It did not take Hortensius long to recognise what he was up against. Rather than argue the case on Cicero’s own terms, he instead sought to have the trial postponed. It was finally set for a date just before the law courts went into a lengthy recess. For the prosecution, this was a potentially devastating setback. The conventions governing an advocate’s mode of address were time-consuming, and, if Cicero were to stick to them, the trial might be expected to drag on for months. The longer it continued, the more opportunities for bribery and arm-twisting Verres would have. As the trial opened the defendant had every reason to crow. Cicero, however, had prepared a devastating ambush. Rather than follow the customary rituals of the law courts, he took the unprecedented step of laying out his evidence immediately in a series of short speeches. Hortensius needed to hear only the first of these to realise that the game was up. He waived his right of reply and the trial promptly collapsed. Verres, not wanting to wait for the inevitable conviction, cut and ran with his art collection to Marseille. Cicero celebrated by publishing the full text of the speeches he would have given, no doubt nicely sharpened for popular consumption, and with a few well-aimed jabs at Hortensius thrown in for good measure. The news was broadcast all over Rome: the king had lost his crown; Hortensius’ rule of the law courts had been brought to a close.
Cicero’s own supremacy was to last a lifetime. The advantages this brought him in terms of influence and contacts were immense. There were also more immediate spoils. At the start of his prosecution Cicero had claimed to have no concern with personal gain. This had been disingenuous in the extreme. As Cicero would well have known, a prosecutor had the right to claim the rank of any criminal he successfully brought to justice. Verres had been a praetor, and so, once he had been convicted, all the perks of his status passed directly to Cicero. Among these were the right to speak in debates ahead of non-praetorian senators. For a man of Cicero’s eloquence this was a crucial privilege. His oratory could now start to weave its magic not only in the law courts, but also in the very cockpit of politics.
Of course, he still had a long way to go, but he had taken great strides. ‘Reflect on what city this is, on the nature of your goal, and on who you are,’ his brother advised him. ‘Every day, as you are walking down to the Forum, turn these thoughts over and over in your mind: “I am a new man! I want the consulship! This is Rome!”’29
The ultimate prize was no longer an impossible dream.
The Bull and the Boy
Throughout the seventies BC the Capitol remained a building site. The great temple of Jupiter rose gradually from its ashes long after Sulla’s own had been scattered on the wind. As the very grandest of the Republic’s grands projets, it was unthinkable that such a monument should be jerry-built. Even before its completion Cicero could hail it as ‘the most famous and beautiful building’ in the city.30 Just as the destruction of the previous temple had been a portent of civil war, so the new one, clearly visible to everyone who passed through the Forum, was evidence that the gods were smiling on Rome again. Peace had returned, and the Republic itself had been restored.
Or so Sulla’s adherents wished everyone to believe. This was why they were so careful to keep supervision of the Capitol in their own hands. After Sulla’s death, official responsibility for the temple passed to his most distinguished associate, Quintus Lutatius Catulus. He was the very embodiment of senatorial hauteur. Distinguished ancestry combined with a reputation for stern, old-fashioned integrity to win him unrivalled authority in the Senate. He was easily Sulla’s most eminent heir. Yet even Catulus’ loyalty had its limits. Sulla had intended to have his name immortalised on the giant architrave of the temple, but Catulus had other plans. Rather than Sulla’s name, he had the temple inscribed with his own.
Catulus’ reputation for austere probity does not appear to have been damaged by this act of one-upmanship. Just the opposite, in fact. The memory of Sulla was tainted and his name regarded as malign. By promoting himself at the expense of his dead leader, Catulus was effectively acknowledging this. His commitment to Sulla’s legacy remained unshaken, but the way in which it had been imposed on the Republic, at the point of a sword, was an obvious embarrassment to any self-proclaimed conservative. Together with Hortensius, who was not only his closest political ally but his brother-in-law, Catulus sought to uphold a proudly backward-looking ideal, one in which a grateful Roman people would be guided towards honour and glory by the Senate. In turn, the Senate was to be guided by men like himself, embodiments of Rome’s ancient order, bound by the flinty traditions of their ancestors. The Republic, however, had many different traditions, confused and confusing, and defying codification. In the past the challenge for a citizen had always been to negotiate the swirling of their cross-currents, but Sulla, having seen where they might lead, had instead sought to tame and – in some cases – to dam their flow. Like a mighty system of dykes, his legislation served to channel what had previously been unchecked. Ritual and a shared sense of duty and obligation, these were what had defined the Republic for centuries. Unwritten custom had been all. Now that was changed. Implacable traditionalists though they were, men such as Catulus were also the heirs to revolution.
Behind the embankments raised by Sulla, however, there was a constant churning pressure. The attachment of citizens to their ancient rights was not easily diverted, and legislation against the tribunate in particular was massively resented. In 75 BC, only three years after Sulla’s death, the crucial law that had prohibited tribunes from holding further office was swept away. Despite a desperate manning of the dykes by Sulla’s supporters, a sizeable majority of senators ended up supporting the measure. Some caved in to a violent protest movement, others were just as likely to have been influenced by personal ambition, or by feuds with opponents, or by ties of obligation, or by totally obscure factors. Motives in Rome had always been opaque. As the traditional order of the Republic began to reassert itself, so too did the old incalculability of Roman politics. Sulla’s dream – that there should be a single, public conduit to power – was crumbling along with his settlement.
How was it, for instance, that even the ineffably prestige-laden Catulus might on occasions be outsmarted in the Senate by a notorious turncoat, Publius Cethegus? Like Verres, Cethegus had switched to Sulla just in time to save his skin. During the siege of Praeneste he had persuaded his former colleagues to surrender, then coolly turned them over to Sulla’s stormtroopers for execution. Thoroughbreds such as Catulus regarded him with revulsion, but Cethegus was hardly the man to care. Rather than compete for public honours, as a Roman nobleman was expected to do, he instead wheeled and dealed behind the scenes, bribing, cajoling and scheming his way to the control of a vast bloc of senators’ votes. This was a political weapon that even the snootiest of aristocrats could respect. Any time an appointment needed fixing, or a bill had to be finessed, the midnight visitors would start flitting to and from Cethegus’ doors.