Cicero (20 page)

Leaving the Senate in session, Cicero, surrounded by leading Senators, went to collect the prisoners one by one from the Praetors' houses. There was no announcement, but the crowds in the Forum sensed that, after the noise and drama of debate, something real and irreversible was under way. Most observers thought that at this stage the men were simply being taken to prison. Apparently no one expected that there would be immediate executions.

A frightened silence descended as the Consul brought Lentulus from the Palatine Hill and led him down the Holy Way to the far corner of the Forum, where the state prison stood. Prisoners were thrown into the dungeon, originally built as a cistern, which was entered through a hole in the roof, and usually left to starve or to await the executioners. According to Sallust, “its filthy condition, darkness and foul smell give it a loathsome and terrifying air.” Lentulus was lowered inside and strangled with a noose. The Praetors went to collect the other four prisoners and they too were led down to the dungeon and executed in turn.

For the time being few people knew what was going on. Cicero decided not to make any announcements at this stage, for he noticed groups of people standing here and there in the Forum who had played minor roles in the conspiracy. They were waiting for nightfall when they hoped to make a rescue bid. Once the executions were over, though, there was no further need for silence. The Consul walked into the Forum and shouted in a loud voice: “They have lived,” avoiding a direct and unlucky mention of death.

Night began to fall and the mood of the crowd changed. A
S
often happens after the relief of tension, there was an explosion of hysterical high spirits. Still accompanied by Senators, the Consul made his way home across the Forum and up the Sacred Way. He was cheered along streets brightly lit by lamps and torches in doorways and on roofs. The Senate had conferred on him the title “Father of His Country,” and when Cato repeated the compliment outside, doubtless at the top of his voice, everyone applauded. It was the proudest moment in the life of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Here he was, center stage in his chosen arena, the Forum, the hero of the hour and the first man in Rome. Nothing again in the years that lay ahead would happen quite like it.

A
S
for Catilina, the dreadful news from Rome soon reached his troops and they began to melt away. He was said to have recruited 20,000 soldiers, but in a little while he had only one quarter of that number. His old friend Antonius was given the task of tracking him down. On the day in early 62 when the two armies met, the reluctant general, no doubt diplomatically, pleaded gout and left the battle to his deputy. It was an easy but bloody victory. Catilina fell beside Marius's standard—we are told, fighting hand-to-hand to the last. The encounter was probably little more than a messy one-sided skirmish. But Catilina was dead.

For all the jibes of the
optimates
, Cicero had averted a danger to the state. In contrast with his later reputation for vanity and indecision, he had acted with intelligence, patience and firmness. He had amply fulfilled the administrative promise of his Quaestorship in Sicily and shown that he was better able to govern than many of his peers. The conspiracy was perhaps less of a threat than Cicero claimed. Nevertheless, Catilina represented, if only in caricature, the continuing challenge from the
populares
and a new model of politician. His defeat was likely to have serious implications for activists like Caesar.

The outgoing Consul had reason to be proud of his stewardship of the Republic, but success had come with a cost. His efforts before he took office to be all things to all men, to please the radical as well as the conservative interest, had failed. His refusal to countenance the land-reform bill in January and his decision to execute the conspirators without trial (especially after the warning of the Rabirius affair) placed him firmly on the side of the
optimates
. Cicero's cover was blown.

The Good Goddess Affair and the Return of Pompey: 62–58
BC

T
he Father of His Country believed that, thanks to him, the Republic was safe. There were, to be sure, troubles ahead. Pompey and his legions would soon return from Asia Minor and the victorious general would expect to play a leading role in the state; just conceivably, if given an excuse, he might act like Sulla, march on Rome and establish an autocracy. The
populares
had lost decisively with the defeat of Catilina, but the snake was only stunned. Caesar, who had been plotting against the Senatorial interest behind the scenes, was rising up the political ladder and, barring accidents, would be Consul in a few years' time. It would be Cicero's task, which he felt to be well within his abilities, to hold the balance between the competing parties.

Overelated by his Consulship, he refused to stop talking about it. His listeners soon grew tired of him. “One could not attend the Senate or a public meeting nor a session of the law courts without having to listen to endless repetitions of the story of Catilina and Lentulus,”
Plutarch writes. “This unpleasing habit of his clung to him like fate.”

Cicero's boastfulness was not simply an expression of conceit, although that played a part. Privately, he mocked himself for “a certain foolish vanity to which I am somewhat prone.” However, the prestige, or
dignitas
,
which was the essential political and social attribute of a leading Roman rested on a combination of his own achievements and those of his ancestors. Cicero had only the former to maintain his status, and so he felt obliged to keep himself firmly and prominently in the public eye by ostentation and constant self-praise. He also encouraged his friends and acquaintances to write about him and his achievements.

Cicero's position was not nearly so preeminent, nor so secure, as he supposed. A
S
it turned out, a reaction against him was under way even before his triumph ended. Pompey, who had been watching events from afar, saw in the military threat from Catilina an opportunity for his recall as the only man able to meet it. This would strengthen his position vis-à-vis the Senate, from which he expected trouble back in Rome. He asked his brother-in-law, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Nepos, who was a Tribune, to obtain a special command for him against Catilina and to do his best to remove the gloss from Cicero's Consulship.

Metellus Nepos launched his attack on the last day of the year. It was the custom that, just before leaving office, Consuls gave a public account of their stewardship to the People gathered at the Assembly Ground in the Forum. Cicero was looking forward to his first major opportunity to publicize his record, but Metellus Nepos put a stop to the festivities. Accompanied by a fellow Tribune, he used his power of veto and refused to let Cicero speak. Seated on benches in front of the Speakers' Platform, they told Cicero that he could only make the traditional oath on leaving office and then had to step down.

Cicero agreed to do as asked, but he was determined to have the last word. Instead of the usual formula, he improvised a new oath. He said: “I swear to you that I have saved my country and maintained her supremacy.”
Later in the day he appealed to Metellus Nepos through intermediaries to soften his hostile attitude. Metellus Nepos replied that his hands were tied, for he could not go back on his public statement. He had insisted that someone “who had punished others without a hearing should not be given the right to speak himself.”

The message was sinister and unmistakable. Metellus Nepos, and so presumably Pompey, was in alliance with
populares
like Caesar. The Tribune went on to promote a bill commissioning Pompey to restore order in Italy, but by then Catilina was dead and his army destroyed. So another decree was laid before the People, allowing Pompey to stand for the Consulship
in his absence. Caesar, now Praetor, was on hand to help and seated himself with Metellus Nepos on the platform in front of the Temple of the Castors in the Forum to superintend the vote.

A
S
expected, Cato, also a Tribune that year, entered a veto. But Metellus Nepos had assembled a troop of gladiators and other fighters, who were waiting in the side streets. He now unleashed them on the crowd, and most of the Senatorial party withdrew under a hail of blows—except, to no one's surprise, for Cato, who obstinately held his ground until one of the Consuls, fearing for his safety, pulled him inside the Temple. Yet despite these strong-arm measures, there was too much opposition from the assembled crowd to proceed with the vote, and the proposal was abandoned.

The Senate sensed that Metellus Nepos had overplayed his hand and suspended both him and Caesar from their official functions. Caesar knew when to recognize defeat: he dismissed his lictors, changed out of his purple-edged toga and went home. However, with typical tactical brilliance, he quickly retrieved the situation. When noisy crowds shouted for his reinstatement, he went out into the Forum and persuaded them to disperse. It is hard to avoid wondering whether this was improvisation or a cleverly scripted piece of street theater. In any event, the Senate was so surprised and gratified by his good behavior that it pardoned him and he returned to his duties as Praetor. A
S
for Metellus Nepos, he made his way back to Pompey to report the failure of his mission.

Undaunted by the attempt to undermine him, the former Consul decided that he needed a new, more opulent house to match his prestige. Towards the end of 62, he purchased one of the grandest mansions in the city's grandest quarter, the Palatine Hill, overlooking the Forum. It belonged, unsurprisingly, to Crassus. The house stood on a northeastern spur of the Palatine and had a magnificent view of the city. Its location could not have been more convenient; the Forum was only a few minutes' walk—or litter ride—down Victory Rise. Cicero's visitors and hangers-on did not have far to go to pay their morning calls. Space in the city center was in short supply and the house was one of the few with a substantial garden. It contained a fine walk of poplar trees together with an exercise ground (
palaestra
), which, following the Greek custom, was also used for philosophical debates.

The purchase price was high, some 3.5 million sesterces, and Cicero had to borrow heavily to find the money. It was awkward that just at this juncture he found himself short of ready cash. Part of his arrangement with Antonius, his fellow Consul, had been a large loan financed by Antonius's expected profits as governor of Macedonia. He was also rumored to have negotiated another loan with a suspected conspirator, whom he had successfully defended on a bribery charge. Unfortunately, he found it difficult to get the cash out of Antonius and had to send a freedman to Macedonia to look after “our joint profits.”

Cicero greatly enjoyed buying houses—he called his collection of eight or so villas the “gems of Italy.” In addition to the palace on the Palatine, there was his family home in Carinae, which he had inherited from his father and now passed on to Quintus, and others in Argiletum and on the Aventine Hill, which were rented out and brought in an income of 80,000 sesterces. There was the family estate at Arpinum, and he owned two small farms near Naples and Pompeii (where he also had a house); he also acquired a number of small lodges or
diversaria
, which wealthy Romans used as private wayside stops along the main roads in the absence of comfortable hotels. Some of his properties he bought, but others were legacies or presents from clients he had represented in the courts.

He had his preferences. The house at Formiae, on the Campanian border about 50 miles north of Pompeii, was “not a villa—it is a public lounge.” A
S
ever, his pride and joy was the place at Tusculum, within easy reach of Rome, where he continued to spend money on improvements. Writing about another property (acquired towards the end of his life) on the tiny wooded peninsula of Astura on the coast near Antium, he observed to Atticus: “This district, let me tell you, is charming; at any rate it's secluded and free from observers if one wants to do some writing. And yet, somehow or other, ‘home's best'; so my feet are soon carrying me back to Tusculum. After all, I think one would soon get tired of the picture scenery of this scrap of wooded coast.”

Now that he no longer had official duties, Cicero kept himself busy as an advocate, but he also had to appear occasionally in court as a witness. One trial at which he gave evidence followed a sensational scandal that took place at the end of 62. He broke the alibi of the unruly young aristocrat Publius Clodius Pulcher, who was accused of sacrilege. Clodius was a
member of the patrician Claudius family, although he used a popular version of the name. The Claudii had produced Consuls in every generation since the foundation of the Republic and over the centuries had built up a well-deserved reputation for high-handedness and violence. In one typical incident, a Claudius was leading a Roman fleet into battle. The sacred chickens refused to give a favorable omen by feeding on some corn that was put out for them. So Claudius had them flung into the sea, with the words: “If they won't eat, then let them drink.”

Clodius possessed a full share of ancestral genes. When serving in Asia Minor during his youth, he had helped foment a mutiny against his commander and later got himself kidnapped by pirates. On his return to Rome he had unsuccessfully prosecuted Catilina on a charge of extortion—with no very serious intent, one guesses, other than to extort money from Catilina's rich protector, Crassus. He had joined Cicero's bodyguard in 63, perhaps as much for the fun of it as from political conviction. Now, as Quaestor-designate, he was on the point of starting his political career in earnest. At present he was known as little more than a young roisterer and it would be a year or two before he revealed himself as a serious and ruthless
popularis
.