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Dedication
professes to have been assisted in it by Scipio and Laelius ; and even Terence's style was made the purer for its being retouched by the same great hands. You must pardon me, therefore, my lord, if, after the example of those excellent authors, I cannot forbear boasting, that some parts of my present work have been brightened by the strokes of your lordship's pencil.
It was the custom of those Roman nobles to spend their leisure, not in vicious pleasures or trifling diversions, contrived, as we truly call it, to kill the time, but in conversing with the celebrated wits and scholars of the age ; in encouraging other people's learning, and improving their own : and here your lordship imitates them with success, and for love of letters and politeness may be compared with the noblest of them. For your house, like theirs, is open to men of parts and merit ; where I have admired your lordship's agreeable manner of treating them all in their own way, by introducing questions of literature, and varying them so artfully, as to give every one an opportunity, not only of bearing a part, but of leading the conversation in his turn. In these liberal exercises you drop the cares of the statesman, relieve your fatigues in the senate, and strengthen your mind while you relax it.
Encomiums of this kind, upon persons of your lordship's quality, commonly pass for words of course, or a fashionable language to the great, and make little impression on men of sense, who know learning, not to be the fruit of wit or parts, for there your lordship's title would be unquestionable, but an acquisition of much labour and study, which the nobles of our days are apt to look upon as inconsistent with the ease and splendour of an elevated fortune, and generally leave to men of professions and inferior life. But your lordship has a different way of thinking, and by your education in a public school and university, has learned from your earliest youth, that no fortune can exempt a man from pains, who desires to distinguish himself from the vulgar ; and that it is a folly, in any condition of life, to aspire to a superior character, without a superior virtue and industry to support it. What time, therefore, others bestow upon their sports, or pleasures, or the lazy indolence of a luxurious life, your lordship applies to the improvement of your knowledge ; and in those early hours, when all around you are hushed in sleep, seize the opportunity of that quiet, as the most favourable season of study, and frequently spend a useful day before others begin to enjoy it.
Preface
There is no part of history which seems capable of yielding either more instruction or entertainment, than that which offers to us the select lives of great and virtuous men who have made an eminent figure on the public stage of the world. In these we see at one view what the annals of -a whole age can afford that is worthy of notice ; and in the wide field of universal history, skipping as it were over the barren places, gather all its flowers, and possess ourselves at once of everything that is good in it.
But there is one great fault which is commonly observed in the writers of particular lives, that they are apt to be partial and prejudiced in favour of their subject, and to give us a panegyric, instead of a history. They work up their characters as painters do their portraits ; taking the praise of their art to consist, not in copying, but in adorning nature ; not in drawing a just resemblance, but giving a fine picture ; or exalting the man into the hero : and this indeed seems to flow from the nature of the thing itself, where the very inclination to write is generally grounded on prepossession, and an affection already contracted for the person whose history we are attempting ; and when we sit down to it with the disposition of a friend, it is natural for us to cast a shade over his failings, to give the strongest colouring to his virtues ; and, out of a good character, to endeavour to draw a perfect one.
I am sensible that this is the common prejudice of biographers, and have endeavoured therefore to divest myself of it as far as I was able ; yet dare not take upon me to affirm, that I have kept myself wholly clear from it ; but shall leave the decision of that point to the judgment of the reader : for I must be so ingenuous as to own, that when I formed the plan of this work, I was previously possessed with a very favourable opinion of Cicero ; which, after the strictest scrutiny, has been greatly confirmed and heightened in me ; and in the case of a shining character, such as Cicero's I am persuaded will appear to be, it is certainly more pardonable to exceed rather in our praises of it, out of a zeal for illustrious merit, than to be reserved in doing justice to it, through a fear of being thought partial. But, that I might guard myself equally from both the extremes, I have taken care always to leave the facts to speak for themselves, and to affirm nothing of any moment without an authentic testimony to support it ; which yet, if consulted in the original at its full length, will commonly add more light and strength to what is advanced, than the fragments quoted in the text and the brevity of notes would admit.
But whatever prejudices may be suspected to adhere to the writer, it is certain that in a work of this nature he will have many more to combat in the reader. The scene of it is laid in a place and age which are familiar to us from our childhood : we learn the names of all the chief actors at school, and choose our several favourites according to our tempers or fancies ; and when we are least able to judge of the merit of them, form distinct characters of each, which we frequently retain through life. Thus Marius, Sylla, Caesar, Pompey, Cato, Cicero, Brutus, Antony, have all their several advocates, zealous for their fame, and ready even to quarrel for the superiority of their virtues. But among the celebrated names of antiquity, those of the great conquerors and generals attract our admiration always the most, and xiv PREFACE.
imprint a notion of magnanimity, and power, and capacity for dominion, superior to that of other mortals : we look upon such as destined by Heaven for empire, and born to trample upon their fellow-creatures ; without reflecting on the numerous evils which are necessary to the acquisition of a glory that is built upon the subversion of nations, and the destruction of the human species. Yet these are the only persons who are thought to shine in history, or to merit the attention of the reader : dazzled with the splendour of their victories, and the pomp of their triumphs, we consider them as the pride and ornament of the Roman name ; while the pacific and civil character, though of all others the most beneficial to mankind, whose sole ambition is, to support the laws, the rights and liberty of his citizens, is looked upon as humble and contemptible on the comparison, for being forced to truckle to the power of these oppressors of their country.
In the following history therefore, if I have happened to affirm anything that contradicts the common opinion and shocks the prejudices of the reader, I must desire him to attend diligently to the authorities on which it is grounded ; and if these do not give satisfaction, to suspend his judgment still to the end of the work, in the progress of which many facts will be cleared up that may appear at first perhaps uncertain and precarious : and in everything especially that relates to Cicero, I would recommend to him to contemplate the whole character, before he thinks himself qualified to judge of its separate parts, on which the whole will always be found the surest comment.
Quintilian has given us an excellent rule in the very case, — that we should be modest and circumspect in passing a judgment on men so illustrious, lest, as it happens to the generality of censurers, we be found at last to condemn tchat we do not understand 11 . There is another reflection likewise very obvious, which yet seldom has its due weight, that a writer on any part of history which he has made his particular study, may be presumed to be better acquainted with it than the generality of his readers ; and when he asserts a fact that does not seem to be well grounded, it may fairly be imputed, till a good reason appears to the contrary, to a more extensive view of his subject ; which, by making it clear to himself, is apt to persuade him, that it is equally clear to everybody else, and that a fuller explication of it would consequently be unnecessary. If these considerations, which are certainly reasonable, have but their proper influence, I flatter myself that there will be no just cause to accuse me of any culpable bias in my accounts of things or persons, or of any other favour to the particular character of Cicero, than what common humanity will naturally bestow upon every character that is found upon the whole to be both great and good.
In drawing the characters of a number of persons who all lived in the same city at the same time, trained by the same discipline, and engaged in the same pursuits ; as there must be many similar strokes, and a general resemblance in them all, so the chief difficulty will be to prevent them from running into too great an uniformity. This I have endeavoured to do, not by forming ideal pictures, or such as would please or surprise ; but by attending to the particular facts which history has delivered of the men, and tracing them to their source, or to those correspondent affections from which they derived their birth ; for these are the distinguishing features of the several persons, which, when duly represented, and placed in their proper light, will not fail to exhibit that precise difference in which the peculiarity of each character consists.
As to the nature of my work, though the title of it carries nothing more than the History of Cicero's Life, yet it might properly enough be called the History of Cicero's Times : since from his first advancement to the public magistracies, there was not anything of moment transacted in the state in which he did not bear an eminent part : so that, to make the whole work of a piece, I have given a summary account of the Roman affairs during the time even of his minority ; and agreeably to what I promised in my proposals, have carried
a Modeste tamen et circumspecto judicio de tantis daninent, quae non inteiligunt. — Quintiirani Instit. viris pronuaciaadum est, ne, quod plerisque accidit, x. 1.
PREFACE.
on a series of history through a period of above sixty years, which, for the importance of the events, and the dignity of the persons concerned in them, is by far the most interesting of any in the annals of Rome.
In the execution of this design, I have pursued as closely as I could that very plan which Cicero himself had sketched out for the model of a complete history. Where he lays it down as a fundamental law, " that the writer should not dare to affirm what was false, or to suppress what was true ; nor give any suspicion either of favour or disaffection : that in the relation of facts he should observe the order of time, and sometimes add the description of places ; should first explain the counsels, then the acts, and lastly the events of things : that in the counsels he should interpose his own judgment on the merit of them ; in the acts relate not only what was done, but how it was done ; in the events show what share chance or rashness or prudence had in them ; that he should describe likewise the particular characters of all the great persons who bare any considerable part in the story ; and should dress up the whole in a clear and equable style, without affecting any ornament or seeking any other praise but of perspicuity." These were the rules that Cicero had drawn up for himself when he was meditating a general history of his country, as I have taken occasion to mention more at large in its proper place.
But as I have borrowed my plan, so I have drawn my materials also, from Cicero ; whose works are the most authentic monuments that remain to us of all the great transactions of that age ; being the original accounts of one, who himself was not only a spectator, but a principal actor in them. There is not a single part of his writings which does not give some light, as well into his own history as into that of the republic : but his Familiar Letters, and above all, those to Atticus, may justly be called the memoirs of the times; for they contain, not only a distinct account of every memorable event, but lay open the springs and motives whence each of them proceeded ; so that, as a polite writer who lived in that very age, and perfectly knew the merit of these letters, says, the man who reads them will hate no occasion for any other history of those times h .
My first business therefore, after I had undertaken this task, was to read over Cicero's works, with no other view than to extract from them all the passages that seemed to have any relation to my design : where the tediousness of collecting an infinite number of testimonies scattered through many different volumes ; of sorting them into their classes, and ranging them in proper order ; the necessity of overlooking many in the first search, and the trouble of retrieving them in a second or third ; and the final omission of several through forgetfulness or inadvertency ; have helped to abate that wonder which had often occurred to me, why no man had ever attempted the same work before me, or at least in this enlarged and comprehensive form in which it is now offered to the public.
In my use of these materials, I have chosen to insert as many of them as I could into the body of my work ; imagining that it would give both a lustre and authority to a sentiment, to deliver it in the person and the very words of Cicero ; especially if they could be managed so as not to appear to be sewed on, like splendid patches, but woven originally into the text as the genuine parts of it. With this view I have taken occasion to introduce several of his letters, with large extracts from such of his orations as gave any particular light into the facts, or customs, or characters described in the history, or which seemed on any other account to be curious and entertaining. The frequent introduction of these may be charged perhaps to laziness, and a design of shortening my pains, by filling up my story with Cicero's words instead of my own : but that was not the case ; nor has this part of the task been the easiest to me ; as those will readily believe who have ever attempted to translate the classical
b Sexdecim volumina epistolarum ab consulatu studiis principum, vitiis ducum, ac mutationibus
ejus usque ad extremnm tempus ad Atticum missa- reipublicae perscripta sunt, ut nihil in his non ap-
rum ; quae qui legat, non multum desideret historiam pareat. — Corn. Nep. in Vit. Attici, 16. contextam eorum temporum. Sic enim omnia de
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writers of Greece or Rome : where the difficulty is, not so much to give their sense, as to give it in their language ; that is, in such as is analogous to it, or what they might be supposed to speak if they were living at this time ; since a splendour of style, as well as of sentiment, is necessary to support the idea of a fine writer. While I am representing Cicero therefore as the most eloquent of the ancients, flowing with a perpetual ease and delicacy, and fullness of expression, it would be ridiculous to produce no other specimen of it but what was stiff and forced, and offensive to a polite reader : yet this is generally the case of our modern versions ; where the first wits of antiquity are made to speak such English, as an Englishman of taste would be ashamed to write on any original subject. Yerbal translations are always inelegant , and necessarily destroy all the beauty of language ; yet by departing too wantonly from the letter, we are apt to vary the sense, and mingle somewhat of our own : translators of low genius never reach beyond the first, but march from word to word, without making the least excursion, for fear of losing themselves ; while men of spirit, who prefer the second, usually contemn the mere task of translating, and are vain enough to think of improving their author. I have endeavoured to take the middle way ; and made it my first care always to preserve the sentiment ; and my next to adhere to the words, as far as I was able to express them in an easy and natural style; which I have varied still agreeably to the different subject, or the kind of writing on which I was employed : and I persuade myself that the many original pieces which I have translated from Cicero, as they are certainly the most shining, so will they be found also the most useful parts of my work, by introducing the reader the oftener into the company of one with whom no man ever conversed, as a very eminent writer tells us, without coming away the better for it d .
After I had gone through my review of Cicero's writings, my next recourse was to the other ancients, both Greeks and Romans, who had touched upon the affairs of that age. These served me chiefly to fill up the interstices of general history, and to illustrate several passages which were but slightly mentioned by Cicero ; as well as to add some stories and circumstances which tradition had preserved, concerning either Cicero himself or any of the chief actors whose characters I had delineated.
But the Greek historians who treat professedly of these times, Plutarch, Appian, Dio, though they are all very useful for illustrating many important facts of aDcient history, which would otherwise have been lost, or imperfectly transmitted to us, are not yet to be read without some caution ; as being strangers to the language and customs of Rome, and liable to frequent mistakes, as well as subject to prejudices in their relation of Roman affairs. Plutarch lived from the reign of Claudius to that of Hadrian, in which he died very old, in the possession of the priesthood of the Delphic Apollo ; and though he is supposed to have resided in Rome near forty years at different times, yet he never seems to have acquired a sufficient skill in the Roman language to qualify himself for the compiler of a Roman history. But if we should allow him all the talents requisite to an historian, yet the attempt of writing the lives of all the illustrious Greeks and Romans, was above the strength of any single man, of what abilities and leisure soever ; nmch more of one, who, as he himself tells us, was so engaged in public business, and in giving lectures of philosophy to the great men of Rome, that he had not time to make himself master of the Latin tongue ; nor to acquire any other knowledge of its words, than what he had gradually learnt by a previous use and experience ofthings e ; his work therefore, from the very nature of it, must needs be superficial and imperfect, and the sketch rather than the completion of a great design.
This we find to be actually true in his account of Cicero's life, where, besides the particular mistakes that have been charged upon him by other writers, we see all the marks of haste, c Nee tatnen exprimi verbum e verbo necesse erit, ut interpretes iudiserti solent. — Cic. De Finib. iii. 4.
d Quis autem siunpfiil lnijus libros in manuni, quin surrexerit ammo sedatiore ? — Erasm. Ep. ad Jo. Ulatten.
e Plutarch, in Vit. Demosthen. init. et Vit. Plutaiclti per Rualdum, c. 14.
PREFACE. xv ii inaccuracy, and want of due information, from the poverty and perplexity of the whole performance. He huddles over Cicero's greatest acts in a summary and negligent manner, yet dwells upon Us dreams and his jests, which for the greatest part were probably spurious ; and in the last scene of his life, which was of all the most glorious, when the whole councils of the empire and the fate and liberty of Rome rested on his shoulders, there he is more particularly trifling and empty, where he had the fairest opportunity of displaying his character to advantage as well as of illustrating a curious part of history, which has not been well explained by any writer, though there are the amplest materials for it in Cicero's Letters and Philippic Orations, of which Plutarch appears to have made little or no use.
Appian flourished likewise in the reign of Hadrian f , and came to Rome probably about the time of Plutarch's death, while his works were in everybody's hands, which he has made greatuse of, and seems to have copied very closely in the most considerable passages of his history.
Dio Cassius lived still later, from the time of the Antonines to that of Alexander Severus ; and besides the exceptions that lie against him in common with the other two, is observed to have conceived a particular prejudice against Cicero, whom he treats on all occasions with the utmost malignity. The most obvious cause of it seems to be his envy to a man who for arts and eloquence was thought to eclipse the fame of Greece ; and, by explaining all the parts of philosophy to the Romans in their own language, had superseded in some measure the use of the Greek learning and lectures at Rome, to which the hungry wits of that nation owed both their credit and their bread. Another reason not less probable may be drawn likewise from Dio's character and principles, which were wholly opposite to those of Cicero : he flourished under the most tyrannical of the emperors, by whom he was advanced to great dignity ; and being the creature of despotic power, thought it a proper compliment to it to depreciate a name so highly revered for its patriotism, and whose writings tended to revive that ancient zeal and spirit of liberty for which the people of Rome were once so celebrated ; for we find him taking all occasions in his history to prefer an absolute and monarchical government to a free and democratical one, as the most beneficial to the Roman state e.
These were the grounds of Dio's malice to Cicero, which is exerted often so absurdly that it betrays and confutes itself. Thus in the debates of the senate about Antony, he dresses up a speech for Fufius Calenus, filled with all the obscene and brutal ribaldry against Cicero that a profligate mind could invent : as if it were possible to persuade any man of sense that such infamous stuff could be spoken in the senate at a time when Cicero had an entire ascendant in it ! who at no time ever suffered the least insult upon his honour without chastising the aggressor for it upon the spot '•> whereas Cicero's speeches in these very debates which are still extant, show that though they were managed with great warmth of opposition, yet it was always with decency of language between him and Calenus, whom, while he reproves and admonishes with his usual freedom, yet he treats with civility, and sometimes even with compliments 11 .
But a few passages from Dio himself will evince the justice of this censure upon him : He calls Cicero's father a fuller, who yet got his livelihood (he says) by dressing other people's vines and olives ; that Cicero was born and bred amidst the scourings of old clothes and the filth of dunghills ; that he was master of no liberal science, nor ever did a single thing in his life worthy of a great man or an orator ; that he prostituted his wife ; trained up his son in drunkenness ; committed incest with his daughter ; lived in adultery with Cerellia, whom he owns at the same time to be seventy years old 1 ; all which palpable lies, with many more of the same sort that he
f Vide App. De Bell. Civ. 1. ii. p. 481. sine odio omnia; nihil sine dolore. [lb. vi.] Qua-
° Vide Dio, 1. xliv. init. propter ut invitus ssepe dissensi a Q. Fufio, ita sum
h Nam quod me tecum iraeunde agere dixisti solere, libenter assensus ejus sententiae : ex quo judicare
non est ita. Vehementer me agere fateor ; iraeunde debetis me non cum homine solere, sed cum causa
nego : omnino irasci amicis non temere soleo, ne si dissidere. Itaque non assentior solum, sed etiam
merentur quidem. Itaque sine verborum contumelia gratias ago Q. Fufio, &c. — Phil. xi. 6 a te dissentire possum, sine animi summo dolore non i Vide Dio, 1. xlvi. p. 295, &c. possum. [Phil. viii. 5.] Satis multa cum Fufio, ac xvm
PREFACE.
tells of Cicero, are yet full as credible as what he declares afterwards of himself, that he was admonished and commanded by a vision from heaven, against his own will and inclination to undertake the task of writing his history k .
Upon these collections from Cicero and the other ancients I finished the first draught of my history, before I began to inquire after the modern writers who had treated the same subject before me either in whole or in part. I was unwilling to look into them sooner, lest they should fix any prejudice insensibly upon me before I had formed a distinct judgment on the real state of the facts, as they appeared to me from their original records. For in writing history, as in travels, instead of transcribing the relations of those who have trodden the same ground before us, we should exhibit a series of observations peculiar to ourselves, such as the facts and places suggested to our own minds from an attentive survey of them, without regard to what any one else may have delivered about them ; and though, in a production of this kind, where the same materials are common to all, many things must necessarily be said which had been observed already by others ; yet, if the author has any genius, there will always be enough of what is new to distinguish it as an original work, and to give him a right to call it his own, which I flatter myself will be allowed to me in the following history. In this inquiry after the modern pieces which had any connexion with my argument, I got notice presently of a greater number than I expected, which bore the title of Cicero's Life ; but, upon running over as many of them as I could readily meet with, I was cured of my eagerness for hunting out the rest, since I perceived them to be nothing else but either trifling panegyrics on Cicero's general character, or imperfect abstracts of his principal acts, thrown together within the compass of a few pages in duodecimo.
There are two books however which have been of real use to me, Sebastiani Corradi Quosstura and M. T. Ciceronis Historia a Francisco Fabricio : the first was the work of an Italian critic of eminent learning, who spent a great part of his life in explaining Cicero's writings, but it is rather an apology for Cicero than the history of his life ; its chief end being to vindicate Cicero's character from all the objections that have ever been made to it, and particularly from the misrepresentations of Plutarch and the calumnies of Dio. The piece is learned and ingenious, and written in good Latin ; yet the dialogue is carried on with so harsh and forced an allegory of a quaestor or treasurer producing the several testimonies of Cicero's acts under the form of genuine money, in opposition to the spurious coins of the Greek historians, that none can read it with pleasure, few with patience. The observations however are generally just and well-grounded, except that the author's zeal for Cicero's honour gets the better sometimes of his judgment, and draws him into a defence of his conduct where even Cicero himself has condemned it.
Fabricius's history is prefixed to several editions of Cicero's works, and is nothing more than a bare detail of his acts and writings, digested into exact order and distinguished by the years of Rome and of Cicero's life, without any explication or comment but what relates to the settlement of the time, which is the sole end of the work. But as this is executed with diligence and accuracy, so it has eased me of a great share of that trouble which I must otherwise have had in ranging my materials into their proper places, in which task however I have always taken care to consult also the Annals of Pighius.
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