Motus Mentis

One of the greatest Roman citizens of the late Republican era was the statesman, lawyer, and orator Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC). A little while ago, wanting to dig a little deeper into the man’s life and work, I ordered a book called The Complete Works of Marcus Tullius Cicero (now out of print, apparently, and hard to come by, so I’m glad I got it when I did).

The book — a thick, textbook-size paperback — is rather difficult to read, because it’s a photographic facsimile of an edition published in London in 1816. It reproduces all the defects and blurriness of the original printed pages, and there are also places where the text at the edges of the pages is curved and distorted, presumably by the book’s having had to be mooshed down onto the bed of some optical scanner. There seems as well to have been some problem with scanning the verso (left-hand) pages, which are often quite faint, with some patches nearly vanishing altogether. At first the thing seemed almost unreadable, but it’s surprising how quickly the brain adjusts, and after a little while I’d stopped noticing all this.

Although this edition was printed in 1816, the book was actually written in 1745, by Conyers Middleton (1683-1750), a noted clergyman and the librarian of the University of Cambridge, where he was a fellow of Trinity College. The book, far from being merely a translation of Cicero’s works, is, instead (so far, at least, I’m currently 291 pages in), a detailed biography of Cicero’s life, with fascinating commentary and analysis by Middleton, translations of relevant material by Cicero, and extensive footnotes in Latin.

All in all, reading the book has been a fascinating experience, with a feeling of leapfrogging backward in time: from 2023 to the first century BC, by way of 1745/1816 — that is to say, from the current era of the American Republic’s collapse, to the time of its founding, and then back to the last days of the antique Republic that provided the model for our own — and Conyers Middleton, whom I had never heard of before reading this book, is a remarkable traveling-companion. I’ll probably be posting further excerpts from the book as I make my way forward, but for now, here are two samples of Middleton’s commentary (with emphasis added by me).

In the first (page 15), Middleton describes the result of the “Social War”, in which Italian cities allied with Rome demanded, and eventually were granted, actual Roman citizenship:

Upon the breaking out of this war, the Romans gave the freedom of the city [citizenship] to all the towns which continued firm to them; and, at the end of it, after the destruction of three thousand lives, thought fit, for the sake of their future quiet, to grant it to all the rest: but this step, which they considered as the foundation of a perpetual peace, was, as an ingenious writer has observed, one of the causes that hastened their ruin: for the enormous bulk to which the city was swelled by it, gave birth to many new disorders, that gradually corrupted and eventually destroyed it; and the discipline of the laws calculated for a people whom the same walls could contain, was too weak to keep in order the vast body of Italy; so the from this time chiefly, all affairs were decided by faction and violence, and the influence of the great; who could bring whole towns into the forum from remote parts of Italy; or pour in a number of slaves and foreigners under the form of citizens; for when the names and persons of real citizens could no longer be distinguished, it was not possible to know, whether any act had passed regularly, by the genuine suffrage of the people.

Next, here’s a passage from page 92, about the passage of a law granting unprecedented emergency authority to Pompey to command Roman armies in Asia (a law that was supported by Julius Caesar, but generally opposed in the Senate):

J. Caesar also was a violent promoter of this law; but from a different motive than the love either of Pompey, or the republic; his design was to recommend himself by it to the people, whose favor, he foresaw, would be of more use to him than the senate’s, and to cast a fresh load of envy upon Pompey, which, by some accident, might be improved afterwards to his hurt; but his chief view was to make the precedent familiar, that, whatever use Pompey might make of it, he himself might one day make a bad one. For this is the common effect of breaking through the barrier of the laws, by which many states have been ruined; when, from the confidence in the abilities and integrity of some eminent citizen, they invest him, on pressing occasions, with extraordinary powers, for the common benefit and defense of the society; for though power so entrusted may, in particular cases, be of singular service, and sometimes even necessary; yet the example is always dangerous, furnishing a perpetual pretence to the ambitious and ill-designing, to grasp at every prerogative which had been granted at any time to the virtuous, till the same power, which would save a country in good hands, oppresses it at last in bad.

How little things change.