17 - Beacon Lights of History - Ancient Achievements by John Lord

In the third installment of the Beacon Lights of History series, Lord delves into the remarkable achievements of the ancient world, exploring pivotal developments in law, the fine arts, and science. He brings to life iconic figures such as Cicero and Cleopatra, revealing their enduring impact on history. Summary by KHand.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Section seventeen of Beacon Lights of History, Volume three, Ancient
Achievements by John Lord. This LibriVox recording is in the
public domain recording by k hand Cicero Part two. On
his return to Rome, Cicro resumed his practice in the
courts with greater devotion than enver. He was now past

(00:21):
fifty years of age, in the prime of his strength,
and in the height of his forensic fame. But notwithstanding
his success and honors, his life was saddened by the
growing dissensions between Caesar and POMPEII, the decline of public spirit,
and the approaching fall of the institutions in which he gloried.
It was clear that one or the other of these

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fortunate generals would soon become the master of the Roman world,
and that liberty was about to perish. His eloquence now
became sad. He sings the death song of departing glories.
He wails his jeremiads over the demoralization which was sweeping
away not merely liberty but religion and extinguishing faith in
the world. To console himself, he retired to one of

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his beautiful villas and wrote that immortal essay De Oratore,
which has come down to us entire. His literary genius
now blazed equally with his public speeches in the Forum
and in the Senate. Literature was his solace and amusement,
not a source of prophet or probably of contemporary fame.

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He wrote treatises on the same principles that he talked
with friends, or that Fra Angelico painted pictures. He renewed
his attempts in poetry, but failed. His poetry is in
the transcendent rhythm of his prose compositions, like that of
Madame de Staal and Macaulay and Rousseau. But he was

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dragged from his literary and forensic life to accept the
office of a governor of a province. It was forced
upon him and honor to him without a charm. Had
he been venal and unscrupulous, he would have seized it
with avidity. He was too conscientious to enrich himself by
public corruption, as other senators did, and unless he could
accumulate a fortune, the command of a distant province was

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an honorable exile. He was fifty six years of age
when he became proconsul of Secilia and Eastern Province, and
all historians have united in praising his proconsulate for its justice,
its integrity, and its ability. He committed no extortions and
returned home when his term of office expired as poor
as it when he went. One of the highest praises

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which can be given to a public man who has
chances of enriching himself is that he remains poor. When
a member of Congress known not to be worth ten
thousand dollars returns to his home worth one hundred thousand dollars,
the public have an instinct that he has somehow or
other been untrue to himself and his country. When a
great man returns home from Washington poorer than when he went,

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his influence is apt to survive his power. And this
perpetuated influence is the highest glory of a public man,
the glory of Jefferson of Hamilton, of Washington, like the
voice of Gladstone during his retirement. Now, Cicero had pre
eminently this influence as long as he lived, and it
was ever exerted for the good of his country. Had

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his country been free, he would have died in honor.
But his country was enslaved, and his voice was drowned,
and he had to pay the penalty of speaking the
truth about those unscrupulous men who usurped authority. On his
return to Rome, the state of public affairs was most alarming.
Caesar and Pompey were in antagonism. He must choose between them,
and he distrusted both. Caesar was the more able, accomplished,

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and magnanimous, but he was the more unscrupulous and dangerous.
He had ventured to cross the Rubicon, the first general
who ever dared thus openly to assail his country's liberties.
Pompey was pompous, overrated, and proud, and had been fortunate
in the East. But then he sided with the constitutional authorities,
that is, with the Senate, so far as his ambition allowed.

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So Cicero took his side feebly, reluctantly, as the least
of the evils. He had to choose, but not without vaciliation,
which is one of the popular charges against him. His
distraction almost took the form of insanity. His consistency was
an incoherence. Never did a more wretched man than Cicero
resort to Pompey's camp, where he remained until his cause

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was lost. He returned after the Battle of Fairsalia as
suppliant at the feet of Caesar the Conqueror. This, to me,
is one of his weakest acts. It would have been
more lofty and heroic to have perished in the camp
of Pompey's sons. In the midst of these public misfortunes
which saddened his soul, his private miseries began. He was

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now prematurely an old man, under sixty years of age,
almost broken down with grief. His beloved daughter Tulia, with
whom his life was bound up, died, and he was
divorced from his wife Arandia, a proceeding, the cause of
which remains a mystery. Neither in his most confident nor
in his conversations with most intimate friends, does it appear

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that he ever unbosomed himself, although he was the frankest
and most social of men. In his impressive silence, he
has set one of the noblest examples of a man
afflicted with domestic infelicities. He buries his conjugal troubles in
eternal silence. Although he is forced to give vent to
sorrows so plaintive and bitter that both friend and foe
were constrained to pity, he expects no sympathy even at Rome,

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for the sundering of conjugal relations, and he communicates no
secrets in his grief and sadness. He does, however, a
most foolish thing. He marries a young lady one third
his age. She accepted him for his name and rank.
He sought her for her beauty, her youth, and her fortune.
This union of May with December was, of course a failure.

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Both parties were soon disenchanted and disappointed. Neither party found happiness,
only discontent and chagrin. The everlasting incongruities of such a relation,
he sixty and she nineteen, soon led to another divorce.
He expected his young wife to warn with him the
loss of his daughter to Leah. She expected that her

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society and charms would be a compensation for all that
he had lost, yea more enough to make him the
most fortunate and happy of mortals. In truth, he was
too old a man to have married a young woman.
Whatever were they inducements. It was the great folly of
his life, an illustration of the fact that, as a
general thing, the older a man grows, the greater fool
he becomes, so far as women are concerned, A folly

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that disgraced and humiliated the two wisest and greatest men
who ever sat on the Jewish throne. In his accumulated sorrows,
Cicero now plunged for relief into literary labors. It was
thus that his private sorrows were the means which Providence
employed to transmit his precious thoughts and experiences to future ages,
as the most valued inheritance he could bestow on posterity.

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What a precious legacy to the mind of the world
was the Book of Ecclesiastes, Yet by what bitter experiences
was its wisdom earned. It was in the short period
when Caesar rejoiced in the mighty power which he transmitted
to the Roman emperors, that Cicero wrote, in comparative retirement,
his History of Roman Eloquence, his Inquiry as to the

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greatest good and Evil, His Cato, his Orator, His Nature
of the Gods, and his treatises on Glory, on fate,
on friendship, on old age, and his grandest work of
all the offices, the best manual in ethics, which has
come down to us from Heath in antiquity. In his
studious retirements, he reminds us of Bacon after his fall,

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when on his estate, surrounded with friends, and in the
enjoyment of elegant leisure, he penned the most valued of
his immortal compositions. And in those degenerate days at Rome,
when liberty was crushed under foot forever, it is beautiful
to see the greatest of Roman statesmen and lawyers consoling
himself and instructing posterity by his exhaustive treatises on the

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fundamental principle of law, of morality, and of philosophy. The
assassination of Caesar by Roman senators, which Cicero seems to
have foreseen, and in which he rejoiced at this time,
shocked and disturbed the world for nearly two thousand years.
The verdict of the civilized world respecting this great conqueror
had been unanimous. But mister Frowd has attempted to reverse

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this verdict, as he has in reference to Henry the Eighth,
and as Carlyle, another idolator of force, has attempted in
the cases of Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Second. This
remarkable word painter, in his Life of Caesar, which is
however interesting from first to last, as everything he writes
is interesting, has presented him as an object of unbounded admiration,

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as I have already noticed in my lecture on Caesar,
whether in his eagerness to say something new, or from
an ill concealed hostility to aristocratic and religious institutions, or
from an admiration of imperialism, or disdain of the people
in their efforts at self government. This able special pleadered
seems to hail the Roman conqueror as a benefactor to

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the cause of civilization. But imperialism crushed all alike, the
people no longer able to send their best men to
the Senate through the high air offices perchanced to represent
their interests, and the nobles shorn of the administration of
the empire. Soldiers not civilians, henceforth were to rule the world.
A dreary thought to a great lawyer like Cicero or

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a landed proprietor like Brutus, even if such a terrible
revolution as occurred in Rome under Caesar, may have been
ordered wisely by a superintending power for those degenerate times,
and as a preservation of the peace of the world,
that Christianity might take root and spreading countries where all
religions were dead. Still, the prostration of what was dearest

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to the hearts of all true citizens by the sword
was a crime, and men are not to be commended
for crime, even if those crimes may be palliated. It
must needs be that offenses come, but woe to those
by whom they come. Cicero was now sixty three, prematurely old, discouraged,
and heartbroken, and yet he braced himself up for one

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more grand effort, for a life and death struggle with Antony,
one of the ablest of Caesar's generals, a demagogue, eloquent
and popular, but outrageously cruel and unscrupulous, and with unbridled passions.
Had it not been for his infatuated love of Cleopatra,
he probably would have succeeded to the imperial scepter. For
it was by the sword that he, too, sought to

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suppress the liberties of the Senate and people against him.
As the enemy of his country. Cicero did not scruple
to launch forth the most terrible of his invectives in
thirteen immortal Philippics, some of which, however, were merely written
and never delivered. After the fashion of Demosthenes, with whom
as an orator and patriot, he can alone be compared.

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He denounced the unprincipled demagogue in general, with every offensive
epithet the language afforded, unveiling his designs, exposing his forgeries,
and proving his crimes. Nobler eloquence was never uttered and
wasted than that with which Cicero pursued impassionate vengeance. The
most powerful and the most unscrupulous man in the Roman Empire.

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Aunt Cicero must have anticipated the fate which impended over
him if Antony were not a decreed public enemy. But
the protests of the orator were in vain. He lived
to utter them as a witness of truth, and nothing
was left to him but to die. Of course, Antony,
when he became triumvir, when he made a bargain that
he never meant to keep with Octavius and Lepidus, for

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a division of the empire between them would not spare
such an enemy as Cicero, the broken hearted patriot, fled
mechanically with a vacillating mind when his proscription became known
to him, now more ready to die than live, since
all hope in his country's liberties was utterly crushed. Perhaps
he might have escaped to some remote corner of the empire,
but he did not wish for life any more than Socrates,

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when summoned before his judges, desponding uncertain pursued, he met
his fate with the heroism of an ancient philosopher. He
surrendered his wearied and exhausted body to the hand of
the executioner, and his lofty soul to the keeping of
that personal and supreme God, in whom he believed as
firmly as any man, perhaps of pagan antiquity, and surely

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of him more than of any other Roman. Could it
be said, as Sir Walter Scott said of Pitt, and
as Gladstone quoted and applied to Sir Robert Peel. Now
as the stately column broke, the beacon light is quenched
in smoke, the trumpet's silver voice is still the warder
silent on the hill, with the death so sad of

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the most illustrious of the Romans, whose fame was not
earned on the battlefield. I should perhaps close my lecture,
Yet it would be incomplete without a short notice of
those services which, as statesmen, orator and essayist he rendered
to his country and to future ages and nations. In
regard to his services as a statesman, they were rendered
chiefly to his day and generation. For he elaborated no

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system of political wisdom like Burke, which bears except casually
and indirectly, on modern governments and institutions. It was his
aim as a statesman to continue the Roman constitution and
keep the people from civil war. Nor does he seem
to have held, like Rousseau, the vox popular as the
voice of God. He could find no language sufficiently strong

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to express his abhorrence of those who led the people
for their own individual advancement. He was equally severe on
corrupt governors and venal judges. He upheld morality and justice
as the only guides in public affairs. He loved popularity,
but he loved his country better. He hated anarchy as
much as did Burke. Like Bright, he looked upon civil

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war as the greatest of national calamities. He advocated the
most enlightened views based on the principles of immutable justice.
He wished to preserve his country equally from unscrupulous generals
and unprincipled politicians. As for his orations, they also were
chiefly designed for his own contemporaries. They are not particularly

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valuable to us, except as models of rhetorical composition in
transcendent beauty and grace of style. They are not so
luminous with fundamental principles as they are vivid with invective, sarcasm,
wit and telling exaggeration, sometimes persuasive in working on the sensibilities,
and at other times full of withering scorn. They are

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more like the pleadings of an advocate than an appeal
to universal reason. He lays down no laws of political philosophy,
nor does he soar into the region of abstract truth,
evolving great deductions in morals. But as an orator he
was transcendently effective, like Demosthenes, though not equal to the
Greek in force. His sentences are perhaps too involved for

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our taste. Yet he always swayed an audience, whether the
people from the rostrum, or the judges at the bar,
or the senators in the curia. He seldom lost a case.
No one could contend with him successfully. He called out
the admiration of critics and even of actors. He had
a wonderful electrical influence. His very tones and gestures carried

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everything before him. His action was superb, and his whole
frame quivered from real or affected emotion. Like Edward Everett
in his happiest efforts, He was vehement in gesture. Like
Brogham and Mirabeau, he was intensely earnest and impressive. Like Savonarola,
he had exceeding tact and was master of the passions

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of his audience. There was an irresistible music in his
tones of voice, like that of Saint Bernard when he
fanned Crusades. He was withering in his denunciations, like Wendell Phillips,
whom in person he somewhat resembled. He was a fascination
like Pericles, and the people could not long spare him
from the excitement he produced. It was their desire to

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hear him speak, which had no small share in producing
his recall from banishment. They crowded around him, as the
people did round Chrysostom and Antioch. He amused like an
actor and instructed like a sage. His sentences are not short, terse,
epigrammic and direct, but elaborate and artificial. Yet with all
his arts of eloquence, his soul fired with great sentiments,

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rose in its inspired fervor above even the melody of voice,
the rhythm of language, and the vehemence of action. A
listener who was not a critic might fancy it was gesture,
voice and language combined. But after all it was the
man communicating his soul to those who hung upon his lips,
and securing conviction by his sincerity and appeals to conscience.

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He must have had a natural gift for oratory, aside
from his learning and accomplishments and rhetorical arts, a talent
very rare in approaching to creative genius. But to his
natural gifts, like Luther or Henry clay Born an orator,
he added marvelous attainments. He had a most retentive memory.
He was versed in the whole history of the world.

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He was always ready with acts illustrations which gave interest
and finish to his discourses. He was the most industrious
and studious man of his age. His attainments were prodigious.
He was master of all the knowledge then known. Like
Gladstone of our day, he was not so learned a
man as Varro. But Varah's works have perished, as the
great monuments of German scholars are perhaps destined to perish.

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For lack of style. Cesero's style embalmed his thoughts and
made them imperishable. No writer is immortal who is not
an artist. Cicero was a consummate artist and study the
arrangement of sentences, like the historian Tacitus and the Grecian Throcydides.
But greater than as an artist was he. In the
loftiness of his mind. He appealed to what is noblest

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in the soul. Transcendent eloquence ever raises mortals to the
skies and never pulls angels down. Love of country, love
of home, love of friends, love of nature, love of law,
love of God is brought out in all his discourses,
exalting the noblest sentiments which move the human soul. He

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was the first to give to the Latin language beauty
and artistic finish. He added to its richness, copiousness, and strength.
He gave it music. For style alone, he would be
valued as one of the immortal classics. All men of
culture have admired it, from Augustine to Bassett, and acknowledged
their obligations to him. We accord to the great poets

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the formation of languages. Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, but I
doubt if either Virgil or Horace contributed to the formation
of the Latin language more than Cicero. Certainly they have
not been more studied and admired in every succeeding age.
The orations of Cicero have been one of the first
books which have been used as text books in colleges.

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Is it not something to have been one of the
acknowledged masters of human composition? What a great service did
Cicero render to the education of the Teutonic races? Whatever
the Latin language has done for them modern world, Cicero
comes in for a large share of the glory. More
is preserved of his writings than of any other writer
of antiquity, but not for style alone. Seen equally in

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his essays and in his orations, is he admirable. His
most enduring claim on the gratitude of the world is
the noble tribute he rendered to those truths which save
the world. His testimony considering he was a pagan, is
remarkable in reference to what is sound in philosophy and morals.
His learning, too, is seen to most advantage in his

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ethical and philosophical writings. It is true he did not
originate like Socrates and Plato. But he condensed and sifted
the writings of the Greeks, and is the best expounder
of their philosophy, who has added substantially to what the
Greeks worked out of their creative brain. I know that
no Roman ever added to the domain of speculative thought.
Yet what Roman ever showed such a comprehension and appreciation

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of Greek philosophy as did Cicero. He was profoundly versed
in all the learning the Grecians ever taught. Like Socrates,
he had a contempt for physical science, because science in
his day was based on imperfect inductions. There were not
facts enough known of the material world to construct sound theories.
Physical science at that time was the most uncertain of

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all knowledge, although there were great pretenders then as now
who maintained it was the only certainty. But the speculations
of scientists disgusted him, for he saw nothing in them
upon which to base incontrovertible truth. They were mere dreams
and baseless theories on the origin of the universe. They
were even puerile, and they were then as now atheistic

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in their tendency. They mocked the consciousness of mankind. They
annihilated faith and providence. At best, they made all things
subject to necessity, to an immutable fate, not to an
intelligent and ever present creator. But Cicero, like Socrates, believed
in God and in providential interference. In striking contrast with Caesar,

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who believed nothing, he taught moral obligation on the basis
of accountability to God. He repudiated expediency as the guide
in life, and fell back on the principles of eternal right.
As an ethical writer, he was profounder and more enlightened
than Paley. He did not seek to overturn the popular
religion like Grecian sophists, only like Socrates, to overturn ignorance

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before a sound foundation could be laid for any system
of truth. Nor did he ridicule religion, as Lucian did
in after times, but soared to comprehend it. Like the
esoteric priests of Egypt in the time of Moses or Pythagoras.
He cherished as lofty views of God and his moral
government as any moralist of antiquity. In all these lofty views,

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he taught in matchless language, principles of government, principles of law,
of ethics, of theology, giving consolation not only to the
men of his day, but to Christian sages in after times.
And there is nothing puerile or dreamy or demoralizing in
his teachings. They all are luminous for learning as well
as genius. He rivaled Bacon in the variety and profundity

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of his attainments. He gloried in the certitudes which consciousness reveals,
as well as in the facts which experience and history demonstrate.
With these he consoled himself in trouble. On these he
reposed in the hour of danger. Like Pascal, he meditated
on the highest truths which task the intellect of man,
but unlike him, did not disdain those weapons which reason forged,

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and which no one used more triumphantly than Pascal himself.
At these great meditations he transmitted for all ages to
ponder as among the most precious of the legacies of antiquity.
Thus did he live a shining light in a corrupt
and godless age, in spite of all the faults which
modern critics have enlarged upon in their ambitious desire for novelties,

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or in their thoughtless or malignant desire to show up
human frailties. He was a patriot, taking the side of
his country's highest interests, a statesman seeking to conserve the
wisdom of his ancestors. An orator exposed vices and defending
the innocent. A philosopher unfolding the wisdom of the Greeks.
A moralist laying down the principles of immutable justice. A

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sage pondering the mysteries of life. Ever active, studious, dignified,
the charm and fascination of cultivated circles, as courteous and
polished as the ornaments of modern society, revered by friends,
feared by enemies, adored by all good people. A kind
father and indulgent husband, A generous friend, hospitable, witty, magnificent,

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a most accomplished gentleman, one of the best men of
all antiquity. What if he was vain and egotistical, and
vacillating and occasionally weak? Can you expect perfection in him
who is born of a woman? We palliate the backslidings
of Christians. We excuse the crimes of a constantine, a Theodosius,
A Cromwell. Shall we have no tolerations for the frailty

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of a pagan in one of the worst periods of history.
I have no patience with those critics who would hurl
him from the pedestal on which he has stood for
two thousand years. Contrast him with other illustrious men. How
few Romans or Greeks were better than he, how few
have rendered such exalted services. And even if he has
not perpetuated a faultless character, he has yet bequeathed a

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noble example. And more has transmitted a legacy in the
richness of which we forget the faults of the testatur,
a legacy of imperishable thought clothed in the language of
imperishable art, A legacy so valuable that it is the
treasured inheritance of all civilized nations, and one which no
nation can afford to lose. Authorities Plutarch's Life of Cicero, Appian, Dion, Cassius, Velius,

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Paterculus are the original authorities next to the writings of
Cicero himself, especially his letters and orations. Middleton's life is full,
but one sided. Forsyth takes the opposite side in his life.
The last work English is that of Anthony Trollop in
Smith's Biographical Dictionary is an able article doctor Vaughan has

(25:07):
written an interesting lecture. Merrivale has elaborately treated this great
man in his valuable History of the Romans, Collige Kibber's
Character and conduct of Cicero, Drummond's Roman History, Rollins's Ancient
History Biographic universe Ae. Mister Freud alludes to Cicero in
his Life of Caesar, taking nearly the same view as

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Forsyth end of Section seventeen