Cicero versus Catiline
The conflict between Cicero and Catiline was partly a clash of political ideology and ambition, but it was also a clash between men of very different backgrounds. Both of them stood at, or very near, the top of Roman politics; but that is where the similarity ends. In fact, their contrasting careers offer a vivid illustration of just how varied political life in Rome of the first century BCE could be.
Catiline, the would-be revolutionary, had the more conventional, more privileged and apparently safer start in life, as in politics. He came from a distinguished old family that traced its lineage back centuries to the mythical founding fathers of Rome. His ancestor Sergestus was said to have fled from the East to Italy with Aeneas after the Trojan War, before the city of Rome even existed. Among his blue-blooded forebears, his great-grandfather was a hero of the war against Hannibal, with the extra claim to fame of being the first man known to have entered combat with a prosthetic hand – probably just a metal hook that replaced his right hand, lost in an earlier battle. Catiline himself had a successful early career and was elected to a series of junior political offices, but in 63 BCE he was close to bankruptcy. A string of crimes was attached to his name, from the murder of his first wife and his own son to sex with a virgin priestess. But whatever his expensive vices, his financial problems came partly from his repeated attempts to secure election as one of the two consuls, the most powerful political posts in the city.
Electioneering at Rome could be a costly business. By the first century BCE it required the kind of lavish generosity that is not always easy to distinguish from bribery. The stakes were high. The men who were successful in the elections had the chance to recoup their outlay, legally or illegally, with some of the perks of office. The failures – and, like military defeats, there were many more of those in Rome than is usually acknowledged – fell ever more deeply into debt.
That was Catiline’s position after he had been beaten in the annual elections for the consulship in both 64 and 63 BCE. Although the usual story is that he had been leaning in that direction before, he now had little option but to resort to ‘revolution’ or ‘direct action’ or ‘terrorism’, whichever you choose to call it. Joining forces with other upper-class desperadoes in similar straits, he appealed to the support of the discontented poor within the city while mustering his makeshift army outside it. And there was no end to his rash promises of debt relief (one of the most despicable forms of radicalism in the eyes of the Roman landed classes) or to his bold threats to take out the leading politicians and to put the whole city to flames.
Or so Cicero, who was one of those who believed he had been earmarked for destruction, summed up his adversary’s motives and aims. He was of a very different stock from Catiline. He came from a wealthy, landed background, as all high-level Roman politicians did. But his origins lay outside the capital, in the small town of Arpinum, about 70 miles from Rome, or at least a day’s journey at the ancient speed of travel. Though they must have been major players locally, no one in his family before him had ever been prominent on the Roman political scene. With none of Catiline’s advantages, Cicero relied on his native talents, on the high-level connections he assiduously cultivated – and on speaking his way to the top. That is to say, his main claim to fame was as a star advocate in the Roman courts; and the celebrity status and prominent supporters that this gave him meant that he was easily elected to each of the required series of junior offices in turn, just like Catiline. But in 64 BCE, where Catiline failed, Cicero succeeded in winning the race for the next year’s consulship.
That crowning success had not been an entirely foregone conclusion. For all his celebrity, Cicero faced the disadvantage of being a ‘new man’, as the Romans called those without political ancestry, and at one stage he even seems to have considered making an electoral pact with Catiline, seedy reputation or not. But in the end, the influential voters swayed it. The Roman electoral system openly and unashamedly gave extra weight to the votes of the rich; and many of them must have concluded that Cicero was a better option than Catiline, whatever their snobbish disdain for his ‘newness’. Some of his rivals called him just a ‘lodger’ at Rome, a ‘part-time citizen’, but he topped the poll. Catiline ended up in the unsuccessful third place. In second place, elected as the other consul, was Gaius Antonius Hybrida, uncle of a more famous Antonius (‘Mark Antony’), whose reputation turned out to be not much better than Catiline’s.
By the summer of 63 BCE, Cicero appears to have got wind of definite danger from Catiline, who was trying his luck as a candidate again. Using his authority as consul, Cicero postponed the next round of elections, and when he finally did let them go ahead, he turned up at the poll with an armed guard and wearing a military breastplate clearly visible under his toga. It was a histrionic display, and the combination of civilian and military kit was alarmingly incongruous, rather as if a modern politician were to enter the legislature in a business suit with a machine gun slung over his shoulder. But it worked. These scare tactics, combined with Catiline’s vociferously populist programme, made sure that he was once more defeated. Claiming that he was a down-and-out standing up for other down-and-outs could hardly have endeared him to elite voters.
Soon after the elections, sometime in the early autumn, Cicero began to receive much clearer intelligence of a violent plot. For a long time he had been getting trickles of information through the girlfriend of one of Catiline’s ‘accomplices’, a woman named Fulvia, who had more or less turned double agent. Now, thanks to a further piece of treachery from the other side, and via the wealthy Marcus Crassus as intermediary, he had a bundle of letters in his hands that directly incriminated Catiline and referred to the terrible bloodshed that was planned – information soon supplemented by definite reports of armed forces gathering north of the city in support of the insurrection. Finally, after he dodged an assassination attempt planned for 7 November, thanks to a tip-off from Fulvia, Cicero summoned the senate to meet the next day so that he could formally denounce Catiline and frighten him out of Rome.
The senators had already, in October, issued a decree urging (or allowing) Cicero as consul ‘to make sure that the state should come to no harm’, roughly the ancient equivalent of a modern ‘emergency powers’ or ‘prevention of terrorism’ act, and no less controversial. Now, on 8 November, they listened while Cicero went through the whole case against Catiline, in a blistering and well-informed attack. It was a marvellous mixture of fury, indignation, self-criticism and apparently solid fact. One minute he was reminding the assembled company of Catiline’s notorious past; the next he was disingenuously regretting that he himself had not reacted to the danger speedily enough; the next he was pouring out precise details of the plot – in whose house the conspirators had gathered, on what dates, who was involved and what exactly their plans were. Catiline had turned up to face the denunciation in person. He asked the senators not to believe everything they were told and made some jibes about Cicero’s modest background, compared with his own distinguished ancestors and their splendid achievements. But he must have realised that his position was hopeless. Overnight he left town.
In the senate
This encounter in front of the senate between Cicero and Catiline is the defining moment of the whole story: the two adversaries coming face to face in an institution that lay at the centre of Roman politics. But how should we picture it? The most famous modern attempt to bring before our eyes what happened on that 8 November is a painting by the nineteenth-century Italian artist Cesare Maccari (detail below and plate 1). It is an image that fits comfortably with many of our preconceptions of ancient Rome and its public life, grand, spacious, formal and elegant.