In the senate

This encounter in front of the senate between Cicero and Catiline is the defining moment of the whole story: the two adversaries coming face to face in an institution that lay at the centre of Roman politics. But how should we picture it? The most famous modern attempt to bring before our eyes what happened on that 8 November is a painting by the nineteenth-century Italian artist Cesare Maccari (detail below and plate 1). It is an image that fits comfortably with many of our preconceptions of ancient Rome and its public life, grand, spacious, formal and elegant.

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 Latincandidatus, 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.