by Cicero
Back in Rome, trials of suspected Catilinarians began to be held under the lex Plautia de vi (Plautian law concerning violence); these lasted several months. The prosecutions were all instigated by private individuals, as was normal at Rome: neither Cicero nor the senate took any further action against the conspirators. In fact, one of those accused, Publius Sulla, the nephew of the dictator and consul-elect of 65, was defended (as Murena had been) by Cicero and Hortensius, and acquitted: in Pro Sulla, which survives, Cicero argues that, as the consul who suppressed the conspiracy, he would have known had Sulla been involved. (The prosecutor was Lucius Manlius Torquatus, the son of the man who had gone on to hold the consulship of which Sulla had been deprived.) All the other defendants, however, were convicted and went into exile. These included Laeca; Cicero’s two would-be assassins, Cornelius and Vargunteius; Autronius; and Servius Cornelius Sulla and his brother Publius. In most cases or in all, Cicero gave decisive evidence for the prosecution. (We hear nothing of the other four men—Cassius, Umbrenus, Furius, and Annius—who were covered by the senate’s decree of 5 December. It is most likely that all four left Rome as soon as their arrest was ordered on 3 December, fled to Catiline, and died with him at Pistoria; it is possible that Furius was the man from Faesulae whom Sallust says commanded the left wing of Catiline’s army (Cat. 59.3).)
After defeating Catiline, Antonius went off to the province Cicero had given him, Macedonia, where he remained governor until 60. There he suffered military defeat, and oppressed the provincials; on his return to Rome, he was prosecuted in 59, probably for extortion, by the young Marcus Caelius Rufus (Cicero’s future client). For the rest of Cicero’s life, his view of other politicians was determined by their actions at the time of the Catilinarian conspiracy, or their attitude to it, and during the 50s he defended in court a number of people who had helped him during the crisis. Antonius was the first of these: although Cicero had no personal liking for him—indeed, he can hardly have looked on him with anything but disgust—he nevertheless believed that the man who was nominally responsible for the defeat of Catiline ought not to be allowed to fall victim to their political enemies. So he defended him with vigour, and lost. (On the trial, see E. S. Gruen, Latomus, 32 (1973), 301–10.) On the day of Antonius’ conviction, a group of Catilinarian sympathizers met at Catiline’s tomb, decorated it with flowers, and held a funeral dinner. Antonius went into exile, in Cephallenia (not far, in fact, from Autronius, who had chosen Epirus as his place of exile); and he remained there until he was recalled by Caesar in the 40s. In 42 he was made censor, a surprising appointment for a convicted criminal, and especially for a man whom the censors of an earlier year had expelled from the senate—but then he was Mark Antony’s uncle.
As tribune in 62, Cato persuaded the senate to help the urban plebs by extending the distribution of subsidized grain, more than doubling the cost to the treasury. At the end of the year, Pompey returned to Italy; but he did not seize power, or attack the senatorial establishment. Instead, he disbanded his troops, and divorced his wife, Metellus Nepos’ half-sister. Also this year the Allobroges rebelled, having received no relief from their troubles, in spite of the great service they had done Rome. They were crushed in 61 by the governor of Transalpine Gaul, Gaius Pomptinus (the praetor whom they had previously encountered at the Mulvian Bridge).
As time went by, Cicero found it increasingly necessary to defend the action that he had taken in 63, especially once he had made an enemy of Clodius—a more dangerous opponent than Nepos—at Clodius’ trial for sacrilege in May 61. In 60 he decided on a propaganda campaign, and published (i) all the political speeches of his consulship which he had not already published (Pro Murena was not included, so presumably was already in the public domain); (ii) a prose account of his consulship in Greek (later used by Plutarch as his main source for the Catilinarian conspiracy, but now lost); and (iii) an epic poem on his consulship in Latin (Consulatus suus, parts of which survive). The evidence for (i) is given in a letter to his friend Atticus (Att. 2.1.3, written in June 60 BC), where the twelve speeches are listed; they include the four Catilinarians. Cicero makes it clear (a) that he has just committed these speeches to paper and (b) that Atticus has not seen them before; so this must be their first publication, and not a reissue. The question therefore arises whether our four Catilinarians are a true record of what Cicero said on the several occasions in 63, or whether they merely give us what in 60 he wanted people to think he had said. Are they purely a production of 63, intended to influence the events of that year, and with no awareness of what was to follow? Or are they a production of 63 that has subsequently been modified to provide an additional slant, reacting to the author’s concerns in 60 and providing a retrospective justification of his political actions? Because Cicero has not introduced into the speeches any indisputable anachronisms (although some passages, such as Cat. 3.15 and 4.21, come very close), we cannot say that they must reflect the situation of 60. There is certainly a pervasive element of apologia in the speeches, which would serve Cicero’s purposes in 60, and would seem surprising in a context in which the executions of 5 December had not yet taken place. But on the other hand, it is not impossible that Cicero was aware from the beginning of the crisis that the actions he would be called upon to take might prove controversial (indeed, the biographer Cornelius Nepos comments at Atticus 16.4 on his prophetic powers). So the question cannot be answered with certainty. Nevertheless, Cicero first gave these speeches to the world in 60, and presented them as part of a larger body of work, a corpus of his consular speeches. It would therefore be unwarranted to treat them purely as productions of 63, and dismiss out of hand (as some scholars have done) any possibility of later revision (the fact that the four speeches are almost identical in length may be a further factor in favour of revision). A more judicious approach would involve taking them as productions of 60, accepting that they provide an account of the events of 63 that is historically accurate in such matters as chronology and fact, but at the same time recognizing that there is a high likelihood that in some passages (e.g. Cat. 1.4, 3.14, 3.15, 3.26–29a, 4.1–3, 4.19–24) they respond to the historical situation of the years after Cicero stepped down from his consulship.
In the short term, Cicero’s propaganda campaign must be judged a failure: in 58 Clodius became tribune and succeeded in driving him into exile for his execution of citizens without trial. He was recalled by a united senate the following year (Nepos, now consul, was with difficulty persuaded to give his consent); but the blow to his prestige remained with him for the rest of his life. As a result, he never passed up any opportunity of reminding people in his speeches of how as consul he had saved Rome—how it had been as a civilian, not as a general, that he had done it, and how it had been achieved by the deaths of a mere five criminals. In the words of the younger Seneca a century later, he praised his consulship ‘not without justice, but without end’ (Dialogues 10.5.1). He reacted in this way not because he was an egomaniac, but because it was never universally accepted that he had done the right thing. There would always be enemies ready to attack his record and to turn public opinion against him; hence he always felt it necessary to fight his corner. His suppression of the conspiracy at Rome was undoubtedly a great achievement, and it is difficult to identify any point at which he made the wrong decision. But he himself paid a high personal price.
Although in the short term the Catilinarians did not save Cicero from criticism, in the longer term they proved overwhelmingly successful: they turned Catiline into one of the great villains of history. There are signs in Cicero’s own works that Catiline may not have been wholly bad. As we have seen, Cicero considered defending him at his extortion trial in 65, and in Pro Caelio (56 BC) he is forced to admit that he did have some admirable qualities, and a certain allure (Cael. 12–14):
For Catiline had, as I am sure you remember, a great many indications of the highest qualities—not fully developed, mind you, but sketched in outline. He mixed with numero
us individuals of bad character; yet he pretended to be devoted to the best of men. He had the effect of degrading those around him; yet he could also stimulate them to effort and hard work. The fires of passion burned within him; yet he was a keen student of military affairs. For my part I do not think the world has ever seen a creature made up of such contrary, divergent, and mutually incompatible interests and appetites.
Who was more agreeable, at one particular time, to men of high rank, and who more intimate with scoundrels? Who at one time a more patriotic citizen, and who a more loathsome enemy of this country? Who more corrupt in his pleasures, and who more able to endure hard work? Who more avaricious in rapacity, and who more lavish in generosity? That man, gentlemen, had many features that were paradoxical. He had a wide circle of friends, and he looked after them well. What he had, he shared with everyone. He helped all his friends in times of need with money, influence, physical exertion, even, if necessary, with recklessness and crime. He could adapt and control the way he was to suit the occasion, and twist and turn his nature this way and that. He could be stern with the serious, relaxed with the free-and-easy, grave with the old, affable with the young, daring with criminals, and dissolute with the depraved. And so this complex, ever-changing character, even when he had collected all the wicked traitors from far and wide, still held many loyal, brave men in his grasp by a sort of pretended semblance of virtue. Indeed, that dastardly attempt to destroy this empire could never have come into being had not that monstrous concentration of so many vices been rooted in certain qualities of skill and endurance.
But that view, though it had some influence on Sallust’s portrayal in the Catiline, never took hold. It was instead the uniformly negative portrait that we find in the Catilinarians that captured the imagination of posterity. By the time of Virgil, a generation after Cicero, the Catilinarians had already become literary classics. Cicero’s invective had become unanswerable: Catiline was the archetypal traitor. In the Aeneid, Virgil twice presents Catiline as a figure in Tartarus, paying the penalty for his crimes. In the first of these passages the reference is oblique, and refers to Catiline’s alleged marriage to his own daughter, one of the wilder claims included by Cicero in In toga candida in 64: ‘This one forced his daughter’s bed and a marriage forbidden’ (6.623; for the identification of Catiline, see D. H. Berry, CQ, NS 42 (1992), 416–20). In the second passage, Virgil has been describing the scenes from Roman history that Vulcan has depicted on the shield he has made for Aeneas, and continues (8.666–9):
Away from these he had added
The abode of Tartarus, the tall portals of Dis,
The punishment of crime, and you, Catiline, clinging
To an overhanging cliff, and trembling before the faces of the Furies.
In the modern era, the invective of the Catilinarians continued to cast its spell. As late as 1894, one of the scholarly commentators on these speeches, A. S. Wilkins, could write, ‘Swept away in the eddy of the universal immorality, in early youth Catilina flung himself into all possible pleasures and excesses which, without undermining his gigantic strength, blunted his moral feelings, and, through his inclination to ambition, led him into a chain of awful crimes, through which his name stands out in history as one of the monsters of mankind’ (p.ix). In the twentieth century, some scholars tried to break free from Cicero’s presentation by arguing that Catiline was set up by Cicero, and that he had nothing to do with Manlius’ rising and/or the conspiracy in the city. But not even they seriously attempted to defend Catiline’s character. In the end, it has proved impossible to escape from the power of Cicero’s denunciation.
In reality, Catiline’s conspiracy was not so very different from the many other outbreaks of civil disorder which occurred in the unstable world of the late republic: it bears a strong resemblance, for instance, to the rising of Marcus Aemilius Lepidus in 78–77. What made it unique was that it took place in the consulship of Cicero. If it had occurred a year earlier, it might have become a much more serious affair, and we might well know little about it. But by delivering and then publishing the Catilinarians—one of the greatest productions of Latin literature—Cicero ensured that Catiline and his conspiracy would always be remembered, provoke debate, and fascinate.
IN CATILINAM I
[1] How far, I ask you,* Catiline, do you mean to stretch our patience? How much longer will your frenzy continue to frustrate us? At what point will your unrestrained recklessness stop flaunting itself? Have the nightly guards on the Palatine, have the patrols in the streets, have the fears of the people, have the gatherings of all loyal citizens, have these strongly defended premises in which this meeting is being held, have the faces and expressions of the senators here had no effect on you at all? Do you not realize that your plans have been exposed? Do you not see that your conspiracy has been arrested and trapped, now that all these people know about it? Which of us do you think does not know what you were up to yesterday evening, what you were up to last night,* where you were, whom you collected together, and what plan of action you decided upon? [2] What a decadent age we live in! The senate is aware of these things, the consul sees them—yet this man remains alive! Alive, did I say? He is not just alive: he actually enters the senate, he takes part in our public deliberations, and with his eyes he notes and marks down each one of us for assassination. We meanwhile, brave men that we are, think that we have done enough for our country if we merely get out of the way of his frenzy and his weapons.
You, Catiline, ought long ago to have been taken to your death, and on a consul’s order. It is on yourself that the destruction which you have long been plotting for all of us ought to be visited. [3] The distinguished chief pontiff, Publius Scipio, as a mere private citizen killed Tiberius Gracchus,* when Gracchus was causing a mild disturbance in our country: so are we, as consuls, to put up with Catiline, when he is aiming to devastate the entire world with fire and slaughter? I will pass over precedents that are too old, such as Gaius Servilius Ahala, who killed Spurius Maelius* with his own hand when Maelius was contemplating an uprising. Gone, gone is that one-time public virtue which led men of courage to punish a citizen traitor more severely than the deadliest foreign enemy. But in fact we have a decree of the senate* against you, Catiline, that is stern and authoritative. So it is not the national deliberations or the resolution of the senate that is wanting: it is we, we the consuls, I tell you, who are failing to act!
[4] The senate once decreed that the consul Lucius Opimius should see to it that the state came to no harm.* Not a night intervened. Gaius Gracchus, despite his illustrious father, grandfather, and ancestors, was killed on suspicion of stirring up dissension; and the ex-consul Marcus Fulvius was also killed, together with his children. A similar senatorial decree put the state into the hands of the consuls Gaius Marius and Lucius Valerius*—and did even a single day then elapse before death and the state’s vengeance overtook the tribune of the plebs Lucius Saturninus and the praetor Gaius Servilius? But we for twenty days now* have been allowing the edge of the senate’s authority to become blunt. We have a senatorial decree like those earlier ones, but it is filed away, as if hidden in a sheath—but on the strength of that decree, you, Catiline, should have been instantly killed. You remain alive, and yet you live on not to put aside your recklessness, but to increase it. Conscript fathers, my only wish is to be compassionate,* my only wish is not to appear remiss in the midst of a national emergency, but already I find that I am guilty of doing nothing, and doing wrong.
[5] There exists in Italy a military camp, hostile to the Roman people, in the mountain passes of Etruria. Each and every day, the number of the enemy increases. The commander of that camp, and the leader of that enemy, you can see inside the city walls, and even in the senate, plotting some form of ruin for our country each day from within. If I now order your arrest, Catiline, and if I order your execution, I suppose what I shall have to be afraid of is not that every loyal citizen will accuse me of being slow to act, but that someo
ne will say I have been too severe! But as it happens, there is a particular reason why I am still not bringing myself to do what I ought to have done long ago. You will be executed only when no one can be found so criminal, so wicked, and so similar to yourself as to deny the justice of that course of action. [6] As long as there remains a single person who has the temerity to speak up for you, you will remain alive—and live in the way you do now, surrounded by the many strong guards I have posted, and prevented from moving against your country. In addition, the many eyes and ears that you are not aware of will continue, as in the past, to track your every move and keep guard against you.
What is the point, Catiline, in waiting any longer, when night cannot cloak your criminal plots in darkness, when a private house cannot confine conspiratorial voices inside its walls—if everything is exposed to the light of day, everything breaks out into the open? Take my advice: call off your plans, and stop thinking of assassination and arson. Whichever way you turn, you have been thwarted. Your plans are all as clear as day to me. Let me take you through them.