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Dialogues of the Dead

<h3>DIALOGUE XVII.</h3> Marcus Brutus—Pomponius Atticus. Brutus.—Well, Atticus, I find that, notwithstanding your friendship for Cicero and for me, you survived us both many years, with the same cheerful spirit you had always possessed, and, by prudently wedding your daughter to Agrippa, secured the favour of Octavius Cæsar, and even contracted a close alliance with him by your granddaughter’s marriage with Tiberius Nero. Atticus.—You know, Brutus, my philosophy was the Epicurean.  I loved my friends, and I served them in their wants and distresses with great generosity; but I did not think myself obliged to die when they died, or not to make others as occasions should offer. Brutus.—You did, I acknowledge, serve your friends, as far as you could, without bringing yourself, on their account, into any great danger or disturbance of mind: but that you loved them I much doubt.  If you loved Cicero, how could you love Antony?  If you loved me, how could you love Octavius?  If you loved Octavius, how could you avoid taking part against Antony in their last civil war?  Affection cannot be so strangely divided, and with so much equality, among men of such opposite characters, and who were such irreconcilable enemies to each other. Atticus.—From my earliest youth I possessed the singular talent of ingratiating myself with the heads of different parties, and yet not engaging with any of them so far as to disturb my own quiet.  My family was connected with the Marian party; and, though I retired to Athens that I might not be unwillingly involved in the troubles which that turbulent faction had begun to excite, yet when young Marius was declared an enemy by the Senate, I sent him a sum of money to support him in his exile.  Nor did this hinder me from making my court so well to Sylla, upon his coming to Athens, that I obtained from him the highest marks of his favour.  Nevertheless, when he pressed me to go with him to Rome, I declined it, being as unwilling to fight for him against the Marian party, as for them against him.  He admired my conduct; and at his departure from Athens, ordered all the presents made to him during his abode in that city to be carried to me.  I remind you of this only to show that moderation in all contentions of this kind had been always my principle; and that in the instances you mentioned I did not act from any levity or inconstancy in my nature, but from a regular consistent plan of conduct, which my reason convinced me was the wisest I could follow. Brutus.—I remember indeed that you observed the same neutrality between Pompey and Julius Cæsar. Atticus.—I did so—and that I might be able to do it with dignity, and without the reproach of ingratitude, I never would accept any office or honour from either of those great men; nor from Cicero, though my sister had married his brother; nor from you, Marcus Brutus, whose friendship I thought the greatest honour of my life. Brutus.—Are there no obligations to a good heart, Pomponius, but honours and offices?  Or could you, by refusing to encumber yourself with these, dissolve all other ties?  But, setting aside any considerations of private affection or esteem, how was you able to reconcile your conduct with that which is the ruling principle in the heart of every virtuous man, and more especially a virtuous Roman, the love of the public? Atticus.—The times I lived in were so bad, and the conflict of parties had so little to do in reality with the love of the public, that I thought my virtue much safer and purer by avoiding than mixing in the fray. Brutus.—Possibly, in the dispute between Marius and Sylla, and even in that between Pompey and Cæsar, a virtuous man might see so much to blame on both sides, and so much to fear, whichever faction should overcome the other, as to be justified in not engaging with either.  But let me say, without vanity, in the war which I waged against Antony and Octavius you could have nothing to blame, for I know you approved the principle upon which I killed Julius Cæsar.  Nor had you anything to fear if our arms had succeeded, for you know that my intentions were upright and pure; nor was it doubtful that Cassius was as much determined as I to restore the Republic.  How could you, then, with any sense of virtue in your heart, maintain an indifference and neutrality between the deliverers and the tyrants of your country? Atticus.—My answer to this will necessarily require explanations, which my respect to the manes of Brutus makes me wish to avoid. Brutus.—In the other world I loved truth, and was desirous that all might speak it with freedom; but here even the tender ears of a tyrant are compelled to endure it.  If I committed any faults, or erred in my judgment, the calamities I have suffered are a punishment for it.  Tell me then, truly, and without fear of offending, what you think were my failings. Atticus.—You said that the principle upon which you killed Julius Cæsar had my approbation.  This I do not deny; but did I ever declare, or give you reason to believe, that I thought it a prudent or well-timed act?  I had quite other thoughts.  Nothing ever seemed to me worse judged or worse timed; and these, Brutus, were my reasons.  Cæsar was just setting out to make war on the Parthians.  This was an enterprise of no little difficulty and no little danger; but his unbounded ambition, and that restless spirit which never would suffer him to take any repose, did not intend to stop there.  You know very well (for he hid nothing from you) that he had formed a vast plan of marching, after he had conquered the whole Parthian Empire, along the coast of the Caspian Sea and the sides of Mount Caucasus into Scythia, in order to subdue all the countries that border on Germany, and Germany itself; from whence he proposed to return to Rome by Gaul.  Consider now, I beseech you, how much time the execution of this project required.  In some of his battles with so many fierce and warlike nations, the bravest of all the barbarians, he might have been slain; but, if he had not, disease, or age itself, might have ended his life before he could have completed such an immense undertaking.  He was, when you killed him, in his fifty-sixth year, and of an infirm constitution.  Except his bastard by Cleopatra, he had no son; nor was his power so absolute or so quietly settled that he could have a thought of bequeathing the Empire, like a private inheritance, to his sister’s grandson, Octavius.  While he was absent there was no reason to fear any violence or maladministration in Italy or in Rome.  Cicero would have had the chief authority in the Senate.  The prætorship of the city had been conferred upon you by the favour of Cæsar, and your known credit with him, added to the high reputation of your virtues and abilities, gave you a weight in all business which none of his party left behind him in Italy would have been able to oppose.  What a fair prospect was here of good order, peace, and liberty at home, while abroad the Roman name would have been rendered more glorious, the disgrace of Crassus revenged, and the Empire extended beyond the utmost ambition of our forefathers by the greatest general that ever led the armies of Rome, or, perhaps, of any other nation!  What did it signify whether in Asia, and among the barbarians, that general bore the name of King or Dictator?  Nothing could be more puerile in you and your friends than to start so much at the proposition of his taking that name in Italy itself, when you had suffered him to enjoy all the power of royalty, and much more than any King of Rome had possessed from Romulus down to Tarquin. Brutus.—We considered that name as the last insult offered to our liberty and our laws; it was an ensign of tyranny, hung out with a vain and arrogant purpose of rendering the servitude of Rome more apparent.  We, therefore, determined to punish the tyrant, and restore our country to freedom. Atticus.—You punished the tyrant, but you did not restore your country to freedom.  By sparing Antony, against the opinion of Cassius, you suffered the tyranny to remain.  He was Consul, and, from the moment that Cæsar was dead, the chief power of the State was in his hands.  The soldiers adored him for his liberality, valour, and military frankness.  His eloquence was more persuasive from appearing unstudied.  The nobility of his house, which descended from Hercules, would naturally inflame his heart with ambition.  The whole course of his life had evidently shown that his thoughts were high and aspiring, and that he had little respect for the liberty of his country.  He had been the second man in Cæsar’s party; by saving him you gave a new head to that party, which could no longer subsist without your ruin.  Many who would have wished the restoration of liberty, if Cæsar had died a natural death, were so incensed at his murder that, merely for the sake of punishing that, they were willing to confer all power upon Antony and make him absolute master of the Republic.  This was particularly true with respect to the veterans who had served under Cæsar, and he saw it so plainly that he presently availed himself of their dispositions.  You and Cassius were obliged to fly out of Italy, and Cicero, who was unwilling to take the same part, could find no expedient to save himself and the Senate but the wretched one of supporting and raising very high another Cæsar, the adopted son and heir of him you had slain, to oppose Antony and to divide the Cæsarean party.  But even while he did this he perpetually offended that party and made them his enemies by harangues in the Senate, which breathed the very spirit of the old Pompeian faction, and made him appear to Octavius and all the friends of the dead Dictator no less guilty of his death than those who had killed him.  What could this end in but that which you and your friends had most to fear, a reunion of the whole Cæsarean party and of their principal leaders, however discordant the one with the other, to destroy the Pompeians?  For my own part, I foresaw it long before the event, and therefore kept myself wholly clear of those proceedings.  You think I ought to have joined you and Cassius at Philippi, because I knew your good intentions, and that, if you succeeded, you designed to restore the commonwealth.  I am persuaded you did both agree in that point, but you differed in so many others, there was such a dissimilitude in your tempers and characters, that the union between you could not have lasted long, and your dissension would have had most fatal effects with regard both to the settlement and to the administration of the Republic.  Besides, the whole mass of it was in such a fermentation, and so corrupted, that I am convinced new disorders would soon have arisen.  If you had applied gentle remedies, to which your nature inclined, those remedies would have failed; if Cassius had induced you to act with severity, your government would have been stigmatised with the name of a tyranny more detestable than that against which you conspired, and Cæsar’s clemency would have been the perpetual topic of every factious oration to the people, and of every seditious discourse to the soldiers.  Thus you would have soon been plunged in the miseries of another civil war, or perhaps assassinated in the Senate, as Julius was by you.  Nothing could give the Roman Empire a lasting tranquillity but such a prudent plan of a mitigated imperial power as was afterwards formed by Octavius, when he had ably and happily delivered himself from all opposition and partnership in the government.  Those quiet times I lived to see, and I must say they were the best I ever had seen, far better than those under the turbulent aristocracy for which you contended.  And let me boast a little of my own prudence, which, through so many storms, could steer me safe into that port.  Had it only given me safety, without reputation, I should not think that I ought to value myself upon it.  But in all these revolutions my honour remained as unimpaired as my fortune.  I so conducted myself that I lost no esteem in being Antony’s friend after having been Cicero’s, or in my alliance with Agrippa and Augustus Cæsar after my friendship with you.  Nor did either Cæsar or Antony blame my inaction in the quarrels between them; but, on the contrary, they both seemed to respect me the more for the neutrality I observed.  My obligations to the one and alliance with the other made it improper for me to act against either, and my constant tenor of life had procured me an exemption from all civil wars by a kind of prescription. Brutus.—If man were born to no higher purpose than to wear out a long life in ease and prosperity, with the general esteem of the world, your wisdom was evidently as much superior to mine as my life was shorter and more unhappy than yours.  Nay, I verily believe it exceeded the prudence of any other man that ever existed, considering in what difficult circumstances you were placed, and with how many violent shocks and sudden changes of fortune you were obliged to contend.  But here the most virtuous and public-spirited conduct is found to have been the most prudent.  The motives of our actions, not the success, give us here renown.  And could I return to that life from whence I am escaped, I would not change my character to imitate yours; I would again be Brutus rather than Atticus.  Even without the sweet hope of an eternal reward in a more perfect state, which is the strongest and most immovable support to the good under every misfortune, I swear by the gods I would not give up the noble feelings of my heart, that elevation of mind which accompanies active and suffering virtue, for your seventy-seven years of constant tranquillity, with all the praise you obtained from the learned men whom you patronised or the great men whom you courted. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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