It is impossible to distinguish what Caelius’ precise role was in all this. It is conceivable, of course, that he had first met Catiline through the agency of Crassus, whose dark political skills Caelius had been studying at first hand. It is even possible that Cicero was responsible for the introduction. In 65 BC a rapacious spell as the governor of Africa had finally caught up with Catiline, when Clodius, back in Rome from the East, and eager to make a mark in the law courts, charged him with extortion. At the same time Cicero, the new man, was nerving himself for an attempt on the consulship. He knew that Catiline was planning to stand as well, and so briefly considered defending him in his forthcoming trial, hoping that the two of them might then run for office the following year on a joint ticket. Catiline, however, turned down the offer with a sneer of patrician contempt. The trial held few fears for him. Sure enough, he was speedily acquitted, possibly with the collusion of Clodius, almost certainly with the assistance of hefty bribes from Crassus. He was now free to run for the consulship of 63 BC. Catiline and Cicero would be going head to head.
Caelius was by his guardian’s side throughout the election campaign. For a young politician who was himself a new man it must have been an intoxicating experience. The election was the most unpredictable in years. Cicero’s whole career had been a preparation for it, but Catiline, just as desperate, was attempting to make good four centuries of family failure. Snobbery formed the basis of his entire campaign. It was conducted in open alliance with another nobleman, Antonius Hybrida, a man so debauched and thuggish that it was hard to believe that he was the son of Cicero’s great hero, Marcus Antonius. Confronted by two such disreputable candidates, the aristocracy took a deep breath, held their noses, and voted for the least bad option. So too, with a good deal more enthusiasm, did the equestrian classes. Cicero won by a mile. Hybrida beat Catiline to a distant third place.
For any patrician, this would have been a humiliation. For Catiline, it threatened disaster: his debts were submerging him, and Crassus, in particular, would have no interest in sponsoring a loser. Yet Catiline had not abandoned all hope. As Cicero, draped in his purple-bordered toga, guarded by his lictors, a consul of the Roman people at last, began his year in office, so Catiline licked his wounds and plotted his comeback. His credit would last him until another election, and so he continued to borrow, lavishing everything on bribery. At the same time, rather than concealing the scale of his debts, he started to boast about them openly. This was a staggering risk, but, in the circumstances, one he had to take. The misery of indebtedness percolated far beyond the gilded seediness of his own circle. Italy seethed with the resentments of the oppressed, whether in the festering tenements of Rome or on barren farmland, where Sulla’s veterans, mortgaged to the hilt, scratched at dust and recalled the fat days of civil war. At private meetings Catiline began to promise the poor that he would be their champion. After all, as he pointed out, ‘Who was best qualified to be the leader and standard-bearer of the desperate, if not a man who was bold and desperate himself ?’22
Cicero, who had been keeping a careful eye on Catiline, was only too willing to take such incendiary talk at face value. Was it possible, he began to wonder, that, having attained the honour of the consulship, he might now be granted the even more glorious honour of saving the Republic from revolution? The prospect filled him with a mixture of consternation and dizzied delight. He and Catiline, stalking each other, both had a vested interest in raising the stakes, in making the flesh of their respective audiences creep. But when at last the two men confronted each other openly in the Senate House, Catiline allowed his loathing of the tongue-wagging upstart opposite to push him into a fatal act of bravado. ‘I can see two bodies,’ he commented, not quite enigmatically enough, ‘one thin but with a large head, one huge, but headless. Is it really so terrible if I offer myself to the body which is lacking a head?’23 His fellow aristocrats, the ‘large head’ of Catiline’s riddle, were ominously unamused. Wrapped in metaphor or not, revolutionary sentiments did not go down well in the Senate House. Catiline had effectively just lost himself a second successive election. Cicero, patrolling the Campus Martius on polling day, made sure to wear a breastplate beneath his toga, and made even more sure that the voters could glimpse it. As the results were announced and Catiline’s defeat became known, so the usurers flocked to pick at his corpse.
Like Caesar campaigning to be pontifex maximus, Catiline had staked everything on a single throw. He had gambled that it was possible to play Janus, showing one face to the senatorial and equestrian elite, the other to the poor, the indebted, the dispossessed. The gamble had failed. But if the establishment had turned its back on Catiline, then the underworld had not. He had stirred up hopes perhaps greater and more desperate than he knew. In the countryside, where peasants were starting to arm themselves with scythes and rusty swords, in Rome, where demonstrations were increasingly boiling over into riots, even in the Senate itself, where losers in the great game of advancement chafed against their debts and disappointments, talk of revolution still burned like sparks in the air. And there, sharing in the wild talk, was Marcus Caelius.
Why? Were the young man’s debts already so prodigious that he was prepared to risk all his hopes of legal advancement by taking part in revolution? Or was it the excitement, the whisperings of conspiracy, that tempted him? Or idealism? A fervour for Catiline’s cause certainly appears to have radicalised many brilliant young men. Generational tensions were more than capable of setting father against son. One senator preferred to kill his heir rather than see him consorting with Catiline, despite the fact that, like Caelius, the young man had been ‘outstandingly talented, well read, and good looking’.24 Even Cicero was forced to admit that Catiline was ‘still capable of maintaining the loyalties of many fine men by putting on a show of moral fervour’.25 So Caelius may have continued to support him for either the basest or the noblest of reasons, or a mixture of the two. But there is a further possibility: it is conceivable that Caelius may not have been supporting Catiline at all. Headstrong as he was, he was also more than capable of a calculating cynicism. Perhaps he was providing his guardian with a pair of well-placed eyes.
Cicero certainly still needed well-placed spies. Following Catiline’s failure in the election, the consul’s forebodings of revolution had become increasingly alarmist. People were starting to demand proof. And then, just as nervousness was turning to mockery, a packet of letters was suddenly delivered to Cicero’s house. They set out Catiline’s plans for a wholesale massacre. The man who handed over these incriminating documents was none other than Crassus. He claimed that they had been handed in to his doorkeeper by an ‘unknown man’.26 When Cicero read the letters out to the Senate the following morning, panic gripped the city. A state of emergency was declared, and the Republic entrusted to Cicero’s hands. Crassus, having publicly shopped his protégé, slunk back into the shadows. In reading accounts of this improbable story it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Catiline was not the only conspirator in that autumn of 63. Who might the ‘unknown man’ have been? We know of only one person who was simultaneously an intimate of Cicero, Crassus and Catiline. That person was Caelius.