At the instigation of a friend from his youth, Servius Sulpicius Rufus, now a distinguished legal expert and candidate for the Consulship of 62, Cicero superintended the passage of a law increasing the penalty for electoral bribery to ten years’ exile. Sulpicius was in fact aiming at one of his rivals, Lucius Licinius Murena, whom he intended to prosecute under the new legislation. However, Catilina believed that he was the target. Infuriated, he decided to have Cicero and other leading figures assassinated. The plan was to attack them on the day in July when elections for next year’s officeholders were to be held.
Cicero learned about the plot from Fulvia, mistress of Catilina’s fellow plotter, Quintus Curius. Curius, who was in financial difficulties, had become less generous to Fulvia than previously and she had pulled away from the liaison. In an attempt to regain her affection, Curius boasted in mysterious terms about his future prospects. Fulvia wheedled the truth out of him. She immediately contacted Terentia, with whom she happened to be acquainted, and told her all she knew. Thereafter, Cicero used Fulvia as a regular informer and, in due course, Curius was himself persuaded to betray his fellow conspirators. Unfortunately, there was no other evidence to corroborate the allegation of conspiracy, and it was not easy to identify specific plans from a welter of wild talk.
Cicero was sufficiently alarmed to persuade the Senate to postpone the forthcoming elections. He questioned Catilina publicly in the Senate about his intentions. Catilina responded with a sinister metaphor: “I see two bodies, one thin and wasted, but with a head, the other headless, but big and strong. What is so dreadful if I myself become the head of the body which needs one?” The first body was the Senate and the second the People. The remark was a bold and threatening claim to leadership of the masses.
The Senate was not convinced of Catilina’s seriousness and took no action. Many optimates still thought of Cicero as a parvenu and felt that he was getting above himself by creating an atmosphere of crisis on the basis of very few facts. This left the Consul in a distinctly awkward position. He had revealed his hand to no avail. Catilina was now alerted to his investigations and, given his personality, might well be provoked into a violent response. Cicero appointed a bodyguard and when the postponed elections eventually took place was careful to let people see that he had started wearing a breastplate under his toga.
Cicero insured himself against the risk of violence by assembling a large number of armed followers. This and all the publicity preempted Catilina’s plans and there were no assassinations. The voting proceeded without any trouble. Quintus, following in his brother’s footsteps in the Honors Race, was elected Praetor, as was Caesar, who won by a strong margin.
Catilina failed for a second time to secure the Consulship. So far as he was concerned, this was the final insult. During the two years that he had been running for Consul, Catilina’s second “conspiracy” had probably been more a secret alliance around a radical program (land redistribution and debt cancellation) than a revolutionary plot, but now, enraged by Sulpicius’s antibribery law and his electoral defeat, he abandoned legality. Against his better instincts, he had stuck by the rules, and look where it had gotten him. His aim was personal—to claim what he saw as his right and to take revenge on everyone who had prevented him from obtaining it. This included Cicero and most of the Senate. He set his mind on a coup d’état.
His closest partners were Praetor Lentulus in Rome and Caius Manlius, one of Sulla’s old centurions, who was gathering a military force in northern Etruria at Faesulae. Catilina was reported to have insisted on a “monstrous” oath of loyalty, which even his friend the Consul Antonius swore. According to Dio (and Plutarch): “He sacrificed a boy and, after administering the oath over his entrails, ate them in company with others.” This sounds far-fetched and was probably another example of black propaganda, but there was a half-submerged tradition of occasional human sacrifice. The last recorded case had taken place after the battle of Cannae, when Hannibal had scored one of his most decisive victories. Two Gauls and two Greeks had been buried alive. The great Greek historian Polybius, writing in the previous century, noted that in times of extreme danger the Romans would go to any lengths to propitiate the gods and thought no ritual inappropriate or beneath their dignity.
Seeing what Catilina had in mind, Crassus, who was not a revolutionary at heart, and Caesar, doubtless as disturbed by Catilina’s poor judgment as by his intentions, definitively abandoned him. For all his difficulties with a skeptical Senate, Cicero was clearly receiving good intelligence, and he looked forward to assembling enough evidence to be able to take action against Catilina.
There was a lull for a time as summer gave way to autumn. Then, at about midnight on October 20, Cicero received an unannounced visit from Crassus and two leading Senators. They had an alarming tale to tell. After dinner earlier the same evening Crassus’s doorkeeper had taken delivery of some letters for various senior Romans. Crassus read the one addressed to him, which was unsigned. It claimed that Catilina was organizing a massacre and warned him to slip away from the city as soon as possible. Crassus said that he had left the other letters unopened and come at once to Cicero—“quite overcome by the news,” as Plutarch puts it, “and wishing to do something to clear himself from the suspicion that he lay under because of his friendship with Catilina.”
Having thought the matter over, Cicero convened a meeting of the Senate early the next morning. It may have occurred to him that Crassus, rattled by Catilina’s behavior and to avoid being implicated in some wild adventure, had himself arranged for the mysterious letters to be written and “delivered.” That did not matter; the important thing was that he at last had something that looked like proof. Once the Senate had assembled, Cicero handed the letters to their recipients, who read them aloud to the meeting. They all contained information about a plot. Next a report was given on the formation of regular bands of soldiers in Etruria; it was claimed that Manlius would take the field on October 28. The Consul asked to be given emergency powers.
So far, the Senate had been treating Cicero as something of a joke and the words “I have been informed that,” which opened his constant announcements that the state was in peril, had become a catchphrase. However, the Senators had no choice now but to give him, through the Final Act, the authority he had been asking for. For a few days nothing happened and there was no news. Perhaps the Consul had got his facts wrong. A week or so later, a relieved Cicero was able to announce that, just as predicted, Manlius had risen.
Military countermeasures were taken and troops levied to put down disturbances. An attempt to capture Praeneste, a town only about 20 miles from Rome, was foiled. Catilina, at his best in a crisis, kept his nerve. No direct links had been discovered between him and Manlius and he stayed in town, behaving normally. Seeing that a prosecution was being threatened, Catilina offered to surrender himself into custody, cheekily suggesting that he be kept under arrest at Cicero’s house. The Consul declined the ambiguous honor and Catilina offered to live in the house of the Praetor Metellus Celer. Metellus was married to a promiscuous noblewoman, Clodia, sister of Publius Clodius Pulcher, who at the time was one of Cicero’s supporters and joined his bodyguard.