The Roman Way

by Edith Hamilton

  But what could this impersonal rationality mean to furious, frightened men whose ears still rang with Cicero’s impassioned appeals to everything mortal and immortal except the rational? Cicero is an authority for Caesar’s brilliant promise at the bar when in his youth he began a career as a lawyer. None of his speeches there have survived and all that can be said is that he must then have changed his style completely in his later years. Cicero was the model for the Roman bar; his powers of terrific invective, of playing upon people’s emotions, of firing them to anger or melting them to tears, of making the eagle scream—the bronze Roman eagle—with appeals to republican glory and ancestral purity of hearth and home—this overpowering onrush of eloquent language would surely never have found a rival in the direct, terse, simple words which are all that Caesar has left behind him.

  There is still another portrait of Caesar drawn by a contemporary. In those last years of the Republic a fierce young poet was walking the streets of Rome and noting with passionate scorn in bitter, jeering verses the corruption he met with there. It would be hard to find in all the range of literature anything more different from Cicero’s letters than Catullus’ poems. To pass from one to the other is rather like passing from Archdeacon Grantley and the pleasant people of Barset to Swift at his most violent. Cicero by birth and by nature is the decent, comfortable bourgeois always; Catullus, the aristocrat by temperament turned rebel against the world and everything decent and comfortable in it.

  The first of the two poems in which he expresses his opinion of Caesar turns on one Mamurra, of whom Cicero wrote to Atticus: “Do I approve of Caesar’s military power being extended? If I did I would approve of the throwing away of the Campanian lands, of my own banishment, of the wealth of Mamurra—” Catullus thought the same about that wealth: “Who can witness, who endure, this thing? Only he who is himself without shame, greedy, a swindling gamester. Mamurra have the wealth of Gaul beyond the Alps and farthest Britain? O Rome, decadent in your debauchery, will you witness these things and endure? Now, arrogant, money rolling off him, he goes to every bed of all alike. Was it for this, O general, great as never another, that you went to that farthest island of the west? You foster this thing of evil? Is it for this, O Caesar, Pompey, that you have brought ruin upon all.”

  The second poem leaves nothing further to be said in the way of personal malediction: “How prettily they agree, Mamurra, Caesar, each as vile as the other with the vice of decadents. No wonder either. The dirt that fouls both has sunk deep in, nor will be washed away. Sick alike, in the same bed, sweet twins, elegantly learned in adultery, both, and one as greedy for it as the other—how prettily they agree.”

  Did that loud furious voice, shouting out filth of vilest abuse, not reach Cicero’s ears when Caesar seemed to him, too, all that was most hateful? He never mentions Catullus; he never hints at any sort of vice in Caesar. With all their decent propriety, the letters give a clear enough picture of Mark Antony’s habits. It would seem natural to find in them some allusion of the kind to Caesar’s if they had been as Catullus made out. But Cicero is completely silent. Once in a speech he remarked that there was no young man in Rome with any attraction against whom such things had not been said.

  The century after Caesar’s death heard other tales about him that bore out Catullus’ accusation, as well as endless stories of ladies who loved him, but they are not for the chronicler to pass on. There is no contemporary evidence in the case except Catullus, and a complete absence of the judicial quality seems to have distinguished that passionate young man beyond all else. It will be with Caesar as with other men accused of infamies which cannot be proved or disproved, people will believe or not according to their own temperament.

  As his contemporaries saw him he was a contradiction, and so he remains. Plutarch quotes a description of him from Cicero which makes credible the many accounts that he was excessively dandified, always an elegant. “When I see his hair so carefully arranged and observe him adjusting it with one finger, I cannot imagine it should enter such a man’s thoughts to subvert the Roman State.” Yet all reports agree that he could fight—and swim—with the best of his soldiers, and that he not only endured exceptional hardships easily, but practiced always a notable temperance in food and drink. If he was really sick with the diseases of the sewer his vigor was truly astounding. He was—probably—nearing fifty-eight when he died. During the three years preceding he had carried on successful wars in Greece, Egypt, Asia Minor, Africa, Spain, in the accounts of which occur constant references to his outstanding characteristic, swiftness—of mind, in anticipating the enemy’s next move, of body, in always arriving long before it seemed possible.

  He was reported as fearfully cruel in Gaul and notably merciful in Italy. As regards the first, he is the chief witness against himself. Four times he tells of terrible severity, of whole tribes of Gauls or Germans wiped out or sold into slavery. Each time the people in question had broken an agreement—or Caesar thought so—and he was fighting in a hostile country with no possibility of help from anywhere. In all other cases he makes himself out a lenient conqueror, and the fact that during the long struggle with the Pompeians there was no rising in Gaul against his rule speaks for his wisdom in exercising it.

  Before he left Rome for the west the splendor of the gladiatorial games he held had outdone all others and were always spoken of as a cause of his popularity with the lower classes, and yet a curious little story of him has come down in a life of Augustus: “As often as Augustus attended the gladiatorial games, he would take special pains to appear absorbed by the spectacle, because he wished to avoid the odium incurred by his relative (Caesar) who had been used, when present on such occasions, to turn away and occupy himself with reading or writing.”

  In the end he remains an enigma except in a single respect, his generalship. Quite possibly that is the way he himself would have had it. At any rate, he cared to put himself before the world only as a soldier. He was too great to be easily pigeonholed. He must be given a place among the men of thought; he was pre-eminent as a statesman and he wrote a book which has held its own for two thousand years. Nevertheless, it is the book of a man interested only in what is outside, in things, which to him included most men and all soldiers. His real place is, of course, with the great captains of the world, who whether they rule over war or industry, act and do not explain.

  At the opposite pole stands Cicero. He can be understood through and through. All the hidden things within the heart, the meannesses and weaknesses we least wish seen in ourselves, in his case lie open, completely exposed to strange, critical eyes. His vanity, his hypocrisy, his falsehoods, his cowardice, his dependence upon praise, his love of ease, his terrible difficulty in making up his mind, all these and more he wrote down for the friend he knew would never hold a single one against him, and so he preserved them plain to see forever. It was a hard fate for a man to bring down upon himself who wanted most of all to stand a glorious figure in the halls of history.

  “He was without magnificence of mind,” Plutarch says in his grave summary of his character. The words are arresting; they bring vividly before us the difference between our scale of values and the Greek and Roman. Magnificence of mind is not among our best-prized virtues today. Caesar had it. When his most trusted officer deserted to the enemy in a time of crisis he sent after him all the possessions he had left behind, horses, slaves, baggage, without a word. After Pompey’s defeat they brought him a great mass of correspondence found in Pompey’s tent, for him to read and find out who were his enemies in Rome. He burned the whole unread. Behind the action lay fearlessness and self-confidence, both of the essence of magnificence. Cicero had neither. He let Catiline go when he had him under his hand. He denounced him sitting before him in the senate-house; he showed him up to the whole senate as a convicted traitor; he thundered and lightened against him—and allowed him to walk out undisturbed, free to leave the city and put himself at the head of a hostile army. He was consul; a w
ord from him and Catiline would have been in prison, but he was not sure that people were with him, and without that surety he never could act. He had no surety within himself.

  Magnificence in a man means one who will live on his own terms, not on those imposed by others. A story which illustrates the point is told by Plutarch. When Caesar was very young, Sulla, the all-powerful, bade him as he had already bidden the obedient Pompey, to divorce his wife and take another of Sulla’s choosing. Caesar refused; his property was confiscated; he still refused; a price was put upon his head; he fled and still refused. In the end it was Sulla, the terrible autocrat, who gave in to a boy not yet out of his teens. Cicero lived all his life on terms imposed by others. The matter of chief importance to him was to have approval. To the day of his death this was a source of terrible trouble to him. It made him jealous of everyone else who was approved. Even of Pompey he could write: “The thought that his services to the country might in the dim future be reckoned higher than mine used to prick me to the heart.” It was the reason he was forever explaining himself, excusing himself. He could not get on without support, or even without praise.

  Plutarch was right, he was never magnificent. But all the same he had virtues to command respect. The negative one of complete personal integrity which Pompey shared with him, and Caesar probably too, is by no means to be lightly regarded. In a city where everything was for sale, to be the exception was admirable. But far beyond that is the fact that whenever it came to a definite choice between what he thought was right and what he knew was safe, he chose the former, at a cost of suffering such as only a man timid and sensitive as he was could feel—such suffering as a man like Caesar never felt. But in spite of the agony it cost him, he held fast to duty when he saw it. “One may do some time-serving,” he once wrote, “but when one’s hour has come one must not miss it.” Nor did he. He joined Pompey when he believed his cause was hopeless and that he was bidding farewell to all that made life worth living. He was a tired old man, too. He wrote Atticus at the time: “And to speak truth, my life’s evening, following peacefully after my long labors, has made me lazy with the thought of home pleasures.” All the same he found his way to Pompey’s camp across the sea. Lucan’s famous line about another faithful adherent of the Republic applies as truly to Cicero in that moment:

  Conquering causes are dear to the gods, the conquered to Cato.

  Once more, when Caesar was dead and there seemed to him a possibility of restoring the Republic, he gave up going to Greece where safety lay, to come back to Rome and fight against the man of the hour, Mark Antony, the greatest power then in Italy, whom he saw as an imminent danger to the state. He died in consequence. He was forced to leave Rome; he went first to one country house, then another. At last he decided to take ship and sail somewhere—anywhere. He was all alone. Not one of the many friends of the letters came forward to stand by him. (The record does not say where Atticus was, but we may feel sure the situation was advantageous.) He embarked, and then—no reason is given—left the boat and returned to the house and lay down upon his bed. He had come to the end of his desire for life. But his servants got him up and into a litter and were hurrying him back to the seashore when Antony’s men caught up with them. He told them to set the litter down, and, Plutarch says, continuing to stroke his chin as he was wont to do, he looked steadfastly upon his murderers. Only one man dared strike him; the others stood by, covering their faces. “There is nothing,” he once wrote to his son-in-law, “absolutely nothing fairer, more beautiful, more to be loved, than high courage.” He had not always been able to show it in his life. In his death he was more fortunate.

  VII

  Catullus

  One holiday morning in the year 57 B.C., the year after Cicero returned from exile, the Roman forum was filled with a gathering unusual to the place. In spite of the festival just beginning, a trial was to be held, and not only the size of the crowd but the fact that many notables were to be seen who would normally never think of coming to court, showed that it was judged an occasion quite out of the ordinary. Ladies of fashion were conspicuous; of all the wits of the town every one had his place there; and not a single young man with any pretensions either to wit or fashion but was well to the fore. There was reason enough for their presence. One of Rome’s very great ladies had brought a charge of murder and attempt to poison against one of the most brilliant young elegants in the city. Even more alluring than that, the two had been lately, very lately, closely associated, their names linked together in everyone’s mouth. It had really been an acknowledged fact; he had even lived for a time in her house, neither of them being people who would dream of giving up anything they wanted because of what might be said. And now they sat facing each other, accuser and defendant on a capital charge, Clodia, once Cicero’s friend, the sister of the hero of the Good Goddess festival and herself the heroine of a thousand scandals, and Cicero’s gay and cynical and delightful young correspondent, Caelius Rufus.

  Clodia had taken her seat in the front row beside the men who had preferred the accusation for her, not one of them important enough to draw even a passing glance away from her. At this time she had not a shred of reputation left; her name was a byword; yet she sat there as disdainfully superior to the staring, covertly sneering crowd as if she had never strayed an inch from the traditions of the great aristocratic house which had fathered her. Of so much the reader of the record may be sure. The Claudii all had magnificence of a sort: they lived their lives on their own terms and what people thought of them mattered not in the very least. In the crowded forum Clodia saw two persons only, the man who had yielded to her for a brief space, lived in her house, taken her money, and then all in a moment scornfully shaken himself free of her, and the man who was to defend him, the bitter enemy of her and hers, home in triumph from the exile her brother had brought down upon him. No one in Rome but knew Cicero’s tongue. Another woman would have stayed safe at home. Clodia took a front seat and faced her foe with eyes that never wavered and a faint smile upon her lips.

  One may conjecture that the defendant was less at ease. He was at least ten years younger than the lady and twenty years less experienced. Furthermore, if the verdict went against him, he was ruined, and a life of fairest promise had stretched before him when this terrible accusation loomed up in his path. He might well be thinking that he had acted with reckless folly when he had wearied of an older woman’s passion and on the instant flung himself away from her. Care was necessary in dealing with the Claudii. He had not troubled to take any. He had laughed at her advances and gone from her to make the city laugh too. Quadrantaria he called her, the lady whose price is a penny, and the taunt went through the town. Whenever Clodia appeared someone would whisper it and everyone catch it up and pass it on. He had scorned her openly, and she had been used only to scorn others herself, to throw carelessly away man after man when they had served her turn. Caelius had been a fool and his only hope to escape paying a terrible price for his folly lay in his advocate.

  To Cicero the case was heaven-sent. He had come back to Rome to find that Clodius had had his beloved house razed to the ground and a temple erected on the site. It was the insult added to injury which seemed hardest of the two to bear. And now was his enemy delivered into his hands. Plutarch says of him that before he started on a speech he was always cold with fright and even when launched into the full current of it could hardly leave off shaking and trembling. It is a credible account. Such high tension and quivering sensitiveness are very often the companions of genius. But, it may well be believed, upon this occasion there was not a trace of either. Cicero was at ease and happy; he was perfectly aware of what he could do.

  The case for the prosecution was at an end: Caelius had hired men to assassinate the envoy of the King of Egypt with money Clodia had given him; with this same money also he had bribed slaves to administer poison to her. Witnesses were present to swear to both charges. Cicero rose to answer. He knew the Roman crowd as a master mus
ician his instrument; he could play upon them as skillfully and as surely.

  “The whole case, gentlemen of the jury, rests upon Clodia, a woman known not only by her noble birth but by the crowd’s complete familiarity with her [laughter]. I wish I need not name her, the more that there has been enmity between me and her husband—I mean, her brother. I am always making that mistake—[a wave of delighted amusement passes over the audience, well aware of the scandal of Clodia’s relations with her brother]. And indeed, I never thought to take upon me a quarrel with a woman, especially with one who far from being considered any man’s adversary is universally held to be the intimate of all [laughter]. I would not offend her. Let me ask her how she would prefer me to address her—in the grave, old-fashioned style or in the lighter manner of today? If the first, I must summon one to rise from the dead, that grand old blind man, of all her family the most renowned, not sorry today that he cannot see who sits before him. He shall stand here and speak in my stead: Clodia, what have you to do with Caelius? How is it that you were either so intimate with him as to give him money, or so hostile to him as to fear to be poisoned by him? You, your father’s daughter, the descendant of generations of men who were Rome’s consuls, the wife of a man Rome delighted to honor—why did you seek this intimacy? Was he your husband’s friend—was he related to you by blood or by marriage? None of these, O daughter of a house where the women have ever equalled the men in glorious renown. Did I break off a base peace with Rome’s bitter foe that you might enter into the alliance of a shameful love? Did I bring water to the city for you to wash away your filthiness? Did I build the great highway that you might take your pleasure on it with strange men?