When Cicero faces off against Bartleby
And Melville talks economic inequality.
Herman Melville is no stranger to symbolic writing. Merely uttering the title of his most famous work (you know the one) conjures boundless interpretations of the color white, to say nothing of religious, romantic, maniacal, and other symbolism and allegory — too many to count. Suffice to say that the American bard knows precisely how and why to use imagery, if for nothing else than to challenge the generations of writers and critics dog-paddling in his wake.
So it’s no surprise that Cicero, the ancient Roman orator, has two cameos in Melville’s masterful novella Bartleby, the Scrivener. Melville, who studied Cicero, was deliberate with his inclusion because he wanted to say something specific about American society and capitalism.
Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853), a masterpiece of short fiction, is about a copyist in a small Wall Street law firm who one day refuses to work anymore. Melville wrote the story during the Gilded Age, a time when inequality between the haves and have-nots stretched the fabric of society, much like it’s doing so today. In Melville’s time there was Vanderbilt and Carnegie. Today substitute Bezos and Zuckerberg. Just like in the mid-19th century, economic injustice has sparked protests worldwide and the future of capitalism is tenuous. Bartleby, the first occupier of Wall Street, is a frustrated man of our times.
Bartleby, the first occupier of Wall Street, is a frustrated man of our times.
Cicero’s appearance in Bartleby supports the story’s overarching protest against the One Percent — a larger argument I make in a new introduction for the novella.
Who or what was Cicero?
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 B.C. E. — 43 B.C.E.) was a Roman statesman, lawyer, philosopher, and orator. He was a contemporary of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. A master of Latin prose, Cicero’s writings influenced Enlightenment-era thinkers like John Locke and Montesquieu. He was admired by America’s founding fathers for his “reasonableness” and for advocating for a society that is based on law and order. Cicero’s works remain in print today.
Cicero gets busted
Cicero — or, more precisely — Cicero’s bust appears twice in Bartleby. The first time is the scene in which Bartleby announces his famous line of protest, “I would prefer not to.” The frail copyist decides that he will not take up an assignment, perplexing his employer.
I looked at him steadfastly. His face was leanly composed, his gray eye dimly calm. Not a wrinkle of agitation rippled him. Had there been the least uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence in his manner; in other words, had there been anything ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises. But as it was, I should have as soon thought of turning my pale plaster-of-paris bust of Cicero out of doors. I stood gazing at him awhile, as he went on with his own writing, and then reseated myself at my desk. This is very strange, thought I. What had one best do?
The second time Cicero appears is during a heated exchange, where the lawyer is confounded by Bartleby’s passive stance.
“Will you tell me, Bartleby, where you were born?”
“I would prefer not to.”
“Will you tell me anything about yourself?”
“I would prefer not to.”
“But what reasonable objection can you have to speak to me? I feel friendly toward you.”
He did not look at me while I spoke, but kept his glance fixed upon my bust of Cicero, which as I then sat, was directly behind me, some six inches above my head.
A familiar character
As a young man around 1836, Melville was determined to become involved in local intellectual circles in Albany, New York. He joined a few fraternal organizations and clubs, including the Ciceronian Debating Society. The group was founded to improve members’ skills in composition, oratory, and debate.
Melville’s participation was contentious. At one point the author became entangled with the leader of a rival debating fraternity, the Philo Logos club. In a contest for the society’s presidency, his nemesis called Melville a “Ciceronian baboon.” A letter about Melville was published in the Microscope on April 15, 1837, accusing him of destroying the Ciceronian group and attempting to do the same with the Philo Logos.
He, like a weary pettifogger…has no fixed principles, but can bear as the wind blows without gripings of conscience. This he considers a masterly display of his political powers.
Cicero, the Aristocrat
Most of Bartleby’s plot unfolds in a law office. Cicero, one of history’s most famous lawyers, is comfortable in the setting. Why Cicero, though, and not another famous legal mind, like that of Julius Caesar or John Adams?
One interpretation is that Cicero’s bust represents brotherly love, a signal as to why the lawyer can’t bring himself to fire Bartleby. Another reading is that Cicero, the mighty orator, ironically sits mute, thereby stifling the conversation between a stubborn employee and his confused employer. This second interpretation is closer to the mark, but there’s more.
Beyond his skills in elocution, Cicero should be remembered as a staunch defender of tradition, aristocratic values, and oligarchic attitudes. A famous rivalry paints such a picture.
In 63 B.C.E. a struggle for power occurred between Cicero and Cataline. Cicero argued on behalf of the establishment while Cataline, who was of Cicero’s same upper economic class, stirred the passions of the poor by promising debt relief if he, Cataline, was elected to the Consul.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Catalina, patientia nostra?
In a famous speech Cicero opened with “How long, Cataline, will you go on abusing our patience?” (Quo usque tandem abutere, Catalina, patientia nostra?) The eloquent demand remains a fixture at protests even today, with variations on the phrase spotted at demonstrations in Italy in 2011 against Silvio Berlusconi and officials in Venice, and in Washington, D.C. in 2017.
Populares vs. optimates
Cataline and his political allies, including Julius Caesar, were for the populares. The main plank in Cataline’s platform was the cancellation of debts, similar to the positions held today by the likes of Bernie Sanders and the student debt relief movement. Cataline’s was a populist movement.
In contrast, Cicero’s patrons, the optimates, “were as hostile to the redistribution of state land as their fathers and grandfathers had been, and indeed shared their conservative instincts,” according to Cicero’s biographer, Anthony Everitt.
Cicero was a wealthy landowner and businessman. He also owned more than 20 slaves. And though the record is scant as to exactly how Cicero got so rich, his foreign service for the Republic was fruitful. According to historian Mary Beard, Cicero’s portfolio around 45 B.C.E. was valued around 13 million sesterces, “worth enough to keep more than 25,000 poor families alive for a year.”
The optimates, i.e., the aristocrats, were Cicero’s people. Everitt quotes advice that his brother, Quintus, gave Cicero as he courted his fellow elites: “You must cultivate [the aristocrats] diligently. You must call upon them, persuade them that politically we have always been in sympathy with the optimates and have never in the least been supporters of the populares.”
In the end, Cicero won the election against Cataline by a wide margin.
Some things stay the same
Knowing Cicero’s background, Melville’s insertion of his character in Bartleby becomes shrewdly apparent.
As I note in my introduction to the novella, research by the economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman shows that in the United States,
the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers — about 170,000 families in a country of 330 million people — control 20 percent of American wealth, the highest share since 1929. The top 1 percent control 39 percent of U.S. wealth, and the bottom 90 percent has only 26 percent.
In terms of economic inequality, Melville’s time was not much different from ours. In the 19th century, there were riots on Wall Street and general strikes across the country as the lower classes revolted against growing social and economic inequality. As Melville was writing Bartleby, immigrants and the destitute lived in squalor while the likes of Astor and Carnegie were amassing unfathomable fortunes. Times change, and yet some things seem to stay the same.
Bartleby is the 99%
Towering above him on a shelf, Cicero’s bust is representative of the lawyer’s conservative character. In the opening pages, Bartleby’s employer describes himself:
I am one of those unambitious lawyers who never addresses a jury, or in any way draws down public applause, but in the cool tranquility of a snug retreat, do a snug business among rich men’s bonds and mortgages and title-deeds. All who know me consider me an eminently safe man. The late John Jacob Astor, a personage little given to poetic enthusiasm, had no hesitation in pronouncing my first grand point to be prudence; my next, method.
Like Cicero, he is a traditionalist and he’s very comfortable being a member of the 19th century’s version of the optimates — the aristocrats. Just like in Cicero’s time, well-to-dos on Melville’s Wall Street look down upon the poor. According to Mary Beard, “the Roman wealthy found little virtue in poverty or in the poor or in an honest day’s work. They disdained the poor, and so did Cicero.” She quotes Cicero:
The cash that comes from selling your labor is vulgar and unacceptable for a gentleman … for wages are effectively the bonds of slavery.
The lawyer has made a wage slave of Bartleby. So when his servant resists, the employer is bewildered. The tables should not be turned like this. The lower class should know its place in society and not question or rebel against the higher class’s dictates. Discord leads to societal breakdown.
Nevertheless he persists. Bartleby stubbornly resists to do any more work for his employer. He further confounds and frustrates his boss by refusing to answer his questions. “I would prefer not to.” By spurning rhetorical debate, both lawyers — the employer and Cicero — are rendered speechless. They have no answer to Bartleby’s uppity resistance.
No wonder, then, that Melville describes Cicero’s bust being made of plaster of Paris and not marble. Cicero’s stance on the role of the benevolent oligarch isn’t solid; it’s hollow. Melville, who penned Bartleby while living in near penury, is all too aware of the Roman statesman’s philosophical shortcomings. Cicero’s weak position above the lawyer’s head can be easily toppled, if only Melville’s readers take up Bartleby’s protest.
Works referenced for this essay (affiliate links):
Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (Liveright, 2015)
Anthony Everitt, Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician (Random House, 2003)
Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Melville: A Biography (University of Massachusetts Press, 1998)
Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography. Volume I: 1819–1851 (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2005)
