The Story of Civilization: Volume III: Caesar and Christ

by Will Durant

  Ever since the state fell under the sway of a few powerful men . . . all influence, rank, and wealth have been in their hands. To us they have left danger, defeat, prosecutions, poverty. . . . What have we left save only the breath of life? ... Is it not better to die valiantly than to lose our wretched and dishonored lives after being the sport of other men’s insolence? 41

  The program on which he proposed to unite the heterogeneous elements of revolution was simple: novae tabulae—“new records”—i.e., a clean sweep and abolition of all debts. He labored for this purpose with all the energy of a Caesar; indeed, for a time he had the sympathy, if not the secret support, of Caesar. “There was nothing,” said Cicero, “that he could not undergo, no pains that he would spare of co-operation, vigilance, and toil. He could bear cold, hunger, and thirst.”42 We are assured by his enemies that he organized a band of 400 men who planned to kill the consuls and seize the government on the first day of 65. The day came, and nothing unusual transpired. At the end of 64 Catiline stood against Cicero for the consulate and waged a vigorous campaign.I Capital took fright and began to leave Italy. The upper classes united in support of Cicero; for a year the concordia ordinum that he had asked for was a reality, and he was its perfect voice.

  Blocked politically, Catiline turned to war. Secretly his followers organized an army of 20,000 men in Etruria, and gathered together in Rome a group of conspirators that included representatives of every class from senators to slaves, and two urban praetors—Cethegus and Lentulus. In the following October Catiline again ran for the consulate. To make sure of his election, conservative historians tell us, he planned to have his rival murdered during the campaign, and to have Cicero assassinated at the same time. Claiming that he had been apprised of these plans, Cicero filled the Field of Mars with armed guards and superintended the voting. Despite the enthusiastic support of the proletariat, Catiline was again defeated. On November 7, says Cicero, several conspirators knocked at his door, but were driven away by his guards. On the morrow, seeing Catiline in the Senate, Cicero flung at him that superb excoriation which once every schoolboy mouthed. As the oration proceeded, the seats around Catiline were emptied one by one, until he sat alone. Silently he bore the torrent of accusations, the sharp, relentless phrases falling like whips upon his head. Cicero played upon every emotion; he spoke of the nation as the common father, and of Catiline as in intent a parricide; he charged him—not with evidence given, but by innuendo and implication—with conspiracy against the state, with theft, adultery, and sexual abnormality; finally he petitioned Jove to protect Rome, and to devote Catiline to eternal punishment. When Cicero had finished, Catiline walked out unhindered, and joined his forces in Etruria. His general, L. Manlius, sent a last appeal to the Senate:

  We call gods and men to witness that it is not against our country that we have taken up arms, nor against the safety of our fellow citizens. We, wretched paupers, who through the violence and cruelty of usurers are without a country, condemned to scorn and indigence, are actuated by only one wish: to guarantee our personal security against wrong. We demand neither power nor wealth, those great and external causes of strife among mankind. We only ask for freedom, a treasure that no man will surrender except with life itself. We implore you, senators, have pity on your miserable fellow citizens! 44

  The next day, in a second oration, Cicero described the rebel’s following as centering around a coterie of perfumed perverts, and indulged without stint his genius for sarcasm and invective, ending again on a religious note. In the following weeks he presented evidence to the Senate purporting to show that Catiline had tried to stir up revolution in Gaul. On December 3 he had Lentulus, Cethegus, and five other adherents of Catiline arrested. In a third oration he declared their guilt, announced their imprisonment, and told the Senate and the people that the conspiracy was broken and that they might retire to their homes in security and peace. On December 5 he convoked the Senate and asked what should be done with the prisoners. Silanus voted that they should be executed. Caesar advised mere imprisonment, recalling that the execution of a Roman citizen was forbidden by the Sempronian Law. In a fourth oration Cicero gently advised death. Cato gave the opinion the sanction of his philosophy, and death won the day. Some young aristocrats tried to kill Caesar as he left the senate chamber, but he escaped. Cicero, with armed men, went to the jail and had the sentence carried out with a minimum of delay. Marcus Antonius, co-consul with Cicero, and father of a famous son, was sent north with an army to destroy Catiline’s force. The Senate promised pardon and 200,000 sesterces to every man who would leave the rebel ranks; but, says Sallust, “not one deserted from Catiline’s camp.” On the plains of Pistoia battle was joined (61). The 3000 insurgents, far outnumbered, fought to the end around their treasured standards, the eagles of Marius. None surrendered or took flight; every one of them died on the field, among them Catiline.

  Being essentially a man of thought rather than of action, Cicero was surprised and impressed by the skill and courage he had shown in suppressing a dangerous revolt. “The direction of so great an enterprise,” he told the Senate, “seems scarcely possible to merely human wisdom.”45 He compared himself with Romulus, but considered it a greater deed to have preserved Rome than to have founded it.46 Senators and magnates smiled at his language, but they knew that he had saved them. Cato and Catulus hailed him as pater patriae, father of his country. When, at the end of 63, he laid down his office, all the propertied classes in the community, he tells us, gave him thanks, named him immortal, and escorted him in honor to his home.47 The proletariat did not join in these demonstrations. It could not forgive him for violating the laws of Rome by putting citizens to death without appeal; it felt that he had made no effort to remove the causes of Catiline’s revolt, or to mitigate the poverty of the masses. It refused to let him address the Assembly on that last day, and listened in anger when he swore that he had preserved the city. The revolution was not over. With Caesar’s consulate it would begin again.

  * * *

  I It was in this campaign that Cicero’s brother Quintus drew up for him a manual of electioneering technique. “Be lavish in your promises,” Quintus advised; “men prefer a false promise to a flat refusal. . . . Contrive to get some new scandal aired against your rivals for crime, corruption, or immorality.”43

  CHAPTER VIII

  Literature Under the Revolution

  145-30 B.C.

  I. LUCRETIUS

  AMID this turbulent transformation of economy, government, and morals, literature was not forgotten, and did not quite escape the fever and stimulus of the age. Varro and Nepos found safety in antiquarian scholarship or historical research; Sallust retired from his campaigns to defend his party and disguise his morals with brilliant monographs; Caesar stooped from empire to grammar and continued his wars in his Commentaries; Catullus and Calvus sought refuge from politics in the pursuit and poetry of love; timid and sensitive spirits like Lucretius hid themselves in the gardens of philosophy; and Cicero retreated now and then from the heat of the Forum to cool his blood with books. But not one of them found peace. War and revolution touched them with pervasive infection; and even Lucretius must have known the restlessness which he describes:

  There is a weight on their minds, and a mountain of misery lies on their hearts. . . . For each, not knowing what he wants, seeks always to change his place, as if he could drop his burden. Here is one who, bored to death at home, goes forth every now and then from his palace; but feeling no better abroad, suddenly returns. Off he courses, driving his nags to his country house in headlong haste. . . . He has hardly crossed the threshold when he yawns, or seeks oblivion in a heavy sleep, or even hurries back to the city. So each man flees from himself; but, as one might expect, the self which he cannot escape cleaves to him all the more against his will. He hates himself because, a sick man, he does not know the cause of his complaint. Any man who could see that clearly would cast aside his business, and before all else would seek t
o understand the nature of things.1

  His poem is our only biography of Titus Lucretius Carus; it is proudly reticent about its author; and outside of it, barring a few allusions, Roman literature is strangely silent about one of its greatest men. Tradition placed his birth at 99 or 95, his death at 55 or 51, B.C.. He lived through half a century of the Roman revolution: through the Social War, Marian massacres, and Sullan proscriptions; through Catiline’s conspiracy and Caesar’s consulate. The aristocracy to which he probably belonged was in obvious decay; the world in which he lived was falling apart into a chaos that left no life or fortune secure. His poem is a longing for physical and mental peace.

  Lucretius sought refuge in nature, philosophy, and poetry. Perhaps also he had a round of love; he must have fared badly, for he writes ungallantly of women, denounces the lure of beauty, and advises itching youth to appease the flesh with calm promiscuity.2 In woods and fields, in plants and animals, m mountain, river, and sea, he found a delight only rivaled by his passion for philosophy. He was as impressionable as Wordsworth, as keen of sense as Keats, as prone as Shelley to find metaphysics in a pebble or a leaf. Nothing of nature’s loveliness or terror was lost upon him; he was stirred by the forms and sounds, odors and savors, of things; felt the silences of secret haunts, the quiet falling of the night, the lazy waking of the day. Everything natural was a marvel to him—the patient flow of water, the sprouting of seeds, the endless changes of the sky, the imperturbable persistence of the stars. He observed animals with curiosity and sympathy, loved their forms of strength or grace, felt their sufferings, and wondered at their wordless philosophy. No poet before him had so expressed the grandeur of the world in its detailed variety and its congregated power. Here at last nature won the citadels of literature, and rewarded her poet with a force of descriptive speech that only Homer and Shakespeare have surpassed.

  So responsive a spirit must have been deeply moved in youth by the mystery and pageantry of religion. But the ancient faith, which had once served family discipline and social order, had lost its hold on the educated classes of Rome. Caesar smiled indulgently as he played pontifex maximus, and the banquets of the priests were the holydays of Roman epicures. A small minority of the people were open atheists; now and then some Roman Alcibiades nocturnally mutilated the statues of the gods.3 No longer inspired or consoled by the official ritual, many among the lower classes were flocking to the bloodstained shrines of the Phrygian Great Mother, or the Cappadocian goddess Ma, or some of the Oriental deities that had entered Italy with soldiers or captives from the East. Under the influence of Greek or Asiatic cults the old Roman idea of “Orcus” as a colorless subterranean abode of all the indiscriminate dead had developed into belief in a literal Hell—a “Tartarus” or “Acheron” of endless suffering for all but a “reborn” initiated few.4 The sun and the moon were conceived as gods, and every eclipse sent terror into lonely villages and teeming tenements. Chaldean fortunetellers and astrologers were overrunning Italy, casting horoscopes for paupers and millionaires, revealing hidden treasures and future events, interpreting omens and dreams with cautious ambiguity and profitable flattery. Every unusual occurrence in nature was examined as the warning of a god. It was this mass of superstition, ritualism, and hypocrisy that Lucretius knew as religion.

  No wonder that he rebelled against it, and attacked it with all the ardor of a religious reformer. We may judge from the bitterness of his resentment the depth of his youthful piety and the distress of his disillusionment. Seeking for some alternative faith, he passed through the skepticism of Ennius to the great poem in which Empedocles had expounded evolution and the conflict of opposites. When he discovered the writings of Epicurus it seemed to him that he had found the answers to his questions; that strange mixture of materialism and free will, of joyful gods and a godless world, appealed to him as a free man’s answer to doubt and fear. A breath of liberation from supernatural terrors seemed to come out of Epicurus’ garden, revealing the omnipresence of law, the self-ruled independence of nature, the forgivable naturalness of death. Lucretius resolved to take this philosophy out of the ungainly prose in which Epicurus had expressed it, fuse it into poetic form, and offer it to his generation as the way, the truth, and the life. He felt in himself a rare and double power—the objective perception of the scientist and the subjective emotion of the poet; and he saw in the total order of nature a sublimity, and in nature’s parts a beauty, that encouraged and justified this marriage of philosophy and poetry. His great purpose aroused all his powers, lifted him to a unique intellectual exuberance, and left him, before its completion, exhausted and perhaps insane. But his “long and delightful toil” gave him a consuming happiness, and he poured into it all the devotion of a profoundly religious soul.

  He chose for his work a philosophical rather than a poetic title—De Rerum Natura, “On the Nature of Things”—a simple translation of the Peri Physeos (“About Nature”) which the pre-Socratics had used as a common name for their treatises. He offered it to the sons of Caius Memmius, praetor in 58, as a road from fear to understanding. He took as his model the Empedoclean epic of exposition, as his speech the quaint bluntness of Ennius, as his medium the mobile and versatile hexameter. And then, forgetting for a moment the distant carelessness of the gods, he began with a fervent apostrophe to Venus conceived, like Empedocles’ Love, as a symbol of creative desire and the ways of peace:

  Mother of Aeneas’ race, delight of men and gods, O nurturing Venus! . . . Through thee every kind of life is conceived and born, and looks upon the sun; before thee and thy coming the winds flee, and the clouds of the sky depart; to thee the miraculous earth lifts up sweet flowers; for thee the waves of the sea laugh, and the peaceful heavens shine with overspreading light. For as soon as the springtime face of day appears, and the fertilizing south wind makes all things fresh and green, then first the birds of the air proclaim thee and thy advent, O divine one, pierced to the heart by thy power; then the wild herds leap over the glad pastures, and cross the swift streams; so, held captive by thy charm, each one follows thee wherever thou goest to lead. Then through seas and mountains and rushing rivers, and the leafy dwellings of the birds, and the verdant fields, thou strikest soft love into the breasts of all creatures, and makest them to propagate their generations after their kinds. Since, therefore, thou alone rulest the nature of things; since without thee nothing rises to the shining shores of light, nothing joyful or lovely is born; I long for thee as partner in the writing of these verses. . . . Grant to my words, O goddess, an undying beauty. Cause, meanwhile, the savage works of war to sleep and be still. ... As Mars reclines upon thy sacred form, bend thou around him from above, pour sweet coaxings from thy mouth, and beg for thy Romans the gift of peace.5

  II. DE RERUM NATURA

  If we try to reduce to some logical form the passionate disorder of Lucretius’ argument, his initial thesis lies in a famous line:

  Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum—

  “to so many evils religion has persuaded men.”6 He tells the story of Iphigenia in Aulis, of countless human sacrifices, of hecatombs offered to gods conceived in the image of man’s greed; he recalls the terror of simplicity and youth lost in a jungle of vengeful deities, the fear of lightning and thunder, of death and Hell, and the subterranean horrors pictured in Etruscan art and Oriental mysteries. He reproaches mankind for preferring sacrificial ritual to philosophical understanding:

  O miserable race of men, to impute to the gods such acts as these, and such bitter wrath! What sorrow did men [through such creeds] prepare for themselves, what wounds for us, what tears for our children! For piety lies not in being often seen turning a veiled head to stones, nor in approaching every altar, nor in lying prostrate . . . before the temples of the gods, nor in sprinkling altars with the blood of beasts . . . but rather in being able to look upon all things with a mind at peace.7

  There are gods, says Lucretius, but they dwell far off in happy isolation from the thought or care
s of men. There, “beyond the flaming ramparts of the world” (extra flammantia moenia mundi),8 beyond the reach of our sacrifices and prayers, they live like followers of Epicurus, shunning worldly affairs, content with the contemplation of beauty and the practices of friendship and peace.9 They are not the authors of creation, nor the causes of events; who would be so unfair as to charge them with the wastefulness, the disorder, the sufferings, and the injustices of earthly life? No, this infinite universe of many worlds is self-contained; it has no law outside itself; nature does everything of her own accord. “For who is strong enough to rule the sum of things, to hold in hand the mighty bridle of the unfathomable deep?—who to turn all the heavens around at once ... to shake the serene sky with thunder, to launch the lightning that often shatters temples, and cast the bolt that slays the innocent and passes the guilty by?”10 The only god is Law; and the truest worship, as well as the only peace, lies in learning that Law and loving it. “This terror and gloom of the mind must be dispelled not by the sun’s rays . . . but by the aspect and law of nature.”11