THE RECONCILIATION OF POMPEY AND Crassus at the end of their joint consulship in 70 BC seemed to conclude the period of political experimentation birthed by Sulla’s march on Rome. Pompey and Crassus had both supported Sulla, they had both used private armies to serve Sulla, and they had both spent much of the 70s becoming two of the most powerful figures in Rome. None could deny that their mutual decision to forgo conflict and to instead compete with one another within the Republic’s political system clearly communicated that the rules of the Republic once again bound even the most influential Romans.
The result was a sudden and unexpected opening up of political competition. Crassus’s wealth and Pompey’s military reputation remained formidable, but they were now ex-consuls without any office. They still enjoyed a privileged status, but it was a status that they shared with others and one that many more could aspire to reach. Their willingness to step down from office when their terms ended allowed less capable and less well-resourced men to compete for the highest offices in the state. But the playing field remained tilted toward the powerful. Those who hoped to rival powerful figures like Crassus and Pompey could not do so by playing fairly. They needed to press any advantage they could find—and the past seventy-five years provided ambitious Romans with examples of how one might bend the rules to advance one’s career or slow down the initiatives of others. Some perhaps saw no harm in bending the norms now that the Republic seemed to have returned to health; others cared less about the Republic than their own prospects. But, in the end, the moment of apparent stability Crassus and Pompey had created only cleared space for a new cast of characters willing to place their short-term ambitions above the long-term health of the Republic.
As the 60s dawned, a host of figures began jockeying for positions of influence. Some of these were members of old families such as the Metelli who saw the apparent return to a stable political order as an opportunity to reassert their family’s traditional claims to high office. Thus Quintus Metellus served as consul and Marcus Metellus as praetor in 69, and Lucius Metellus followed them as consul for 68. Others were tribunes who chose to follow in the footsteps of Tiberius Gracchus and Saturninus by using the office to make divisive political gestures. In 67, the tribune Gabinius marshaled a mob of supporters willing to attack opponents and used the threat of removal to get a fellow tribune to rescind his veto. Like their predecessors in the later 110s, other tribunes built their reputations by claiming to root out senatorial corruption. In the same year as Gabinius’s activities, the tribune Cornelius put forward a set of laws that stopped the Senate from exempting its members from laws and compelled praetors to follow their own edicts. He also tried unsuccessfully to bar the lending of money to foreign states and to curtail electoral bribery, both pursuits that advantaged senators in particular. Ambitious tribunes also sought to build support through manipulation of the electoral system. On the last day of 67, the tribune Manlius (who, like all tribunes, had started his term for the year 66 in the fall of 67) tried to take advantage of the fact that he was in office at the point when the terms of the consuls and other magistrates for 67 were about to end. Manlius used this moment of transition to slip through a vote to approve a law altering the composition of the voting tribes by distributing freedmen equally across them, a move that he presumably thought would improve his own chances of being elected to higher magistracies. Unfortunately for Manlius, this law was annulled when the new consuls took office on the first day of 66.1
Now that Pompey and Crassus had restored the ability of tribunes to stand for higher offices in the Republic, the most enterprising tribunes followed in the footsteps of Sulpicius and built their influence by inducing more powerful figures into alliances with them. One of the most consequential tribunal initiatives in 67 was the creation of a special, three-year-long command to fight piracy throughout the Mediterranean. Though Gabinius’s law creating the command specified only that this extraordinary commander would be selected from among the living former consuls, there was no doubt that the position was designed for Pompey. Although it offered just the sort of chance for military glory without the confines of a traditional political office that Pompey had often seized, he held back from actively campaigning for the position. Pompey did, though, give a thoroughly unsubtle speech in which he listed his many military accomplishments for an audience that needed no reminding of them. Gabinius then proposed that Rome entrust the war against the pirates to Pompey.2
Gabinius’s proposals for the creation of the command and the awarding of it to Pompey provoked strong resistance both in the Senate and among his fellow tribunes. In the Senate, an ambitious young senator named Julius Caesar stood out as the only vocal supporter of Gabinius’s measures. The next most positive comment seems to have been the orator Hortensius’s lukewarm statement that no one should have such power but, if someone were to receive it, Pompey would be his choice. The rest of the Senate vigorously opposed both the command and Pompey’s selection to it. Among Gabinius’s fellow tribunes, the proposals provoked additional resistance. L. Trebellius and L. Roscius Otho both were willing to use their veto to block its creation, though after Gabinius nearly had Trebellius deposed neither went through with the threat. After being shouted down by the pro-Pompey crowd, Roscius could do no more than hold up two fingers to register his view that more than one man should hold such power. Ultimately, the law was passed, the command was given to Pompey, and the size of the forces under his command was increased so that Pompey could now call on up to 500 ships, 5,000 cavalry, and 120,000 infantry. It is said that people felt so confident that Pompey would end piracy that the price of bread immediately dropped.3
When the historian Cassius Dio later wrote about this moment, he perceptively identified in it a set of tensions that lay beneath the seemingly stable Republic of the early 60s. One issue was the willingness of newly empowered tribunes to use Pompey’s personal ambitions to advance their own careers in a rough political environment. Gabinius, it seems, conceived of the command either at Pompey’s instigation or, perhaps more likely, as a lure to attract Pompey’s patronage. A second issue was the way in which Pompey conceived of his place in the Republic of the 60s. Although he did not want to seize power as Sulla had, he clearly craved a special status that put him above others. As rumors of his appointment to the antipiracy command spread, Pompey came to see the commission not as an honor he might gain but rather as an entitlement he was owed. His “failure to hold it was a disgrace” that he could not bear. The reaction among senators also grew out of the particular conditions of the time. Although Pompey took care never to openly campaign for the command, the Senate responded to his name being floated with alarm. According to Dio, Catulus, the other consul when Lepidus rebelled in 78 BC, even delivered a speech in which he cautioned about the disasters that “lawless lust for power” had caused in Rome. His ominous words that “great honors ruin even great people” would loom over the rest of Dio’s Republican narrative.4
Dio emphasized the destructive potential of a politics shaped by the aspirations of eager tribunes, the ambitions of already great men like Pompey, and the fears of senators at risk of being overshadowed. But that potential was not immediately realized. Despite the Senate’s concern about Pompey’s new command, the effort he led against the pirates proved surprisingly successful. Pompey realized that the task of rooting out piracy was as much a social and economic problem as it was a military one. The biggest spike in pirate attacks had come after Mithridates’s armies had devastated much of the farmland in Asia Minor, with the resulting poverty pushing the region’s inhabitants into crime. Other people who attacked ships did so in part as a response to Roman territorial expansion into their regions. Late-second-century Roman attempts to dominate maritime trade in the Aegean had forced displaced merchants either to submit or to challenge Roman authority. Pompey understood that most of these pirates were not irredeemable villains, and accordingly he showed them mercy. In Asia Minor, he did not kill repentant pirates but instead settled them inland in order to repopulate areas devastated by Mithridates. Pompey’s policies quickly integrated many of the erstwhile pirates back into the Roman imperial structure—while, crucially, making them his loyal political clients.5
The speed with which Pompey brought the piracy problem under control astonished Romans. His extraordinary command was to last for three years. Instead, Pompey needed about three months.6 This led to a second effort in early 66 to give Pompey yet another extraordinary command, this time to prosecute another war against Mithridates that had thus far proved agonizingly inconclusive. Superficially, it might seem natural to have assigned this war to Pompey. He was already in the general area with the army he had led against the pirates, and Romans thought that Lucullus, the current commander, seemed to be making slow progress against the Pontic king.
The proposal actually had nothing to do with the military situation in Asia. The tribune Manlius proposed Pompey as a commander not because Lucullus had actually been unsuccessful but because Manlius needed to rebound politically. Manlius raised the issue of Pompey’s command soon after the failure of his effort to redistribute freedmen across all tribes in January of 66. Feeling politically exposed, Manlius first tried to indicate that Crassus had backed the tribal reform measure, and when this failed to improve his position, he decided to pivot away from the unpopular proposal altogether. He turned toward Pompey in an attempt to court a new, more powerful backer. Manlius carefully crafted the Mithridates command so that it would appeal to the general. Pompey’s authority would last indefinitely, it would supersede that of all other commanders (including Lucullus), and Pompey would also have the right to initiate wars elsewhere without consulting the Senate. Manlius appealed to Pompey’s desire for popular approval by putting the command through the concilium plebis rather than the Senate.7
Pompey seems to have learned about the law while in Crete. His precise reaction to it is not known, but the response in Rome was electric. People looking to court Pompey rallied to build support for Manlius’s motion. Julius Caesar again spoke in the Senate in support of Pompey, and the ambitious equestrian orator Cicero (who was then serving as praetor) lent his voice to the cause as well. Meanwhile, senators such as Catulus argued vigorously against the concentration of yet more power in the hands of one individual.
Dio again perceptively analyzes the debate, showing how neither the larger objectives of the military campaign nor the precedents set by the command’s creation figured prominently in the positions that many of the principals took. Pompey wanted to retain an unmatched level of military authority. Manlius offered this to Pompey as a way to restore his own flagging political fortunes. Caesar supported the proposal because he thought that doing so would enhance his popularity in the short run and, in the long run, invite such envy of Pompey that Pompey’s position might become weakened. Cicero, Dio asserts, backed the law because he sensed it would pass and he wanted to define himself as a leader in the Senate who could ensure that whatever side of a question he backed would succeed. And, though Dio does not claim this, Catulus and others in the Senate likely opposed the law out of fear that their influence would diminish as Pompey became even more powerful.8
In the end, Manlius’s law passed and, when new legates were sent to Pompey for the campaign, the ex-tribune Gabinius was among them. This set in motion a series of conquests unlike anything the Roman world had ever seen. In a little more than three years, Pompey would defeat Mithridates, chase him through Armenia, conquer large swathes of Asia Minor and all of Syria, and reduce much of the rest of the Eastern Mediterranean to Roman client kingdoms that paid an annual tribute. This conquest was done with the same sort of political skill that Pompey had shown with the pirates. Pompey so capably regulated local affairs in the areas newly annexed to Rome that his local ordinances remained in effect for nearly three hundred years.9 He did not hesitate to use his armies, but, when he was victorious, he offered favorable alliances to local kings and cities that left them particularly well disposed toward him. Pompey now enjoyed a network of friendly sovereigns that stretched from Armenia in the north to Judaea in the south.
While Pompey remade the Eastern Mediterranean, figures in Rome jostled to fill the vacuum his absence had created. Crassus continued to subtly expand the influential network of supporters that had brought him to the consulship. When Crassus served as censor in 65, he tried to push through a measure extending Roman citizenship to people on the northern side of the Po River, though this transparent attempt to create a large group of voters loyal to him was struck down by Catulus, the other censor of the year. Crassus pushed for a Roman annexation of the kingdom of Egypt, with Julius Caesar to supervise the handover. Catulus blocked this too. Crassus also developed an economic and patronage relationship with some of the people responsible for collecting taxes in the province of Asia.10 This, at least, Catulus could not block.
New players with different sets of skills emerged as well. Two of them, Cicero and Julius Caesar, had already begun to influence public life before Pompey departed. Each man had carefully cultivated a particular public persona. Cicero was an equestrian with a gift for long-winded, self-congratulatory orations that nevertheless often proved extremely persuasive. He had first risen to prominence when, as a twenty-six-year-old, he defended Sextus Roscius against a charge of parricide in 80 BC. What defined his early career, however, were the speeches he gave against Verres, the corrupt governor of Sicily, in 70 BC. In the Verrine orations, Cicero showed himself to be both a sophisticated stylist and an extremely effective advocate with the unique ability to playfully but powerfully shape a listener’s perspective. These gifts propelled Cicero’s political career, allowing him to rise from the ranks of Italian equites to the Senate and, ultimately, to the consulship. But these gifts imperfectly offset some significant character flaws. Cicero, as Dio wrote, “was the greatest boaster alive and regarded no one as equal to himself… he was wearisome and burdensome and consequently both disliked and hated even by those very persons whom he otherwise pleased.”11 Often, Cicero could not manage to hold his tongue, frequently seeming more enchanted by the rhetorical jab he could throw than he was conscious of the enemy his words might create.12 Cicero could be a powerful ally, but his arrogance, unpredictability, and general insufferability always threatened to undercut the political gains he made.
Caesar was in many ways the opposite of Cicero. Cicero was an equestrian from an Italian town whose family had never produced a consul. Caesar came from an old Roman patrician family that claimed descent from Iulus, the son of Aeneas and thus the grandson of the goddess Venus. Cicero was intolerable. Caesar was affable and popular. Even their prose differed. Caesar was no less accomplished a stylist, but his short, powerful sentences and precise words contrasted notably with the long, complicated constructions Cicero preferred—stylistic differences as profound as those that distinguish the prose of Hemingway from that of Faulkner. Caesar also managed his personal relationships much more skillfully than Cicero. Whereas Cicero had a unique capacity to anger even those who had once been friendly with him, Caesar’s personality enabled him not only to build enduring friendships with his peers but even to bring together the bitterest rivals.
Caesar’s greatest gift, however, lay in his remarkable ability to build and maintain popularity with the Roman public. Born in 100 BC, Caesar’s efforts to develop a personal political brand began quite early in his life. His family had been strong supporters of Marius and Cinna. Caesar’s aunt Julia was Marius’s wife and, as a young man, Caesar married Cinna’s daughter Cornelia. Caesar was not proscribed following Sulla’s victory, but he still suffered under the dictator. His family property and his wife’s dowry were both seized, Caesar was stripped of his position as priest of Jupiter, and he elected to leave Rome instead of obeying Sulla’s order to divorce Cornelia. It took the intervention of his mother and the Vestal Virgins to get the threat against Caesar lifted.13
Caesar had the political genius to understand that misfortune under Sulla could be useful in crafting a political identity in the post-Sullan Republic. Aside from stepping in as priest of Jupiter when his father died in 85 BC, Caesar’s age had prevented him from doing anything disreputable in support of the regimes of Marius and Cinna.14 And yet he was still punished, a sympathetic victim of the loyalty that he continued to show to his family and the family of his wife. Indeed, Caesar’s defiance of Sulla’s divorce order also positioned him to later claim the positive legacies of Marius and Cinna, even as he denied any connection to the crimes the men had committed.
The massacre of so many of Marius’s and Cinna’s most prominent supporters had not eliminated the public support that the men once enjoyed. Indeed, as the horrors of Sulla’s dictatorship and the disorder of the new Republic he crafted became clearer, memories of Marius became much fonder.15 And yet Sulla had killed nearly everyone in Italy with a close enough connection to Marius to plausibly lay claim to his legacy. The position of Marius’s political heir sat vacant and the power that could come from that title remained latent. Until Caesar.
Caesar carefully chose his moment. In 69 BC, soon after his election to the office of quaestor, Caesar’s aunt Julia died. Caesar gave the funeral oration for her from the Rostra in the Forum. Then, in the funeral procession, he publicly displayed images of Marius and Marius’s son, both seen on Rome’s streets for the first time since Sulla had pronounced Marius a public enemy.16
Marius was a complicated figure with a complicated legacy that included both his brilliance in saving Rome from barbarians in the 100s and the horrible violence he inflicted on Rome in the 80s. Caesar believed it was possible to rehabilitate the public memory of Marius by emphasizing the former while ignoring the latter. In the immediate term, Caesar likely hoped that his display might provoke Sulla’s partisans to respond with such irrational anger that they refused to even acknowledge the undoubtedly heroic achievements of Marius’s first consulships. Caesar’s choice of venue was also key. This was, after all, a funeral for Marius’s wife. Vitriolic attacks against the family of the deceased would seem particularly tasteless in such a setting. An overreaction by Sullan supporters would then open the door to further commemorations of Marius, and for Caesar to both rehabilitate and claim the legacy of his uncle.
Caesar got the response he hoped for. The display outraged supporters of Sulla, but the enthusiastic applause of the Roman crowd drowned out their cries. Then, later in the same year, the death of his wife Cornelia gave Caesar another opportunity to publicly celebrate a woman connected to the anti-Sullan leadership. Women as young as Cornelia did not typically receive funeral orations. But as Caesar clearly understood, his departure from precedent when he nonetheless gave such an oration simultaneously humanized him and further refined the Marian legacy he aimed to embrace.17
After the funerals, Caesar set out to Spain for his service as quaestor, returning in 68 (before his term ended) to resume his career in Rome. The quaestorship qualified Caesar for the Senate, and it was as one of the Senate’s most junior members that Caesar spoke in favor of giving Pompey the command against the pirates. Caesar also began to spend lavishly to cultivate the public, entertaining clients and potential supporters in a way that most of his contemporaries thought ruinously unsustainable.18
Caesar continued to refine his public profile when he was elected aedile for the year 65. In addition to the administrative responsibilities aediles assumed, they sponsored public games. Caesar saw great potential in these events. Although he shared the expenses and organizational responsibilities for the public games with his fellow aedile Marcus Bibulus, Caesar managed to get the bulk of the public credit for the success of these state-funded spectacles by paying personally for an additional set of 320 gladiatorial contests in honor of his late father.19
During his aedileship Caesar made another, more provocative claim on the legacy of Marius. He erected on the Capitoline Hill statues of Marius and “trophy-bearing Victories” that were decorated with gold and bore inscriptions commemorating Marius’s defeat of the Cimbri. These monuments celebrated Marius as the Republic’s savior, saying nothing about his tyranny in the 80s. Marius’s monumental rehabilitation again stirred passions in precisely the way that Caesar had hoped. The statues’ unveiling prompted a public display of anger by politicians opposed to Marius, but, as in 69 BC, the enthusiastic cheers of those who remembered Marius fondly drowned out the shrill calls that Caesar was plotting revolution. Plutarch describes a scene in which calls that Caesar had “shown himself worthy of his kinship with Marius” rang out amid tears of joy and raucous applause. When the Senate convened to discuss the controversy over the statues, Catulus, the old self-appointed champion of Republican values, supposedly told his colleagues that Caesar was now undermining the government. His harsh warning failed to convince. Many of the older supporters of Sulla in the Senate were dying out, and Caesar’s defense of his actions combined with the enthusiasm of the crowd for Marius caused the Senate to let the matter drop.
A third figure who became increasingly prominent during Pompey’s time in the East cultivated a very different sort of public image from that crafted by Crassus, Caesar, and Cicero. This was Marcus Porcius Cato, the great-grandson of the Marcus Porcius Cato who towered over Roman political life in the early and mid-second century BC. Cato the Younger, as he would come to be called, shared his ancestor’s sternness and idiosyncratic commitment to vague (and sometimes inconsistently applied) principles of political propriety. And, like his ancestor, Cato the Younger carefully cultivated an image of unassailable virtue that caused later authors to gush that he was “most formidable, a man endowed with the greatest self-control, and inferior to no Roman in his commitment to the highest principles.”20
Cato cultivated this political brand so well during his lifetime that his legacy would tower over Roman political life for centuries after his death. Cato the secular saint became such a fixture of Roman senatorial writings after the Republic’s end that Cato the man has become an extremely difficult figure to reconstruct. Cato certainly became a vocal and active critic of any agenda that he saw as undermining the Republic and the freedom that elite men like him enjoyed under it, but these later activities have shaped the way that his earlier life is described. Plutarch describes him as a child who spoke eloquently while playing sports and who neither laughed nor became angry (though Plutarch does concede that, on some rare occasions, the boy did smile). Other stories of Cato’s youth are equally absurd. Both Plutarch and Valerius Maximus recount how Cato, who was then a four-year-old orphan living in the home of Livius Drusus, was dangled out of a window after he refused to agree that citizenship should be extended to all Italians. Another equally implausible story told how Cato used to visit the home of Sulla because the dictator enjoyed conversations with the youth. One day, when Cato was fourteen, he came to Sulla’s home and, entering the premises, witnessed the torture of many eminent men. Cato then supposedly asked his tutor, a man named Sarpedon, why no one had yet killed Sulla. When he was told that people feared Sulla even more than they hated him, Cato asked for a sword so that he “could free his homeland from slavery by killing” Sulla. This story is nonsense, of course, but it was retold in subsequent centuries because it reinforced the powerful idea that Cato would do anything to defend the Republic.21
The surviving tales of Cato’s early adulthood are more plausible. When he became old enough to inherit his share of the family fortune, Cato received 720,000 denarii. This was a substantial sum that would permit Cato to live comfortably, but it paled in comparison to the fortunes of political rivals such as Crassus or even the amount of wealth that Cicero would come to possess. Cato thus made the decision to become a follower of the Stoic philosopher Antipater of Tyre. He resolved to live modestly, but, by doing things like walking the filthy streets of Rome in the morning without shoes or a tunic, he advertised his modesty ostentatiously.22
In these years Cato occasionally made speeches at meetings and in court cases, but his public career really began when, as a twenty-three-year-old, he enlisted to serve in the war against Sertorius. Again, Cato made sure that his displays of moderation and discipline stood out amid an army that had acquired a reputation for laxity. Then, when the campaign concluded, Cato continued the pattern of making ostentatious displays of his own righteousness. He campaigned for a military tribuneship (a midlevel military office that often represented the next step in an elite political career) without the customary help of an aide who could remind him of the names of the people with whom he spoke. Such aides were legally prohibited, but, in a city as large as Rome, their employment was tacitly accepted as a practical necessity. Cato was the only candidate to obey this law, and he made sure that everyone in the electorate knew it.23
Opportunistic displays of supposedly principled actions continued to define Cato’s career as he moved from a military tribuneship through the quaestorship and, by the end of 64, into the Senate. As military tribune, Cato endeared himself to his soldiers by marching with them when other commanders rode horses and by dressing more like a common soldier than a commander. When his term of service ended, we are told, his soldiers wept uncontrollably and threw down their garments so he would not need to walk on the ground as he left the camp. As quaestor, he made a point of investigating the financial activities of treasury clerks and the accounts of previous quaestors to expose wrongdoing. Like Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus, Cato also butted heads with the old ex-consul Catulus by unsuccessfully prosecuting one of his associates for corruption. And, in an attempt to further demonstrate his independence, Cato also initiated legal proceedings to take back some of the public property that Sulla had awarded to people who had killed men that Sulla had proscribed.24
When Cato entered the Senate, he had very effectively cultivated a public identity as an incorruptible, philosophically pure principal defender of Republican liberty. He came from a family whose name had become synonymous with the protection of traditional Roman virtues, he made sure to offer regular demonstrations of his moderation, and he had carefully chosen public occasions in which to pose as the morally upright voice of probity in a depraved world. He was not a populist like Caesar nor a spectacular orator like Cicero, but the moral authority he asserted gave Cato a potency that the gifts, talents, and achievements of figures like Cicero, Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus would struggle to neutralize.
Caesar and Cato joined the Senate in the mid-60s amid a seemingly endless series of political crises. The arguments about Pompey’s commands in 67 and 66 gave way to a new controversy about a bribery law that, when it took effect in late 66, led to the disqualification of both of the candidates elected to serve as consul in 65 BC. Then, the consular election in 64 laid the foundations for another political crisis. That election pitted Cicero against two other candidates, Lucius Sergius Catilina (often called Catiline by people today) and Gaius Antonius Hybrida, both of whom came from senatorial families. Campaigns for consulships were extremely costly affairs, and successful candidates often formed alliances to pool their support. Catiline and Antonius made such an alliance during the campaign and based their appeals around the idea that Cicero’s low birth should disqualify him from so high an office.
Despite their attacks, Cicero came first in the voting, making him the first “new man” to be chosen consul since the election of Pompey’s father in 89 BC.25 Cicero’s victory owed a great deal to both the skill with which he campaigned and the opportunities for rhetorical attack that the checkered careers of his opponents provided him. Cicero particularly targeted Catiline, who had benefited financially from Sulla’s proscriptions in the 80s and then, following a governorship in Africa in 67–66, was prosecuted for extortion.26 The most dramatic encounter between Cicero and his opponents occurred in a Senate meeting devoted to questions of electoral bribery in which Cicero savaged Catiline with allegations of corruption and secret, murderous plots against political opponents.27 Catiline and Antonius could only respond with a tired attack on Cicero’s family.
Cicero seems to have quickly found a way to work effectively with Antonius during their joint consulship, but reconciliation with Catiline was both unnecessary and not particularly advisable. Catiline was prosecuted for murder in the autumn of 64. Although a number of senators spoke in his defense, Cicero was not one of them. Catiline also seems to have been growing increasingly desperate. As the year 63 progressed, he was rumored to be deeply in debt. He stood again for the consulship, but this time the field was much more crowded than it had been in 64. In an effort to distinguish himself, Catiline elected to pose as a champion of the oppressed and downtrodden, a group with which he perhaps identified more than the average observer understood. He sensed that many Romans were coming to believe that an unfair economic structure had created two tiers of Romans, and he tried to position himself as the candidate who could best address this divide. It was not a bad electoral strategy. Early in 63, Cicero had blocked a tribunician law pushing land redistribution and, later in the year, it became clear that many of the Sullan supporters who had received property from the proscriptions also faced financial problems. The patrician Catiline proved a poor messenger, however, and when Cato threatened to prosecute him for bribery a couple of weeks before the election, Catiline’s chances took a further hit. He failed to win election in a crowded field and his political career seemed over.28
In the months after his electoral defeat, Catiline began planning a revolt, the centerpiece of which was an army that ultimately grew to perhaps ten thousand. Cataline saw this army as the focal point of a complicated (and rather impractical) plan that also involved a Gallic tribe called the Allobroges, a series of assassinations of leading officials (including Cicero), and a wave of arson attacks in Rome. It is unclear how the plot could have succeeded by itself, but Catiline possibly saw it as part of a bigger game. Catiline may have anticipated that Pompey, who was concluding his campaigns in the East, would return to Italy just as Sulla had. If Pompey did intend to seize power, Catiline’s ramshackle army could serve as an advance force that might make Pompey’s task easier.29 If this happened, Catiline and his followers could reasonably expect the same sort of financial and political windfall that they had received from Sulla two decades before.
There were two significant problems with Catiline’s plan. First, as subsequent events would make clear, Pompey had no intention of using his army to seize power. Catiline had appointed himself the vanguard of a revolution that would never happen. Second, and more importantly, Catiline’s plot was discovered rather quickly. On October 20 of 63, Crassus and some other senators handed over to Cicero a set of letters warning of a massacre that was planned in Rome. Cicero informed the Senate, the Senate voted to empower the consuls to take any measure necessary to protect the state, and Catiline’s general Manlius then decided to prematurely raise the flag of rebellion. On October 29, news of the revolt reached Rome. Catiline was indicted on October 30. After a failed attempt to assassinate Cicero on November 7, Cicero gave an oration attacking Catiline and urging him to leave Rome. Catiline fled on the night of November 8. Then, on the night of December 2, envoys from the Allobroges met with and received letters from conspirators in Rome. Cicero knew about the meeting and had the envoys and one of the conspirators arrested as they left the city.30
The Senate met on each of the next three days to decide how to handle the situation. Cato, Caesar, and Cicero would all play prominent roles in the discussions. On December 3, Cicero presided over a senate meeting in the Temple of Concordia to which the implicated conspirators were summoned. They were compelled to confirm that the unopened letters seized the night before bore their seals. The letters were then read aloud, revealing to all that the conspiracy reached into the capital itself. The five conspirators were placed under arrest and each was entrusted to the care of an individual senator. The Senate voted Cicero an official commendation. He then delivered a public oration to the people in which he described the conspirators’ plan to burn the city and recounted their arrest. The crowd erupted in joyful cheers.31
Cicero had expertly staged the events on December 3, but he was less successful in controlling developments on the following day. On December 4, the Senate heard from Lucius Tarquinius, another conspirator who had been captured while he was making his way to Catiline. Tarquinius too described a conspiracy that involved arson, assassination, and an attack by Catiline’s rebel army, but he also implicated Crassus in the plot. Crassus’s clients and friends immediately raised an outcry that these charges were completely false and, after discussing them, the Senate agreed. Tarquinius was then placed back under arrest while speculation began to swirl about why he had lied. Crassus, however, became convinced that Cicero had persuaded Tarquinius to implicate him in the plot.32 On the same day, Catulus and Gaius Piso first attempted to bribe Cicero to lodge a false accusation against Julius Caesar and, when that failed, began circulating their own rumor that Caesar too had been involved in the conspiracy. As the meeting adjourned, some of the men guarding the Temple of Concordia even drew their swords on Caesar after hearing about his possible involvement.33
On December 5, the Senate convened to discuss what to do with the five men under arrest. The consul-elect for the year 62 began by recommending that they be put to death. Then Julius Caesar rose and gave a speech in which he reminded senators of the many times in Roman history in which Romans put their dignity ahead of their desire for revenge. Caesar acknowledged that the crimes the conspirators planned were horrific, but he also emphasized that the punishment of execution had no precedent in Roman history, because Roman citizens found guilty of a crime were instead given the option of exile. He also emphasized that “all bad precedents originated in cases that were good” and warned that execution would provide grounds for future incompetent or malicious officials to kill citizens who did not deserve such punishment. Caesar proposed that a better response would be to confiscate the property of those implicated in the conspiracy and imprison them for the rest of their lives in towns outside of Rome.34
After some more discussion, Cato rose to speak. He reminded his fellow senators that, though they might think of their possessions, houses, paintings, and statues as things that might fall victim to Catiline’s revolution, they needed instead to be mindful that what Catiline truly threatened was their liberty. Their belongings, their luxuries, even their power meant nothing if the Republic did not survive. The fundamental duty of the Senate was to preserve Rome’s republic and, if senators would stop looking to their private interests and pleasures, they would understand that this matter was too serious to allow for any error. The conspirators, Cato concluded, should be punished as if they were caught committing the crimes they intended. They should, Cato implied, be treated as violent enemies of the state, and executed.35
When Cato finished speaking, it was clear that his motion had carried the day—so much so that there were even rumblings about the Senate punishing Caesar himself for advocating a more moderate punishment for the conspirators. With the Senate resolved to execute the conspirators, Cicero ordered the magistrates responsible for the prisoners to lead them into a dungeon below the Capitoline Hill, where they were strangled. That evening Cicero was given a triumphal escort by torchlight as he headed home. In the afterglow of his greatest triumph, Cicero seemed very much to have earned the title that would soon be voted to him: “father of his country.”36
Unfortunately for Cicero, the Catilinarian conspiracy did not end on December 5. Cataline himself remained with his army in Etruria and, as Caesar predicted, Cicero’s decision to execute Roman citizens without trial quickly proved to be a horrible miscalculation. Some of the new tribunes who took office on December 10 immediately exploited the complicated feelings of fear, unease, and remorse provoked by the Catilinarian crisis and Cicero’s response to it. On December 29 of 63, as Cicero prepared to address the Roman people for the final time as consul, Metellus Nepos, one of the new tribunes elected for 62 who had already taken office, used his veto to prevent Cicero from giving the speech because he had killed Roman citizens without a trial. Cicero elected instead to swear a public oath that he had saved the Republic.37
With Cicero out of office, Nepos continued his efforts to exploit the Catilinarian situation. On January 3, he introduced a motion to recall Pompey so that he might lead his army against Catiline’s forces. The desertion of 70 percent of Catiline’s army after the executions on December 5 meant that Nepos’s proposal was completely unnecessary. It was, however, alarming to those who suspected that it would serve as a pretext to allow Pompey to return to Italy without dismissing his army. The alarm increased when Nepos also joined to it another measure that would allow Pompey to stand for the consulship in absentia. Cato, who had stood for the tribunate expressly for the purpose of vetoing measures proposed by Nepos, physically blocked the public reading of the proposed law, first by preventing the herald from reading its text and then by placing his hand over Nepos’s mouth when the tribune tried to recite it from memory. He did this before an assembly presided over by Caesar (who was serving as praetor and was supportive of the measure) and in front of a crowd composed of large numbers of Pompey’s supporters, who were flanked by armed men. The armed men charged Cato, scattering most of the crowd, and he fled to the Temple of Castor and Pollux. The Senate ultimately instructed the consuls to do whatever was necessary to restore order and suspended both Nepos and Caesar from office. Sensing that this was a lost cause, Caesar quickly backed down and was reinstated. Nepos, however, fled Rome to join Pompey.38
These five days spanning the end of 63 and the beginning of 62 show how the gifted but flawed men who had gained prominence while Pompey campaigned abroad tried to capitalize on the chaos Catiline had generated. For Cicero, the suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy brought him the greatest political triumph of his career. It generated some of his most powerful speeches and earned him one of Rome’s most prestigious titles. But his decision to permit the execution of five Roman citizens without trial, an act that Cicero hoped would show his great competence as a leader, instead backfired quickly. Less than a month later, the true significance of what Cicero had done dawned on Romans—and they were horrified by it. Actions praised at the beginning of December had, by month’s end, become serious political liabilities. Cicero’s eloquence ensured that he would remain a useful political ally, but his actions against Catiline undermined the central claim that he had made about his great competence as consul and created a political vulnerability that would forever limit his future influence.
Cato had come out of the Catilinarian conspiracy with a different set of opportunities and limitations. He had argued publicly for the execution of the conspirators, but, unlike Cicero, he had not been directly responsible for their deaths. He had also articulated his position in a way that was consistent with his larger idea that the overriding goal of all political actions should be the preservation of the liberty that the Republic represented. Cato’s entire public profile grew out of his complete and unwavering commitment to this ideal. As his efforts to silence Nepos showed, the Catilinarian conspiracy had only empowered Cato to make more public stands of this sort. By January of 62, he had defined himself as Rome’s leading voice of principled opposition to any policies that he claimed could undermine the Republic. Indeed, the very act of Cato opposing a policy could be interpreted as a criticism that the policy threatened the integrity of Rome. Cato’s criticisms could be extremely potent, but, in a world in which Roman citizens had real problems they expected the state to address, Cato’s unbending commitment to abstract principles also had its limitations.
Caesar responded to the Catilinarian chaos quite differently from how Cicero and Cato did. Whereas both Cicero and Cato hoped to reap immediate political benefits from the incident, Caesar continued to play the long game. The actions Caesar took in December and January of 63–62 BC fit a larger pattern of careful attention to his public perception. Caesar’s position was much more nuanced than Cicero’s claim to competence or Cato’s commitment to the principle of freedom, but it was no less carefully developed. Caesar was the heir to the popular legacy of Marius, but he was a much more capable populist than the man whose inheritance he sought to claim. Caesar’s response to the Catilinarian conspiracy, which might seem rather scattered at first glance, actually reveals an astute sense of where popular sentiments were likely to end up. Indeed, in the speech to the Senate that Sallust reconstructs, one sees why Caesar had such concerns about the illegal killing of Roman citizens. Sulla, he reminds his audience, used the same argument to justify his initial round of executions when he took Rome. But, Caesar continues, the killing did not stop there. Instead, those who rejoiced in the earliest executions “were themselves dragged away not long afterwards and there was no end to the killing until Sulla filled all of his followers with riches.”39 Some of those riches came from the property Caesar’s family had once owned. Others came from property once held by the people to whom Caesar was appealing.
By early 62, the care Caesar had taken for building his popularity with voters and cultivating friendships with powerful allies had led him to a string of electoral victories that shocked observers. In 63 alone, Caesar had won election to the office of pontifex maximus and praetor. These victories were expensive and they left Caesar effectively bankrupt, but the political return had been immense. Caesar had also developed a keen sense of how to use the popularity of the distant Pompey as a tool to advance his own interests. Caesar supported all of the tribunal initiatives to grant Pompey extraordinary commands, but he never personally proposed them. This made him appear supportive of the popular general, but not obsequious. It also gave him the ability to easily walk away from failed measures, such as Nepos’s proposal to invite Pompey’s army to Italy and to let him run for consul in absentia. Caesar was building a much subtler but potentially more enduring sort of influence. And, unlike Cato and Cicero, Caesar had built it without alienating large segments of the population.
This was the world to which Pompey prepared to return in 62 BC. Though Pompey had certainly been kept abreast of events in the capital, he had no way to truly appreciate how the political dynamics in the city had changed. Not only did he now have to contend with three forceful and distinctive new rivals, but Pompey also had to deal with a Republic in which he himself had become a vessel in which supporters placed their hopes and opponents placed their fears. Pompey would return a man, but Romans expected either a hero or a monster. It is unsurprising, then, that Pompey’s arrival did not go as he planned.