The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1. Marcus Cicero

I get there," he often found it necessary, when engaged in any serious literary work, to seek the more complete retirement of Formiæ, Cumæ, or Pompeii, near all of which he acquired properties, besides an inheritance at Arpinum.4 But the important achievements in literature were still in the future. The few letters of b.c. 68-67 are full of directions to Atticus for the collection of books or works of art suitable to his house, and of matters of private interest. They are also short and sometimes abrupt. The famous allusion to his father's death in the second letter of this collection, contained in a singleDeath of Cicero's Father. line—pater nobis decessit a.d. 111 Kal. Decembris—followed by directions to Atticus as to articles of vertu for his villa, has much exercised the minds of admirers, who do not like to think Cicero capable of such a cold-hearted sentence. It is certainly very unlike his usual manner.5 He is more apt to exaggerate than understate his emotions; and in the first letter extant he speaks with real feeling of the death of a cousin. Elsewhere—as we have seen—he refers to his father with respect and gratitude. How then are we to account for such a cold announcement? Several expedients have been hit upon. First, to change decessit to discessit, and to refer the sentence to the father's quitting Rome, and not life; in which case it is not easy to see why the information is given at all. Second, to suppose it to be a mere answer to a request for the information on the part of Atticus; in which case the date must refer to some previous year, or the letter must be placed considerably later, to allow of time for Atticus to hear of the death and to write his question. In favour of the first is the fact that Asconius (§ 82) says that Cicero lost his father when he was a candidate for the consulship (b.c. 64). Some doubt has been thrown upon the genuineness of the passage in Asconius; and, if that is not trustworthy, we have nothing else to help us. On the whole I think we must leave the announcement as it stands in all its baldness. Cicero's father had long been an invalid, and Atticus may have been well aware that the end was expected. He would also be acquainted with the son's feelings towards his father, and Cicero may have held it unnecessary to enlarge upon them. It is possible, too, that he had already written to tell Atticus of the death and of his own feelings, but had omitted the date, which he here supplies. Whatever may be the true explanation—impossible now to recover—everything we know of Cicero forbids us to reckon insensibility among his faults, or reserve in expressing his feelings among his characteristics.

      The Prætorship, b.c. 66.

      In the next year (b.c. 67) we find Cicero elected to the prætorship, after at least two interruptions to the comitia, which, though not aimed at himself, gave him a foretaste of the political troubles to come a few years later. He is, however, at present simply annoyed at the inconvenience, not yet apprehensive of any harm to the constitution. The double postponement, indeed, had the effect of gratifying his vanity: for his own name was returned three times first of the list of eight. His prætorship (b.c. 66) passed without any startling event. The two somewhat meagre letters which remain belonging to this year tell us hardly anything. Still he began more or less to define his political position by advocating the lex Manilia, for putting the Mithridatic war into the hands of Pompey; and one of his most elaborate forensic speeches—that for Cluentius—was delivered in the course of the year: in which also his brother Quintus was elected to the ædileship.

      b.c. 65-64. Preparations for the Consulship.

      So far Cicero had risen steadily and without serious difficulty up the official ladder. But the stress was now to come. The old families seem not to have been so ready to oppose the rise of the novus homo to the prætorship. It was the consulship on which they tried to keep a tight hand. Accordingly, immediately after the year of his prætorship, we find him anxiously looking out for support and inquiring who are likely to be his competitors. The interesting point in regard to this is his connexion with Catiline. In his speech in the senate delivered in the following year (in toga candida, b.c. 64) he denounced Catiline in the most violent language, accusing him of every conceivable crime; yet in b.c. 65 he not only contemplated being elected with him without any expression of disgust, but even considered whether he should not undertake his defence on some charge that was being brought against him—perhaps for his conduct during the Sullan proscriptions. To whitewash Catiline is a hopeless task; and it throws a lurid light upon the political and moral sentiments of the time to find Cicero even contemplating such a conjunction.

      After this, for two years, there is a break in the correspondence. Atticus had probably returned to Rome, and if there were letters to others (as no doubt there were) they have been lost. A certain light is thrown on the proceedings of the year of candidature (b.c. 64) by the essay "On the duties of a candidate," ascribed to his brother Quintus, who was himself to be a candidate for the prætorship in the next year (b.c. 63). We may see from this essay that Pompey was still regarded as the greatest and most influential man at Rome; that Catiline's character was so atrocious in the eyes of most, that his opposition was not to be feared; that Cicero's "newness" was a really formidable bar to his election, and that his chief support was to be looked for from the individuals and companies for whom he had acted as counsel, and who hoped to secure his services in the future. The support of the nobles was not a certainty. There had been a taint of popularity in some of Cicero's utterances, and the writer urges him to convince the consulars that he was at one with the Optimates, while at the same time aiming at the conciliation of the equestrian order. This was, in fact, to be Cicero's political position in the future. The party of the Optimates—in spite of his disgust at the indifference and frivolity of many of them—was to be his party: his favourite constitutional object was to be to keep the equites and the senate on good terms: and his greatest embarrassment was how to reconcile this position with his personal loyalty to Pompey, and his views as to the reforms necessary in the government of the provinces.

      The Consulship, b.c. 63.

      For the momentous year of the consulship we have no letters. His brother Quintus was in Rome as candidate and then prætor-designate; Atticus was also in Rome; and the business, as well as the dignity of a consul, were against anything like ordinary correspondence. Of the earlier part of the consulship we have little record. The speeches against Rullus were delivered at the beginning of the year, and commit Cicero pretty definitely to a policy as to the ager publicus—which was, to his disgust, entirely reversed by the triumvirs in b.c. 59—but they do not shew any sense of coming trouble. Cicero, however, throughout his consulship took a very definite line against the populares. Not only did he defend Rabirius Postumus, when accused by Cæsar of the assassination of Saturninus, and address the people against offering violence to L. Roscius on account of the unpopular lex theatralis,6 but he even resisted the restoration to their civil rights of the sons of the men proscribed by Sulla, avowedly on the ground of the necessity of maintaining the established order, though he knew and confessed the justice of the proposal.7

      The Conspiracy of Catiline.

      Any movement, therefore, on the side of the popular party had now his opposition with which to reckon. He professes to have known very early in his year of office that some more than usually dangerous movement was in contemplation. We cannot well decide from the violent denunciation of Catiline contained—to judge from extant fragments—in the speech in toga candida, how far Cicero was really acquainted with any definite designs of his. Roman orators indulged in a violence of language so alien from modern ideas and habits, that it is difficult to draw definite conclusions. But it appears from Sallust that Catiline had in a secret meeting before the elections of b.c. 64, professed an intention of going all lengths in a revolutionary programme and, if that was the case, Cicero would be sure to have had some secret information on the subject. But his hands were partly tied by the fact that the comitia had given him a colleague—C. Antonius—deeply implicated in Catiline's policy, whatever it was. Pompey, whom he regarded as the champion of law and order, was in the East: and Catiline's candidature—and it was supposed his policy also—had had the almost open support of the richest man in Rome, M. Licinius Crassus, and of the most influential man of the populares, C. Iulius Cæsar. In the house of one or the other of them, indeed, the meeting at which Catiline first unfolded his purposes was believed to have been held.