Political Speeches (Oxford World's Classics) (30 page)

After the elections, Catiline was prosecuted again, this time for murders committed during the Sullan proscriptions (i.e. the murder of persons who had not been proscribed, since the proscriptions themselves were legal). His uncle, Lucius Bellienus, had been convicted of this same offence just before the elections. But Catiline was supported once again by the consulars (though not this time by Torquatus), and was acquitted.

Cicero, then, had an ally of Catiline for his colleague as consul. Early in 63, he did a deal with Antonius. In the allocation of provinces for the consuls of 63, Cicero had been assigned Macedonia, which offered an unscrupulous governor opportunities for considerable self-enrichment, while Antonius received the much less lucrative Cisalpine Gaul. Cicero had no wish to govern a province and be absent from Rome, and so he bought Antonius’ allegiance by exchanging provinces with him. Some months later he publicly renounced Cisalpine Gaul, and so, unusually, did not proceed to a province when his year as consul was at an end. (Cisalpine Gaul was assigned instead to the praetor Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer, the future consul of 60.) With hindsight, this was the
wrong decision. If he had been absent for a year or two after his consulship, he might have avoided the attacks he was to endure for his execution of the ringleaders of the conspiracy. (On Cicero’s exchange of provinces, see W. Allen, Jr.,
TAPA
83 (1952), 233–41.)

In the summer, Catiline was standing for the consulship for the second and final time. The other candidates were Decimus Junius Silanus, who had been one of the candidates in 65, Lucius Licinius Murena, and Servius Sulpicius Rufus, who was a leading jurist and friend of Cicero; Sulpicius and Catiline were both patricians and so it was impossible for both of them to be elected (every year at least one consul had to be a plebeian). During the campaign bribery was once again rife—probably all the candidates except Sulpicius engaged in it—and once again the senate attempted to suppress it. First, a senatorial decree was passed, on Cicero’s proposal, clarifying the terms of the law on electoral malpractice, the
lex Calpurnia
of 67; afterwards, on Sulpicius’ insistence, Cicero and Antonius together carried a new law, the
lex Tullia
, regulating electoral practices, defining malpractices more specifically, and adding a ten-year exile to the penalties laid down by the
lex Calpurnia
. Marcus Porcius Cato, recently elected to the tribunate for 62, threatened to prosecute any candidate for the consulship who engaged in bribery—though he would, he added, make an exception of his brother-in-law Silanus (whom we can probably therefore assume to have been guilty). In the senate a few days before the consular elections (in the second half of July), Cato specifically threatened Catiline with prosecution. Catiline replied enigmatically that if he were ruined by a conviction in the courts, he would see that he brought the whole country down with him.

Shortly before the election was due to take place, Catiline gave an inflammatory address at his house, recommending himself as someone who was prepared to go to any lengths on behalf of the poor and desperate, among whom he included himself. He is represented in the sources as having depended for his support on three groups of people: those of all levels of society who were suffering as a result of debt; Sullan veterans who had been rewarded with land but had fallen on hard times; and people who had been dispossessed in Sulla’s confiscations (the first group obviously overlapped to some extent with the other two). The fact that he rallied his supporters under a silver eagle used by Marius in the war against the Cimbri (see
Cat
. 1.24, 2.13; Sal.
Cat
. 59.3) would suggest that he appealed more to the third group, dispossessed Marians, than to the second: Cicero would then have exaggerated, in order to increase Catiline’s unpopularity, the extent to which he relied on Sullan veterans (a group with whom few probably had much sympathy). But on the other hand, Catiline’s ally Manlius was a Sullan veteran; so there must have
been at least an element of the second group among his following. (See further W. V. Harris,
Rome in Etruria and Umbria
(Oxford, 1971), 289–94.)

The difficulties faced by these groups were considerable. Italian agriculture was still suffering as a result of Sulla’s civil war, confiscations, and settlements (82–81), and as a result of Spartacus’ revolt (73–71). Up and down Italy, the men who had had their land taken away by Sulla and the men to whom he had given it lived in close proximity: there must have been a great deal of localized violence and unrest. Moreover, during the previous decade the Third Mithridatic War (73–63) and the pirates (to 67) had prevented Roman financiers lending money abroad, and they had instead lent it in Italy. But with Pompey’s defeat of Mithridates in 63 and his settlement of the eastern provinces, there was a rush to lend money overseas. (The situation became so serious that the senate this year banned the export of gold and silver from Rome; Cicero took steps to enforce the ban.) At home, creditors immediately called in their loans. This spelled ruin for the urban plebs and for heavily indebted members of the upper class alike. To many, their only hope appeared to be a one-off cancellation of debts (
novae tabulae
): at the end of his life, in 44, Cicero was to remark that pressure for this had never been greater than in his consulship (
Off
. 2.84). For the upper class, unprecedented political and social competition caused by Sulla’s rigid ‘sequence of offices’ (
cursus honorum
), with its ever decreasing number of positions available at each stage in a senator’s career, had led to an explosion of bribery and indebtedness. Aediles, for instance, were required to put on games at their own expense: the games would need to be more spendid than the previous ones if the magistrate were to rise higher, but even so he would have no guarantee that he would ever gain the provincial governorship which would allow him to recoup his outlay. After Caesar gave his aedilician games in 65 he was allegedly in debt for 25 million sesterces; the sum was not paid off until he had conquered Gaul. (See further Z. Yavetz,
Historia
, 12 (1963), 485–99; and on debt in this period, M. W. Frederiksen,
JRS
56 (1966), 128–41.)

Prior to his last attempt at the consulship, Catiline appears to have shown no interest in addressing Rome’s social problems; but the plight of so many of his contemporaries now presented him with an opportunity. During his campaign he was escorted by a large group of supporters from Arretium and Faesulae in northern Etruria, one of the areas that had suffered most from Sulla’s confiscations and settlements. This group, led by Gaius Manlius, a former Sullan centurion, consisted mainly of discontented Sullan colonists, but also included a number of the dispossessed. (That is what Cicero says at
Mur
. 49; but it is possible, as we have seen, that the Sullan colonists were in fact in the minority. Manlius’ presence in Rome is attested by Plutarch (
Cic
. 14.2).) To these men and
his other supporters, Catiline offered the policy they longed for—cancellation of debts. It was precisely the policy to win him the support of the desperate from all ranks of society—and one that no respectable politician was prepared to offer.

Once the content of Catiline’s election address at his house had been reported to Cicero, Cicero persuaded the senate to postpone the elections in order that they could discuss the speech Catiline had made. So the senate met, and Catiline, called upon to justify himself, far from denying what he had said, made another speech in the same vein. To Cicero’s dismay, the senate then declined to take any effective action, and the election therefore went ahead without further delay (there is no good reason for thinking it was postponed until October). Catiline attended with a gang of armed men. Cicero, who was presiding, came with a bodyguard, and ostentatiously wore a large cuirass. He did this partly to register his disagreement with the senate about the nature of the threat posed by Catiline, and partly to bring home to the people the danger that Catiline represented. The voting took place, and Silanus and Murena, the two plebeians, were elected. Sulpicius and Cato then launched a prosecution of Murena under the
lex Tullia
for electoral malpractice.

Despairing of gaining power by conventional means, Catiline now started his conspiracy. He could have chosen instead to wait for Murena’s conviction and then stand against Sulpicius at the supplementary election which would follow: he did not this time face the difficulty he had faced in 65 of not having been a candidate in the original election. But he had evidently run out of patience, hope, and cash.

We know little of what happened in August and September. In September the senate seems to have discussed Catiline’s conspiracy (on the rather dubious evidence of Suetonius, who says that they were discussing it on the day when the future emperor Augustus was born); but there was as yet no hard evidence against him. On the night of 19 (or perhaps 18) October, however, Crassus came to Cicero’s house at midnight, accompanied by Marcus Claudius Marcellus (the future consul of 51 and subject of Cicero’s
Pro Marcello
) and Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio Nasica (the future consul of 52), and handed him a set of letters that had been delivered to his house. Crassus had opened only the one addressed to himself: it was anonymous, and warned him of an impending massacre by Catiline and advised him to leave Rome in secret. The next morning Cicero convened the senate and had the rest of the letters read aloud by their addressees (we are not told who they were); all the letters carried the same message as the letter to Crassus. After this, on 20 October (and therefore either at this same meeting of the senate or at another a day later), Quintus Arrius, an ex-praetor, reported that news had come from
Faesulae that Manlius was preparing an armed rising. The senate therefore passed the emergency decree (
senatus consultum ultimum
or ‘SCU’), first used against Gaius Gracchus in 121
BC
, urging the consuls to take whatever action they considered necessary for the security of the state (the date of the SCU, usually given as 21 October, but given here as 20 October, is very uncertain: it was either eighteen or seventeen days before the date of the
First Catilinarian
, which is itself uncertain).

A week later (27 October), Manlius, having heard of the passing of the SCU, was in open rebellion. Some modern scholars have suggested that his rising was in origin independent of Catiline. But there is no suggestion of this in the ancient sources (except an ironic rejection of the idea by Cicero at
Cat
. 2.14); and Manlius had supported Catiline during the election campaign. The deal between Manlius and Catiline seems to have been that Manlius would help Catiline achieve his ambition of being elected consul if Catiline would then redress his men’s grievances and give them relief from their debts. Once Catiline had decided, after the election, that he would continue to seek the consulship by other means, Manlius must have made a decision that it was in his best interest to continue the arrangement. (On Manlius’ connection with Catiline, see E. J. Phillips,
Historia
, 25 (1976), 443–4.)

Cicero now took a number of security measures, as he had been urged to do by the senate’s decree. He made arrangements for the defence of Rome, and also of Praeneste, which he believed the conspirators were planning to seize on I November. Early in November, news came from Faesulae that Manlius’ rebellion had begun, and there were reports of slave revolts at Capua and in Apulia. To meet these threats, two generals who were outside the city waiting to be awarded triumphs, Quintus Marcius Rex (the consul of 68) and Quintus Caecilius Metellus Creticus (the consul of 69), were sent to Faesulae and Apulia respectively. In addition, two praetors, Quintus Pompeius Rufus and Metellus Celer, were sent respectively to Capua and Picenum. Rewards were offered to anyone who came forward with information about the conspiracy. No one did so.

All this time Catiline remained in Rome. There was as yet no real evidence to incriminate him: the letters sent to Crassus had been anonymous, and so proved nothing. Lucius Aemilius Paullus, however, gave notice that he intended to prosecute Catiline for violence. Catiline responded by offering to place himself in the custody first of Manius Aemilius Lepidus (the consul of 66), then of Cicero, then of Metellus Celer (who presumably had not yet left for Picenum), then of a Marcus Metellus (possibly the praetor of 69); but of these the first three refused to accept him, and the fourth presumably refused also, since Catiline remained a free man. The case never came to trial.

Quintus Marcius Rex, meanwhile, had arrived in Etruria. Manlius sent him a message stating his supporters’ grievances, to which Marcius replied that the men should lay down their arms and put their trust in the senate’s mercy. Understandably, they declined to take this advice. (It is interesting that Manlius should have attempted to make terms with Marcius: this would appear to show that his support for Catiline was merely the means to an end, and that Catiline’s consulship was in itself a matter of indifference to him.)

On the night of 6 November, Catiline held a secret meeting in Rome with his chief supporters at the house of one of them, the senator Marcus Porcius Laeca, in the scythe-makers’ quarter. Arrangements were made for Catiline himself to go to Manlius’ army, and for other conspirators to go and take charge of the risings elsewhere in Italy. Those who remained would organize assassinations and the firing of various parts of the city. (Cicero makes much of the Catilinarians’ alleged intention to burn Rome, and it was largely this claim which enabled him to turn the urban plebs against the conspiracy. It is incredible, however, that Catiline should have intended a general conflagration—though quite possible that he planned specific, localized fires, and was foolish enough to imagine that they would not spread.) Finally, two conspirators, Gaius Cornelius (an
eques
) and Lucius Vargunteius (a man who had been tried for electoral malpractice and probably expelled from the senate), would call on Cicero at his house early the next morning and assassinate him. (Antonius, of course, was Catiline’s ally of old, and the conspirators did not plan to kill him.)