ROMAN LIFE IN THE DAYS OF CICERO.* MR. Cuulicu has
in this book taken a quite new step in his very successful project of popularising, without vulgarising, the great Greek and Roman Classics. In some, indeed, of his tales from Livy, and tales from Herodotus, he was on historic ground ; but in these sketches of life, taken from the speeches and letters of Cicero, he is on the ground of history as attested by contem- porary evidence of the most minute and most authoritative kind, and a more charming selection of scenes from the life and times of Cicero it would be difficult to find. The only fault of the book is that it opens, rather unfortunately, with a slightly dull chapter on the Roman boy, which is not quite of a piece with the rest of the book, and which looks rather as if Mr. Church at first sketched out for himself a different plan, which he subsequently found it undesirable to pursue. He disclaims in the preface any intention of writing a book illustrative of the social life of the Romans, and yet the first chapter would seem to have been conceived from that point of view, though it is almost immediately changed for a very much better and livelier design,—that of illustrating the times of Cicero by sketches of Cicero's own achievements, and of those of the great men who were either his friends or his rivals. After this first chapter, however, which is a little too much in the style of a manual of Roman manners and customs, Mr. Church keeps much closer to the events or incidents of the times of the great Roman orator and statesman, and then the interest never flags. The account of those celebrated causes in which Cicero pleaded,—the defence of Roscius, the impeachment of Verres, and the exposure of Catiline's conspiracy,—is singularly vivid and lively. Of Cicero's country retreats, of his anxiety to adorn his library at Tnsculum, of his Sabine farm near Arpinum with its island study, of his more fashionable sea-side home near Cape Caieta, where he was bored by too attentive friends; of his dreariness and com- plainingness in exile, and of the furtive way in which he reproached his friends under pretence of reproaching himself, indeed of the curious mixture of courage and vacillation in his character generally, Mr. Church gives us a most graphic picture in this interesting little book, which to the present writer, at least, has had all the interest of a novel. Some of Cicero's contemporaries, too, are sketched in with few but effective strokes,—Sulla, Pompey, Catiline, Atticus, Cwsar, and Antony. In all these delineations, there is enough detail to produce a vivid impression, but not more than enough for the purposes of a sketch in which some one feature, whether it be one that concerns the character of Cicero, or that of his friends and rivals, or the society which they kept and the constraint or freedom with which they treated each other, is brought out. Thus we get a most effective picture of the corrup-
* Roman Life in the Days of Cicerb. Sketches Drawn from his Letters and Speeches. By the Rev. Alfred J. Church, H I., Professor of Latin at University College, Loudon. With Illustrations, Loudon I Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday. 18434.
tion of a time in which juries were bribable, indeed, and often bribed, but yet not so utterly bribable but that ability and courage, and still more, audacity, might foil the most deliberate and apparently well-planned attempt to defeat justice. Cicero himself often defeated such attempts at corruption, and defeated them when his own life was the stake for which he played. At the same time, it is pretty clear that he did not despise the arts of the advocate, even though those arts were of a kind to mislead the jury into the conclusion which he desired them to draw.
We will illustrate the descriptive power of the book by one passage, in which Mr. Church gives us a picture of one of Cicero's country retreats, and by another in which he condenses the story of the indictment drawn against Verres. Here is a sketch of the country house near Arpinum
"A Roman of even moderate wealth—for Cicero was far from being one of the richest men of his time—commonly possessed more country-houses than belonk even to the wealthiest of English nobles. One such house at least Cicero inherited from his father. It was about three miles from Arpinum, a little town in that hill country of the Sabines which was the proverbial seat of a temperate and frugal race, and which Cicero describes in Homeric phrase as
Rough but a kindly nurse of men.'
In his grandfather's time it had been a plain farmhouse, of the kind that had satisfied the simpler manners of former days--the days when Consuls and Dictators were content, their time of office ended, to plough their own fields and reap their own harvests. Cicero was born within its walls, for the primitive fashion of family life still prevailed, and the married son continued to live in his father's house. After the old man's death, when the old-fashioned frugality gave way to a more sumptuous manner of life, the house was greatly enlarged, one of the additions being a library, a room of which the grandfather, who thought that his contemporaries were like Syrian slaves, 'the more Greek they knew the greater knaves they were,' had never felt the want ; but in which his 80E4 especially in his later days, spent most of his time. The garden and grounds were espe- cially delightful, the most charming spot of all being an island formed by the little stream Fibrenus. A description put into the mouth of Quintus, the younger son of the house, thus depicts it : I have never seen a more pleasant spot. Fibrenns here divides his stream into two of equal size, and so washes either side. Flowing rapidly by he joins his waters again, having compassed just as much ground as makes a convenient place for our literary discussions. This done he hurries on, just as if the providing of such a spot had been his only office and function to fall into the Liris. Then, like one adopted into a noble family, he loses his own obscurer name. The Liris, indeed, he makes much colder. A colder stream than this indeed I never touched, though I have seen many. I can scarce bear to dip my foot in it. You remember how Plato makes Socrates dip his foot in Mesas.' Atticus, too, is loud in his praises. This, you know, is my first time of coming here, and I feel that I cannot admire it enough. As to the splendid villas which one often sees, with their marble pavements and gilded ceilings, I despise them. And their water- courses, to which they give the fine names of Nile or Enripus, who would not laugh at them when he sees your streams ? When we want rest and delight for the mind it is to nature that we must come. Once I used to wonder—for I never thought that there was anything but rocks and hills in the place—that you took such pleasure in the spot. But now I marvel that when you are away from Rome you care to be anywhere but here.'—' Well,' replied Cicero, when I get away from town for several days at a time, I do prefer this place ; but this I can seldom do. And indeed I love it, not only because it is so pleasant, so healthy a resort, but also because it is my native land, mine and my father's too, and because I live here among the associations of those that have gone before me,'"
And here is the close of the spirited account of the impeach- ment of Verres
"Verres had still one hope left ; and this, strangely enough, sprang out of the very number and enormity of his crimes. The mass of evid- ence was so great that the trial might be expected to last for a long time. If it could only be protracted into the next year, when his friends would be in office, he might still hope to escape. And indeed there was but little time left. The trial began on the fifth of August. In the middle of the month Pompey was to exhibit some games. Then would come the games called 'The Games of Rome,' and after this others again, filling up much of the three months of September, October, and November. Cicero anticipated this difficulty. He made a short speech (it could not have lasted more than two hours in delivering), in which he stated the case in outline. He made a strong appeal to the jury. They were themselves on their trial. The eyes of all the world were on them. If they did not do justice on so notorious a criminal, they would never be trusted any more. It would seem that the senatorkwere not fit to administer the law. The Jaw itself was on its trial. The provincials openly declared that if Verres was acquitted, the law under which their governors were liable to be accused had better be repealed. If no fear of a prosecu- tion were banging over them, they would be content with as much plunder as would satisfy their own wants. They would not need to extort as much more wherewith to bribe their judges. Then he called his witnesses. A marvellous array they were. From the foot of Mount Taurus, from the shores of the Black Sea, from many cities of the Grecian mainland, from many islands of the 2Egean, from every city and market-town of Sicily, deputations thronged to Rome. In the porticoes, and on the steps of the temples, in the area of the Foram, in the colonnade that surrounded it, on the housetops and on the overlooking declivities, were stationed dense and eager
crowds of impoverished heirs and their guardians, bankrupt tax- farmers and corn-merchants, fathers bewailing their children carried off to the przetor's harem, children mourning for their parents dead in the pra3tor's dungeons, Greek nobles whose descent was traced to Cecrops or Enrysthenes, or to the great Ionian and Mayan houses, and Phcenicians, whose ancestors had been priests of the Tyrian Melcarth, or claimed kindred with the Zidonian Jab.' Nine days were spent in hearing this mass of evidence. Hortensius was utterly
overpowered by it. He had no opportunity for displaying his eloquence, or making apathetic appeal for a noble oppressed by the hatred of the democracy. After a few feeble attempts at cross- examination, he practically abandoned the case. The defendant himself perceived that his position was hopeless. Before the nine days, with their terrible impeachment, had come to an end he fled from Rome. The jury returned an unanimous verdict of guilty, and the prisoner was condemned to banishment and to pay a fine. The place of banishment (which he was apparently allowed to select out- side certain limits) was Marseilles. The amount of the fine we do not know. It certainly was not enough to impoverish him. Much of the money and many of the works of art which he had stolen were left to him. These latter, by a singularly just retribution, proved his rain in the end. After the death of Cicero, Antony permitted the exiles to return. Verres came with them, bringing back his treasures of art, and was put to death because they excited the cupidity of the masters of Rome."
It is curious to note how many of the great Romans of this era seem to have depended on their youth for the brilliance of their genius. Sulla's genius certainly paled before that of Pompey. Cicero was never again the man he was before his exile ; and, indeed, was himself conscious of showing weakness and vacilla- tion at a time when he might have defeated the design of Clodius, if he had had but the audacity of his earlier self. Pompey, the most brilliant of youthful generals, seems to have lost all nerve and presence of mind towards the close of his career. And even Calsar's assassination prevented his genius from being put to the test of age. Surely, in the closing days of the Republic, there was a strange want of those fixed con- victions on which had rested the iron tenacity of the Rome of an earlier period; and, except where the place of these convictions was supplied by something of the dash of youthful daring, there seems to have been a vein of weakness in Roman genius, quite unlike the sterling patriotism and self-confidence of earlier periods. There was a touch of Alcibiades in even the best, as well as in the worst, of the great men of the last days of the Republic.
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