by Will Durant
Knowing the skepticism of his age, he based his moral and political treatises on purely secular grounds, independent of supernatural sanctions. He begins (in De Finibus) by inquiring for the road to happiness, and hesitantly agrees with the Stoics that virtue alone suffices. Therefore (in De Officiis) he examines the way of virtue, and by the charm of his style succeeds for a time in making duty interesting. “All men are brothers,” he writes, and “the whole world is to be considered as the common city of gods and men.”66 The most perfect morality would be a conscientious loyalty to this whole. More immediately a man owes it to himself and society, first of all, to establish a sound economic basis to his life, and then to fulfill his duties as a citizen. Wise statesmanship is nobler than the subtlest philosophy.67
Monarchy is the best form of government when the monarch is good, the worst when he is bad—a truism soon to be illustrated in Rome. Aristocracy is good when the really best rule; but Cicero, as a member of the middle class, could not quite admit that the old entrenched families were the best. Democracy is good when the people are virtuous, which, Cicero thought, is never; besides, it is vitiated by the false assumption of equality. The best form of government is a mixed constitution, like that of pre-Gracchan Rome: the democratic power of the assemblies, the aristocratic power of the Senate, the almost royal power of the consuls for a year. Without checks and balances monarchy becomes despotism, aristocracy becomes oligarchy, democracy becomes mob rule, chaos, and dictatorship. Writing five years after Caesar’s consulate, Cicero cast a dart in his direction:
Plato says that from the exaggerated license which people call liberty, tyrants spring up as from a root . . . and that at last such liberty reduces a nation to slavery. Everything in excess is changed into its opposite. . . . For out of such an ungoverned populace one is usually chosen as leader . . . someone bold and unscrupulous . . . who curries favor with the people by giving them other men’s property. To such a man, because he has much reason for fear if he remains a private citizen, the protection of public office is given, and continually renewed. He surrounds himself with an armed guard, and emerges as a tyrant over the very people who raised him to power.68
Nevertheless, Caesar won; and Cicero thought it best to bury his discontent in melodious platitudes on law, friendship, glory, and old age. Silent leges inter arma, he said—“laws are silent in time of war”; but at least he could muse on the philosophy of law. Following the Stoics, he defined law as “right reason in agreement with nature”;69 i.e., law seeks to make orderly and stable the relations that rise out of the social impulses of men. “Nature has inclined us to love men” (society), “and this is the foundation of law.”70 Friendship should be based not upon mutual advantage but upon common interests cemented and limited by virtue and justice; the law of friendship should be “neither to ask dishonorable things, nor to do them if asked.”71 An honorable life is the best guarantee of a pleasant old age. An indulgent and intemperate youth delivers to age a body prematurely worn out; but a life well spent can leave both body and mind sound to a hundred years; witness Masinissa. Devotion to study may make one “unaware of the stealthy approach of old age.”72 Age as well as youth has its glories—a tolerant wisdom, the respectful affection of children, desire and ambition’s fever cooled. Age may fear death, but not if the mind has been formed by philosophy. Beyond the grave there will be, at the best, a new and happier life; and at the worst there will be peace.73
All in all, Cicero’s essays in philosophy are meager in result. Like his statesmanship they clung too anxiously to orthodoxy and tradition. He had all the curiosity of a scientist and all the timidity of a bourgeois; even in his philosophy he remained a politician, reluctant to offend any vote. He collected the ideas of others, and balanced pros and cons so well that we come out from his sessions by the same door wherein we went. Only one thing redeems these little books—the simple beauty of their style. How pleasant Cicero’s Latin is, how easy to read, how smoothly and clearly the stream of language flows! When he narrates events he catches some of the vivacity that made his speeches chain attention; when he describes a character it is with such skill that he mourns that he has no time to be Rome’s greatest historian;74 when he lets himself go he flowers into the balanced clauses and crashing periods which he had learned from Isocrates, and with which he had made the Forum resound. His ideas are those of the upper classes, but his style aims to reach the people; for them he labors to be clear, toils to make his truisms thrilling, and salts abstractions with anecdote and wit.
He re-created the Latin language. He extended its vocabulary, forged from it a flexible instrument for philosophy, fitted it to be the vehicle of learning and literature in western Europe for seventeen hundred years. Posterity remembered him more as an author than as a statesman. When, despite all his reminders, men had almost forgotten the glory of his consulate, they cherished his conquests in letters and eloquence. And since the world honors form as well as substance, art as well as knowledge and power, he achieved, of all Romans, a fame second only to Caesar’s. It was an exception that he could never forgive.
* * *
I Lucretius never uses this word, but calls his primordial particles primordia, elementa, or semina (seeds).
II Cf. the “indeterminacy” ascribed to the electrons by some physicists of our time.
III “There are many seeds of things that support our life; and on the other hand there must be many flying about that make for disease and death.”27
IV The words Epicurean and Stoic will be used in these volumes as meaning a believer in the metaphysics and ethics of Epicurus, or of Zeno; epicurean and stoic as meaning one who practices, or avoids, soft living and sensual indulgence.
V Cf.p. 135.
VI No one has yet transformed Catullus’ poems into equivalent English verse. The foregoing is an almost literal translation of
Passer, deliciae meae puellae,
quicum ludere, quern in sinu tenere,
cui primum digitum dare adpetenti
et acris solet incitari morsus,
cum desiderio meo nitenti
carum nescio quid libet iocari. . . ,33
VII Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
rumoresque senum severiorum
omnes unius aestimemus assis.
Soles occidere et redire possunt;
nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.
Da mi basia mille, deinde centum
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum. . . ,34
VIII Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,
ut te postremo donarem munere mortis. . . .
Accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu,
atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.38
IX “The soul of the world is God, and its parts are the true divinities.”45
X Varro claims that Sallust “was taken in adultery by Annius Milo, soundly beaten with thongs, and permitted to escape only after paying a sum of money”;46a but this, too, may be politics.
XI This last sum had been raised by a loan from a client; we do not know if it was repaid. Forbidden by law to receive fees, lawyers received loans instead. Another way of being paid was to be remembered in a client’s will. Through bequests of this sort or another Cicero inherited 20,000,000 sesterces in thirty years.53 The constitution of man always rewrites the constitutions of states.
XII De Republica, 54 B.C..; De Legibus, 52; Academica, De Consolatione, and De Finibus, 45; De Natura Deorum, De Divinatione, De Fato, De Virtutibus, De Officiis, De Amicitia, De Senectute, De Gloria, Disputationes Tusculanae, all 44 B.C.. In these same two years, 45-44, Cicero wrote five books on oratory.
CHAPTER IX
Caesar
100-44 B.C.
I. THE RAKE
CAIUS JULIUS CAESAR traced his pedigree to lulus Ascanius, son of Aeneas, son of Venus, daughter of Jupiter: he began and ended as a god. The J
ulian gens, though impoverished, was one of the oldest and noblest in Italy. A Caius Julius had been consul in 489, another in 482, a Vopiscus Julius in 473, a Sextus Julius in 157, another in 91.1 From his uncle-in-law Marius he derived by a kind of avuncular heredity an inclination toward radical politics. His mother Aurelia was a matron of dignity and wisdom, frugally managing her small home in the unfashionable Subura—a district of shops, taverns, and brothels. There Caesar was born 100 B.C.., allegedly by the operation that bears his name.I
“Now was this Caesar,” says Holland’s Suetonius, “wondrous docible and apt to learn.” His tutor in Latin, Greek, and rhetoric was a Gaul; with him Caesar unconsciously began to prepare himself for his greatest conquest. The youth took readily to oratory and almost lost himself in juvenile authorship. He was saved by being made military aide to Marcus Thermus in Asia. Nicomedes, ruler of Bithynia, took such a fancy to him that Cicero and other gossips later taunted him with having “lost his virginity to a king.”2 Returning to Rome in 84, he married Cossutia to please his father; when, soon afterward, his father died, he divorced her and married Cornelia, daughter of that Cinna who had taken over the revolution from Marius. When Sulla came to power he ordered Caesar to divorce Cornelia; when Caesar refused, Sulla confiscated his patrimony and Cornelia’s dowry, and listed him for death.
Caesar fled from Italy and joined the army in Cilicia. On Sulla’s death he returned to Rome (78), but finding his enemies in power he left again for Asia. Pirates captured him on the way, took him to one of their Cilician lairs, and offered to free him for twenty talents ($72,000); he reproached them for underestimating his value, and volunteered to give them fifty. Having sent his servants to raise the money, he amused himself by writing poems and reading them to his captors. They did not like them. He called them dull barbarians and promised to hang them at the earliest opportunity. When the ransom came he hurried to Miletus, engaged vessels and crews, chased and caught the pirates, recovered the ransom, and crucified them; but being a man of great clemency, he had their throats cut first.3 Then he went to Rhodes to study rhetoric and philosophy.
Back again in Rome, he divided his energies between politics and love. He was handsome, though already worried about his thinning hair. When Cornelia died (68) he married Pompeia, granddaughter of Sulla. As this was a purely political marriage, he did not scruple to carry on liaisons in the fashion of his time; but in such number and with such ambigendered diversity that Curio (father of his later general) called him omnium mulierum vir et omnium virorum mulier—“the husband of every woman and the wife of every man.”4 He would continue these habits in his campaigns, dallying with Cleopatra in Egypt, with Queen Eunoe in Numidia, and with so many ladies in Gaul that his soldiers in fond jest called him moechus calvus, the “bald adulterer”; in his triumph after conquering Gaul they sang a couplet warning all husbands to keep their wives under lock and key as long as Caesar was in town. The aristocracy hated him doubly—for undermining their privileges and seducing their wives. Pompey divorced his wife for her intimacy with Caesar. Cato’s passionate hostility was not all philosophical: his half sister Servilia was the most devoted of Caesar’s mistresses. When Cato, suspecting Caesar’s complicity with Catiline, challenged him in the Senate to read aloud a note just brought to him, Caesar passed it to Cato without comment; it was a love letter from Servilia.5 Her passion for him continued throughout his life, and merciless gossip, in her later years, charged her with surrendering her daughter Tertia to Caesar’s lust. During the Civil War, at a public auction, Caesar “knocked down” some confiscated estates of irreconcilable aristocrats to Servilia at a nominal price; when some expressed surprise at the low figure, Cicero remarked, in a pithy pun that might have cost him his life, Tertia deducta, which could either mean “a third off,” or refer to the rumor that Servilia had brought her daughter to Caesar. Tertia became the wife of Caesar’s prime assassin, Cassius. So the amours of men mingle with the commotions of states.
Probably these diversified investments helped Caesar’s rise as well as his fall. Every woman he won was an influential friend, usually in the enemy’s camp; and most of them remained his devotees even when his passion had cooled to courtesy. Crassus, though his wife Tertulla was reported to be Caesar’s mistress, lent him vast sums to finance his candidacies with bribes and games; at one time Caesar owed him 800 talents ($2,880,000). Such loans were not acts of generosity or friendship; they were campaign contributions, to be repaid with political favors or military spoils. Crassus, like Atticus, needed protection and opportunities for his millions. Most Roman politicians of the time incurred similar “debts”: Mark Antony owed 40,000,000 sesterces, Cicero 60,000,000, Milo 70,000,000—though these figures may be conservative slanders. We must think of Caesar as at first an unscrupulous politician and a reckless rake, slowly transformed by growth and responsibility into one of history’s most profound and conscientious statesmen. We must not forget, as we rejoice at his faults, that he was a great man notwithstanding. We cannot equate ourselves with Caesar by proving that he seduced women, bribed ward leaders, and wrote books.
II. THE CONSUL
Caesar began as the secret ally of Catiline and ended as the remaker of Rome. Hardly a year after Sulla’s death he prosecuted Gnaeus Dolabella, a tool of the Sullan reaction; the jury voted against Caesar, but the people applauded his democratic offensive and his brilliant speech. He could not rival Cicero’s verve and wit, passionate periods, and rhetorical flagellations; indeed, Caesar disliked this “Asianic” style and disciplined himself to the masculine brevity and stern simplicity that were to distinguish his Commentaries on the Gallic and Civil Wars. Nevertheless, he was soon ranked as second only to Cicero in eloquence.6
In 68 he was chosen quaestor and was assigned to serve in Spain. He led military expeditions against the native tribes, sacked towns, and collected enough plunder to pay off some of his debts. At the same time he won the gratitude of Spanish cities by lowering the interest charges on the sums that had been lent them by the Roman bankers. Coming at Gades upon a statue of Alexander, he reproached himself for having accomplished so little at an age when the Macedonian had conquered half the Mediterranean world. He returned to Rome and plunged again into the race for office and power. In 65 he was elected aedile, or commissioner of public works. He spent his money—i.e., the money of Crassus—in adorning the Forum with new buildings and colonnades, and courted the populace with unstinted games. Sulla had removed from the Capitol the trophies of Marius—banners, pictures, and spoils representing the features and victories of the old radical; Caesar had these restored, to the joy of Marius’ veterans; and by that act alone he announced his rebel policy. The conservatives protested and marked him out as a man to be broken.
In 64, as president of a commission appointed to try cases of murder, he summoned to his tribunal the surviving agents of Sulla’s proscriptions and sentenced several of them to exile or death. In 63 he voted in the Senate against the execution of Catiline’s accomplices and remarked casually, in his speech, that human personality does not outlive death;7 it was apparently the only part of his speech that offended no one. In that same year he was elected pontifex maximus, head of the Roman religion. In 62 he was chosen praetor, and prosecuted a leading conservative for embezzling public funds. In 61 he was appointed propraetor for Spain, but his creditors prevented his departure. He admitted that he needed 25,000,000 sesterces in order to have nothing.8 Crassus came to his rescue by underwriting all his obligations. Caesar proceeded to Spain, led militarily brilliant campaigns against tribes with a passion for independence, and came back to Rome with spoils enough to pay off his debts and yet so enrich the Treasury that the Senate voted him a triumph. Perhaps the optimates were subtle; they knew that Caesar wished to stand for the consulate, that the law forbade candidacy in absence, and that the triumphator was required by law to remain outside the city until the day of his triumph—which the Senate had set for after the election. But Caesar forewent his triumph,
entered the city, and campaigned with irresistible energy and skill.
His victory was obtained by his clever attachment of Pompey to the liberal cause. Pompey had just returned from the East after a succession of military and diplomatic achievements. By clearing the sea of pirates he had restored security to Mediterranean trade, and prosperity to the cities it served. He had pleased the capitalists of Rome by conquering Bithynia, Pontus, and Syria; he had deposed and set up kings and had lent them money from his spoils at lush rates of interest; he had accepted a huge bribe from the king of Egypt to come and quell a revolt there, and then had refrained from carrying out the compact on the ground that it was illegal;9 he had pacified Palestine and made it a client state of Rome; he had founded thirty-nine cities and had established law, order, and peace; all in all he had behaved with judgment, statesmanship, and profit. Now he had brought back to Rome such wealth in taxes and tribute, goods captured and slaves ransomed or sold, that he was able to contribute 200,000,000 sesterces to the Treasury, add 350,000,000 to its annual revenues, distribute 384,000,000 among his soldiers, and yet keep enough for himself to rival Crassus as one of the two richest men in Rome.