Cicero

5

AGAINST CATILINA

Campaign and Conspiracy: 63 BC

Cicero aimed to scale the summit of Roman political life at the first possible opportunity or, as the phrase went, “in his year.” A two-year interval was required by law between a Praetorship and a Consulship and when he left office as Praetor in December 66, Cicero laid down his powers completely, forgoing the customary provincial governorship, and at once began planning his campaign for the Consulship in 63. The election would be held in the summer of the preceding year.

Quintus wrote a “Short Guide to Electioneering” (Commentariolum petitionis) for his brother, in which he set out a comprehensive campaign strategy. (Some scholars regard the document as a rhetorical exercise of the imperial age, but, with its good sense and knowledge of the period, it is to all appearances authentic.) There is a good deal in it which today’s politicians would find instructive, as when Quintus observed that candidates should not hesitate to be generous with pledges and assurances. “People naturally prefer you to lie to them rather than refuse them your help,” he writes. There is advice about the specific obstacles Cicero was facing, chief of which was his status as a New Man. “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.”

Of Cicero’s six rivals, four were hopeless electoral prospects, respectable but dull—and in one case probably dull-witted. The other two raised very different considerations. Caius Antonius was the son of the great orator, Marcus Antonius; he was corrupt, often insolvent and with little native ability or pluck. He had been disgraced in 70 and expelled from the Senate but managed all the same to be reelected to the Praetorship. Although unimpressive, he was acceptable to the political establishment and for that reason had to be taken seriously.

Lucius Sergius Catilina was an altogether more formidable opponent. He was one of a line of able and rebellious young aristocrats during the declining years of the Roman Republic who refused to settle down after early indiscretions and enter respectable politics as defenders of the status quo. They usually joined the populares. Sometimes they did so out of youthful idealism and intellectual conviction, but others were simply rebelling against family discipline. They often badly needed money.

In recent years the failure of agriculture and the sudden block in trade with, and tax revenues from, the eastern provinces following the resurgence of Mithridates had created a cash-flow crisis for the state of Rome and for many citizens. So far as we can make it out, the main plank of Catilina’s political program was a general cancellation of debts. This thoroughly frightened the propertied classes. How much popular support the policy attracted is harder to say. In the absence of a proper banking system, the web of credit spread through every level of society. While debt cancellation would to some extent benefit the poor more than the rich, in many respects it would simply shift the problem of financial liquidity around the system rather than get rid of it, replacing one set of bankrupts with another.

Whatever Catilina’s precise policies, he stood for, or was part of, the wider popularis movement, which step by step was dismantling Sulla’s reforms and was set on weakening the Senate’s hold on the levers of government. The radicals seem not to have had a clear set of proposals and seized opportunities as they came along.

The Senate had no answer to Rome’s problems and indeed sought none. Its aim was simply to maintain the constitution and resist the continual attacks on its authority. Above all, it needed to conserve its forces for the day of Pompey’s return. On the likely assumption that he would defeat Mithridates and bring Asia Minor back under Roman control, he would acquire immense prestige and would overshadow all his peers. Not only that, he would come back to Italy at the head of a victorious army and would be in a position to control, or even take over, the government.

Born into an old but impoverished family, Catilina was about the same age as Cicero. Their paths had first crossed during the War of the Allies, when they both served as very young men on Cnaeus Pompeius Strabo’s military staff. Later, during the civil war between Sulla and Marius, Catilina had taken part in the horrifying murder of Cicero’s cousin and Marius’s nephew, the Praetor Marcus Marius Gratidianus. He had been accused, with what truth we do not know, of having had sex with a Vestal Virgin, Fabia, the half-sister of Cicero’s wife, Terentia. He was also believed to have killed his own son because he was in love with a certain Aurelia Orestilla, who would not agree to marry a man with a child. Despite a pervading smell of scandal, he rose steadily up the political ladder and was Praetor in 68. He then spent a year as governor of the province of Africa and was back in Rome in mid-66.

It was at this point that he began to flirt with revolutionary illegality. Like other reformers before him, Catilina found it advisable to surround himself with bodyguards. Hostile contemporaries put a sexual gloss on this. “No one has ever had such a talent for seducing young men,” Cicero remarked. Sallust claimed that Catilina recruited “debauchees, adulterers and gamblers, who have squandered their inheritances in gaming dens, pot houses and brothels.”

Like every Roman politician Catilina needed to create a coterie of supporters on the basis of favors provided. What was unusual about him was his focus on the young; this may reflect his social and personal tastes or, alternatively, hostility in respectable circles, where alarmist stories deterred mature and experienced citizens from joining his cause. His following was said to include criminals and informers alongside members of his own class. He was reported to reward his youthful supporters handsomely for their loyalty, procuring mistresses for some and dogs and horses for others. Cicero gave an account of a party attended by a certain Quintus Gallius, a friend of Catilina, which evokes the raffish atmosphere of his circle.

There are shouts and screams, screeching females, there is deafening music. I thought I could make out some people entering and others leaving, some of them staggering from the effects of the wine, some of them still yawning from yesterday’s boozing. Among them was Gallius, perfumed and wreathed with flowers; the floor was filthy, soiled with wine and covered with withered garlands and fish bones.

The picture classical historians give of Catilina is a garish one and there is evidence that it may be exaggerated. Some years later, in 56, Cicero found himself obliged, to his clear embarrassment, to put in a good word for Catilina when he was representing one of his former followers on trial for murder. He offered a less diabolic likeness of a complex and many-sided personality, and one that is both more plausible and more attractive. He said:

Catilina had many excellent qualities, not indeed maturely developed, but at least sketched out roughly in outline.… There was a good deal about him that exercised a corrupting effect on other people; and yet he also undeniably possessed a gift for stimulating his associates into vigorous activity. Catilina was at one and the same time a furnace of inordinate sensual passions and a serious student of military affairs. I do not believe that the world has ever seen such a portent of divergent, contrary, contradictory tastes and appetites.

Whatever the truth about his personality, Catilina now began to get into serious trouble. He was put on notice of trial for extortion in Africa. At about the same time, during the summer of 66, the two Consuls-elect for 65 were disqualified for bribery. Catilina would have liked to stand for one of the vacancies but, because of the legal threat hanging over his own head, was debarred. Furious, he is said to have colluded with the two disgraced men and a bankrupt young noble in a plot to assassinate the replacement Consuls when they took up office on January 1, 65, kill as many Senators as possible and seize one of the Consulships for himself. The plot, if it existed at all, failed and the moment passed.

Some have argued that Cicero had a hand in making up or greatly embellishing the story (he referred to it in an election speech, for which a politician is not on oath). It is impossible to deduce what really happened from the available evidence. But it is probably true that at worst Catilina was beginning angrily to flex his conspiratorial muscles. This confused business is known as the first Catilinarian conspiracy, but the above version of events may simply have been black propaganda devised against Catilina a couple of years later.

Two more substantial figures can be detected in the shadows of this mysterious affair. Caius Julius Caesar was now a mature politician in his mid-thirties. Working with Crassus, who provided generous subsidies, he quietly supported Catilina’s endeavors from the wings. Indeed, according to another version of the story, it was not Catilina (who does not even receive a mention) who conceived the massacre of Rome’s political establishment, but Crassus and Caesar, who planned to become Dictator and his deputy, the Master of Horse, respectively. A different denouement was offered to this story: Crassus, through nervousness or scruple, failed to turn up at the appointed hour. So Caesar decided that discretion was the better part of valor and failed to give the agreed signal for the assassination.

It is an unlikely tale, but, if some kind of coup d’état was being attempted, the key player would surely have been Crassus rather than Caesar. The accusations implicating Caesar can be traced to imaginative attacks by his opponents. Crassus, by contrast, had both the means and a powerful motive for trying to assert himself as the leading man in the state—namely, the continuing, maddening dominance of Pompey. He would have been irritated by the fact that the two men who won the by-elections for the Consulship of 65 were known adherents of Pompey. However, having helped Catilina financially, he may have gone on to ask himself whether, on reflection, it was in his interest as a multimillionaire to support a man who proposed to abolish debts. Massively rich but politically cautious, he was willing to wound but afraid to strike.

Caesar was beginning to move center stage. Throughout his career he was always a high spender, on both his pleasures and his politics. When he was Aedile in 65, he borrowed himself almost into bankruptcy to create the most exciting and magnificent spectacles and gladiatorial shows that money could buy, which he piously dedicated to the memory of his dead father. He set up stands in the Forum to create an arena into which gladiators emerged from the network of tunnels below the pavement. But he went further: building temporary colonnades, he took over most of the rest of the square and the neighboring halls as well as the Capitol Hill and crammed them with exhibitions. He wanted to make sure that his year as Aedile was not soon forgotten.

In the eyes of his contemporaries, Caesar was cast in the mold of a Catilina: bright, radical and scandalous. He had already acquired an exotic reputation. His adventures during his teens when he had been on the run from Sulla had been only the start. In his twenties, like many young upper-class Romans, he had gone soldiering in Asia and won the Civic Crown—an award analogous to the Medal of Honor—for conspicuous gallantry in action. He may also have had a brief love affair with the King of Bithynia, but it did not inhibit his vigorous sex life among the wives of his contemporaries back in Rome. A Senator once referred to him in a speech as “every woman’s man and every man’s woman” and for the rest of Caesar’s career he had to endure much heavy-handed jocularity about the incident.

A few years later Caesar was captured by pirates, who were endemic in the Mediterranean; while waiting for his ransom to arrive he got onto friendly terms with his captors, but warned them that he would return and have them crucified. They thought he was joking. They were not the last to underestimate Caesar’s determination and regret it. AS soon as he was free, he raised a squadron on his own initiative, tracked down the pirates and executed them, just as he had promised.

The fact that he was a nephew of Marius impeded his political progress under the Sullan constitution and the dominant Senatorial establishment. However, he had displayed traits which seemed clearly to promise future success: courage, rapidity of reaction, a refusal to let emotion control his decisions, absolute loyalty to friends, pride in race and an easy sociability which gave way, when necessary, to an equally easy ruthlessness.

Above all, his powers of observation and analysis enabled him to see more quickly than other politicians what was possible and what was not. Caesar pulled away from the impulsive Catilina, who plunged down a path that was bound to lead to disaster. Even if he did succeed in overthrowing the Senate with the help of his scented youngsters, it would be a brief victory: Catilina was hardly likely to survive Pompey’s return to Italy. Caesar realized that the popularis cause would succeed only if the great general was won over or at least neutralized. It was to this purpose that he turned his mind in the coming years.

AS spring turned into summer and the election for the following year’s Consulship approached, there was a concentration of minds among the governing classes in Rome. After careful consideration and despite their distaste for New Men, the optimates decided to back Cicero as the best of the evils on offer. In fact, the more observant of them could see that the Senate’s obstinate passivity was counterproductive and that Cicero would take a thoughtful and active approach to promoting its interests. However, an awkward matter presented itself. Cicero had neither the means nor the will to buy victory. So it may have been no accident that shortly before the vote the Senate decided to tighten up the rules against corruption at the polls; this would be necessary if Cicero was to compete effectively with Catilina and Antonius, both of whose campaigns were apparently being bankrolled by Crassus.

Cicero was particularly uneasy about Catilina. At one point he thought of taking on his defense against the impending extortion charges in return for cooperation over his candidacy. “We have the jury we want,” he told Atticus sardonically, “with the full cooperation of the prosecution. If he is acquitted, I hope he will be more inclined to work with me in the campaign.” This is one of the very few occasions when we see Cicero on record as willing to aid and abet corruption, a sign of his desperation to win. In the end, though, he gave up the idea and Catilina proceeded to secure a rigged acquittal without Cicero’s help.

Cicero’s other main rival, Antonius, was a much more malleable character. He had little aptitude for leadership in any direction, good or bad; Quintus said that “he was frightened of his own shadow.” However, he was happy enough to give additional support to someone who took the lead, a quality Cicero was to make the most of later.

Cicero decided to play to his own strength: he would use his skills as a public speaker to blacken his opponents. This would be a safer tactic than setting out policies which would be bound to offend the People whose votes he needed or the Senate on whose patronage he depended. He delivered a ferocious speech against Catilina and Antonius, citing the possibly nonexistent conspiracy of the previous year and attacking their political and private records. Both men had dirtied their hands during the proscription. Of Catilina, Cicero asked: “Can any man be a friend of someone who has murdered so many citizens?” He continued in that rip-roaring vein. “He has fouled himself in all manner of vice and crime. He is soaked in the blood of those he has impiously slaughtered. He has robbed the provincials. He has violated the laws and the courts.” He categorized Antonius as “this ruffian in Sulla’s army, this cut-throat at the entrance to Rome.” He also dropped some dark hints about their secret backers. “I assert, gentlemen, that last night Catilina and Antonius, with their attendants, met at the house of a certain nobleman well known to investigations of extravagance.” He had to mean either Crassus or Caesar, one of whom had the money and the other the flair for spending it.

Cicero claimed that a new plot was brewing and there is evidence that something sinister was afoot. Before the Consular election, which took place in June, Catilina called a meeting of friends and dissidents. A list of those present survives: it includes the rejected Consular candidates of 65; Lucius Cassius Longinus, brother of the Cassius who would conspire against Caesar many years later; an old blue-blooded reprobate, P. Cornelius Lentulus Sura, who had already been Consul but, like Antonius, had been expelled from the Senate and was running for Praetorship in 63 in order to gain reentry. A man of no great note was also present, a certain Quintus Curius, who had been expelled from the Senate in 70. His importance was to lie in the fact that he had a talkative mistress named Fulvia. Members of the local nobility from the Italian colonies and municipalities visited Rome in order to attend the gathering. Finally, according to one first-century account, Crassus or Caesar was involved. If true, they were playing for very high stakes. By now they must have been questioning Catilina’s political judgment: the charge is best seen as guesswork by hostile contemporaries.

In the event, Cicero won the election by a wide margin, heading the vote in all the wards. Admittedly, he had been lucky in his rivals, but he had succeeded without bribery or violence. For a New Man to win the Consulship was a remarkable accomplishment. In less than twenty years, Cicero had risen from being a little-known lawyer from the provinces to being joint head of state of the greatest empire in the known world. His triumphs in the law courts and his successful ascent up the honors ladder were due to his own abilities and native talent.

The election was a great day for Terentia as well as her husband. She had taken a risk when she married the newcomer from Arpinum, but now it seemed she or her relatives had chosen well and she joined the band of powerful matriarchs who exercised considerable influence behind the scenes. The record of the Consulship suggests that this strong-willed woman showed little hesitation in offering her husband political advice and support.

Cicero had lived through terrible times and his fundamental aim was to make sure that they never returned. He stood for the rule of law and the maintenance of a constitution in which all social groups could play a part, but where the Senate took the lead according to ancestral tradition. His colleague was the feeble Antonius, with whom he struck an astute deal. Cicero, not wanting the usual governorship that followed a Consulship, agreed to give up the rich province he had been allocated, Macedonia, and pass it to Antonius. This would enable Antonius to recoup his debts (or more precisely, his election “expenses”) by the normal techniques of extortion. In return he would give Cicero a free hand during their Consular year and withdraw his support from Catilina, from whom trouble could be expected. This meant in effect that Cicero would be sole Consul.

Catilina was enraged by his defeat. Some time during the following months, Crassus and Caesar reviewed their options; they concluded that Catilina might become dangerously unreliable after this disappointment and began to scale down their support. They would have been reassured by Catilina’s decision to be patient and stand again for Consulship in 63. But if he could not win the first time around, would he be likely to do so a second time, with the Senatorial cause now in the capable hands of Cicero? Probably not. In future he would not be able to rely on their backing.

When Cicero entered office on January 1, 63 BC, the economic situation was bleak. Although the signs were that Pompey would defeat the King of Pontus, reopen the trade routes, set up the tax farmers in business again and come home loaded with booty, that still lay in the future. Victory was in sight, but for the time being Italy was suffering.

One consequence was that levels of unemployment in Rome were high. This was serious, for in the absence of a police force or any security services, it was easy for mob rule to flourish. So far as poor free-born citizens were concerned, life was precarious and many survived on jobs in the building trade or at the docks. Freedmen usually had the backing of their former owners and a wider range of specialist skills at their disposal; they probably dominated the retail trade and small-scale industrial enterprises. Both groups were suffering under the recession.

Meanwhile the endemic crisis of the countryside worsened. The south of Italy was still suffering from the after-effects of the Slave War. Also, many of Sulla’s veterans had been settled in Etruria fifteen years previously, within striking distance of the capital: they had either been allocated poor-quality agricultural land or turned out to be unlucky farmers. Either way they were in trouble, and of a mind to make their unhappiness known.

The rich were in some difficulty too. When the recession hit them, their finances were already strained by various forms of conspicuous expenditure—in particular, the fashion for building horti, large and expensive villas with gardens outside the city, or holiday homes on the coast at resorts like Baiae. The costs of public life were high, with increasing pressure on candidates to spend a fortune in bribes or on theatrical shows and gladiatorial games. Some great families were running the shameful risk of insolvency.

The populares immediately threw down a challenge to the new regime. In January 63 a Tribune tabled the first land-reform bill for years. It was generally thought that, once again, Crassus and Caesar were behind the move. This presented Cicero with a ticklish problem. He was indebted to the optimates, who were as hostile to the redistribution of state land as their fathers and grandfathers had been, and indeed shared their conservative instincts. But if he could, Cicero wanted to be a Consul for all, believing that Rome would not have a future without what he called the concordia ordinum, the “concord of the classes.”

On the face of it, the bill’s contents were sensible and moderate. Colonies were to be established by selling public land in Italy and the provinces and by buying additional privately owned land on a voluntary basis. Nevertheless, Cicero opposed the legislation both in the Senate and at the General Assembly, thus opening his Consulship on a negative note.

The proposed law was probably less contentious than the means of implementing it—a powerful commission with ten members and a life of five years. This was too much for a political culture that disapproved of power being handed for a substantial period of time to any individual or group. Cicero derisively nicknamed the commissioners the “ten kings.” It is not entirely clear what ensued, but in all likelihood the bill never came to the vote at the General Assembly.

Crassus and Caesar were probably not too put out by this setback. They had made some gains. The debate had cast doubt on the sincerity of Cicero’s promise to be a Consul for all. It had also inserted a wedge between him and Pompey, who would soon have an army to resettle.

Meanwhile, Cicero maintained his oratorical predominance in the courts. He successfully defended a former Consul on a charge of extortion, a case in which Caesar gave evidence for the prosecution.

Caesar and his friends now staged a remarkable coup, a real-life agitprop drama with an unfriendly lesson for the Senate. Titus Labienus, a member of Caesar’s circle and later one of his most able military commanders, unexpectedly indicted an elderly and inconspicuous Senator, Caius Rabirius, on a charge of high treason for a murder committed thirty-six years previously, when Saturninus had surrendered to Marius, then Consul, and been locked up with his followers in the Senate House. According to Labienus, Rabirius was one of the young men who had climbed on the roof and killed Saturninus with a rain of tiles.

This was no ordinary prosecution. The old man was to be tried under an archaic and brutal procedure called perduellio. The punishment, if he was found guilty, was scourging and crucifixion. A court was appointed according to the antiquated rules and Caesar and his cousin cleverly managed to get themselves chosen as its two judges. An execution post was erected in the Field of Mars in anticipation of a conviction.

What was the point of this bizarre rigmarole? Apparently the identity of Saturninus’s killer had long been known: a slave who had won his freedom as a reward. What Labienus and, behind him, Caesar wanted to do was deliver a political warning. In times of crisis the Senate had the authority to call a state of emergency, through a special decree known as the Final Act (senatusconsultum ultimum). Its terms were broadly drawn: “The Consuls should see to it that the state comes to no harm.” This, some said, allowed the Consuls to override a Roman citizen’s basic rights not to be executed without trial. According to this view, Saturninus’s death had been legal because the Senate had passed the Final Act—despite the fact that he had been no ordinary citizen but a Tribune whose person was meant to be inviolable. Populares never accepted this interpretation of the law and argued that nothing could cancel a fundamental civic liberty. Legally they appear to have been correct; the power under the Final Act to condemn citizens to death without due process had only become accepted through time and custom.

The reason for the timing of the attack on Rabirius is obscure. In general terms, it was in the interest of the populares continually to find ways of seizing the initiative from the optimates. This was especially the case now that the Senate, in Cicero’s capable hands, looked as if it would recover lost ground. Rabirius’s trial may then have simply been an episode in the ongoing campaign against the forces of conservatism. But there is another possibility. Caesar knew that Catilina had not yet run his full political course. If rejection at the polls drove him to act illegally, as appeared not unlikely, he might need protection from an extreme interpretation of the Final Act. In this case, the affair shows Caesar at his most prescient and most loyal.

Unsurprisingly, the judges found Rabirius guilty and passed a sentence of death. AS expected, he appealed to the People against the verdict. Hortensius spoke on Rabirius’s behalf, arguing that he did not in fact commit the crime. He was followed by Cicero, who spent little time on the facts of the case. This was a political show trial and he went straight to the constitutional point. “What I assert with all the emphasis at my command, what I proclaim, what I publish to the world is identical with the stated opinions of the prosecutor [Caesar or Labienus]. No king remains, no tribe, no nation who can cause you any alarm. No external or foreign threat can infiltrate our Republic. If you wish Rome to live forever and our empire to be without end, if you wish that our glory never fade, we must be on our guard against our own passions, against men of violence, against the enemy within, against domestic plots. But against these evils your forefathers left you a great protection [in the Final Act]. Cherish this pronouncement.”

A vote on the appeal never took place and sources disagree about which way it looked as if it would go. After fruitlessly remonstrating with the judges, a Praetor, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer, used one of Rome’s many obstructive constitutional devices to halt the proceedings. He ran up to the fort on top of the Janiculan Hill on the other side of the Tiber and pulled down the military flag flying there. In the city’s early history this flag was raised during assembly meetings; if lowered, it warned of an enemy attack and led automatically to the immediate suspension of public business. The rule was still in force and so the assembly dispersed.

How serious had Caesar been? It is hard to say. It may be that the trial was a neat and painless way of twisting the Senate’s tail. If that were so, Caesar had presumably prompted Metellus Celer to abort the project before the old man was crucified. On the other hand, it is possible that Caesar really did want a guilty verdict and, one must suppose, an execution. Either way, he had made his point and he did not attempt to reconvene the court.

In 63 Caesar stood for the senior religious post of Chief Pontiff, chairman of the college of pontifices, the most important political function of which was to decide the annual calendar of lucky and unlucky days for the conduct of public business. It was usually the preserve of ex-Consuls and elder statesmen and Caesar contracted enormous debts to bribe the necessary voters. Success brought him little power but great prestige and an official residence in the Forum. If Caesar had lost, his credit would have collapsed and he would have been bankrupt. He told his mother, as she kissed him good-bye on the morning of the poll, that if he did not return as Chief Pontiff, he would not return at all.

Meanwhile Catilina was pursuing his schemes and the well-informed Cicero went on keeping an eye on him. Support for Catilina was more broadly based than at the time of his putative first conspiracy. Many Senators who had spent or gambled away their wealth saw nothing to be lost and much to be gained by joining him. A general cancellation of debts, the central plank of his policies, would solve all their problems. Unsurprisingly, this was a program unlikely to appeal to the propertied classes and indeed to the middling sort of people—shopkeepers and small traders. The revolutionary leader was under growing pressure from his supporters in Rome, and from the discontented Sullan veterans in the countryside to seize power by fair means or foul.

At the instigation of a friend from his youth, Servius Sulpicius Rufus, now a distinguished legal expert and candidate for the Consulship of 62, Cicero superintended the passage of a law increasing the penalty for electoral bribery to ten years’ exile. Sulpicius was in fact aiming at one of his rivals, Lucius Licinius Murena, whom he intended to prosecute under the new legislation. However, Catilina believed that he was the target. Infuriated, he decided to have Cicero and other leading figures assassinated. The plan was to attack them on the day in July when elections for next year’s officeholders were to be held.

Cicero learned about the plot from Fulvia, mistress of Catilina’s fellow plotter, Quintus Curius. Curius, who was in financial difficulties, had become less generous to Fulvia than previously and she had pulled away from the liaison. In an attempt to regain her affection, Curius boasted in mysterious terms about his future prospects. Fulvia wheedled the truth out of him. She immediately contacted Terentia, with whom she happened to be acquainted, and told her all she knew. Thereafter, Cicero used Fulvia as a regular informer and, in due course, Curius was himself persuaded to betray his fellow conspirators. Unfortunately, there was no other evidence to corroborate the allegation of conspiracy, and it was not easy to identify specific plans from a welter of wild talk.

Cicero was sufficiently alarmed to persuade the Senate to postpone the forthcoming elections. He questioned Catilina publicly in the Senate about his intentions. Catilina responded with a sinister metaphor: “I see two bodies, one thin and wasted, but with a head, the other headless, but big and strong. What is so dreadful if I myself become the head of the body which needs one?” The first body was the Senate and the second the People. The remark was a bold and threatening claim to leadership of the masses.

The Senate was not convinced of Catilina’s seriousness and took no action. Many optimates still thought of Cicero as a parvenu and felt that he was getting above himself by creating an atmosphere of crisis on the basis of very few facts. This left the Consul in a distinctly awkward position. He had revealed his hand to no avail. Catilina was now alerted to his investigations and, given his personality, might well be provoked into a violent response. Cicero appointed a bodyguard and when the postponed elections eventually took place was careful to let people see that he had started wearing a breastplate under his toga.

Cicero insured himself against the risk of violence by assembling a large number of armed followers. This and all the publicity preempted Catilina’s plans and there were no assassinations. The voting proceeded without any trouble. Quintus, following in his brother’s footsteps in the Honors Race, was elected Praetor, as was Caesar, who won by a strong margin.

Catilina failed for a second time to secure the Consulship. So far as he was concerned, this was the final insult. During the two years that he had been running for Consul, Catilina’s second “conspiracy” had probably been more a secret alliance around a radical program (land redistribution and debt cancellation) than a revolutionary plot, but now, enraged by Sulpicius’s antibribery law and his electoral defeat, he abandoned legality. Against his better instincts, he had stuck by the rules, and look where it had gotten him. His aim was personal—to claim what he saw as his right and to take revenge on everyone who had prevented him from obtaining it. This included Cicero and most of the Senate. He set his mind on a coup d’état.

His closest partners were Praetor Lentulus in Rome and Caius Manlius, one of Sulla’s old centurions, who was gathering a military force in northern Etruria at Faesulae. Catilina was reported to have insisted on a “monstrous” oath of loyalty, which even his friend the Consul Antonius swore. According to Dio (and Plutarch): “He sacrificed a boy and, after administering the oath over his entrails, ate them in company with others.” This sounds far-fetched and was probably another example of black propaganda, but there was a half-submerged tradition of occasional human sacrifice. The last recorded case had taken place after the battle of Cannae, when Hannibal had scored one of his most decisive victories. Two Gauls and two Greeks had been buried alive. The great Greek historian Polybius, writing in the previous century, noted that in times of extreme danger the Romans would go to any lengths to propitiate the gods and thought no ritual inappropriate or beneath their dignity.

Seeing what Catilina had in mind, Crassus, who was not a revolutionary at heart, and Caesar, doubtless as disturbed by Catilina’s poor judgment as by his intentions, definitively abandoned him. For all his difficulties with a skeptical Senate, Cicero was clearly receiving good intelligence, and he looked forward to assembling enough evidence to be able to take action against Catilina.

There was a lull for a time as summer gave way to autumn. Then, at about midnight on October 20, Cicero received an unannounced visit from Crassus and two leading Senators. They had an alarming tale to tell. After dinner earlier the same evening Crassus’s doorkeeper had taken delivery of some letters for various senior Romans. Crassus read the one addressed to him, which was unsigned. It claimed that Catilina was organizing a massacre and warned him to slip away from the city as soon as possible. Crassus said that he had left the other letters unopened and come at once to Cicero—“quite overcome by the news,” as Plutarch puts it, “and wishing to do something to clear himself from the suspicion that he lay under because of his friendship with Catilina.”

Having thought the matter over, Cicero convened a meeting of the Senate early the next morning. It may have occurred to him that Crassus, rattled by Catilina’s behavior and to avoid being implicated in some wild adventure, had himself arranged for the mysterious letters to be written and “delivered.” That did not matter; the important thing was that he at last had something that looked like proof. Once the Senate had assembled, Cicero handed the letters to their recipients, who read them aloud to the meeting. They all contained information about a plot. Next a report was given on the formation of regular bands of soldiers in Etruria; it was claimed that Manlius would take the field on October 28. The Consul asked to be given emergency powers.

So far, the Senate had been treating Cicero as something of a joke and the words “I have been informed that,” which opened his constant announcements that the state was in peril, had become a catchphrase. However, the Senators had no choice now but to give him, through the Final Act, the authority he had been asking for. For a few days nothing happened and there was no news. Perhaps the Consul had got his facts wrong. A week or so later, a relieved Cicero was able to announce that, just as predicted, Manlius had risen.

Military countermeasures were taken and troops levied to put down disturbances. An attempt to capture Praeneste, a town only about 20 miles from Rome, was foiled. Catilina, at his best in a crisis, kept his nerve. No direct links had been discovered between him and Manlius and he stayed in town, behaving normally. Seeing that a prosecution was being threatened, Catilina offered to surrender himself into custody, cheekily suggesting that he be kept under arrest at Cicero’s house. The Consul declined the ambiguous honor and Catilina offered to live in the house of the Praetor Metellus Celer. Metellus was married to a promiscuous noblewoman, Clodia, sister of Publius Clodius Pulcher, who at the time was one of Cicero’s supporters and joined his bodyguard.

Catilina stayed elsewhere and on the night of November 6 attended an important planning meeting. Evidently morale was low, and he did his best to raise everyone’s spirits. He announced necessary administrative arrangements, but the indispensable Fulvia, briefed by her lover, was on hand to tell Cicero later in the evening what had been discussed.

Cicero’s growing confidence is illustrated by the fact that he waited until November 8, two days later, before summoning the Senate to meet at the temple of Jupiter the Stayer near the Palatine Hill, which was easier to guard than the Senate House. He had extraordinary news to impart and the occasion was all the more dramatic in that Catilina, although he must have known or guessed that his cover was blown, put in an appearance. The Senate’s mood had hardened and few members spoke to him or sat beside him. At the meeting, the Consul addressed Catilina directly:

I am able to report how [on November 6] you came into Scythemakers’ Street (I will be perfectly specific) and entered the house of Marcus Laeca: and many of your accomplices in this lunatic, criminal enterprise joined you there. Do you dare to deny it?… You parceled out the regions of Italy. You decided where you wanted each of your agents to go. You assigned parts of the city to be burned. You confirmed that you yourself would be leaving and added that the only thing that held you back for a little was the fact that I was still alive.

Cicero reported that two of those at the meeting had agreed to go to his house in the early hours, somehow gain entry and murder him in his bed. Forewarned, he had increased his guard and arranged that the men, ostensibly presenting themselves to convey “the morning’s greetings,” were refused admission.

A heated exchange between the two protagonists in the drama followed. According to Sallust, Catilina reacted fiercely to the speech, calling Cicero an “immigrant” and refusing to go into voluntary exile without a trial. Cicero asked the Senators if they wished to banish Catilina. This was an ill-judged intervention. Embarrassed by Catilina’s presence, the majority said nothing. Cleverly retrieving the situation, Cicero then asked if they would order him to banish Quintus Lutatius Catulus, one of the House’s most respected members. They roared back, “No.” This allowed the Consul to claim that, by its silence, the Senate had in fact consigned the revolutionary to exile.

Catilina said he would think over what he had heard and left the meeting freely. He understood that all was up for him in Rome: only the military option remained. He slipped out of the city that night, accompanied by 300 armed men, and made his way north to Manlius’s troops. Before he left he wrote an explanatory letter to the elder statesman Catulus. If it is genuine, and it reads so, it almost touchingly reveals a man, self-centered yet sincere, who had nothing left to hope for.

I do not intend … to make any formal defense of my new policy. I will however explain my point of view; what I am going to say implies no consciousness of guilt, and on my word of honor you can accept it as the truth. I was provoked by wrongs and insults and robbed of the fruits of my painstaking industry, and I found myself unable to maintain a position of dignity. So I openly undertook the championship of the oppressed, as I had often done before.… I saw unworthy men promoted to honorable positions [and] felt myself treated as an outcast on account of unjust suspicions. That is why I have adopted a course of action, amply justified in my present circumstances, which offers a hope of saving what is left of my honor. I intended to write at greater length, but news has come that they are preparing to use force against me. So for the present I commend Orestilla [his wife] to you and entrust her to your protection. Shield her from wrong, I beg in the name of your own children. Farewell.

Claiming the office of which he believed he had been robbed, Catilina assumed a Consul’s rods and axes. He also took with him a silver eagle, a military standard that had belonged to Marius and which he kept in a shrine at his house. He took his time to reach Faesulae, arriving in mid-November. AS soon as the Senate heard the news of his departure/defection, he and Manlius were declared public enemies.

In Rome the management of the conspiracy devolved to the middle-aged Lentulus. It is strange that he and his colleagues did not abandon their plans. Perhaps they were still under the influence of Catilina’s outsize personality. Perhaps they feared to break their oaths. Perhaps they felt they were on a vehicle careering out of control and that it was marginally safer to stay on board than jump off. Whatever their reasons, they held to their course.

Although Lentulus had a contemptuous attitude toward the proprieties of public life, he was a superstitious man and was apparently encouraged by some forged prophecies predicting that he would achieve absolute power (from which it may be inferred that he was not averse to supplanting Catilina). He decided on a wholesale massacre of the Senate and timed it for one of the nights of the Saturnalia in mid-December. This festival of misrule (a distant original of Christmas) would provide cover for the preparations. It was the custom for clients to bring their patrons presents, and houses were kept open all night for the purpose. About 400 men, carrying concealed swords, were detailed to kill Senators individually in their homes. Lentulus devised a solution to the problem of the returning Pompey; his children would be taken as hostages against his good behavior. The plan had a frivolous kind of ingenuity, but, as ever, Fulvia was able to pass on the details to Cicero.

The Consul was now interrupted by a legal matter. AS he had promised he would, Sulpicius prosecuted Murena for handing out bribes during his election campaign. Cicero defended him and, although exhausted, produced one of his most entertaining speeches. He poked fun at nit-picking lawyers and scoffed at Marcus Porcius Cato, a leading conservative who was a member of the prosecution team, for his extravagant commitment to the doctrines of Stoicism. “But I must change my tone,” he said coyly,

for Cato argues with me on rigid and Stoical principles. He says that it is not right for goodwill to be enticed by food. He says that men’s judgments, in the important business of electing men to office, ought not to be corrupted by pleasures. So, if a candidate invites a man to supper, he commits an offense. “Do you,” he asks, “seek to obtain supreme power, supreme authority, and the helm of the Republic, by encouraging men’s sensual appetites, by soothing their minds, by offering them luxuries? Are you seeking employment as a pimp from a band of lecherous young men, or the sovereignty of the world from the Roman people?” What an extraordinary thing to say! For our customs, our way of living, our manners, and the constitution itself reject it. Consider the Spartans, the inventors of that lifestyle and of that sort of language, men who lie down at mealtime on hard oak benches, and the Cretans, none of whom ever lies down at all to eat. Neither of them has preserved their political constitutions or their power better than the Romans, who set aside times for pleasure as well as times for work. One of those nations was destroyed by a single invasion of our army, the other only maintains its discipline and its laws thanks to our imperial protection.

Cato sourly observed: “What a comical Consul we’ve got!” Murena was acquitted.

It was time to deal with Lentulus. With almost incredible stupidity, the conspirators played into Cicero’s hands. It so happened that a delegation from the Allobroges, a Gallic tribe with a grievance, was in Rome. Lentulus thought it would be a good idea to let them into the conspiracy and encourage them to stir up a revolt in Gaul. The Allobroges were uncertain how to react and consulted their patron in Rome, one Fabius Sanga (a forebear of whom had conquered the Allobroges in 121 BC). He brought them at once to Cicero, who instructed them to negotiate with the conspirators.

An elaborate sting was devised. The Allobroges were asked to obtain documentary proof of the conspiracy by persuading the conspirators to write letters to the tribe’s Senate. They did so, also sending along a messenger, a man from Croton, with an unsigned communication for Catilina, whom the Allobroges were invited to visit on their way home. In addition, the messenger was given a word-of-mouth recommendation that Catilina should commit one of the most heinous offenses in the Roman catalog: the freeing of slaves to take up arms against the Republic.

The Allobroges left Rome on the night of December 2 and ran into an ambush, led by the Praetor Caius Pomptinus, which Cicero had laid at the Milvian Bridge across the Tiber just outside the city. Everyone was arrested and brought back to the city. Here, at last, was all the evidence that could be desired. Cicero convened the Senate early the following morning, aptly enough at the Temple of Concord at the foot of the Capitoline Hill.

Most of the day was taken up with hearing the evidence and receiving reports. The man from Croton was given immunity, and he testified. Four Senators took down verbatim notes at the Consul’s request, so that a full and accurate record of the debate would be available. (Cicero arranged for clerks with shorthand skills to attend future sessions.) The house of one of the conspirators, Caius Cornelius Cethegus, was found to be stacked with weapons, spears, armor and a large number of knives and swords. Lentulus, as a senior magistrate, underwent some sort of cross-examination. He resigned his office as Praetor, taking off his purple-bordered toga on the floor of the Senate and putting on other clothes more in keeping with his new situation.

It was a cut-and-dried case. The leading conspirators were handed over to the Praetors to keep them under arrest, although not in chains, and there was a scare when slaves and freedmen of Lentulus and Cethegus came around by back streets to the Praetors’ houses and tried, unsuccessfully, to rescue them. Cicero left the debate briefly to station guards in appropriate places in the city.

In the evening dense crowds gathered outside the Temple of Concord and, when the Senate adjourned, Cicero came outside to make a short speech to the crowd: he made the most of the horror stories about firing the city, freeing the slaves and inviting a Gallic invasion. Large numbers of people then escorted him to a friend’s house where he spent the night. He was unable to go home, for Terentia was presiding, as the Consul’s wife, over a secret ceremony in honor of the Good Goddess in the presence of the Vestal Virgins, from which men were forbidden. Those attending the ceremony were well aware of what was happening outside; when a flame suddenly shot up from a dying fire on the altar, it was immediately interpreted as a portent and a message was sent out to Cicero advising him to take action against the conspirators.

What should be done with the prisoners? In principle, as Roman citizens, they should receive a trial, but that would entail a dangerous delay while Catilina was in the field. The mood in the city was volatile, and the likelihood of bribery would make the outcome of any court proceedings uncertain, however strong the prosecution’s case. The alternative was to execute the men without delay. This was both legally and politically problematic. The trial of Rabirius was still fresh in everybody’s mind. Caesar had used the case to limit the force of the Final Act. AS Cicero was well aware, Caesar could well organize a backlash if citizens were killed without a proper hearing. While a Consul had power over life and death when in office, he could be called to account in the courts after the end of his term. It could, of course, be argued that the conspirators had abrogated their citizenship by taking up arms against the state. This would self-evidently be the case with Catilina, who was at the head of a hostile army. But as for Lentulus and the others, the position was less clear-cut. They had not been caught in the act of rebellion, although the cache of weapons was damning evidence of their intentions.

Cicero decided to cover his back by asking the Senate, which met again two days later, for its opinion. He indicated that he would implement whatever they decided, although he implied that he favored execution. He called on the Consul-designate, Junius Silanus, to speak first. Silanus argued for the “extreme penalty,” which everybody took to mean death. The other Consul-designate, Murena, agreed, as did the bench of ex-Consuls. It looked as if there would be no argument. But then the Praetors-Elect were invited to speak and Caesar stood up to address the meeting.

He spoke with great severity. No form of punishment could be too harsh for the crime, he said. But the death penalty would be a mistake. The accused were men of distinction. Death without trial would create a disastrous precedent and, although he had “no fear of Marcus Tullius,” another Consul might use his power despotically. The text of his speech has not come down to us, but Cicero’s response has. In the published version Cicero is recorded as saying, “Imprisonment, [Caesar] says, was unmistakably devised as the special penalty for atrocious crimes. He moves, therefore, that the defendants should be imprisoned, and distributed among the municipalities for their incarceration.” If Caesar had indeed argued for long-term, perhaps life imprisonment, his suggestion would have been hard to take seriously in a country that did not have residential jails. How would the conspirators be looked after? Surely there would be a high risk of escape. (The previous day, after all, had seen an attempt to free the prisoners.)

According to later sources, Caesar in fact proposed that Cicero “ought to distribute the accused around the towns of Italy, as he thought best, until Catilina had been suppressed and they could be brought back for trial.” No doubt, he had in mind house arrest at the homes of local worthies. This was a more rational and practical proposition and one far more difficult to oppose. It is probably what was actually said, in which case Cicero distorted Caesar’s position in his published address. He would have had good reason for doing so, for it was not long before he needed every argument he could muster to defend the decision that was actually taken. It would help him if he could show, or suggest, that Caesar’s alternative was unrealistic.

One way or another, Caesar’s speech was a courageous and clever act. It had a decisive impact, and opinion turned against execution. Silanus recanted, saying he had meant not death but imprisonment. Only one ex-Consul, Catulus, spoke against Caesar’s proposal.

Then Marcus Porcius Cato, an influential figure still only in his early thirties, took the floor. Cato was one of the most remarkable and idiosyncratic personalities of the age. An uncompromising Republican, he was a ferocious opponent of the populares and of anyone who breached the constitution. From his childhood on he had had an obstinate nature and his name became a byword for virtue and truthfulness. “That’s incredible, even if Cato says so,” was a common expression.

AS a boy he had been “sluggish of comprehension and slow, but what he comprehended he held fast in his memory.” He had loved a half-brother, who died young, with the same almost monomaniac excess with which he adhered to his opinions. Cato had rigid views of right and wrong, and he had no sense of humor. He was impervious to physical discomfort. Apart from the fact that he was a heavy drinker, he lived austerely, sometimes not troubling to wear shoes. Although not averse to making money, he was ferociously opposed to bribery and corruption in public life. AS Quaestor in 65, he was responsible for the management of the Treasury: he reformed the lax financial procedures he found there, upsetting the civil servants and his Senatorial friends. Cicero admired him, but found him difficult to handle, mainly because he had no aptitude whatever for compromise.

Cato was a good public speaker with a loud, penetrating voice, although, unusually for the age, he did not practice rhetorical exercises or rehearse his speeches in public. Once he was on his feet he could speak for hours and was an indomitable filibusterer. On this occasion he was blunt. He attacked Silanus for changing his mind but reserved most of his scorn for Caesar. Under a popular pretext and with humane words, he said, Caesar was trying to subvert the state. He wanted to frighten the Senate about a situation from which he had a good deal to fear himself. Why was the Senate hesitating? The conspirators had confessed to planning massacres and arson. “If we could afford to risk the consequences of making a mistake,” Cato said (according to Sallust), “I would be quite willing to let experience convince you of your folly, since you scorn advice. But we are completely encircled. Catilina and his army are ready to grip us by the throat, and there are other foes within the walls, in the very heart of our city.” He concluded by putting a motion to the house: “Having admitted their criminal intention, they should be put to death as if they had been caught in the actual commission of capital offenses, in accordance with ancient custom.”

An incident occurred while Cato was speaking which caused much amusement at his expense. A letter was brought in for Caesar, and Cato immediately accused him of being in touch with the conspirators. He challenged him to read the note out loud. Caesar simply passed it across: it was a love letter from Servilia, Caesar’s mistress at the time and Cato’s half-sister. Cato threw it back angrily with the words: “Take it, you drunken idiot.”

According to Plutarch, the speech was the only one of Cato’s ever to be published and is a good example of his ability, when he fixed his mind on something, to see it with exceptional clarity. He was one of the first to recognize the seriousness of the threat Caesar posed to conservative interests. The Senate was impressed and shifted its ground again, endorsing Cato’s motion for the death penalty. Picking up a suggestion of Caesar’s, they also ordered the confiscation of the conspirators’ property. Caesar protested that it was unfair for the Senate to endorse the severest element in his proposal while rejecting his recommendation for mercy. Cicero acknowledged the point and remitted the confiscation.

Caesar now appears to have lost his temper. According to Suetonius, he tried to block the proceedings. A body of equites outside, serving as a defense force for the House and presumably listening through open doors, threatened to kill him unless he desisted. They unsheathed their swords and made passes at him. Some friends huddled around him and protected him with their arms and togas. The guards looked at Cicero, who shook his head. Daunted, Caesar left the meeting and did not attend the Senate for the rest of the year.

What were the legal rights and wrongs of the argument? In the absence of a complete knowledge of the Roman legal system, it is hard to be sure. The populares may have been correct to argue that the Final Act did not override citizens’ basic rights. Cicero’s insistence on consulting the Senate before deciding what to do with the prisoners suggests that he was aware of the possible validity of their view. However, it is interesting that in his intervention Caesar did not raise the question of the legality of summary executions. The facts that Lentulus and his friends had admitted their guilty intent and that weapons had been found in their possession may have been enough to place them outside the protection of the law. However, unlike Catilina, the conspirators had not yet put their armory to any use. So the issue came down to whether plotting to commit treason could be equated with the act of treason itself. Cato was in no doubt that this was so, but he was arguing in the heat of the moment. In the final analysis, he and the other Senators were behaving not as legal experts but as politicians forced to come to a quick decision in an emergency. Nobody at the time challenged their right to do so.

Leaving the Senate in session, Cicero, surrounded by leading Senators, went to collect the prisoners one by one from the Praetors’ houses. There was no announcement, but the crowds in the Forum sensed that, after the noise and drama of debate, something real and irreversible was under way. Most observers thought that at this stage the men were simply being taken to prison. Apparently no one expected that there would be immediate executions.

A frightened silence descended as the Consul brought Lentulus from the Palatine Hill and led him down the Holy Way to the far corner of the Forum, where the state prison stood. Prisoners were thrown into the dungeon, originally built as a cistern, which was entered through a hole in the roof, and usually left to starve or to await the executioners. According to Sallust, “its filthy condition, darkness and foul smell give it a loathsome and terrifying air.” Lentulus was lowered inside and strangled with a noose. The Praetors went to collect the other four prisoners and they too were led down to the dungeon and executed in turn.

For the time being few people knew what was going on. Cicero decided not to make any announcements at this stage, for he noticed groups of people standing here and there in the Forum who had played minor roles in the conspiracy. They were waiting for nightfall when they hoped to make a rescue bid. Once the executions were over, though, there was no further need for silence. The Consul walked into the Forum and shouted in a loud voice: “They have lived,” avoiding a direct and unlucky mention of death.

Night began to fall and the mood of the crowd changed. AS often happens after the relief of tension, there was an explosion of hysterical high spirits. Still accompanied by Senators, the Consul made his way home across the Forum and up the Sacred Way. He was cheered along streets brightly lit by lamps and torches in doorways and on roofs. The Senate had conferred on him the title “Father of His Country,” and when Cato repeated the compliment outside, doubtless at the top of his voice, everyone applauded. It was the proudest moment in the life of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Here he was, center stage in his chosen arena, the Forum, the hero of the hour and the first man in Rome. Nothing again in the years that lay ahead would happen quite like it.

AS for Catilina, the dreadful news from Rome soon reached his troops and they began to melt away. He was said to have recruited 20,000 soldiers, but in a little while he had only one quarter of that number. His old friend Antonius was given the task of tracking him down. On the day in early 62 when the two armies met, the reluctant general, no doubt diplomatically, pleaded gout and left the battle to his deputy. It was an easy but bloody victory. Catilina fell beside Marius’s standard—we are told, fighting hand-to-hand to the last. The encounter was probably little more than a messy one-sided skirmish. But Catilina was dead.

For all the jibes of the optimates, Cicero had averted a danger to the state. In contrast with his later reputation for vanity and indecision, he had acted with intelligence, patience and firmness. He had amply fulfilled the administrative promise of his Quaestorship in Sicily and shown that he was better able to govern than many of his peers. The conspiracy was perhaps less of a threat than Cicero claimed. Nevertheless, Catilina represented, if only in caricature, the continuing challenge from the populares and a new model of politician. His defeat was likely to have serious implications for activists like Caesar.

The outgoing Consul had reason to be proud of his stewardship of the Republic, but success had come with a cost. His efforts before he took office to be all things to all men, to please the radical as well as the conservative interest, had failed. His refusal to countenance the land-reform bill in January and his decision to execute the conspirators without trial (especially after the warning of the Rabirius affair) placed him firmly on the side of the optimates. Cicero’s cover was blown.