Episodes such as this served to demonstrate that the popularis tradition, scotched but not destroyed by Sulla, was starting to revive. It was a striking achievement – but it came at a cost. For the plebs, who idolised Caesar, his munificence was the key to his appeal, but his enemies could reasonably hope that it might also prove to be his downfall. Just as Cato was famous for his austerity, so Caesar was notorious for his debts. Everyone knew that a moment of reckoning would have to come. It duly arrived in 63 BC. Caesar, looking to break into the front rank of the Senate once and for all, and to colour his loose-belted image with a touch of more traditional prestige, chose to stake his entire career upon a single election. The post of Rome’s high priest, the pontifex maximus, had just become vacant. This was the most prestigious office in the Republic. The man elected to it held it until he died. Quite apart from the immense moral authority it bestowed, it also came with a mansion on the via Sacra, in the Forum. If Caesar became pontifex maximus, then he would be, literally, at the centre of Rome.
His opponent in the election was none other than that grandest of all grandees, Quintus Lutatius Catulus. Under normal circumstances, Catulus would have considered himself a shoo-in. The very fact of Caesar’s candidature was a scandal. Pontifex maximus had always been considered a post suitable for a distinguished former consul, and emphatically not for a politician on the make. Caesar, however, was not the man to be put off by a minor detail of tradition like that. Instead, he opted for his invariable strategy when confronted by a problem: he threw money at it. The electors were bribed on a monstrous scale. By now Caesar had stretched his credit to the limit. On the day that the result of the election was due to be announced he kissed Aurelia goodbye, then told her, ‘Mother, today you will either see me as high priest or I will be heading into exile.’19
As it proved, he would indeed be moving from the Subura – not into exile, but to his new mansion on the via Sacra. Caesar had pulled it off. He had been elected high priest. Once again, his extravagance had paid spectacular dividends. He had dared to gamble for massive stakes – against the status quo and the most ancient traditions of the Republic itself – and he had won.
Caelius’ Conspiracy
There were plenty who gambled and did not win. Caesar’s strategy of conspicuous extravagance was perilous. The promise of future greatness was staked against ruin. Money might be squandered, but never potential. Lose an election, fail to gain a lucrative posting, and a whole career might come crashing down.
It was no wonder that the provincial aristocracy, even as they fostered the ambitions of their sons, should also have slightly dreaded them. To send an heir to Rome was a calculated risk. Young men were easy prey to money-sharks. If a father were prudent, he would attempt to find patrons in the capital, mentors who might not only instruct his son in the labyrinthine ways of the Republic, but also protect him from the city’s many seductions. Particularly for families who had never held office in Rome, it was essential to secure the best. So it was, for instance, that when a banker by the name of Caelius Rufus succeeded in obtaining for his son the sponsorship of not only Crassus but Cicero too, the young Caelius was immediately marked out as a brilliant prospect. This in turn – ironically – served to secure him massive credit. When the usurers came swarming, Caelius welcomed them with open arms. Handsome, witty and buccaneering, the young man was soon developing a lifestyle far in excess of his allowance. He was too ambitious to neglect his education, but even as he studied under his two guardians he was simultaneously establishing a reputation as one of the three best dancers in Rome. New circles were opening to him – circles in which Cicero tended not to move. As he became ever more of a fixture on the party scene, Caelius began to fall under the spell of a whole new order of acquaintance.
And in particular of a louche patrician by the name of Lucius Sergius Catilina – Catiline. Caesar was not the only man to have founded a career on wild extravagance, nor was he the only aristocrat to have a chip on his shoulder about the bare walls of his atrium. Catiline’s great-grandfather had been a celebrated war hero, fighting against Hannibal with a prosthetic iron hand, but politically his ancestors had been an embarrassment. Even so, although there had been no consul in the family for almost four hundred years, Catiline’s patrician status provided him with cachet. He could pass muster, for instance, with the rigorously snobbish Catulus. Their friendship had been literally sealed with blood. Back in the dark days of the proscriptions, Catiline had helped Catulus to punish his father’s murderer. The wretched man had been whipped through the streets to where the tomb of Catulus’ father stood, his bones smashed with rods, his face mutilated, and only then put out of his misery by decapitation. To Catulus, this savagery had been a grim act of filial piety, a blood-offering to his father’s restless soul. Catiline had had no such excuse. After the murder he had brandished the severed – and supposedly still breathing – head back through the streets of Rome. Even by the standards of the civil war this was regarded as repellent behaviour. Although nothing was ever proved in a court of law, charges of murder, to say nothing of adultery and sacrilege, were to dog Catiline for the rest of his career. True, his sinister reputation was not always a handicap: among more raffish circles it combined with his stylishness and approachability to make him into a figure of menacing glamour. But while this served to provide him with a considerable constituency, it also placed him in a tactical bind. ‘His main appeal he targeted at the young’:20 how long could Catiline continue to do this without alienating allies such as Catulus, let alone the majority of senators who already mistrusted him?
In an attempt to square the circle he turned to Crassus for help – or so at least the political gossip had it. No one could be sure, of course. Crassus’ manoeuvrings were invariably veiled in shadow. But one thing could be certain: Crassus, in the sixties BC, was a worried man. Once again he was faced with the prospect of being trumped by Pompey. Not only would his old rival soon be returning at the head of a seasoned army, but he would be stupefyingly wealthy: for the first time in his political career Crassus was threatened with losing his status as the richest man in Rome. No wonder that he was frantic to shore up his support. Catiline, with huge ambitions and even huger debts, must surely have struck him as well worth a punt.
It was not merely that Crassus was looking to have a tame consul elected. Catiline also promised other pickings. He was popular wherever the margins of political life were at their seamiest: among the bands of upper-class delinquents brawling in the Subura; among the salons of scheming, dissipated women; among the indebted, the disappointed and the impatient; in short, wherever respectability tipped over into the disreputable. For the abstemious Crassus, a former consul, such a world was clearly out of bounds, although Cicero commented waspishly that he would dance in the Forum if it would win him a legacy.21 That was as may be – but for as long as Crassus had Catiline as his creature, fishing in the murky waters of the underworld, glad-handing the salons, scheming with radicals in late-night bars, it was the proxy whose dignity was on the line.