Wild speculation, of course. Any or all of the above explanations are possible. But it is not sufficient to blame a lack of sources alone for the mystery. It also reflects something fundamental about the Republic itself. The longing of the Romans for glory, which burned brightly within them and lit their city and indeed their entire empire with its flame, also cast flickering and treacherous shadows. Every ambitious politician required the skills of a conspirator. When Cicero met Catiline for the last time, face to face in the Senate House, he dissected his enemy’s manoeuvrings with forensic brilliance, exposing them to the full scorching glare of his outrage, picking over the details of the conspiracy to such effect that Catiline fled Rome that very night. Ever after Cicero was to regard this as his finest hour, ‘a pinnacle of immortal glory’,27 as he modestly expressed it. The image of himself as the dauntless protector of the Republic, a patriot pure and simple, would provide him with the touchstone for the rest of his career. It was a perspective that Catiline, unsurprisingly, failed to share. Before leaving Rome he had written to Catulus, still protesting his innocence, bitterly complaining that he had been manoeuvred into exile. Heading north, ostensibly towards retirement in Marseille, he had in fact turned aside to take command of a ragbag army of peasants and war veterans. Meanwhile, back in Rome, more spine-tingling details of his plots, fed to the Senate at judicious intervals, had started to emerge: Gauls in the north of Italy were to rise in savage revolt; slaves were to be freed; the city itself was to be put to the torch. The whole of Rome was engulfed by hysteria. Cicero was the hero of the hour. Yet a few dissenting voices could still be heard. The crisis had been manufactured, they whispered. Catiline had been right. It was Cicero who had pushed him into his revolt, Cicero and his vainglory, Cicero the upstart, greedy for fame.
Of course, as is invariably the way with conspiracy theories, hard proof was lacking. No one was on hand to subject Cicero to the kind of grilling that he himself had given Catiline. The truth remained obscured behind a haze of disinformation. It was certainly evident that Cicero had employed dirty tricks to smoke out his enemy, but how much further than that he might have gone was impossible to say. Yet, in a sense he would have been less a Roman had he not schemed to push his enemy over the edge. Every consul dreamed of stamping his term of office with glory. That was how the game of self-advancement was played. Cicero may not have behaved according to the standards of his own propaganda, but then again – apart from Cato – who ever did?
And it was Catiline, after all, who had first upped the stakes. The civil war had shown how quickly violence could escalate. In a society as competitive as Rome’s even to talk of forcing short cuts through the constitution was perilous, like tossing a flame on to a tinder box. This explains why Cicero was so anxious to erect firebreaks around Catiline. He feared that if the conspirators were not isolated, then the conflagration might quickly spread out of control. Sure enough, no sooner had Catulus accepted that Catiline had indeed been plotting to destroy the Republic than he was attempting to finger Crassus and, just for good measure, Caesar too. Cicero may have had his own suspicions on that account, but Catulus’ move was precisely the kind he was desperate to avoid. He had no wish to see a man like Crassus backed into a corner.
On 5 December, with panic-stricken rumours growing wilder by the hour, he convened a crisis meeting of the Senate. All the conspiracy’s ringleaders in Rome had been identified and arrested, he announced. Neither Crassus’ nor Caesar’s name appeared on the list. Even so, the great debate that followed was at least as much about the hatreds and ambitions of the various speakers as it was about the conspiracy itself. At stake was the issue of what to do with Catiline’s henchmen. Many were of good family, and it was forbidden by the severest laws of the Republic to execute any citizen without a proper trial. But did the state of emergency entitle Cicero to waive this sacred injunction? Caesar, still nervous that the hysteria might sweep him away, proposed the novel idea that the conspirators should be imprisoned for life; Cato, opposing him, demanded their execution. Here, in the clash between these two men so matched in talent, so opposite in character, was the opening salvo of a struggle that would eventually convulse the Republic. For now, it was Cato who emerged triumphant. A majority in the Senate agreed with him that the safety of Rome was more important than the rights of individual citizens. And besides, who ever heard of imprisonment as a punishment? The conspirators were sentenced to death.
Among their number was a former consul. Watched by a confused and frightened crowd, he was led through the Forum, Cicero by his side, bristling with grim self-importance, four other senators following in quick succession. With the shadows of twilight deepening over the city, the five prisoners were lowered into the blackness of an underground cell. Here they were garrotted. Cicero, emerging from the gloom, tersely announced their deaths to the crowd. Many in the Forum were friends of the executed men, and they now slunk away, but throughout the rest of the city the news was greeted with an explosion of applause. A blaze of torches illumined the road that led from the Forum up to Cicero’s house. As the consul climbed it he was escorted by a phalanx of the greatest names in Rome. All acclaimed him as the saviour of his country. Surely, not even in his wildest dreams could the provincial from Arpinum ever have imagined such a day.
What had impressed his colleagues was not merely that he appeared to have saved the Republic, but that he had done so with comparatively little bloodshed. Cicero himself remained desperate to preserve a fire-wall around the conspiracy. He refused, for instance, to investigate his fellow consul, Antonius Hybrida, despite the fact that Hybrida had been one of Catiline’s closest friends. Cicero bribed his colleague with the governorship of Macedon, a rich province that would more than enable him to pay off his debts, and command of the war against Catiline. Since Hybrida was not merely suspected of double-dealing with the rebels, but was also a coward and an alcoholic to boot, this provoked much unease. Allies of Pompey began to press for the great man’s recall. This in turn provoked an eruption of outrage from Cato, who announced that he would rather die than see Pompey given an Italian command. But if anyone had genuinely stood in Pompey’s way, it was Cicero. The prospect of a Rome pushed into armed factions, their rivalry escalating into ever greater violence, degenerating in the end into open civil war, this had been his ultimate nightmare. Nothing would have provided Pompey with a more perfect excuse to intervene with his legions. It was in this sense that Cicero had indeed saved the Republic, less from Catiline, perhaps, than from itself.
In the summer of 62 BC, just a few bare months before Pompey was due back in Italy, Catiline’s makeshift army was finally cornered and destroyed. Hybrida, succumbing to a diplomatic illness, spent the entire battle in his tent, then scuttled off to Macedon, to extract his blood-money but otherwise lie low. He was not alone in beating a tactical retreat from Rome. Humbler players in the conspiracy were also slipping away. Among them was Caelius. He travelled to Africa, where his father had extensive business holdings, staffed with protective subordinates. But Caelius had far from abandoned his political career. For a year he served in Africa as an aide-de-camp to the province’s newly appointed proconsul, and did so very successfully. Whatever Caelius’ precise role in the conspiracy had been, his future still lay all before him. He had seen enough of public life to know that nothing in it was for ever. Alliances might buckle, twist and be reversed. The heroes of one year might be the villains of the next. In the blink of an eye the political landscape might be utterly transformed.