Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/744

Rh 720 ROMAN LITERATURE of the republic ; and no man ever lived who, by the in- tensity of his patriotic and imperial feeling, by his prac- tical experience of great affairs, and by the largeness of his human sympathies, was better fitted than Cicero to be the representative of the type of oratory demanded by the condition of the later republic. He elevates nearly every subject with which he deals, in those speeches at least which he thought worthy of preservation, by connecting it with great political or imperial issues. But with the patriotic motive of his speeches there is generally com- bined a great moral motive. Whatever were the weak- nesses and faults of his personal character, no man of antiquity had higher ethical aspirations. Nowhere is the Eoman ideal of character humanized by Greek studies presented with more impressiveness than in the speeches of Cicero. In no writer ancient or modern do we find a greater power of moral indignation. And, while he inveighed against the enormities of the man whom he accused with the grave rebuke of a censor as well as the passion of a personal enemy, no advocate could feel or awaken in others a keener sympathy with the fortunes and the character of the man whom he was defending. To his great artistic accomplishment, perfected by prac- tice and elaborate study, to the power of his patriotic, his moral, and personal sympathies, and his passionate emo- tional nature, must be added his vivid imagination and the rich and copious stream of his language, in which he had no rival among Roman writers or speakers. 1 He realizes with the imagination of a great dramatist the personages of his story, their feelings and motives, and the minutest details of their action. It has been said that Roman poetry has produced few, if any, great types of character. But the Verres, Catiline, Antony of Cicero are living and permanent types. The story told in the Pro Cluentio may be true or false, but the picture of provincial crime which it presents is vividly dramatic. Had we only known Cicero in his speeches we should have ranked him with Demosthenes as one who had realized the highest literary ideal, and thereby secured immortality to an art the effect of which is not often perpetuated. We should think of him also as the creator and master of Latin style, the writer by whom the amplest, most passionate, and most living powers of the language had been called forth and combined into a great and orderly literary organ. We know him, moreover, not only as a great orator but as a just and appreciative critic of oratory. But to his ser- vices to Roman oratory we have to add his services not indeed to philosophy but to the literature of philosophy, and his application to the exposition of his doctrines of the calmer and more equable resources of the language. If not a philosopher he is an admirable interpreter of those branches of philosophy which are fitted for practical ap- plication, and he presents us with the results of Greek reflexion vivified by his own human sympathies and his large experience of men. In giving a model of the style in which human interest can best be imparted to abstract discussions, he has used his great oratorical gift and art to persuade the world to accept the most hopeful opinions on human destiny and the principles of conduct most conducive to elevation and integrity of character. The Letters of Cicero are the best either in his own or in any other language. They are thoroughly natural, " colloquia absentium amicorum," to use his own phrase. In nearly all other published corresponde'nce there is some medium which interrupts the natural outlet of the man, something of literary mannerism, natural reserve, academic elaborateness, and after-thought. Cicero's letters to Atticus and to the friends with whom he was completely at his 1 ' ' Qui non illustravit modo sed etiam gerniit in hac urbe dicendi copiam " (Cic., Brut., 73). ease are the most sincere and immediate expression of the thought and feeling of the moment. They let us into the secret of his most serious thoughts and cares, and they give a natural outlet to his vivacity of observation, his wit and humour, his kindliness of nature. It shows how flexible an instrument Latin prose had become in his hand, when it could in accordance with the conditions of perfect literary taste do justice at once to the ample and vehement volume of his oratory, to the calmer and more rhythmical movement of his philosophical meditation, and to the natural interchange of thought and feeling in the every- day intercourse of life. Among the many rival orators of the age the most eminent were Hortensius and Caesar. The former, like other members of the aristocracy, such as Memmius and Torquatus, and like Q. Catulus in the preceding generation, was a kind of dilettante poet and a precursor of the poetry of pleasure, which attained such prominence in the elegiac poets of the Augustan age. Of Julius Caesar (100-44) as an Caesar, orator we can judge only by his reputation and by the testi- mony of his great rival and adversary Cicero ; but we are able to appreciate the special praise of perfect taste in the use of language attributed to him. 2 In his Commentaries, by laying aside the ornaments of oratory, 3 he created the most admirable style of prose narrative, the style which presents interesting events in their sequence of time and dependence on the will of the actor, rapidly and vividly, with scarcely any colouring of personal or moral feeling, any oratorical passion, any pictorial illustration. While he shows the persuasive art of an orator by presenting the subjugation of Gaul and his own action in the Civil War in the light most favourable to his claim to rule the Roman world, he is entirely free from the Roman fashion of self-laudation or disparagement of an adversary. Yet the character of the man is stamped on every line that he writes, and reveals itself especially in a perfect simplicity of style, the result of the clearest intelligence and the strongest sense of personal dignity. He avoids not only every unusual but every superfluous word ; and, although no writing can be more free from rhetorical colouring, yet there may from time to time be detected a glow of sympathy, like the glow of generous passion in Thucydides, the more effective from the reserve with which it betrays itself whenever he is called on to record any act of personal heroism or of devotion to military duty. In the simplicity of his style, the directness of hisSallus narrative, the entire absence of any didactic tendency, Caesar presents a marked contrast to another prose writer of that age, the historian Sallust (87-34). Like Varro, he survived Cicero by some years, but the tone and spirit in which his works are written assign him to the republican era. He was the first of the purely artistic historians, as distinct from the annalists and the writers of personal memoirs. He imitated the Greek historians in taking par- ticular actions the Jugurthan War and the Catilinarian Conspiracy as the subjects of artistic treatment. He wrote also a continuous work, Historix, treating of the events of the twelve years following the death of Sulla, of which only fragments are preserved. His two extant works are more valuable as artistic studies of the rival parties in the state and of personal character than as trustworthy narratives of facts. His style aims at effect- iveness by pregnant expression, sententiousness, archaism. He produces the impression of caring more for the manner of saying a thing than for its truth. Yet he has great value as a painter of historical portraits, some of them those of his contemporaries, and as an author who had 2 " Latine loqui elegantissime." 3 " Nudi enim sunt, recti et venusti, omni ornatu orationis tanquam veste detracto " (Cicero).