DCCCLX (BRUT. I, 16)
M. IUNIUS BRUTUS TO CICERO (AT
ROME)
MACEDONIA (MAY)
I1 have read an extract from your letter to
Octavius which was sent me by Atticus. Your zeal
and care for my safety gave me no novel pleasure;
for it is not merely a matter of habit, but of
daily habit, to be told of you that you have said
or done something in defence of my position which
displayed your fidelity and complimentary opinion
of me. But that same extract of your letter to
Octavius about us caused me a distress as great as
my heart is capable of feeling. For you thank him
in the name of the Republic in such terms! With
such abject and whispering humbleness-why must I
write the word? I blush to think of my position
and high estate, yet I must write it-you commend
our safety to him! Could any death be worse
disaster? You, in fact,. avow that the slavery is
not abolished, only the master changed! Recall
your words and dare to say that those prayers are
not the prayers of an enslaved
subject to a tyrant. The one and only thing-you
say—that is demanded and expected of him
is that he consent to the safety of those
citizens, of whom the loyalists and the people
have a good opinion. What? If he doesn't consent,
shall we not be safe? And yet it is better not to
be than to be by his favour. 2 Upon my
honour I do not think that all the gods are so
hostile to the safety of the Roman people, that we
need entreat Octavius for the safety of any
citizen, not to say for "the liberators of the
world"—for there is a certain advantage
in using strong language, and at any rate there is
a propriety in doing so to people who do not know
what every man ought to fear or to aim at.
Do you confess, Cicero,
that Octavius has this power, and are you his
friend? Or, if you regard me with affection, do
you wish me to appear at Rome, when in order to do
so safely I have had to be recommended to that
boy? Why do you thank him, if you think he has to
be asked to allow and suffer us to keep our lives?
Is it to be regarded as a favour that he has
preferred to be himself rather than a second
Antony, to whom we had to make petitions like
that? Does anyone address to the destroyer of
another's tyranny, and not rather to its
successor, a prayer that those who have done the
most splendid services to their country may be
allowed their lives? This is mere weakness and a
counsel of despair. And the fault is not yours
more than everyone else's. It was this that egged
on Caesar to desire royalty, and induced Antony
after his death to aim at occupying the place of
the dead man, and has at the present moment put
that boy of yours on such a pedestal, as to make
you think that he must be absolutely entreated to
grant life to such men as us, and that we shall
even now be able to enjoy a bare safety from the
pity of one man, and by nothing else whatever. But
if we had remembered that we were Romans, these
dregs of mankind would not have conceived the
ambition of playing the tyrant with more boldness
than we should have forbidden it: nor would Antony
have had his ambition more roused by
Caesar's royalty, than his fears excited by
Caesar's death. For yourself; a consular and the
avenger of such abominable crimes—and I
fear that by their suppression the mischief was
only postponed by you for a short
time—how can you contemplate your own
achievements, and at the same time countenance, or
at any rate endure these things with such abject
humbleness as to have the air of countenancing
them? Again, what was your private and personal
quarrel with Antony? Why, it was just because he
made this very claim—that our safety
should be asked as a favour from him; that we
should hold our civil rights on
sufferance—we from whom he had himself
received his freedom; that he should be absolute
in the Republic—it was for these reasons
that you thought we must take up arms to prevent
his playing the tyrant. Was the object of doing so
that, when he had been prevented, we should have
to petition another man to allow himself to be put
in his place? Or was it that the Republic should
be its own master and at its own disposal? Surely:
unless we are to suppose that our objection was
not to slavery but to the terms of our slavery!
And yet, not only had we the opportunity of
supporting our high estate with Antony as a
liberal master, but even of enjoying rewards and
honours as his partners to the top of our
ambition: for what would he have refused to men,
whose submissiveness he saw would be the greatest
bulwark of his tyranny? But nothing seemed
sufficient to make us barter our honour and
freedom. This very boy,
whom the name of Caesar appears to instigate
against the slayers of Caesar, what would he give,
if there were a chance of such traffic, to be as
powerful with our support, as he certainly will be
when we choose life for its own sake, and the
possession of money, and the title of consulars!
But Caesar will have perished in vain: for why did
we rejoice at his death, if we were to become none
the less slaves when he is dead? No one else cares
about these things, but may the gods and goddesses
take from me every. thing sooner than the
resolution of never conceding what I would not
endure in Caesar—I won't say to the heir
of the man I killed, but even to my father himself
if he were to come to life again-namely, that he
should, without a protest from me, be more
powerful than the laws and the senate. Are you so deluded as to think that the rest of
the world will be' free from one without whose
consent there is no footing for us in Rome?
Moreover, how can you possibly get what you ask?
For you ask that he would consent to our safety:
do we therefore appear likely to accept safety,
since we have accepted life? But how can we accept
it, if we previously give up position and liberty?
Do you count the fact of living at Rome as
complete citizenship? It is circumstance, not the
particular place of residence, that must secure me
that. I was neither properly a full citizen while
Caesar was alive, except when I had resolved upon
doing that deed; nor can I ever be anywhere an
exile so long as I abhor servitude and submission
to insult worse than every other evil. To ask a
man who has adopted a tyrant's name as his own
3 for
the safety of the avengers and destroyers of the
tyranny—is not this to fall back into
the very dungeon from which you have just escaped?
Why, in Greek states when tyrants are put down
their sons are included under the same punishment.
4 Am I to desire to see
a state, or to regard it as a state at all, which
is incapable of recovering even a freedom handed
down by its ancestors and rooted in its very
being, and which is more afraid of the name of a
slain tyrant in the person of a mere boy, than
confident in itself; though seeing the very man
who possessed the most over-weening power removed
by the valour of a few? For myself—do
not henceforth recommend me to your Caesar, nor
yourself either, if you will listen to me. You
must have a great value for the few years that
your time of life allows you, if for their sake
you are going to be a suppliant to that boy of
yours. Again, take care that those very splendid
attacks which you have made and are still making
upon Antony, instead of getting you credit for
courage, are not misinterpreted into a belief that
you are afraid. For if you think Octavius the sort
of person from whom to make petitions for our
safety, you will be thought not to
have fled from a master, but to have looked out
for a more agreeable master. Of your praising him
for his conduct up to this time I quite approve,
for it deserves to be praised, provided that he
adopted these measures against the tyrannical
power of another and not in support of his own.
But when you shew your opinion that he is not only
to be allowed so much power, but is even to have
so much tendered to him by yourself; as to be
petitioned not to refuse us our lives, you are
making a very bad bargain with him, for you are
giving away to him the very thing of which the
Republic seemed to be in possession through him.
And it does not occur to you that, if Octavius
deserves those honours for waging war on Antony,
to those who have cut up that mischief by the
roots—of which the present position is
but the last trace—the Roman people will
never give what is an adequate reward of their
service, though it should heap everything it had
to give upon them at once. See too how much more
awake people are to actual fear than to the memory
of past terrors. Because Antony is still alive and
in arms, while in regard to Caesar what could and
was bound to be done is all over and cannot be
undone, Octavius is the man whose decision as to
us is awaited by the Roman people; we are in such
a position that one man has to be petitioned to
enable us to live. I however—to return
to your policy—so far from being the
sort of man to supplicate, am one forcibly to
coerce those who demand that supplications should
be addressed to them. If I can't do that, I will
withdraw far from the servile herd and will for
myself regard as Rome wherever I am able to be
free. I shall feel only pity for men like
yourself; if neither age nor honours nor the
example of other men's courage has been able to
lessen your clinging to life. For my part I shall
only think myself happy if I abide with firmness
and persistency in the idea that my patriotism has
had its reward: for what is there better than the
memory of good actions, and for a man-wanting
nothing except liberty—to disregard the
vicissitudes of human life? But at any rate I will
not yield to the yielders, nor be conquered by
those who are willing to be conquered themselves.
I will try every expedient, every plan: and I will
never desist from the attempt to rescue our
country from slavery. If the luck follows which ought to follow, I shall rejoice:
if not, I shall rejoice all the same, for on what
better deeds or thoughts can my life be spent than
on those which are directed to the liberation of
my fellow citizens? For you, Cicero, I beg and
entreat you not to give in to fatigue or despair.
In warding off actually existing evils ever seek
to discover those that will occur if they are not
prevented, and so prevent their creeping in upon
us. Consider that the brave and independent
spirit, with which as consul and now as a consular
you have vindicated the freedom of the state,
ceases to exist if a consistent and even tenor of
conduct is not preserved. For I confess that tried
virtue is in a harder position than virtue that is
unknown. We exact good deeds as a debt: we assail
the reverse with anger in our hearts, as though we
were cheated by such men. So, for instance, though
it is a most laudable thing that Cicero should
resist Antony, yet because the consul of that time
is thought naturally to guarantee the consular of
today, no one admires him. And if this same Cicero
when dealing with others has distorted his
judgment, which he kept unshaken with such
steadiness and high spirit in routing Antony, he
will not only snatch the glory of future action
from his own grasp, but will even force his past
career to fade from sight (for there is nothing
which is truly great in itself; unless it is
deliberate and systematic), because no one is
under a greater obligation to love the Republic
and to be the champion of liberty, whether we
regard his ability or his great past or the eager
demands upon him from all the world. Wherefore
Octavius ought not to be petitioned to consent to
our safety. Rather do you rouse yourself to the
fixed belief that the state in which you have
performed the most splendid services will be free
and honoured, if only the people have leaders in
their resistance to the plots of traitors.
MACEDONIA (MAY)
