Selected Works - Marcus Tullius Cicero

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The lavish are those who squander their money on public banquets, doles of meat among the people, gladiatorial shows, magnificent games, and wild-beast fights—vanities of which but a brief recollection will remain, or none at all. The generous, on the other hand, are those who employ their own means to ransom captives from brigands, or who assume their friends’ debts or help in providing dowries for their daughters, or assist them in acquiring property or increasing what they have. And so I wonder what Theophrastus could have been thinking about when he wrote his book on “Wealth.” It contains much that is fine; but his position is absurd, when he praises at great length the magnificent appointments of the popular games, and it is in the means for indulging in such expenditures that he finds the highest privilege of wealth. But to me the privilege it gives for the exercise of generosity, of which I have given a few illustrations, seems far higher and far more certain.

      How much more true and pertinent are Aristotle’s words, as he rebukes us for not being amazed at this extravagant waste of money, all to win the favour of the populace. “If people in time of siege,” he says, “are required to pay a mina for a pint of water, this seems to us at first beyond belief, and all are amazed; but, when they think about it, they make allowances for it on the plea of necessity. But in the matter of this enormous waste and unlimited expenditure we are not very greatly astonished, and that, too, though by it no extreme need is relieved, no dignity is enhanced, and the very gratification of the populace is but for a brief, passing moment; such pleasure as it is, too, is confined to the most frivolous, and even in these the very memory of their enjoyment dies as soon as the moment of gratification is past.” His conclusion, too, is excellent: “This sort of amusement pleases children, silly women, slaves, and the servile free; but a serious-minded man who weighs such matters with sound judgment cannot possibly approve of them.”

      And yet I realize that in our country, even in the good old times, it had become a settled custom to expect magnificent entertainments from the very best men in their year of aedileship. So both Publius Crassus, who was not merely surnamed “The Rich” but was rich in fact, gave splendid games in his aedileship; and a little later Lucius Crassus (with Quintus Mucius, the most unpretentious man in the world, as his colleague) gave most magnificent entertainments in his aedileship. Then came Gaius Claudius, the son of Appius, and, after him, many others—the Luculli, Hortensius, and Silanus. Publius Lentulus, however, in the year of my consulship, eclipsed all that had gone before him, and Scaurus emulated him. And my friend Pompey’s exhibitions in his second consulship were the most magnificent of all. And so you see what I think about all this sort of thing.

      XVII. Still we should avoid any suspicion of penuriousness. Mamercus was a very wealthy man, and his refusal of the aedileship was the cause of his defeat for the consulship. If, therefore, such entertainment is demanded by the people, men of right judgment must at least consent to furnish it, even if they do not like the idea. But in so doing they should keep within their means, as I myself did. They should likewise afford such entertainment, if gifts of money to the people are to be the means of securing on some occasion some more important or more useful object. Thus Orestes recently won great honour by his public dinners given in the streets, on the pretext of their being a tithe-offering. Neither did anybody find fault with Marcus Seius for supplying grain to the people at an as{76} the peck at a time when the market-price was prohibitive; for he thus succeeded in disarming the bitter and deep-seated prejudice of the people against him at an outlay neither very great nor discreditable to him in view of the fact that he was aedile at the time. But the highest honour recently fell to my friend Milo, who bought a band of gladiators for the sake of the country, whose preservation then depended upon my recall from exile, and with them put down the desperate schemes, the reign of terror, of Publius Clodius.

      The justification for gifts of money, therefore, is either necessity or expediency. And, in making them even in such cases, the rule of the golden mean is best. To be sure, Lucius Philippus, the son of Quintus, a man of great ability and unusual renown, used to make it his boast that without giving any entertainments he had risen to all the positions looked upon as the highest within the gift of the state. Cotta could say the same, and Curio. I, too, may make this boast my own—to a certain extent;{77} for in comparison with the eminence of the offices to which I was unanimously elected at the earliest legal age—and this was not the good fortune of any one of those just mentioned—the outlay in my aedileship was very inconsiderable.

      Again, the expenditure of money is better justified when it is made for walls, docks, harbours, aqueducts, and all those works which are of service to the community. There is, to be sure, more of present satisfaction in what is handed out, like cash down; nevertheless public improvements win us greater gratitude with posterity. Out of respect for Pompey’s memory I am rather diffident about expressing any criticism of theatres, colonnades, and new temples; and yet the greatest philosophers do not approve of them—our Panaetius himself, for example, whom I am following, not slavishly translating, in these books; so, too, Demetrius of Phalerum, who denounces Pericles, the foremost man of Greece, for throwing away so much money on the magnificent, far-famed Propylaea. But this whole theme is discussed at length in my books on “The Republic.”

      To conclude, the whole system of public bounties in such extravagant amount is intrinsically wrong; but it may under certain circumstances be necessary to make them; even then they must be proportioned to our ability and regulated by the golden mean.

      XVIII. Now, as touching that second division of gifts of money, those which are prompted by a spirit of generosity, we ought to look at different cases differently. The case of the man who is overwhelmed by misfortune is different from that of the one who is seeking to better his condition, though he suffers from no actual distress. It will be the duty of charity to incline more to the unfortunate, unless, perchance, they deserve their misfortune. But of course we ought by no means to withhold our assistance altogether from those who wish for aid, not to save them from utter ruin but to enable them to reach a higher degree of fortune. But, in selecting worthy cases, we ought to use judgment and discretion. For, as Ennius says so admirably,

      “Good deeds misplaced, methinks, are evil deeds.”

      Furthermore, the favour conferred upon a man who is good and grateful finds its reward, in such a case, not only in his own good-will but in that of others. For, when generosity is not indiscriminate giving, it wins most gratitude and people praise it with more enthusiasm, because goodness of heart in a man of high station becomes the common refuge of everybody. Pains must, therefore, be taken to benefit as many as possible with such kindnesses that the memory of them shall be handed down to children and to children’s children, so that they too may not be ungrateful. For all men detest ingratitude and look upon the sin of it as a wrong committed against themselves also, because it discourages generosity; and they regard the ingrate as the common foe of all the poor.

      Ransoming prisoners from servitude and relieving the poor is a form of charity that is a service to the state as well as to the individual. And we find in one of Crassus’s orations the full proof given that such beneficence used to be the common practice of our order. This form of charity, then, I much prefer to the lavish expenditure of money for public exhibitions. The former is suited to men of worth and dignity, the latter to those shallow flatterers, if I may call them so, who tickle with idle pleasure, so to speak, the fickle fancy of the rabble.

      It will, moreover, befit a gentleman to be at the same time liberal in giving and not inconsiderate in exacting his dues, but in every business relation—in buying or selling, in hiring or letting, in relations arising out of adjoining houses and lands—to be fair, reasonable, often freely yielding much of his own right, and keeping out of litigation as far as his interests will permit and perhaps even a little farther. For it is not only generous occasionally to abate a little of one’s rightful claims, but it is sometimes even advantageous. We should, however, have a care for our personal property, for it is discreditable to let it run through our fingers; but we must guard it in such a way that there shall be no suspicion of meanness or avarice. For the greatest privilege of wealth is, beyond all peradventure, the opportunity it affords for doing good, without sacrificing one’s fortune.

      Hospitality also is a theme of Theophrastus’s praise, and rightly so. For, as it seems to me at least, it is most proper that the homes of distinguished men should be open to distinguished

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