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.
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