The Roman Way

by Edith Hamilton

  Pompey, who, Cicero writes Atticus, “swears he will not see me injured [by Clodius] if it costs him his life,” acted as was his way at a crisis, held grandly aloof and would take no part at all. When Cicero went to beseech his help and even flung himself at his feet, he answered coldly that he could not interfere, and he did not so much as stretch out his hand to raise the stricken man. Unforgivable, one would suppose, from a friend, and Pompey was an old friend; and yet when after more than a year of misery in foreign parts Cicero was recalled with Pompey’s approval, he not only forgave him, he felt himself ever after deep in his debt. Inexplicably—nothing in the record gives any reason why—the plaster god which Pompey throughout the letters appears to be, all gilding outside and inside all hollow, had Cicero’s unspeakable devotion. Years later when the war had begun for the leadership of the Roman world and Pompey fled before Caesar, abandoning Italy to him, Cicero could write: “The one thing that tortures me is that I did not follow Pompey when he was rushing to ruin. Since then I have never approved his course and he has never ceased to commit one blunder after another. And never a letter to me. But yet, now my old love breaks forth; now I miss him intolerably. Day and night I gaze at the sea and long to take flight to him.”

  With Caesar it was just the other way about. Cicero would not like him, no matter what he did. Caesar sent him many letters during the years he was in Gaul; he succeeded at least in convincing him that he could count upon him. All of the letters have been lost, but one of them Cicero quotes from in his answer: “A letter has just come from you saying, ‘As to the man you have recommended to me, I will e’en make him king of Gaul. Send me somebody else to give a post to!’” It is delightfully said. The words, so few, are like a tiny snapshot—no pose; for the moment the great general has gone: a laughing face looks out and there is something warm beneath the gaiety. He wrote Cicero, so the latter tells his brother, “a most beautiful letter,” when his dearly loved daughter died, the young Julia, Pompey’s wife, who as long as she lived kept peace between the two men who both adored her.

  Even on his arduous campaigns he took the trouble to write often. “A most cordial letter from Caesar,” Cicero writes Atticus. “The result of the war in Britain is looked forward to with anxiety. There is not a scrap of silver on the island, no booty either except slaves—and I don’t fancy there will be any with literary or musical talent among them.” And again, some three weeks later: “On October 24th I had a letter from Caesar in Britain, dated September 25th. Britain is settled, hostages taken. No booty, but a tribute imposed, [it was never paid], and they are bringing back the army.”

  That was in the year 54. Then for several years Caesar drops out of the letters except now and then in those Caelius Rufus writes Cicero in Cilicia: “Lots of talk about Caesar—not so very nice. One fellow says he’s lost his cavalry, which I don’t doubt; another that he’s hemmed in among the Bellovaci, cut off from the rest of the army. All secrets these. Domitius puts his finger to his lips before he even begins to speak.”

  The date of that letter is 50, the year when, frightened by Caesar’s triumphs in the west and his increasing popularity in Rome, the senate and Pompey lightly determined to put him down. Caelius writes: “Pompey is resolved not to allow Caesar to be consul unless he hands over his army; Caesar is convinced there is no safety for him without the army; he wants to compromise—have both give up their armies.” This fair proposal was rejected. Rome had no idea yet what Caesar was like. “When Pompey was asked,” Caelius continues, “‘What if Caesar is minded to be consul and keep his army too?’ he replied with the utmost suavity, ‘What if my son is minded to lay his stick across my shoulders?’” “Pompey has a perfect contempt for Caesar,” Cicero writes Atticus. The result of this attitude was that Caesar crossed the Rubicon early in the next year and the fight was on, to end eighteen months later in Pompey’s defeat and death.

  Almost at once Caelius Rufus, the gay adventurer, and Atticus, the far-seeing and prudent, go over to Caesar, significant straws, both of them. Caelius flings himself into the cause with enthusiasm. “Did you ever see a sillier fellow than your Pompey,” he writes Cicero from Caesar’s quarters in northern Italy, “stirring up all this mud with his feeble inefficiency? And did you ever read or hear of anyone keener in action than our Caesar or more moderate in victory?” Of Atticus’ right-about-face we know only from a letter Cicero writes him: “When men like you and Peducaeus are going to meet him [Caesar] at the fifth milestone, surely his belief that he is right will be strengthened. ‘What harm in that?’ you ask. None—but yet the outward signs of the distinction between true feeling and pretense are all upset.” Poor Cicero. Atticus is merely acting according to the principles of expediency that he and Cicero had always acknowledged to each other they followed, but when it comes to the point of deserting Pompey and the senate just because they are not succeeding, Cicero cannot do it and it is bitter to him that Atticus can. And yet a few months earlier he had written him: “What am I to do? I know if it comes to fighting it would be better to be beaten with Pompey than conquer with Caesar. But consider by what trick I can keep Caesar’s good will.”

  From then on until Pompey’s defeat there is nothing in the letters Cicero himself writes that helps to explain Caesar. He is only denunciatory. Caesar is “that viper we have cherished in our bosom”; “the prince of scoundrels”; a “wretched madman” who has “never seen the shadow of honor and right.” But there are two letters of Caesar’s included in the correspondence which are remarkable documents. During Cicero’s long and agonizing struggle to follow what he felt was the path of honor and take his stand with Pompey and the losing cause, Caesar never ceased begging him—not to join him, that, it is clear, he instantly saw Cicero would not do—but not to join Pompey either. He writes him—the letter is inscribed On the march and the year is 49—“You will have done a serious injury to our friendship and consulted your own interest very little if you show that you have condemned anything that I have done, the greatest harm you could do me. By the right of our friendship, I beg you, do not take such a step. What better befits a good and peaceful man and a good citizen than to keep out of civil dissension? There are some who approved such a course and were unable to follow it because of danger.” He means himself and the words, so carefully impersonal, are yet one of the few personal expressions of his feelings on record. “But for you,” the letter continues, “the evidence of my life, your conviction of my affection, must show you there is no safer or more honorable course than to keep clear of the struggle.”

  Urgent words, written with strong feeling. It is not to be supposed that politically Cicero was important to Caesar. He had always been a weak and wavering politician. What must have dictated that letter was Caesar’s genuine friendship, and also, perhaps no less, his hatred of civil war. He wanted to enlist in the cause of peace the eloquent tongue he had himself often been moved by.

  When his letters failed he arranged for a meeting, and Cicero’s account of it to Atticus shows how little those two able men, who had known him all his life, understood him. “We were mistaken,” so the letter runs, “in thinking he would be easy to manage. I have never seen anyone less easy. After much talk he said, ‘Well, come and work for peace.’ ‘On my own terms?’ I asked. ‘Am I to dictate to you?’ he said. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I shall oppose your invasion of Spain and I shall mourn for Pompey.’ He replied, ‘That is not what I want.’ ‘So I fancied,’ said I. ‘But that is what I must say if I go to Rome.’ So we parted. I am sure he has no liking for me, but I like myself as I have not for a great while. He is very wide-awake and bold—”

  Most significant of all is another letter which one of Caesar’s officers sent Cicero in an effort to show him Caesar’s real aims and so win him over. It is unique in military correspondence. Caesar had written his subordinate: “I made up my mind to act with the greatest moderation and do my best to bring about a reconciliation with Pompey. Let us see if in this way we can win all hear
ts and secure a lasting victory. It is a new way of conquering, to use compassion and generosity as our defenses. I captured one of Pompey’s officers. Of course I acted according to this plan of mine and set him free at once.”

  There was nothing weak and wavering in Caesar. He kept to his plan; he followed this new way of conquering. When Pompey was defeated, one after another of the men who had supported him were given a free pardon. There has never been a victor more merciful. In that pitiless ancient world he stands alone. Cicero, eagerly forgiven and welcomed back to Italy, was won to an apparent admiration. He writes one and another of his friends, “We find him daily more yielding and conciliatory”; “He has a mild and merciful nature”; “I continue to enjoy his extreme kindness to me.” And on one occasion when Caesar pardons a man who had not only opposed him but deeply insulted him, Cicero even has a moment of enthusiasm: “It seemed to me so glorious a day that I imagined I saw before me some fair vision of the Republic rising from the dead.”

  Such expressions, however, are all in letters to other people, never to Atticus. The only praise he ever gave Caesar in the letters where he spoke the truth was praise of his writing: “I forgot to enclose a copy of my letter to Caesar—not, as you suspect, because I was ashamed of seeming a flatterer. I have a high opinion of those books of his, so that I wrote without flattery, and yet I think he will read it with pleasure.” For the rest, the allusions are brief and cautious: “I give you a free hand. Only take care that nothing is done to offend the great man.” Atticus would not have welcomed just then any denunciations of the great man, nor would Cicero have dreamed of writing them. He was doing everything in his power to stand well with Caesar, and postal messengers did not always carry mail to the right person.

  The last glimpse of Caesar is in a letter dated about six months later and less than three months before the Ides of March. Cicero gives him a dinner party, a very splendid affair. “It passed off perfectly delightfully,” he tells Atticus. “A formidable guest, but he left no regret behind. Until one o’clock he admitted no one: at his accounts, I believe. Then he took a walk, and after two, his bath, and then, when he had been anointed sat down to dinner. He was undergoing a course of emetics so he ate and drank as he pleased—a lordly dinner and well served,

  Well cooked, well seasoned and the truth to tell,

  With pleasant discourse all went very well.

  We were all friends together. Still he isn’t the sort of guest to whom one would say, ‘be sure to look me up on your way back.’ Once is enough. There was no serious talk but plenty of literary—” a sentence typically Roman in its evaluation of what was really worth men’s sober attention.

  In Cicero’s next letter Caesar is dead. The conspirators did not ask Cicero to join them, to his never-ending regret, he protests in several letters. There were no bounds to his enthusiasm at first: “Though all the world conspire against us, the Ides of March console me. Our heroes accomplished most gloriously and magnificently all they could.” So for the next two months. Then there is a change. He begins to distrust Brutus and Cassius as leaders. They will not take any decisive steps. They keep away from Rome and do nothing. “The deed was done with the courage of men, but with the blind policy of a child,” he writes Atticus in May. And when he goes to see them a month later he finds “a ship breaking up or rather in wreckage. No plan, no reason, no system.” Then for a moment he remembers the friend who had stood by him through just such a shipwreck: “For Caesar, somehow, was most patient with me.” But that touch of regret and wonder stands quite alone. His final words are as sweeping a condemnation as has ever been spoken of one man by another. In the treatise on moral duties, written in the year of Caesar’s death and the year before his own, he says: “So great was his passion for wrongdoing that the very doing of wrong was a joy to him for its own sake.” This is Cicero’s obituary over Caesar.

  It is not possible to explain his feeling as due merely or mainly to his devotion to the Republic and consequent hatred of the man who took the supreme power himself. To the end of his life he loved and praised and mourned Pompey, but long before he joined his camp in Greece he had seen clearly that he was fighting for one thing only, his own domination. “Absolute power is what Pompey and Caesar both have sought,” he wrote Atticus. “Both want to be kings.” “Pompey’s idea from the first has been to bring savage tribes to ravage Italy.” Nevertheless, his affection for him never failed. Something else was responsible for his steady dislike of Caesar. Alone among his contemporaries he was qualified to understand him, and no doubt Caesar felt this. His powerful and brilliant mind could find a companionship in Cicero no one else could give him. Except for him he was surrounded by petty minds, mean and limited spirits. But Cicero would have none of him, and so far as is known, except for Mark Antony, Caesar never had a close and steadfast friend. The two officers he most trusted turned against him; Brutus whom he loved killed him, and no other men are mentioned as being on terms of intimacy with him.

  The devotion of his soldiers to him, affirmed in many stories, must be a fact. He could not have done what he did without it. The speech in which it is always said he quelled a mutiny with a single word, calling his men not fellow-soldiers as was his custom, but citizens, civilians, shows a great deal more about his methods than the mere clever use of a term.

  It was a most critical moment for him. He was in Rome after Pompey’s defeat, on the point of sailing for Africa, to put down the powerful senatorial army there. In the city he was surrounded by bitter enemies. His whole dependence was his army, and the best and most trusted legion in it mutinied. They nearly killed their officer; they marched to Rome and claimed their discharge; they would serve Caesar no longer. He sent for them, telling them to bring their swords with them, a direction perfectly characteristic of him. Everything told of him shows his unconcern about danger to himself. Face to face with them, he asked them to state their case and listened while they told him all they had done and suffered and been poorly rewarded for, and demanded to be discharged. His speech in answer was also characteristic, very gentle, very brief, exactly to the point:

  “You say well, citizens. You have worked hard—you have suffered much. You desire your discharge. You have it. I discharge you all. You shall have your recompense. It shall never be said of me that I made use of you when I was in danger, and was ungrateful to you when danger was past.”

  That was all, yet the legionaries listening were completely broken to his will. They cried out that they would never leave him; they implored him to forgive them, to receive them again as his soldiers. Back of the words was his personality, and although that can never be recaptured, something of it yet comes through the brief, bald sentences: the strength that faced tranquilly desertion at a moment of great need; the pride that would not utter a word of appeal or reproach; the mild tolerance of one who knew men and counted upon nothing from them.

  One more speech famous in antiquity is reported which shows the same characteristics. It was made to his officers during the war in Africa. The senatorial forces there had formed an alliance with a barbarian king of whom frightful stories were told. Caesar heard that his centurions were nervous at the report of the king’s approach with an overwhelming army, and he called them together. “You are to understand,” he said, “that within a day King Juba will be here. He has ten legions” (their own force was very inferior), “thirty thousand horse, one hundred thousand skirmishers, three hundred elephants. Your part is neither to think about the situation nor to ask questions. I tell you the truth and you must prepare for it. If any of you are frightened I will provide you with means for going home.”

  “I am told,” Cicero said to him in a speech made in the senate a few weeks before his assassination, “that you often say you do not wish for longer life. I have myself with sorrow heard you say that you have lived long enough.” The night before the Ides of March, a chronicler relates, he was at supper with a number of others when the talk turned on what was the best kind o
f death. Caesar, who was signing papers while the rest argued, looked up and said: “A sudden one.” The story, of course, is too apposite, but the man who first told it understood character. It is just what Caesar would have said.

  Two other accounts of him by contemporaries have come down. Sallust, who wrote a history of Catiline’s conspiracy, describes Caesar at some length, but dwells only upon his kindness and leniency. He was always “giving, relieving, pardoning, a refuge for the unfortunate”; “He was marked out by his humanity and benevolence”; “He cared for his friends’ interests and neglected his own.” It is undoubtedly the report of a partisan; Sallust was an officer of Caesar’s and Caesar thought highly of him, but it agrees in general with Cicero’s account—who was no partisan. The speech Caesar made against putting the conspirators to death, Sallust gives in full, and all the probabilities are that it is essentially accurate. Certainly Sallust was not present when it was spoken, but there were short-hand writers in Rome, and the occasion was a great and notable one. Furthermore, those who had heard the speech would be Sallust’s readers and the very ones whose approval would mean most. It is not credible that he wrote what the senate would know was false. The speech is brief and calm, a closely reasoned, unemotional appeal to abide by the law. Laws are made to be men’s defenses not only against others but against their own selves. They are man’s safeguards against man’s passions. The proposal before the house is to put citizens to death. It is illegal. Whenever in the past the great bulwark of the law has been weakened, the consequences have invariably been calamitous. If by any act now it should be seriously impaired, the danger is that it may be ultimately completely overthrown, to the disaster of all within the state.