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 prosecut
ion 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.
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