The other side of the story
Might there not be another side to the story? The detailed evidence we have from Cicero’s pen, or point of view, means that his perspective will always be dominant. But it does not necessarily mean that it is true in any simple sense, or that it is the only way of seeing things. People have wondered for centuries quite how loaded an account Cicero offers us, and have detected alternative views and interpretations just beneath the surface of his version of events. Sallust himself hints as much. For, although his account is heavily based on Cicero’s writing, by transferring the famous ‘Quo usque tandem’ from the mouth of Cicero to that of Catiline, he may well have been reminding his readers that the facts and their interpretations were, at the very least, fluid.
One obvious question is whether the speech we know as the First Catilinarian really is what Cicero said to the assembled senators in the Temple of Jupiter on 8 November. It is hard to imagine that it was a complete fabrication. How would he have got away with circulating a version that bore no relationship to what he had said? But almost certainly it is not a word-for-word match. If he spoke from notes and the ancient equivalent of bullet points, then the text we have presumably lies somewhere between what he remembered saying and what he would have liked to have said. Even if he was reading from a fairly complete text, when he circulated the speech to friends, associates and those he wanted to impress, he would almost certainly have improved it somewhat, tidying up the loose ends and inserting a few more clever one-liners, which might have been missed out or slipped his mind on the day.
A lot hangs too on exactly when it was circulated and why. We know from one of his letters to Atticus that Cicero was arranging for the First Catilinarian to be copied in June 60 BCE, when he must have been well aware that the controversy over his execution of the ‘conspirators’ was not likely to go away. It would have been tempting and convenient for Cicero to use the written text of the speech in his own defence, even if that meant some strategic adjustments and insertions. In fact, the repeated references, in the version we have, to Catiline as if he were a foreign enemy (in Latin hostis) may well be one of the ways in which Cicero responded to his opponents: by referring to the conspirators as enemies of the state, he was implying that they did not deserve the protection of Roman law; they had lost their civic rights (including the right to trial). Of course, that may already have been a leitmotiv in the oral version of the speech given on 8 November. We simply do not know. But the term certainly took on far greater significance – and I strongly suspect was given far greater emphasis – in the permanent, written version.
These questions prompt us to look harder for different versions of the story. Never mind Cicero’s perspective, is it possible to get any idea of how Catiline and his supporters would have seen it? The words and the views of Cicero now dominate the contemporary evidence for the mid first century BCE. But it is always worth trying to read his version, or any version of Roman history, ‘against the grain’, to prise apart the small chinks in the story using the snatches of other, independent, evidence that we have and to ask if other observers might have seen things differently. Were those whom Cicero described as monstrous villains really as villainous as he painted them? In this case, there is just about enough to raise some doubts about what was really going on.
Cicero casts Catiline as a desperado with terrible gambling debts, thanks entirely to his moral failings. But the situation cannot have been so simple. There was some sort of credit crunch in Rome in 63 BCE, and more economic and social problems than Cicero was prepared to acknowledge. Another achievement of his ‘great consulate’ was to scotch a proposal to distribute land in Italy to some of the poor in the city. To put it another way, if Catiline behaved like a desperado, he might have had a good reason, and the support of many ordinary people driven to desperate measures by similar distress.
How can we tell? It is harder to reconstruct economics than politics across 2,000 years, but we do get some unexpected glimpses. The evidence of the surviving coins of the period is particularly revealing, both of the conditions of the times and of the ability of modern historians and archaeologists to squeeze the material they have in ingenious ways. Roman coins can often be precisely dated, because at this period they were newly designed each year and ‘signed’ by the annual officials who were responsible for issuing them. They were minted using a series of individually hand-cut ‘dies’ (or stamps), whose minor differences in detail are still visible on the finished coins. We can calculate roughly how many coins an individual die could stamp (before it became too blunt to make a crisp image), and if we have a large enough sample of coins we can estimate roughly how many dies had been used altogether in minting a single issue. From that we can get a rough and ready idea of how many coins were produced each year: the more dies, the more coins, and vice versa.
4. This silver coin was minted in 63 BCE, its design showing one of the Roman people voting on a piece of legislation, casting a voting tablet into a jar for counting. The differences in detail between the two versions well illustrate the differences in the die stamps. The name of the official in charge of the mint that year, Longinus, is also stamped on the coin.
According to these calculations, the number of coins being minted in the late 60s BCE fell so sharply that there were fewer overall in circulation than there had been a few years before. The reasons for this we cannot reconstruct. Like most states before the eighteenth century or even later, Rome had no monetary policy as such, nor any financial institutions where that kind of policy could be developed. But the likely consequences are obvious. Whether he recklessly gambled away his fortune or not, Catiline – and many others – might have been short of cash; while those already in debt would have been faced with creditors, short of cash themselves, calling in their loans.
All this was in addition to the other long-standing factors that might have given the humble or the have-nots in Rome an incentive to protest or to join in with those promising radical change. There was the enormous disparity of wealth between rich and poor, the squalid living conditions for most of the population, and probably for much of the time, even if not starvation, then persistent hunger. Despite Cicero’s dismissive descriptions of Catiline’s followers as reprobates, gangsters and the destitute, the logic of some of his own account, and of Sallust’s, suggests otherwise. For they either state or imply that Catiline’s support evaporated when it was reported that he intended to burn the city down. If so, we are not dealing with down-and-outs and complete no-hopers with nothing to lose – and everything to gain – from total conflagration. Much more likely, his supporters included the humble suffering poor, who still had some stake in the survival of the city.
Cicero, inevitably, had an interest in making the most of the danger that Catiline posed. Whatever his political success, he held a precarious position at the top of Roman society, among aristocratic families who claimed, like Catiline, a direct line back to the founders of the city, or even to the gods. Julius Caesar’s family, for example, was proud to trace its lineage back to the goddess Venus; another, more curiously, claimed descent from the equally mythical Pasiphae, the wife of King Minos, whose extraordinary coupling with a bull produced the monstrous Minotaur. In order to secure his position in these circles, Cicero was no doubt looking to make a splash during his year as consul. An impressive military victory against a barbarian enemy would have been ideal, and what most Romans would have dreamt of. Rome was always a warrior state, and victory in war the surest route to glory. Cicero, however, was no soldier: he had come to prominence in the law courts, not by leading his army in battle against dangerous, or unfortunate, foreigners. He needed to ‘save the state’ in some other way.
5. This Roman tombstone of the fourth century CE illustrates one simple way of striking a coin. The blank coin is placed between two dies, resting on an anvil. The man on the left is giving this ‘sandwich’ a heavy blow with a hammer to imprint the design on the blank. As the tongs in the hands of the assistant on the right suggest, the blank has been heated to make the imprinting easier.
Some Roman commentators noted that the crisis played very much to Cicero’s advantage. One anonymous pamphlet, attacking Cicero’s whole career and preserved because it was once believed, wrongly, to be from the pen of Sallust, states explicitly that he ‘turned the troubles of the state to his own glory’, going so far as to claim that his consulship was ‘the cause of the conspiracy’ rather than the solution. To put it bluntly, one basic question for us should be not whether Cicero exaggerated the dangers of the conspiracy, but how far.
The most determined modern sceptics have deemed the whole plot not much more than a figment of Cicero’s imagination – in which case the man who claimed to be a ‘weapons enthusiast’ was exactly that, the incriminating letters were forgeries, the deputation of Gauls were a complete dupe of the consul and the rumoured assassination attempts were paranoid inventions. Such a radical view seems implausible. There was, after all, a hand-to-hand battle between Catiline’s men and Roman legions, which can hardly be dismissed as a figment. It is much more likely that, whatever his original motives, Catiline – far-sighted radical or unprincipled terrorist – was partly driven to extreme measures by a consul spoiling for a fight and bent on his own glory. Cicero may even have convinced himself, whatever the evidence, that Catiline was a serious threat to the safety of Rome. That, as we know from many more recent examples, is how political paranoia and self-interest often work. We will never be quite sure. The ‘conspiracy’ will always be a prime example of the classic interpretative dilemma: were there really ‘reds under the bed’, or was the crisis, partly at least, a conservative invention? It should also act as a reminder that in Roman history, as elsewhere, we must always be alert to the other side of the story – which is part of the point of this SPQR.