“Is aught of pleasure, aught of solace sweet Permitted, Calvus, to the silent grave, What time the tale of sorrow we repeat, Yearning o’er memories we fain would save?
Know this. From Love and Friendship if a tear Can make its way into that silentness, Quintilia feels untimely Death less drear, For hearing of the love that still can bless.” Catullus, xcvi. (by S. T. I).
Lastly, we come to the man of letters who has given his name to this period of literature, which indeed draws more than half its interest from him and from his works. Marcus Tullius Cicero was an Italian, and had little of the Roman character in his make; he came from the town of Arpinum, among the foothills of the Apennines some sixty miles south-east of Rome. He made his way into Roman society by his social and conversational powers, and by his capacity for friendship, and into the field of politics by his great gift of oratory, which was now indispensable for public men. As a “new man” he never was really at home with the high aristocracy, but he was a man of many friends for all that, and reckoned among them all the great men of his time, including both Cæsar and Pompey. His best and truest friend, who worked for him all his life with unsparing care, was a man of business who stood outside of politics, Pomponius Atticus; and of Cicero’s letters to this faithful friend and adviser nearly four hundred survive to prove the reality of that lifelong devotion. Some five hundred letters to and from other correspondents are also extant, and the whole collection forms the most fascinating record of a great man’s life and thoughts that has come down to us from classical antiquity.
Since Mommsen wrote his famous _History of Rome_, in which he was almost ignored, Cicero has often been treated with contempt as a shallow thinker, deriving all his inspiration from Greek originals, and as a feeble statesman, brilliant only as an orator. It is true that there is a want of _grit_ in much that Cicero wrote: he was the child of his age, never tired of writing and talking, little used to profound thinking, and rarely acting with independent vigour. But he has two claims on the gratitude of posterity which should never be forgotten. First, he made Latin into the most perfect language of prose that the world as yet has known. The echoes of his beautiful style can be heard centuries afterwards in the Latin fathers of Christianity, especially St. Augustine and Lactantius, and they are still audible in the best French and Italian prose-writers of to-day. Secondly, of all Romans Cicero is the one best known to us as an individual human being: and few indeed who have had the chance to become really familiar with him can fail to love him as his own friends loved him. He was not the stuff of which strong statesmen are made; he was too dependent on the support and approval of others to inspire men with zeal for a cause—especially for a losing cause. His own consulship was brilliant, for he was able to combine the best elements in the State in the cause of order as against anarchy—anarchy which threatened the very existence of Rome as a city; and at the end of his life he showed the same ability to use a strong combination to good purpose in the political field. But he was not of such strong growth as to mark out a line of his own, and at some unhappy moments of his life his weakness is apt to move our pity, if not our contempt.