Ad Familiares 11.27
Ad Familiares 11.27
Headnote
Cicero to C. Matius, from the Tusculan villa, between 23 and 30 August 44 BC — Perseus dateline Scr. in Tusculano inter x et iii K. Sept. a. 710 (44). C. Matius was an old equestrian friend of Cicero’s and a devoted personal friend of Julius Caesar. After the Ides, Matius had taken on the management of the ludi Victoriae Caesaris that Octavian put on in late July, and was widely reported to be the leading voice of the Caesarian remnant in private conversation in the city. The complaint to which the letter answers had been brought from Matius by Trebatius: that Cicero — or at any rate Cicero’s circle — was treating Matius as having betrayed the friendship by aligning with the heirs of the murdered dictator, and was reporting that Matius had voted for one of Antony’s bills.
The letter is one of the major documents in the corpus on the ethics of friendship under tyranny. Cicero defends his amicitia with Matius across the whole arc of their thirty years’ acquaintance — their early familiarity, Matius’s offices on his behalf in 49, the hurried visits and consolations of the civil-war years — and then turns to the present complaint with a piece of distinctively Ciceronian casuistry: there are two ways the defence of Matius’s conduct can be argued, and he, Cicero, is accustomed to take the more generous of them. He insists on the falsity of the rumour about the vote; he praises Matius’s loyalty to a dead friend; but he also makes very plain, in the eighth section, his own view that “the liberty of one’s country is to be set above the life of a friend,” and that Caesar “was a king.”
The letter pairs with Matius’s celebrated reply (11.28). Together the two are the closest surviving exchange we have between a constitutionalist and an unrepentant Caesarian in the autumn of 44, and the closest Cicero anywhere comes to writing out, in a letter, the philosophical case he was simultaneously making in De Amicitia and De Officiis for an amicitia bounded by honestum. The Latinity is high-rhetorical throughout — anaphora at the heads of the recollections of 49 and 48, the controlled contrast of vetustas and amor at the opening of $§$~2, the doubled defence-structure of $§$~7 (“some things I deny, others I defend”), and the sustained utramque partem disputation at the close.
I have not yet quite settled whether our friend Trebatius brought me more vexation or more pleasure — a man as full of dutifulness as he is of affection for us both. For when I had come to my place at Tusculum towards evening, the next day he came to me in the morning, although his health was not yet sufficiently strong. When I scolded him for sparing his health too little, he answered that nothing had felt longer to him than the time before seeing me. “Is there any news?” I said. He brought to me your complaint. Before I reply to it, I will set a few things before you.
nondum satis constitui molestiaene plus an voluptatis attulerit mihi Trebatius noster, homo cum plenus offici tum utriusque nostrum amantissimus. nam cum in Tusculanum vesperi venissem, postridie ille ad me, nondum satis firmo corpore cum esset, mane venit. quem cum obiurgarem quod parum valetudini parceret, tum ille nihil sibi longius fuisse quam ut me videret. num quidnam inquam ’novi?’ detulit ad me querelam tuam. de qua prius quam respondeo pauca proponam.
So far as I can search the past by memory, no friend of mine is older than you. But long standing has something in common with many; affection does not. I cared for you from the day I came to know you, and I judged that I was cared for by you. Your departure afterwards, and a long one at that, and our public ambitions, and the unlikeness of our manner of life, did not allow our inclinations to be cemented together by daily company; yet I recognised your feeling towards me many years before the civil war, when Caesar was in Gaul. For what you thought to be greatly to my advantage — and not without advantage to Caesar himself — you brought about: that he should care for me, court me, count me among his own. I pass over many things which in those days were said, written, shared between us with the utmost intimacy; for graver matters followed.
quantum memoria repetere praeterita possum, nemo est mihi te amicus antiquior. sed vetustas habet aliquid commune cum multis, amor non habet. dilexi te quo die cognovi meque a te diligi iudicavi. tuus deinde discessus isque diuturnus ambitio nostra et vitae dissimilitudo non est passa voluntates nostras consuetudine conglutinari; tuum tamen erga me animum agnovi multis annis ante bellum civile, cum Caesar esset in Gallia. quod enim vehementer mihi utile esse putabas nec inutile ipsi Caesari perfecisti, ut ille me diligeret, coleret, haberet in suis. multa praetereo quae temporibus illis inter nos familiarissime dicta, scripta, communicata sunt; graviora enim consecuta sunt.
At the start of the civil war, when you were on your way to Caesar at Brundisium, you came to me at my villa near Formiae. First of all, that very visit — how much it was worth, especially in those times! Then, do you suppose that I have forgotten your counsel, your conversation, your humanity? In all of which I remember that Trebatius shared. Nor indeed have I forgotten the letter you sent me when you had gone out to meet Caesar in the territory, I think, of Trebula.
et initio belli civilis cum Brundisium versus ires ad Caesarem, venisti ad me in Formianum. primum hoc ipsum quanti, praesertim temporibus illis! deinde oblitum me putas consili, sermonis, humanitatis tuae? quibus rebus interesse memini Trebatium. nec vero sum oblitus litterarum tuarum quas ad me misisti, cum Caesari obviam venisses in agro, ut arbitror, Trebulano.
There followed that time when either my sense of honour, or my duty, or fortune, compelled me to set out to Pompey. What office of yours, what zeal of yours, was wanting either towards me in my absence or towards my people who were present? Whom, moreover, did all who belong to me judge a closer friend to me and to themselves than you? I came to Brundisium. Do you suppose that I have forgotten with what speed — the moment you heard — you flew to me from Tarentum? what your sitting beside me was, what your speech was, what the rallying was of my spirit broken by the dread of our common misfortunes?
secutum illud tempus est, cum me ad Pompeium proficisci sive pudor meus coegit sive officium sive fortuna. quod officium tuum, quod studium vel in absentem me vel in praesentis meos defuit? quem porro omnes mei et mihi et sibi te amiciorem iudicaverunt? veni Brundisium. oblitumne me putas qua celeritate, ut primum audieris, ad me Tarento advolaris, quae tua fuerit adsessio, oratio, confirmatio animi mei fracti communium miseriarum metu?
At last, eventually, we began to be at Rome. What was lacking to our intimacy? In the greatest questions — how I should conduct myself with respect to Caesar — I made use of your counsel; in the rest, of your good office. To whom, except Caesar, besides me, did you grant the favour of calling at his house, of spending many hours there often in the most delightful conversation? It was then too, if you remember, that you urged me to write these works of philosophy. After Caesar’s return, what was a greater concern to you than that I should be on the most familiar terms with him? Which you had brought about.
tandem aliquando Romae esse coepimus. quid defuit nostrae familiaritati? in maximis rebus quonam modo gererem me adversus Caesarem usus tuo consilio sum, in reliquis officio. cui tu tribuisti excepto Caesare praeter me ut domum ventitares horasque multas saepe suavissimo sermone consumeres, tum cum etiam, si meministi, ut haec filosofou/mena scriberem tu me impulisti? post Caesaris reditum quid tibi maiori curae fuit quam ut essem ego illi quam familiarissimus? quod effeceras.
To what end, then, has this discourse run longer than I had thought? Because I was astonished that you, who ought to know all this, should have believed that anything had been done by me at variance with our friendship. For besides what I have just recounted, which is on record and conspicuous, I have many things more hidden, which I can scarcely follow out in words. Everything about you delights me, but most of all the greatest things: a great loyalty in friendship, judgement, weight, constancy — and then charm, humanity, learning.
quorsum igitur haec oratio longior quam putaram? quia sum admiratus te, qui haec nosse deberes, quicquam a me commissum, quod esset alienum nostra amicitia, credidisse. nam praeter haec quae commemoravi, quae testata sunt et inlustria, habeo multa occultiora, quae vix verbis exsequi possum. omnia me tua delectant sed maxime maxima cum fides in amicitia, consilium, gravitas, constantia tum lepos, humanitas, litterae.
For which reason — now I come back to the complaint — I, in the first place, did not believe that you had cast your vote for that law; and in the second place, had I believed it, I would never have supposed that you had done so without some just cause. Your standing makes it so that whatever you do is noted; while men’s ill will makes it so that things are reported as harsher than they really were when done by you. If you do not hear of these things, I do not know what to say. For my part, whenever I hear, I defend you as I know I am accustomed to be defended by you against my enemies. The defence, moreover, is twofold: some things are such as I am accustomed flatly to deny — as about that very vote — and others are such that I defend them as having been done by you out of piety and humanity, as about your management of the games.
quapropter (redeo nunc ad querelam) ego te suffragium tulisse in illa lege primum non credidi; deinde, si credidissem, numquam id sine aliqua iusta causa existimarem te fecisse. dignitas tua facit ut animadvertatur quicquid facias, malevolentia autem hominum ut non nulla durius quam a te facta sint proferantur. ea tu si non audis, quid dicam nescio; equidem, si quando audio, tam defendo quam me scio a te contra iniquos meos solere defendi. defensio autem est duplex; alia sunt quae liquido negare soleam, ut de isto ipso suffragio, alia quae defendam a te pie fieri et humane, ut de curatione ludorum.
But it does not escape you, learned man that you are, that if Caesar was a king — which to me at least he seems to have been — one can argue your case on either side: either on the side I am accustomed to take, that your loyalty and humanity are to be praised, since you love a friend even though dead; or on the side some take, that the liberty of one’s country is to be set above the life of a friend. Out of such discussions, would that my arguments had been carried back to you! Indeed those two things, which are the greatest of your praises, who recounts either more gladly than I, or more often: that you were the gravest authority both against undertaking the civil war and for moderating the victory? On which point I have found no one who did not agree with me. For which reason I am grateful to our friend Trebatius for giving me cause for this letter; in which, if you do not put trust, you will have judged me devoid of all duty and humanity. Than which nothing can be more grievous to me, or more foreign to you.
sed te, hominem doctissimum, non fugit, si Caesar rex fuerit (quod mihi quidem videtur), in utramque partem de tuo officio disputari posse, vel in eam qua ego soleo uti, laudandam esse fidem et humanitatem tuam, qui amicum etiam mortuum diligas, vel in eam qua non nulli utuntur, libertatem patriae vitae amici anteponendam. ex his sermonibus utinam essent delatae ad te disputationes meae! illa vero duo, quae maxima sunt laudum tuarum, quis aut libentius is quam ego commemorat aut saepius, te et non suscipiendi belli civilis gravissimum auctorem fuisse et moderandae victoriae? in quo qui mihi non adsentiretur inveni neminem. qua re habeo gratiam Trebatio, familiari nostro, qui mihi dedit causam harum litterarum; quibus nisi credideris, me omnis offici et humanitatis expertem iudicaris; quo nec mihi gravius quicquam potest esse nec te alienius.