3 I TROLLOPE'S "LIFE OF CICERO." * We have been told somewhat persistently of late that the literature of Greece and Rome is becoming obsolete as the foundation of a liberal education. Modern languages, modern history, modern science, are to take its place. There is come to be a "modern side" to many of our great public schools; French is sug. gested as the alternative for Latin; Greek is to become optional at our universities. The growing common sense of this nineteenth century revolts, it is said, against the fetters of the old "classical "training. The public calls for something more practical, and less pedantic; it does not want to hear so much of these ancient languages and ancient times; they will not help us in the way of business, or of social science, or of sanitary reforms. From Blackwood's Magazine. plications of party and individual policy Yet we fail to discover any strong symp- adapted from their pages seem to have as More especially do the latter days of • The Life of Cicero. By Anthony Trollope. 2 vols. London: Chapman & Hall (Limited). manners more truthfully than perhaps any writer one could name, - throwing himself on a sudden, heart and soul, into the arena of Roman politics in the days of the Triumvirates, is something to startle this very modern generation. But so it is. Mr. Anthony Trollope has left the happy hunting-grounds of Barsetshire for the Fumum et opes strepitumque Romæ. We make no apology for the Latin quota- very reason his volumes appeal to a wider | yet another added to the constantly increasing circle. Not that this is an unscholarly volumes about Roman times. book by any means; but we are spared a good many nice discussions and criticisms which interest the classical student more exclusively, and we have here perhaps the first "Life of Cicero" which will take its place on the drawing-room table. It may be said at once that Mr. Trollope writes with a purpose a very distinct purpose. His biography of Cicero "has sprung from love of the man." As Juvenal tells us that indignation stirs the satirist into poetry, so here indignation of another kind has given us a biographer. It has long seemed to Mr. Trollope that no modern writer has done Cicero justice. I must acknowledge that in discussing his character with men of letters, as I have been prone to do, I have found none quite to agree with me. His intellect they have admitted, and his industry; but his patriotism they have doubted, his sincerity they have disputed, and his courage they have denied. It might have become me to have been silenced by their verdict, but I have rather been instigated to appeal to the public, and to ask them to agree with me against my friends. It is not only that Cicero has touched all matters of interest to men, and has given a new grace to all that he has touched; that as an orator, rhetorician, an essayist, and a correspondent he was supreme, that as a statesman he was honest, as an advocate fearless, and as a governor pure; that he was a man whose intellectual part always dominated that of the body; that in taste he was excellent, in thought both correct and enterprising, and that in language he was perfect. All this has been already so said of him by other biographers. Plutarch, who is as familiar to us as though he had been English-and Middleton, who thoroughly loved his subject- and latterly Mr. Forsyth, who has struggled to be honest to him, might have sufficed as telling us so much as that. But there was a humanity in Cicero, a something almost of Christianity, a stepping forward out of the dead intellectualities of Roman life into moral perceptions, into natural affections, into domesticity, philanthropy, and conscious discharge of duty, which do not seem to have been as yet fully appreciated. To have loved his neighbor as himself before the teaching of Christ, was much for a man to achieve; and that he did this, is what I claim for Cicero, and hope to bring home to the minds of those who can find time for reading We have then, in these volumes, confessedly the work of a champion and an apologist. Not that they present any partial or garbled statement of facts, or that they ignore the many inconsistencies and weaknesses of Cicero's character; but their author thinks that Cicero has suffered unfairly at the hands of his critics, from the very fact that we know so much of him from his letters: they have been read against him, so unfairly, Mr. Trollope thinks, that he "almost wishes they had not been preserved." He does not make out Cicero to be a hero, as we have said; but his love and admiration of the man amount to enthusiasm, and it is by no means necessary for a man to be a hero in order to call forth these feelings in those who read or write about him any more than in those with whom he lives. We do not always agree with the present writer in his estimate: but so long as facts are not distorted or omitted, an honest partiality is no disqualification in a biographer, - perhaps rather the contrary; and it certainly makes the narrative more piquant by the infusion of the personality of the writer. We know more of Cicero than of any Roman who ever lived. A magnificent orator, engaged as "counsel" in the chief political trials of his day; the most powerful speaker in the Senate at a time when the fate of Rome hung on the strife of parties, who carefully prepared all his speeches and pleadings (whether actually delivered or not), and committed them to writing afterwards; an indefatigable and brilliant letter-writer, who during twentyfive of the busiest years of his life kept up a large correspondence, in which. most of the public events of the day are touched upon by one who played an important part in them all, and the characters of the public men who were his contemporaries are freely discussed, while at the same time his personal tastes and habits are disclosed in all the familiar confidence of private friendship,-his whole political and personal life lies open to us, since a large proportion of these speeches and letters have been preserved. He figures, "" too, in so many different characters at the interest, the more surely will opinions once, - the leader of the Roman bar, first differ. Over Cæsar and Cicero we disminister of State in tempestuous times, pute as though they were party leaders of the governor of an important foreign de- to-day. We incline to think that it is not pendency, the political and literary cor- so much because the complicated intrigues respondent and great in all these. We and the internecine civil warfare which are probably not in possession of a quar- distracted the expiring republic have any ter of all that he wrote; but from what absorbing interest for modern readers, as we have, we can collect an autobiography because they are the only period of her of the man almost as complete as if he history which we can study in the public had advisedly written it, together with a speeches and the private correspondence political history of his times. Yet it is no of the day; because we can learn how her paradox to say that it is because we know great men in those days actually spoke so much, that we feel how little we know. and wrote and how they judged of each Ignorance is always sharp and decisive in other's motives and conduct. They are its verdicts; wider knowledge leads to a thus brought far nearer to us, in spite of balancing of evidence and a judicial hesi- the difference of date, than many periods tation. The old school histories of En- of our own national history. We know gland, with which many of us in our almost as much of Cæsar as we do of younger days had to be content, were Cromwell, and far more of Cicero than of wont to 'sum up the characters of our En- Bacon. glish sovereigns with a brevity and distinctness very satisfactory to the learner: it was "bloody" Queen Mary, and "glorious Queen Bess, and " good old" George the Third. But in these days of historical research we have had to unlearn a good many of these rough-andready estimates, and are taught to believe that white is not nearly so white, or black so black, as it has been painted. So it is with ancient history. The characters of Aristides, and Themistocles, and Alexander, are stereotyped; Camillus and Fabius enjoy an undisturbed reputation, because, in point of fact, we know so little about them. But when we get into the latter days of the Roman commonwealth, our materials - thanks chiefly to Cicero are so comparatively abundant, that the public men of that period are shown us in almost as strong a light as those of the past or present generation; we see something of the different sides of their character, of the views entertained of them by their contemporaries, friends, or enemies, we have to make allowance for exaggerations, and try to reconcile contradictions, till we find ourselves either warming into partisanship or inclined to give no verdict at all. The closer view we get of any man's public or private life, the greater will be our interest in his actions and character; and the greater But the life and character and correspondence of Cicero have a special attraction for many who may not care very much for the civil wars of Rome. He was, as Mr. Trollope says, so little like a Roman. Without going quite so far as to endorse the opinion that he was so like a Christian, "that in essentials we can hardly see the difference”—although here Mr. Trollope might claim the authority both of Petrarch and of Erasmus-he had certainly very little in him of the old spirit of paganism. In many points he strongly resembled the modern intellectual Englishman who throws himself into public life. What a man he would have been for London life! How he would have enjoyed his club, picking up the news of the day from all lips, while he seemed to give it to all ears! How popular he would have been at the Carlton, and how men would have listened to him while every great or little crisis was discussed! How supreme he would have sat on the Treasury bench, or how unanswerable, how fatal, how joyous when attacking the government from the opposite seats! How crowded would have been his rack with invitations to dinner!. ... How the pages of the magazines would have run over with little essays from his pen! "Have you seen our Cicero's paper on agriculture? That lucky fellow, Editor got him to do it last month!" "Of course you have read Cicero's article on the soul? The bishops don't know which way to turn. "So the political article in the Quarterly is Cicero's." "Of course, you know the art criticism in the Times this year is Tully's doing!" But that would probably be a write! With the penny post instead of travelling messengers at his command, and pen instead of wax and sticks, or perhaps with an instrument-writer and a private secretary, he would have answered all questions and solved all difficulties. He would have so abounded with intellectual fertility, that men would not have known whether most to admire his powers of expression or to deprecate his want of bounce. And then what letters he would reticence. We recognize the great modern statesman whose versatile powers and "want of reticence are probably in the writer's mind (though he certainly would not be found at the Carlton); but we hardly think Cicero would have condescended to postcards. The three men who occupy the foreground of Roman history, after the bloody wars of Marius and Sulla, were strictly contemporaries. Julius Cæsar was born exactly a hundred years before the Christian era, Cnæus Pompey and Marcus Tullius Cicero six years earlier. Mark Antony (we confess to a prejudice, like Mr. Trollope, in favor of the familiar English forms), who strove for a short time to wield Cæsar's power, was seventeen years his junior, and naturally came later to the front. Round these four names the history of Rome gathers itself for nearly fifty years: from the fall of Sulla till the accession to absolute power of Augustus. With Pompey first, and with Julius Cæsar afterwards, Cicero tried to make common cause, in the interest of what he thought was republican liberty, though it was really only the rule of an oligarchy. Both welcomed his support so long as it was likely to serve their private ambition; for Cicero represented the intellect and the respectability of Rome: and both could and did appreciate him highly when he did not threaten to cross their interests. In the case of Cæsar, the literary tastes which they had in common formed a strong bond of union; and, as we find, they could meet and discuss literary ques. tions at Cicero's dinner-table, even in the days when Cæsar was making evident steps towards what Cicero abhorred as an unconstitutional power, and when, consequently, any conversation on politics would have been embarrassing. In spite of some difference in age, they had been intimate, as Cicero tells us, when young men about Rome, and had studied ora tory together at Rhodes under Molo. For Pompey Cicero certainly entertained at one time a personal regard; for we have no reason to think him wholly insincere in his profession of it, and Pompey, though reputed cold and arrogant, seems to have had certain powers of fascination when he chose to put them forth. With Antony Cicero could have had little in common; and there was at no time any friendship between the two-though Antony, too, after Cæsar's fall, would have bid high for Cicero's support, and Cicero turned to him for a moment, though almost hopelessly, after the collapse of the republican fortunes at Philippi. On these men Cicero's hopes and fears for Rome and for himself, his patriotic aspirations and his political ambitions, his very life and fortunes, hung during the most important period of his public career: they were the masters of his fate as well as that of Rome, and at the hands of the weakest and the worst of them he met his death. Though Cicero himself is not the leading actor in these last scenes of the republic, he necessarily figures in all that are presented to us in full: because it is on him that we have chiefly to depend for the history of the times, and he could only write fully of events in which he had a share. We have to see with his eyes, and to hear evidence through his interpretation; and it is difficult to avoid judging men as he judged them. But that would not always be safe. It is impossible for the most honest writer, in describing the political struggles in which he has taken a strong personal interest and a leading part, not to give to his narrative of facts, and his judgment of motives and actions, the color of his own political creed. The greater his abilities, the more earnest his convictions, the more misleading he is apt to become as a historical guide, if we resign ourselves to him implicitly. If we want to form a dispassionate judgment on any of our own great national struggles, we make a point of reading at least some of the contemporary memoirs on both sides. But, for the times of which we are now speaking, we have no opportunity of making this comparison, Except for the mere skeleton of the history, it is Cicero alone upon whom we have to depend alike for facts and opinions. Pompey and Cæsar would have very little personality for us, except as successful soldiers, who made that success a path to political power, but for Cicero's letters. And it is as well, perhaps, that he wrote of these This is in brief the inner story of of his grand aspirations, his frequent weaknesses, the failure which must have been far sadder to him than death. men according to his different moods, | was. sanguine or despondent, trustful or suspi- Cicero's life, cious, now gratified by some mark of attention, now mortified at some neglect, now thinking he saw in one or other the saviour of Roman liberties, and now Sprung from a modest family, none of the would-be despot, since this gives us whom had risen to public honors, his a chance of seeing them on more than father a plain country gentleman, as we one side of their character, and as they might describe him, he seems nevertheappeared to other men's observation from less to have received the best education day to day. Had only some one or two that Rome and foreign travel could give of these letters been preserved, we might him. He had studied rhetoric, as was the have mistaken for Cicero's deliberate custom with all who aspired to a liberal judgment of Pompey or Cæsar what we education: to speak well was an essential now see to be only the confidential ex- accomplishment for the Roman gentlepression of the strong feeling of the hour. man who had any ambition to enter public At one moment we find him "quite in-life. In order to win the "most sweet flamed with love" for Cæsar, or hoping "to be found worthy to be the Lælius to Pompey's "Scipio," — at another moment foreseeing in the latter a possible Sylla, and denouncing the former as the worst enemy of his country. We cannot help thinking that Cicero was a man whom circumstances - chief among which must be reckoned his transcendental abilities as an orator had forced into a position to which he was unequal. The only career at Rome was what we should call politics, or, more correctly speaking, the service of the State, for it included military command, and the possibility of military glory. Rome still retained so much of the spirit of the old regal constitution that her chief magistrates were leaders in the field as well as in the council. The bar, so far as it could be considered as a profession at all—for the advocates professed to take no fees was only a preparation for the Senate-house and the popular assemblies; and a Roman of good family, and of even moderate ambition and abilities, looked forward to rising step by step to the successive offices of State, to becoming in his time quæstor, ædile, prætor, and, it might be, consul. Had it been possible in the commonwealth of Rome for a man of brilliant powers and great capacity for work to win his way to fame and public honors at the bar, or as an author, or in both these lines, as he might now in England, Cicero's greatness would have been undisputed, and the questions now so warmly discussed as to his conduct and character would never have arisen. The faults laid to his charge affect exclusively his public life, and his behavior under the pressure of unusual trials and the most embarrassing complications. The times were wholly out of joint;" he was not born to set them right; yet he thought he voices" of the Roman commons, which were to open to the candidate the path to fame and wealth, he must at least know how to use his own. And great as we may conceive Cicero's natural gifts to have been, we know that they were not brought to perfection without severe and careful training. It was in his twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth year that he made his first appearance as an advocate in private causes; a volunteer and gratuitous advocate, it must be understood, for no fees were attached to a Roman brief, and a Roman gentleman would have held it "servile" to do any such work for pay. Usury, strange to say, was the only direct mode of making money which was considered gentlemanlike at Rome. There was indeed a law in existence which prohibited any one from even receiving a present for his services as a pleader; but it seems soon to have fallen into practical abeyance, and the very fact of its confirmation or re-enactment under Augustus shows that it had been at least very loosely observed. As was the case with our own bribery acts in the good old election days, the law made a thing illegal, but failed to enlist public opinion on its side so far as to make it disgraceful. That these professional orators did take fees or presents, under whatever euphonious name the giver and the recipient might be pleased to describe them, admits of no doubt. Cicero claims for himself a superiority to such temptations which he feels to be exceptional, and Mr. Trollope is very indignant. that any one should refuse to admit this disclaimer to the fullest extent. The discredit which has been thrown upon it rests upon the known practice of other advocates, the undoubted fact of Cicero's being in the receipt of a large income whose sources are not ascertained, and a |