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,
in 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 endeavoured
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, Lælius 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 vigour 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'œuvre_ of another age which has already begun to grow old,
has not merely neglected to restore the colours 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 coloured 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, because 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."