CHAPTER ONE
·
CICERO'S FINEST HOUR
SPQR: 63 BCE
Our history of ancient Rome begins in the middle of the first century
BCE, more than 600 years after the city was founded. It begins with
promises of revolution, with a terrorist conspiracy to destroy the city,
with undercover operations and public harangues, with a battle fought
between Romans and Romans, and with citizens (innocent or not) rounded up
and summarily executed in the interests of homeland security. The year is 63
BCE. On the one side is Lucius Sergius Catilina ('Catiline' in English), a
disgruntled, bankrupt aristocrat and the architect of a plot, so it was
believed, to assassinate Rome's elected officials and burn the place down –
writing off all debts, of rich and poor alike, in the process. On the other side
is Marcus Tullius Cicero (just 'Cicero' from now on), the famous orator,
philosopher, priest, poet, politician, wit and raconteur, one of those marked
out for assassination – and a man who never ceased to use his rhetorical
talents to boast how he had uncovered Catiline's terrible plot and saved the
state. This was his finest hour.
In 63 BCE the city of Rome was a vast metropolis of more than a million
inhabitants, larger than any other in Europe before the nineteenth century;
and, although as yet it had no emperors, it ruled over an empire stretching
from Spain to Syria, from the South of France to the Sahara. It was a
sprawling mixture of luxury and filth, liberty and exploitation, civic pride
and murderous civil war. In the chapters that follow we shall look much
further back, to the very start of Roman time and to the early exploits,
belligerent and otherwise, of the Roman people. We shall think about what
lies behind some of those stories of early Rome that still strike a chord today,
from 'Romulus and Remus' to 'The Rape of Lucretia'. And we shall be
asking questions that historians have asked since antiquity itself. How, and
why, did an ordinary little town in central Italy grow so much bigger than any
other city in the ancient Mediterranean and come to control such a huge
empire? What, if anything, was special about the Romans? But with the
history of Rome it makes little sense to begin the story at the very beginning.
It is only in the first century BCE that we can start to explore Rome, close
up and in vivid detail, through contemporary eyes. An extraordinary wealth
of words survives from this period: from private letters to public speeches,
from philosophy to poetry – epic and erotic, scholarly and straight from the
street. Thanks to all this, we can still follow the day-to-day wheeling and
dealing of Rome's political grandees. We can eavesdrop on their bargaining
and their trade-offs and glimpse their back-stabbing, metaphorical and
literal. We can even get a taste of their private lives: their marital tiffs, their
cash-flow problems, their grief at the death of beloved children, or
occasionally of their beloved slaves. There is no earlier period in the history
of the West that it is possible to get to know quite so well or so intimately
(we have nothing like such rich and varied evidence from classical Athens).
It is not for more than a millennium, in the world of Renaissance Florence,
that we find any other place that we can know in such detail again.
What is more, it was during the first century BCE that Roman writers
themselves began systematically to study the earlier centuries of their city
and their empire. Curiosity about Rome's past certainly goes back further
than that: we can still read, for example, an analysis of the city's rise to
power written by a Greek resident in the mid second century BCE. But it is
only from the first century BCE that Roman scholars and critics began to pose
many of the historical questions that we still pose even now. By a process
that combined learned research with a good deal of constructive invention,
they pieced together a version of early Rome that we still rely on today. We
still see Roman history, at least in part, through first-century BCE eyes. Or, to
put it another way, Roman history, as we know it, started here.
Sixty-three BCE is a significant year in that crucial century. It was a time
of near disaster for the city. Over the 1,000 years that we will be exploring in
this book, Rome faced danger and defeat many times. Around 390 BCE, for
example, a posse of marauding Gauls occupied the city. In 218 BCE the
Carthaginian warlord, Hannibal, famously crossed the Alps with his thirty-
seven elephants and inflicted terrible losses on the Romans before they
eventually managed to fight him off. Roman estimates of casualties at the
Battle of Cannae in 216 BCE, up to 70,000 deaths in a single afternoon, make
it as great a bloodbath as Gettysburg or the first day of the Somme, maybe
even greater. And, almost equally fearsome in the Roman imagination, in the
70s BCE a scratch force of ex-gladiators and runaways, under the command of
Spartacus, proved more than a match for some ill-trained legions. The
Romans were never as invincible in battle as we tend to assume, or as they
liked to make out. In 63 BCE, however, they faced the enemy within, a
terrorist plot at the heart of the Roman establishment.
The story of this crisis can still be traced in intimate detail, day by day,
occasionally hour by hour. We know precisely where much of it happened,
and in a few places we can still look up to some of exactly the same
monuments as dominated the scene in 63 BCE. We can follow the sting
operations that gave Cicero his information on the plot and see how Catiline
was forced out of the city to his makeshift army north of Rome and into a
battle with the official Roman legions that cost him his life. We can also
glimpse some of the arguments, controversies and wider questions that the
crisis raised and still does. The tough response by Cicero – including those
summary executions – presented in stark form issues that trouble us even
today. Is it legitimate to eliminate 'terrorists' outside the due processes of
law? How far should civil rights be sacrificed in the interests of homeland
security? The Romans never ceased to debate 'The Conspiracy of Catiline',
as it came to be known. Was Catiline wholly evil, or was there something to
be said in mitigation of what he did? At what price was revolution averted?
The events of 63 BCE, and the catchphrases created then, have continued to
resonate throughout Western history. Some of the exact words spoken in the
tense debates that followed the discovery of the plot still find their place in
our own political rhetoric and are still, as we shall see, paraded on the
placards and banners, and even in the tweets, of modern political protest.
1. The heavy arches and columns of the 'Tabularium', built into Michelangelo's Palazzo above, is still a
major landmark at one end of the Roman Forum. Constructed just a couple of decades before Cicero
was consul in 63 BCE, it must then have seemed one of the most splendid recent architectural
developments. Its function is less clear. It was obviously a public building of some kind, but not
necessarily the 'Record Office' (tabularium) that is often assumed.
Whatever its rights and wrongs, 'The Conspiracy' takes us to the centre
of Roman political life in the first century BCE, to its conventions,
controversies and conflicts. In doing so, it allows us to glimpse in action the
'Senate' and the 'Roman People' – the two institutions whose names are
embedded in my title, SPQR (Senatus PopulusQue Romanus). Individually,
and sometimes in bitter opposition, these were the main sources of political
authority in first-century BCE Rome. Together they formed a shorthand slogan
for the legitimate power of the Roman state, a slogan that lasted throughout
Roman history and continues to be used in Italy in the twenty-first century CE.
More widely still, the senate (minus the PopulusQue Romanus) has lent its
name to modern legislative assemblies the world over, from the USA to
Rwanda.
2. SPQR is still plastered over the city of Rome, on everything from manhole covers to rubbish bins. It
can be traced back to the lifetime of Cicero, making it one of the most enduring acronyms in history. It
has predictably prompted parody. 'Sono Pazzi Questi Romani' is an Italian favourite: 'These Romans
are mad'.
The cast of characters in the crisis includes some of the most famous
figures in Roman history. Gaius Julius Caesar, then in his thirties, made a
radical contribution to the debate on how to punish the conspirators. Marcus
Licinius Crassus, the Roman plutocrat who notoriously remarked that you
could count no one rich if he did not have the cash to raise his own private
army, played some mysterious part behind the scenes. But centre stage, as
Catiline's main adversary, we find the one person whom it is possible to get
to know better than anyone else in the whole of the ancient world. Cicero's
speeches, essays, letters, jokes and poetry still fill dozens of volumes of
modern printed text. There is no one else in antiquity until Augustine –
Christian saint, prolific theologian and avid self-scrutiniser – 450 years later,
whose life is documented in public and private fully enough to be able to
reconstruct a plausible biography in modern terms. And it is largely through
Cicero's writing, his eyes and his prejudices that we see the Roman world of
the first century BCE and much of the city's history up to his day. The year 63
BCE was the turning point of his career: for things were never quite so good
for Cicero again. His career ended twenty years later, in failure. Still
confident of his own importance, occasionally a name to conjure with but no
longer in the front rank, he was murdered in the civil wars that followed the
assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE, his head and right hand pinned up in
the centre of Rome for all to see – and to mangle and maim.
Cicero's grisly death presaged a yet bigger revolution in the first century
BCE, which began with a form of popular political power, even if not a
'democracy' exactly, and ended with an autocrat established on the throne
and the Roman Empire under one-man rule. Though Cicero may have 'saved
the state' in 63 BCE, the truth is that the state in the form he knew was not to
last much longer. There was another revolution on the horizon, which would
be more successful than Catiline's. To the 'Senate and Roman People' was
soon added the overweening figure of the 'emperor', embodied in a series of
autocrats who were part of Western history, flattered and abused, obeyed and
ignored, for centuries. But that is a story for later in SPQR. For now we shall
put down our feet in one of the most memorable, meatiest and most revealing
moments in the whole of Roman history.
Cicero versus Catiline
The conflict between Cicero and Catiline was partly a clash of political
ideology and ambition, but it was also a clash between men of very different
backgrounds. Both of them stood at, or very near, the top of Roman politics;
but that is where the similarity ends. In fact, their contrasting careers offer a
vivid illustration of just how varied political life in Rome of the first century
BCE could be.
Catiline, the would-be revolutionary, had the more conventional, more
privileged and apparently safer start in life, as in politics. He came from a
distinguished old family that traced its lineage back centuries to the mythical
founding fathers of Rome. His ancestor Sergestus was said to have fled from
the East to Italy with Aeneas after the Trojan War, before the city of Rome
even existed. Among his blue-blooded forebears, his great-grandfather was a
hero of the war against Hannibal, with the extra claim to fame of being the
first man known to have entered combat with a prosthetic hand – probably
just a metal hook that replaced his right hand, lost in an earlier battle.
Catiline himself had a successful early career and was elected to a series of
junior political offices, but in 63 BCE he was close to bankruptcy. A string of
crimes was attached to his name, from the murder of his first wife and his
own son to sex with a virgin priestess. But whatever his expensive vices, his
financial problems came partly from his repeated attempts to secure election
as one of the two consuls, the most powerful political posts in the city.
Electioneering at Rome could be a costly business. By the first century
BCE it required the kind of lavish generosity that is not always easy to
distinguish from bribery. The stakes were high. The men who were
successful in the elections had the chance to recoup their outlay, legally or
illegally, with some of the perks of office. The failures – and, like military
defeats, there were many more of those in Rome than is usually
acknowledged – fell ever more deeply into debt.
That was Catiline's position after he had been beaten in the annual
elections for the consulship in both 64 and 63 BCE. Although the usual story is
that he had been leaning in that direction before, he now had little option but
to resort to 'revolution' or 'direct action' or 'terrorism', whichever you
choose to call it. Joining forces with other upper-class desperadoes in
similar straits, he appealed to the support of the discontented poor within the
city while mustering his makeshift army outside it. And there was no end to
his rash promises of debt relief (one of the most despicable forms of
radicalism in the eyes of the Roman landed classes) or to his bold threats to
take out the leading politicians and to put the whole city to flames.
Or so Cicero, who was one of those who believed he had been
earmarked for destruction, summed up his adversary's motives and aims. He
was of a very different stock from Catiline. He came from a wealthy, landed
background, as all high-level Roman politicians did. But his origins lay
outside the capital, in the small town of Arpinum, about 70 miles from Rome,
or at least a day's journey at the ancient speed of travel. Though they must
have been major players locally, no one in his family before him had ever
been prominent on the Roman political scene. With none of Catiline's
advantages, Cicero relied on his native talents, on the high-level connections
he assiduously cultivated – and on speaking his way to the top. That is to say,
his main claim to fame was as a star advocate in the Roman courts; and the
celebrity status and prominent supporters that this gave him meant that he was
easily elected to each of the required series of junior offices in turn, just like
Catiline. But in 64 BCE, where Catiline failed, Cicero succeeded in winning
the race for the next year's consulship.
That crowning success had not been an entirely foregone conclusion. For
all his celebrity, Cicero faced the disadvantage of being a 'new man', as the
Romans called those without political ancestry, and at one stage he even
seems to have considered making an electoral pact with Catiline, seedy
reputation or not. But in the end, the influential voters swayed it. The Roman
electoral system openly and unashamedly gave extra weight to the votes of
the rich; and many of them must have concluded that Cicero was a better
option than Catiline, whatever their snobbish disdain for his 'newness'.
Some of his rivals called him just a 'lodger' at Rome, a 'part-time citizen',
but he topped the poll. Catiline ended up in the unsuccessful third place. In
second place, elected as the other consul, was Gaius Antonius Hybrida,
uncle of a more famous Antonius ('Mark Antony'), whose reputation turned
out to be not much better than Catiline's.
By the summer of 63 BCE, Cicero appears to have got wind of definite
danger from Catiline, who was trying his luck as a candidate again. Using his
authority as consul, Cicero postponed the next round of elections, and when
he finally did let them go ahead, he turned up at the poll with an armed guard
and wearing a military breastplate clearly visible under his toga. It was a
histrionic display, and the combination of civilian and military kit was
alarmingly incongruous, rather as if a modern politician were to enter the
legislature in a business suit with a machine gun slung over his shoulder. But
it worked. These scare tactics, combined with Catiline's vociferously
populist programme, made sure that he was once more defeated. Claiming
that he was a down-and-out standing up for other down-and-outs could
hardly have endeared him to elite voters.
Soon after the elections, sometime in the early autumn, Cicero began to
receive much clearer intelligence of a violent plot. For a long time he had
been getting trickles of information through the girlfriend of one of Catiline's
'accomplices', a woman named Fulvia, who had more or less turned double
agent. Now, thanks to a further piece of treachery from the other side, and via
the wealthy Marcus Crassus as intermediary, he had a bundle of letters in his
hands that directly incriminated Catiline and referred to the terrible
bloodshed that was planned – information soon supplemented by definite
reports of armed forces gathering north of the city in support of the
insurrection. Finally, after he dodged an assassination attempt planned for 7
November, thanks to a tip-off from Fulvia, Cicero summoned the senate to
meet the next day so that he could formally denounce Catiline and frighten
him out of Rome.
The senators had already, in October, issued a decree urging (or
allowing) Cicero as consul 'to make sure that the state should come to no
harm', roughly the ancient equivalent of a modern 'emergency powers' or
'prevention of terrorism' act, and no less controversial. Now, on 8
November, they listened while Cicero went through the whole case against
Catiline, in a blistering and well-informed attack. It was a marvellous
mixture of fury, indignation, self-criticism and apparently solid fact. One
minute he was reminding the assembled company of Catiline's notorious
past; the next he was disingenuously regretting that he himself had not reacted
to the danger speedily enough; the next he was pouring out precise details of
the plot – in whose house the conspirators had gathered, on what dates, who
was involved and what exactly their plans were. Catiline had turned up to
face the denunciation in person. He asked the senators not to believe
everything they were told and made some jibes about Cicero's modest
background, compared with his own distinguished ancestors and their
splendid achievements. But he must have realised that his position was
hopeless. Overnight he left town.
In the senate
This encounter in front of the senate between Cicero and Catiline is the
defining moment of the whole story: the two adversaries coming face to face
in an institution that lay at the centre of Roman politics. But how should we
picture it? The most famous modern attempt to bring before our eyes what
happened on that 8 November is a painting by the nineteenth-century Italian
artist Cesare Maccari (detail below and plate 1). It is an image that fits
comfortably with many of our preconceptions of ancient Rome and its public
life, grand, spacious, formal and elegant.
It is also an image with which Cicero would no doubt have been
delighted. Catiline sits isolated, head bowed, as if no one wants to risk
getting anywhere near him, still less to talk to him. Cicero, meanwhile, is the
star of the scene, standing next to what seems to be a smoking brazier in front
of an altar, addressing the attentive audience of toga-clad senators. Everyday
Roman clothing – tunics, cloaks and even occasionally trousers – was much
more varied and colourful than this. Togas, however, were the formal,
national dress: Romans could define themselves as the gens togata, 'the race
that wears the toga', while some contemporary outsiders occasionally
laughed at this strange, cumbersome garment. And togas were white, with the
addition of a purple border for anyone who held public office. In fact, the
modern word 'candidate' derives from the Latin candidatus, which means
'whitened' and refers to the specially whitened togas that Romans wore
during election campaigns, to impress the voters. In a world where status
needed to be on show, the niceties of dress went even further: there was also
a broad purple stripe on senators' tunics, worn beneath the toga, and a
slightly narrower one if you were the next rank down in Roman society, an
'equestrian' or 'knight', and special shoes for both ranks.
3. In Maccari's painting of the scene in the senate, Cicero is in full flood, apparently talking without the
aid of notes. It nicely captures one of the defining aspirations of the Roman elite: to be a 'good man
skilled in speaking' (vir bonus dicendi peritus).
Maccari has captured the senators' smart togas, even though he seems to
have forgotten those significant borders. But in almost every other way the
painting is no more than a seductive fantasy of the occasion and the setting.
For a start, Cicero is presented as a white-haired elder statesman, Catiline as
a moody young villain, when actually both were in their forties, and Catiline
was the elder by a couple of years. Besides, this is far too sparsely attended
a meeting; unless we are to imagine more of them somewhere offstage, there
are barely fifty senators listening to the momentous speech.
In the middle of the first century BCE, the senate was a body of some 600
members; they were all men who had been previously elected to political
office (and I mean all men – no woman ever held political office in ancient
Rome). Anyone who had held the junior position of quaestor, twenty of them
elected each year, went automatically into the senate with a seat for life.
They met regularly, debating, advising the consuls and issuing decrees, which
were, in practice, usually obeyed – though, as these did not have the force of
law, there was always the awkward question of what would happen if a
decree of the senate was flouted or simply ignored. No doubt attendance
fluctuated, but this particular meeting must surely have been packed.
As for the setting, it looks Roman enough, but with that huge column
stretching up out of sight and the lavish, brightly coloured marble lining the
walls, it is far too grand for almost anything in Rome in this period. Our
modern image of the ancient city as an extravaganza of gleaming marble on a
vast scale is not entirely wrong. But that is a later development in the history
of Rome, beginning with the advent of one-man rule under the emperors and
with the first systematic exploitation of the marble quarries in Carrara in
North Italy, more than thirty years after the crisis of Catiline.
The Rome of Cicero's day, with its million or so inhabitants, was still
built largely of brick or local stone, a warren of winding streets and dark
alleys. A visitor from Athens or Alexandria in Egypt, which did have many
buildings in the style of Maccari's painting, would have found the place
unimpressive, not to say squalid. It was such a breeding ground of disease
that a later Roman doctor wrote that you didn't need to read textbooks to
research malaria – it was all around you in the city of Rome. The rented
market in slums provided grim accommodation for the poor but lucrative
profits for unscrupulous landlords. Cicero himself had large amounts of
money invested in low-grade property and once joked, more out of
superiority than embarrassment, that even the rats had packed up and left one
of his crumbling rental blocks.
A few of the richest Romans had begun to raise the eyebrows of
onlookers with their plush private houses, fitted out with elaborate paintings,
elegant Greek statues, fancy furniture (one-legged tables were a particular
cause of envy and anxiety), even imported marble columns. There was also a
scatter of public buildings designed on a grand scale, built in (or veneered
with) marble, offering a glimpse of the lavish face of the city that was to
come. But the location of the meeting on 8 November was nothing like that.
Cicero had summoned the senators to meet, as they often did, in a temple:
on this occasion a modest, old building dedicated to the god Jupiter, near the
Forum, at the heart of the city, constructed on the standard rectangular plan,
not the semicircular structure of Maccari's fantasy – probably small and ill
lit, with lamps and torches only partly compensating for a lack of windows.
We have to imagine several hundred senators packed into a stuffy, cramped
space, some sitting on makeshift chairs or benches, others standing, and
jostling, no doubt, under some venerable, ancient statue of Jupiter. It was
certainly a momentous occasion in Roman history, but equally certainly, as
with many things in Rome, much less elegant in reality than we like to
imagine.
Triumph – and humiliation
The scene that followed has not been re-created by admiring painters.
Catiline left town to join his supporters who had scratched together an army
outside Rome. Meanwhile, Cicero mounted a clever sting operation to
expose the conspirators still left in the city. Ill-advisedly, as it turned out,
they had tried to involve in the plot a deputation of men from Gaul who had
come to Rome to complain about their exploitation at the hands of Roman
provincial governors. For whatever reason – maybe nothing more profound
than an instinct for backing the winner – these Gauls decided to work
secretly with Cicero, and they were able to provide clinching evidence of
names, places, plans and some more letters with incriminating information.
Arrests followed, as well as the usual unconvincing excuses. When the house
of one of the conspirators was found stuffed with weapons, the man protested
his innocence by claiming that his hobby was weapon collecting.
On 5 December, Cicero summoned the senate again, to discuss what
should be done with the men now in custody. This time the senators met in the
temple of the goddess Concord, or Harmony, a sure sign that affairs of state
were anything but harmonious. Julius Caesar made the daring suggestion that
the captured conspirators should be imprisoned: either, according to one
account, until they could be properly tried once the crisis was over or,
according to another, for life. Custodial sentences were not the penalties of
choice in the ancient world, prisons being little more than places where
criminals were held before execution. Fines, exile and death made up the
usual repertoire of Roman punishment. If Caesar really did advocate life
imprisonment in 63 BCE, then it was probably the first time in Western history
that this was mooted as an alternative to the death penalty, without success.
Relying on the emergency powers decree, and on the vociferous support of
many senators, Cicero had the men summarily executed, with not even a
show trial. Triumphantly, he announced their deaths to the cheering crowd in
a famous one-word euphemism: vixere, 'they have lived' – that is, 'they're
dead'.
Within a few weeks, Roman legions defeated Catiline's army of
discontents in North Italy. Catiline himself fell fighting bravely at the front of
his men. The Roman commander, Cicero's fellow consul, Antonius Hybrida,
claimed to have bad feet on the day of the final battle and handed over
leadership to his number two, raising suspicions in some quarters about
exactly where his sympathies lay. And he was not the only one whose
motives were questioned. There have been all sorts of possibly wild,
certainly inconclusive, speculation, going back to the ancient world, about
which far more successful men might secretly have been backing Catiline.
Was he really the agent of the devious Marcus Crassus? And what was
Caesar's true position?
Catiline's defeat was nonetheless a notable victory for Cicero; and his
supporters dubbed him pater patriae, or 'father of the fatherland', one of the
most splendid and satisfying titles you could have in a highly patriarchal
society, such as Rome. But his success soon turned sour. Already on his last
day as consul, two of his political rivals prevented him from giving the usual
valedictory address to a meeting of the Roman people: 'Those who have
punished others without a hearing,' they insisted, 'ought not to have the right
to be heard themselves.' A few years later, in 58 BCE, the Roman people
voted, in general terms, to expel anyone who had put a citizen to death
without trial. Cicero left Rome, just before another bill was passed
specifically singling him out, by name, for exile.
So far in this story the Populus(Que) Romanus (the PQR in SPQR) has
not played a particularly prominent role. The 'people' was a much larger and
amorphous body than the senate, made up, in political terms, of all male
Roman citizens; the women had no formal political rights. In 63 BCE that was
around a million men spread across the capital and throughout Italy, as well
as a few beyond. In practice, it usually comprised the few thousand or the
few hundred who, on any particular occasion, chose to turn up to elections,
votes or meetings in the city of Rome. Exactly how influential the people
were has always – even in the ancient world – been one of the big
controversies in Roman history; but two things are certain. At this period,
they alone could elect the political officials of the Roman state; no matter
how blue-blooded you were, you could only hold office as, say, consul if the
Roman people elected you. And they alone, unlike the senate, could make
law. In 58 BCE Cicero's enemies argued that, whatever authority he had
claimed under the senate's prevention of terrorism decree, his executions of
Catiline's followers had flouted the fundamental right of any Roman citizen
to a proper trial. It was up to the people to exile him.
The sometime 'father of the fatherland' spent a miserable year in North
Greece (his abject self-pity is not endearing), until the people voted to recall
him. He was welcomed back to the cheers of his supporters, but his house in
the city had been demolished and, as if to drive the political point home, a
shrine to Libertas had been erected on its site. His career never fully
recovered.
Writing it up
The reasons why we can tell this story in such detail are very simple: the
Romans themselves wrote a great deal about it, and a lot of what they wrote
has survived. Modern historians often lament how little we can know about
some aspects of the ancient world. 'Just think of what we don't know about
the lives of the poor,' they complain, 'or of the perspectives of women.' This
is as anachronistic as it is deceptive. The writers of Roman literature were
almost exclusively male; or, at least, very few works by women have come
down to us (the autobiography of the emperor Nero's mother, Agrippina,
must count as one of the saddest losses of classical literature). These men
were also almost exclusively well off, even though some Roman poets did
like to pretend, as poets still occasionally do, that they were starving in
garrets. The complaints, however, miss a far more important point.
The single most extraordinary fact about the Roman world is that so much
of what the Romans wrote has survived, over two millennia. We have their
poetry, letters, essays, speeches and histories, to which I have already
referred, but also novels, geographies, satires and reams and reams of
technical writing on everything from water engineering to medicine and
disease. The survival is largely due to the diligence of medieval monks who
transcribed by hand, again and again, what they believed were the most
important, or useful, works of classical literature, with a significant but often
forgotten contribution from medieval Islamic scholars who translated into
Arabic some of the philosophy and scientific material. And thanks to
archaeologists who have excavated papyri from the sands and the rubbish
dumps of Egypt, wooden writing tablets from Roman military bases in the
north of England and eloquent tombstones from all over the empire, we have
glimpses of the life and letters of some rather more ordinary inhabitants of
the Roman world. We have notes sent home, shopping lists, account books
and last messages inscribed on graves. Even if this is a small proportion of
what once existed, we have access to more Roman literature – and more
Roman writing in general – than any one person could now thoroughly master
in the course of a lifetime.
So how is it, exactly, that we know of the conflict between Catiline and
Cicero? The story has come down to us by various routes, and it is partly the
variety that makes it so rich. There are brief accounts in the works of a
number of ancient Roman historians, including an ancient biography of
Cicero himself – all written a hundred years or more after the events. More
important, and more revealing, is a long essay, stretching over some fifty
pages of a standard English translation, which offers a detailed narrative, and
analysis, of the War against Catiline, or Bellum Catilinae, to use what was
almost certainly its ancient title. It was written only twenty years after the
'war', in the 40s BCE, by Gaius Sallustius Crispus, or 'Sallust', as he is now
usually known. A 'new man' like Cicero and a friend and ally of Julius
Caesar, he had a very mixed political reputation: his period as a Roman
governor in North Africa was infamous, even by Roman standards, for
corruption and extortion. But despite his not entirely savoury career, or
maybe because of it, Sallust's essay is one of the sharpest pieces of political
analysis to survive from the ancient world.
Sallust did not simply tell the unfolding story of the attempted uprising,
its causes and its upshot. He used the figure of Catiline as an emblem of the
wider failings of first-century BCE Rome. In Sallust's view, the moral fibre of
Roman culture had been destroyed by the city's success and by the wealth,
greed and lust for power that had followed its conquest of the Mediterranean
and the crushing of all its serious rivals. The crucial moment came eighty-
three years before the war against Catiline, when in 146 BCE Roman armies
finally destroyed Carthage, Hannibal's home base on the north coast of
Africa. After that, Sallust thought, no significant threats to Roman domination
were left. Catiline may have had positive qualities, as Sallust accepted, from
bravery in the front line of battle to extraordinary powers of endurance: 'his
ability to withstand hunger, cold or sleep deprivation was incredible'. But he
symbolised much of what was wrong with the Rome of his day.
Behind Sallust's essay lie other vivid documents, which ultimately go
back to the hand of Cicero himself and give his version of what happened.
Some of the letters he wrote to his closest friend, Titus Pomponius Atticus –
a wealthy man who never entered formal politics but often pulled the strings
from the sidelines – mention his initially friendly relations with Catiline.
Mixed in with domestic news, about the birth of his son ('Let me tell you, I
have become a father …') and the arrival of new statues from Greece to
decorate his house, Cicero explains in 65 BCE that he was contemplating
defending Catiline in the courts, in the hope that they might later work
together.
How such private letters ended up in the public domain is something of a
mystery. Most likely, a member of Cicero's household made copies of them
available after his death and they quickly circulated among curious readers,
fans and enemies. Nothing was ever published, in quite our sense, in the
ancient world. Almost a thousand letters in all survive, written both to and by
the great man over the last twenty years or so of his life. Revealing his self-
pity in exile ('All I can do is weep!') and his anguish on the death of his
daughter after childbirth while covering topics from thieving agents, through
society divorces, to the ambitions of Julius Caesar, they are some of the most
intriguing documents we have from ancient Rome.
Equally intriguing a survival, and perhaps even more surprising, is part
of a long poem that Cicero wrote to celebrate the achievements of his
consulship; it is no longer complete, but it was famous, or infamous, enough
that more than seventy lines of it are quoted by other ancient writers and by
Cicero himself in later works. It includes one of the most notorious lines of
Latin doggerel to have made it through the Dark Ages: 'O fortunatam natam
me consule Romam' – a jingle with something of the ring of 'Rome was sure
a lucky state / Born in my great consulate'. And, in what has been seen as a
major, if slightly hilarious, lapse of modesty, it seems to have featured an
'assembly of the gods' in which our superhuman consul discusses with the
divine senate on Mount Olympus how he should handle Catiline's plot.
By the first century BCE, reputation and fame in Rome depended not just
on word of mouth but also on publicity, sometimes elaborately, even
awkwardly, orchestrated. We know that Cicero tried to persuade one of his
historian friends, Lucius Lucceius, to write a celebratory account of his
defeat of Catiline and its sequel ('I am extremely keen,' he said in a letter,
'that my name should be put in the limelight in your writing'); and he also
hoped that a fashionable Greek poet, whose tricky immigration case he had
defended in the Roman courts, would compose a worthy epic on this same
subject. In the event, he had to write his own verse tribute – to himself. A
few modern critics have tried, not very convincingly, to defend the literary
quality of the work, and even of what has become its signature line ('O
fortunatam natam …'). Most Roman critics whose views on the topic
survive satirised both the vanity of the enterprise and its language. Even one
of Cicero's greatest admirers, a keen student of his oratorical techniques,
regretted that 'he had gone quite so over the top'. Others gleefully ridiculed
or parodied the poem.
But the most direct access that we have to the events of 63 BCE comes
from the scripts of some of the speeches that Cicero gave at the time of the
uprising. Two were delivered to public meetings of the Roman people,
updating them on the progress of the investigations into Catiline's conspiracy
and announcing victory over the dissidents. One was Cicero's contribution to
the debate in the senate on 5 December which determined the appropriate
penalty for those under arrest. And, most famous of all, there was the speech
that he gave to the senate on 8 November, denouncing Catiline, in the words
that we should imagine coming out of his mouth in Maccari's painting.
Cicero himself probably circulated copies of all these soon after they had
been delivered, laboriously transcribed by a small army of slaves. And,
unlike his efforts at poetry, they quickly became admired and much-quoted
classics of Latin literature, and prime examples of great oratory to be learned
and imitated by Roman schoolboys and would-be public speakers for the rest
of antiquity. They were even read and studied by those who were not entirely
fluent in Latin. That was certainly going on in Roman Egypt four hundred
years later. The earliest copies of these speeches to survive have been found
on papyrus dating to the fourth or fifth century CE, now just small scraps of
what were originally much longer texts. They include the original Latin and a
word-for-word translation into Greek. We must imagine a native Greek
speaker in Egypt struggling a little, and needing some help, in getting to grips
with Cicero's original language.
Many later learners have struggled too. This group of four speeches,
Against Catiline (In Catilinam) or the Catilinarians, as they are now often
known, went on to enter the educational and cultural traditions of the West.
Copied and disseminated via the medieval monasteries, they were used to
drill generations of pupils in the Latin language, and they were closely
analysed as literary masterpieces by Renaissance intellectuals and rhetorical
theorists. Even today, in mechanically printed editions, they keep their place
in the syllabus for those who learn Latin, and they remain models of
persuasive oratory, whose techniques underlie some of the most famous
modern speeches, including those of Tony Blair and Barack Obama.
It did not take long for the opening words of Cicero's speech given on 8
November (the First Catilinarian) to become one of the best known and
instantly recognisable quotes of the Roman world: 'Quo usque tandem
abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?' ('How long, Catiline, will you go on
abusing our patience?'); and it was closely followed, a few lines later in the
written text, by the snappy, and still much repeated, slogan 'O tempora, o
mores' ('O what a world we live in!', or, literally, 'O the times, O the
customs!'). In fact, the phrase 'Quo usque tandem …' must already have
been firmly embedded in the Roman literary consciousness by the time that
Sallust was writing his account of the 'war', just twenty years later. So
firmly embedded was it that, in pointed or playful irony, Sallust could put it
into Catiline's mouth. 'Quae quo usque tandem patiemini, o fortissimi
viri?' ('How long will you go on putting up with this, my braves?') is how
Sallust's revolutionary stirs up his followers, reminding them of the
injustices they were suffering at the hands of the elite. The words are purely
imaginary. Ancient writers regularly scripted speeches for their protagonists,
much as historians today like to ascribe feelings or motives to their
characters. The joke here is that Catiline, Cicero's greatest enemy, is made to
voice his antagonist's most famous slogan.
That is only one of the wry ironies and pointed, paradoxical 'mis-
quotations' in the history of this distinctive phrase. It often lurked in Roman
literature whenever revolutionary designs were at stake. Just a few years
after Sallust, Titus Livius, or 'Livy', as he is better known, was writing his
own history of Rome from its beginning, originally in 142 'books' – a vast
project, even though an ancient book amounted to what fitted onto a roll of
papyrus and is closer to the length of a modern chapter. What Livy had to say
about Catiline has been lost. But when he wanted to capture the civil
conflicts of hundreds of years earlier, in particular the 'conspiracy' of one
Marcus Manlius, who in the fourth century BCE was supposed to have incited
the Roman poor to rebellion against the oppressive rule of the elite, he went
back to a version of the classic words. 'Quo usque tandem ignorabitis vires
vestras?' ('How long will you go on being ignorant of your strength?') he
imagined Manlius asking his followers to get them to realise that, poor
though they were, they had the manpower to succeed.
The point here is not merely about an echo of language. Nor is it just
about the figure of Catiline as a byword for villainy, though he certainly
plays that part often enough in Roman literature. His name came to be used as
a nickname for unpopular emperors, and half a century later Publius Vergilius
Maro (or 'Virgil', as he is now usually known) gave him a cameo role in the
Aeneid, where the villain is pictured being tortured in the underworld,
'trembling at the face of the Furies'. More important is the way that the
conflict between Catiline and Cicero became a powerful template for
understanding civil disobedience and insurrection throughout Roman history
and beyond. When Roman historians wrote about revolution, the image of
Catiline almost always lay somewhere behind their accounts, even at the cost
of some strange inversions of chronology. As his carefully chosen words
hint, Livy's Marcus Manlius, a nobleman turning to doomed revolution,
supported by an impoverished rabble, was largely a projection of Catiline
back into early Roman history.
The other side of the story
Might there not be another side to the story? The detailed evidence we have
from Cicero's pen, or point of view, means that his perspective will always
be dominant. But it does not necessarily mean that it is true in any simple
sense, or that it is the only way of seeing things. People have wondered for
centuries quite how loaded an account Cicero offers us, and have detected
alternative views and interpretations just beneath the surface of his version
of events. Sallust himself hints as much. For, although his account is heavily
based on Cicero's writing, by transferring the famous 'Quo usque tandem'
from the mouth of Cicero to that of Catiline, he may well have been
reminding his readers that the facts and their interpretations were, at the very
least, fluid.
One obvious question is whether the speech we know as the First
Catilinarian really is what Cicero said to the assembled senators in the
Temple of Jupiter on 8 November. It is hard to imagine that it was a complete
fabrication. How would he have got away with circulating a version that
bore no relationship to what he had said? But almost certainly it is not a
word-for-word match. If he spoke from notes and the ancient equivalent of
bullet points, then the text we have presumably lies somewhere between
what he remembered saying and what he would have liked to have said. Even
if he was reading from a fairly complete text, when he circulated the speech
to friends, associates and those he wanted to impress, he would almost
certainly have improved it somewhat, tidying up the loose ends and inserting
a few more clever one-liners, which might have been missed out or slipped
his mind on the day.
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?