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’.

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 63BCE 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.