It is also an image with which Cicero would no doubt have been delighted. Catiline sits isolated, head bowed, as if no one wants to risk getting anywhere near him, still less to talk to him. Cicero, meanwhile, is the star of the scene, standing next to what seems to be a smoking brazier in front of an altar, addressing the attentive audience of toga-clad senators. Everyday Roman clothing – tunics, cloaks and even occasionally trousers – was much more varied and colourful than this. Togas, however, were the formal, national dress: Romans could define themselves as the gens togata, ‘the race that wears the toga’, while some contemporary outsiders occasionally laughed at this strange, cumbersome garment. And togas were white, with the addition of a purple border for anyone who held public office. In fact, the modern word ‘candidate’ derives from the Latin candidatus, which means ‘whitened’ and refers to the specially whitened togas that Romans wore during election campaigns, to impress the voters. In a world where status needed to be on show, the niceties of dress went even further: there was also a broad purple stripe on senators’ tunics, worn beneath the toga, and a slightly narrower one if you were the next rank down in Roman society, an ‘equestrian’ or ‘knight’, and special shoes for both ranks.
3. In Maccari’s painting of the scene in the senate, Cicero is in full flood, apparently talking without the aid of notes. It nicely captures one of the defining aspirations of the Roman elite: to be a ‘good man skilled in speaking’ (vir bonus dicendi peritus).
Maccari has captured the senators’ smart togas, even though he seems to have forgotten those significant borders. But in almost every other way the painting is no more than a seductive fantasy of the occasion and the setting. For a start, Cicero is presented as a white-haired elder statesman, Catiline as a moody young villain, when actually both were in their forties, and Catiline was the elder by a couple of years. Besides, this is far too sparsely attended a meeting; unless we are to imagine more of them somewhere offstage, there are barely fifty senators listening to the momentous speech.
In the middle of the first century BCE, the senate was a body of some 600 members; they were all men who had been previously elected to political office (and I mean all men – no woman ever held political office in ancient Rome). Anyone who had held the junior position of quaestor, twenty of them elected each year, went automatically into the senate with a seat for life. They met regularly, debating, advising the consuls and issuing decrees, which were, in practice, usually obeyed – though, as these did not have the force of law, there was always the awkward question of what would happen if a decree of the senate was flouted or simply ignored. No doubt attendance fluctuated, but this particular meeting must surely have been packed.
As for the setting, it looks Roman enough, but with that huge column stretching up out of sight and the lavish, brightly coloured marble lining the walls, it is far too grand for almost anything in Rome in this period. Our modern image of the ancient city as an extravaganza of gleaming marble on a vast scale is not entirely wrong. But that is a later development in the history of Rome, beginning with the advent of one-man rule under the emperors and with the first systematic exploitation of the marble quarries in Carrara in North Italy, more than thirty years after the crisis of Catiline.
The Rome of Cicero’s day, with its million or so inhabitants, was still built largely of brick or local stone, a warren of winding streets and dark alleys. A visitor from Athens or Alexandria in Egypt, which did have many buildings in the style of Maccari’s painting, would have found the place unimpressive, not to say squalid. It was such a breeding ground of disease that a later Roman doctor wrote that you didn’t need to read textbooks to research malaria – it was all around you in the city of Rome. The rented market in slums provided grim accommodation for the poor but lucrative profits for unscrupulous landlords. Cicero himself had large amounts of money invested in low-grade property and once joked, more out of superiority than embarrassment, that even the rats had packed up and left one of his crumbling rental blocks.
A few of the richest Romans had begun to raise the eyebrows of onlookers with their plush private houses, fitted out with elaborate paintings, elegant Greek statues, fancy furniture (one-legged tables were a particular cause of envy and anxiety), even imported marble columns. There was also a scatter of public buildings designed on a grand scale, built in (or veneered with) marble, offering a glimpse of the lavish face of the city that was to come. But the location of the meeting on 8 November was nothing like that.
Cicero had summoned the senators to meet, as they often did, in a temple: on this occasion a modest, old building dedicated to the god Jupiter, near the Forum, at the heart of the city, constructed on the standard rectangular plan, not the semicircular structure of Maccari’s fantasy – probably small and ill lit, with lamps and torches only partly compensating for a lack of windows. We have to imagine several hundred senators packed into a stuffy, cramped space, some sitting on makeshift chairs or benches, others standing, and jostling, no doubt, under some venerable, ancient statue of Jupiter. It was certainly a momentous occasion in Roman history, but equally certainly, as with many things in Rome, much less elegant in reality than we like to imagine.
Triumph – and humiliation
The scene that followed has not been re-created by admiring painters. Catiline left town to join his supporters who had scratched together an army outside Rome. Meanwhile, Cicero mounted a clever sting operation to expose the conspirators still left in the city. Ill-advisedly, as it turned out, they had tried to involve in the plot a deputation of men from Gaul who had come to Rome to complain about their exploitation at the hands of Roman provincial governors. For whatever reason – maybe nothing more profound than an instinct for backing the winner – these Gauls decided to work secretly with Cicero, and they were able to provide clinching evidence of names, places, plans and some more letters with incriminating information. Arrests followed, as well as the usual unconvincing excuses. When the house of one of the conspirators was found stuffed with weapons, the man protested his innocence by claiming that his hobby was weapon collecting.
On 5 December, Cicero summoned the senate again, to discuss what should be done with the men now in custody. This time the senators met in the temple of the goddess Concord, or Harmony, a sure sign that affairs of state were anything but harmonious. Julius Caesar made the daring suggestion that the captured conspirators should be imprisoned: either, according to one account, until they could be properly tried once the crisis was over or, according to another, for life. Custodial sentences were not the penalties of choice in the ancient world, prisons being little more than places where criminals were held before execution. Fines, exile and death made up the usual repertoire of Roman punishment. If Caesar really did advocate life imprisonment in 63 BCE, then it was probably the first time in Western history that this was mooted as an alternative to the death penalty, without success. Relying on the emergency powers decree, and on the vociferous support of many senators, Cicero had the men summarily executed, with not even a show trial. Triumphantly, he announced their deaths to the cheering crowd in a famous one-word euphemism: vixere, ‘they have lived’ – that is, ‘they’re dead’.