If Cicero, the most tender-hearted of Roman public men, could urge the claims of the companies so strongly, and, as in this last letter, without any allusion to the interests of the province and its people, we may well imagine how others, less scrupulous, must have combined with the capitalists to work havoc in regions that only needed peace and mild government to recover from centuries of misery. Such a letter is the best comment we can have on the pernicious system of raising taxes by contract–a system which was to be modified, regulated, and eventually reduced to harmless dimensions under the benevolent and scientific government of the early Empire.
We must now turn to the other department of the activity of the men of business, that of banking and money-lending (_negotiatores_).
On the north or sunny side of the Forum we noticed in our walk round the city the shops of the bankers (_tabernae argentariae_). The _argentarii_ were originally, as their name suggests, only money-changers, a class of small business men that arose in response to a need felt as soon as increasing commerce and extended empire brought foreign coin in large quantities to Rome. The Italian communities outside the Roman State issued their own coinage until they were admitted to the civitas after the Social War,–a fact which alone is sufficient to show the need of men who made it their business to know the current value of various coins in Roman money; and as Rome became involved in the affairs of the East, there were always circulating in the city the tetradrachms of Antioch and Alexandria, the Rhodian drachmas, and the cistophori of the kings of Pergamus, afterwards coined in the province of Asia.[127] No doubt the money-changing business was a profitable one, and itself led to the formation of capital which could be used in taking deposits and making advances; and, as Professor Purser puts it,[128] the mere possession of a quantity of coin for purposes of change would be likely to develop spontaneously the profession of banking. In the same way the _nummularii_, or assayers of the coin, having a mass of it in their hands, would tend to develop a private business as well as their official public one. All these, argentarii or nummularii, might be called _foeneratores_, from the interest (_foenus_) which they charged in their transactions. The profession was a respectable one, for honesty and exactness in accounts were absolutely necessary to success in it.[129] If the reader will turn to Cicero’s speech in defence of Caecina (6. 16), he will find these accounts appealed to, though apparently not actually produced in court; but in the _Noctes Atticae_ of Aulus Gellius (xiv. 2) a judge who is describing a civil case which came before him, mentions, among the documents produced, _mensae rationes_, i.e. the accounts kept by the banker.
Your argentarius seems to have been ready to undertake for you almost all that a modern banker will do for his customer. He would take deposits of money, either for the depositor’s use or to bear interest, and would make payments on his behalf on receipt of a written order, answering to our cheque;[130] this was a practice probably introduced from Greece, for in the Eastern Mediterranean the whole business of credit and exchange had long been reduced to a system. Again, if you wished to be supplied with money during a journey, or to pay a sum to any one at a distance, e.g. in Greece or Asia, your argentarius would arrange it for you by giving you letters of credit or bills of exchange on a banker at such towns as you might mention, and so save you the trouble of carrying a heavy weight of coin with you. When, Cicero sent his son to the University of Athens, he wished to give him a generous allowance,–too generous, as we should think, for it amounted to about L640 a year,–and he asked Atticus whether it could be managed for him by _permutatio_, i.e. exchange, and received an affirmative answer[131]. So too when his beloved freedman secretary Tiro fell ill of fever at Patrae, Cicero finds it easy to get a local banker there to advance him all the money he needed, and to pay the doctor, engaging himself to repay the money to any agent whom the banker might name[132].
Your argentarius would also attend for you, or appoint an agent to attend, at any public auction in which you were interested as seller or purchaser, and would pay or receive the money for you,–a practice which must have greatly helped him in getting to know the current value of all kinds of property, and indeed in learning to understand human nature on its business side. In the passage from the _pro Caecina_ quoted just now, a lady, Caesennia, wished to buy an estate; she employs an agent, Aebutius, no doubt recommended by her banker, and to him the estate is knocked down. He undertakes that the argentarius of the vendor, who is present at the auction, shall be paid the value, and this is ultimately done by Caesennia, and the sum entered in the banker’s books (tabulae).
But perhaps the most important part of the business was the finding money for those who were in want of it, i.e. making advances on interest. The poor man who was in need of ready money could get it from the argentarius in coin if he had any security to offer, and, as we saw in the last chapter, might get entangled more and more hopelessly in the nets of the money-lender. Whether the same argentarius did this small business and also the work of supplying the rich man with credit, we do not know; it may have been the case that the great money-lenders like Atticus themselves employed argentarii, and so kept them going. That Atticus would undertake, anyhow, for a friend like Cicero, any amount of money-finding, we know well from many letters of Cicero, written when he was anxious to buy a piece of land at any cost on which to erect a shrine to his beloved daughter[133]; and we may be pretty sure that Atticus could not have done all that Cicero importunately pressed upon him if he had not had a number of useful professional agents at command. From these same letters we also learn that finding money by no means necessarily meant finding coin; in a society where every one was lending or borrowing, and probably doing both at the same time, what actually passed was chiefly securities, mortgages, debts, and so on. If you wanted to hand over a hundred thousand or so to a creditor, what your agent had as often as not to do was to persuade that creditor to accept as payment the debts owing to yourself from others, i.e. you would hand over to him, if he would accept them, the bonds or other securities given you by your own debtors.[134]
It is plain then that the money-lenders had an enormous business, even in Rome alone, and risky as it undoubtedly was, it must often have been a profitable one. And it was not only at Rome that men were borrowing and lending, but over the whole Empire. For reasons which it would need an economic treatise to explain, private men, cities, and even kings were in want of money; it was needed to meet the increased cost of living and the constantly increasing standard of living among the educated;[135] it was needed by the cities of Greece and the East to repair the damages done in the wars of the last three hundred years; it was needed by the poorer provincials to pay the taxes for which neither the publicani nor the Roman government could afford to wait; and it was needed by the kings who had come within the dismal shadow of the Roman Empire, in order to carry on their own government, or to satisfy the demands of the neighbouring provincial governor, or to bribe the ruling men at Rome to get some decree passed in their favour. Cicero, at the end of his life, looking back to his own consulship in 63, says that at no time in his recollection was the whole world in such a condition of indebtedness,[136] and in a famous passage in his second Catilinarian oration he has drawn a picture of the various classes of debtors in Rome and Italy at that time (_Cat._ ii. Sec. 18 foll.). He tells us of those who have wealth and yet will not pay their debts; of those who are in debt and look to a revolution to absolve them; of the veterans of the Sullan army, settled in colonies such as Faesulae, who had rushed into debt in order to live luxurious lives; of old debtors of the city, getting deeper and deeper into the quagmire, who joined the conspiracy as a last desperate venture. There was in fact in that famous year a real social fermentation going on, caused by economic disturbance of the most serious kind; the germs of the disease can be traced back to the Hannibalic war and its effects on Italy, but all the symptoms had been continually exacerbated by the negligence and ignorance of the government, and brought to a head by the Social and Civil Wars in 90-82 B.C. In 63 the State escaped an economic catastrophe through the vigilance of Cicero and the alliance of the respectable classes under his leadership. In 49, and again in 48, it escaped a similar disaster through the good sense of Caesar and his agents, who succeeded in steering between Scylla and Charybdis by saving the debtors without ruining the lenders.[137]
Wonderful figures are given by later writers, such as Plutarch, of the debts and loans of the great men of this time, and they may stand as giving us a general impression of private financial recklessness. But the only authentic information that has come down to us is what Cicero drops from time to time in his correspondence about his own affairs,[138] and even this needs much explanation which we are unable to apply to it. What is certain is that Cicero never had more than a very moderate income on which he could depend, and that at times he was hard up for money, especially of course after his exile and the confiscation of his property; and that on the other hand he never had any difficulty in getting the sums he needed, and never shows the smallest real anxiety about his finances. His profession as a barrister only brought him a return indirectly in the form of an occasional legacy or gift, since fees were forbidden by a lex Cincia; his books could hardly have paid him, at least in the form of money; his inherited property was small, and his Italian villas were not profitable farms, nor was it the practice to let such country houses, as we do now, when not occupying them; he declined a provincial government, the usual source of wealth, and when at last compelled to undertake one, only realised what was then a paltry sum,–some L17,500, all of which, while in deposit at Ephesus, was seized by the Pompeians in the Civil War.[139] Yet even early in life he could afford the necessary expenses for election to successive magistracies, and could live in the style demanded of an important public man. Immediately after his consulship he paid L28,000 for Crassus’ house on the Palatine, and it is here that we first discover how he managed such financial operations. Here are his own words in a letter to a friend of December 62 B.C.:[140] “I have bought the house for 3,500 sestertia … so you may now look on me as so deeply in debt as to be eager to join a conspiracy if any one would admit me! … Money is plentiful at 6 per cent, and the success of my measures (in the consulship) has caused me to be regarded as a good security.”
The simple fact was that Cicero was always regarded as a safe man to lend money to, by the business men and the great capitalists; partly because he was an honest man,–a _vir bonus_ who would never dream of repudiation or bankruptcy; partly because he knew every one, and had a hundred wealthy friends besides the lender of the moment and among them, most faithful of all, the prudent and indefatigable Atticus. Undoubtedly then it was by borrowing, and regularly paying interest on the loans, that he raised money whenever he wanted it. He may have occasionally made money in the companies of tax-collectors; we have seen that he probably had shares in some of their ventures. But there is no clear evidence in his letters of this source of wealth,[141] and there is abundant evidence of the borrowing. After his return from exile, though the senate had given him somewhat meagre compensation for the loss of his property, he began at once to borrow and to build: “I am building in three places,” he writes to his brother,[142] “and am patching up my other houses. I live somewhat more lavishly than I used to do; I am obliged to do so.” Here again we know from whom he borrowed,–it was this same brother, who of course had no more certain income than his own, probably less. But he had been governor of Asia for three years (61-58 B.C.), and must have realised large sums even in that exhausted province; and at this moment he was legatus to Pompeius as special commissioner for organising the supply of corn, and thus was in immediate contact with one of the greatest millionaires of the day. In order to repay his brother all Marcus had to do was to borrow from other friends. “In regard to money I am crippled. But the liberality of my brother I have repaid, in spite of his protests, by the aid of my friends, that I might not be drained quite dry myself” (_ad Att._ iv. 3). Two years later an unwary reader might feel some astonishment at finding that Quintus himself was now deep in debt;[143] but as he continues to read the correspondence his astonishment will vanish. With the prospect before him of a prolonged stay in Gaul with Caesar, Quintus might doubtless have borrowed to any extent; and in fact with Caesar’s help–the proceeds of the Gallic wars–both brothers found themselves in opulence. The Civil War, and the repayment of his debts to Caesar, nearly ruined Marcus towards the end of his life, but nothing prevented his contriving to find money for any object on which he had set his heart; when in his grief for the loss of his daughter he wishes to buy suburban gardens where a shrine to her memory may (strange to say) attract public notice, he tells Atticus to buy what is necessary _at any cost_. “Manage the business your own way; do not consider what my purse demands–about that I care nothing–but what I _want_.”[144]
Such being the financial method of Cicero and his brother, we cannot be surprised to find that the younger generation of the family followed faithfully in the footsteps of their elders. We have seen that the young Marcus had a large allowance at Athens and on the whole he seems to have kept fairly well within it, in spite of some trouble; but his cousin the younger Quintus, coming to see his uncle in December 45, showed him a gloomy countenance, and on being asked the meaning of it, said that he was going with Caesar to the Parthian war in order to avoid his creditors, and presumably to make money to pay them with.[145] He had not even enough money for the journey out. His uncle did not offer to give him any, but he does not seem to have thought very seriously of the young man’s embarrassments.
One more example of the financial dealings of the business men of this extraordinary age, and we will bring this chapter to an end. It is a story which has luckily been preserved in Cicero’s speech in defence of a certain Rabirius Postumus in the year 54, who was accused under Caesar’s law de pecuniis repetundis (extortion in the provinces). It is a remarkable revelation of all the most striking methods of making and using money in the last years of the Republic.
The father of this Rabirius, says Cicero, had been a distinguished member of the equestrian order, and “fortissimus et maximus publicanus”; not greedy of money, but most liberal to his friends–in other words, he was not a miser, for that character was rare in this age, but lent his money freely in order to acquire influence and consideration. The son took up the same line of business, and engaged in a wide sphere of financial operations. He dealt largely in the stock of the tax-companies; he lent money to cities in several provinces; he lent money to Ptolemy Auletes, King of Egypt, both before he was expelled from his kingdom by sedition, and afterwards when he was in Rome in 59 and 58, intriguing to induce the senate to have him restored. Rabirius never doubted that he would be so restored, and seems to have failed to see the probability of such a policy being contested or quarrelled about, as actually happened in the winter of 57-56. He lent, and persuaded his friends to lend:[146] he represented the king’s cause as a good investment; and then, like the investing agent of to-day who slips so easily from carelessness into crime, he had to go on lending more and more, because he feared that if he stopped the king might turn against him.
He had staked the mass of his substance on a desperate venture. But time went on and Ptolemy was not restored, and without the revenues of his kingdom he of course could not pay his creditors. At last, at the end of the year 56, Gabinius, then governor of Syria, had pressure put on him by the creditors–among them perhaps both Caesar and Pompeius–to march into Egypt without the authority of the senate. He took Rabirius with him, and, in order to secure the repayment, the latter was made superintendent (dioikaetaes) of the Egyptian revenues[147]. Unluckily for him, his wily debtor did after all turn against him, and he escaped from Egypt with difficulty and with the loss of all his wealth. When Gabinius was accused de repetundis and found guilty of accepting enormous sums from Ptolemy, Rabirius was involved in the same prosecution as having received part of the money; Cicero defended him, and as it seems with success, on the plea that equites were not liable to prosecution under the lex Julia. Towards the end of his speech he drew a clever picture of his unlucky client’s misfortunes, and declared that he would have had to quit the Forum, i.e. to leave the Stock Exchange in disgrace, if Caesar had not come to his rescue by placing large sums at his disposal.
What Rabirius did was simply to gamble on a gigantic scale, and get others to gamble with him. The luck turned against him, and he came utterly to grief. There seems indeed to have been a perfect passion for dealing with money in this wild way among the men of wealth and influence; it was the fancy of the hour, and no disgrace attached to it if a man could escape ruin. Thus the vast capital accumulated–the sources of which were almost entirely in the provinces and the kingdoms on the frontiers–was hardly ever used productively. It never returned to the region whence it came, to be used in developing its resources; the idea of using it even in Italy for industrial undertakings was absent from the mind of the gambler. Those numberless villas, of which we shall speak in another chapter, were homes of luxury and magnificence, not centres of agricultural industry. There are indeed some signs that in this very generation the revival of Italian agriculture was beginning, and more especially the cultivation of the olive and the vine; Varro, some twenty years later, could claim that Italy was the best cultivated country in the world.[148] It may be that the din of the “insanum forum” and its wild speculation has prevented our hearing of the quiet efforts in the country to put capital to a legitimate productive use. But of the social life of the city the Forum was the heart, and of any prudent or scientific use of capital the Forum knew hardly anything.
Of the two classes of business men we have been describing, the tax-farmers and the money-lenders, it is hard to say which wrought the most mischief in the Empire; they played into each other’s hands in wringing money out of the helpless provincials. Together too they did incalculable harm, morally and socially, among the upper strata of Roman society at home. Economic maladies react upon the mental, and moral condition of a State. Where the idea of making money for its own sake, or merely for the sake of the pleasure derivable from excitement, is paramount in the minds of so large a section of society, moral perception quickly becomes warped. The sense of justice disappears, because when the fever is on a man he does not stop to ask whether his gains are ill-gotten; and in this age the only restriction on the plundering of the subjects of the Empire was a legal one, and that of no great efficacy. There are many repulsive things in the exquisite poetry of Catullus, but none of them jar on the modern mind quite so sharply as his virulent attacks on a provincial governor in whose suite he had gone to Bithynia in the hope of enriching himself, and under whose just administration he had failed to do so. There is lost also the sense of a duty arising out of the possession of wealth–the feeling that it should do some good in the world, or at least be in part applied to some useful purpose. Lastly, the exciting pursuit of wealth helps to produce a curious restlessness and instability of character, of which we have many examples in the age we are studying. “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel,” are words that might be applied to many a young man among Cicero’s acquaintance, and to many women also.
No sudden operation could cure these evils–they needed the careful and gradual treatment of a wise physician. As in so many other ways, so here Augustus showed his wonderful instinct as a social reformer. The first requisite of all was an age of comparative peace–a healthy atmosphere in which the patient could recover his natural tone. Next in importance was the removal of the incitement to enrich yourself and to spend illegally or unprofitably, and the revival of a sense of duty towards the State and its rulers. Provincial governors were made more really responsible, and a scientific census revealed the actual tax-paying capacity of the provincials; tax-farming was more closely superintended and gradually disappeared. It is true enough that even under the Empire great fortunes were made and lost, but the gambling spirit, the wild recklessness in monetary dealings, are not met with again. The Roman Forum ceased to be insane, and Italy became once more the home of much happy and useful country life. The passionate and reckless self-consciousness of Catullus is succeeded in the next generation by the calm sweet hopefulness of Virgil; in passing from the one poet to the other, we feel that we are leaving behind us an age of over-sensitive self-seeking and entering on one in which duty and honour, labour on the land and hard work for the State, may be reckoned as things more likely to make life worth living than all the accumulated capital of a Crassus.
CHAPTER IV
THE GOVERNING ARISTOCRACY
Above the men of business of equestrian rank, in social standing though not necessarily in wealth, there was in Cicero’s time an aristocracy which a Roman of that day would perhaps have found it a little difficult to explain or define to a foreigner. Fortunately all foreigners coming to Rome would know what was meant by the senate, the great council which received envoys from all nations outside the Empire; and the stranger might be told in the first place that all members of that august assembly, with their families, were considered as elevated above the equestrian order, and as forming the main body of the aristocracy proper. But if the informant were by chance a conservative Roman of old family, he might proceed to qualify this definition. “There are now in the senate,” he might say, “plenty of men who are only there because they have held the quaestorship, which Sulla made the qualification for a seat, and there are many equites whom Sulla made into senators by the form of a vote of the people; such men, even the great orator Cicero himself, I do not reckon as really members of the nobility, because they do not belong to old families who have done the State good service in past time. They have no images of their ancestors in their houses; they come from municipal towns, or spring from some low family in the city; they may have raised themselves by their talents, perhaps only by their money, but they have no guarantee of antiquity, their names are not in our annals. All we true conservative Romans (and a, Roman is hardly a Roman if not conservative) profoundly believe that a man whose family has once attained to high public honour and done good public service, will be a safer person to elect as a magistrate than one whose family is unknown and untried–a belief which is surely based on a truth of human nature. I should count a man who happens not to be in the senate himself, for want of wealth or inclination, but whose family has its images and its traditions of great ancestors, as far more truly an “optimate” than most of these new men. Fortunately our most famous families, whose names are known all over the Empire, are still to be found in the senate, and indeed form a powerful body there, capable of resisting to the last the revolutionary dangers that threaten us. The people still elect to magistracies the Aemilii, Lutatii, Claudii, Cornelii, Julii, and many more families that have been famous in our history, and will, I trust, continue to elect them so long as our Republic lasts.”[149]
There was indeed a glamour about these splendid names, as there is about the titles of our ancient noble families; their holders may almost be said to have claimed high office as a right, like the Whig families Of the Revolution for a century after their triumph. Though we may use the word in a wider sense in this chapter, these grand old families were the true aristocracy, and inspired just that respect in the minds of men outside their circle which is still so familiar to us in England. Cicero was to such men an “outsider,” a _novus homo_; and the close reader of Cicero’s letters, if he is looking out (as he should be) for Cicero’s constantly changing attitude of mind as he addresses himself to various correspondents, cannot fail to see how comparatively awkward and stilted he often is when writing to one of these great nobles, with whom he has never been really intimate; and how easily his pen glides along when he is letting himself talk to Atticus, or Poetus, or M. Marius, men who were outside the pale of nobility. It is true that he is sometimes embarrassed in other ways when writing to great personages, as, for example, Lentulus Spinther, consul in 57, or to Appius Claudius, consul in 53; but had they been men of his own kind he never would have felt that embarrassment in the same degree. When writing to such men he rarely or never indulges in those little sportive jokes or allusions which enliven his more intimate correspondence, nor does he tell the truth so strictly, for they might not always care to hear it.
Here is a specimen which will give some idea of his manner in writing to an aristocrat: he is congratulating L. Aemilius Paullus, who secured his election to the consulship in the summer of 51 B.C.:
“Though I never doubted that the Roman people, considering your eminent services to the Republic and _the splendid position of your family_, would enthusiastically elect you consul by a unanimous vote, yet I felt extreme delight when the news reached me; and I pray the gods to render your official career fortunate, and to make the administration of your office worthy of your own position and _that of your ancestors_…. And would that it had been in my power to have been at home to see that wished-for day, and to have given you the support which your noble services and kindness to me deserved! But since the unexpected and unlooked-for accident of my having to take a province has deprived me of that opportunity, yet, that I may be enabled to see you as consul actually administering the state in a manner worthy of your position, I earnestly beg you to take care to prevent my being treated unfairly, or having additional time added to my year of office. If you do that, you will abundantly crown your former acts of kindness to me.”[150]
This Aemilius Paullus, like Spinther and many others, belonged to a respectable but somewhat characterless type of aristocrat; these formed a considerable and a powerful section of the senate, where they were an obstacle to reform and administrative efficiency. They were really a survival from the old type of Roman noble, which had done excellent work in its day; men in whom the individual had been kept in strict subordination to the State, and whose personal idiosyncrasies and ambitions only excited suspicion. But towards the end of the Republican period the individual had free play; at no time in ancient history do we meet with so many various and interesting kinds of individuality, even among the nobilitas itself. This is not merely the result of the abundant literature in which their traits have come down to us; it was a fact of the age, in which the idea of the State had fallen into the background, and the individual found no restraint on his thoughts and little on his actions, no hindrance to the development of his capacity either for good or evil. Sulla, Catiline, Pompeius, Cato, Clodius, Caesar, all have their marked characteristics, familiar to all who read the history of the Roman revolution. Caesar is the most remarkable example of strong character among the men of high aristocratic descent, and it is interesting to notice how entirely he was without the exclusive tendency which we associate with aristocrats. He was intimate with men of all ranks; his closest friends seem to have been men who were noble. While the high aristocrats looked down as a rule on Cicero the novus homo, and for some years positively hated him[151], Caesar, though differing from him _toto coelo_ in politics, was always on pleasant terms of personal intercourse with him; he had a charm of manner, a literary taste, and a genuine admiration for genius, which was invariably irresistible to the sensitive “novus homo.” With Pompey, though he trusted him politically as he never trusted Caesar, Cicero was never so intimate. They had not the same common interests; Cicero could laugh at Pompey behind his back, but hardly once in his correspondence does he attempt to raise a jest about Caesar.
Thus in the governing or senatorial aristocracy we find men of a great variety of character, from the old-fashioned nobilis, exclusive in society and obstructive in politics, to the man of individual genius and literary ability, whether of blue blood like Caesar, or like Cicero the scion of a municipal family which has never gained or sought political distinction. But for the purposes of this chapter we may discern and discuss two main types of character in this aristocracy: first, that on which the new Greek culture had worked to advantage, not destroying the best Roman qualities, but drawing them into usefulness in new ways; secondly, that on which the same culture had worked to its harm by taking advantage of weak points in the Roman armour, sapping the true Roman quality without substituting any other excellence. We will briefly trace the growth of these two types, and take an example of each among Cicero’s intimate friends, not from the famous personages familiar to every one, but from eminent and interesting men of whom the ordinary student knows comparatively little.
Ever since the Hannibalic war, and probably even before it, Roman nobles had felt the power of Greek culture; they had begun to think, to learn about peoples who were different from themselves in habits and manners, and to advance, the best of them at least, in wisdom and knowledge; and this is true in spite of the unquestioned fact that it was in this same era that the seeds were sown of moral and political degeneracy. We shall have abundant opportunity of noting the effects of this degeneracy in the last age of the Republic, but it is pleasant to dwell for a moment on that more wholesome Greek influence which enticed the finer minds among the Roman nobility into a new region of culture, stimulating thought and strengthening the springs of conduct.
Even the old Cato himself, most rigid of Roman conservatives, was not unmoved by this influence,[152] and it was to him that Rome owed the introduction of Ennius, the greatest literary figure of that age, into Roman society[153]. But the first genuine example of the new culture, of the Hellenic enthusiasm of the age, is to be found in Aemilius Paullus, the conqueror of Macedonia, a true Roman aristocrat who was delighted to learn from Greeks. Plutarch’s _Life_ of this man is a valuable record of the tendencies of the time. After his failure to obtain a second consulship, Plutarch tells us[154] that he retired into private life, devoting himself to religious duties and to the education of his children, training these in the old Roman habits in which he had himself been trained, but also in Greek culture, and that with even greater enthusiasm. He had about them Greek teachers, not only of grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy, but of the fine arts, and even of out-door pursuits, such as hunting (to which the Romans were not greatly addicted), and of the care of horses and dogs; and he made a point of being present himself at all their exercises, bodily and mental. The result of this wholesome Xenophontic education is seen in his son, the great Scipio Aemilianus, who was adopted into the family of the Scipios in the lifetime of his father. Whatever view we may take of this great man’s conduct in war and politics, there can hardly be a doubt that the Romans themselves were right in treasuring his memory as one of the best of their race. When we put all the facts of his life together, from his early youth, of which his friend Polybius has left us a most beautiful picture,[155] to his sudden and probably violent death in the maturity of his powers, we are compelled to believe that he was really a man of wide sympathies, a strong sense of justice which guided him steadily through good report and ill, perfect purity of life, and hatred of all that was low and bad, whether in rich or poor. He was not, like his father, a Roman aristocrat patronising Greek culture;[156] in him we see a perfectly natural and mature combination of the noblest qualities of the Roman and the wholesomest qualities of the Greek. “It was an awakening truth,” says a great authority, “in the minds of Romans like Scipio, that intellectual culture must be built upon a foundation of moral rectitude: and such a foundation they could find in the storehouse of their own domestic traditions.”[157] When Cicero, who held him to be the greatest of Romans, wrote his dialogue on the State (_de Republica_), with the new idea pervading it of the moral and political ascendancy of a single man, he made Scipio the hero and the one ascendant figure in his work, and ended it with an imitation of the Platonic “myth,” in the form of a “dream of Scipio.”
Scipio gathered round him a circle of able and cultured men, both Roman and Greek, including almost every living Roman of ability, and among the Greeks the historian Polybius and the philosopher Panaetius, of whom we shall have more to learn in the course of this volume. Of this circle the best and ablest men of Cicero’s earlier days were mentally the children, and his own views both of literature and politics were largely formed upon the Scipionic tradition. Indeed to understand the mental and moral furniture of the Roman mind in the Ciceronian age, it is absolutely necessary to study that of the generation which made that mind what it was; but here space can only be found to point out how the enlightenment of the Scipionic circle opened out new ways in manners, in literature, in philosophical receptivity, and lastly in the study of the law, which was destined to be Rome’s greatest contribution to civilisation.
Manners, the demeanour of the individual in social intercourse, are a valuable index, if not an entirely conclusive one, of the mental and moral tone of society in any age. Ease and courteousness of bearing mean, as a rule, that the sense of another’s claims as a human being are always present to the mind. Whatever be the shortcomings of the last age of the Republic, we must give due credit to the fact that in their outward demeanour towards each other the educated men of that age almost invariably show good breeding. It is true enough that public vituperation, in senate or law-courts, was a fact of every day, and the wealth of violent personal abuse which a gentleman like Cicero could expend on one whom for the time he hated, or who had done him some wrong, passes all belief.[158] But the history of this vituperation is a curious one; it was a traditional method of hostile oratory, and sprang from an old Roman root, the tendency to defamation and satire, which may itself be attributed in part to the Italian custom of levelling abuse at a public man (e.g. at his triumph) in order to avert evil from him.[159] To single out a man’s personal ugliness, to calumniate his ancestry in the vilest terms,–these were little more than traditional practices, oratorical devices, which the rhetorical education of the day encouraged, and which no one took very seriously.[160] But we are concerned in this chapter mainly with private life; and there we find almost universal consideration and courtesy. In the whole of the Ciceronian correspondence there is hardly a letter that does not show good breeding, and there are many that are the natural result of real kindly feeling and true sympathy.
A good example of the best type of Roman manners is to be found in Plutarch’s _Life_ of Gaius Gracchus, the younger contemporary of Scipio, who had married his sister. Plutarch draws a picture of him so vivid that by common consent it is ascribed to the memoirs of some one who knew him. “In all his dealings with men,” says the biographer, “he was always dignified yet always courteous”; that is, while he inspired respect, men felt also that he would do anything in his power for them. That this was said of him by a Roman, and not invented for him by Plutarch, seems probable because the combination is one peculiarly Roman; so Livy, when he wishes to describe the finest type of Roman character, says that a certain man was “haud minus libertatis alienae quam suae dignitatis memor.”[161] This same combination meets us also in the little pictures of the social life of cultivated men which Cicero has left us in some of his dialogues. There the speakers are usually of the nobility, often distinguished members of senatorial families, as in the _de Oratore_, where the chief _personae_ are Crassus, Antonius, and Scaevola, the conservative triumvirate of the day. They all seem grave, or but seldom gently jocular, respectful to each other, and perhaps a trifle tedious; they never quarrel, however deeply they may differ, and we may guess that they did not hold their opinions strongly enough to urge them to open rupture. We seem to see the same grave faces, with rather noses and large mouths, which meet us in the sculptures of Augustus’ Ara Pacis,[162]–full of dignity, but a little wanting in animation.
There is one singular exception to the good manners of the period; but as the result rather of affectation than of nature, it may help to prove our rule. Again and again in Plutarch’s _Life_ of Cato the younger the mention of his rudeness proves the strength of the tradition about him. It was said that this lost him the consulship, as he declined to make himself agreeable in the style expected from candidates[163]. Even in a letter to Cicero, an old friend, though not actually rude, he is absurdly patronising and impertinent to a man many years his senior, and writes in very bad taste. Probably the enmity between him and Caesar arose or was confirmed in this way, as Cato always made a point of being rudest to those whom he most disliked. He fancied that he was imitating his great ancestor, and asserting the virtue of good old Roman bluntness against modern Greek affectation; he did not in the least see that he was himself a curious example of Roman affectation, shown up by the real amenities of intercourse, for which Romans had largely to thank Greece[164].
In literature too the average capacity of this aristocracy was high, though the greatest literary figures of the age, if we except Caesar, do not, strictly speaking, belong to it; Cicero was a novus homo, and Lucretius and Catullus were not of the senatorial order. But the new education, as we shall see later on, was admirably calculated to train men in the art of speaking and writing, if not in the habit of independent thinking; and among the nobles who reaped the full fruits of this education every one could write in Latin and probably also in Greek, and if he aimed at public distinction, could speak without disgracing himself in the senate and the courts. Oratory was, in fact, the staple product of the age, and the chief _raison d’etre_ of its literary activity. Long ago the practice had begun of writing out successful speeches delivered in the senate, in the courts, or at funerals; the means of publication were easy, as a consequence of the number of Greek slaves who could act as copyists, and thus oratory formed the basis of a prose literature which is essentially Roman,[165] rooted in the practical necessities of the life of the Roman noble, though deeply tinged with the Greek ideas and forms of expression acquired in the process of education in vogue. Treatises on rhetoric, the art of effective expression in prose, form an important part of it; two of them still survive from the time of Sulla,–the _Rhetorica ad Herennium_ of an unknown author, and Cicero’s early treatise _de Inventione_. Later on Cicero wrote his admirable dialogue _de Oratore_ and other works on the same subject, ending with his _Brutus_, a catalogue raisonnee, invaluable to us, of all the great Roman orators down to his own time.
In history writing the standard was not so high. The rhetorical education made men good professional orators, but indifferent and dilettante historians, and the example of more accurate historical investigation and reflection set by Polybius was not followed, except perhaps by Caelius Antipater in the Gracchan age.[166] History was affected for the worse by the rhetorical art, as indeed poetry was destined also to be; Sallust, though we owe much to him, was in fact an amateur, who thought more of style and expression than of truth and fact. Caesar, who did not profess to be a historian, but only to provide the materials for history,[167] stands alone in making facts more important than words, and rarely troubles his reader with speeches or other rhetorical superfluities.[168] Biographies and autobiographies were fashionable; of the former only those of Cornelius Nepos, one of Cicero’s many friends, have come down to us, and none of the latter, but we know a long list of eminent men who wrote their own memoirs, including Catulus the elder, Rutilius the famous victim of equestrian judges, Sulla, and Lucullus. But far above all other prose writers of the age stand two men, neither of them Roman by birth, but yet members of the senatorial order; the one a man of encyclopaedic learning, with what we may almost call a scientific interest in the subjects which he treated in awkward and homely Latin, the other a man of comparatively little learning, but gifted with so exquisite a sense of the beautiful in expression, and at the same time with a humanity so real and in that day so rare, that it is not without good cause that he has recently been called the most highly cultured man of all antiquity.[169] Of Varro’s numerous works we have unluckily but few survivals; of Cicero’s we have still such a mass as will for ever provide ample material for studying the life, the manners, the thought of his day.
A large part of this mass consists of the correspondence of which we are making such frequent use in these chapters. Letter-writing is perhaps the most pleasing and genuine of all the literary activities of the time; men took pains to write well, yet not with any definite prospect of publication, such as was the motive a century later in the days of Seneca and Pliny. The nine hundred and odd letters of the Ciceronian collection are most of them neither mere communications nor yet rhetorical exercises, but real letters, the intercourse of intimate friends at a distance, in which their inmost thoughts can often be seen. Cicero is indeed apt to become rhetorical even in his letters, when writing under excitement about politics; but the most delightful letters in the collection are those in which he writes to his friends in happy and natural language of his daily life and occupations, his books, his villas, his children, his joys and sorrows. It is strange that the great historian of Rome in our time entirely failed to see the charm and the value of these letters, as of all Cicero’s writings; his countrymen have now agreed to differ from him, and to restore a great writer to his true position.
In philosophical receptivity too the brightest and finest minds among this aristocracy show an ability which is almost astonishing, when we consider that there had been no education in Rome worth the name until the second century B.C.[170] I use the word receptivity, because the Romans of our period never really learnt to think for themselves; they never grappled with a problem, or struck out a new line of thought. But so far as we can judge by Cicero’s philosophical works, the only ones of his age which have come down to us, the power to read with understanding and to reproduce with skill was unquestionably of a high order. The opportunities for study were not wanting; private libraries were numerous, and all Cicero’s friends who had collected books were glad to let him have the use of them.[171] Greek philosophers were often domesticated in wealthy families, and could discourse with the statesman when he had leisure from public business. Much of this was no more than fashion, and real endeavour and earnestness were rare; but the fact remains that one philosophical system, more especially on its ethical side, took real possession of the best type of Roman mind, and had permanent and saving influence on it.
Stoicism was brought to Rome by Panaetius of Rhodes, the intimate friend of Scipio, a mild and tactful Greek whose Rhodian birth gave him perhaps some advantage in associating with the old allies of his state. He came to Rome at a critical moment, when even the best men were drifting into pure material self-seeking; and the results of his teaching were during two centuries so wholesome and inspiring that we may almost think of him as a missionary. The ground had been prepared for him in some sense by Polybius, who introduced him to Scipio and his circle, and who was then engaged in writing his history. From Polybius the Romans, the best of them at least, first learnt to realise their own empire and the great change it had wrought in the world; to think about what they had done and the qualities that enabled them to do it. From Panaetius they were to learn a philosophical creed which might direct and save them in the future, which might serve as ballast in public and private life, just when the ship was beginning to drift in moral helplessness. He was the founder of a school of practical wisdom, singularly well adapted to the Roman character and intellect, which were always practical rather than speculative; and far better suited to ordinary human life than the old rigid and austere Stoic ethics, of which the younger Cato was the only eminent Roman disciple. From what we know of Panaetius’ ethical teaching,–and in the first two books of Cicero’s work, _de Officiis_, we have a fairly complete view of it,–we do not find the old doctrine that absolute wisdom and justice are the only ends to pursue, and everything else indifferent; a doctrine which put the old-fashioned Stoic out of court in public life. The relative element, the useful, played a great part in the teaching of Panaetius. Though his system is based on the highest principles to which moral teaching could then appeal, it did not exclude the give and take, the compromise without which no practical man of affairs can make way, nor yet the wealth and bodily comforts that secure leisure for thought.[172]
Panaetius’ mission was carried on by another Rhodian philosopher, the famous Posidonius, who lived long enough to know Cicero himself and many of his contemporaries; a man less inspiring perhaps than Panaetius, but of greater knowledge and attainment; a traveller, geographer, and a man of the world, whose writings on many subjects, though lost to us, really lie at the back of a great part of the Roman literary output of his time.[173] He was the disciple of Panaetius; envoy from Rhodes to Rome in the terrible year 86; and later on the inmate of Roman families, and the admired friend of Cicero Pompeius, and Varro. Philosophy was only one of the many pursuits of this extraordinary man, whose literary and historical influence can be traced in almost every leading Roman author for a century at least; but his philosophical importance was during his lifetime perhaps predominant. The generation that knew him was rich in Stoics; for example, Aelius Stilo, the master of Varro, “doctissimus eorum temporum,” as Gellius calls him;[2] Rutilius, who was mentioned just now as having written memoirs; and among others probably the great lawyer Mucius Scaevola. Cato, as we have seen, was not a follower of the Roman school of Stoicism, but of the older and uncompromising doctrine; but Cicero, though never a professed Stoic, was really deeply influenced, and towards the end of his life almost fascinated, by a creed which suited his humanity while it stimulated his instinct for righteousness.[174] And, like Cicero, many other men of serious character felt the power of Stoicism almost unconsciously, without openly professing it.
Stoicism then was in several ways congenial to the Roman spirit, but in one direction it had an inspiring influence which has been of lasting moment to the world. Up to the time of Panaetius and the Scipionic circle the Roman idea and study of law had been of a crabbed practical character, wanting in breadth of treatment, destitute of any philosophical conception of the moral principles which lie behind all law and government. The Stoic doctrine of universal law ruling the world–a divine law, emanating from the universal Reason–seems to have called up life in these dry bones. It might be held by a Roman Stoic that human law comes into existence when man becomes aware of the divine law, and recognises its claim upon him. Morality is thus identical with law in the widest sense of the word, for both are equally called into being by the Right Reason, which is the universal primary force.[175] It is not possible here to show how this grand and elevating idea of law may have affected Roman jurisprudence, but we will just notice that the first quasi-philosophical treatment of law is found following the age of Panaetius and the Scipionic circle; that the phrase _ius gentium_ then begins to take the meaning of general principles or rules common to all peoples, and founded on “natural reason”;[176] and that this led by degrees to the later idea of the Law of Nature, and to the cosmopolitanism of the Roman legal system, which came to embrace all peoples and degrees in its rational and beneficent influence. If the Greek had a genius for beauty, and the Jew for righteousness, the Roman had a genius for law; and the power of Stoicism in ennobling and enriching his native conception of it is probably not to be easily over-estimated.
Thus behind the stormy scenes of public life in this period there is a process going on which will be of value not only to the Roman Empire but to modern civilisation. It was carried on more especially by two men of the highest character, Q. Mucius Scaevola, Cicero’s adviser in his early days, and often his model in later life; and Servius Sulpicius Rufus, his exact contemporary and lifelong friend. Neither Scaevola nor Sulpicius were, so far as we know, professed disciples of Stoicism; but that they applied perhaps half unconsciously the principles of Stoicism to their own legal studies is almost certain. The combination of legal training and Stoic influence (whether direct or unconscious) seems to have been capable of bringing the Roman aristocratic character to a high pitch of perfection; and it will be pleasant to take this friend of Cicero, whose public career we can clearly trace, and one or two of whose letters we still possess, as our example of a really well spent life in an age when time and talent were constantly abused and wasted.
Sulpicius and Cicero were born in the same year, 106; they went hand in hand in early life, and remained friends till their deaths in 43, Sulpicius dying a few months before Cicero. They were both attached in early youth to the Scaevola just mentioned, the first of the great series of scientific Roman lawyers. But the consulship of Cicero made a wide divergence in their lives. In that year Sulpicius was a candidate for the consulship and failed; and then, resigning further attempts to obtain the highest honour, he retired for the next twelve years into private life, devoting himself to the work which has made his name immortal. His writings are lost; nothing remains of them but a few chance fragments and allusions; but he was reckoned the second of the great writers on legal subjects, and it is probable that he contributed as much as any of them to the work of making Roman law what it has been as a power in the world, a factor in modern civilisation. For he treated it, as his friend said of him,[177] with the hand and mind of an artist, laying out his whole subject and distributing it into its constituent parts, by definition and interpretation making clear what seemed obscure, and distinguishing the false from the true in legal principle. In the splendid panegyric pronounced on him in the senate after his death,[178] Cicero again emphatically declared him to be unrivalled in jurisprudence. In beautiful but untranslatable language he claims that he was “non magis iuris consultus, quam iustitiae,”–an encomium which all great lawyers might well envy; he aimed rather at enabling men to be rid of litigation than at encouraging them to engage in it.
From such passages we might conjecture, even if we knew nothing more about him, that Sulpicius was a man of very fine clay, of real _humanitas_ in the widest sense of that expressive word; and this is entirely borne out in other ways.[179] Emerging at last from retirement, he stood again for the consulship in 52 B.C., and was elected. The year of his office, 51, was the first in which the enemies of Caesar, with Cato at their head, began to attack his position and clamour for his recall from his command; this violent hostility Sulpicius tried, not without temporary success, to restrain, and the fact that a man of so just a mind should have taken this line is one of the best arguments for the reasonableness of Caesar’s cause.[180] When war broke out he was greatly perplexed how to act; his breadth of view made decision difficult, and he seems to have been at all times more a student than a man of action. With some heart-burnings he joined Caesar in the struggle, and accepted from him the government of Achaia; it was at this time that he wrote the famous letter of consolation to Cicero on the death of his beloved daughter Tullia, which is full of true feeling and kindliness, though evidently composed with effort, if not with difficulty. After Caesar’s death he of course acted with Cicero against Antony, and in the spring of 43, making always for peace and good-will, he gave his life for his country in a way that claims our admiration more really than the suicide of Cato the professional Stoic; he headed an embassy to Antony, though dangerously ill at the time, and died in this last effort to obtain a hearing for the voice of justice. He has a _monumentum aere perennius_ in the speech of his old friend urging the senate to vote him a public funeral and a statue, as one who had laid down his life for his country.
We must now turn to consider how the mischievous side of the new Greek culture, in combination with other tendencies of the time, found its way into weak points in the armour of the Roman aristocracy.
The pursuit of ease and pleasure, to which the attainment of wealth and political power were too often merely subordinated, is a leading characteristic of the time. It is seen in many different forms, in many different types of character; but at the root of the whole corruption is the spirit of the coarser side of Epicureanism. As with Roman Stoicism, so too with Roman Epicureanism, it is not so much the professed holding of philosophical tenets that affected life; in the case of the latter system, it was the coincidence of its popularity with the decay of the old Roman faith and morality, and with the abnormal opportunities of self-indulgence. Cato as a professed Stoic, Lucretius as an enthusiastic Epicurean, stand quite apart from the mass of men who were actuated one way or the other by these philosophical creeds. The majority simply played with the philosophy, while following the natural bent of their individual character; but such dilettanteism was often quite enough to affect that character permanently for good or evil.
“Epicureanism popularised inevitably turns to vice.” Was it really popular at Rome? Cicero tells us in a valuable passage[181] that one Amafinius had written on it, and that a great number of copies of his book were sold, partly because the arguments were easy to follow, partly because the doctrine was pleasant, and partly too because men failed to get hold of anything better. The date of this Amafinius is uncertain, but it is probable that Cicero is here speaking of the latter part of the second century B.C.; and he goes on to say that other writers took up the same line of teaching, and established it over the whole of Italy (Italiam totam occupaverunt). If this was in the time of the Social and Civil Wars, of the proscriptions, of increasing crime and self-seeking, we can well understand that the doctrine was popular. We have a remarkable example of it in the life of a public man of Cicero’s own time, the object of the most envenomed invective that he ever uttered.[182] We cannot believe a tithe of what he says about this man, Calpurnius Piso, consul in 58; but in this particular matter of the damage done him by Epicurean teaching we have independent evidence which confirms it. Piso, then a young man, made acquaintance with a Greek of this school of thought, learnt from him that pleasure was the sole end of life, and failing to appreciate the true meaning and bearing of the doctrine, fell into the trap. It was a dangerous doctrine, Cicero says, for a youth of no remarkable intelligence; and the tutor, instead of being the young man’s guide to virtue, was used by him as an authority for vice.[183] This Greek was a certain Philodemus, a few of whose poems are preserved in the _Greek Anthology_; and a glance at them will show at once how dangerous such a man would be as the companion of a Roman youth. He may not himself have been a bad man–Cicero indeed rather suggests the contrary, calling him _vere humanus_–but the air about him was poisonous. In his pupil, if we can trust in the smallest degree the picture drawn of him by Cicero, we may see a specimen of the young men of the age whose talents might have made them useful in the world, but for the strength of the current that drew them into self-indulgence.
Not only the pursuit of pleasure, but its correlative, the avoidance of work and duty, can be abundantly illustrated in this age; and this too may have had a subtle connexion with Epicurean teaching, which had always discouraged the individual from distraction in the service of the State, as disturbing to the free development of his own virtue. Sulla did much hard work, but made the serious blunder of retiring to enjoy himself just when his new constitutional machinery needed the most careful watching and tending. Lucullus, after showing a wonderful capacity for work and a greater genius for war than perhaps any man of his time, retired from public life as a millionaire and a quietist, to enjoy the wealth that has become proverbial, and a luxury that is astonishing, even if we make due allowance for the exaggeration of our accounts of it. To his library we have already been introduced; those who would see him in his banqueting-hall, or rather one of the many in his palace, may turn to the fortieth chapter of Plutarch’s most interesting _Life_ of him, and read the story there told of the dinner he gave to Cicero and Pompeius in the “Apollo” dining-room.[184]
The same cynical carelessness about public affairs and neglect of duty, as compared with private ease or advantage, seems to have been characteristic of the ordinary senator. Active and busy in his own interest, he was indifferent to that of the State. There are distinct signs that the attendance in the senate was not good. When Cicero was away in Cilicia his correspondent writes of difficulties in getting together a sufficient number even for such important business as the settlement of provincial governments.[185] On the other hand, much private business was done, and many jobs perpetrated, in a thin senate; in 66 a tribune proposed that no senator should be dispensed from the action of a law unless two hundred were present.[186] It was in such a thin senate, we may be sure, that the virtuous Brutus was dispensed from the law which forbade lending to foreign borrowers in Rome, and thus was enabled to lend to the miserable Salaminians of Cyprus at 48 per cent, and to recover his money under the bond.[187] Writing to his brother in December 57, Cicero speaks of business done in a senate full for the time of year, which was midwinter, just before the Saturnalia, when only two hundred were present out of about six hundred. In February 54, a month when the senate had always much business to get through, it was so cold one day that the few members present clamoured for dismissal and obtained it.[188] And when the senate did meet there was a constant tendency to let things go. No reform of procedure is mentioned as even thought of, at a time when it was far more necessary than in our Parliament; business was talked about, postponed obstructed, and personal animosities and private interests seem, so far as we can judge from the correspondence of the time, to have been predominant. With wearisome iteration the letters speak of nothing done, of business postponed, or of the passing of some senatus consultum, the utter futility of which is obvious even now.[189] Even the magistrates seem to have been growing careless; we hear of a praetor presiding in the court de repetundis who had not taken the trouble to acquaint himself with the text of the law which governed its procedure;[190] and that praetors were worse than careless about their action in civil cases is proved by another law of the same tribune Cornelius mentioned just now, “that praetors should abide by the rules laid down in their edicts.”[191]
But all these futilities, and much of the same kind outside of the senate, together with the quarrels of individuals, the chances and incidents of elections, and all such gossip as forms the staple commodity of the society papers of to-day, were a source of infinite delight to another type of pleasure-loving public man, the last to be illustrated here.
If the older noble families were apathetic and idle, there were plenty of young men, rising most often from the class below, whose minds were intensely active–active in the pursuit of pleasure, but pleasure in the comparatively harmless form of amusement and excitement. One of these, the son of a banker at Puteoli, Marcus Caelius Rufus, stands out as a living portrait in his own letters to Cicero, of which no fewer than seventeen are preserved.[192] Of his early years too we know a good deal, told us in the speech in defence of him spoken by Cicero in the year 56; and these combined sources of information make him the most interesting figure in the life of his age. M. Boissier has written a delightful essay on him in his _Ciceron et ses amis_, and Professor Tyrrell has done the like in the introduction to the fourth volume of his edition of Cicero’s letters; but they have treated him less as a type of the youth of his day than as the friend and pupil of Cicero. Caelius will always repay fresh study; he was amusing and interesting to his contemporaries, and so he will be for ever to us. He is a veritable Proteus–you never know what shape he will take next;
Omnia transformat sese in miracula rerum—-
we can trace no less than six such transformations in the story of his life. And this instability, let us note at once, was not the restlessness of a jaded _roue_, but the coruscation of a clever mind wholly without principle, intensely interested in his _monde_, in the life in which he moved, with all its enjoyment and excitement.
Caelius’ father brought his son to Cicero, as soon as he had taken his toga virilis, to study law and oratory, and Cicero was evidently attracted by the bright and lively boy; he never deserted him, and the last letter of Caelius to his old preceptor was written only just before his own sad end. But Cicero was not the man to keep an unstable character out of mischief; he loved young men, especially clever ones, and was apt to take an optimistic view of them, as he did of his own son and nephew. Caelius, always attracted by novelty, left Cicero and attached himself to Catiline; and for this vagary, as well as for his own want of success in controlling his pupil, Cicero rather awkwardly and amusingly apologises in the early chapters of his speech in his defence. Wild oats must be sown, he says; when a youth has given full fling to his propensities to vice, they will leave him, and he may become a useful citizen,–a dangerous view of a preceptor’s duty, which reminds us of the treatment, of the boy Nero by his philosopher guardian long afterwards.[193]
Caelius escaped the fate of Catiline and his crew only to fall into the hands of another clique not less dangerous for his moral welfare. He became one of a group of brilliant young men, among whom were probably Catullus and Calvus the poets, who were lovers, and passionate lovers, of the infamous Clodia; they were needy, she found them money, and they hovered about her like moths about a candle. In such a life of passion and pleasure quarrels were inevitable. If the Lesbia of Catullus be Clodia, as we may believe, she had thrown the poet over with a light heart. It was apparently of his own free will that Caelius deserted her: in revenge she turned upon him with an accusation of theft and attempt to poison. What truth there was in the charges we do not really know, but Cicero defended him successfully, and in this way we come to know the details of this unsteady life.
In gratitude, and possibly in shame, Caelius now returned to his old friend, and abandoned the whole ring of his vicious companions for diligent practice in the courts, where he obtained considerable fame as an orator. A fragment of a speech of his preserved by Quintilian shows, as Professor Tyrrell observes, wonderful power of graphic and picturesque utterance.[194] Cicero, writing of him after his death,[195] says that he was at this time on the right side in politics, and that as tribune of the plebs in 56 he successfully supported the good cause, and checked revolutionary and seditious movements. All was going well with him until Cicero went as governor to Cilicia in 51. Cicero seems to have felt complete confidence in him, and invited him to become his confidential political correspondent; fifteen out of his seventeen letters were written in this capacity. These letters show us the man as clearly as if we had his diary before us. Caelius is no idle scamp or lazy Epicurean; his mind is constantly active: nothing escapes his notice: the minutest and most sordid things delight him. He is bright, happy, witty, frivolous, and doubtless lovable. It is amusing to see how Cicero himself now and again catches the infection, and tries (in vain) to write in the same frivolous manner.[196] Caelius has some political insight; he sees civil war approaching, but he takes it all as a game, and on the eve of events which were to shake the world he trifles with the symptoms as though they were the silliest gossip of the capital.[197] In none of these letters is there the smallest vestige of principle to be found. On the very eve of civil war he tells Cicero[198] that as soon as war breaks out the right thing to do is to join the stronger side. Judging Caesar’s side to be the stronger, he joined it accordingly, and did his best to induce Cicero to do the same. As M. Boissier happily says, he never cared to “menager ses transitions.”
He had, however, to discover that if to change over to Caesar was the safer course, to turn a political somersault once more, to try and undermine the work of the master, meant simply ruin. We have the story of his sixth and last transformation from Caesar himself, who was not, however, in Italy at the time.[199] Credit in Italy had been seriously upset by the outbreak of Civil War, and Caesar had been at much pains to steady it by an ordinance which has been alluded to in the last chapter.[200] In 48 Caelius was praetor; in the master’s absence he suddenly took up the cause of the debtors, and tried to evoke appeals against the decisions of his colleague Trebonius,–a great lawyer and a just man. Failing in this, he started as a downright revolutionary, proposing first the abolition of house-rent, and finally the abolition of all debts; and Milo, in exile at Massilia, was summoned to help him to raise Italy against Caesar. This was too much, and both were quickly caught and killed as they were stirring up gladiators and other slave-bands among the latifundia of South Italy.
Caelius’ letters give us a chance of seeing what that life of the Forum really was which so fascinated the young men of the day, and some of the old, such as Cicero himself. We can see these children playing on the very edge of the crater, like the French noblesse before the Revolution. In both cases there was a semi-consciousness that the eruption was not far off,–but they went on playing. What was it that so greatly amused and pleased them?
What Caelius is always writing of is mainly elections and canvassing, accusations and trials, games and shows. Elections he treats as pure sport, as a kind of enjoyable gambling, or as a means of spiting some one whom you want to annoy. With elections accusations were often connected: if a man were accused before his election he could not continue to stand; if condemned after it he was disqualified; here were ways in which personal spite might deprive him of success at the last moment.[201] Accusations, too were of course the best means by which an ambitious young man could come to the front. The whole number of trials mentioned by Caelius is astonishing; sometimes there is such a complication of them as is difficult to follow. Every one is ready to lay an accusation, without the smallest regard for truth. Young Appius Claudius accuses Servilius, and makes a mess of the attack, while the praetor mismanages the conduct of the trial, so that nothing comes of it; but finally Appius is himself accused by the Servilii _de vi_, in order to keep him from further attacks on Servilius![202] Appius the father quarrelled with Caelius and egged on others to accuse him, though he was curule aedile at the time. “Their impudence was so boundless that they secured that an information should be laid against me for a very serious crime (under the Scantinian law). Scarcely had Pola got the words out of his mouth, when I laid an information under the same law against the censor, Appius. I never saw a more successful stroke!”[203]
Of the games, and the panthers to be exhibited at them, about which Caelius is for ever worrying his friend in Cilicia, we shall see something in another chapter. There is plenty of other gossip in these letters, and gossip often about unsavoury matters which need not be noticed here. It lets in a flood of light upon the causes of the general incompetence and inefficiency; the life of the Forum was a demoralising one:
Uni se atque eidem studio omnes dedere et arti uerba dare ut caute possint, pugnare dolose: blanditia certare, bonum simulare uirum se: insidias facere, ut si hostes sint omnibus omnes.[204]
From what has been said in this sketch it should be clear that we have in the aristocracy of this period a complicated society, the various aspects of which can hardly be united in a single picture. It is partly a hereditary aristocracy, with all the pride and exclusiveness of a group of old families accustomed to power and consequence. It is in the main a society of gentlemen, dignified in manner, and kindly towards each other, and it is also a society of high culture and literary ability, though poor in creative genius, and unimaginative. On the other hand, it is a class which has lost its interest in the State, and is energetic only when pursuing its own interests: pleasure-loving, luxurious, gossiping, trifling with serious matters, short-sighted in politics because anxious only for personal advance. “Rari nantes in gurgite vasto” are the men who are really in earnest, but they are there; we must not forget that in Lucretius and Cicero this society produced one of the greatest poets and one of the most perfect prose writers that the world treasures; in Sulpicius a lawyer of permanent value to humanity, and in Caesar not only an author and a scholar but a man of action unrivalled in capacity and industry.
CHAPTER V
MARRIAGE: AND THE ROMAN LADY
In order to appreciate the position of women of various types in the society we are examining, it is necessary to make it clear what Roman marriage originally and ideally meant. In any society, it will be found that the position and influence of woman can be fairly well discerned from the nature of the marriage ceremony and the conditions under which it is carried out. At Rome, in all periods of her history, a _iustum matrimonium_, i.e. a marriage sanctioned by law and religion, and therefore entirely legal in all its results, was a matter of great moment, not to be achieved without many forms and ceremonies. The reason for this elaboration is obvious, at any rate to any one who has some acquaintance with ancient life in Greece or Italy. As we shall see later on, the house was a residence for the divine members of the family, as well as the human; the entrance, therefore, of a bride into the household,–of one, that is, who had no part nor lot in that family life–meant some straining of the relation between the divine and human members. The human part of the family brings in a new member, but it has to be assured that the divine part is willing to accept her before the step taken can be regarded as complete. She has to enter the family in such a way as to be able to share in its sacra, i.e. in the worship of the household spirits, the ancestors in their tombs, or in any special cult attached to the family. In order to secure this eligibility, she was in the earliest times subjected to a ceremony which was clearly of a sacramental character, and which had as its effect the transference of the bride from the hand (manus) of her father, i.e. from absolute subjection to him as the head of her own family, to the hand of her husband, i.e. to absolute subjection to him as the head of her new family.
This sacramental ceremony was called _confarreatio_, because a sacred cake, made of the old Italian grain called _far_, and offered to Jupiter Farreus,[205] was partaken of by bride and bridegroom, in the presence of the Pontifex Maximus, the Flamen Dialis, and ten other witnesses. At such a ceremony the auspices had of course been taken, and apparently a victim was also slain, and offered probably to Ceres, the skin of which was stretched over two seats (sellae), on which the bride and bridegroom had to sit.[206] These details of the early form of patrician marriage are only mentioned here to make the religious character of the Roman idea of the rite quite plain; in other words, to prove that the entrance of a bride into a family from outside was a matter of very great difficulty and seriousness, not to be achieved without special aid and the intervention of the gods. We may even go so far as to say that the new materfamilias was in some sort a priestess of the household, and that she must undergo a solemn initiation before assuming that position. And we may still further illustrate the mystical religious nature of the whole rite, if we remember that throughout Roman history no one could hold the priesthood of Jupiter (flaminium diale), or that of Mars or Quirinus, or of the Rex sacrorum, who had not been born of parents wedded by confarreatio, and that in each case the priest himself must be married by the same ceremony.[207] This last mentioned fact may also serve to remind us that it was not only the family and its sacra, its life and its maintenance, that called for the ceremonies making up a iustum matrimonium, but also the State and its sacra, its life and its maintenance.[208] As confarreatio had as its immediate object the providing of a materfamilias fully qualified in all her various functions, and as its further object the providing of persons legally qualified to perform the most important sacra of the state; so marriage, in whatever form, had as its object at once the maintenance of the family and its sacra and the production of men able to serve the State in peace and war. To be a Roman citizen you must be the product of a iustum matrimonium. From this initial fact flow all the _iura_ or rights which together make up citizenship; whether the private rights, which enable you to hold and transfer and to inherit property under the shelter of the Roman law,[209] or the public rights, which protect your person against violence and murder, and enable you to give your vote in the public assembly and to seek election to magistracies.[210]
Marriage then was a matter of the utmost importance in Roman life, and in all the forms of it we find this importance marked by due solemnity of ritual. In two other forms, besides confarreatio, the bride could be brought under the hand of her husband, viz., _coemptio_ and _usus_, with which we are not here specially concerned; for long before the last century of the Republic all three methods had become practically obsolete, or were only occasionally used for particular purposes. In the course of time it had been found more convenient for a woman to remain after her marriage in the hand of her father, or if he were dead, in the “tutela” of a guardian (tutor), than to pass into that of her husband; for in the latter case her property became absolutely his. The natural tendency to escape from the restrictions of marital _manus_ may be illustrated by a case such as the following: a woman under the _tutela_ of a guardian wishes to marry; if she does so, and passes under the _manus_ of her husband, her _tutor_ loses all control over her property, which may probably be of great importance for the family she is leaving; he therefore naturally objects to such a marriage, and urges that she should be married without _manus_.[211] In fact the interests of her own family would often clash with those of the one she was about to enter, and a compromise could be effected by the abandonment of marriage _cum manu_.
Now this, the abandonment of marriage _cum manu_, means simply that certain legal consequences of the marriage ceremony were dropped, and with them just those parts of the ceremony which produced these consequences. Otherwise the marriage was absolutely as valid for all purposes private and public as it could be made even by confarreatio itself. The sacramental part was absent, and the survival of the features of marriage by purchase, which we may see in the form of coemptio, was also absent; but in all other respects the marriage ceremony was the same as in marriage _cum manu_. It retained all essential religious features, losing only a part of its legal character. It will be as well briefly to describe a Roman wedding of the type common in the last two centuries of the Republic.
To begin with, the boy and girl–for such they were, as we should look on them, even at the time of marriage–have been betrothed, in all probability, long before. Cicero tells us that he betrothed his daughter Tullia to Calpurnius Piso Frugi early in 66 B.C.; the marriage took place in 63. Tullia seems to have been born in 76, so that she was ten years old at the time of betrothal and thirteen at that of marriage. This is probably typical of what usually happened; and it shows that the matter was really entirely in the hands of the parents. It was a family arrangement, a _mariage de convenance_, as has been and is the practice among many peoples, ancient and modern.[212] The betrothal was indeed a promise rather than a definite contract, and might be broken off without illegality; and thus if there were a strong dislike on the part of either girl or boy a way of escape could be found.[213] However this may be, we may be sure that the idea of the marriage was not that of a union for love, though it was distinguished from concubinage by an “affectio maritalis” as well as by legal forms, and though a true attachment might, and often did, as in modern times in like circumstances, arise out of it. It was the idea of the service of the family and the State that lay at the root of the union. This is well illustrated, like so many other Roman ideas, in the _Aeneid_ of Virgil. Those who persist in looking on Aeneas with modern eyes, and convict him of perfidy towards Dido, forget that his passion for Dido was a sudden one, not sanctioned by the gods or by favourable auspices, and that the ultimate union with Lavinia, for whom he forms no such attachment, was one which would recommend itself to every Roman as justified by the advantage to the State. The poet, it is true, betrays his own intense humanity in his treatment of the fate of Dido, but he does so in spite of his theme,–the duty of every Roman to his family and the State. A Roman would no doubt fall in love, like a youth of any other nation, but his passion had nothing to do with his life of duty as a Roman. This idea of marriage had serious consequences, to which we shall return later on.
When the day for the wedding arrives, our bride assumes her bridal dress, laying aside the toga praetexta of her childhood and dedicating her dolls to the Lar of her family; and wearing the reddish veil (_flammeum_) and the woollen girdle fastened with a knot called the knot of Hercules,[214] she awaits the arrival of the bridegroom in her father’s house. Meanwhile the auspices are being taken;[215] in earlier times this was done by observing the flight of birds, but now by examination of the entrails of a victim, apparently a sheep. If this is satisfactory the youthful pair declare their consent to the union and join their right hands as directed by a pronuba, i.e. a married woman, who acts as a kind of priestess. Then after another sacrifice and a wedding feast, the bride is conducted from her old home to that of her husband, accompanied by three boys, sons of living parents, one carrying a torch while the other two lead her by either hand; flute-players go before, and nuts are thrown to the boys. This _deductio_, charmingly described in the beautiful sixty-fifth poem of Catullus, is full of interesting detail which must be omitted here. When the bridegroom’s house is reached, the bride smears the doorposts with fat and oil and ties a woollen fillet round each: she is then lifted over the threshold, is taken by her husband into the partnership of fire and water–the essentials of domestic life–and passes into the atrium. The morrow will find her a materfamilias, sitting among her maids in that atrium, or in the more private apartments behind it:
Claudite ostia, virgines
Lusimus satis. At boni
Coniuges, bene vivite, et
Munere assiduo valentem
Exercete iuventam.
Even the dissipated Catullus could not but treat the subject of marriage with dignity and tenderness, and in this last stanza of his poem he alludes to the duties of a married pair in language which would have satisfied the strictest Roman. He has also touched another chord which would echo in the heart of every good citizen, in the delicious lines which just precede those quoted, and anticipate the child–a son of course–that is to be born, and that will lie in his mother’s arms holding out his little hands, and smiling on his father.[216] Nothing can better illustrate the contrast in the mind of the Roman between passionate love and serious marriage than a comparison of this lovely poem with those which tell the sordid tale of the poet’s intrigues with Lesbia (Clodia). The beauty and _gravitas_ of married life as it used to be are still felt and still found, but the depths of human feeling are not stirred by them. Love lies beyond, is a fact outside the pale of the ordered life of the family or the State.
No one who studies this ceremonial of Roman marriage, in the light of the ideas which it indicates and reflects, can avoid the conclusion that the position of the married woman must have been one of substantial dignity, calling for and calling out a corresponding type of character. Beyond doubt the position of the Roman materfamilias was a much more dignified one than that of the Greek wife. She was far indeed from being a mere drudge or squaw; she shared with her husband in all the duties of the household, including those of religion, and within the house itself she was practically supreme.[217] She lived in the atrium, and was not shut away in a women’s chamber; she nursed her own children and brought them up; she had entire control of the female slaves who were her maids; she took her meals with her husband, but sitting, not reclining, and abstaining from wine; in all practical matters she was consulted, and only on questions political or intellectual was she expected to be silent. When she went out arrayed in the graceful _stola matronalis_, she was treated with respect, and the passers-by made way for her; but it is characteristic of her position that she did not as a rule leave the house without the knowledge of her husband, or without an escort.[218]
In keeping with this dignified position was the ideal character of the materfamilias. Ideal we must call it, for it does not in all respects coincide with the tradition of Roman women even in early times; but we must remember that at all periods of Roman history the woman whose memory survives is apt to be the woman who is not the ideal matron, but one who forces herself into notice by violating the traditions of womanhood. The typical matron would assuredly never dream of playing a part in history; her influence was behind the scenes, and therefore proportionally powerful. The legendary mother of Coriolanus (the Volumnia of Shakespeare), Cornelia the mother of the Gracchi, Aurelia, Caesar’s mother, and Julia his daughter, did indirectly play a far greater part in public life than the loud and vicious ladies who have left behind them names famous or infamous; but they never claimed the recognition of their power.
This peculiar character of the Roman matron, a combination of dignity, industry, and practical wisdom, was exactly suited to attract the attention of a gentle philosopher like Plutarch, who loved, with genuine moral fervour, all that was noble and honest in human nature. Not only does he constantly refer to the Roman ladies and their character in his _Lives_ and his _Morals_, but in his series of more than a hundred “Roman questions” the first nine, as well as many others, are concerned with marriage and the household life; and in his treatise called _Coniugalia praecepta_ he reflects many of the features of the Roman matron. From him, in Sir Thomas North’s translation, Shakespeare drew the inspiration which enabled him to produce on the Elizabethan stage at least one such typical matron. In Coriolanus he has followed Plutarch so closely that the reader may almost be referred to him as an authority; and in the contrast between the austere and dignified Volumnia and the passionate and voluptuous Cleopatra of the later play, the poet’s imagination seems to have been guided by a true historical instinct.
We need not doubt that the austere matron of the old type survived into the age we are specially concerned with; but we hardly come across her in the literature of the time, just because she was living her own useful life, and did not seek publicity. Chance has indeed preserved for us on stone the story of a wonderful lady, whose early years of married life were spent in the trying time of the civil wars of 49-43 B.C., and who, if a devoted husband’s praises are to be trusted, as indeed they may be, was a woman of the finest Roman cast, and endowed with such a combination of practical virtues as we should hardly have expected even in a Roman matron. But we shall return to this inscription later on.
The ladies whom we meet with in Cicero’s letters and in the other literature of the last age of the Republic are not of this type. Since the second Punic war the Roman lady has changed, like everything else Roman. It is not possible here to trace the history of the change in detail, but we may note that it seems to have begun within the household, in matters of dress and expense, and later on affected the life and bearing of women in society and politics. Marriages cum manu became unusual: the wife remained in the potestas of her father, who in most cases, doubtless, ceased to trouble himself about her, and as her property did not pass to her husband, she could not but obtain a new position of independence. Women began to be rich, and in the year 169 B.C. a law was passed (lex Voconia) forbidding women of the highest census[219] (who alone would probably be concerned) to inherit legacies. Even before the end of the great war, and when private luxury would seem out of place, it had been proposed to abolish the Oppian law, which placed restrictions on the ornaments and apparel of women; and in spite of the vehement opposition of Cato, then a young man, the proposal was successful.[220] At the same time divorce, which had probably never been impossible though it must have been rare,[221] began to be a common practice. We find to our surprise that the virtuous Aemilius Paullus, in other respects a model paterfamilias, put away his wife, and when asked why he did so, replied that a woman might be excellent in the eyes of her neighbours, but that only a husband could tell where the shoe pinched.[222] And in estimating the changed position of women within the family we must not forget the fact that in the course of the long and unceasing wars of the second century B.C., husbands were away from home for years together, and in innumerable cases must have perished by the sword or pestilence, or fallen into the hands of an enemy and been enslaved. It was inevitable that as the male population diminished, as it undoubtedly did in that century, the importance of woman should proportionately have increased. Unfortunately too, even when the husbands were at home, their wives sometimes seem to have wished to be rid of them. In 180 B.C. the consul Piso was believed to have been murdered by his wife, and whether the story be true or not, the suspicion is at least significant.[223] In 154 two noble ladies, wives of consulares, were accused of poisoning their husbands and put to death by a council of their own relations.[224] Though the evidence in these cases is not by any means satisfactory, yet we can hardly doubt that there was a tendency among women of the highest rank to give way to passion and excitement; the evidence for the Bacchanalian conspiracy of 186 B.C., in which women played a very prominent part, is explicit, and shows that there was a “new woman” even then, who had ceased to be satisfied with the austere life of the family and with the mental comfort supplied by the old religion, and was ready to break out into recklessness even in matters which were the concern of the State.[225] That they had already begun to exercise an undue influence over their husbands in public affairs seems suggested by old Cato’s famous dictum that “all men rule over women, we Romans rule over all men, and our wives rule over us.”[226]
But it would be a great mistake to suppose that the men themselves were not equally to blame. Wives do not poison their husbands without some reason for hating them, and the reason is not difficult to guess. It is a fact beyond doubt that in spite of the charm of family life as it has been described above, neither law nor custom exacted conjugal faithfulness from a husband.[227] Old Cato represents fairly well the old idea of Roman virtue, yet it is clear enough, both from Plutarch’s _Life_ of him (e.g. ch. xxiv.) and from fragments of his own writings, that his view of the conjugal relation was a coarse one,–that he looked on the wife rather as a necessary agent for providing the State with children than as a helpmeet to be tended and revered. And this being so, we are not surprised to find that men are already beginning to dislike and avoid marriage; a most dangerous symptom, with which a century later Augustus found it impossible to cope. In the year 131, just after Tiberius Gracchus had been trying to revive the population of Italy by his agrarian law, Metellus Macedonicus the censor did what he could to induce men to marry “liberorum creandorum causa”; and a fragment of a speech of his on this subject became famous afterwards, as quoted by Augustus with the same object. It is equally characteristic of Roman humour and Roman hardness. “If we could do without wives,” he said to the people, “we should be rid of that nuisance: but since nature has decreed that we can neither live comfortably with them nor live at all without them, we must e’en look rather to our permanent interests than to a passing pleasure.”[228]
Now if we take into account these tendencies, on the part both of men and women in the married state, and further consider the stormy and revolutionary character of the half century that succeeded the Gracchi,–the Social and Civil Wars, the proscriptions of Marius and Sulla,–we shall be prepared to find the ladies of Cicero’s time by no means simply feminine in charm or homely in disposition. Most of them are indeed mere names to us, and we have to be careful in weighing what is said of them by later writers. But of two or three of them we do in fact know a good deal.
The one of whom we really know most is the wife of Cicero, Terentia: an ordinary lady, of no particular ability or interest, who may stand as representative of the quieter type of married woman. She lived with her husband about thirty years, and until towards the end of that period, a long one for the age, we find nothing substantial against her. If we had nothing but Cicero’s letters to her, more than twenty in number, and his allusions to her in other letters, we should conclude that she was a faithful and on the whole a sensible wife. But more than once he writes of her delicate health,[229] and as the poor lady had at various times a great deal of trouble to go through, it is quite possible that as she grew older she became short in her temper, or trying in other ways to a husband so excitable and vacillating. We find stories of her in Plutarch and elsewhere which represent her as shrewish, too careful of her own money, and so on;[230] but facts are of more account than the gossip of the day, and there is not a sign in the letters that Cicero disliked or mistrusted her until the year 47. Had there really been cause for mistrust it would have slipped out in some letter to Atticus. Then, after his absence during the war, he seems to have believed that she had neglected himself and his interests: his letters to her grow colder and colder, and the last is one which, as has been truly said, a gentleman would not write to his housekeeper. The pity of it is that Cicero, after divorcing her, married a young and rich wife, and does not seem to have behaved very well to her. In a letter to Atticus (xii. 32) he writes that Publilia wanted to come to him with her mother, when he was at Astura devoting himself to grief for his daughter, and that he had answered that he wished to be let alone. The letter shows Cicero at his worst, for once heartless and discourteous; and if he could be so to a young lady who wished to do her duty by him, what may he not have been to Terentia? I suspect that Terentia was quite as much sinned against as sinning; and may we not believe that of the innumerable married women who were divorced at this time some at least were the victims of their husbands’ callousness rather than of their own shortcomings?
The wife of Cicero’s brother Quintus does, however, seem to have been a difficult person to get on with. She was a sister of Atticus, but she did not share her brother’s tact and universal good-will. Marcus Cicero has recorded (_ad Att._ v. I) a scene in which her ill-temper was so ludicrous that the divorce which took place afterwards needs no explanation. The two brothers were travelling together, and Pomponia was with them; something had irritated her. When they stopped to lunch at a place belonging to Quintus at Arcanum, he asked his wife to invite the ladies of the party in. “Nothing, as I thought, could be more courteous, and that too not only in the actual words, but in his intention and the expression of his face. But she, in the hearing of us all, exclaimed, ‘I am only a stranger here!'” Apparently she had not been asked by her husband to see after the luncheon; this had been done by a freedman, and she was annoyed. “There,” said Quintus, “that is what I have to put up with every day!” When he sent her dishes from the triclinium, where the gentlemen were having their meal, she would not taste them. This little domestic contretemps is too good to be neglected, but we must turn to women of greater note and character.
Terentia and Pomponia and their kind seem to have had nothing in the way of “higher education,” nor do their husbands seem to have expected from them any desire to share in their own intellectual interests. Not once does Cicero allude to any pleasant social intercourse in which his wife took part; and, to say the truth, he would probably have avoided marriage with a woman of taste and knowledge. There were such women, as we shall see, probably many of them; ever since the incoming of wealth and of Greek education, of theatres and amusements and all the pleasant out-of-door life of the city, what was now coming to be called _cultus_ had occupied the minds and affected the habits of Roman ladies as well as men. Unfortunately it was seldom that it was found compatible with the old Roman ideal of the materfamilias and her duties. The invasion of new manners was too sudden, as was the corresponding invasion of wealth; such a lady as Cornelia, the famous mother of the Gracchi, “who knew what education really meant, who had learned men about her and could write well herself, and yet could combine with these qualities the careful discharge of the duties of wife and mother,”[231]–such ladies must have been rare, and in Cicero’s time hardly to be found. More and more the notion gained ground that a clever woman who wished to make a figure in society, to be the centre of her own _monde_, could not well realise her ambition simply as a married woman. She would probably marry, play fast and loose with the married state, neglect her children if she had any, and after one or two divorces, die or disappear. So powerfully did this idea of the incompatibility of culture and wifehood gain possession of the Roman mind in the last century B.C., that Augustus found his struggle with it the most difficult task he had to face; in vain he exiled Ovid for publishing a work in which married women are most frankly and explicitly left out of account, while all that is attractive in the other sex to a man of taste and education is assumed to be found only among those who have, so far at least, eschewed the duties and burdens of married life. The culta puella and the cultus puer of Ovid’s fascinating yet repulsive poem[232] are the products of a society which looks on pleasure, not reason or duty, as the main end of life,–not indeed pleasure simply of the grosser type, but the gratification of one’s own wish for enjoyment and excitement, without a thought of the misery all around, or any sense of the self-respect that comes of active well-doing.
The most notable example of a woman of _cultus_ in Cicero’s day was the famous Clodia, the Lesbia (as we may now almost assume) who fascinated Catullus and then threw him over. She had been married to a man of family and high station, Metellus Celer, who had died, strange to say, without divorcing her. She must have been a woman of great beauty and charm, for she seems to have attracted round her a little coterie of clever young men and poets, to whom she could lend money or accord praise as suited the moment. Whether Cicero himself had once come within reach of her attractions, and perhaps suffered by them, is an open question, and depends chiefly on statements of Plutarch which may (as has been said above) have no better foundation than the gossip of society. But we know how two typical young men of the time, Caelius and Catullus, flew into the candle and were singed; we know how fiercely she turned on Caelius, exposing herself and him without a moment’s hesitation in a public court; and we know how cruelly she treated the poet, who hated her for it even while he still loved her:[233]
Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris; Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
CATULL. 85.
She was, as M. Boissier has well said,[234] the exact counterpart of her still more famous brother: “Elle apportait dans sa conduite privee, dans ses engagements d’affection, les memes emportements et les memes ardeurs que son frere dans la vie publique. Prompte a tous les exces et ne rougissant pas de les avouer, aimant et haissant avec fureur, incapable de se gouverner et detestant toute contrainte, elle ne dementait pas cette grande et fiere famille dont elle descendait.” All this is true; we need not go beyond it and believe the worst that has been said of her.
We have just a glimpse of another lady of _cultus_, but only a glimpse. This was Sempronia, the wife of an honest man and the mother of another;[235] but according to Sallust, who introduces her to us as a principal in the conspiracy of Catiline, she was one of those who found steady married life incompatible with literary and artistic tastes. “She could play and dance more elegantly than an honest woman should … she played fast and loose with her money, and equally so with her good fame.”[236] She had no scruples, he says, in denying a debt, or in helping in a murder: yet she had plenty of _esprit_, could write verses and talk brilliantly, and she knew too how to assume an air of modesty on occasion. Sallust loved to colour his portraits highly, and in painting this woman he saw no doubt a chance of literary effect; but that she was really in the conspiracy we cannot doubt, and that she had private ends to gain by it is also probable. She seems to be the first of a series of ladies who during the next century and later were to be a power in politics, and most of whom were at least capable of crime, public and private. There is indeed one instance a few years earlier of a woman exercising an almost supreme influence in the State, and a woman too of the worst kind. Plutarch tells us in the most explicit way that when Lucullus in 75 B.C. was trying to secure for himself the command against Mithridates, he found himself compelled to apply to a woman named Praecia, whose social gifts and good nature gave her immense influence, which she used with the pertinacity peculiar to such ladies. Her reputation, however, was very bad, and among other lovers she had enslaved Cethegus (afterwards the conspirator), whose power at the time was immense at Rome. Thus, says Plutarch, the whole power of the State fell into the hands of Praecia, for no public measure was passed if Cethegus was not for it, in other words, if Praecia did not recommend it to him. If the story be true, as it seems to be, Lucullus gained her over by gifts and flattery, and thus Cethegus took up his cause and got him the command.[237]
Even if we put aside as untrustworthy a great deal of what is told us of the relations of men and women in this period, it must be confessed that there is quite sufficient evidence to show that they were loose in the extreme, and show an altogether unhealthy condition of family and social life. The famous tigress of the story of Cluentius, Sassia, as she appears in Cicero’s defence of him, was beyond doubt a criminal of the worst kind, however much we may discount the orator’s rhetoric; and her case proves that the evil did not exist only at Rome, but was to be found even in a provincial town of no great importance. Divorce was so common as to be almost inevitable. Husbands divorced their wives on the smallest pretexts, and wives divorced their husbands.[238] Even the virtuous Cato seems to have divorced his wife Marcia in order that Hortensius should marry her, and after some years to have married her again as the widow of Hortensius, with a large fortune.[239] Cicero himself writes sometimes in the lightest-hearted way of conjugal relations which we should think most serious;[240] and we find him telling Atticus how he had met at dinner the actress Cytheris, a woman of notoriously bad character. “I did not know she was going to be there,” he says, “but even the Socratic Aristippus himself did not blush when he was taunted about Lais.”[241] Caesar’s reputation in such matters was at all times bad, and though many of the stories about him are manifestly false, his conquest by Cleopatra was a fact, and we learn with regret that the Egyptian queen was living in a villa of his in gardens beyond the Tiber during the year 46, when he was himself in Rome.
It will be a relief to the reader, after spending so much time in this unwholesome atmosphere, to turn for a moment in the last place to a record, unique and entirely credible, of a truly good and wholesome woman, and of a long period of uninterrupted conjugal devotion. About the year 8 B.C., not long before Ovid wrote those poems in which married life was assumed to be hardly worth living, a husband in high life at Rome lost the wife who had for forty-one years been his faithful companion in prosperity, his wise and courageous counsellor in adversity. He recorded her praises and the story of her devotion to him in a long inscription, placed, as we may suppose, on the wall of the tomb in which he laid her to rest, and a most fortunate chance has preserved for us a great part of the marble on which this inscription was engraved. It is in the form of a laudatio, or funeral encomium; yet we cannot feel sure that he actually delivered it as a speech, for throughout it he addresses, not an audience, but the lost wife herself, in a manner unique among such documents of the kind as have come down to us. He speaks to her as though she were still living, though passed from his sight; and it is just this that makes it more real and more touching than any memorial of the dead that has come down to us from either Italy or Greece.[242]
In such a record names are of no great importance; it is no great misfortune that we do not know quite for certain who this man and his wife were. But there is a very strong probability that her name was Turia, and that he was a certain Q. Lucretius Vespillo, who served under Pompeius in Epirus in 48 B.C., whose romantic adventures in the proscriptions of 43 are recorded by Appian,[243] and who eventually became consul under Augustus in 19 B.C. We may venture to use these names in telling the remarkable story. For telling it here no apology is needed, for it has never been told in English as a whole, so far as I am aware.
It begins when the pair were about to be married, probably in 49 B.C., and with a horrible family calamity, not unnatural at the moment of the outbreak of a dangerous civil war. Both Turia’s parents were murdered suddenly and together at their country residence–perhaps, as Mommsen suggested, by their own slaves. Immediately afterwards Lucretius had to leave with Pompeius’ army for Epirus, and Turia was left alone, bereft of both her parents, to do what she could to secure the punishment of the murderers. Alone as she was, or aided only by a married sister, she at once showed the courage and energy which are obvious in all we hear of her. She seems to have succeeded in tracking the assassins and bringing them to justice: “even if I had been there myself,” says her husband, “I could have done no more.”
But this was by no means the only dangerous task she had to undertake in those years of civil war and insecurity. When Lucretius left her they seem to have been staying at the villa where her parents had been murdered; she had given him all her gold and pearls, and kept him supplied in his absence with money, provisions, and even slaves, which she contrived to smuggle over sea to Epirus.[244] And during the march of Caesar’s army through Italy she seems to have been threatened, either in that villa or another, by some detachment of his troops, and to have escaped only through her own courage and the clemency of one whose name is not mentioned, but who can hardly be other than the great Julius himself, a true gentleman, whose instinct and policy alike it was throughout this civil war to be merciful to opponents.
A year later, while Lucretius was still away, yet another peril came upon her. While Caesar was operating round Dyrrhachium, there was a dangerous rising in Campania and Southern Italy, for which our giddy friend Caelius Rufus was chiefly responsible; gladiators and ruffianly shepherd slaves were enlisted, and by some of these the villa where she was staying was attacked, and successfully defended by her–so much at least it seems possible to infer from the fragment recently discovered.
One might think that Turia had already had her full share of trouble and danger, but there is much more to come. About this time she had to defend herself against another attack, not indeed on her person, but on her rights as an heiress. An attempt was made by her relations to upset her father’s will, under which she and Lucretius were appointed equal inheritors of his property. The result of this would have been to make her the sole heiress, leaving out her husband and her married sister; but she would have been under the legal _tutela_ or guardianship of persons whose motive in attacking the will was to obtain administration of the property.[245] No doubt they meant to administer it for their own advantage; and it was absolutely necessary that she should resist them. How she did it her husband does not tell us, but he says that the enemy retreated from his position, yielding to her firmness and perseverance (constantia). The patrimonium came, as her father had intended, to herself and her husband; and he dwells on the care with which they dealt with it, he exercising a _tutela_ over her share, while she exercised a _custodia_ over his. Very touchingly he adds, “but of this I leave much unsaid, lest I should seem to be claiming a share in the praise that is due to you alone.”
When Lucretius returned to Italy, apparently pardoned by Caesar for the part he had taken against him, the marriage must have been consummated. Then came the murder of the Dictator, which plunged Italy once more into civil war, until in 43 Antony Octavian and Lepidus made their famous compact, and at once proceeded to that abominable work of proscription which made a reign of terror at Rome, and spilt much of the best Roman blood. The happiness of the pair was suddenly destroyed, for Lucretius found himself named in the fatal lists.[246] He seems to have been in the country, not far from Rome, when he received a message from his wife, telling him of impending peril that he might have to face at any moment, and warning him strongly against a certain rash course–perhaps an attempt to escape to Sextus Pompeius in Sicily, a course which cost the lives of many deluded victims. She implored him to return to their own house in Rome, where she had devised a secure hiding-place for him. She meant no doubt to die with him there if he were discovered.
He obeyed his good genius and made for Rome, by night it would seem, with only two faithful slaves. One of these fell lame and had to be left behind; and Lucretius, leaning on the arm of the other, approached the city gate. Suddenly they became aware of a troop of soldiers issuing from it, and Lucretius took refuge in one of the many tombs that lined the great roads outside the walls. They had not been long in this dismal hiding when they were surprised by a party of tomb-wreckers–ghouls who haunted these roads by night and lived by robbing tombs or travellers. Luckily they wanted rather to rob than to murder, and the slave gave himself up to them to be stripped, while his master, who was no doubt disguised, perhaps as a slave, contrived to slip out of their hands and reached the city gate safely. Here he waited, as we might expect him to do, for his brave companion, and then succeeded in making his way into the city and to his house, where his wife concealed him between the roof and the ceiling of one of their bedrooms, until the storm should blow over.
But neither life nor property was safe until some pardon and restitution were obtained from one at least of the triumvirs. When at last these were conceded by Octavian, he was himself absent in the campaign that ended with Philippi, and Lepidus was consul in charge of Rome. To Lepidus Turia had to go, to beg the confirmation of Octavian’s grace, and this brutal man received her with insult and injury. She fell at his feet, as her husband describes with bitter indignation, but instead of being raised and congratulated, she was hustled, beaten like a slave, and driven from his presence. But her perseverance had its ultimate reward. The clemency of Octavian prevailed on his return to Italy, and this treatment of a lad; was among the many crimes that called for the eventual degradation of Lepidus.
This was the last of their perilous escapes. A long period of happy married life awaited them, more particularly after the battle of Actium, when “peace and the republic were restored.” One thing only was wanting to complete their perfect felicity–they had no children. It was this that caused Turia to make a proposal to her husband which, coming from a truly unselfish woman, and seen in the light of Roman ideas of married life, is far from unnatural; but to us it must seem astonishing, and it filled Lucretius with horror. She urged that he should divorce her, and take another wife in the hope of a son and heir. If there is nothing very surprising in this from a Roman point of view, it is indeed to us both surprising and touching that she should have supported her request by a promise that she would be as much a mother to the expected children as their own mother, and would still be to Lucretius a sister, having nothing apart from him, nothing secret, and taking away with her no part of their inheritance.
To us, reading this proposal in cold blood just nineteen hundred years after it was made, it may seem foolishly impracticable; to her, whose whole life was spent in unselfish devotion to her husband’s interests, whose warm love for him was always mingled with discretion, it was simply an act of pietas–of wifely duty. Yet he could not for a moment think so himself: his indignation at the bare idea of it lives for ever on the marble in glowing words. “I must confess,” he says, “that the anger so burnt within me that my senses almost deserted me: that you should ever have thought it possible that we could be separated but by death, was most horrible to me. What was the need of children compared with my loyalty to you: why should I exchange certain happiness for an uncertain future? But I say no more of this: you remained with me, for I could not yield without disgrace to myself and unhappiness to both of us. The one sorrow that was in store for me was that I was destined to survive you.”
These two, we may feel sure, were wholly worthy of each other. What she would have said of him, if he had been the first to go, we can only guess; but he has left a portrait of her, as she lived and worked in his household, which, mutilated though it is, may be inadequately paraphrased as follows:
“You were a faithful wife to me,” he says, “and an obedient one: you were kind and gracious, sociable and friendly: you were assiduous at your spinning (lanificia): you followed the religious rites of your family and your state, and admitted no foreign cults or degraded magic (superstitio): you did not dress conspicuously, nor seek to make a display in your household arrangements. Your duty to our whole household was exemplary: you tended my mother as carefully as if she had been your own. You had innumerable other excellences, in common with all other worthy matrons, but these I have mentioned were peculiarly yours.”
No one can study this inscription without becoming convinced that it tells an unvarnished tale of truth–that here was really a rare and precious woman; a Roman matron of the very best type, practical, judicious, courageous, simple in her habits and courteous to all her guests. And we feel that there is one human being, and one only, of whom she is always thinking, to whom she has given her whole heart–the husband whose words and deeds show that he was wholly worthy of her.
CHAPTER VI
THE EDUCATION OF THE UPPER CLASSES
From what has been said in preceding chapters of the duties and the habits of the two sections of the upper stratum of society, it will readily be inferred that the kind of education called for was one mainly of character. In these men, whether for the work of business or of government, what was wanted was the will to do well and justly, and the instinctive hatred of all evil and unjust dealing. Such an education of the will and character is supplied (whatever be its shortcomings in other ways) by our English public school education, for men whose work in life is in many ways singularly like that of the Roman upper classes. Such an education, too, was outlined by Aristotle for the men of his ideal state; and Mr. Newman’s picture of the probable results of it is so suggestive of what was really needed at Rome that I may quote it here.[247]
“As its outcome at the age of twenty-one we may imagine a bronzed and hardy youth, healthy in body and mind, able to bear hunger and hard physical labour … not untouched by studies which awake in men the interest of civilised beings, and prepare them for the right use of leisure in future years, and though burdened with little knowledge, possessed of an educated sense of beauty, and an ingrained love of what is noble and hatred of all that is the reverse. He would be more cultivated and human than the best type of young Spartan, more physically vigorous and reverential, though less intellectually developed, than the best type of young Athenian–a nascent soldier and servant of the state, not, like most young Athenians of ability, a nascent orator. And as he would be only half way through his education at an age when many Greeks had finished theirs, he would be more conscious of his own immaturity. We feel at once how different he would be from the clever lads who swarmed at Athens, youths with an infinite capacity for picking holes, and capable of saying something plausible on every subject under the sun.”
If we note, with Mr. Newman, that Aristotle here makes if anything too little of intellectual training (as indeed may also be said of our own public schools), and add to his picture something more of that knowledge which, when united with an honest will and healthy body, will almost infallibly produce a sound judgment, we shall have a type of character eminently fitted to share in the duties and the trials of the government of such empires as the Roman and the British. But at Rome, in the age of Cicero, such a type of character was rare indeed; and though this was due to various causes, some of which have been already noticed,–the building up of a Roman empire before the Romans were ripe to appreciate the duties of an imperial state, and the sudden incoming of wealth in an age when the idea of its productive use was almost unknown,–yet it will occur to every reader that there must have been also something wrong in the upbringing of the youth of the upper classes to account for the rarity of really sound character, for the frequent absence of what we should call the sense of duty, public and private. I propose in this chapter to deal with the question of Roman education just so far as to show where in Cicero’s time it was chiefly defective. It is a subject that has been very completely worked out, and an excellent summary of the results will be found in the little volume on Roman education written by the late Professor A.S. Wilkins, just before his lamented death: but he was describing its methods without special reference to its defects, and it is these defects on which I wish more particularly to dwell.[248]
Let us notice, in the first place, how little is said in the literature of the time, including biographies, of that period of life which is now so full of interest to readers of memoirs, so full of interest to ourselves as we look back to it in advancing years. It may be that we now exaggerate the importance of childhood, but it is equally certain that the Romans undervalued the importance of it. It may be that we over-estimate the value of our public-school life, but it is certain that the Romans had no such school life to be proud of. Biography was at this time a favourite form of literature, and some of the memoirs then written were available for use by later writers, such as Valerius Maximus, Suetonius, and Plutarch; yet it is curious how little has come down to us of the childhood or boyhood of the great men of the time. Plutarch indeed was deeply interested in education, including that of childhood, and we can hardly doubt that he would have used in his Roman Lives any information that came in his way. He does tell us something, for which we are eternally indebted to him, of old Cato’s method of educating his son,[249] and something too, in his _Life of Aemilius Paullus_,[250] of the education of the eldest son of that family, the great Scipio Aemilianus. But in each of these Lives we shall find that this information is used rather to bring out the character of the father than to illustrate the upbringing of the son; and as a rule the Lives begin with the parentage of the hero, and then pass on at once to his early manhood.
The Life of the younger Cato, however, is an exception to the rule, which we must ascribe to the attraction which all historians and philosophers felt to this singular character. Plutarch knew the naiue and character of Cato’s paedagogus, Sarpedon,[251] and tells us that he was an obedient child, but would ask for the reason of everything, in those questions beginning with “why” which are often embarrassing to the teacher. Two stories in the second and third chapters of this Life are also found in that insipid medley of fact and fable drawn up in the reign of Tiberius, by Valerius Maximus, for educational purposes;[252] a third, which is peculiarly significant, and seems to bear the stamp of truth, is only to be found in Plutarch. I give it here in full: