VIII
STRUGGLE OF THE PARTIES DURING THE ABSENCE OF POMPEY
With the passage of the Gabinian law the parties in the capital changed places. As soon as Pompey took his command in the field, what was regarded as his party similarly took command in the capital. To be sure, the nobility still stood in compact array, and the comitial machinery continued to elect consuls who (as the democrats put it) were already chosen in their cradles; for not even the holders of power could break down the influence of the old families. But unfortunately the consulate, at the very moment when the “new men” were virtually excluded from it, began itself to pale before the newly risen star of the military.
The aristocracy felt this, and without quite confessing it they gave themselves up for lost. Except for Quintus Catulus, who with honorable firmness persevered at his difficult post as champion of a vanquished party down to his death in 60 B.C., there was no top-ranking Optimate who sustained the interests of the aristocracy with courage and steadfastness. Their most talented and famous men, such as Quintus Metellus Pius and Lucius Lucullus, practically abdicated and sought dignified retirement in their villas, in the attempt to forget the Forum and the senate house amid their gardens and libraries, their aviaries and fishponds. This was of course still more true among the younger aristocrats, who were either wholly absorbed in luxury and literature or turned towards the rising sun.
Among the younger men there was a single exception. Marcus Porcius Cato, born in 95 B.C., was a man of the best intentions and of rare devotion, and yet one of the most quixotic and cheerless phenomena in an age so replete with political caricatures. Honorable and steadfast, earnest in purpose and in action, full of attachment to his country and to its hereditary constitution, but dull in intellect and sensuously as well as morally destitute of passion, he might well have made a tolerable state comptroller. But unfortunately he fell early under the power of formalism, swayed partly by the Stoic catchwords whose abstract baldness and spiritless isolation made them fashionable among the gentility of that day, and partly by the example of his great-grandfather whom he deemed it his mission to reproduce. He began to walk about the sinful capital as a model citizen and mirror of virtue, to scold at the times like the old Cato, to travel on foot instead of riding, to accept no interest on loans, to decline badges of distinction as a soldier, and to herald the restoration of the good old days by going without a shirt, after the precedent of King Romulus. His ancestor was a gray-haired farmer whom hatred and anger made an orator, who wielded in equally masterful style the plow or the sword, and whose narrow but original and sound common sense ordinarily hit the nail on the head. This young caricature was an unimpassioned pedant from whose lips dropped scholastic wisdom, who was everywhere seen sitting book in hand, a philosopher who understood neither the art of war nor any other art, a cloud-walker amid moral abstractions.
Yet he attained to moral and thereby even to political importance. In an utterly wretched and cowardly age his courage and negative virtues told powerfully on the multitude. He even formed a school, and there were individuals (true, only a few) who in their turn copied and caricatured afresh this living model of a philosopher. From the same cause also stemmed his political influence. As the only prominent conservative who possessed at least integrity and courage, if not talent and insight, he was always ready to throw himself into the breach whether it was necessary to do so or not. Thus he soon became the recognized champion of the Optimate party, to which neither his age nor his rank nor his intellect entitled him. Where sheer perseverance of a single man was efficacious he achieved some admitted successes; and in questions of detail, especially of a financial character, he often judiciously interfered, as he was never absent from a meeting of the Senate. His quaestorship in fact formed an epoch, for as long as he lived he checked the details of the budget, maintaining of course a constant warfare with the farmers of the taxes.
For the rest, he simply lacked every ingredient of a statesman. He was incapable of even comprehending a political aim and of surveying political relations. His whole tactics consisted in setting his face against everyone who deviated or seemed to him to deviate from the traditional moral and political catechism of the aristocracy, and thus of course he played into the hands of his opponents as often as he helped his own party. The Don Quixote of the aristocracy, he proved by his character and his actions that, although an aristocracy still existed, there was not the ghost of an aristocratic policy.
To battle with such an aristocracy brought little honor, but the democratic attacks of course did not cease on that account. The popular demagogues threw themselves on the broken ranks of the nobility like a pack of scavengers, and the surface of the political pond was ruffled into high waves of foam. The multitude joined in with greater alacrity since Gaius Caesar especially kept them in good humor by the extravagant magnificence of his games (65 B.C.)—in which all the equipment, even the cages of the wild beasts, appeared of massive silver—and generally by a liberality which was all the more princely for being based solely on reckless borrowing.
The attacks on the nobility were of the most varied kind. The abuses of aristocratic rule afforded copious materials, and magistrates and advocates who were liberal or assumed a liberal cloak, like Gaius Cornelius, Aulus Gabinius, and Marcus Cicero, continued systematically to unveil the most scandalous Optimate misdeeds and to propose laws against them. The Senate was directed to give audience to foreign envoys on set days, in order to prevent the usual postponement. Debts contracted by foreign ambassadors in Rome were declared nonactionable, as this was the only means of seriously checking the corruptions which formed the order of the day in the Senate. The right of the Senate to set aside the laws in particular cases was restricted, as was the abuse whereby every Roman of rank with private business in the provinces got himself appointed a Roman envoy by the Senate. The penalties against vote-buying and unlawful electioneering were strengthened, the latter having especially increased by the efforts of ousted senators to recover their seats through re-election. What had hitherto been taken for granted was now laid down as law, that the praetors were bound to administer justice in conformity with the rules set forth by them upon entering office.
Above all, however, efforts were made to complete the democratic restoration and to reinstate the major Gracchan ideas in suitable contemporary form. The election of the priests by the comitia, which Gnaeus Domitius had introduced and Sulla had again abolished, was re-established by a law of the tribune of the people Titus Labienus in 63 B.C. The democrats were fond of pointing out that the Sempronian grain laws were far from fully restored, while glossing over the fact that under the changed circumstances—the straitened condition of the public finances and the great increase in the number of Roman citizens—full restoration was quite impracticable.
In the country between the Po and the Alps, the agitation for political equality with the Italians was zealously fostered. As early as 68 B.C. Gaius Caesar traveled from place to place among the Transpadanes for this purpose. In 65 B.C. Marcus Crassus as censor arranged to place the inhabitants directly on the roll of citizens, an effort frustrated only by the resistance of his colleague. The attempt seems to have been repeated regularly in the following censorships. As formerly Gracchus and Flaccus had been the patrons of the Latins, so the present democratic leaders presented themselves as protectors of the Transpadanes, and Gaius Piso (consul in 67 B.C.) came to regret that he had ventured to outrage one of these followers of Caesar and Crassus.
On the other hand, these same leaders were quite indisposed to advocate political equality for freedmen. The tribune of the people Gaius Manilius, who in a thinly attended assembly procured the renewal of the Sulpician law as to the suffrage of freedmen, was immediately disavowed by the democratic leaders, and with their consent the law was canceled by the Senate the day after its passage. In the same spirit, all strangers who possessed neither Roman nor Latin citizenship were ejected from the capital by decree of the people in 65 B.C. Thus the intrinsic inconsistency of the Gracchan policy, at once seeking to help the excluded obtain admission into the circle of the privileged while maintaining the distinctive rights of the privileged, was handed down to the successors of the Gracchi. Caesar and his friends on the one hand held forth to the Transpadanes the prospect of the franchise; on the other they assented to the discrimination against the freedmen, and to the protection of the Italians in Italy against the industry and trading skill of the Hellenes and Orientals.1
The democratic leaders were still more vehement in all personal questions. To be sure, prudence enjoined them not to urge the restoration of the estates confiscated by Sulla, that they might not split with their own allies over a question of material interests, which will almost always defeat a purely political movement. The recall of the emigrants was too closely connected with this question of property to appear advisable. On the other hand, great efforts were made to restore political rights to the children of the proscribed, and the heads of the senatorial party were incessantly subjected to personal attack. Thus Gaius Memmius initiated a process against Marcus Lucullus in 66 B.C.; his more famous brother was allowed to wait three years for his well-deserved triumph; and Quintus Metellus, the conqueror of Crete, and Quintus Rex were similarly insulted.
It produced a still greater sensation when the young democratic leader Gaius Caesar not only presumed to compete in 63 B.C. for the supreme pontificate with the two most distinguished aristocrats, Quintus Catulus and Publius Servilius, but carried the day among the citizens. The heirs of Sulla, especially his son Faustus, found themselves constantly threatened with an action for the refunding of the public moneys which, it was alleged, had been embezzled by the regent. There was even talk of resuming the democratic impeachments on the basis of the Varian law.
The individuals who had taken part in the Sullan executions were, as may readily be conceived, prosecuted with the utmost zeal. When in 65 B.C. the quaestor Marcus Cato, in his pedantic integrity, himself demanded back from them as state property the rewards which they had received for murder, it is hardly surprising that the next year Gaius Caesar, as president of the commission regarding murder, summarily treated as null and void the Sullan ordinance which declared that a proscribed person might be killed with impunity, and caused the most noted of Sulla’s executioners, Lucius Catilina, Lucius Bellienus, and Lucius Luscius, to be brought before his jurymen and partially condemned.
Lastly, the long-proscribed democratic heroes and martyrs were once again publicly praised and their memory celebrated. Gaius Marius, at whose name all hearts had once throbbed, was not only the man to whom Italy owed her deliverance from the northern barbarians: he was at the same time the uncle of the present leader of the democrats. Loudly had the multitude rejoiced when Gaius Caesar in 68 B.C. ventured illegally to show the honored features of the hero in the Forum at the interment of his widow. Three years later the emblems of victory, which Marius had caused to be erected in the Capitol and Sulla had ordered to be thrown down, one morning unexpectedly glittered afresh in gold and marble at the old spot. The veterans of the African and Cimbrian wars crowded around the statue of their beloved general with tears in their eyes, and in presence of the rejoicing masses the Senate did not dare seize the trophies which the same bold hand had renewed in defiance of the laws.
But all these doings, however noisy, were of trifling political importance. The oligarchy was vanquished and the democracy had attained the helm. It was to be expected that underlings of various grades should hasten to give additional kicks to the prostrate foe, that the democrats should have their basis in law and their worship of principles, that their doctrinaires should not rest till all the popular prerogatives were restored, and should occasionally make themselves ridiculous, as legitimists are wont to do. But taken as a whole, the agitation was aimless. Indeed, it betrays the perplexity of its authors in seeking an object for their activity, for it concentrated almost wholly on subordinate matters or on things already largely settled.
It could not be otherwise. In their struggle with the aristocracy the democrats had conquered, but they had not conquered alone. They still awaited the fiery trial of reckoning not with their former foe, but with their too-powerful ally, who was substantially responsible for their victory, and into whose hands they had placed unparalleled military and political power because they dared not refuse him. The general of the seas and of the East was still busy appointing and deposing kings. How long it would take him, or when he would declare the war ended, no one could say but himself; for the time of his return—in short, the day of reckoning—was left in his hands like everything else. Meanwhile the parties in Rome sat and waited. The Optimates looked forward to the arrival of the dreaded general with comparative calm. They could only gain by the rupture they saw approaching between Pompey and the popular party. The democrats on the contrary waited with painful anxiety, and sought to use the interval allowed to them by Pompey’s absence to lay a countermine against the impending explosion.
This policy again coincided with that of Crassus, who had no course left for countering his envied and hated rival but to ally himself more closely than before with the democrats. During the first coalition a special bond had joined Caesar and Crassus as the two weaker parties, and a common interest and a common danger strengthened the link between the richest and the most insolvent of the Romans. While the democrats publicly described Pompey as the head and pride of their party, and seemed to direct all their arrows against the aristocracy, preparations were secretly made against him.
These attempts of the democrats to escape from the impending military dictatorship have far greater historical significance than their noisy agitation against the nobility, for the most part employed only as a mask. It is true that they were carried on behind a curtain of secrecy which our sources allow us to pierce only occasionally, for both that age and the succeeding one had reasons for throwing a veil over the matter. But in general both the course and the object of these efforts are completely clear. The military power could only be effectually checkmated by another military power. The purpose of the democrats was to seize the reins of government after the example of Marius and Cinna; then to entrust one of their leaders with the conquest of Egypt or the governorship of Spain or some similar ordinary or extraordinary office; and thus to find in him and his military force a counterpoise to Pompey and his army.
For this they required a revolution directed immediately against the nominal government, but in reality against Pompey as the designated monarch. To effect this revolution, there was perpetual conspiracy in Rome from the passing of the Gabinio-Manilian laws down to the return of Pompey. The capital lived in anxious suspense. The depressed temper of the capitalists, the suspensions of payments, and the frequent bankruptcies were heralds of the fermenting revolution, which seemed as though it must also produce a totally new political configuration. The project of the democrats, which pointed beyond the Senate at Pompey, implied a community of interest between that general and the Senate. But in attempting to offset Pompey’s dictatorship with another more agreeable, the democrats in effect accepted the general principal of military government, and sought to drive out Satan by Beelzebub. Thus a question of principle became in their hands a question of persons.
The first step towards the proposed revolution was to be the overthrow of the existing government by an insurrection primarily instigated in Rome by democratic conspirators. The moral condition of both the lowest and the highest ranks of society in the capital presented the materials for this purpose in lamentable abundance. We need not describe again here the character of the free and the servile proletariat of the capital. It was already said that only a poor man was qualified to represent the poor, an idea which suggested that the mass of the poor might constitute itself an independent power alongside the oligarchy of the rich, and perhaps play the tyrant instead of allowing itself to be tyrannized.
But equivalent ideas were not wanting even in the circles of the young men of rank. The fashionable life of the capital shattered not merely the fortunes of men, but also their vigor of body and mind. That elegant world of fragrant ringlets, of fashionable mustachios and ruffles—merry as were its doings in the dance and with the harp, and early and late at the winecup—yet concealed in its bosom an alarming abyss of moral and economic ruin, of well- or ill-concealed despair, of frantic or knavish resolves. These circles sighed openly for a return of the days of Cinna, with its proscriptions and confiscations and its wiping out of debts. There were people enough, including not a few of respected lineage and unusual abilities, who only waited the signal to fall like a gang of robbers on civil society and recoup by pillage the fortunes which they had squandered. Where a band gathers, leaders are not wanting; and in this case men were soon found who were fitted to be captains of banditti.
The late praetor Lucius Catilina 2 and the quaestor Gnaeus Piso were distinguished among their peers not merely by their genteel birth and superior rank. They had completely burned their bridges behind them, and impressed their accomplices by their dissoluteness quite as much as by their talents. Catiline especially was one of the most wicked men of that wicked age. His villainies belong to the records of crime, not history; but his very appearance—the pale countenance, the wild glance, the gait by turns sluggish and hurried—betrayed his dismal past. He possessed in high degree the qualities required in the leader of such a band: the faculty of enjoying all pleasures and of bearing all privations, courage, military talent, knowledge of men, the energy of a felon, and that horrible mastery of vice which knows how to seduce the weak and train the fallen to crime.
To form from such elements a conspiracy to overthrow the existing order of things was not difficult for men who possessed money and political influence. Catiline, Piso, and their fellows entered readily into any plan which promised proscriptions and the cancellation of debts. Catiline also had a special grudge against the aristocracy, because it had opposed the candidacy of such an infamous and dangerous man for the consulship. As one of Sulla’s executioners he had hunted the proscribed at the head of a band of Celts, and had killed among others his own aged father-in-law with his own hand; now he readily contracted to perform similar services for the opposite party. A secret league was formed, said to number over 400 individuals. It included associates in all the districts and urban communities of Italy, in addition to the numerous recruits who would, as a matter of course, flock unbidden from the ranks of the dissolute youth to any insurrection which promised a wiping out of debts.
In December of 66 B.C.—so we are told—the leaders of the league thought that they had found the fitting occasion for striking a blow. The two consuls elected for 65 B.C., Publius Cornelius Sulla and Publius Autronius Paetus, had just been convicted of electoral bribery, and thus according to law had forfeited their right to hold office. Both thereupon joined the league. The conspirators resolved to procure the consulship for them by force, and thereby to seize possession of the supreme power.
On the day when the new consuls should enter office—January 1, 65 B.C.—the senate house was to be assailed by armed men, the new consuls and other victims were to be put to death, and Sulla and Paetus were to be proclaimed as consuls after the canceling of the judicial sentence which excluded them. Crassus was then to be invested with the dictatorship and Caesar with the mastership of the horse, doubtless with a view to raising an imposing military force while Pompey was still far away in the Caucasus. Captains and common soldiers were hired and instructed, and Catiline waited on the appointed day near the senate house for the signal, which was to be given him by Caesar on a hint from Crassus. But he waited in vain; Crassus was absent from the decisive sitting of the Senate, and on this occasion the projected insurrection failed.
A still more comprehensive plan was then devised for February 5th, but this also was frustrated because Catiline gave the signal too early, before all the bandits had arrived. Thereupon the secret came out. The government did not venture to proceed openly against the conspiracy, but it assigned a guard to the threatened consuls, and it opposed the conspiratorial band with another band paid by the government. To remove Piso, it was proposed that he be sent as quaestor with praetorian powers to Hither Spain; and Crassus consented, in the hope of securing through him the resources of that important province for the insurrection. Proposals going further were prevented by the tribunes.
So runs the account that has come down to us, obviously the version current in government circles. Its credibility in detail must, in the absence of any means of checking it, be considered moot. As for the main question—the participation of Caesar and Crassus—the testimony of their political opponents certainly cannot be regarded as sufficient evidence. But their known actions during this period correspond with striking exactness to the secret moves which this report ascribes to them. The attempt of Crassus, who was censor in this year, to enroll the Transpadanes on the list of citizens was itself a revolutionary enterprise. It is still more remarkable that Crassus also made preparations to enroll Egypt and Cyprus in the list of Roman provinces, and that Caesar about the same time had a proposal submitted to the people to send him to Egypt, in order to reinstate the king whom the Alexandrians had expelled.
These machinations suspiciously coincide with the charges raised by their antagonists. The truth cannot be established with certainty. However, it is highly probable that Crassus and Caesar mounted a plan to establish a military dictatorship during Pompey’s absence; that Egypt was selected as the basis of this democratic military power; that the attempted insurrection of 65 B.C. had been contrived to achieve these goals; and that Catiline and Piso were mere tools in the hands of Crassus and Caesar.
For the moment the conspiracy came to a standstill. The elections for 64 B.C. took place without Crassus and Caesar renewing their attempt to get possession of the consulship, perhaps for the reason that a relative of the democratic leader, Lucius Caesar, a weak man occasionally used by his kinsman as a tool, was on this occasion a candidate. But the news from Asia urged them to make haste. The affairs of Asia Minor and Armenia were already completely settled. The democratic strategists might proclaim that ending the Mithradatic war demanded the capture of the king, that it was therefore necessary to continue the pursuit round the Black Sea, and that above all things Pompey should keep aloof from Syria. But the general, not concerning himself about such talk, had left Armenia in the spring of 64 B.C. and marched towards Syria. If Egypt was to be used as a democratic springboard there was no time to be lost. Otherwise, Pompey might easily arrive in Egypt before Caesar.
The conspiracy of 66 B.C., far from being broken up by the government’s timid measures of repression, was again astir when the consular elections for 63 B.C. approached. The persons involved were presumably about the same, and the plan was but little altered. The leaders of the movement again kept in the background. On this occasion they had set up as candidates for the consulship Catiline himself and Gaius Antonius, the younger son of the orator and a brother of the general who had earned such a bad name in Crete. Antonius was originally a Sullan like Catiline, and like the latter had been brought to trial some years before by the democratic party and ejected from the Senate. Otherwise he was an indolent, insignificant, utterly bankrupt man with none of the qualifications of a leader, who willingly lent himself as a tool to the democrats for the prize of the consulship and the advantages attached to it.
Through these consuls the heads of the conspiracy intended to seize the government, arrest the children of Pompey as hostages, and take up arms in Italy and in the provinces against Pompey. On the first news of the rising in the capital, the governor Gnaeus Piso was to raise the banner of insurrection in Hither Spain. Sea communication with him was impossible, since Pompey commanded the seas. For this purpose the conspirators counted on their old friends the Transpadanes—among whom there was great agitation, and who of course would have received the franchise at once—and on various Celtic tribes. The threads of the plot reached as far as Mauretania, where one of the conspirators, the Roman speculator Publius Sittius, compelled by financial embarrassments to keep out of Italy, had armed a troop of desperadoes; with these he wandered about as a leader of freelances in western Africa, where he had old commercial connections.
The party put all its energies into the election struggle. Crassus and Caesar staked their money—whether their own or borrowed—and their connections to procure the consulship for Catiline and Antonius. The comrades of Catiline strained every nerve to elect the man who promised them not only the magistracies and priesthoods, the palaces and country estates of their opponents, but above all deliverance from their debts—and who, they knew, would keep his word. The aristocracy was in great perplexity, chiefly because it was not able even to offer opposition candidates. That such a candidate risked his head was obvious. The times were past when a post of danger tempted the citizen, and now even ambition was hushed in the presence of fear. Accordingly the nobility contented themselves with making a feeble attempt to check electioneering intrigues by issuing a new law respecting the purchase of votes (which, however, was thwarted by the veto of a tribune of the people) and with turning over their votes to a candidate who, if not acceptable, was at least inoffensive.
This candidate was Marcus Cicero, a notorious political trimmer accustomed to flirt at times with the democrats, at times with Pompey, at times (from a somewhat greater distance) with the aristocracy, and to lend his services as an advocate to every influential man under impeachment without distinction of person or party. (He numbered even Catiline among his clients.) He belonged properly to no party or—what was much the same—to the party of material interests, which was dominant in the courts and was pleased with the eloquent pleader and the courtly and witty companion. He had connections enough in the capital and the country towns to have a chance alongside of the candidates proposed by the democracy; and as the nobility (although with reluctance) and the Pompeians voted for him, he was elected by a great majority.
The two democratic candidates received almost the same number of votes; but a few more fell to Antonius, whose family was more prominent than that of his fellow-candidate. This accident frustrated the election of Catiline and saved Rome from a second Cinna. A little before this Piso had (it was said at the instigation of Pompey) been put to death in Spain by his native escort. With Antonius alone as consul nothing could be done. Cicero weaned him away from the conspiracy even before they entered on their offices, by renouncing his legal privilege of having the consular provinces determined by lot, and handing over to his debt-ridden colleague the lucrative governorship of Macedonia. The essential preliminary moves of the conspiracy were thus again thwarted.
Meanwhile, developments in Asia grew daily more perilous for the democrats. The reorganization of Syria proceeded rapidly, and already invitations had come to Pompey from Egypt to occupy that country for Rome. The democratic leaders could not but fear that they would hear next of Pompey in person on the banks of the Nile. This very apprehension probably explains the attempt of Caesar to get himself sent by the people to Egypt for the purpose of aiding the king against his rebellious subjects. It failed apparently through the disinclination of great and small to undertake anything whatever against the interest of Pompey. His return home, and the probable catastrophe which it involved for the democrats, were always drawing nearer. But as often as the string of the bow had been broken, there still must be a fresh attempt to bend it. The city was in sullen ferment, and frequent conferences among the top conspirators indicated that some new step was contemplated.
Their intent became manifest when the new tribunes took office on December 10, 64 B.C. One of them, Publius Servilius Rullus, immediately proposed an agrarian law designed to give the democratic leaders a position similar to that of Pompey under the Gabinio-Manilian laws. The nominal object was the founding of colonies in Italy. The land for these, however, was not to be gained by dispossession. On the contrary, all existing private rights were guaranteed, and even the illegal occupations of the most recent times were converted into full ownership. Only the leased Campanian domain was to be parceled out and colonized, with the government acquiring the rest of the land by ordinary purchase.3
To execute this measure, decemvirs with special powers were to be nominated for a five-year term of office, to be assisted by 200 subalterns from the equestrian order. However, the decemvirs were to be chosen only from those candidates who presented themselves personally, and (as in the elections of priests), only seventeen of the thirty-five tribes, chosen by lot, were to take part in the election. It needed no great acuteness to see that the object was to create a power like that of Pompey, only with a somewhat less military and more democratic hue. The jurisdiction was needed to convert Egypt into a military base against Pompey. The clause forbidding the choice of an absent person excluded Pompey, and the reduction of the number of tribes entitled to vote was designed to make the election easier to control.
But this attempt completely missed fire. The multitude, preferring to have their grain handed out to them under the shade of Roman porticoes rather than to cultivate it for themselves in the sweat of their brow, received the proposal itself with complete indifference. They also soon came to feel that Pompey would never acquiesce in a move so offensive to him, and that a party whose alarm impelled it to such wild schemes must be in trouble.
Under the circumstances it was not difficult for the government to frustrate the proposal. The new consul Cicero saw another opportunity of exhibiting his talent for giving a final kick to the beaten party, and even before the waiting tribunes could exercise their veto the author withdrew his proposal. The democracy had gained nothing but the unpleasant lesson that the great multitude still adhered to Pompey, out of love or fear, and that every proposal which seemed to be directed against him was certain to fail.
Wearied by all this vain agitation and scheming, Catiline determined to push the matter to a decision, and during the summer took steps to open the civil war. Faesulae, a very strong Etrurian town which swarmed with the impoverished and the desperate, and which fifteen years earlier had been the center of the Lepidan revolt, was selected as the insurrectionary headquarters. Thither were despatched the consignments of money, much of which was furnished by ladies of quality in the capital who were implicated in the conspiracy. There arms and soldiers were collected under the temporary command of the old Sullan captain Gaius Manlius, as brave and conscience-free a man as ever any soldier of fortune. Similar though less extensive preparations were made at other points in Italy. The Transpadanes were so excited that they seemed only waiting for the signal to strike. In the Bruttian country, on the east coast of Italy, in Capua, and wherever else great bodies of slaves were accumulated, a second slave insurrection like that of Spartacus seemed imminent.
Even in the capital something was brewing, it seemed to those who saw the haughty bearing of the debtors summoned to appear before the urban praetor. The capitalists were unspeakably anxious, and it was necessary to prohibit the export of gold and silver and to set a watch over the principal ports. The plan of the conspirators was simply this: during the consular election for 62 B.C., for which Catiline had again announced himself, the consul conducting the election as well as the inconvenient rival candidates were to be murdered, in order to carry the election for Catiline at any price. In case of necessity, armed bands from Faesulae and the other rallying points were to be brought in against the capital.
Cicero, always quickly and completely informed by his male and female agents of the transactions of the conspirators, on the day fixed for the election denounced the conspiracy in the full Senate and in presence of its principal leaders. Catiline did not condescend to deny it. He answered haughtily that if the election for consul should fall on him, the great headless party would certainly no longer want a leader against the small party led by wretched heads. But as unmistakable evidence of the plot was not before them, the timid Senate did nothing more than postpone the election, and approve the exceptional measures which the magistrates might deem suitable. Thus the election battle approached, in this case a real battle, for Cicero had formed an armed bodyguard of younger men, mainly from the mercantile order. This armed force covered and dominated the Campus Martius, and the conspirators were not successful either in killing the consul conducting the election or in carrying the election for their candidate.4
Meanwhile, preparations for civil war continued. On October 27th Gaius Manlius planted at Faesulae one of the Marian eagles from the Cimbrian war, round which the army of the insurrection was to flock, and summoned the robbers from the mountains as well as the country people to join him. His proclamations, following the old traditions of the popular party, demanded liberation from burdensome debt and a modification of the insolvency procedure, which still involved forfeiting the debtor’s freedom if the debt exceeded his estate. It seemed as though the rabble of the capital, posing as the legitimate successor of the old plebeian farmers and fighting its battles under the glorious eagles of the Cimbrian war, wished to dishonor not only the present but also the past of Rome.
The rising, however, remained isolated. At the other centers the conspiracy did not go beyond collecting arms and holding secret conferences, since resolute leaders were everywhere lacking. This was fortunate for the government, for its own irresolution and the clumsiness of its rusty machinery had prevented it from making any military preparations whatever against the long-threatened civil war. Only now was the general levy called out, and superior officers ordered to the several regions of Italy that each might suppress the insurrection in his own district. At the same time the gladiatorial slaves were ejected from the capital, and street patrols were ordered because of the fear of incendiarism.
Catiline was in a painful position. His plan called for a simultaneous rising in the capital and in Etruria at the time of the consular elections. The failure of the former and the outbreak of the latter endangered his person as well as his whole undertaking. Now that his partisans at Faesulae had risen in arms against the government, he could no longer remain in the capital; yet everything depended on his inducing the conspirators of the capital to strike even before he left Rome—for he knew his helpmates too well to rely on them in such a matter. The more considerable of the conspirators—the former consul Publius Lentulus Sura and the two former praetors Publius Autronius and Lucius Cassius—were incapable men: Lentulus was an ordinary aristocrat of big words and great pretensions, but slow in conception and irresolute in action; Autronius was distinguished for nothing but his powerful screaming voice; while as for Lucius Cassius, no one could comprehend how such a fat, stupid man had fallen among the conspirators.
But Catiline did not dare place his abler partisans, such as the young senator Gaius Cethegus and the equites Lucius Statilius and Publius Gabinius Capito, at the head of the movement. Even among the conspirators the traditional hierarchy of rank was observed, the anarchists themselves believing that they could not carry the day unless a consular or at least a praetorian were at their head. Therefore, however urgently the army of the insurrection might need its general, and however perilous it was for the latter to tarry in the capital after the outbreak of the revolt, Catiline nevertheless resolved to remain for a time in Rome. Accustomed to impose on his cowardly opponents by audacious insolence, he showed himself publicly in the Forum and in the senate house, replying to threats that they should beware of pushing him too far, and that if they should set the house on fire he would be compelled to extinguish the conflagration in ruins. In reality neither private persons nor officials ventured to lay hands on the dangerous man. It was almost a matter of indifference when a young nobleman brought him to trial on a charge of violence, for the larger question would have been decided long before the case could be tried.
However, the projects of Catiline failed, chiefly because the government’s agents had made their way into the circle of the conspirators and accurately reported every detail of the plot. For instance, when the conspirators appeared before Praeneste, which they had hoped to surprise by a coup de main, they found the inhabitants warned and armed. With everything miscarrying in like fashion, even Catiline found it advisable to fix his departure a few days hence. But at a last conference of the conspirators, held at Catiline’s urgent behest on the night of November 6-7, it was resolved to assassinate the consul Cicero as the principal leader of the governmental opposition. In order to obviate any treachery, it was resolved to execute the plan at once. Accordingly, early on the morning of November 7th the selected murderers knocked at the house of the consul, but were repulsed by the reinforced guard. On this occasion too the government’s spies had foiled the conspirators.
The next day Cicero convoked the Senate. Even now Catiline ventured to appear and defend himself against the indignant attacks of the consul, who unveiled before his face the events of the last few days; but men no longer listened to him, and he sat amid empty benches. He left the sitting and proceeded, as doubtless he had planned to do anyway, to Etruria. Here he proclaimed himself consul and assumed a waiting attitude, in order to advance against the capital as soon as the insurrection broke out there. The government outlawed Catiline and Manlius, as well as their comrades who did not lay down their arms by a certain day. New levies were called out, with the army to oppose Catiline being placed under the consul Gaius Antonius, who was notoriously implicated in the conspiracy, and whose character made it wholly fortuitous whether he would lead his troops against Catiline or over to him. The government’s plans seemed directly calculated to convert this Antonius into a second Lepidus.
No stronger steps were taken against the leaders of the conspiracy who had remained in Rome, although everyone pointed the finger at them, and the insurrection in the capital was far from being abandoned by the conspirators. On the contrary, it had been set by Catiline himself before his departure. A tribune was to give the signal by calling an assembly of the people. The following night Cethegus was to dispatch the consul Cicero; Gabinius and Statilius were to set the city on fire simultaneously at twelve places; and communication was to be established as soon as possible with the army of Catiline, which meantime would be advancing. Had Lentulus, who headed the conspirators after Catiline’s departure, listened to the urgent pleas of Cethegus and struck rapidly, the conspiracy might even then have been successful. But the conspirators were just as incapable and as cowardly as their opponents, and weeks elapsed without a decision.
At length the countermine brought about a decision. Lentulus in his tedious fashion, which sought to cover his negligence in immediate and necessary matters by projecting large and distant plans, had entered into negotiations with the deputies of a Celtic canton, the Allobroges, who were then in Rome. He had attempted to implicate these representatives of a thoroughly disorganized and bankrupt commonwealth in the conspiracy, and had given them messages and letters to his confidants. The Allobroges left Rome, but were arrested close to the gates on the night of December 2-3 by the Roman authorities, and their papers were taken from them. The Allobrogian deputies had obviously lent themselves as spies to the Roman government, and had carried on the negotiations only with a view to securing the desired proofs implicating the ringleaders of the conspiracy.
The next morning Cicero with the utmost secrecy ordered the arrest of the most dangerous leaders of the plot. Lentulus, Cethegus, Gabinius, and Statilius were taken, though some others escaped seizure by flight. The guilt of both the arrested and the fugitives was completely evident. Immediately after the arrest the intercepted letters, whose seals and handwriting the prisoners could not deny, were laid before the Senate, and the captives and witnesses were heard. Further confirmatory facts, deposits of arms in the houses of the conspirators, and threatening expressions which they had employed were presently forthcoming. The existence of the conspiracy was fully established, and at Cicero’s suggestion the most important documents were immediately published as news-sheets.
The indignation against the anarchist conspiracy was general. The oligarchy would gladly have used the revelations to settle accounts with the popular party in general and Caesar in particular, but it was too thoroughly broken to prepare for him the fate it had once prepared for the two Gracchi and Saturninus. The multitude of the capital was especially shocked by the incendiary schemes of the conspirators. The merchants and business interests naturally saw this war of debtors against creditors as a struggle for their very existence, and in tumultuous excitement their youth crowded round the senate house brandishing their swords against the open and secret partisans of Catiline. Though its ultimate authors were still at liberty, the conspiracy was paralyzed by the capture or flight of the whole staff entrusted with its execution; and the band assembled at Faesulae could accomplish little unless supported by an insurrection in the capital.
In a tolerably well-ordered commonwealth the matter would now have been at an end, and the military and the courts would have done the rest. But in Rome matters had reached a point where the government could not even keep a couple of prominent noblemen in safe custody. The slaves and freedmen of Lentulus and the other captives were stirring, and it was alleged that plans were afoot to liberate them by force from the private houses in which they were detained. Thanks to the anarchist doings of recent years, there was no lack of ringleaders in Rome who contracted at fixed rates for riots and deeds of violence; Catiline knew what had occurred, and was near enough to attempt a coup de main with his bands. How much of these rumors was true we cannot tell, but there was ground for apprehension when the government had neither troops nor even a respectable police force at its command, and was therefore left at the mercy of any gang of bandits.
Under these circumstances, it was suggested that any attempts at liberation might be precluded by immediate execution of the prisoners. Constitutionally, this was not possible. According to the ancient and sacred right of appeal, a sentence of death could be pronounced against a Roman citizen only by the whole citizenry; and since the courts established by the citizenry had themselves become antiquated, a capital sentence was no longer pronounced at all.
Cicero would gladly have rejected the hazardous suggestion. Unimportant as the legal question itself might be to the advocate, he knew well how useful it is for an advocate to be called liberal, and he had no desire to alienate the democratic party forever by shedding this blood. But those around him, especially his genteel wife, urged him to crown his services to his country by this bold step. The consul, anxiously endeavoring like all cowards to avoid the appearance of cowardice while trembling before the formidable responsibility, in his distress convoked the Senate and left it to decide on life or death for the four prisoners.
This of course had no meaning, for the Senate was constitutionally even less entitled to act than the consul: but when was cowardice ever consistent? Caesar made every effort to save the prisoners, and his speech, full of covert threats of future vengeance, made the deepest impression. Although all the consulars and the great majority of the Senate had already declared for the execution, most of them, led by Cicero, seemed again inclined to stay within the limits of the law. But when Cato in pettifogging fashion cast suspicion on the waverers as being accomplices of the plot, and pointed to the preparations for liberating the prisoners by a street riot, he succeeded in raising a fresh alarm which produced a majority for immediate execution.
Implementing the decree naturally devolved on the consul who had called it forth. Late on the evening of December 5 the prisoners were brought from their previous quarters, and conducted across the still-crowded market place to the prison in which condemned criminals were kept. It was a subterranean vault twelve feet deep at the foot of the Capitol, which had formerly served as a well-house. Lentulus was conducted by the consul himself, the others by praetors, all attended by strong guards; but the anticipated attempt at rescue did not take place. No one knew whether the prisoners were being conveyed to a secure place of custody or to the scene of execution. At the door of the prison they were handed over to the executioners, and were strangled in the subterranean vault by torchlight.
The consul had waited before the door till the executions were accomplished. Then his well-known voice proclaimed to the multitude waiting in silence in the Forum, “They are dead.” Far into the night the crowds moved through the streets and exultantly hailed the consul, to whom they believed that they owed the security of their houses and their property. The Senate ordered public festivals of gratitude, and the first men of the nobility, Marcus Cato and Quintus Catulus, saluted the author of the sentence of death with the title (now heard for the first time) of “father of his fatherland.”
But it was a dreadful deed, and all the more dreadful because it appeared great and praiseworthy to a whole people. Never perhaps has a commonwealth more lamentably declared itself bankrupt than did Rome through this resolution, adopted in cold blood by the majority of the government and approved by public opinion. A few political prisoners, who were no doubt guilty under law, but who had not forfeited life, were put to death in all haste because the prisons were insecure and there were insufficient police. With the humor seldom lacking in a historical tragedy, this act of the most brutal tyranny was carried out by the most unstable and timid of all Roman statesmen, and the “first democratic consul” was selected to destroy the palladium of the ancient freedom of the Roman commonwealth.
After the conspiracy in the capital had thus been nipped in the bud, there remained the task of putting down the insurrection in Etruria. The army of about 2,000 men which Catiline found on his arrival had increased nearly five-fold by the numerous recruits who already formed two tolerably full legions, though only about a fourth of these were sufficiently armed. Catiline had withdrawn his force into the mountains and avoided battle with the troops of Antonius, in order to complete the organization of his bands while awaiting the outbreak of the insurrection in Rome.
The news of its failure broke up the insurgent army, and most of the less-compromised returned home. The desperate remnant attempted to cut its way through the Apennine passes into Gaul; but when the little band arrived at the foot of the mountains near Pistoria it found itself caught between two armies. In front of it was the corps of Quintus Metellus, which had come up from Ravenna and Ariminum to occupy the northern slope of the Apennines; behind it was the army of Antonius, who had at length yielded to the urgings of his officers and agreed to a winter campaign. Wedged in on both sides, with his supplies running out, Catiline had no course left but to throw himself on his nearest foe, Antonius.
In a narrow valley enclosed by rocky mountains the conflict took place between the insurgents and the troops of Antonius. The latter, in order to avoid being the personal executioner of his former allies, had under a pretext entrusted the command for this day to a brave officer who had grown gray under arms, Marcus Petreius. The superior strength of the government army was of little account, owing to the nature of the battlefield. Both Catiline and Petreius placed their most trusted men in the foremost ranks, and quarter was neither asked nor given. The conflict lasted long, and many brave men fell on both sides. Catiline, who before the battle began had sent back his horse and those of all his officers, showed on this day that nature had destined him for no ordinary things, and that he knew both how to command as a general and how to fight as a soldier.
At length Petreius with his guard broke the center of the enemy and attacked the two wings from within. This decided the victory. The corpses of the Catilinarians (3,000 were counted) covered the ground where they had fought. The officers and the general himself had near the end thrown themselves on the enemy, and thus found the death they sought. Antonius was rewarded by the Senate with the title of Imperator, and new thanksgiving festivals showed that the government and the governed were beginning to become accustomed to civil war.
The anarchist plot had thus been suppressed in the capital as in Italy with bloody violence. The only further reminders of it were the criminal processes which thinned the ranks of the beaten party, and the large accessions to the robber bands of Italy. One of these, for instance, made up of the remains of the armies of Spartacus and Catiline, was destroyed two years later in 60 B.C. by a military force in the territory of Thurii.
But it is important to keep in mind that the blow fell not merely on the anarchists who had conspired to fire the capital and had fought at Pistoria, but on the whole democratic party. That this party, and in particular Crassus and Caesar, had a hand in this conspiracy as well as in the plot of 66 B.C. may be regarded as historically if not judicially established. To be sure, the mere fact that Catulus and other Optimates accused the democratic leaders of complicity, and that Caesar, as senator, spoke and voted against the brutal judicial murder contemplated by the oligarchy, could only be regarded as proof by a partisan sophist. But other facts are more weighty. According to precise and irrefutable testimony, Crassus and Caesar were major supporters of Catiline’s candidacy for the consulship. And when Caesar brought the executioners of Sulla before the commission for murder in 64 B.C. he allowed the most guilty and infamous of all, Catiline, to be acquitted.
It is true that Cicero, in his revelations of December 3rd, did not name Caesar and Crassus among the conspirators. But it is notorious that the informers denounced not merely those against whom the subsequent investigation was directed, but also many “innocent” persons whom Cicero thought it politic to erase from the list. In later years, when he had no reason to disguise the truth, he expressly named Caesar among the accomplices.5 A further indirect but significant indication lies in the fact that of the four persons arrested on December 3rd, the two least dangerous, Statilius and Gabinius, were handed over to be guarded by Caesar and Crassus. It was obviously intended that the latter should either, if they permitted an escape, be compromised before the public as accessories, or, if they did not, be compromised in the eyes of their fellow-conspirators as renegades.
The following scene in the Senate shows how matters stood. Immediately after the arrest of Lentulus and his comrades, a messenger dispatched by the conspirators to Catiline was seized by agents of the government, and, after having been assured that he would not be prosecuted, was induced to make a comprehensive confession before a full meeting of the Senate. But when he came to the critical points and in particular named Crassus as having commissioned him, he was interrupted by the senators; and on the suggestion of Cicero it was resolved not only to cancel the whole statement without further inquiry, but also to imprison its author, notwithstanding the amnesty assured to him, until he should have both retracted the statement and confessed who had instigated him to give such false testimony!
Here it is abundantly clear that the man who called Crassus the bull of the herd had a very accurate knowledge of the state of affairs, and also that the majority of the Senate with Cicero at their head were tacitly agreed that revelations should not be permitted to go beyond a certain limit. The public was not so nice, and the young men who had taken up arms to ward off the incendiaries were exasperated against Caesar more than anyone else. When he left the Senate on December 5th they pointed their swords at his breast, and he narrowly escaped with his life on the same spot where the fatal blow fell on him seventeen years afterwards; he did not enter the senate house again for a considerable time.
Any one who studies the conspiracy impartially will not be able to resist the suspicion that Catiline was backed by more powerful men, who relied on the lack of a legally complete chain of evidence and on the lukewarmness and cowardice of the half-informed Senate, which greedily clutched at any pretext for inaction. These men knew how to hinder the authorities from serious interference with the conspiracy, how to procure free departure for the insurgent chief, and even how to manage the declaration of war and the sending of troops against the insurrection so that it was almost equivalent to a reinforcing army. While the course of the events thus testifies that the ramifications of the plot reached far higher than Lentulus and Catiline, it is also worth noticing that when Caesar had got to the head of the state much later, he was very close to the only surviving Catilinarian, Publius Sittius the leader of the Mauretanian free bands, and that he modified the debt laws quite as the proclamations of Manlius had demanded.
All these pieces of evidence speak clearly enough. But even if they did not, the desperate position of the democrats in the face of the military power—which since the Gabinio-Manilian laws had assumed an ever more threatening visage—renders it almost certain that they (as is usual in such cases) found their last resort in secret plots and in alliance with anarchy. The circumstances were very similar to those of the Cinnan times. While Pompey occupied in the East a position nearly the same as Sulla once did, Crassus and Caesar sought to raise against him in Italy a power like that which Marius and Cinna had possessed, with the view toward employing it better than the latter had done.
The road to this result lay once more through terrorism and anarchy, and Catiline was certainly the right man to blaze that trail. Naturally the more reputable democratic leaders kept as far in the background as possible, and left to their unclean associates the dirty work whose political results they hoped later to appropriate. Still more naturally, when the plot had failed, the higher-ups made every effort to conceal their part in it. And when the former conspirator, Caesar, later became the target of political plots, the veil was for that very reason drawn only the more closely over those darker years in the life of the great man, and special apologies were written for him with that very object.
For five years Pompey had stood at the head of his armies and fleets in the East, for five years the democratic party at home had conspired to overthrow him. The result was discouraging. With unspeakable exertions it had not only accomplished nothing, but had suffered enormous moral as well as material loss. Even the coalition of 71 B.C. was scandalous to pure democrats, although their party at that time had only allied itself with two distinguished men of the opposition and bound them to its program. But now the democratic party had made common cause with a band of murderers and bankrupts, almost all of whom were likewise deserters from the camp of the aristocracy, and had at least temporarily accepted their program. The capitalist party, one of the chief elements of the coalition of 71 B.C., was thus estranged and driven into the arms of the Optimates or anyone else who could protect it against anarchy.
Even the multitude of the capital, who had no objection to a street-riot but still found it inconvenient to have their houses set on fire over their heads, became somewhat alarmed. It is remarkable that in this very year (63 B.C.) the full re-establishment of the Sempronian grain laws took place, proposed in the Senate by Cato. The league of the democratic leaders with anarchy had obviously created a breach between the former and the citizens of the city; and the oligarchy sought, not without some temporary success, to enlarge this chasm and draw over the masses to their side. Lastly, Pompey had been partly warned and partly exasperated by all these cabals. After all that had occurred, and after the democrats had virtually torn asunder the ties which connected them with Pompey, they could hardly with propriety make the request—which in 70 B.C. had had a certain amount of reason to it—that he should not destroy with the sword the democratic power which he had raised, and which had raised him.
Thus the democratic party was disgraced and weakened, but above all it was exposed to ridicule through the merciless illumination of its perplexity and debility. Where the humiliation of the overthrown government and similar unimportant matters were concerned, it was great and potent; but every one of its attempts at a real political success had failed. Its relation to Pompey was as false as it was pitiful. While loading him with praise and demonstrations of homage, it was concocting against him one intrigue after another, and one after another, like so many soap bubbles, they burst of themselves. The general of the East and of the seas, far from spending himself against them, appeared not even to notice them, and to win his victories in the political arena as Hercules triumphed over the Pygmies, without being aware of it.
The attempt to kindle civil war had failed miserably. Although the anarchist section had at least displayed some energy, the democrats, while knowing how to hire conspirators, had not known how to lead them or to save them or to die with them. Even the old languid oligarchy, strengthened partly by the masses passing over to it from the popular party, and still more by the unmistakable community of interests between itself and Pompey, had been enabled to suppress the attempted revolution and thereby achieve a last victory over the democrats. Meanwhile king Mithradates was dead, Asia Minor and Syria were regulated, and Pompey’s return to Italy might be expected at any moment. The decision was not far off—but it is scarcely possible any longer to speak of a decision between the general who returned stronger and more famous than ever, and the popular party humbled beyond parallel and utterly powerless. Crassus prepared to embark his family and his gold and seek an asylum somewhere in the East, and even so elastic and energetic a nature as Caesar seemed on the point of giving up the game as lost. In the year 63 B.C. he was a candidate for the office of pontifex maximus. When he left his home on the morning of the election, he declared that if he should lose, he would never again cross the threshold of his house.
1. The popular party also (Mommsen continues in the original) re-established the right of the people to set aside judicial decisions.
2. More generally known to history as Catiline, and hereafter so called.
3. The money for the land purchases was to come from a variety of sources listed in the original, the most important being the sale of overseas public land, war booty, special taxes on subject communities, and the revenues from newly annexed provinces.
4. Recent study has shown Mommsen’s detailed chronology of the Catilinarian conspiracy to be at fault, and his erroneous dates have been omitted in the preceding paragraph.
5. Ed. note: this is most doubtful. While there is some credible contemporary evidence that Cicero so accused Crassus, the only support for a Ciceronian accusation of Caesar is a statement of very low credibility made by Plutarch 150 years later.