The Life of Cicero, Volume One by Anthony Trollope

Author:Anthony Trollope [Trollope, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Classics, General, Fiction, Nonfiction, Reference & Language, Reference, Fiction & Literature
ISBN: 4064066213596
Google: Q1vDDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Good Press
Published: 2019-12-09T05:00:00+00:00

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Chapter IX

CATILINE.

To wash the blackamoor white has been the favorite task of some modern historians. To find a paradox in character is a relief to the investigating mind which does not care to walk always in the well-tried paths, or to follow the grooves made plain and uninteresting by earlier writers. Tiberius and even Nero have been praised. The memories of our early years have been shocked by instructions to regard Richard III. and Henry VIII. as great and scrupulous kings. The devil may have been painted blacker than he should be, and the minds of just men, who will not accept the verdict of the majority, have been much exercised to put the matter right. We are now told that Catiline was a popular hero; that, though he might have wished to murder Cicero, he was, in accordance with the practice of his days, not much to be blamed for that; and that he was simply the follower of the Gracchi, and the forerunner of Cæsar in his desire to oppose the oligarchy of Rome.177 In this there is much that is true. Murder was common. He who had seen the Sullan proscriptions, as both Catiline and Cicero had done, might well have learned to feel less scrupulous as to blood than we do in these days. Even Cicero, who of all the Romans was the most humane—even he, no doubt, would have been well contented that Catiline should have been destroyed by the people.178 Even he was the cause, as we shall see just now, of the execution of the leaders of the conspirators whom Catiline left behind him in the city—an execution of which the legality is at any rate very doubtful. But in judging even of bloodshed we have to regard the circumstances of the time in the verdicts we give. Our consciousness of altered manners and of the growth of gentleness force this upon us. We cannot execrate the conspirators who murdered Cæsar as we would do those who might now plot the death of a tyrant; nor can we deal as heavily with the murderers of Cæsar as we would have done then with Catilinarian conspirators in Rome, had Catiline's conspiracy succeeded. And so, too, in acknowledging that Catiline was the outcome of the Gracchi, and to some extent the preparation for Cæsar, we must again compare him with them, his motives and designs with theirs, before we can allow ourselves to sympathize with him, because there was much in them worthy of praise and honor.

That the Gracchi were seditious no historian has, I think, denied. They were willing to use the usages and laws of the Republic where those usages and laws assisted them, but as willing to act illegally when the usages and laws ran counter to them. In the reforms or changes which they attempted they were undoubtedly rebels; but no reader comes across the tale of the death, first of one and then of the other, without a regret.

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