[Sidenote: B.C. 64.] Among the patricians who were rising through the
lower magistracies and were aspiring to the consulship was Lucius
Sergius Catiline. Catiline, now in middle life, had when young been a
fervent admirer of Sylla, and, as has been already said, had been an
active agent in the proscription. He had murdered his brother-in-law,
and perhaps his brother, under political pretences. In an age when
licentiousness of the grossest kind was too common to attract
attention, Catiline had achieved a notoriety for infamy. Ho had
intrigued with a Vestal virgin, the sister of Cicero's wife, Terentia.
If Cicero is to be believed, he had made away with his own wife, that
he might marry Aurelia Orestilla, a woman as wicked as she was
beautiful, and he had killed his child also because Aurelia had
objected to be encumbered with a step-son. But this, too, was common in
high society in those days. Adultery and incest had become familiar
excitements. Boys of ten years old had learnt the art of poisoning
their fathers,[1] and the story of Aurelia Orestilla and Catiline had
been rehearsed a few years before by Sassia and Oppianicus at
Larino.[2] Other enormities Catiline had been guilty of which Cicero
declined to mention, lest he should show too openly what crimes might
go unpunished under the senatorial administration. But villainy,
however notorious, did not interfere with advancement in the public
service. Catiline was adroit, bold, and even captivating. He made his
way into high office along the usual gradations. He was praetor in B.C.
68. He went as governor to Africa in the year following, and he
returned with money enough, as he reasonably hoped, to purchase the
last step to the consulship. He was impeached when he came back for
extortion and oppression, under one of the many laws which were made to
be laughed at. Till his trial was over he was disqualified from
presenting himself as a candidate, and the election for the year 65 was
carried by Autronius Paetus and Cornelius Sylla. Two other patricians,
Aurelius Cotta and Manlius Torquatus, had stood against them. The
successful competitors were unseated for bribery; Cotta and Torquatus
took their places, and, apparently as a natural resource in the
existing contempt into which the constitution had fallen, the
disappointed candidates formed a plot to kill their rivals and their
rivals' friends in the Senate, and to make a revolution. Cneius Piso, a
young nobleman of the bluest blood, joined in the conspiracy. Catiline
threw himself into it as his natural element, and aristocratic
tradition said in later years that Caesar and Crassus were implicated
also. Some desperate scheme there certainly was, but the accounts of it
are confused: one authority says that it failed because Catiline gave
the signal prematurely; others that Caesar was to have given the
signal, and did not do it; others that Crassus's heart failed him;
others that the consuls had secret notice given to them and took
precautions. Cicero, who was in Rome at the time, declares that he
never heard of the conspiracy.[3] When evidence is inconclusive,
probability becomes argument. Nothing can be less likely than that a
cautious capitalist of vast wealth like Crassus should have connected
himself with a party of dissolute adventurers. Had Caesar committed
himself, jealously watched as he was by the aristocrats, some proofs of
his complicity would have been forthcoming. The aristocracy under the
empire revenged themselves for their ruin by charging Caesar with a
share in every combination that had been formed against them, from
Sylla's time downwards. Be the truth what it may, nothing came of this
project. Piso went to Spain, where he was killed. The prosecution of
Catiline for his African misgovernment was continued, and, strange to
say, Cicero undertook his defence. He was under no uncertainty as to
Catiline's general character, or his particular guilt in the charge
brought against him. It was plain as the sun at midday.[4] But Cicero
was about to stand himself for the consulship, the object of his most
passionate desire. He had several competitors; and as he thought well
of Catiline's prospects, he intended to coalesce with him.[5] Catiline
was acquitted, apparently through a special selection of the judges,
with the connivance of the prosecutor. The canvass was violent, and the
corruption flagrant. [6]Cicero did not bribe himself, but if Catiline's
voters would give him a help, he was not so scrupulous as to be above
taking advantage of it. Catiline's humor or the circumstances of the
time provided him with a more honorable support. He required a more
manageable colleague than he could have found in Cicero. Among the
candidates was one of Sylla's officers, Caius Antonius, the uncle of
Marc Antony, the triumvir. This Antonius had been prosecuted by Caesar
for ill-usage of the Macedonians. He had been expelled by the censors
from the Senate for general worthlessness; but public disgrace seems to
have had no effect whatever on the chances of a candidate for the
consulship in this singular age. Antonius was weak and vicious, and
Catiline could mould him as he pleased. He had made himself popular by
his profusion when aedile in providing shows for the mob. The feeling
against the Senate was so bitter that the aristocracy had no chance of
carrying a candidate of their own, and the competition was reduced at
last to Catiline, Antonius and Cicero. Antonius was certain of his
election, and the contest lay between Catiline and Cicero. Each of them
tried to gain the support of Antonius and his friends. Catiline
promised Antonius a revolution, in which they were to share the world
between them. Cicero promised his influence to obtain some lucrative
province for Antonius to misgovern. Catiline would probably have
succeeded, when the aristocracy, knowing what to expect if so
scandalous a pair came into office, threw their weight on Cicero's side
and turned the scale. Cicero was liked among the people for his
prosecution of Verres, for his support of the Manilian law, and for the
boldness with which he had exposed patrician delinquencies. With the
Senate for him also, he was returned at the head of the poll. The proud
Roman nobility had selected a self-made lawyer as their representative.
Cicero was consul, and Antonius with him. Catiline had failed. It was
the turning-point of Cicero's life. Before his consulship he had not
irrevocably taken a side. No public speaker had more eloquently shown
the necessity for reform; no one had denounced with keener sarcasm the
infamies and follies of senatorial favorites. Conscience and patriotism
should have alike held him to the reforming party; and political
instinct, if vanity had left him the use of his perception, would have
led him in the same direction. Possibly before he received the votes of
the patricians and their clients he had bound himself with certain
engagements to them. Possibly he held the Senate's intellect cheap, and
saw the position which he could arrive at among the aristocracy if he
offered them his services. The strongest intellect was with the
reformers, and first on that side he could never be. First among the
Conservatives[7] he could easily be; and he might prefer being at the
head of a party which at heart he despised, to working at the side of
persons who must stand inevitably above him. We may regret that gifted
men should be influenced by personal considerations, but under party
government it is a fact that they are so influenced, and will be as
long as it continues. Caesar and Pompey were soldiers. The army was
democratic, and the triumph of the democracy meant the rule of a
popular general. Cicero was a civilian, and a man of speech. In the
forum and in the Curia he knew that he could reign supreme.
Cicero had thus reached the highest step in the scale of promotion by
trimming between the rival factions. Caesar was rising simultaneously
behind him on lines of his own. In the year B.C. 65 he had been aedile,
having for his colleague Bibulus, his future companion on the
successive grades of ascent. Bibulus was a rich plebeian, whose delight
in office was the introduction which it gave him into the society of
the great; and in his politics he outdid his aristocratic patrons. The
aediles had charge of the public buildings and the games and
exhibitions in the capital. The aedileship was a magistracy through
which it was ordinarily necessary to pass in order to reach the
consulship; and as the aediles were expected to bear their own
expenses, the consulship was thus restricted to those who could afford
an extravagant outlay. They were expected to decorate the city with new
ornaments, and to entertain the people with magnificent spectacles. If
they fell short of public expectation, they need look no further for
the suffrages of their many-headed master. Cicero had slipped through
the aedileship, without ruin to himself. He was a self-raised man,
known to be dependent upon his own exertions, and liked from the
willingness with which he gave his help to accused persons on their
trials. Thus no great demands had been made upon him. Caesar, either
more ambitious or less confident in his services, raised a new and
costly row of columns in front of the Capitol. He built a temple to the
Dioscuri, and he charmed the populace with a show of gladiators
unusually extensive. Personally he cared nothing for these sanguinary
exhibitions, and he displayed his indifference ostentatiously by
reading or writing while the butchery was going forward.[8] But he
required the favor of the multitude, and then, as always, took the road
which led most directly to his end. The noble lords watched him
suspiciously, and their uneasiness was not diminished when, not content
with having produced the insignia of Marius at his aunt's funeral, he
restored the trophies for the victories over the Cimbri and Teutons,
which had been removed by Sylla. The name of Marius was growing every
day more dear to the popular party. They forgave, if they had ever
resented, his credulities. His veterans who had fought with him through
his campaigns came forward in tears to salute the honored relics of
their once glorious commander.
As he felt the ground stronger under his feet, Caesar now began to
assume an attitude more peremptorily marked. He had won a reputation in
the Forum; he had spoken in the Senate; he had warmly advocated the
appointment of Pompey to his high commands; and he was regarded as a
prominent democratic leader. But he had not aspired to the tribunate;
he had not thrown himself into politics with any absorbing passion. His
exertions had been intermittent, and he was chiefly known as a
brilliant member of fashionable society, a peculiar favorite with
women, and remarkable for his abstinence from the coarse debauchery
which disgraced his patrician contemporaries. He was now playing for a
higher stake, and the oligarchy had occasion to be reminded of Sylla's
prophecy. In carrying out the proscription, Sylla had employed
professional assassins, and payments had been made out of the treasury
to wretches who came to him with bloody trophies in their hands to
demand the promised fees. The time had come when these doings were to
be looked into; hundreds of men had been murdered, their estates
confiscated, and their families ruined, who had not been even
ostensibly guilty of any public crime. At Caesar's instance an inquiry
was ordered. He himself was appointed Judex Quaestionis, or chairman of
a committee of investigation; and Catiline, among others, was called to
answer for himself--a curious commentary on Caesar's supposed
connection with him.
[Sidenote: B.C. 63.] Nor did the inquisition stop with Sylla. Titus
Labienus, afterward so famous and so infamous, was then tribune of the
people. His father had been killed at the side of Saturninus and
Glaucia thirty-seven years before, when the young lords of Rome had
unroofed the senate-house, and had pelted them and their companions to
death with tiles. One of the actors in the scene, Caius Rabirius, now a
very old man, was still alive. Labienus prosecuted him before Caesar.
Rabirius was condemned, and appealed to the people; and Cicero, who had
just been made consul, spoke in his defence. On this occasion Cicero
for the first time came actively in collision with Caesar. His language
contrasted remarkably with the tone of his speeches against Verres and
for the Manilian law. It was adroit, for he charged Marius with having
shared the guilt, if guilt there had been, in the death of those men;
but the burden of what he said was to defend enthusiastically the
conservative aristocracy, and to censure with all his bitterness the
democratic reformers. Rabirius was acquitted, perhaps justly. It was a
hard thing to revive the memory of a political crime which had been
shared by the whole patrician order after so long an interval. But
Cicero had shown his new colors; no help, it was evident, was
thenceforward to be expected from him in the direction of reform. The
popular party replied in a singular manner. The office of Pontifex
Maximus was the most coveted of all the honors to which a Roman citizen
could aspire. It was held for life, it was splendidly endowed, and
there still hung about the pontificate the traditionary dignity
attaching to the chief of the once sincerely believed Roman religion.
Like other objects of ambition, the nomination had fallen, with the
growth of democracy, to the people, but the position had always been
held by some member of the old aristocracy; and Sylla, to secure them
in the possession of it, had reverted to the ancient constitution, and
had restored to the Sacred College the privilege of choosing their
head. Under the impulse which the popular party had received from
Pompey's successes, Labienus carried a vote in the assembly, by which
the people resumed the nomination to the pontificate themselves. In the
same year it fell vacant by the death of the aged Metullus Pius. Two
patricians, Quintus Catulus and Caesar's old general Servilius
Isauricus, were the Senate's candidates, and vast sums were subscribed
and spent to secure the success of one or other of the two. Caesar came
forward to oppose them. Caesar aspired to be Pontifex Maximus--Pope of
Rome--he who of all men living was the least given to illusion; he who
was the most frank in his confession of entire disbelief in the legends
which, though few credited them any more, yet almost all thought it
decent to pretend to credit. Among the phenomena of the time this was
surely the most singular. Yet Caesar had been a priest from his
boyhood, and why should he not be Pope? He offered himself to the
Comitia. Committed as he was to a contest with the richest men in Rome,
he spent money freely. He was in debt already for his expenses as
aedile. He engaged his credit still deeper for this new competition.
The story ran that when his mother kissed him as he was leaving his
home for the Forum on the morning of the election, he told her that he
would return as pontiff, or she would never see him more. He was chosen
by an overwhelming majority, the votes given for him being larger than
the collective numbers of the votes entered for his opponents.
[Sidenote: B.C. 63.] The election for the pontificate was on the 6th of
March, and soon after Caesar received a further evidence of popular
favor on being chosen praetor for the next year. As the liberal party
was growing in courage and definiteness, Cicero showed himself more
decidedly on the other side. Now was the time for him, highly placed as
he was, to prevent a repetition of the scandals which he had so
eloquently denounced, to pass laws which no future Verres or Lucullus
could dare to defy. Now was his opportunity to take the wind out of the
reformers' sails, and to grapple himself with the thousand forms of
patrician villainy which he well knew to be destroying the
Commonwealth. Not one such measure, save an ineffectual attempt to
check election bribery, distinguished the consulship of Cicero. His
entire efforts were directed to the combination in a solid phalanx of
the equestrian and patrician orders. The danger to society, he had come
to think, was an approaching war against property, and his hope was to
unite the rich of both classes in defence against the landless and
moneyless multitudes.[9] The land question had become again as pressing
as in the time of the Gracchi. The peasant proprietors were melting
away as fast as ever, and Rome was becoming choked with impoverished
citizens, who ought to have been farmers and fathers of families, but
were degenerating into a rabble fed upon the corn grants, and occupied
with nothing but spectacles and politics. The agrarian laws in the past
had been violent, and might reasonably be complained of; but a remedy
could now be found for this fast-increasing mischief without injury to
anyone. Pompey's victories had filled the public treasury. Vast
territories abroad had lapsed to the possession of the State; and
Rullus, one of the tribunes, proposed that part of these territories
should be sold, and that out of the proceeds, and out of the money
which Pompey had sent home, farms should be purchased in Italy and poor
citizens settled upon them. Rullus's scheme might have been crude, and
the details of it objectionable; but to attempt the problem was better
than to sit still and let the evil go unchecked. If the bill was
impracticable in its existing form, it might have been amended; and so
far as the immediate effect of such a law was concerned, it was against
the interests of the democrats. The popular vote depended for its
strength on the masses of poor who were crowded into Rome; and the
tribune was proposing to weaken his own army. But the very name of an
agrarian law set patrician households in a flutter, and Cicero stooped
to be their advocate. He attacked Rullus with brutal sarcasm. He
insulted his appearance; he ridiculed his dress, his hair, and his
beard. He mocked at his bad enunciation and bad grammar. No one more
despised the mob than Cicero; but because Rullus had said that the city
rabble was dangerously powerful, and ought to be "drawn off" to some
wholesome employment, the eloquent consul condescended to quote the
words, to score a point against his opponent; and he told the crowd
that their tribune had described a number of excellent citizens to the
Senate as no better than the contents of a cesspool.[10]
By these methods Cicero caught the people's voices. The plan came to
nothing, and his consulship would have waned away, undistinguished by
any act which his country would have cared to remember, but for an
accident which raised him for a moment into a position of real
consequence, and impressed on his own mind a conviction that he was a
second Romulus.
Revolutionary conspiracies are only formidable when the government
against which they are directed is already despised and detested. As
long as an administration is endurable the majority of citizens prefer
to bear with it, and will assist in repressing violent attempts at its
overthrow. Their patience, however, may be exhausted, and the disgust
may rise to a point when any change may seem an improvement. Authority
is no longer shielded by the majesty with which it ought to be
surrounded. It has made public its own degradation; and the most
worthless adventurer knows that he has no moral indignation to fear if
he tries to snatch the reins out of hands which are at least no more
pure than his own. If he can dress his endeavors in the livery of
patriotism, if he can put himself forward as the champion of an injured
people, he can cover the scandals of his own character and appear as a
hero and a liberator. Catiline had missed the consulship, and was a
ruined man. He had calculated on succeeding to a province where he
might gather a golden harvest and come home to live in splendor, like
Lucullus. He had failed, defeated by a mere plebeian whom his
brother-patricians had stooped to prefer to him. Were the secret
history known of the contest for the consulship, much might be
discovered there to explain Cicero's and Catiline's hatred of each
other. Cicero had once thought of coalescing with Catiline,
notwithstanding his knowledge of his previous crimes: Catiline had
perhaps hoped to dupe Cicero, and had been himself outwitted. He
intended to stand again for the year 62, but evidently on a different
footing from that on which he had presented himself before. That such a
man should have been able to offer himself at all, and that such a
person as Cicero should have entered into any kind of amicable
relations with him, was a sign by itself that the Commonwealth was
already sickening for death.
Catiline was surrounded by men of high birth, whose fortunes were
desperate as his own. There was Lentulus, who had been consul a few
years before, and had been expelled from the Senate by the censors.
There was Cethegus, staggering under a mountain of debts. There was
Autronius, who had been unseated for bribery when chosen consul in 65.
There was Manlius, once a distinguished officer in Sylla's army, and
now a beggar. Besides these were a number of senators, knights,
gentlemen, and dissolute young patricians, whose theory of the world
was that it had been created for them to take their pleasure in, and
who found their pleasures shortened by emptiness of purse. To them, as
to their betters, the Empire was but a large dish out of which they
considered that they had a right to feed themselves. They were
defrauded of their proper share, and Catiline was the person who would
help them to it.
Etruria was full of Sylla's disbanded soldiers, who had squandered
their allotments, and were hanging about, unoccupied and starving.
Catiline sent down Manlius, their old officer, to collect as many as he
could of them without attracting notice. He himself, as the election
day approached, and Cicero's year of office was drawing to an end, took
up the character of an aristocratic demagogue, and asked for the
suffrages of the people as the champion of the poor against the rich,
as the friend of the wretched and oppressed; and those who thought
themselves wretched and oppressed in Rome were so large a body, and so
bitterly hostile were they all to the prosperous classes, that his
election was anticipated as a certainty. In the Senate the consulship
of Catiline was regarded as no less than an impending national
calamity. Marcus Cato, great-grandson of the censor, then growing into
fame by his acrid tongue and narrow republican fanaticism, who had
sneered at Pompey's victories as triumphs over women, and had not
spared even Cicero himself, threatened Catiline in the Curia. Catiline
answered, in a fully attended house, that if any agitation was kindled
against him he would put it out, not with water, but with revolution.
His language became so audacious that, on the eve of the election day,
Cicero moved for a postponement, that the Senate might take his
language into consideration. Catiline's conduct was brought on for
debate, and the consul called on him to explain himself. There was no
concealment in Catiline. Then and always Cicero admits he was perfectly
frank. He made no excuses. He admitted the truth of what had been
reported of him. The State, he said, had two bodies, one weak (the
aristocracy), with a weak leader (Cicero); the other, the great mass of
the citizens--strong in themselves, but without a head, and he himself
intended to be that head.[11] A groan was heard in the house, but less
loud than in Cicero's opinion it ought to have been; and Catiline
sailed out in triumph, leaving the noble lords looking in each other's
faces.
[Sidenote: October, B.C. 63.] Both Cicero and the Senate were evidently
in the greatest alarm that Catiline would succeed constitutionally in
being chosen consul, and they strained every sinew to prevent so
terrible a catastrophe. When the Comitia came on, Cicero admits that he
occupied the voting place in the Campus Martius with a guard of men who
could be depended on. He was violating the law, which forbade the
presence of an armed force on those occasions. He excused himself by
pretending that Catiline's party intended violence, and he appeared
ostentatiously in a breastplate as if his own life was aimed at. The
result was that Catiline failed once more, and was rejected by a small
majority. Cicero attributes his defeat to the moral effect produced by
the breastplate. But from the time of the Gracchi downwards the
aristocracy had not hesitated to lay pressure on the elections when
they could safely do it; and the story must be taken with reservation,
in the absence of a more impartial account than we possess of the
purpose to which Cicero's guard was applied. Undoubtedly it was
desirable to strain the usual rules to keep a wretch like Catiline from
the consulship; but as certainly, both before the election and after
it, Catiline had the sympathies of a very large part of the resident
inhabitants of the city, and these sympathies must be taken into
account if we are to understand the long train of incidents of which
this occasion was the beginning.
Two strict aristocrats, Decimus Silanus and Lucius Murena,[12] were
declared elected. Pompey was on his way home, but had not yet reached
Italy. There were no regular troops in the whole peninsula, and the
nearest approach to an army was the body of Syllans, whom Manlius had
quietly collected at Fiesole. Cicero's colleague Antonius was secretly
in communication with Catiline, evidently thinking it likely that he
would succeed. Catiline determined to wait no longer, and to raise an
insurrection in the capital, with slave emancipation and a cancelling
of debt for a cry. Manlius was to march on Rome, and the Senate, it was
expected, would fall without a blow. Caesar and Crassus sent a warning
to Cicero to be on his guard. Caesar had called Catiline to account for
his doings at the time of the proscription, and knew his nature too
well to expect benefit to the people from a revolution conducted under
the auspices of bankrupt patrician adventurers. No citizen had more to
lose than Crassus from a crusade of the poor against the rich. But they
had both been suspected two years before, and in the excited temper of
men's minds they took precautions for their own reputation's sake, as
well as for the safety of the State. Quintus Curius, a senator, who was
one of the conspirators, was meanwhile betraying his accomplices, and
gave daily notice to the consuls of each step which was contemplated.
But so weak was authority and so dangerous the temper of the people
that the difficulty was to know what to do. Secret information was
scarcely needed. Catiline, as Cicero said, was "_apertissimus_," most
frank in the declaration of his intentions. Manlius's army at Fiesole
was an open fact, and any day might bring news that he was on the march
to Rome. The Senate, as usual in extreme emergencies, declared the
State in danger, and gave the consuls unlimited powers to provide for
public security. So scornfully confident was Catiline that he offered
to place himself under surveillance at the house of any senator whom
Cicero might name, or to reside with Cicero himself, if the consul
preferred to keep a personal eye upon him. Cicero answered that he
dared not trust himself with so perilous a guest.
[Sidenote: November, B.C. 63.] So for a few days matters hung in
suspense, Manlius expecting an order to advance, Catiline waiting
apparently for a spontaneous insurrection in the city before he gave
the word. Intended attempts at various points had been baffled by
Cicero's precautions. At last, finding that the people remained quiet,
Catiline called a meeting of his friends one stormy night at the
beginning of November, and it was agreed that two of the party should
go the next morning at dawn to Cicero's house, demand to see him on
important business, and kill him in his bed. Curius, who was present,
immediately furnished Cicero with an account of what had passed. When
his morning visitors arrived they were told that they could not be
admitted; and a summons was sent round to the senators to assemble
immediately at the Temple of Jupiter Stator, one of the strongest
positions in the city.[13] The audacious Catiline attended, and took
his usual seat; every one shrank from him, and he was left alone on the
bench. Then Cicero rose. In the Senate, where to speak was the first
duty of man, he was in his proper element, and had abundant courage. He
addressed himself personally to the principal conspirator. He exposed,
if exposure be the fitting word when half the persons present knew as
much as he could tell them, the history of Catiline's proceedings. He
described in detail the meeting of the past evening, looking round
perhaps in the faces of the senators who he was aware had been present
at it. He spoke of the visit designed to himself in the morning, which
had been baffled by his precautions. He went back over the history of
the preceding half-century. Fresh from the defence of Rabirius, he
showed how dangerous citizens, the Gracchi, Saturninus, Glaucia, had
been satisfactorily killed when they were meditating mischief. He did
not see that a constitution was already doomed when the ruling powers
were driven to assassinate their opponents, because a trial with the
forms of law would have ended in their acquittal. He told Catiline that
under the powers which the Senate had conferred on him he might order
his instant execution. He detailed Catiline's past enormities, which he
had forgotten when he sought his friendship, and he ended in bidding
him leave the city, go and join Manlius and his army.
Never had Cicero been greater, and never did oratory end in a more
absurd conclusion. He dared not arrest Catiline. He confessed that he
dared not. There was not a doubt that Catiline was meditating a
revolution--but a revolution was precisely what half the world was
wishing for. Rightly read, those sounding paragraphs, those moral
denunciations, those appeals to history and patriotic sentiment, were
the funeral knell of the Roman Commonwealth.
Let Catiline go into open war, Cicero said, and then there would no
longer be a doubt. Then all the world would admit his treason. Catiline
went; and what was to follow next? Antonius, the second consul, was
notoriously not to be relied on. The other conspirators, senators who
sat listening while Cicero poured out his eloquent indignation,
remained still in the city with the threads of insurrection in their
hands, and were encouraged to persevere by the evident helplessness of
the government. The imperfect record of history retains for us only the
actions of a few individuals whom special talent or special
circumstances distinguished, and such information is only fragmentary.
We lose sight of the unnamed seething multitudes by whose desires and
by whose hatreds the stream of events was truly guided. The party of
revolution was as various as it was wide. Powerful wealthy men belonged
to it, who were politically dissatisfied; ambitious men of rank, whose
money embarrassments weighted them in the race against their
competitors; old officers and soldiers of Sylla, who had spent the
fortunes which they had won by violence, and were now trying to bring
him back from the dead to renew their lease of plunder; ruined wretches
without number, broken down with fines and proscriptions, and debts and
the accumulation of usurious interest. Add to these "the dangerous
classes," the natural enemies of all governments--parricides,
adulterers, thieves, forgers, escaped slaves, brigands, and pirates who
had lost their occupation; and, finally, Catiline's own chosen
comrades, the smooth-faced patrician youths with curled hair and
redolent with perfumes, as yet beardless or with the first down upon
their chins, wearing scarves and veils and sleeved tunics reaching to
their ankles, industrious but only with the dice-box, night-watchers
but in the supper-rooms, in the small hours before dawn, immodest,
dissolute boys, whose education had been in learning to love and to be
loved, to sing and to dance naked at the midnight orgies, and along
with it to handle poniards and mix poisoned bowls.[14]
[Sidenote: November, B.C. 64.] Well might Cicero be alarmed at such a
combination; well might he say that if a generation of such youths
lived to manhood there would be a commonwealth of Catilines. But what
was to be thought of the prospects of a society in which such phenomena
were developing themselves? Cicero bade them all go--follow their chief
into the war, and perish in the snow of the Apennines. But how if they
would not go? How if from the soil of Rome, under the rule of his
friends the Senate, fresh crops of such youths would rise perennially?
The Commonwealth needed more drastic medicine than eloquent
exhortations, however true the picture might be.
[Sidenote: November, B.C. 63.] None of the promising young gentlemen
took Cicero's advice. Catiline went alone and joined Manlius, and had
he come on at once he might perhaps have taken Rome. The army was to
support an insurrection, and the insurrection was to support the army.
Catiline waited for a signal from his friends in the city, and
Lentulus, Cethegus, Autronius, and the rest of the leaders waited for
Catiline to arrive. Conspirators never think that they have taken
precautions enough or have gained allies enough; and in endeavoring to
secure fresh support they made a fatal mistake. An embassy of
Allobroges was in the city, a frontier tribe on the borders of the
Roman province in Gaul, who were allies of Rome, though not as yet
subjects. The Gauls were the one foreign nation whom the Romans really
feared. The passes of the Alps alone protected Italy from the hordes of
German or Gallic barbarians, whose numbers being unknown were supposed
to be exhaustless. Middle-aged men could still remember the panic at
the invasion of the Cimbri and Teutons, and it was the chief pride of
the democrats that the State had then been saved by their own Marius.
At the critical moment it was discovered that the conspirators had
entered into a correspondence with these Allobroges, and had actually
proposed to them to make a fresh inroad over the Alps. The suspicion of
such an intention at once alienated from Catiline the respectable part
of the democratic party. The fact of the communication was betrayed to
Cicero. He intercepted the letters; he produced them in the Senate with
the seals unbroken, that no suspicion might rest upon himself. Lentulus
and Cethegus were sent for, and could not deny their hands. The letters
were then opened and read, and no shadow of uncertainty any longer
remained that they had really designed to bring in an army of Gauls.
Such of the conspirators as were known and were still within reach were
instantly seized.
[Sidenote: December 5, B.C. 63.] Cicero, with a pardonable laudation of
himself and of the Divine Providence of which he professed to regard
himself as the minister, congratulated his country on its escape from
so genuine a danger; and he then invited the Senate to say what was to
be done with these apostates from their order, whose treason was now
demonstrated. A plot for a mere change of government, for the
deposition of the aristocrats and the return to power of the popular
party, it might be impolitic, perhaps impossible, severely to punish;
but Catiline and his friends had planned the betrayal of the State to
the barbarians; and with persons who had committed themselves to
national treason there was no occasion to hesitate. Cicero produced the
list of those whom he considered guilty, and there were some among his
friends who thought the opportunity might be used to get rid of
dangerous enemies, after the fashion of Sylla, especially of Crassus
and Caesar. The name of Crassus was first mentioned, some said by
secret friends of Catiline, who hoped to alarm the Senate into inaction
by showing with whom they would have to deal. Crassus, it is possible,
knew more than he had told the consul. Catiline's success had, at one
moment, seemed assured; and great capitalists are apt to insure against
contingencies. But Cicero moved and carried a resolution that the
charge against him was a wicked invention. The attempt against Caesar
was more determined. Old Catulus, whom Caesar had defeated in the
contest for the pontificate, and Caius Calpurnius Piso,[15] a bitter
aristocrat, whom Caesar had prosecuted for misgovernment in Gaul, urged
Cicero to include his name. But Cicero was too honorable to lend
himself to an accusation which he knew to be false. Some of the young
lords in their disappointment threatened Caesar at the senate-house
door with their swords; but the attack missed its mark, and served only
to show how dreaded Caesar already was, and how eager a desire there
was to make an end of him.
The list submitted for judgment contained the names of none but those
who were indisputably guilty. The Senate voted at once that they were
traitors to the State. The next question was of the nature of their
punishment. In the first place the persons of public officers were
sacred, and Lentulus was at the time a praetor. And next the Sempronian
law forbade distinctly that any Roman citizen should be put to death
without a trial, and without the right of appeal to the assembly.[16]
It did not mean simply that Roman citizens were not to be murdered, or
that at any time it had been supposed that they might. The object was
to restrain the extraordinary power claimed by the Senate of setting
the laws aside on exceptional occasions. Silanus, the consul-elect for
the following year, was, according to usage, asked to give his opinion
first. He voted for immediate death. One after the other the voices
were the same, till the turn came of Tiberius Nero, the
great-grandfather of Nero the Emperor. Tiberius was against haste. He
advised that the prisoners should be kept in confinement till Catiline
was taken or killed, and that the whole affair should then be carefully
investigated. Investigation was perhaps what many senators were most
anxious to avoid. When Tiberius had done, Caesar rose. The speech which
Sallust places in his mouth was not an imaginary sketch of what Sallust
supposed him likely to have said, but the version generally received of
what he actually did say, and the most important passages of it are
certainly authentic. For the first time we see through the surface of
Caesar's outward actions into his real mind. During the three quarters
of a century which had passed since the death of the elder Gracchus one
political murder had followed upon another. Every conspicuous democrat
had been killed by the aristocrats in some convenient disturbance. No
constitution could survive when the law was habitually set aside by
violence; and disdaining the suspicion with which he knew that his
words would be regarded, Caesar warned the Senate against another act
of precipitate anger which would be unlawful in itself, unworthy of
their dignity, and likely in the future to throw a doubt upon the guilt
of the men upon whose fate they were deliberating. He did not
extenuate, he rather emphasized, the criminality of Catiline and his
confederates; but for that reason and because for the present no
reasonable person felt the slightest uncertainty about it, he advised
them to keep within the lines which the law had marked out for them. He
spoke with respect of Silanus. He did not suppose him to be influenced
by feelings of party animosity. Silanus had recommended the execution
of the prisoners, either because he thought their lives incompatible
with the safety of the State, or because no milder punishment seemed
adequate to the enormity of their conduct. But the safety of the State,
he said, with a compliment to Cicero, had been sufficiently provided
for by the diligence of the consul. As to punishment, none could be too
severe; but with that remarkable adherence to _fact_, which always
distinguished Caesar, that repudiation of illusion and sincere
utterance of his real belief, whatever that might be, he contended that
death was not a punishment at all. Death was the end of human
suffering. In the grave there was neither joy nor sorrow. When a man
was dead he ceased to be.[17]He became as he had been before he was
born. Probably almost every one in the Senate thought like Caesar on
this subject. Cicero certainly did. The only difference was that
plausible statesmen affected a respect for the popular superstition,
and pretended to believe what they did not believe. Caesar spoke his
convictions out. There was no longer any solemnity in an execution. It
was merely the removal out of the way of troublesome persons; and
convenient as such a method might be, it was of graver consequence that
the Senate of Rome, the guardians of the law, should not set an example
of violating the law. Illegality, Caesar told them, would be followed
by greater illegalities. He reminded them how they had applauded Sylla,
how they had rejoiced when they saw their political enemies summarily
despatched; and yet the proscription, as they well knew, had been
perverted to the license of avarice and private revenge. They might
feel sure that no such consequence need be feared under their present
consul: but times might change. The worst crimes which had been
committed in Rome in the past century had risen out of the imitation of
precedents, which at the moment seemed defensible. The laws had
prescribed a definite punishment for treason. Those laws had been
gravely considered; they had been enacted by the great men who had
built up the Roman dominion, and were not to be set aside in impatient
haste. Caesar therefore recommended that the estates of the
conspirators should be confiscated, that they themselves should be kept
in strict and solitary confinement dispersed in various places, and
that a resolution should be passed forbidding an application for their
pardon either to Senate or people.
The speech was weighty in substance and weightily delivered, and it
produced its effect.[18] Silanus withdrew his opinion. Quintus Cicero,
the consul's brother, followed, and a clear majority of the Senate went
with them, till it came to the turn of a young man who in that year had
taken his place in the house for the first time, who was destined to
make a reputation which could be set in competition with that of the
gods themselves, and whose moral opinion could be held superior to that
of the gods.[19]
Marcus Porcius Cato was born in the year 95, and was thus five years
younger than Caesar and eleven years younger than Cicero. He was the
great-grandson, as was said above, of the stern rugged censor who hated
Greek, preferred the teaching of the plough-tail and the Twelve Tables
to the philosophy of Aristotle, disbelieved in progress, and held by
the maxims of his father--the last, he of the Romans of the old type.
The young Marcus affected to take his ancestor for a pattern. He
resembled him as nearly as a modern Anglican monk resembles St. Francis
or St. Bernard. He could reproduce the form, but it was the form with
the life gone out of it. He was immeasurably superior to the men around
him. He was virtuous, if it be virtue to abstain from sin. He never
lied. No one ever suspected him of dishonesty or corruption. But his
excellences were not of the retiring sort. He carried them written upon
him in letters for all to read, as a testimony to a wicked generation.
His opinions were as pedantic as his life was abstemious, and no one
was permitted to differ from him without being held guilty rather of a
crime than of a mistake. He was an aristocratic pedant, to whom the
living forces of humanity seemed but irrational impulses of which he
and such as he were the appointed school-masters. To such a temperament
a man of genius is instinctively hateful. Cato had spoken often in the
Senate, though so young a member of it, denouncing the immoral habits
of the age. He now rose to match himself against Caesar; and with
passionate vehemence he insisted that the wretches who had plotted the
overthrow of the State should be immediately killed. He noticed
Caesar's objections only to irritate the suspicion in which he probably
shared, that Caesar himself was one of Catiline's accomplices. That
Caesar had urged as a reason for moderation the absence of immediate
danger, was in Cato's opinion an argument the more for anxiety.
Naturally, too, he did not miss the opportunity of striking at the
scepticism which questioned future retribution. Whether Cato believed
himself in a future life mattered little, if Caesar's frank avowal
could be turned to his prejudice.
Cato spoke to an audience well disposed to go with him. Silanus went
round to his first view, and the mass of senators followed him. Caesar
attempted to reply; but so fierce were the passions that had been
roused, that again he was in danger of violence. The young knights who
were present as a senatorial guard rushed at him with their drawn
swords. A few friends protected him with their cloaks, and he left the
Curia not to enter it again for the rest of the year. When Caesar was
gone, Cicero rose to finish the debate. He too glanced at Caesar's
infidelity, and as Caesar had spoken of the wisdom of past generations,
he observed that in the same generations there had been a pious belief
that the grave was not the end of human existence. With an ironical
compliment to the prudence of Caesar's advice, he said that his own
interest would lead him to follow it; he would have the less to fear
from the irritation of the people. The Senate, he observed, must have
heard with pleasure that Caesar condemned the conspiracy. Caesar was
the leader of the popular party, and from him at least they now knew
that they had nothing to fear. The punishment which Caesar recommended
was, in fact, Cicero admitted, more severe than death. He trusted,
therefore, that if the conspirators were executed, and he had to answer
to the people for the sentence to be passed upon them, Caesar himself
would defend him against the charge of cruelty. Meanwhile he said that
he had the ineffable satisfaction of knowing that he had saved the
State. The Senate might adopt such resolutions as might seem good to
them without alarm for the consequences. The conspiracy was disarmed.
He had made enemies among the bad citizens; but he had deserved and he
had won the gratitude of the good, and he stood secure behind the
impregnable bulwark of his country's love.
So Cicero, in the first effusion of self-admiration with which he never
ceased to regard his conduct on this occasion. No doubt he had acted
bravely, and he had shown as much adroitness as courage. But the whole
truth was never told. The Senate's anxiety to execute the prisoners
arose from a fear that the people would be against them if an appeal to
the assembly was allowed. The Senate was contending for the privilege
of suspending the laws by its own independent will; and the privilege,
if it was ever constitutional, had become so odious by the abuse of it,
that to a large section of Roman citizens a conspiracy against the
oligarchy had ceased to be looked on as treason at all. Cicero and Cato
had their way. Lentulus, Cethegus, Autronius and their companions were
strangled in their cells, on the afternoon of the debate upon their
fate. A few weeks later Catiline's army was cut to pieces, and he
himself was killed. So desperately his haggard bands had fought that
they fell in their ranks where they stood, and never Roman commander
gained a victory that cost him more dear. So furious a resistance
implied a motive and a purpose beyond any which Cicero or Sallust
records, and the commission of inquiry suggested by Tiberius Nero in
the Senate might have led to curious revelations. The Senate perhaps
had its own reasons for fearing such revelations, and for wishing the
voices closed which could have made them.
[1] "Nunc quis patrem decem annorum natus non modo aufert sed tollit
nisi veneno?"--_Varronis Fragmenta_, ed. Alexander Riese, p. 216.
[2] See the story in Cicero, _Pro Cluentio_.
[3] _Pro P. Sullâ_, 4.
[4] "Catilina, si judicatum erit, meridie non lucere, certus erit
competitor."--_Epist. ad Atticum_, i. 1.
[5] "Hoc tempore Catilinam, competitorem nostrum, defendere cogitamus.
Judices habemus, quos volumus, summa accusatoris voluntate. Spero, si
absolutus erit, conjunctiorem illum nobis fore in ratione
petitionis."--_Ib_., i. 2.
[6] "Scito nihil tam exercitum nunc esse Romae quam candidatos omnibus
iniquitatibus."--_Ib_., i. 11.
[7] I use a word apparently modern, but Cicero himself gave the name of
Conservatores Reipublicae to the party to which he belonged.
[8] Suetonius, speaking of Augustus, says: "Quoties adesset, nihil
praeterea agebat, seu vitandi rumoris causâ, quo patrem Caesarem vulgo
reprehensum commemorabat, quod inter spectandum epistolis libellisque
legendis aut rescribendis vacaret; seu studio spectandi et voluptate,"
etc.--_Vita Octavii_, 45.
[9] Writing three years later to Atticus, he says: "Confirmabam omnium
privatorum possessiones, is enim est noster exercitus, ut tute scis
locupletium."--_To Atticus_, i. 19. Pomponius Atticus, Cicero's
most intimate correspondent, was a Roman knight, who inheriting a
large estate from his father, increased it by contracts, banking,
money-lending, and slave-dealing, in which he was deeply engaged.
He was an accomplished, cultivated man, a shrewd observer of the
times, and careful of committing himself on any side. His acquaintance
with Cicero rested on similarity of temperament, with a solid
financial basis at the bottom of it. They were mutually useful to
each other.
[10] "Et nimium istud est, quod ab hoc tribuno plebis dictum est in
senatu: urbanam plebem nimium in republicâ posse: exhauriendam esse:
hoc enim verbo est usus; quasi de aliquâ sentinâ, ac non de optimorum
civium genere loqueretur."--_Contra Rullum_, ii. 26.
[11] Cicero, _Pro Murenâ_, 25.
[12] Murena was afterward prosecuted for bribery at this election. Cicero
defended him; but even Cato, aristocrat as he was, affected to be
shocked at the virtuous consul's undertaking so bad a case. It is
observable that in his speech for Murena, Cicero found as many virtues
in Lucullus as in his speech on the Manilian law he had found vices.
It was another symptom of his change of attitude.
[13] "In loco munitissimo."
[14] This description of the young Roman aristocracy is given by Cicero in
his most powerful vein: "Postremum autem genus est, non solum numero,
verum etiam genere ipso atque vita, quod proprium est Catilinae, de
ejus delectu, immo vero de complexu ejus ac sinu: quos pexo capillo,
nitidos, aut imberbes, aut bene barbatos, videtis, manicatis et
talaribus tunicis; velis amictos, non togis: quorum omnis industria
vitae et vigilandi labor in antelucanis coenis expromitur. In his
gregibus omnes aleatores, omnes adulteri, omnes impuri impudicique
versantur. Hi pueri tam lepidi ac delicati non solum amare et amari
neque cantare et saltare, sed etiam sicas vibrare et spargere venena
didicerunt.... Nudi in conviviis saltare didicerunt."--_In
Catilinam_, ii. 10. Compare _In Pisonem_, 10.
The Romans shaved their beards at full maturity, and therefore
"benebarbatos" does not mean grown men, but youths on the edge of
manhood.
[15] Not to be confounded with Lucius Calpurnius Piso, who was Caesar's
father-in-law.
[16] "Injussu populi."
[17] The real opinion of educated Romans on this subject was expressed in
the well-known lines of Lucretius, which were probably written near
this very time:
"Nil igitur mors est, ad nos neque pertinet hilum,
Quandoquidem natura animi mortalis habetur:
Et, velut ante acto nil tempore sensimus aegri,
Ad confligendum venientibus undique Poenis;
Omnia cum belli trepido concussa tumultu,
Horrida, contremuere sub altis aetheris auris;
In dubioque fuit sub utrorum regna cadendum
Omnibus humanis esset, terrâque, marique:
Sic, ubi non erimus, cum corporis atque animai
Discidium fuerit, quibus e sumus uniter apti,
Scilicet haud nobis quicquam, qui non erimus tum,
Accidere omnino poterit, sensumque movere:
Non, si terra mari miscebitur, et mare coelo."
LUCRETIUS, lib. iii. 11. 842-854.
[18] In the following century when Caesar's life had become mythic, a
story was current that when Caesar was speaking on this occasion a
note was brought in to him, and Cato, suspecting that it referred to
the conspiracy, insisted that it should be read. Caesar handed it to
Cato, and it proved to be a love letter from Cato's sister, Servilia,
the mother of Brutus. More will be said of the supposed liaison
between Caesar and Servilia hereafter. For the present it is enough to
say that there is no contemporary evidence for the story at all; and
that if it be true that a note of some kind from Servilia was given to
Caesar, it is more consistent with probability and the other
circumstances of the case, that it was an innocent note of business.
Ladies do not send in compromising letters to their lovers when they
are on their feet in Parliament; nor, if such an accident should
happen, do the lovers pass them over to be read by the ladies'
brothers.
[19] "Victrix causa Deis placuit, sed victa Catoni."--LUCAN.