AMID the recurrent crises of the twentieth century there is a curious topicality in the spectacle of this highly intelligent but far from superhuman personality, first struggling to eminence in a great state, and then having to face, as well as he could, a crushing series of almost world-wide emergencies and convulsions. Very few other men have both stood at the centre of world events and written so well and fully about the part they played. The character that emerges is a complicated one, composed of brilliant but discordant and sometimes contradictory qualities.
His story which will be told - largely by himself - in this book essentially consists of his repeated efforts, in spite of frequent and formidable discouragements, to oppose the autocratic modes of rule which were gradually throughout his life encroaching on the Republican system: and which reached their climax in the wholly authoritarian dictatorships of Sulla (82–79 B.C.) and Caesar (49–44 B.C.), and the scarcely less formidable committee regimes, both cynical and the second efficiently ruthless, of the two sets of Triumvirs (60–50 and 43–31 B.C.).1
Cicero was not often a very successful politician, but he derives unmistakable greatness from his insistence, against odds, that such dictatorial rulers were in the wrong because they unjustifiably curtailed the freedom of the individual: whereas the ultimate authority should be not themselves but certain unchangeable moral principles which they are incompetent to annul or amend. His own words on the subject, in his treatise On the State (III. 33), written during a period of profound political disappointment, represent an early and fundamental statement of one side’s position in a perennial controversy.
True law is Reason, right and natural, commanding people to fulfil their obligations and prohibiting and deterring them from doing wrong. Its validity is universal; it is immutable and eternal. Its commands and prohibitions apply effectively to good men, and those uninfluenced by them are bad. Any attempt to supersede this law, to repeal any part of it, is sinful; to cancel it entirely is impossible. Neither the Senate nor the Assembly can exempt us from its demands; we need no interpreter or expounder of it but ourselves. There will not be one law at Rome, one at Athens, or one now and one later, but all nations will be subject all the time to this one changeless and everlasting law.
That is to say, right and wrong are irreconcilable, and no legislation can make one into the other. But Cicero was not content to enunciate moral principles from the study. For he was one of those politicians, never too numerous and in his day outstandingly rare, who have proposed, in their finest and most unhampered moments, to put their moral principles into practice in the conduct of political affairs.1 True, when he came to write his treatise On the State - as the government was visibly collapsing – he was prepared to envisage a ‘guide’ for the Republic. Though the conception was general and ideal, his own qualifications as well as Pompey’s (or those which he had once hoped that Pompey might possess, p. 78), cannot have been wholly absent from his mind. But this was to be a constitutional, philosophical sort of guidance from the sidelines: dictatorship was and remained the negation of all that he stood for. Indeed, he attempted, at decisive moments of his career, to prevent such regimes from taking root and suppressing the free operation of Republican institutions – which alone, in his opinion, could supply the ideal of a stable and balanced state where human beings might express themselves as social creatures.
However, a description limited to those terms does not show the peculiar nature of Cicero’s political achievement. The austerely grand picture of a high-minded man resisting tyranny was what he would have liked the world to accept, but the truth is more complex and more interesting. Any consistently straightforward, high-minded approach was, for Cicero, ruled out by insuperable obstacles. The ruthless, cutthroat politics of the late Republic did not allow success to come at all easily to men like him who were excluded by birth and resources from the cliques of great and rich families which, in shifting combinations, traditionally dominated the Senate and the state.2
Cicero was only able to fight against these difficulties at all because of his incomparable eloquence, which was as welcome a support to political leaders as the backing of a leading daily newspaper would be today. But Cicero’s struggle to utilize this asset to the best effect was seriously impeded by his own personality; for his extraordinary talent was matched by equally conspicuous faults and weaknesses, including snobbery, vanity, extravagance, vacillation and a too emotional and rancorous judgement of political problems – not to mention a tendency to make enemies by injudicious jokes. In the recurring dilemmas of a hideously disturbed national situation he was obliged to accept many humiliating failures and compromises. ‘Matched as in single duel,’ as de Quincey described him, ‘with a strong temptation to error growing out of his public position,’ Cicero repeatedly changed direction, laid himself open to many charges of insincerity, and not infrequently despaired. His practice abundantly fell short of his principles and pronouncements.
Yet these, in regard to totalitarian rule, came genuinely from the heart; and, obstructed by the imperfections of the political scene and of his own character, Cicero recurrently though in the end unavailingly sought the means to carry them into effect. His permanent political value lies in the attempts which this all too humanly unheroic man made to realize his right idea. This despite every discouragement he never altogether abandoned, and once or twice, at critical moments, supported at great personal risk – indeed, finally, at the cost of his life.
Of the violence and greed besetting the decaying Republic, he was constantly aware; and from an early stage of his career he attacked them when opportunity arose (Chapter 1). However, like his contemporaries, he did not know of any changes that could radically improve matters. In effect, Cicero felt that his ideal state might be achieved by the existing Roman system, reformed a little by a return to ancient practices, as seen in the idealized colours of Macaulay’s Lays (Chapter 5). But this view took fatally inadequate account of the fundamental flaws in the contemporary scene: the narrowness and political barrenness of the dominant groups, the dangers to public security from armies, gangs, and mobs, the competition between all classes in plundering the provinces, and the general unfitness of a government designed long ago for a city-state to rule what had become an enormous multi-racial empire. Cicero did not fully realize that this government, without far-reaching administrative reforms such as those later introduced by Augustus, had no hope of keeping pace with the large, grim new world for which it had never been intended.
In public life, as John Morley observed, the choice is constantly between two evils, and action is one long second best. Cicero’s choice, given the current failure to think of anything better, was between inefficient and incomplete freedom, and the tidier and possibly (though not certainly) more efficient solution of dictatorship. Whatever the drawbacks of the former, he found it preferable, since the alternative was incompatible with his belief that governmental powers must be limited. That is why, in spite of the allurements of an unprovocative acquiescence, he summoned up the courage to attack Antony, at a time when Antony was powerful and menacing (Chapter 3).
True, it would be oversimplifying Cicero’s motives to interpret them as straightforwardly altruistic. All his past humiliations, mistakes, and evasions – including most recently a prompt withdrawal after Caesar’s murder, when his guidance might have been very valuable – must have come to his mind and pricked him towards this desperate action. Possibly, too, he may have felt that the invective he was addressing to Antony, for which precedents existed, need not be irreparable, and that oratorical violence need not lead to physical violence; although there was clearly a risk that it would. The risk became a fact: Cicero proved to have staked his life, and he lost it. Whatever the complexity of his motives he had taken a deliberate decision, when he need not have done so, to oppose the threat of a dangerous tyranny. His adoption of this course, in spite of all the familiar temptations to quietism and all the excruciating doubts which, at every crisis of his life, his active brain suggested to him makes his essential moral courage all the more remarkable; as he himself aptly remarked, ‘I am timid in attempting to guard against dangers, but not in facing them’.
In comparison with this, basic achievement of resistance to autocracy, a precise definition of the varying nuances of his political views at different stages of his career is of less importance. Cicero was very often speaking for the Italian ‘knights’, the largely middle-class non-senators from whose ranks he came – the business community of Italy and the empire. His political programme, if so it can be called, was ‘Harmony between the Orders’ – cooperation, in the interests of the Republic, between the knights and the Senate, of which he became a member. He started his career on the left – interested not indeed in Revolution (he calls the proletariat ‘leeches that suck dry the Treasury’), but in the extension of privileges beyond the senatorial class to the knights (Chapter 1). Later, in the fifties B.C., his emphasis shifted towards a more general and universal ‘harmony’, based on a new conception of the harmonious elite, less now as a political or economic grouping than as a category of men distinguished by a sense of moral responsibility – a category which included many of his good, moderate fellow-countrymen from the Italian towns. This development of Cicero’s thought was prompted by disillusion with the governing class, and yet in another sense Cicero had moved towards the right: his mind was no longer on attacking vested interests, as in the Verrines, but on desperately endeavouring to conserve what good might be found in them. Men often move to the right as they grow older, when their temperaments cool and they acquire vested interests in the status quo. But in Cicero’s case the change was due not only or even principally to this general tendency but to alterations in his political environment. When he was young, the dangers to the Republic came from the right: the dictatorship of Sulla had favoured the aristocracy against the middle classes, and then the misgovemment of men like Verres, which so discredited the Republican system, was still supported by the same traditional elements. In those days, therefore, Cicero had stood to the left of the regime. When he was older, however, the threat came from Caesar, who aimed to put a revolutionary stop once and for all to the free operation of the consuls, Senate, and other Republican institutions; so Cicero, standing with those who opposed Caesar, found himself (with misgivings) the associate of the traditionalists and the right.
But fundamentally, at all times, he was a moderate, a ‘middle-of-the-road man’; to the two tyrannies, reaction and revolution, he was equally opposed, and whenever either of them became menacing he was on the other side. That is to say, he was a liberal; indeed he is the greatest ancestor of that whole liberal moderate tradition in western life which is at hazard today. Though he had much else to give the world, this aspect of his character and literary production – his role as an early, thoughtful, articulate, and ultimately self-sacrificing enemy of oppressive and un parliamentary methods of government – is so important, both in his own life and in the subsequent history of the world, that it must be chosen as one of the two leading themes of this volume. The other, that will now be discussed, relates to the principle which – along with temperamental preference and enlightened self-interest – encouraged him to this course of action: namely the necessity (because it is natural) of cooperation between human beings.