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Let us hope, however, that the zeal of the learned may stop short of that displayed by Simon Du Bos, or we may have whole treatises of Cicero of which he himself was guiltless. I can hardly content myself with classifying the De Republica and the De Legibus under the same name with these essays of Cicero, which are undoubtedly moral in their nature.
In no other way can I explain to myself the feeling of subservience to Brutus which Cicero so generally expresses: it exists in none other of his relations of life. Political subservience there is to Pompey; but he can laugh at Pompey, and did not dedicate to him his treatises De Republica, or De Legibus. To Appius Claudius he was very courteous.
The brave Gaul, who had done his best to defend his country and had carried himself to the last with a fine gallantry, was kept by his conqueror six years in chains and then strangled amid the glories of that conqueror's triumph, a signal instance of the mercy which has been attributed to Cæsar as his special virtue. In this year, too, Cicero's dialogues with Atticus, De Legibus, were written.
Take down, for instance, the volume of the Camden called "De Antiquis Legibus Liber," otherwise, "Cronica Majorum et Vicecomitum Londoniarum," printed from "a small folio, nine inches and a half in length and seven inches in breadth, the binding of white leather covering wooden backs, and containing 159 leaves of parchment, paged continuously with Arabic cyphers."
But in this, De Legibus, we may presume that he intends to give instructions for the guidance of the public, whereas in the other he is communicating to a few chosen friends those esoteric doctrines which it would be dangerous to give to the world at large. There is a charming passage, in which we are told not to devote the rich things of the earth to the gods.
But Cicero declares in his dialogue with Atticus, De Legibus, written when he was fifty-five years old, in the prime of his intellect, that "of all the glories and divine gifts which your Athens has produced for the improvement of men nothing surpasses these mysteries, by which the harshness of our uncivilized life has been softened, and we have been lifted up to humanity; and as they are called 'initia," by which aspirants were initiated, "so we have in truth found in them the seeds of a new life.
Quia quicunque natus in vna ciuitate, vel patria, si tantummodo moueat se ad proximam ciuitatem, inueniet ibi procul dubio aliquam differentiam, vel diuersitatem in idiomate linguae, vel in modo loquendi, in moribus hominum, in occupationibus, in legibus, in consuetudinibus, vel etiam in agrorom fructibus, in arborum frugibus, seu in his quae gignuntur in terra, in aere, et in aquis.
A few years later he wrote his Tractatus de Legibus Angliae, which was in fact a handbook for the Curia Regis, and described the new process in civil trials and the rules established by the Norman lawyers for the King's Court and its travelling judges. Thomas Brown, the king's almoner, besides his daily record of the king's doings, left behind him an account of the laws of the kingdom.
It was not so much a new law as an administrative act; but it formed a precedent for later times, and the energy of the justices of trailbaston effected a real, if temporary, improvement in the condition of the country. So important was the measure that a chronicler calls the year in which this was enacted the "year of trailbaston". Liber de antiquis legibus, p. 250.
It was based on a statesmanlike instinct; and had it been possible for that instinct to express itself practically in a positive policy like that of Augustus, instead of showing itself in philosophical treatises like the de Legibus, or on occasional moments of danger like that of the Bona Dea sacrilege, it is quite possible that much mischief might have been averted.
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