Cicero, inevitably, had an interest in making the most of the danger that Catiline posed. Whatever his political success, he held a precarious position at the top of Roman society, among aristocratic families who claimed, like Catiline, a direct line back to the founders of the city, or even to the gods. Julius Caesar’s family, for example, was proud to trace its lineage back to the goddess Venus; another, more curiously, claimed descent from the equally mythical Pasiphae, the wife of King Minos, whose extraordinary coupling with a bull produced the monstrous Minotaur. In order to secure his position in these circles, Cicero was no doubt looking to make a splash during his year as consul. An impressive military victory against a barbarian enemy would have been ideal, and what most Romans would have dreamt of. Rome was always a warrior state, and victory in war the surest route to glory. Cicero, however, was no soldier: he had come to prominence in the law courts, not by leading his army in battle against dangerous, or unfortunate, foreigners. He needed to ‘save the state’ in some other way.
5. This Roman tombstone of the fourth century CE illustrates one simple way of striking a coin. The blank coin is placed between two dies, resting on an anvil. The man on the left is giving this ‘sandwich’ a heavy blow with a hammer to imprint the design on the blank. As the tongs in the hands of the assistant on the right suggest, the blank has been heated to make the imprinting easier.
Some Roman commentators noted that the crisis played very much to Cicero’s advantage. One anonymous pamphlet, attacking Cicero’s whole career and preserved because it was once believed, wrongly, to be from the pen of Sallust, states explicitly that he ‘turned the troubles of the state to his own glory’, going so far as to claim that his consulship was ‘the cause of the conspiracy’ rather than the solution. To put it bluntly, one basic question for us should be not whether Cicero exaggerated the dangers of the conspiracy, but how far.
The most determined modern sceptics have deemed the whole plot not much more than a figment of Cicero’s imagination – in which case the man who claimed to be a ‘weapons enthusiast’ was exactly that, the incriminating letters were forgeries, the deputation of Gauls were a complete dupe of the consul and the rumoured assassination attempts were paranoid inventions. Such a radical view seems implausible. There was, after all, a hand-to-hand battle between Catiline’s men and Roman legions, which can hardly be dismissed as a figment. It is much more likely that, whatever his original motives, Catiline – far-sighted radical or unprincipled terrorist – was partly driven to extreme measures by a consul spoiling for a fight and bent on his own glory. Cicero may even have convinced himself, whatever the evidence, that Catiline was a serious threat to the safety of Rome. That, as we know from many more recent examples, is how political paranoia and self-interest often work. We will never be quite sure. The ‘conspiracy’ will always be a prime example of the classic interpretative dilemma: were there really ‘reds under the bed’, or was the crisis, partly at least, a conservative invention? It should also act as a reminder that in Roman history, as elsewhere, we must always be alert to the other side of the story – which is part of the point of this SPQR.
Our Catiline?
The clash between Cicero and Catiline has offered a template for political conflict ever since. It can hardly be a coincidence that Maccari’s painting of the events of 8 November was commissioned, along with other scenes of Roman history, for the room in the Palazzo Madama that had just become the home of the modern Italian senate; presumably a lesson was intended for the modern senators. And over the centuries the rights and wrongs of the ‘conspiracy’, the respective faults and virtues of Catiline and Cicero, and the conflicts between homeland security and civil liberties have been fiercely debated, and not only among historians.
Occasionally the story has been drastically rewritten. One medieval tradition in Tuscany has Catiline surviving the battle against the Roman legions and going on, as a local hero, to have a complicated romantic entanglement with a woman called Belisea. Another version gives him a son Uberto, and so makes him the ancestor of the Uberti dynasty in Florence. Even more imaginatively, Prosper de Crébillon’s play Catilina, first performed in the mid eighteenth century, conjures up an affair between Catiline and Cicero’s daughter, Tullia, complete with some steamy assignations in a Roman temple.
When the conspiracy has been replayed in fiction and on stage, it has been adjusted according to the political alignment of the author and the political climate of the times. Henrik Ibsen’s first drama, written in the aftermath of the European revolutions of the 1840s, takes the events of 63 BCE as its theme. Here a revolutionary Catiline is pitted against the corruption of the world in which he lived, while Cicero, who could have imagined nothing worse, is almost entirely written out of the events, never appearing on stage and barely mentioned. For Ben Jonson, by contrast, writing in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, Catiline was a sadistic anti-hero, whose victims were so numerous that, in Jonson’s vivid imagination, a whole navy was required to ferry them across the River Styx to the Underworld. His Cicero is not particularly likeable either but instead a droning bore; indeed so boring that at the play’s first performance, in 1611, many members of the audience walked out during his interminable denunciation of Catiline.
Jonson was being unfair to Cicero’s powers of persuasive oratory – at least if the continuing use of his words, quoted and strategically adapted, is anything to go by. For his First Catilinarian speech, and especially its famous first line (‘How long, Catiline, will you go on abusing our patience?’), still lurks in twenty-first-century political rhetoric, is plastered on modern political banners and is fitted conveniently into the 140 characters of a tweet. All you need do is insert the name of your particular modern target. Indeed, a stream of tweets and other headlines posted over the time I was writing this book swapped the name ‘Catilina’ for, among others, those of the presidents of the United States, France and Syria, the mayor of Milan and the State of Israeclass="underline" ‘Quo usque tandem abutere, François Hollande, patientia nostra?’ Quite how many of those who now adopt the slogan could explain exactly where it comes from, or what the clash between Cicero and Catiline was all about, it is impossible to know. Some may be classicists with a political cause, but that is unlikely to be true of all these objectors and protesters. The use of the phrase points to something rather different from specialist classical expertise, and probably more important. It is a strong hint that, just under the surface of Western politics, the dimly remembered conflict between Cicero and Catiline still acts as a template for our own political struggles and arguments. Cicero’s eloquence, even if only half understood, still informs the language of modern politics.
6. In 2012, Hungarian protesters against the Fidesz party’s attempts to rewrite the constitution blazoned Cicero’s famous phrase, in Latin. But it has not been reused only in political contexts. In a notorious intellectual spat, Camille Paglia substituted the name of French philosopher Michel Foucault for Catiline’s: ‘How long, O Foucault …?’
Cicero would be delighted. When he wrote to his friend Lucceius, asking the historian to commemorate the achievements of his consulship, he was hoping for eternal fame: ‘the idea of being spoken about by posterity pushes me to some sort of hope for immortality,’ he wrote with a touch of well-contrived diffidence. Lucceius, as we saw, did not oblige. He might have been put off by Cicero’s blatant request that he ‘neglect the rules of history’ to write up the events rather more fulsomely than accurately. But in the end, it turned out that Cicero achieved more immortality for his achievements in 63 BCE than Lucceius could ever have given him, being quoted and requoted over 2,000 years.