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 thisis 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.

How such private letters ended up in the public domain is something of a mystery. Most likely, a member of Cicero’s household made copies of them available after his death and they quickly circulated among curious readers, fans and enemies. Nothing was ever published, in quite our sense, in the ancient world. Almost a thousand letters in all survive, written both to and by the great man over the last twenty years or so of his life. Revealing his self-pity in exile (‘All I can do is weep!’) and his anguish on the death of his daughter after childbirth while covering topics from thieving agents, through society divorces, to the ambitions of Julius Caesar, they are some of the most intriguing documents we have from ancient Rome.

Equally intriguing a survival, and perhaps even more surprising, is part of a long poem that Cicero wrote to celebrate the achievements of his consulship; it is no longer complete, but it was famous, or infamous, enough that more than seventy lines of it are quoted by other ancient writers and by Cicero himself in later works. It includes one of the most notorious lines of Latin doggerel to have made it through the Dark Ages: ‘O fortunatam natam me consule Romam’ – a jingle with something of the ring of ‘Rome was sure a lucky state / Born in my great consulate’. And, in what has been seen as a major, if slightly hilarious, lapse of modesty, it seems to have featured an ‘assembly of the gods’ in which our superhuman consul discusses with the divine senate on Mount Olympus how he should handle Catiline’s plot.

By the first century BCE, reputation and fame in Rome depended not just on word of mouth but also on publicity, sometimes elaborately, even awkwardly, orchestrated. We know that Cicero tried to persuade one of his historian friends, Lucius Lucceius, to write a celebratory account of his defeat of Catiline and its sequel (‘I am extremely keen,’ he said in a letter, ‘that my name should be put in the limelight in your writing’); and he also hoped that a fashionable Greek poet, whose tricky immigration case he had defended in the Roman courts, would compose a worthy epic on this same subject. In the event, he had to write his own verse tribute – to himself. A few modern critics have tried, not very convincingly, to defend the literary quality of the work, and even of what has become its signature line (‘O fortunatam natam …’). Most Roman critics whose views on the topic survive satirised both the vanity of the enterprise and its language. Even one of Cicero’s greatest admirers, a keen student of his oratorical techniques, regretted that ‘he had gone quite so over the top’. Others gleefully ridiculed or parodied the poem.

But the most direct access that we have to the events of 63 BCE comes from the scripts of some of the speeches that Cicero gave at the time of the uprising. Two were delivered to public meetings of the Roman people, updating them on the progress of the investigations into Catiline’s conspiracy and announcing victory over the dissidents. One was Cicero’s contribution to the debate in the senate on 5 December which determined the appropriate penalty for those under arrest. And, most famous of all, there was the speech that he gave to the senate on 8 November, denouncing Catiline, in the words that we should imagine coming out of his mouth in Maccari’s painting.

Cicero himself probably circulated copies of all these soon after they had been delivered, laboriously transcribed by a small army of slaves. And, unlike his efforts at poetry, they quickly became admired and much-quoted classics of Latin literature, and prime examples of great oratory to be learned and imitated by Roman schoolboys and would-be public speakers for the rest of antiquity. They were even read and studied by those who were not entirely fluent in Latin. That was certainly going on in Roman Egypt four hundred years later. The earliest copies of these speeches to survive have been found on papyrus dating to the fourth or fifth century CE, now just small scraps of what were originally much longer texts. They include the original Latin and a word-for-word translation into Greek. We must imagine a native Greek speaker in Egypt struggling a little, and needing some help, in getting to grips with Cicero’s original language.

Many later learners have struggled too. This group of four speeches, Against Catiline (In Catilinam) or the Catilinarians, as they are now often known, went on to enter the educational and cultural traditions of the West. Copied and disseminated via the medieval monasteries, they were used to drill generations of pupils in the Latin language, and they were closely analysed as literary masterpieces by Renaissance intellectuals and rhetorical theorists. Even today, in mechanically printed editions, they keep their place in the syllabus for those who learn Latin, and they remain models of persuasive oratory, whose techniques underlie some of the most famous modern speeches, including those of Tony Blair and Barack Obama.

It did not take long for the opening words of Cicero’s speech given on 8 November (the First Catilinarian) to become one of the best known and instantly recognisable quotes of the Roman world: ‘Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?’ (‘How long, Catiline, will you go on abusing our patience?’); and it was closely followed, a few lines later in the written text, by the snappy, and still much repeated, slogan ‘O tempora, o mores’ (‘O what a world we live in!’, or, literally, ‘O the times, O the customs!’). In fact, the phrase ‘Quo usque tandem …’ must already have been firmly embedded in the Roman literary consciousness by the time that Sallust was writing his account of the ‘war’, just twenty years later. So firmly embedded was it that, in pointed or playful irony, Sallust could put it into Catiline’s mouth. ‘Quae quo usque tandem patiemini, o fortissimi viri?’ (‘How long will you go on putting up with this, my braves?’) is how Sallust’s revolutionary stirs up his followers, reminding them of the injustices they were suffering at the hands of the elite. The words are purely imaginary. Ancient writers regularly scripted speeches for their protagonists, much as historians today like to ascribe feelings or motives to their characters. The joke here is that Catiline, Cicero’s greatest enemy, is made to voice his antagonist’s most famous slogan.

That is only one of the wry ironies and pointed, paradoxical ‘mis-quotations’ in the history of this distinctive phrase. It often lurked in Roman literature whenever revolutionary designs were at stake. Just a few years after Sallust, Titus Livius, or ‘Livy’, as he is better known, was writing his own history of Rome from its beginning, originally in 142 ‘books’ – a vast project, even though an ancient book amounted to what fitted onto a roll of papyrus and is closer to the length of a modern chapter. What Livy had to say about Catiline has been lost. But when he wanted to capture the civil conflicts of hundreds of years earlier, in particular the ‘conspiracy’ of one Marcus Manlius, who in the fourth century BCE was supposed to have incited the Roman poor to rebellion against the oppressive rule of the elite, he went back to a version of the classic words. ‘Quo usque tandem ignorabitis vires vestras?’ (‘How long will you go on being ignorant of your strength?’) he imagined Manlius asking his followers to get them to realise that, poor though they were, they had the manpower to succeed.

The point here is not merely about an echo of language. Nor is it just about the figure of Catiline as a byword for villainy, though he certainly plays that part often enough in Roman literature. His name came to be used as a nickname for unpopular emperors, and half a century later Publius Vergilius Maro (or ‘Virgil’, as he is now usually known) gave him a cameo role in the Aeneid, where the villain is pictured being tortured in the underworld, ‘trembling at the face of the Furies’. More important is the way that the conflict between Catiline and Cicero became a powerful template for understanding civil disobedience and insurrection throughout Roman history and beyond. When Roman historians wrote about revolution, the image of Catiline almost always lay somewhere behind their accounts, even at the cost of some strange inversions of chronology. As his carefully chosen words hint, Livy’s Marcus Manlius, a nobleman turning to doomed revolution, supported by an impoverished rabble, was largely a projection of Catiline back into early Roman history.