MR. FORSYTH'S CICERO.*

THE Life of Cicero' by Mr. Forsyth is a greater acquisition to our literature than appears on the surface; for it has been abridged in various particulars, it appears without the references which lie in the background to support its opinions, and it has all the substance of the work of a man who has studied his subject thoroughly, without the opportunity of showing the scaffolding he has employed in its construction. It is, nevertheless, obviously the clearest, fairest, and most faithful life of Cicero which has yet appeared. Middleton's, more than a century old, was a flattery and a very extravagant panegyric. mann's, on the other hand, was as spiteful, malignant, uncharitable, and unjust. But between these two versions Mr. Forsyth has steered to his own view of Cicero, as he really was, as compared with his contemporaries, and as we may view him ourselves even from a Christian standard, without prejudice, favour, malice, or constraint.

Dru

* Life of Marcus Tullius Cicero.' By William Forsyth, M.A., Q.C., author of 'Hortensius,' &c. 2 vols. John Murray. 1864.

There is this paramount facility for estimating Cicero, that there is no man in the whole ancient world who is as open to us as he. We have his private letters by hundreds, and in some of them his innermost thoughts. We have all that is not of the public life and of that artificial standard to which a Roman citizen invariably aspired to attain. Other Romans come before us solely as great functionaries of State, as ædiles, quæstors, prætors, consuls; but Cicero was more than a civis Romanus-that is to say, he is more to us in his incomings and outgoings, in his private and familiar ways, in his secret penchants and foibles. If we hear him in the Forum with his "Si quid sit in me ingenii, judices, quod sentio quam sit exiguum, tamen," &c. (we want the afflatus of Mr. Samuel Warren to sustain the rolling period), if we view Cicero in the Senate, or as the consular saviour of the State, with his "Oh! fortunatam natam," and other self-decoration of that sort, we shall see but one-half of what is really to be seen of the living Cicero. We must follow him to Tusculum or Formiæ, to his place of exile at Thessalonica or Dyrrachium. We must read his appeals to the sympathies of Terentia, or his messages to his children, or his confidences with Atticus. We must conceive of him as tossing Tulliola beneath the canopy of an Italian sky, or ransacking his beloved manuscripts in the privacy of his country home. We can see the man Cicero there with his tenderness and his vanity, his weakness and his strength, as we can take the measure of no other Roman.

Moreover, we can turn to Mr. Forsyth in the certainty that he is not misleading us in the use of these facilities, and that his scholarship, candour, and judgment will help us to a faithful portraiture of his hero. We may well imagine, he says, that the young Cicero must often have lent a listening ear to the story of the exploits of Marius, himself a native of Arpinum. He was evidently so early a boy of promise that his parents took him from Arpinum to Rome, where certainly Niebuhr had no authority for the statement that in his youth he was without friends. Young Cicero without friends, that susceptible boy (where were Niebuhr's spectacles, if he used spectacles ?)—why, the thing is impossible! The fact is that Cicero became very intimate, notwithstanding his extreme youth, with Crassus of the choicest Greek, and with Antonius the grandfather of the Triumvir, who divided with Crassus the palm of Roman eloquence in those days; and he expressly mentions that he used to apply for information from time to time to Antonius, and put questions to him as far as his boyish modesty, allowed him to venture with so distinguished a man. Mr. Forsyth goes on to say that both Crassus and Antonius took delight in gratifying the eager curiosity of so intelligent an inquirer, and must have felt respecting him what Lady Holland said to her husband, the first Lord Holland, of "little William Pitt," that he was "really the cleverest child she ever saw."

Of the two schools-Mr. Forsyth would almost call them parties of education at Rome in those days, the

Latin and the Greek school, Cicero chiefly studied in the latter. He studied with Phædrus the Epicurean, and he was a pupil of the poet Archias, whom he afterwards defended in the Forum. We cannot say much for the poetry of Archias, since none of it is extant, and that of Cicero himself is so unequivocally absurd. Cicero had not the poetic faculty, so it is a pity that he wrote verses. There was one ancient augur who, nevertheless, believed in his poem on Marius. "Canescet sæclis innumerabilibus," said the complimentary old gentlemen.

But the old

lawyer was neither a poet nor a prophet. Voltaire remarked of Rousseau's Ode addressed to posterity, "Voici une lettre qui n'arrivera jamais à son adresse,” and Cicero's Epic met with a similar fate. At the age of 16 he laid aside the toga prætexta and assumed the toga pura or virilis.

"The custom was for the young man to be conducted by his father or other near relation to the Forum, when he was presented to the Prætor, whose tribunal or court was there, and the ceremony of the change of dress was performed. He then received the congratulations of his relatives and friends who accompanied him, amidst the applause of the surrounding crowd; for there never was any lack of idlers in the Forum; and, indeed, so numerous were they that old Cato the Censor once proposed that the ground should be paved with sharp stones to make it a less agreeable lounge. After this the youth was conducted along the Via Sacra, which ran through the Forum up to the Capitol, and a sacrifice was offered at the altar

of Jupiter, whose magnificent temple crowned the hill. The rest of the day was spent in festivities at home; and the hero of the hour, now no longer a boy but a man, received presents as on a birthday among ourselves."

It was immediately afterwards that he was introduced to the old augur-the most profound lawyer of his day in Rome-that he might have the benefit of his instruction in the science of which that accomplished jurist was so great a master.

There were no chambers of pleaders or conveyancers in those days, yet the house of a Roman jurisconsult was always open, not only to suitors, but to students, who came there to listen to the responsa prudentum, or legal opinions, which were delivered not in the stiff formal manner of a modern consultation, but in the easy mode of familiar conversation, sometimes during a walk in the peristylium of the house, and sometimes during a saunter in the Forum. It was thus that Cicero attached himself to Scævola, the augur, as a kind of pupil, and that so assiduously, that, in his own emphatic language, he declares that he hardly ever quitted his side. Philosophy and oratory seem to have been the chief objects of his study; but if of any man before Bacon appeared that might be said which the great master of modern philosophy claimed for himself, that he "had taken all knowledge for his province," it might be truly declared of the youthful Cicero.

66

Perhaps at no other place and at no other time,