There were plenty who gambled and did not win. Caesar’s strategy of conspicuous extravagance was perilous. The promise of future greatness was staked against ruin. Money might be squandered, but never potential. Lose an election, fail to gain a lucrative posting, and a whole career might come crashing down.
It was no wonder that the provincial aristocracy, even as they fostered the ambitions of their sons, should also have slightly dreaded them. To send an heir to Rome was a calculated risk. Young men were easy prey to money-sharks. If a father were prudent, he would attempt to find patrons in the capital, mentors who might not only instruct his son in the labyrinthine ways of the Republic, but also protect him from the city’s many seductions. Particularly for families who had never held office in Rome, it was essential to secure the best. So it was, for instance, that when a banker by the name of Caelius Rufus succeeded in obtaining for his son the sponsorship of not only Crassus but Cicero too, the young Caelius was immediately marked out as a brilliant prospect. This in turn – ironically – served to secure him massive credit. When the usurers came swarming, Caelius welcomed them with open arms. Handsome, witty and buccaneering, the young man was soon developing a lifestyle far in excess of his allowance. He was too ambitious to neglect his education, but even as he studied under his two guardians he was simultaneously establishing a reputation as one of the three best dancers in Rome. New circles were opening to him – circles in which Cicero tended not to move. As he became ever more of a fixture on the party scene, Caelius began to fall under the spell of a whole new order of acquaintance.
And in particular of a louche patrician by the name of Lucius Sergius Catilina – Catiline. Caesar was not the only man to have founded a career on wild extravagance, nor was he the only aristocrat to have a chip on his shoulder about the bare walls of his atrium. Catiline’s great-grandfather had been a celebrated war hero, fighting against Hannibal with a prosthetic iron hand, but politically his ancestors had been an embarrassment. Even so, although there had been no consul in the family for almost four hundred years, Catiline’s patrician status provided him with cachet. He could pass muster, for instance, with the rigorously snobbish Catulus. Their friendship had been literally sealed with blood. Back in the dark days of the proscriptions, Catiline had helped Catulus to punish his father’s murderer. The wretched man had been whipped through the streets to where the tomb of Catulus’ father stood, his bones smashed with rods, his face mutilated, and only then put out of his misery by decapitation. To Catulus, this savagery had been a grim act of filial piety, a blood-offering to his father’s restless soul. Catiline had had no such excuse. After the murder he had brandished the severed – and supposedly still breathing – head back through the streets of Rome. Even by the standards of the civil war this was regarded as repellent behaviour. Although nothing was ever proved in a court of law, charges of murder, to say nothing of adultery and sacrilege, were to dog Catiline for the rest of his career. True, his sinister reputation was not always a handicap: among more raffish circles it combined with his stylishness and approachability to make him into a figure of menacing glamour. But while this served to provide him with a considerable constituency, it also placed him in a tactical bind. ‘His main appeal he targeted at the young’:20 how long could Catiline continue to do this without alienating allies such as Catulus, let alone the majority of senators who already mistrusted him?
In an attempt to square the circle he turned to Crassus for help – or so at least the political gossip had it. No one could be sure, of course. Crassus’ manoeuvrings were invariably veiled in shadow. But one thing could be certain: Crassus, in the sixties BC, was a worried man. Once again he was faced with the prospect of being trumped by Pompey. Not only would his old rival soon be returning at the head of a seasoned army, but he would be stupefyingly wealthy: for the first time in his political career Crassus was threatened with losing his status as the richest man in Rome. No wonder that he was frantic to shore up his support. Catiline, with huge ambitions and even huger debts, must surely have struck him as well worth a punt.
It was not merely that Crassus was looking to have a tame consul elected. Catiline also promised other pickings. He was popular wherever the margins of political life were at their seamiest: among the bands of upper-class delinquents brawling in the Subura; among the salons of scheming, dissipated women; among the indebted, the disappointed and the impatient; in short, wherever respectability tipped over into the disreputable. For the abstemious Crassus, a former consul, such a world was clearly out of bounds, although Cicero commented waspishly that he would dance in the Forum if it would win him a legacy.21 That was as may be – but for as long as Crassus had Catiline as his creature, fishing in the murky waters of the underworld, glad-handing the salons, scheming with radicals in late-night bars, it was the proxy whose dignity was on the line.
It is impossible to distinguish what Caelius’ precise role was in all this. It is conceivable, of course, that he had first met Catiline through the agency of Crassus, whose dark political skills Caelius had been studying at first hand. It is even possible that Cicero was responsible for the introduction. In 65 BC a rapacious spell as the governor of Africa had finally caught up with Catiline, when Clodius, back in Rome from the East, and eager to make a mark in the law courts, charged him with extortion. At the same time Cicero, the new man, was nerving himself for an attempt on the consulship. He knew that Catiline was planning to stand as well, and so briefly considered defending him in his forthcoming trial, hoping that the two of them might then run for office the following year on a joint ticket. Catiline, however, turned down the offer with a sneer of patrician contempt. The trial held few fears for him. Sure enough, he was speedily acquitted, possibly with the collusion of Clodius, almost certainly with the assistance of hefty bribes from Crassus. He was now free to run for the consulship of 63 BC. Catiline and Cicero would be going head to head.
Caelius was by his guardian’s side throughout the election campaign. For a young politician who was himself a new man it must have been an intoxicating experience. The election was the most unpredictable in years. Cicero’s whole career had been a preparation for it, but Catiline, just as desperate, was attempting to make good four centuries of family failure. Snobbery formed the basis of his entire campaign. It was conducted in open alliance with another nobleman, Antonius Hybrida, a man so debauched and thuggish that it was hard to believe that he was the son of Cicero’s great hero, Marcus Antonius. Confronted by two such disreputable candidates, the aristocracy took a deep breath, held their noses, and voted for the least bad option. So too, with a good deal more enthusiasm, did the equestrian classes. Cicero won by a mile. Hybrida beat Catiline to a distant third place.
For any patrician, this would have been a humiliation. For Catiline, it threatened disaster: his debts were submerging him, and Crassus, in particular, would have no interest in sponsoring a loser. Yet Catiline had not abandoned all hope. As Cicero, draped in hispurple-bordered toga, guarded by his lictors, a consul of the Roman people at last, began his year in office, so Catiline licked his wounds and plotted his comeback. His credit would last him until another election, and so he continued to borrow, lavishing everything on bribery. At the same time, rather than concealing the scale of his debts, he started to boast about them openly. This was a staggering risk, but, in the circumstances, one he had to take. The misery of indebtedness percolated far beyond the gilded seediness of his own circle. Italy seethed with the resentments of the oppressed, whether in the festering tenements of Rome or on barren farmland, where Sulla’s veterans, mortgaged to the hilt, scratched at dust and recalled the fat days of civil war. At private meetings Catiline began to promise the poor that he would be their champion. After all, as he pointed out, ‘Who was best qualified to be the leader and standard-bearer of the desperate, if not a man who was bold and desperate himself ?’22
Cicero, who had been keeping a careful eye on Catiline, was only too willing to take such incendiary talk at face value. Was it possible, he began to wonder, that, having attained the honour of the consulship, he might now be granted the even more glorious honour of saving the Republic from revolution? The prospect filled him with a mixture of consternation and dizzied delight. He and Catiline, stalking each other, both had a vested interest in raising the stakes, in making the flesh of their respective audiences creep. But when at last the two men confronted each other openly in the Senate House, Catiline allowed his loathing of the tongue-wagging upstart opposite to push him into a fatal act of bravado. ‘I can see two bodies,’ he commented, not quite enigmatically enough, ‘one thin but with a large head, one huge, but headless. Is it really so terrible if I offer myself to the body which is lacking a head?’23 His fellow aristocrats, the ‘large head’ of Catiline’s riddle, were ominously unamused. Wrapped in metaphor or not, revolutionarysentiments did not go down well in the Senate House. Catiline had effectively just lost himself a second successive election. Cicero, patrolling the Campus Martius on polling day, made sure to wear a breastplate beneath his toga, and made even more sure that the voters could glimpse it. As the results were announced and Catiline’s defeat became known, so the usurers flocked to pick at his corpse.
Like Caesar campaigning to be pontifex maximus, Catiline had staked everything on a single throw. He had gambled that it was possible to play Janus, showing one face to the senatorial and equestrian elite, the other to the poor, the indebted, the dispossessed. The gamble had failed. But if the establishment had turned its back on Catiline, then the underworld had not. He had stirred up hopes perhaps greater and more desperate than he knew. In the countryside, where peasants were starting to arm themselves with scythes and rusty swords, in Rome, where demonstrations were increasingly boiling over into riots, even in the Senate itself, where losers in the great game of advancement chafed against their debts and disappointments, talk of revolution still burned like sparks in the air. And there, sharing in the wild talk, was Marcus Caelius.
Why? Were the young man’s debts already so prodigious that he was prepared to risk all his hopes of legal advancement by taking part in revolution? Or was it the excitement, the whisperings of conspiracy, that tempted him? Or idealism? A fervour for Catiline’s cause certainly appears to have radicalised many brilliant young men. Generational tensions were more than capable of setting father against son. One senator preferred to kill his heir rather than see him consorting with Catiline, despite the fact that, like Caelius, the young man had been ‘outstandingly talented, well read, and good looking’.24 Even Cicero was forced to admit that Catiline was ‘still capable of maintaining the loyalties of many fine men by putting on a show of moral fervour’.25 So Caelius may have continued to support him for either the basest or the noblest of reasons, or a mixture of the two. But there is a further possibility: it is conceivable that Caelius may not have been supporting Catiline at all. Headstrong as he was, he was also more than capable of a calculating cynicism. Perhaps he was providing his guardian with a pair of well-placed eyes.
Cicero certainly still needed well-placed spies. Following Catiline’s failure in the election, the consul’s forebodings of revolution had become increasingly alarmist. People were starting to demand proof. And then, just as nervousness was turning to mockery, a packet of letters was suddenly delivered to Cicero’s house. They set out Catiline’s plans for a wholesale massacre. The man who handed over these incriminating documents was none other than Crassus. He claimed that they had been handed in to his doorkeeper by an ‘unknown man’.26 When Cicero read the letters out to the Senate the following morning, panic gripped the city. A state of emergency was declared, and the Republic entrusted to Cicero’s hands. Crassus, having publicly shopped his protégé, slunk back into the shadows. In reading accounts of this improbable story it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Catiline was not the only conspirator in that autumn of 63. Who might the ‘unknown man’ have been? We know of only one person who was simultaneously an intimate of Cicero, Crassus and Catiline. That person was Caelius.
Wild speculation, of course. Any or all of the above explanations are possible. But it is not sufficient to blame a lack of sources alone for the mystery. It also reflects something fundamental about the Republic itself. The longing of the Romans for glory, which burned brightly within them and lit their city and indeed their entire empire with its flame, also cast flickering and treacherous shadows. Every ambitious politician required the skills of a conspirator. When Cicero met Catiline for the last time, face to face in the Senate House, he dissected his enemy’s manoeuvrings with forensic brilliance, exposing them to the full scorching glare of his outrage, picking over the details of the conspiracy to such effect that Catiline fled Rome that very night. Ever after Cicero was to regard this as his finest hour, ‘a pinnacle of immortal glory’,27 as he modestly expressed it. The image of himself as the dauntless protector of the Republic, a patriot pure and simple, would provide him with the touchstone for the rest of his career. It was a perspective that Catiline, unsurprisingly, failed to share. Before leaving Rome he had written to Catulus, still protesting his innocence, bitterly complaining that he had been manoeuvred into exile. Heading north, ostensibly towards retirement in Marseille, he had in fact turned aside to take command of a ragbag army of peasants and war veterans. Meanwhile, back in Rome, more spine-tingling details of his plots, fed to the Senate at judicious intervals, had started to emerge: Gauls in the north of Italy were to rise in savage revolt; slaves were to be freed; the city itself was to be put to the torch. The whole of Rome was engulfed by hysteria. Cicero was the hero of the hour. Yet a few dissenting voices could still be heard. The crisis had been manufactured, they whispered. Catiline had been right. It was Cicero who had pushed him into his revolt, Cicero and his vainglory, Cicero the upstart, greedy for fame.
Of course, as is invariably the way with conspiracy theories, hard proof was lacking. No one was on hand to subject Cicero to the kind of grilling that he himself had given Catiline. The truth remained obscured behind a haze of disinformation. It was certainly evident that Cicero had employed dirty tricks to smoke out his enemy, but how much further than that he might have gone was impossible to say. Yet, in a sense he would have been less a Roman had he not schemed to push his enemy over the edge. Every consul dreamed of stamping his term of office with glory. That was how the game of self-advancement was played. Cicero may not have behaved according to the standards of his own propaganda, but then again – apart from Cato – who ever did?
And it was Catiline, after all, who had first upped the stakes. The civil war had shown how quickly violence could escalate. In a society as competitive as Rome’s even to talk of forcing short cuts through the constitution was perilous, like tossing a flame on to a tinder box. This explains why Cicero was so anxious to erect firebreaks around Catiline. He feared that if the conspirators were not isolated, then the conflagration might quickly spread out of control. Sure enough, no sooner had Catulus accepted that Catiline had indeed been plotting to destroy the Republic than he was attempting to finger Crassus and, just for good measure, Caesar too. Cicero may have had his own suspicions on that account, but Catulus’ move was precisely the kind he was desperate to avoid. He had no wish to see a man like Crassus backed into a corner.
On 5 December, with panic-stricken rumours growing wilder by the hour, he convened a crisis meeting of the Senate. All the conspiracy’s ringleaders in Rome had been identified and arrested, he announced. Neither Crassus’ nor Caesar’s name appeared on the list. Even so, the great debate that followed was at least as much about the hatreds and ambitions of the various speakers as it was about the conspiracy itself. At stake was the issue of what to do with Catiline’s henchmen. Many were of good family, and it was forbidden by the severest laws of the Republic to execute any citizen without a proper trial. But did the state of emergency entitle Cicero to waive this sacred injunction? Caesar, still nervous that the hysteria might sweep him away, proposed the novel idea that the conspirators should be imprisoned for life; Cato, opposing him, demanded their execution. Here, in the clash between these two men so matched in talent, so opposite in character, was the opening salvo of a struggle that would eventually convulse the Republic. For now, it was Cato who emerged triumphant. A majority in the Senate agreed with him that the safety of Rome was more important than the rights of individual citizens. And besides, who ever heard of imprisonment as a punishment? The conspirators were sentenced to death.
Among their number was a former consul. Watched by a confused and frightened crowd, he was led through the Forum, Cicero by his side, bristling with grim self-importance, four other senators following in quick succession. With the shadows of twilight deepening over the city, the five prisoners were lowered into the blackness of an underground cell. Here they were garrotted. Cicero, emerging from the gloom, tersely announced their deaths to the crowd. Many in the Forum were friends of the executed men, and they now slunk away, but throughout the rest of the city the news was greeted with an explosion of applause. A blaze of torches illumined the road that led from the Forum up to Cicero’s house. As the consul climbed it he was escorted by a phalanx of the greatest names in Rome. All acclaimed him as the saviour of his country. Surely, not even in his wildest dreams could the provincial from Arpinum ever have imagined such a day.
What had impressed his colleagues was not merely that he appeared to have saved the Republic, but that he had done so with comparatively little bloodshed. Cicero himself remained desperate to preserve a fire-wall around the conspiracy. He refused, for instance, to investigate his fellow consul, Antonius Hybrida, despite the fact that Hybrida had been one of Catiline’s closest friends. Cicero bribed his colleague with the governorship of Macedon, a rich province that would more than enable him to pay off his debts, and command of the war against Catiline. Since Hybrida was not merely suspected of double-dealing with the rebels, but was also a coward and an alcoholic to boot, this provoked much unease. Allies of Pompey began to press for the great man’s recall. This in turn provoked an eruption of outrage from Cato, who announced that he would rather die than see Pompey given an Italian command. But if anyone had genuinely stood in Pompey’s way, it was Cicero. The prospect of a Rome pushed into armed factions, their rivalry escalating into ever greater violence, degenerating in the end into open civil war, this had been his ultimate nightmare. Nothing would have provided Pompey with a more perfect excuse to intervene with his legions. It was in this sense that Cicero had indeed saved the Republic, less from Catiline, perhaps, than from itself.
In the summer of 62 BC, just a few bare months before Pompey was due back in Italy, Catiline’s makeshift army was finally cornered and destroyed. Hybrida, succumbing to a diplomatic illness, spent the entire battle in his tent, then scuttled off to Macedon, to extract his blood-money but otherwise lie low. He was not alone in beating a tactical retreat from Rome. Humbler players in the conspiracy were also slipping away. Among them was Caelius. He travelled to Africa, where his father had extensive business holdings, staffed with protective subordinates. But Caelius had far from abandoned his political career. For a year he served in Africa as an aide-de-camp to the province’s newly appointed proconsul, and did so very successfully. Whatever Caelius’ precise role in the conspiracy had been, his future still lay all before him. He had seen enough of public life to know that nothing in it was for ever. Alliances might buckle, twist and be reversed. The heroes of one year might be the villains of the next. In the blink of an eye the political landscape might be utterly transformed.
And so it would soon dramatically prove.