Within a few weeks, Roman legions defeated Catiline’s army of discontents in North Italy. Catiline himself fell fighting bravely at the front of his men. The Roman commander, Cicero’s fellow consul, Antonius Hybrida, claimed to have bad feet on the day of the final battle and handed over leadership to his number two, raising suspicions in some quarters about exactly where his sympathies lay. And he was not the only one whose motives were questioned. There have been all sorts of possibly wild, certainly inconclusive, speculation, going back to the ancient world, about which far more successful men might secretly have been backing Catiline. Was he really the agent of the devious Marcus Crassus? And what was Caesar’s true position?
Catiline’s defeat was nonetheless a notable victory for Cicero; and his supporters dubbed him pater patriae, or ‘father of the fatherland’, one of the most splendid and satisfying titles you could have in a highly patriarchal society, such as Rome. But his success soon turned sour. Already on his last day as consul, two of his political rivals prevented him from giving the usual valedictory address to a meeting of the Roman people: ‘Those who have punished others without a hearing,’ they insisted, ‘ought not to have the right to be heard themselves.’ A few years later, in 58 BCE, the Roman people voted, in general terms, to expel anyone who had put a citizen to death without trial. Cicero left Rome, just before another bill was passed specifically singling him out, by name, for exile.
So far in this story the Populus(Que) Romanus (the PQR in SPQR) has not played a particularly prominent role. The ‘people’ was a much larger and amorphous body than the senate, made up, in political terms, of all male Roman citizens; the women had no formal political rights. In 63 BCE that was around a million men spread across the capital and throughout Italy, as well as a few beyond. In practice, it usually comprised the few thousand or the few hundred who, on any particular occasion, chose to turn up to elections, votes or meetings in the city of Rome. Exactly how influential the people were has always – even in the ancient world – been one of the big controversies in Roman history; but two things are certain. At this period, they alone could elect the political officials of the Roman state; no matter how blue-blooded you were, you could only hold office as, say, consul if the Roman people elected you. And they alone, unlike the senate, could make law. In 58 BCE Cicero’s enemies argued that, whatever authority he had claimed under the senate’s prevention of terrorism decree, his executions of Catiline’s followers had flouted the fundamental right of any Roman citizen to a proper trial. It was up to the people to exile him.
The sometime ‘father of the fatherland’ spent a miserable year in North Greece (his abject self-pity is not endearing), until the people voted to recall him. He was welcomed back to the cheers of his supporters, but his house in the city had been demolished and, as if to drive the political point home, a shrine to Libertas had been erected on its site. His career never fully recovered.
Writing it up
The reasons why we can tell this story in such detail are very simple: the Romans themselves wrote a great deal about it, and a lot of what they wrote has survived. Modern historians often lament how little we can know about some aspects of the ancient world. ‘Just think of what we don’t know about the lives of the poor,’ they complain, ‘or of the perspectives of women.’ This is as anachronistic as it is deceptive. The writers of Roman literature were almost exclusively male; or, at least, very few works by women have come down to us (the autobiography of the emperor Nero’s mother, Agrippina, must count as one of the saddest losses of classical literature). These men were also almost exclusively well off, even though some Roman poets did like to pretend, as poets still occasionally do, that they were starving in garrets. The complaints, however, miss a far more important point.
The single most extraordinary fact about the Roman world is that so much of what the Romans wrote has survived, over two millennia. We have their poetry, letters, essays, speeches and histories, to which I have already referred, but also novels, geographies, satires and reams and reams of technical writing on everything from water engineering to medicine and disease. The survival is largely due to the diligence of medieval monks who transcribed by hand, again and again, what they believed were the most important, or useful, works of classical literature, with a significant but often forgotten contribution from medieval Islamic scholars who translated into Arabic some of the philosophy and scientific material. And thanks to archaeologists who have excavated papyri from the sands and the rubbish dumps of Egypt, wooden writing tablets from Roman military bases in the north of England and eloquent tombstones from all over the empire, we have glimpses of the life and letters of some rather more ordinary inhabitants of the Roman world. We have notes sent home, shopping lists, account books and last messages inscribed on graves. Even if this is a small proportion of what once existed, we have access to more Roman literature – and more Roman writing in general – than any one person could now thoroughly master in the course of a lifetime.
So how is it, exactly, that we know of the conflict between Catiline and Cicero? The story has come down to us by various routes, and it is partly the variety that makes it so rich. There are brief accounts in the works of a number of ancient Roman historians, including an ancient biography of Cicero himself – all written a hundred years or more after the events. More important, and more revealing, is a long essay, stretching over some fifty pages of a standard English translation, which offers a detailed narrative, and analysis, of the War against Catiline, or Bellum Catilinae, to use what was almost certainly its ancient title. It was written only twenty years after the ‘war’, in the 40s BCE, by Gaius Sallustius Crispus, or ‘Sallust’, as he is now usually known. A ‘new man’ like Cicero and a friend and ally of Julius Caesar, he had a very mixed political reputation: his period as a Roman governor in North Africa was infamous, even by Roman standards, for corruption and extortion. But despite his not entirely savoury career, or maybe because of it, Sallust’s essay is one of the sharpest pieces of political analysis to survive from the ancient world.
Sallust did not simply tell the unfolding story of the attempted uprising, its causes and its upshot. He used the figure of Catiline as an emblem of the wider failings of first-century BCE Rome. In Sallust’s view, the moral fibre of Roman culture had been destroyed by the city’s success and by the wealth, greed and lust for power that had followed its conquest of the Mediterranean and the crushing of all its serious rivals. The crucial moment came eighty-three years before the war against Catiline, when in 146 BCE Roman armies finally destroyed Carthage, Hannibal’s home base on the north coast of Africa. After that, Sallust thought, no significant threats to Roman domination were left. Catiline may have had positive qualities, as Sallust accepted, from bravery in the front line of battle to extraordinary powers of endurance: ‘his ability to withstand hunger, cold or sleep deprivation was incredible’. But he symbolised much of what was wrong with the Rome of his day.
Behind Sallust’s essay lie other vivid documents, which ultimately go back to the hand of Cicero himself and give his version of what happened. Some of the letters he wrote to his closest friend, Titus Pomponius Atticus – a wealthy man who never entered formal politics but often pulled the strings from the sidelines – mention his initially friendly relations with Catiline. Mixed in with domestic news, about the birth of his son (‘Let me tell you, I have become a father …’) and the arrival of new statues from Greece to decorate his house, Cicero explains in 65 BCE that he was contemplating defending Catiline in the courts, in the hope that they might later work together.