Cicero (16 page)

Campaign and Conspiracy: 63
BC

C
icero 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.

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:

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. A
S
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.

A
S
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.