CHAPTER VI

THE HELLENISM OF CICERO AND HIS FRIENDS

THE Hellenism of Cicero and his circle are quite worth a separate chapter, for not only does the career of this celebrated man form an epoch in the history of Greek letters at Rome, but he has given us such copious and reiterated explanations of what he intended, and what he performed, that we are in no doubt or hesitation as to his peculiar title to literary fame.

We are not concerned here with Cicero as a politician, unless it be to show that his character in this relation corresponds with its literary aspects. He aspired, like most men of great intellect and of weak character, to act as mediator between extreme men on both sides; he earned, as usual, what many such men have not deserved, the character of a trimmer. But in his case the general verdict is justified by his own statements. Any one who will take an Index of Cicero and look up what he has said to and of Cæsar before his supremacy, during his supremacy, and after his murder, will require no further evidence. The retort of the displaced knight Laberius sums it all up. He was looking for a seat in the theatre, when Cicero, who did not want his company, but desired to retain his goodwill,

said: 'I should gladly have made place for you beside me, were I not squeezed for room.' 'It is odd that you should be squeezed,' was the retort, 'seeing you generally sit upon two stools.'

Yet it is a curious reflection that what was in politics his disgrace was in letters his greatest title to honour. He was a mediator; he was distinctly the first Roman able to appreciate and translate Greek thought of the highest kind, while he also produced solid and splendid Latin work of his own. With Cicero Latin prose became distinctly a rival of the best Greek prose, and no critic who has honestly studied the great roll of Latin writers down to the Middle Ages, can deny that here the Romans have produced a literature as first-rate, and as independent, as ever was produced by a people coming late in history, and therefore necessarily starting with great models before them.

This, then, is the keynote which Cicero perpetually strikes, and with reasonable pride. He boasts that in his day the highest species of Greek prose, which had hitherto defied the efforts of the Roman writers-philosophy-had been mastered by him, and reproduced in a clear and elegant Roman form. Whatever metaphysical critics may say as to the substance, and yet even here Cicero is by no means contemptible, there is no doubt as to the form. Any one who has had metaphysical ideas to propound, ever since, has found Latin an adequate medium, from Seneca to Descartes. There were other departments of prose in which he had great forerunners, as we have already mentioned (above, p. 84). In poetry, where he tried to naturalise Epic hexameters, he distinctly failed. He met the fate of most great prose writers who have attempted poetry. Lucretius, his greatest literary contemporary, of whom he hardly speaks, would probably have been as poor in

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ROMANS WEARING GREEK DRESS

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prose as Cicero was in poetry. But the concurrent appearance of Lucretius and Catullus as poets, and of Cæsar as a historian, with Cicero as an orator and philosophic essayist, shows that his genius, like every other great and successful genius, expressed the spirit and the temper of its age.

Let us now turn from generalities to the details which he gives us concerning the education which produced these splendid results.

We may start from a curious passage which will lead us to many important inferences. In the speech pro Rabirio, among other very flimsy arguments which the orator is called upon to refute, is the following: 'Object if you please, that he went about in a [Greek] pallium [not a Roman toga], that he wore the insignia of a non-Roman man; all that this means is merely that he was rash in trusting his money, his fame, his fortunes to the caprice of a king [of Egypt]. He was foolish, I confess; but the facts remain; either he must wear a pallium at Alexandria, if he was ever to resume his toga at Rome, or he must lose all his fortune if he stuck to his toga. We have often seen not merely Roman citizens, but noble youths, and even some senators of the highest families, not too in their private gardens or suburban villas, but in the town of Naples, wearing a Greek head-dress-mitella, deliciarum caussa et voluptatis. You see L. Sylla the dictator in a [Greek] chlamys, and the statue of L. Scipio, who conquered Antiochus, in the Capitol, not only in a chlamys, but in

2

1 § 25 sq.

2 Here, at Naples,' says Strabo, writing two generations later, 'are found the deepest traces of Greek life, gymnasia and ephebies and phratries and Greek proper names, though the people are Roman. Now they have also a five-yearly feast, with musical and gymnastic contests which rival the most famous in Greece. . . . The Greek customs of Naples are kept up by those who have lived by educating,

Greek slippers. And these men did not incur prosecution, or even criticism. We need not cite the case of P. Rutilius, who escaped the massacre of Mithradates at Mytilene by adopting Greek dress. So when Rabirius went to king Auletes, and the king proposed this way of saving the money, that he should become the king's agent [diœcetes], both the name and the dress were odious to him; but there was no help for it. For we know what it is to serve an absolute king.'

We have here a plain statement of the fact that at an earlier stage of the contact between Greece and Rome an imitation of Greek fashions was tolerated, which was unpopular and censured in Cicero's day. Thus, to cite other evidence, T. Flamininus was, no doubt, both proud and envied because he could speak Greek, and join in the deliberations of a Greek assembly, whereas it was made a distinct charge against Cicero by a supporter of Verres, that he had actually attended a Greek Senate (at Syracuse) and spoken in Greek there.1

Many natural causes can be assigned for this reaction.

and others who retire hither from Rome by reason of age or sickness and live at their ease. This Greek aspect of society pleases not a few Romans who dwell there from choice' (v. 4, § 7). This kind of refined retirement is quite different from the pergræcari of Plautus, a word which passed out of use with the idea it represents, and is noted in the Dictionaries as ante-classical. Nicolaus Damasc. (Bios Kaio. 4) specially insists that Augustus never in his youth wore anything but Roman dress, though he lived much in Greek lands.

1 Ait indignum facinus esse, quod ego in senatu Græco verba fecissem, quod quidem apud Græcos Græce locutus essem, id ferri nullo modo posse (in Verr. ii. 4, § 66). I suppose the fear that lucrative foreign appointments might be limited to good Greek scholars was one cause of this strong feeling among the vulgar and greedy Roman nobles. There was a regular profession of interpreters in Sicily to explain Greek to the Romans (in Verr. ii. 3, § 84). These people were like the Levantines, who do this kind of duty now in Syria and Egypt.

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GREEK TRAINING UNPOPULAR

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The evils which came in with Hellenism became more and more evident; and if about the very period with which our history in this volume begins (140 B.C.) the greatest families still held fast to the principle that all higher culture must come through Greek, the results were such as to alarm many strict and patriotic Romans. The political

views of Scipio Emilianus, the pupil of Polybius and Panatius, were suspicious enough, and his advocacy of a larger cosmopolitanism so dangerous as to cause his assassination (129 B.C.) The career of the Gracchi, both trained from the outset by Greek philosophers and grammarians, was still more ominous. The practical insignificance of the Greek race in politics made their theories all the more extravagant and reckless, and such a man as Blossius of Cumæ, who first inflamed Tiberius Gracchus and then joined the insurgent or claimant Aristonicus in his war for Pergamum against Rome, must have appeared to respectable Romans, even of a liberal type, peculiarly mischievous.

Cicero accordingly represents the great orators of the generation preceding his own,-Antonius and Crassus,as distinctly repudiating Greek training in their public utterances, on account of its unpopularity with the Roman public. He adds, no doubt, that in secret they zealously learned what they could from Greek books, and that they knew far more about them than they pretended. But to go to Greece for the purpose of study would have been in their day thought unpatriotic and unpractical. Crassus, indeed, had a confidential Greek slave as his amanuensis and reader, but both he and Antonius are represented by

1

1 Quod enim neque precibus unquam nec insidiando nec speculando assequi potui, ut, quid Crassus ageret meditandi aut dicendi caussa, non modo videre mihi, sed ex ejus scriptore et lectore Diphilo suspicari liceret, etc. (de Oratore, i. § 136).

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