Page:Cicero And The Fall Of The Roman Republic.djvu/477

Rh What manner of man Cicero was, I have attempted to show from his own mouth. Happily the materials for a judgment, which I have been able present to my readers, are copious; else it would be impossible to appreciate the lights and shadows of a career so varied, or to estimate at its true value a temperament so sensitive, a character so many-sided, a will so much determined by human sympathies and human weakness. We may contrast Cicero in this respect with his great contemporaries, Cato and Cæsar. Cato knew no guide of action except his own stern conception of duty. He was unalterably faithful to the Republic, and was ready to make any sacrifice for it, except the sacrifice of that inopportune rigidity which prevented his ideal being realised in practice. Cæsar pursued no ideals but only practical objects. Whatever means, good or bad, he found ready to his hand from time to time, he used them with consummate skill, in the first place to further his own ambition to be absolute master, and in the next place to suppress certain crying evils and to realise certain definite improvements in administration. He secured Italy from the most pressing danger on her frontier, and he elicited a strong, humane, and orderly government from the confusions of the Civil War. For the sake of these objects, without scruple or remorse, he renounced as unattainable all the nobler fruits of statesmanship, and inexorably crushed out all the possibilities of a worthier future for his nation and for the world. Cato and Cæsar are each of them thorough, positive, one-sided; they act, rightly or wrongly, without