annoyed that you did not like being where you are; and now it gives me a pang of pain when you write that you do. I am distressed that you can find pleasure without me!” He is laughing at himself, but even so the words ring true and others like them are found again and again. “All men believe,” he wrote elsewhere, “that life without friendship is no life at all.”

  No doubt these friends were often among the powerful; nevertheless some of the very warmest and sweetest of the letters are written to the slave who was his secretary. He was not strong, and Cicero showed a constant and tender anxiety for him: “Let your health be your only care; leave everything else to my care. Manifest as much regard for yourself as you do for me. Add this to the numberless services you have done and I shall value it more than them al
l. Take care, take care of yourself, Tiro mine.” There are many such little notes to this beloved servant.

  But what was given to a slave in full measure Caesar never won for himself, although year after year he tried. To be sure, away back in 63 (B.C., N.B.) he had voted against putting Catiline’s fellow-conspirators to death, than which he could have done nothing worse in Cicero’s eyes. All the same, when three years later he formed the coalition with Pompey and Crassus he invited Cicero to join, as great a proof of his esteem as he could have given. Cicero refused, why, can only be conjectured; the letters do not mention the offer nor indeed the coalition, except for a single reference to “three unbridled men.” He refused, too, Caesar’s next friendly move made soon after, when he had been given an office as notable in its results as any that has ever been given, the governorship of “Cisalpine Gaul and the Provinces beyond the Alps.” He asked Cicero to go with him. Atticus is told, “Caesar most liberally invites me to take a place on his personal staff.”

  Back of that offer was the hero of the Good Goddess festival, young Clodius, although no one would have been more surprised than he to know it. He was easily the most popular man in Rome at the moment and as dangerous an enemy as one could have. It might be supposed that he was Caesar’s enemy, too, but not at all. The scandal and the divorce and Pompeia’s disgrace had somehow all been wiped off the slate, to Caesar’s lasting shame, Plutarch says, but political expediency is always abominable in Plutarch’s eyes. Clodius was to defend Caesar’s interests during his absence. Caesar knew he was planning a spectacular vengeance on Cicero, and the invitation was given to get him away where he would be safe, and also, perhaps, where he would be harmless. After he refused to join the coalition, Caesar’s idea of him was always that as a politician he was a liability. But life outside Rome was desolation to him and Caesar’s company certainly nothing by way of compensation. He would not go, and soon after, Clodius triumphantly passed the law which cut him completely off from his beloved city and sent him into exile, the most forlorn, homesick wanderer that ever there was.