SPQR

by Mary Beard

  A lot hangs too on exactly when it was circulated and why. We know from one of his letters to Atticus that Cicero was arranging for the First Catilinarian to be copied in June 60 BCE, when he must have been well aware that the controversy over his execution of the ‘conspirators’ was not likely to go away. It would have been tempting and convenient for Cicero to use the written text of the speech in his own defence, even if that meant some strategic adjustments and insertions. In fact, the repeated references, in the version we have, to Catiline as if he were a foreign enemy (in Latin hostis) may well be one of the ways in which Cicero responded to his opponents: by referring to the conspirators as enemies of the state, he was implying that they did not deserve the protection of Roman law; they had lost their civic rights (including the right to trial). Of course, that may already have been a leitmotiv in the oral version of the speech given on 8 November. We simply do not know. But the term certainly took on far greater significance – and I strongly suspect was given far greater emphasis – in the permanent, written version.

  These questions prompt us to look harder for different versions of the story. Never mind Cicero’s perspective, is it possible to get any idea of how Catiline and his supporters would have seen it? The words and the views of Cicero now dominate the contemporary evidence for the mid first century BCE. But it is always worth trying to read his version, or any version of Roman history, ‘against the grain’, to prise apart the small chinks in the story using the snatches of other, independent, evidence that we have and to ask if other observers might have seen things differently. Were those whom Cicero described as monstrous villains really as villainous as he painted them? In this case, there is just about enough to raise some doubts about what was really going on.

  Cicero casts Catiline as a desperado with terrible gambling debts, thanks entirely to his moral failings. But the situation cannot have been so simple. There was some sort of credit crunch in Rome in 63 BCE, and more economic and social problems than Cicero was prepared to acknowledge. Another achievement of his ‘great consulate’ was to scotch a proposal to distribute land in Italy to some of the poor in the city. To put it another way, if Catiline behaved like a desperado, he might have had a good reason, and the support of many ordinary people driven to desperate measures by similar distress.

  How can we tell? It is harder to reconstruct economics than politics across 2,000 years, but we do get some unexpected glimpses. The evidence of the surviving coins of the period is particularly revealing, both of the conditions of the times and of the ability of modern historians and archaeologists to squeeze the material they have in ingenious ways. Roman coins can often be precisely dated, because at this period they were newly designed each year and ‘signed’ by the annual officials who were responsible for issuing them. They were minted using a series of individually hand-cut ‘dies’ (or stamps), whose minor differences in detail are still visible on the finished coins. We can calculate roughly how many coins an individual die could stamp (before it became too blunt to make a crisp image), and if we have a large enough sample of coins we can estimate roughly how many dies had been used altogether in minting a single issue. From that we can get a rough and ready idea of how many coins were produced each year: the more dies, the more coins, and vice versa.

  4. This silver coin was minted in 63 BCE, its design showing one of the Roman people voting on a piece of legislation, casting a voting tablet into a jar for counting. The differences in detail between the two versions well illustrate the differences in the die stamps. The name of the official in charge of the mint that year, Longinus, is also stamped on the coin.

  According to these calculations, the number of coins being minted in the late 60s BCE fell so sharply that there were fewer overall in circulation than there had been a few years before. The reasons for this we cannot reconstruct. Like most states before the eighteenth century or even later, Rome had no monetary policy as such, nor any financial institutions where that kind of policy could be developed. But the likely consequences are obvious. Whether he recklessly gambled away his fortune or not, Catiline – and many others – might have been short of cash; while those already in debt would have been faced with creditors, short of cash themselves, calling in their loans.

  All this was in addition to the other long-standing factors that might have given the humble or the have-nots in Rome an incentive to protest or to join in with those promising radical change. There was the enormous disparity of wealth between rich and poor, the squalid living conditions for most of the population, and probably for much of the time, even if not starvation, then persistent hunger. Despite Cicero’s dismissive descriptions of Catiline’s followers as reprobates, gangsters and the destitute, the logic of some of his own account, and of Sallust’s, suggests otherwise. For they either state or imply that Catiline’s support evaporated when it was reported that he intended to burn the city down. If so, we are not dealing with down-and-outs and complete no-hopers with nothing to lose – and everything to gain – from total conflagration. Much more likely, his supporters included the humble suffering poor, who still had some stake in the survival of the city.

  Cicero, inevitably, had an interest in making the most of the danger that Catiline posed. Whatever his political success, he held a precarious position at the top of Roman society, among aristocratic families who claimed, like Catiline, a direct line back to the founders of the city, or even to the gods. Julius Caesar’s family, for example, was proud to trace its lineage back to the goddess Venus; another, more curiously, claimed descent from the equally mythical Pasiphae, the wife of King Minos, whose extraordinary coupling with a bull produced the monstrous Minotaur. In order to secure his position in these circles, Cicero was no doubt looking to make a splash during his year as consul. An impressive military victory against a barbarian enemy would have been ideal, and what most Romans would have dreamt of. Rome was always a warrior state, and victory in war the surest route to glory. Cicero, however, was no soldier: he had come to prominence in the law courts, not by leading his army in battle against dangerous, or unfortunate, foreigners. He needed to ‘save the state’ in some other way.

  5. This Roman tombstone of the fourth century CE illustrates one simple way of striking a coin. The blank coin is placed between two dies, resting on an anvil. The man on the left is giving this ‘sandwich’ a heavy blow with a hammer to imprint the design on the blank. As the tongs in the hands of the assistant on the right suggest, the blank has been heated to make the imprinting easier.

  Some Roman commentators noted that the crisis played very much to Cicero’s advantage. One anonymous pamphlet, attacking Cicero’s whole career and preserved because it was once believed, wrongly, to be from the pen of Sallust, states explicitly that he ‘turned the troubles of the state to his own glory’, going so far as to claim that his consulship was ‘the cause of the conspiracy’ rather than the solution. To put it bluntly, one basic question for us should be not whether Cicero exaggerated the dangers of the conspiracy, but how far.

  The most determined modern sceptics have deemed the whole plot not much more than a figment of Cicero’s imagination – in which case the man who claimed to be a ‘weapons enthusiast’ was exactly that, the incriminating letters were forgeries, the deputation of Gauls were a complete dupe of the consul and the rumoured assassination attempts were paranoid inventions. Such a radical view seems implausible. There was, after all, a hand-to-hand battle between Catiline’s men and Roman legions, which can hardly be dismissed as a figment. It is much more likely that, whatever his original motives, Catiline – far-sighted radical or unprincipled terrorist – was partly driven to extreme measures by a consul spoiling for a fight and bent on his own glory. Cicero may even have convinced himself, whatever the evidence, that Catiline was a serious threat to the safety of Rome. That, as we know from many more recent examples, is how political paranoia and self-interest often work. We will never be quite sure. The ‘conspiracy’ will always be a prime example of
the classic interpretative dilemma: were there really ‘reds under the bed’, or was the crisis, partly at least, a conservative invention? It should also act as a reminder that in Roman history, as elsewhere, we must always be alert to the other side of the story – which is part of the point of this SPQR.

  Our Catiline?

  The clash between Cicero and Catiline has offered a template for political conflict ever since. It can hardly be a coincidence that Maccari’s painting of the events of 8 November was commissioned, along with other scenes of Roman history, for the room in the Palazzo Madama that had just become the home of the modern Italian senate; presumably a lesson was intended for the modern senators. And over the centuries the rights and wrongs of the ‘conspiracy’, the respective faults and virtues of Catiline and Cicero, and the conflicts between homeland security and civil liberties have been fiercely debated, and not only among historians.

  Occasionally the story has been drastically rewritten. One medieval tradition in Tuscany has Catiline surviving the battle against the Roman legions and going on, as a local hero, to have a complicated romantic entanglement with a woman called Belisea. Another version gives him a son Uberto, and so makes him the ancestor of the Uberti dynasty in Florence. Even more imaginatively, Prosper de Crébillon’s play Catilina, first performed in the mid eighteenth century, conjures up an affair between Catiline and Cicero’s daughter, Tullia, complete with some steamy assignations in a Roman temple.

  When the conspiracy has been replayed in fiction and on stage, it has been adjusted according to the political alignment of the author and the political climate of the times. Henrik Ibsen’s first drama, written in the aftermath of the European revolutions of the 1840s, takes the events of 63 BCE as its theme. Here a revolutionary Catiline is pitted against the corruption of the world in which he lived, while Cicero, who could have imagined nothing worse, is almost entirely written out of the events, never appearing on stage and barely mentioned. For Ben Jonson, by contrast, writing in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, Catiline was a sadistic anti-hero, whose victims were so numerous that, in Jonson’s vivid imagination, a whole navy was required to ferry them across the River Styx to the Underworld. His Cicero is not particularly likeable either but instead a droning bore; indeed so boring that at the play’s first performance, in 1611, many members of the audience walked out during his interminable denunciation of Catiline.

  Jonson was being unfair to Cicero’s powers of persuasive oratory – at least if the continuing use of his words, quoted and strategically adapted, is anything to go by. For his First Catilinarian speech, and especially its famous first line (‘How long, Catiline, will you go on abusing our patience?’), still lurks in twenty-first-century political rhetoric, is plastered on modern political banners and is fitted conveniently into the 140 characters of a tweet. All you need do is insert the name of your particular modern target. Indeed, a stream of tweets and other headlines posted over the time I was writing this book swapped the name ‘Catilina’ for, among others, those of the presidents of the United States, France and Syria, the mayor of Milan and the State of Israel: ‘Quo usque tandem abutere, François Hollande, patientia nostra?’ Quite how many of those who now adopt the slogan could explain exactly where it comes from, or what the clash between Cicero and Catiline was all about, it is impossible to know. Some may be classicists with a political cause, but that is unlikely to be true of all these objectors and protesters. The use of the phrase points to something rather different from specialist classical expertise, and probably more important. It is a strong hint that, just under the surface of Western politics, the dimly remembered conflict between Cicero and Catiline still acts as a template for our own political struggles and arguments. Cicero’s eloquence, even if only half understood, still informs the language of modern politics.

  6. In 2012, Hungarian protesters against the Fidesz party’s attempts to rewrite the constitution blazoned Cicero’s famous phrase, in Latin. But it has not been reused only in political contexts. In a notorious intellectual spat, Camille Paglia substituted the name of French philosopher Michel Foucault for Catiline’s: ‘How long, O Foucault …?’

  Cicero would be delighted. When he wrote to his friend Lucceius, asking the historian to commemorate the achievements of his consulship, he was hoping for eternal fame: ‘the idea of being spoken about by posterity pushes me to some sort of hope for immortality,’ he wrote with a touch of well-contrived diffidence. Lucceius, as we saw, did not oblige. He might have been put off by Cicero’s blatant request that he ‘neglect the rules of history’ to write up the events rather more fulsomely than accurately. But in the end, it turned out that Cicero achieved more immortality for his achievements in 63 BCE than Lucceius could ever have given him, being quoted and requoted over 2,000 years.

  We shall find many more of these political conflicts, disputed interpretations and sometimes uncomfortable echoes of our own times in the chapters that follow. But it is now the moment to turn back from the relatively firm ground of the first century BCE to Rome’s deepest history. How did Cicero and his contemporaries reconstruct the early years of their city? Why were their origins important to them? What does it mean to ask ‘Where did Rome begin?’ How much can we, or could they, really know of earliest Rome?

  CHAPTER TWO

  ·

  IN THE BEGINNING

  Cicero and Romulus

  ACCORDING TO ONE Roman tradition, the Temple of Jupiter where Cicero harangued Catiline on 8 November 63 BCE had been established seven centuries earlier by Romulus, Rome’s founding father. Romulus and the new citizens of his tiny community were fighting their neighbours, a people known as the Sabines, on the site that later became the Forum, the political centre of Cicero’s Rome. Things were going badly for the Romans, and they had been driven to retreat. As a last attempt to snatch victory, Romulus prayed to the god Jupiter – not just to Jupiter, in fact, but to Jupiter Stator, ‘Jupiter who holds men firm’. He would build a temple in thanks, Romulus promised the god, if only the Romans would resist the temptation to run for it, and stand their ground against the enemy. They did, and the Temple of Jupiter Stator was erected on that very spot, the first in a long series of shrines and temples in the city built to commemorate divine help in securing military victory for Rome.

  That at least was the story told by Livy and several other Roman writers. Archaeologists have never managed firmly to identify any remains of this temple, which must in any case have been much rebuilt by Cicero’s time, especially if its origins really did go back to the beginning of Rome. But there can be no doubt that, when he chose to summon the senate to meet there, Cicero knew exactly what he was doing. He had the precedent of Romulus in mind and was using the location to make a point. He wanted to keep the Romans steadfast (to ‘hold them firm’) in the face of their new enemy, Catiline. In fact, he said almost exactly that at the end of his speech, when – no doubt gesturing to the statue of the god – he appealed to Jupiter Stator and reminded his audience of the foundation of the temple:

  You, Jupiter, who were established by Romulus in the same year as the city itself, the god who, we rightly say, holds firm the city and the empire – you will keep this man and his gang away from your temple and the temples of the other gods, from the houses of the city and its walls, from the lives and fortunes of all the citizens of Rome …

  The implication that Cicero was casting himself as a new Romulus was not lost on the Romans of his day, and the connection could rebound: some people used it as another excuse to sneer at his small-town origins by calling him ‘the Romulus of Arpinum’.

  This was a classic Roman appeal to the founding fathers, to the stirring tales of early Rome and to the moment when the city came into being. Even now, the image of a wolf suckling the baby Romulus and his twin brother Remus signals the origins of Rome. The famous bronze statue of the scene is one of the most copied and instantly recognisable works of Roman art, illustrated on thousands of souvenir postcards, tea towels, a
shtrays and fridge magnets, and plastered all over the modern city as the emblem of Roma football club.

  Because this image is so familiar, it is easy to take the story of Romulus and Remus – or Remus and Romulus, to give them their usual Roman order – rather too much for granted and to forget that it is one of the oddest ‘historical legends’ of any city’s foundation at any period, anywhere in the world. And myth or legend it certainly is, even though Romans assumed that it was, in broad terms, history. The wolf’s nurturing of the twins is such a strange episode in a very peculiar tale that even ancient writers sometimes showed a healthy scepticism about the appearance of a conveniently lactating animal to suckle the pair of abandoned babies, right on cue. The rest of the narrative is an extraordinary mixture of puzzling details: not only the unusual idea of having two founders (Romulus and Remus) but also a series of decidedly unheroic elements, from murder, through rape and abduction, to the bulk of Rome’s first citizens being criminals and runaways.