|
But if our adversaries do not care how foully and disgracefully the
Roman republic be stained by corrupt practices, so long only as it
holds together and continues in being, and if they therefore pooh-pooh
the testimony of Sallust to its "utterly wicked and profligate"
condition, what will they make of Cicero's statement, that even in
his time it had become entirely extinct, and that there remained extant
no Roman republic at all? He introduces Scipio (the Scipio who had
destroyed Carthage) discussing the republic, at a time when already
there were presentiments of its speedy ruin by that corruption which
Sallust describes. In fact, at the time when the discussion took
place, one of the Gracchi, who, according to Sallust, was the
first great instigator of seditions, had already been put to death.
His death, indeed, is mentioned in the same book. Now Scipio, at
the end of the second book, says: "As among the different sounds
which proceed from lyres, flutes, and the human voice, there must be
maintained a certain harmony which a cultivated ear cannot endure to
hear disturbed or jarring, but which may be elicited in full and
absolute concord by the modulation even of voices very unlike one
another; so, where reason is allowed to modulate the diverse elements
of the state, there is obtained a perfect concord from the upper,
lower, and middle classes as from various sounds; and what musicians
call harmony in singing, is concord in matters of state, which is the
strictest bond and best security of any republic, and which by no
ingenuity can be retained where justice has become extinct." Then,
when he had expatiated somewhat more fully, and had more copiously
illustrated the benefits of its presence and the ruinous effects of its
absence upon a state, Pilus, one of the company present at the
discussion, struck in and demanded that the question should be more
thoroughly sifted, and that the subject of justice should be freely
discussed for the sake of ascertaining what truth there was in the maxim
which was then becoming daily more current, that "the republic cannot
be governed without injustice." Scipio expressed his willingness to
have this maxim discussed and sifted, and gave it as his opinion that
it was baseless, and that no progress could be made in discussing the
republic unless it was established, not only that this maxim, that
"the republic cannot be governed without injustice," was false, but
also that the truth is, that it cannot be governed without the most
absolute justice. And the discussion of this question, being deferred
till the next day, is carried on in the third book with great
animation. For Pilus himself undertook to defend the position that
the republic cannot be governed. without injustice, at the same time
being at special pains to clear himself of any real participation in
that opinion. He advocated with great keenness the cause of injustice
against justice, and endeavored by plausible reasons and examples to
demonstrate that the former is beneficial, the latter useless, to the
republic. Then, at the request of the company, Laelius attempted to
defend justice, and strained every nerve to prove that nothing is so
hurtful to a state as injustice; and that without justice a republic
can neither be governed, nor even continue to exist.
When this question has been handled to the satisfaction of the
company, Scipio reverts to the original thread of discourse, and
repeats with commendation his own brief definition of a republic, that
it is the weal of the people. "The people" he defines as being not
every assemblage or mob, but an assemblage associated by a common
acknowledgment of law, and by a community of interests. Then he shows
the use of definition in debate; and from these definitions of his own
he gathers that a republic, or "weal of the people," then exists
only when it is well and justly governed, whether by a monarch, or an
aristocracy, or by the whole people. But when the monarch is unjust,
or, as the Greeks say, a tyrant; or the aristocrats are unjust, and
form a faction; or the people themselves are unjust, and become, as
Scipio for want of a better name calls them, themselves the tyrant,
then the republic is not only blemished (as had been proved the day
before), but by legitimate deduction from those definitions, it
altogether ceases to be. For it could not be the people's weal when a
tyrant factiously lorded it over the state; neither would the people be
any longer a people if it were unjust, since it would no longer answer
the definition of a people, "an assemblage associated by a common
acknowledgment of law, and by a community of interests."
When, therefore, the Roman republic was such as Sallust described
it, it was not "utterly wicked and profligate," as he says, but had
altogether ceased to exist, if we are to admit the reasoning of that
debate maintained on the subject of the republic by its best
representatives. Tully himself, too, speaking not in the person of
Scipio or any one else, but uttering his own sentiments, uses the
following language in the beginning of the fifth book, after quoting a
line from the poet Ennius, in which he said, "Rome's severe
morality and her citizens are her safeguard." "This verse," says
Cicero, "seems to me to have all the sententious truthfulness of an
oracle. For neither would the citizens have availed without the
morality of the community, nor would the morality of the commons
without outstanding men have availed either to establish or so long to
maintain in vigor so grand a republic with so wide and just an empire.
Accordingly, before our day, the hereditary usages formed our
foremost men, and they on their part retained the usages and
institutions of their fathers. But our age, receiving the republic as
a chef-d'oeuvre of another age which has already begun to grow old,
has not merely neglected to restore the colors of the original, but has
not even been at the pains to preserve so much as the general outline
and most outstanding features. For what survives of that primitive
morality which the poet called Rome's safeguard? It is so obsolete
and forgotten, that, far from practising it, one does not even know
it. And of the citizens what shall I say? Morality has perished
through poverty of great men; a poverty for which we must not only
assign a reason, but for the guilt of which we must answer as criminals
charged with a capital crime. For it is through our vices, and not by
any mishap, that we retain only the name of a republic, and have long
since lost the reality."
This is the confession of Cicero, long indeed after the death of
Africanus, whom he introduced as an interlocutor in his work De
Republica, but still before the coming of Christ. Yet, if the
disasters he bewails had been lamented after the Christian religion had
been diffused, and had begun to prevail, is there a man of our
adversaries who would not have thought that they were to be imputed to
the Christians? Why, then, did their gods not take steps then to
prevent the decay and extinction of that republic, over the loss of
which Cicero, long before Christ had come in the flesh, sings so
lugubrious a dirge? Its admirers have need to inquire whether, even
in the days of primitive men and morals, true justice flourished in
it; or was it not perhaps even then, to use the casual expression of
Cicero, rather a colored painting than the living reality? But, if
God will, we shall consider this elsewhere. For I mean in its own
place to show that, according to the definitions in which Cicero
himself, using Scipio as his mouthpiece, briefly propounded what a
republic is, and what a people is, and according to many testimonies,
both of his own lips and of those who took part in that same debate,
Rome never was a republic, be cause true justice had never a place in
it. But accepting the more feasible definitions of a republic, I
grant there was a republic of a certain kind, and certainly much better
administered by the more ancient Romans than by their modern
representatives. But the fact is, true justice has no existence save
in that republic whose founder and ruler is Christ, if at least any
choose to call this a republic; and indeed we cannot deny that it is
the people's weal. But if perchance this name, which has become
familiar in other connections, be considered alien to our common
parlance, we may at all events say that in this city is true justice;
the city of which Holy Scripture says, "Glorious things are said of
thee, O city of God."
|
|