Latin literature of the Revolution, Lucretius, Catullus, Cicero, Sallust, Varro

Introduction

Amid this tumultuous transformation of economy, government, and moral codes, literature was not forgotten and was not entirely detached from the fever of the age. Varro and Nepos sought health in the investigation of antiquity or historical research; Sallust laid aside his political struggles to champion his party and concealed his own ethics behind the mantle of monographs; Caesar descended from the heights of empire to devote himself to grammar and syntax and pursued his wars in his Commentaries; Catullus and Calvus fled from politics into the arms of poetry and love; sensitive and shamefaced souls like Lucretius hid themselves in the garden of philosophy; and Cicero too occasionally sought refuge from the heat of the Forum in a corner to cool his fevered blood with a book. Yet none of them attained peace. War and revolution fell upon their souls like a contagious disease. Even Lucretius must not have been untouched by restlessness, for he describes it thus:

Upon their minds a burden, upon their hearts a mountain of distress. … For each, ignorant of his own inner desire, constantly moves from place to place as if he would lay down his load. One who is sorely weary at home goes out from his dwelling, yet mounted on horseback he rides to his country villa. … But scarcely has he crossed the threshold when he yawns and seeks forgetfulness in heavy sleep or hurries back to the city. Thus each flees from himself; yet, as is to be expected, that “self” which he cannot escape, against his will, clings to him more closely still. He hates himself because the sick man knows not the cause of his discontent. Whoever can see this clearly will abandon his affairs and before all else seek to know the nature of things.

Lucretius

His poem is the only biography we possess of Titus Lucretius Carus. But this poem is guarded with a proud reticence about its author, and apart from it Roman literature, save for a few allusions, is astonishingly silent about one of its greatest men. According to tradition, his birth was in 99 or 95 BC, and his death in 55 or 51. Lucretius lived through half a century of the Roman Revolution: the Social War, the massacre of Marius, the proscriptions of Sulla, the conspiracy of Catiline, and the consulship of Caesar. The aristocracy, to which he perhaps belonged, was visibly in decay; the world in which he lived had plunged into a chaos that left no man’s life or property secure. His poem is a longing for peace of body and mind.

Lucretius took refuge in nature, philosophy, and poetry. He may have tasted love, but he cannot have drunk deeply of it, for he speaks harshly of women, condemns the deception of beauty, and advises amorous youths to allay their passion in calm intercourse with this or that. He delighted in forest and field, in plants and animals, in mountain, river, and sea—a delight rivaled only by his passion for philosophy. Like Wordsworth he was impressionable, like Keats sensitive, like Shelley eager to find in every pebble or leaf of a tree a token of metaphysics. No detail of nature’s grace or terror escaped him; he was enraptured by forms and sounds and scents and tastes; he felt the silence of hidden glades, the tranquil spreading of night, and the lazy rising of day. Every natural thing was a miracle to him—the patient flow of water, the growth of seeds, the endless changes of the sky, and the untroubled permanence of the stars. He watched animals with curiosity and affection, loved their powerful or beautiful forms, felt their sufferings, and marveled at their silent wisdom. No poet before him had described the grandeur of the world from the viewpoint of its endless variety and collective power. Here at last nature opened the fortress of literature and gave her poet a power of descriptive speech that only Homer and Shakespeare surpassed.

A spirit so sensitive must in youth have received a profound impression from the mystery and splendor of religion. But the old faith, which had once served the ordering of family and society, had now lost its hold upon the educated of Rome. When Caesar was elected Pontifex Maximus he smiled tolerantly, and the banquets of the priests were days of unbridled revelry for the pleasure-seekers of Rome. A small group of men were openly atheistic. Some Roman Alcibiades damaged the statues of the gods by night. Many of the lower classes, who no longer drew inspiration or consolation from official worship, flocked to the blood-stained temples of the Phrygian “Great Mother” or the Cappadocian “Ma” and to various Eastern deities brought to Italy with soldiers or captives from the East. The Roman conception of “Orcus,” the colorless underground abode of all the dead, under the influence of Greek or Asian cults, turned into a real hell called “Tartarus” or “Acheron,” a center of eternal torment for all except a few “twice-born” initiates. They regarded the sun and moon as gods, and every eclipse plunged remote villages and crowded houses into terror. Soothsayers and astrologers had overrun Italy, casting horoscopes for rich and poor, foretelling hidden treasures and future events, and interpreting omens and dreams with cautious ambiguity and mercenary flattery. Every unusual event in nature was examined as a warning from one of the gods. This mass of superstition, ritual, and hypocrisy was what Lucretius called religion.

It was not surprising that Lucretius should revolt against it and assail it with the zeal of a religious reformer. The violence of his disgust reveals the depth of his youthful piety and the bitterness of his disillusionment. Seeking a new faith, he passed from the skepticism of Ennius to a great poem in which Empedocles explained evolution and the conflict of opposites. When he became acquainted with the writings of Epicurus, it seemed to him that he had found the answer to his problems; that astonishing blend of materialism and free will, of happy gods and a godless world, came to him as the answer of a free man to doubt and fear. It seemed that from the “Garden of Epicurus” a breeze of liberation from supernatural terrors blew, revealing the universality of law, the self-sufficiency of nature, and the natural acceptability of death. Lucretius resolved to draw this philosophy out of the awkward prose form Epicurus had chosen and to cast it into poetry, offering it to his generation as the way, the truth, and the life. He felt within himself a rare dual power: the objective perception of the scientist and the subjective emotion of the poet; and in the majestic order of nature as a whole, and in the beauty of its parts, he found encouragement and justification for his effort to fuse philosophy with poetry. Lucretius’s grand design roused all his powers, led him to a unique intellectual richness, and, before he reached his goal, left him exhausted and perhaps mad. But the “pleasant and long labor” of the poet gave him a profound joy, and Lucretius mingled with it all the earnestness of a deeply religious soul.

On the Nature of Things

If we wish to reduce the passionate confusion of Lucretius’s ideas to logical form, we must say that the first principle of his thought is contained in the famous line:

Religion has prompted men to many evil deeds.

He retells the story of Iphigenia at Aulis and the countless human sacrifices, and the offering of many victims to gods imaged in human form; he recalls the fears of simple souls and youths lost in the grove of jealous gods, the terror of thunder and lightning, the dread of death and hell, and the subterranean terrors embodied in Etruscan art and Eastern cults. He rebukes men for preferring the rite of sacrifice to philosophical understanding:

O wretched race of men, why have you attributed such deeds and such bitter wrath to the gods! What sorrows have men wrought for themselves, what wounds have they inflicted upon us, and what tears have they brought to the eyes of our children! For piety is not to bow the veiled head before images, or to approach every altar, or to fall prostrate before the temples of the gods, or to sprinkle the blood of animals upon the altars. … But rather it is to be able to look upon all things with a tranquil mind.

Lucretius believes in the existence of the gods, but says that these gods live happily far from the thoughts or cares of men and there, “beyond the flaming ramparts of the world,” beyond the reach of our sacrifices and prayers, like the followers of Epicurus, avoiding worldly affairs, they delight in the contemplation of beauty and in the performance of friendship and peace-seeking. The gods are not the agents of creation or the causes of events. Is it not unjust to attribute the excesses and confusions and sufferings and injustices of earthly life to the gods? No, this cosmos composed of many worlds is self-sustaining, and beyond it there is no law; nature does everything according to her own pleasure, “for who has the power to rule the sum of things and to grasp the mighty force of the measureless deeps; who has the strength to turn the heavens at once and to hurl the thunderbolt that shatters temples and to send the arrow that strikes the innocent and passes by the guilty?” Only “law” is god; and the truest worship and the only source of peace lie in knowing and loving this law. “This fear and anguish of the mind must be … dispelled not by the rays of the sun but by the observation and law of nature.”

And thus Lucretius, while mingling the harsh materialism of Democritus with the honey of the Muses, makes the main tenet of his creed that “nothing exists except atoms and void”—that is, matter and space. From this tenet he immediately reaches one of the principles (and hypotheses) of modern science: that the quantity of matter and motion never changes in the universe; nothing arises from nothing and destruction is only change of form. The particles are indestructible, unchangeable, solid, resistant to all pressure, soundless, scentless, tasteless, colorless, and infinite. They intermingle and produce countless combinations and qualities and move ceaselessly, in the apparent stillness of things, in restless motion.

Atoms have parts called “minima”; each minimum is solid, indivisible, and ultimate. It is perhaps because of the varied arrangement of these minima that the size and shape of particles differ and produce the delightful variety of nature. Particles do not move in straight or uniform lines; in their motion there is a kind of “swerve” or elemental deviation and spontaneity that pervades all things, whose highest form is the free will of man.

Everything was at first without form; but the gradual diversification of moving atoms, both in size and in shape—without any design—produced air and fire and water and earth and from them the sun and moon and planets and stars. In the boundlessness of space new worlds are born and old worlds take the path of decay. Stars are fiery bodies set in a ring of ether (that is, a dust of the thinnest atoms) that encloses every planetary system; this is the fiery wall of the cosmos that creates the flaming rampart of the world. A portion of the primeval dust separated from the main mass and revolved upon itself until it cooled and formed the earth: earthquakes are not the roar of gods but the result of the bursting of vapors and underground rivers. Thunder and lightning are not the voice and breath of a god but the natural results of the condensation and collision of clouds. Rain does not fall through the mercy of Jupiter but because the moisture evaporated from the earth by the sun returns to the earth.

Life in origin does not differ from other forms of matter and is the product of moving atoms that individually are dead. Just as the cosmos took shape by the inherent laws of matter, so the earth through a wholly natural selection produced all the kinds and organs of life.

The “mind” is an organ just like the hands or the eyes; and like them it is the tool or agent of the “soul” or vital breath that, as a very subtle substance, is diffused through the whole body and sets every member in motion. Images from the surface of things are constantly reflected upon the highly sensitive particles that form the mind; this is the origin of sensation. Taste, smell, hearing, sight, and touch are caused by particles that rise from things and strike the tongue or palate, the nose, the ears, the eyes, or the skin. All the senses are a kind of touch, and the senses are the final test of truth; if they appear to err, this is the result of a wrong interpretation of them, and only another sense can correct that error. Reason cannot be the test of truth, for it itself depends upon experience, that is, sensation.

The soul is neither spiritual nor immortal. It cannot move the body unless it is of the same nature as the body; it grows and ages with the body; like the body it is affected by disease, medicine, or wine; and when the body dies, its particles apparently disperse. The soul without the body is empty of sensation and meaning; without the organs of touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight what use is the soul? Life is given us not as an absolute possession but as a loan and for the time we are able to use it. When we have exhausted our powers we should leave the stage of life with the courtesy of a grateful guest rising from a banquet. Death in itself is not terrible; only the fear of the hereafter makes death so terrible. But there is no hereafter. Hell is here and in the sufferings that arise from ignorance and lust and quarrelsomeness and greed; heaven is also here in the “quiet temples of the wise.”

Virtue lies neither in fear of the gods nor in cowardly flight from pleasure, but in the harmonious activity of the senses and mental powers under the guidance of reason. “Some men waste their lives in the pursuit of a statue or a name,” but “the true wealth of a man is to live simply with a tranquil mind.” Better than living in luxury in magnificent halls is “to rest in company upon the soft grass beside a stream and under tall trees” or to listen to a quiet song or to lose oneself in the love and care of our children. Marriage is good, but passionate love is a madness that robs the mind of clarity and reason. “If anyone is struck by the dart of Venus, whether it be a boy with a girl’s hands and feet who shoots the arrow or a woman who radiates love from her whole being, he is drawn toward the source of the dart in longing for union with it.” No marriage and no society can be soundly founded in such amorous intoxication.

Since Lucretius expends all his passion on philosophy and finds no room for romantic love, he likewise rejects the romantic anthropology of those Greeks who, in the manner of Rousseau, extolled primitive life. In ancient times men were doubtless brave, but they lived in caves without fire, loved one another without marriage, killed without law, and died of hunger as much as civilized men die of overeating. Lucretius describes the rise of civilization in a brief sketch of early anthropology. Social organization gave man the ability to live longer than animals far stronger than he. He discovered fire from the rubbing of leaves and branches, created language from gestures, and learned song from birds; he tamed animals for his use and his own passions with marriage and law; he cultivated the earth; he wove clothing; he shaped metals into tools; he observed the heavens; he measured time; he learned navigation; he perfected the art of slaughter; he overcame the weak; and he created cities and states. History is a succession of governments and civilizations that rise, grow, decay, and die; but each civilization in turn transmits the heritage of civilized habits, moral codes, and arts to the next, like “runners who pass the torch of life from hand to hand.”

Everything that grows accepts decay: organs, organisms, families, states, races, planets, and stars; only the atoms never die. In the endless alternation of the expansion of life and the contraction of death, the forces of destruction balance the forces of creation and growth. Both good and evil exist in nature. Suffering, even unjustly, comes to every living thing, and disintegration follows every evolution. Our earth itself is dying; earthquakes tear it apart. The soil grows weary, rains and rivers wear it away, and even mountains are ultimately carried down into the sea. One day our entire solar system will taste death; “the walls of the heavens thunder on every side and are overturned.” But the very moment of annihilation reveals the indestructibility of the force of life in the world. “The cry of the newborn child is mingled with the dirge sung for the dead.” New systems, new stars, new planets, another earth, and new life appear. Evolution begins again.

The Lover of Lesbia

In 57 BC Gaius Memmius, to whom Lucretius had dedicated his poem, left Rome to go as propraetor to Bithynia. In accordance with the custom of Roman governors he took a man of letters with him—not Lucretius, but a poet who differed from him in everything except the intensity of feeling. Quintus or (Gaius) Valerius Catullus had come to Rome five years earlier from his birthplace, Verona. In Verona his father enjoyed such standing that Caesar often visited him as a guest. Quintus himself must have been a man of considerable means, for he had villas near Tibur and beside Lake Garda and a splendid house in Rome. According to his own claim all these properties were mortgaged; but the figure that emerges from Catullus’s poems is that of a cultivated man of his time who has no worry about bread but is engrossed in the pleasures of the capital’s libertines.

The wittiest epigrammatists and the most intelligent young orators and politicians belonged to this circle: Marcus Caelius, a penniless noble who later became a communist; Licinius Calvus, a genius in poetry and law; and Helvius Cinna, a poet whom the mob favoring Antony later mistook for one of Caesar’s assassins and beat to death. These men, with every taunt and jest in their store, opposed Caesar, unaware that their literary rebellion was itself a reflection of the revolution in their society. They had grown weary of the old literary forms, the crudeness and bombast of Naevius and Ennius, and wished to express the feelings of youth in new meters and in lyric form with a polished and refined style that had once been current in the Alexandria of Callimachus but had never reached Rome. They were disgusted with the old moral principles and the “way of the ancestors” that elderly men constantly drummed into their ears and extolled the sanctity of instinct, the innocence of desire, and the grandeur of extravagance. Together with Catullus they were no worse than the other literary swordsmen of their own or the next generation; Horace, Ovid, Tibullus, Propertius, and even Virgil in their youth made every woman, married or unmarried, the center of their life and poetry in order to sate their dreams with an easily accessible and transient love.

The liveliest lady of this group was Clodia, of the proud house of the Claudii that now produced emperors. Apuleius assures us that it was this woman whom Catullus, in memory of Sappho, called Lesbia and whom he sometimes translated and often imitated and always praised in Sappho’s poems. Catullus, who entered Rome at the age of twenty-two, formed a friendship with Clodia at the very time when her husband was governing the Roman province of Gaul at the foot of the Alps. The moment he saw Clodia “passing her crystal foot over the worn threshold” he lost his heart and called her “the shining goddess of graceful step,” and indeed a woman’s step, like her voice, can completely steal a man’s heart. Clodia graciously admitted him among her admirers, and the infatuated poet poured at her feet the most beautiful lyric poems in the Latin language, since he could not compete with his rivals in any other commodity. He translated for Clodia in full Sappho’s description of the passion of love that now consumed his being; and to the sparrow that Clodia pressed to her breast he offered a jewel of envy:

Sparrow, delight of my lady,  
with whom she plays and presses to her breast;  
to whom she offers her fingertip  
and provokes you to peck it sharply;  
I know not what game that shining love  
plays with my burning desire! ...

For a while he was lost in joy, visiting Clodia every day, reading his poems to her, and caring for nothing except his passion.

My Lesbia, let us live and love,  
and value at a farthing all the talk  
of sour old men.  
Suns may set and rise again;  
but when our brief sun has set,  
the long night of eternal sleep will follow.  
Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,  
then another thousand, then a second hundred,  
then yet another thousand and a second hundred.  
And when we have reached many thousands,  
we will confuse the count,  
so that we may not know the number,  
lest some malicious person should envy us  
knowing how many kisses we have shared.

We do not know how long this ecstasy lasted; perhaps the thousands wearied Clodia, and she, who had already turned her back on her husband for Catullus, now found relief from boredom in betraying Catullus for another. Clodia’s range of pleasure had now become so wide that Catullus wildly praised her way, which “at one time embraced three hundred adulterers.” At the height of his infatuation with Clodia he grew to hate her and rejected her claim of fidelity with a metaphor in the manner of Keats:

The promises of a woman to her eager lover  
should be written on the winds that blow  
and engraved on the rushing streams.

When steadfast doubt turned into feeble certainty, his passion gave way to a harsh and ugly bitterness. He accused Clodia of giving herself to tavern-haunters, heaped vile abuse upon her new lovers, and fell into thoughts of suicide—but only in the language of poetry. At the same time he was capable of expressing loftier feelings; he wrote a marriage song for his friend Manlius and envied the healthy comradeship of married life, the security and stability of household management, and the blessed restraints of father—

motherhood. He accompanied Memmius on his journey to Bithynia in order to distance himself for a while from the scene of the drama, but his hope of regaining happiness or wealth there ended in disappointment. He strayed from his path and sought the grave of a brother who had been killed in the Troad. At the grave he performed the ancient funeral rites with full reverence, and shortly afterward wrote those tender lines that have become proverbial in the world:

Brother, I have crossed lands and seas  
to come to this sad rite,  
and to bring you the last offering for the dead. …  
Accept these gifts mingled with a brother’s tears;  
and hail and farewell, brother, forever.

His stay in Asia changed and calmed him. The pessimist who had called death “eternal sleep” was stirred by the religions and ancient rites of the East. In the powerful and vital verses of his greatest poem, Attis, he describes with living solemnity the worship of Cybele and is seized with strange emotion at the sight of the devotee who has castrated himself and laments the joys and friendships of his youth. In the poem Peleus and Thetis he retells the story of Peleus and Ariadne in hexameters so melodious and delicate that Virgil was unable to produce its like. In a small ship he bought at Amastris he sailed the black seas and the Aegean and Adriatic and the Po as far as Lake Garda and his villa at Sirmio. He asked: “What better way to escape the sorrows of the world than to return to one’s home and hearth and rest in one’s comfortable bed?” Men first set out in search of joy and finally are content with peace.

The Scholars

How were Latin books written, illustrated, bound, published, and sold? The Romans wrote school exercises, short letters, and brief commercial documents in the manner of their ancestors with a stylus on wax tablets and erased them with the thumb. The oldest known written work in the Latin language with a reed pen on paper made in Egypt from the pressed and glued leaves of the papyrus tree has survived. In the early centuries AD scrolls made from the dried skins of animals began to compete with papyrus for recording literary works and important documents. From a folded sheet of skin came the “diploma” or double leaf. Every written work was usually in the form of a scroll that was unrolled while reading, usually with two or three columns on one page, without punctuation of sentences and even without word division. Some manuscripts had illustrations in ink; for example, Varro’s book “Pictures” contained portraits of seven hundred famous men, each with a biographical note attached. Anyone could hire slaves to produce multiple copies of a manuscript and sell them. The wealthy had secretaries who copied any book they wanted. Since copyists received food instead of wages, books were cheap. The number of copies of each book at first reached a thousand. Booksellers bought books wholesale from publishers like Atticus and retailed them in the stalls of the “arcades.” The publisher or bookseller gave the author nothing except compliments and occasional gifts; there was no copyright. At this time there were many private libraries, and around 40 BC Asinius Pollio turned his large collection into the first public library in Rome. Caesar planned a great library and made Varro its director, but this plan too, like many of his intentions, was carried out in the time of Augustus.

Thanks to these facilities, Roman literature and scholarship began to rival the industry of the people of Alexandria. Poems, treatises, histories, and textbooks multiplied. Every noble adorned his adventures with verse, every lady practiced eloquence and composed musical airs, and every general wrote memoirs. This was the age of “summaries”; to meet the needs of a hurried commercial age, a summary was prepared on every subject. Marcus Terentius Varro, despite his many military campaigns, found time during his ninety years of life (116–26 BC) to condense almost every branch of knowledge. His six hundred and twenty “volumes” (comprising about seventy-four books) formed an encyclopedia produced by one man in his time. Being fascinated by etymology, he wrote a treatise “On the Latin Language” that is now our chief guide to the earliest Roman speech. In another treatise of his called “On Country Life” (36 BC), perhaps in harmony with the intentions of Augustus, he tried to encourage a return to the land as the best refuge from the tumult of city life. In the preface to the treatise he wrote: “My eightieth year warns me that I must pack up and prepare to leave this dwelling.” He made his will in the form of a preface to the peace and joy of rural life, and in it he praised strong-bodied women who bore children in the fields and soon resumed work. He lamented the decline in the number of infants that was draining the population of Rome. “In the past the abundance of children was a woman’s pride; but now a woman, echoing Ennius, proudly says that she is ‘willing to go to war to bear a child.’” In the book “On the Divine Institutions of Antiquity” he reached the conclusion that fertility, order, and courage in every nation require moral precepts based on religious belief. Accepting the view of the great jurist Quintus Mucius Scaevola on the distinction between two kinds of religion—the religion of philosophers and the religion of the people—he argued that the second, despite its intellectual shortcomings, must be preserved; and although he himself believed in a vague kind of pantheism, he proposed that a vigorous effort should be made to restore the worship of the ancient gods of Rome. Inspired by Cato and Polybius, he in turn exerted a decisive influence on the religious policy of Augustus and on the pious ruralism of Virgil.

Varro, as if to complete Cato the Elder’s work in every field, took up the subject of Cato’s book in his own work called “The Principles of the Life of the Roman People,” which was a history of Roman civilization. Alas, time has completely destroyed this book and almost all of Varro’s works, but it has preserved the charming little biographies written by Cornelius Nepos. In Rome history was a craft that never rose to the level of a science. Even in the works of Tacitus it never became a critical examination and compression of sources. But in this age historiography found a brilliant stylist, and that was Gaius Sallustius Crispus (86–35 BC). As a politician and soldier he played a prominent role in support of Caesar, governed Numidia, was a clever thief, and poured wealth at the feet of women; then in one of the villas in Rome, famous for its gardens and later the residence of emperors, he retired and spent his life in luxury and literary work. His books, like the art of politics, were the continuation of war but by other means. His “Histories” and “Jugurthine War” and “Catiline” are stout defenses of the “Popular Party” and devastating attacks on the “Old Guard.” He exposed the moral decline of Rome, accused the Senate and the courts of placing the rights of property above the rights of man, and falsely put into the mouth of Marius a speech proving the natural equality of all classes and demanding that the path of advancement be opened to every talent. He enriched his narratives with philosophical interpretation and psychological analysis of character and fashioned a style of concise sarcasm and vigorous liveliness that became the model for Tacitus.

The Pen of Cicero

Cicero, proud of his orations and conscious of their influence on literature, was stung by the criticisms of the Attic school and rose to his own defense in a series of treatises on the art of oratory. In the course of witty dialogues he briefly recounted the history of Roman eloquence and laid down rules for composition, prose, rhythm, and delivery. He did not claim that his style was “Asiatic,” but asserted that he had modeled it on that of Demosthenes, and reminded the followers of the Attic style that their cold and lifeless speech lulled or drove away the listener.

The fifty-seven orations of Cicero that have reached us reveal all the secrets of success in eloquence. These orations are masterpieces in the presentation of one aspect of an issue or a character, in relieving the boredom of the listener with jest and anecdote, in arousing pride and prejudice and emotion and patriotism and pity, in the shameless exposure of real or rumored or social or private faults of opponents or clients, in the skillful diversion of attention from unfavorable points, in raining down rapid-fire questions intended to make reply difficult or to silence the adversary, and in heaping accusations in short sentences with phrases as stinging as a whip and as shattering as a flood. The orator in these speeches makes no claim to fairness; his aim is more to discredit than to censure. In his speech he makes full use of that unrestrained license of abuse that, though forbidden in the theaters, was permitted in the Forum. Cicero does not shrink from using words such as “pig,” “rascal,” “butcher,” and “dung” against his victims; he tells Piso that virgins kill themselves to escape his debauchery; and he upbraids Antony for embracing his wife in public. The spectators and judges delighted in such abuse and no one took it seriously. Cicero, a few years after his ruthless attacks on Piso, formed a firm friendship with him in the treatise On Piso. It must also be admitted that Cicero’s orations are more filled with self-love and bombast than with moral purity, wise judgment, or even shrewd and penetrating forensic insight. But what eloquence! Even the speech of Demosthenes did not reach this level of clarity, vitality, wit, and mixture of salt and the zest of combat with men. Surely no one before or after Cicero has spoken in the Latin language with such fluency and captivating charm and passionate elegance. This was the golden age of Latin prose. Caesar, in dedicating his book On Analogy to Cicero, wrote: “You have drawn forth all the treasures of eloquence from their hiding place and were the first to make use of them. Thus you have conferred a great benefit on the Romans and have added honor to your birthplace. You have achieved a victory that can only be the reward of the greatest generals. For to extend the boundaries of human thought is a more noble task than to enlarge the territory of the Roman Empire.”

The orations expose the political character of Cicero, but his letters illuminate his personality and even redeem his political character. Cicero dictated all of them to his secretary and never revised them. In writing most of them he had no intention of publication, and therefore the hidden corners of one man’s soul have rarely been so exposed. Nepos said: “Whoever reads these letters will have no need of the history of those times.” In these letters the most vital part of the story of the revolution is told without padding or ornament. Their style is often unaffected and direct and full of jest and wit. Their language is a graceful blend of literary dignity and colloquial fluency. These letters are the most interesting works of Cicero and truly the most interesting works of extant Latin prose. It is natural that in these voluminous correspondences (comprising 864 letters, of which ninety are addressed to Cicero) we sometimes encounter contradictions and deceptions. Here there is no trace of piety or religious belief, unlike in his treatises or orations, where, as a last resort, he calls upon the gods and in all of them repeatedly speaks of purity and religious faith. His private opinion of certain individuals, especially Caesar, is not always consistent with his public statements. His incredible vanity here assumes a more pleasing form than in his orations—the orations that seem always to carry his own statue with them; he smilingly admits that “praise of myself is worth more to me than anything else.” With disarming innocence he assures us that “if there is one man in all time who hates boastfulness, it is I.” Reading so many letters about money and so much wrangling about so many houses tires the mind. In addition to villas at Arpinum, Astura, Puteoli, and Pompeii, Cicero owned an estate at Formiae for 250,000 sesterces and another at Tusculum for 500,000 sesterces and built a palace on the Palatine for three million five hundred thousand sesterces. Such ostentation does not become a sage.

But who among us is so pure that after the publication of his private letters his good name would still be preserved? Truly the more we read these letters the more we warm to Cicero. His faults and perhaps his vanity were no greater than our own; his mistake was to immortalize these faults in the elegant dress of prose. In the better side of his character he was a hard-working man, a loving father, and a loyal friend. We see him sitting in his house, loving his books and his children, and trying to love his wife Terentia, who was afflicted with rheumatism, quick to take offense, and equal to him in wealth and fluency of speech. Both were too rich to be happy. Their preoccupations and quarrels were always over large sums; it was not until old age that Cicero divorced Terentia over a financial dispute. Shortly afterward he married Publilia not for her age but for her wealth; but as soon as Publilia showed unkindness to his daughter Tullia he divorced her too. He loved Tullia to the point of madness; her death drove him to frantic mourning and he wanted to erect a temple for her as for one of the goddesses. The letters he wrote to Tiro, his secretary, about her are the most charming. Tiro took shorthand dictation of Cicero’s speeches and managed his financial affairs with such competence that Cicero freed him in reward. He wrote more letters than to anyone else to Atticus, who invested his savings, relieved him of financial difficulties, published his writings, and gave him unsolicited valuable advice. At the height of the revolution, when Atticus had wisely taken refuge in Greece, Cicero wrote him a letter full of affection and charm:

I feel the need of nothing so much as of that person with whom I can share all my troubles; of someone who loves me and is prudent and with whom I can speak without flattery or ornament or caution. My brother, who is all kindness and affection, is far from me. … And you who have so often delivered me from sorrow and anxiety with your advice and have been the companion of my bath and garden and the sharer of all my words and thoughts—where are you?

In those stormy days, when Caesar crossed the Rubicon and defeated Pompey and declared himself dictator, Cicero for a while withdrew from political activity and sought refuge in reading and writing philosophy. He asked Atticus: “Beware of giving your books to anyone, but keep them for me as you promised. I love them dearly, just as I now hate everything else.” In his youth, in his defense of Archias, in one of his most modest and charming speeches, he had praised the study of literature because it was “the nourishment of youth, the ornament of prosperity, and the light of old age.” Now he acted on his own advice and in less than two years produced a library of philosophical books. The decline of religious belief in the upper classes had created a void that seemed to be causing the character and society of Rome to decay. Cicero imagined that philosophy could take the place of theology and guide the classes to the abode of happiness. He resolved not to create a new school himself but to summarize the teachings of the Greek sages and, as his last gift, to offer them to his people. Cicero was so honest that he admitted that in most places he had adapted and sometimes translated the treatises of Panaetius and Posidonius and other later Greeks. But he turned the tedious prose of his sources into clear and vigorous Latin, gave life to his discourses by casting them in dialogue form, and rapidly traversed the barren valleys of logic and metaphysics to reach the shores of the living questions of conduct and statesmanship. Since Plato, wisdom had not appeared in prose of such beauty.

In his thought he drew most inspiration from Plato. He disliked the cautiousness of the Epicureans who spoke of “theology with such certainty as if they had just returned from the assembly of the gods”; likewise with the Stoics who argued about providence as if “the gods had been made for the use of men”—a view that in other respects did not seem unreasonable to Cicero himself. The basis of his outlook is the same as that of the New Academy—namely a moderate skepticism that denies every certainty and considers probability sufficient for human life. He writes: “My philosophy in many things rests on doubt. … Allow me not to know what I do not know.”

He says: “Those who seek to know my personal opinion are excessively curious.” But his reluctance to believe soon gives way to his talent for expression. He despises the rites of sacrifice and the prophecies of oracles and divination and writes a treatise wholly against divination. Despite the widespread vogue of astrology he asks whether all those who were killed at Cannae had been born under the same star. He even doubts that knowledge of the future is a blessing; the future may be as bitter as the other aspects of truth that we so boldly pursue. He thinks that by mocking old beliefs he can diminish their market value. “When we call grain Ceres and wine Bacchus we use a common metaphor; but do you suppose that everyone is so foolish as to think that the substance of his food is a god?” Yet in the matter of atheism too he is as skeptical as of any other dogmatic assertion. He rejects the atomic theory of Democritus and Lucretius and maintains that the spontaneous ordering of wandering particles into the present system of the cosmos—even in infinite time—is as improbable as the spontaneous assembly of the letters of the alphabet into the annals of Ennius. Our ignorance of the gods is no proof of their non-existence; and in fact Cicero argues that the common belief of mankind in destiny weighs the scale in favor of their probable existence. He concludes that religion is necessary for individual morality and social order and that no wise man may attack it. Hence, while rejecting divination, he himself performs the duties of official augury. This cannot be regarded as pure hypocrisy; Cicero himself perhaps called it political sense. Morality, society, and the Roman state were intertwined with the old religion and the decline of religion was harmful to their security. (The Roman emperors could also give such a reason for persecuting the Christians.) When Cicero lost his beloved Tullia he hoped more than ever for the immortality of the individual. Several years earlier, in the “Dream of Scipio,” the final section of his “Republic,” he had adapted from Pythagoras, Plato, and Eudoxus an elaborate and eloquent fable about life after death. In this fable the noble and virtuous dead enjoy eternal bliss, but in Cicero’s private letters, even in those consoling bereaved friends, there is no mention of the life beyond.

Cicero, being acquainted with the skepticism of his time, based his ethical and political treatises on non-religious foundations independent of supernatural guarantees. In the treatise “On the Supreme Good” he begins with an inquiry into happiness and then, with some hesitation, agrees with the Stoics that moral virtue alone is the path to happiness. Therefore in another treatise he examines the path of virtue and with the enchantment of his style for a while succeeds in making duty attractive. He writes: “All men are brothers and the whole world should be regarded as the common city of gods and men.” The most perfect moral code is conscious loyalty to this whole. Man must first be loyal to himself and his society so as above all to lay a sound economic foundation for his life and then perform his duties as a citizen. Wise statesmanship is more valuable than the most subtle philosophy.

Monarchy is the best form of government if the king is good, and the worst if the king is bad—the truth of this commonplace was soon proved in Rome. Aristocracy is good if the best men really rule. But Cicero, himself a member of the middle class, could not honestly admit that old and powerful families were among the best men. Democracy is good if the people are virtuous, and this to Cicero’s mind seems an impossibility. The best form of government is one that combines all these, like the Roman state before the Gracchi, that is, the democratic power of the assemblies, the aristocratic power of the Senate, and the quasi-royal power of the consuls for one year. If there is no check or balance, monarchy turns into despotism, aristocratic government into oligarchy, and democracy into mob rule, tumult, and dictatorship. Five years after Caesar became consul Cicero taunted him:

Plato says that from unbridled excess, which the people call liberty, tyrants arise like a shoot from a root … and this kind of liberty brings the people under the yoke of servitude. Excess in anything produces its opposite. … For from such a people an unrestrained individual is usually chosen as leader. … A man who is bold and unscrupulous … and makes himself popular with the people by distributing the property of others is entrusted with the duty of guarding the seat of government and it is continually renewed, because he has many reasons to fear remaining an ordinary citizen. He therefore appoints a bodyguard around himself and tyrannizes over the very people who raised him to power.

Yet Caesar triumphed and Cicero thought it wise to bury his discontent under tasteless but melodious words about law, friendship, honor, and old age. He said: “Laws are silent in time of war;” but at least he could think about the philosophy of law. Following the Stoics he defined law as “right reason in agreement with nature” and meant that law gives system and stability to the relations arising from human instincts. … “Nature has created us as lovers of our fellow men” (society), “and this is the basis of law.” Friendship should be based on common interests that are strengthened and limited by virtue and justice, not on mutual advantage. The code of friendship should be: “to expect nothing dishonorable and to do nothing of that kind.” An honorable life is the best guarantee of happiness in old age. Submission to passion and excess in youth wear out the body prematurely, but living rightly keeps both body and mind healthy to a hundred years; our example is Masinissa. Attachment to study keeps a man unaware of the stealthy approach of old age. Old age has its blessings—like the attainment of patient wisdom, a modest affection for children, and the subsiding of the fever of lust and ambition. Old age brings the fear of death, but not if the mind is imbued with wisdom. After death, in the best case, a new and happier life awaits us, and in the worst case we shall find rest.

On the whole Cicero’s treatises on philosophy are thin and all of them, like his statesmanship, are firmly attached to official beliefs and tradition. He had all the curiosity of a scholar and the caution of a bourgeois; even in his philosophy he remained a politician and did not wish to lose anyone’s vote. He collected the opinions of others and weighed the arguments for and against with such care that we leave his gatherings with the same opinions with which we entered. All these treatises have only one merit, and that is the simple beauty of their style. Cicero’s Latin is so delightful and so easy to read, and what a clear and lucid language it has! When he recounts events there is something of that vitality in his words that makes his orations charming. When he describes a character he shows such skill that he himself regrets not having the opportunity to become the greatest historian of Rome. When he lets the reins of speech go, there flow from his tongue rhythmic phrases and pounding cadences that he learned from Isocrates and with which he fills the space of the Forum. His thoughts belong to the upper classes, but his manner is directed to the people. He tried to make his speech clear to the people and his impromptu remarks exciting, and he salted his generalities with anecdote and witty sayings.

Cicero recreated the Latin language, enriched its vocabulary, and made it a flexible tool for philosophy and a resource for the scholarship and literature of Western Europe that served for seventeen centuries. Posterity remembered him more as a writer than as a statesman. Men, despite all his reminders, forgot his greatness as consul but praised his victories in literature and eloquence. And since the world values form as much as matter, and art as much as knowledge and power, Cicero among the Romans ranked second only to Caesar in fame; and this exception he could never forgive.