Chapter XXI: The Conspiracy of Catiline (1)

MARCUS PORCIUS CATO

Pompey, in quitting the centre of affairs, could not fail to augur that his removal would be the signal for the revival of party passions, and that a few more years’ experience of the miseries of anarchy would demand his recall with fuller powers for the settlement of affairs. The nobles, on their part, having been compelled to submit to his extraordinary appointment, now cast about for the means of turning his absence to their advantage. They had placed him at their head, and he had betrayed them; they now looked for a stouter and more faithful champion, and prepared themselves, when the time should serve, to strike a blow for ascendency, the shock of which should be felt on the Euphrates, and daunt the conqueror of Syria and Pontus.

The chiefs whom they had hitherto consulted had mortified them by their conciliatory temper, their timidity or their languor. Catulus they respected, but they distrusted his firmness: Lucullus, whose aid they next invoked, disregarded their solicitations. Hortensius was sunk in pride and indolence. There were among them many personages of inferior fame and influence, the Silani, the Scribonii, the Marcii, the Domitii, the Scipios and Marcelli, who might make good officers, but wanted the genius for command. But there was one man, still in their ranks, young in years, a plebeian by extraction, unknown in civil or military affairs, in whose unflinching zeal and dauntless courage they felt they could securely confide. Judgment, indeed, and tact he sorely needed; but these were qualities which the nobles held in little regard, and neither he nor they were sensible of this grievous deficiency.

This man was Marcus Porcius Cato, the heir of the venerable name of the censor Cato, his great-grandfather, a name long revered by the Romans for probity and simplicity. The slave of national prejudices Cato believed, like his illustrious ancestor, in the mission of a superior caste to govern the Roman state, in the natural right of the lords of the human race to hold the world in bondage, in the absolute authority of the husband over the wife, the parent over the child, the master over the servant. In his principles Cato was the most bigoted of tyrants. Yet never were these awful dogmas held by a man whose natural temper was more averse to the violence and cruelty by which alone they can be maintained, and in vain did Cato strive to fortify himself against the instincts of humanity within him by abstract speculation and severe self-discipline. Born in the year 95, he had witnessed the termination of the Social War, and resented, as a mere boy, the compromise in which that mighty struggle resulted. Nevertheless his feelings had revolted from the atrocious measures with which Sulla had avenged it, and alone of his party, he sighed over their most brilliant victories and lamented the bloody execution they did upon their enemies.

From the early days of his boyhood Cato had unremittingly trained himself in the austere pattern of the ancient manners, already becoming obsolete in the time of the censor. Inured to frugality and the simplest tastes, he raised himself above the temptations of his class to rapine and extortion. Enrolling himself in the priesthood of the god Apollo, he acknowledged perhaps a divine call to the practice of bodily self-denial, in which, in the view of the ancients, the religious life mainly consisted. He imbibed the doctrines of the stoic philosophy, the rigidity of which was congenial to his temper, and strove under their guidance to square his public conduct by the strictest rules of private integrity. If he failed, it was through the infirmity of nature, not the inconsistency of vanity or caprice; but, doubtless, the exigencies of public affairs drove him, as well as other men of less eminent pretensions, to many a sordid compromise with his own principles, while in private life the strength to which he aspired became the source of manifold weakness. It made him proud of his own virtues, confident in his judgments, inaccessible to generous impulses, caustic in his remarks on others, a blind observer of forms, and a slave to prejudices. A party composed of such men as Cato would have been ill-matched with the ranks of crafty intriguers opposed to them on every side; but when the selfish, indolent, and unprincipled chose themselves a champion of a character so alien from their own, the hollowness of the alliance and the hopelessness of the cause became sufficiently manifest.

[Sidenote: [67 B.C.]]

During the progress of the intrigues for the appointment of Pompey to his maritime command, his creatures had not ceased to worry the senate by the advocacy of fresh measures for the reformation of administrative abuses. In the year 67, a certain C. Cornelius, formerly quæstor to the great imperator, proposed, being at the time tribune, an enactment to limit the usury which the wealthy nobles demanded for the loans negotiated with them at Rome by the agents of the provinces. Laws indeed already existed for regulating this practice, but the wants of the needy and the cupidity of the capitalists had combined to disregard them, and the senate had ventured to assume the prerogative of the people in dispensing with their provisions in favour of personages of its own order. This daring encroachment Cornelius offered at the same time to repress. His measure was both popular and just. The senators could not oppose it by argument, but they gained one of the tribunes to intercede against it. But Cornelius was supported by the people, who encouraged him to persist in reading the terms of his rogation in spite of the official veto. A tumult ensued in the comitium, and, terrified by the sound of blows, Pompey, we may presume, engaged his instrument to desist from the direct attack, and allow the matter to be compromised. The senate acquiesced, but the offence was deeply resented, and speedily punished. No sooner had Cornelius quitted his functions as tribune, than he was accused of _majestas_ for having disregarded the veto of a colleague. The crime was manifest, and the culprit might despair of defending himself against the powerful influences arrayed against him, when Manilius, the same who had devoted himself to the service of Pompey, caused the tribunal to be surrounded by bands of armed ruffians, and the accusers to be threatened with violence unless they desisted from their suit. The consuls interfered with a military force and gave them the means of escaping over the roofs of the neighbouring houses. In the following year the process was renewed, and Cicero, as the mouthpiece of Pompey, was retained to defend the criminal. The advocate pleaded the favour with which his client was regarded by Pompey himself, and either this consideration or the fear of further violence, or perhaps the cooling down of men’s passions after so long an interval, gained him an acquittal. But the attempt, only too successful, of Manilius to overawe by force the administration of justice, deserves to be remarked for its fatal significance. From henceforth we shall find it repeated day by day with aggravated violence. Consuls and tribunes will vie with one another to destroy the foundation of all social confidence. Already the senate and the people are committed to a struggle, which must eventually involve the interference of a power paramount to both. Far-sighted men see already the shadows of monarchy advancing upon them, which the mission of Pompey to the East, long, distant, and perilous, seems the readiest means of retarding, and possibly of averting.

Cicero’s speech for Cornelius was a triumph of artifice and ingenuity. But the fame of his eloquence was already established by his harangue in favour of the bill of Manilius, and the favour of the people had already raised him to the prætorship for the year 66 by the unanimous suffrages of the centuries. After the failure of the attack upon the refractory tribune, faction slept for a short season, or prepared itself in silence for a fiercer outburst of animosity.[b]

CAIUS JULIUS CÆSAR

Though the restoration of the tribunate and the withdrawal of the judicial power had given a rude shock to the senatorial oligarchy, they still remained masters of Rome. But a chief was growing up who was destined to restore life to the Marian party, to become master of the Roman world, and to be acknowledged as the greatest man whom Rome ever produced.

C. Julius Cæsar was born of an old patrician family in the year 100 B.C. He was therefore six years younger than Pompey and Cicero. His father, C. Cæsar, did not live to reach the consulship. His uncle Sextus held that high dignity in 91 B.C., just before the outbreak of the Social War. But the connection on which the young patrician most prided himself was the marriage of his aunt Julia with C. Marius; and at the early age of seventeen he declared his adhesion to the popular party by espousing Cornelia, the daughter of Cinna, who was at that time absolute master of Rome. We have already noticed his bold refusal to repudiate his wife, and his narrow escape from Sulla’s assassins. His first military service was performed under M. Minucius Thermus, who was left by Sulla to take Mytilene. In the siege of that place he won a civic crown for saving a citizen. On the death of Sulla he returned to Rome, and, after the custom of ambitious young Romans, he indicted Cn. Dolabella, for extortion in Macedonia. The senatorial jury acquitted Dolabella as a matter of course; but the credit gained by the young orator was great; and he went to Rhodes to study rhetoric under Molo, in whose school Cicero had lately been taking lessons. It was on his way to Rhodes that he fell into the hands of Cilician pirates. Redeemed by a heavy ransom, he collected some ships, attacked his captors, took them prisoners, and crucified them at Pergamus, according to a threat which he had made while he was their prisoner. About the year 74 B.C. he heard that he had been chosen as one of the pontifices, and he instantly returned to Rome, where he remained for some years, leading a life of pleasure, taking little part in politics, but yet, by his winning manners and open-handed generosity, laying in a large store of popularity, and perhaps exercising an unseen influence over the events of the time.

[Sidenote: [74-64 B.C.]]

It was in 67 B.C., as we have seen, that Pompey left the city to take the command against the pirates. At the same time, Cæsar, being in his thirty-third year, was elected quæstor, and signalised his year of office by a panegyric over his aunt Julia, the widow of Marius. His wife Cornelia died in the same year, and gave occasion to another funeral harangue. In both of these speeches the political allusions were evident; and he ventured to have the bust of Marius carried among his family images for the first time since the dictatorship of Sulla.[c] Cæsar had in 65 obtained the ædileship, in conjunction with Bibulus, the candidate of the nobles. That office, which had properly the care of the public edifices, was charged also with providing for the amusements of the people. It required an enormous outlay of money, and men ambitious of higher honours spared no expense to eclipse one another in the splendour they lavished upon it. The ædiles defrayed the charge of the gladiatorial shows, and on this occasion Cæsar gained immense applause by the profusion of silver bullion with which he decorated the furniture and implements of the arena. Already deeply plunged in debt, he continued to borrow on the credit of his genius and rising fortunes. If his wealthy colleague equalled him in munificence, there seemed more merit in the generosity of the penniless adventurer, and Bibulus was obliged to liken himself to Pollux, who though he possessed a temple at Rome in conjunction with his twin-brother, heard it always designated by the name of Castor, and never by his own. Cæsar could rely on the clamorous support of the populace thus attuned to his most stirring appeals. The display of the bust of Marius had already irritated the faction of Sulla, but now a greater insult was inflicted upon them.

Among his conspicuous acts of munificence as ædile, Cæsar had adorned the Forum and the Capitol with pictures and statues: he had erected halls and porticoes for the gratification of the people, and these too he had adorned with monuments of taste and luxury. One morning there suddenly appeared among the new ornaments of the Capitol the statue of Marius, surrounded by the trophies of his Cimbrian and Jugurthine victories. The people shouted with delight; the nobles scowled with indignation. The author of the deed did not proclaim himself, but neither friends nor foes could err in ascribing it to the daring ædile. Catulus determined to bring the offender to punishment for this direct breach of law. The remembrance of the murder of his father, the noblest victim of the Marian proscriptions, inflamed the bitterness of his animosity. He accused Cæsar of throwing off the mask from his ulterior designs; of no longer subverting the republic with mines, but of assailing it with the battering-ram. Cæsar defended himself before the senate, and succeeded in foiling his accuser; but he owed his triumph neither to the favour nor the justice of his audience, but to the temper of the people, on which the nobles dared not make an experiment. It would appear from the historians that the trophies of Marius retained possession of their place in front of the Capitol, an indication of the popular strength which must have shaken the nerves even of Cato himself.

The nobles could at least retaliate. On quitting the ædileship, Cæsar demanded a public mission to reduce Egypt to the form of a province, in virtue of the will of the king Ptolemy Alexander. This country, through which all the commerce of the East already passed into Europe, was reputed the wealthiest in the world. Pouring into the royal treasury an annual tribute of 14,800 talents, it offered a magnificent prey to the rapacious republic, and to the fortunate proconsul through whose hands these golden harvests should pass. Crassus and Cæsar disputed this rich booty; but neither the one nor the other succeeded in obtaining it. The senate mustered all its forces to baffle both claimants, and was enabled, perhaps by their division, to succeed. It employed a tribune named Papius to enact that all foreigners, and especially Cæsar’s clients, the Transpadane Gauls, should be removed from the city, and thus boldly cleared the Forum of the tumultuary partisans, by whose hands, if not by whose votes, the reckless demagogue might hope to extort the prize.

(From a statue)]

[Sidenote: [64 B.C.]]

Instead of this brilliant mission Cæsar was invited (64) to preside in the tribunal, to which was committed the inquisition into cases of murder. Hitherto he had done no more than protest against the dictatorship of Sulla; he now determined to brand it with legal stigma. Among the cases which he caused to be cited before him were those of two political offenders, men who had imbrued their hands in the blood of the victims of the proscription. One of these named Bellienus was the centurion who had stabbed Ofella, the other was a more obscure assassin. He condemned these wretched ruffians, only to strike terror into higher quarters. He induced a tribune named Labienus to accuse an aged senator, Rabirius, of the slaughter of the tribune Saturninus; and by making it a criminal, and not a political, charge, he forbade the accused to withdraw himself from the process by voluntary exile. Cicero and Hortensius defended the culprit, but failed to move the judges. Rabirius appealed to the people. Labienus attacked, and Cicero again defended him, while the senators used every effort to excite the compassion of the populace. But the people exulted in the audacious injustice of the whole proceeding: for it was well known, first, that Rabirius had not killed Saturninus; secondly, that the real slayer had been rewarded, and the deed solemnly justified by competent authority; and, thirdly, that the transaction had occurred not less than thirty-six years before, and deserved to be buried in oblivion with the birth of a new generation. The appeal of Rabirius would inevitably have been rejected but for the adroitness of the prætor, Metellus Celer, who suddenly struck the flag which floated from the Janiculum while the tribes were assembled for public business. In ancient times the striking of the flag was the signal that the Etrurians were advancing to attack the city. Immediately all business was suspended, the comitia dissolved, and the citizens rushed to man the walls. The formality still remained in force among a people singularly retentive of traditional usages; and now the multitude which had just shouted clamorously for innocent blood, laughed at the trick by which its fury was baffled, and acquiesced in the suspension of the proceedings. Cæsar had gained his point in alarming and mortifying the senate, and allowed the matter to drop, which he never perhaps seriously intended to push to extremity.

[Sidenote: [63 B.C.]]

The same Labienus, devoting himself with zeal to the service of the patron he had chosen, induced the people in the next place to demand the abolition of Sulla’s law, by which they had been deprived of the election of pontiffs. On recovering this prerogative they acquitted their debt to Cæsar by nominating him chief of the college, thereby placing him at the head of a great political engine, and rendering his person inviolable. Neither the notorious laxity of his moral principles, nor his contempt, of which few could be ignorant, for the religious belief of his countrymen, hindered Cæsar’s advancement to the highest office of the national worship. It was enough that he should perform the stated functions of his post, and maintain the traditional usages upon which the safety of the state was popularly deemed to depend. Cæsar’s triumph was the more complete, as it was a victory over Catulus, who had competed with him for this dignity, and who, knowing his pecuniary embarrassments, had offered to buy off his opposition by a loan. Cæsar rejected the bribe with scorn, and declared that he would borrow still more largely to gain the prize. The nobles were straining every nerve to implicate him in a charge of conspiracy against the state, and the chief pontificate was necessary to insure his safety. When the hour of election arrived he addressed his mother, as he left his house, with the words, “This day your son will be either supreme pontiff, or else an exile.”

The crime which it had been sought to fasten upon Cæsar was of the deepest dye and most alarming character. For some years past the city had been kept in feverish anxiety by rumours of a plot, not against any particular interest or party, but against the very constitution of the social fabric. The nobles had sounded the alarm, and their agents had insinuated complicity in some wild and treasonable enterprise against Cæsar, Crassus, and many other august citizens, objects of dislike and fear to the existing government. The fact of such a conspiracy was indeed speedily revealed, and it discovers to us in the most striking manner the frightful corruption of the times. Into its actual connections and ramifications we shall presently inquire; but first it will be well to trace its origin and motives, in order to explain the way in which the senate proposed to take advantage of it.

L. SERGIUS CATILINA AND HIS TIMES

[Sidenote: [65-63 B.C.]]

The generation of statesmen which had grown up at the feet of the Scipios and the Gracchi, though it had exchanged much of the simple dignity of the old Roman character for a tasteless affectation of Hellenic culture, was still for the most part imbued with sentiments of honour and probity, devoted to the welfare of the state, and only ambitious to shine at the head of a commonwealth of freemen. But its children, born and bred under the relaxation of all principle induced by the civil dissensions, were fearfully devoid of every moral principle. The vast accession of wealth and power which accompanied the conquest of the East overthrew whatever barriers poverty and simplicity of manners might still have set against the torrent of selfish indulgence. The acquisition of wealth, moreover, had only served to precipitate expense and prodigality. A few crafty usurers swept into their coffers the plunder won by a multitude of spendthrifts.

Political and private gambling had reduced thousands of the well born to the condition of mere needy adventurers, while the advantages of birth and station served only to make them more dangerous and their manners more seductive. Among these restless and accomplished bravos none was so conspicuous or so able as L. Sergius Catilina. His descent was one of the most ancient in Rome, and he had served with distinction among the nobles ranged under Sulla’s banner. His valour indeed from the first had been tinged with brutal ferocity, and the stories currently reported of him, believed as they undoubtedly were by his own contemporaries, may give us at least an idea of the crimes which were possible at the period. It has been already mentioned that he was accused of assassinating his brother from private malice, and of getting his name inscribed on the list of proscription for the sake of obtaining his confiscated estate. All Rome had seen him waving on the top of a pike the head of the murdered Gratidianus. It was rumoured that, wanting to marry the fair but profligate Orestilla, who waived his suit through jealousy of his son by a former consort, the father had sacrificed the youth without scruple to his passion.

Though loaded with the infamy of such crimes, Catiline had entered on the career of public honours, had obtained the prætorship for the year 68, had succeeded from thence to the government of Africa, and upon his return in 66 was about to offer himself for the consulship. Publius Clodius, a stripling, not less profligate, but as yet less notorious, crossed his path with a charge of malversation in his province. Presently the rumour ran that Catiline, thus disconcerted, formed a plot with Autronius Pætus, just deprived of the consulship for bribery, with Calpurnius Piso and other dissolute nobles, to murder the successful candidates, and to seize the powers of the state. The names both of Crassus and Cæsar were whispered in connection with this bloody enterprise. The former, it was said, was to be created dictator, the latter his master of the horse. When it was asked upon what military resources the rash intriguers relied, it was answered that Piso, who had acquired the command of one of the Iberian provinces, was charged to organise an armed force in that quarter, with which to balance the legions of the senate under Pompey. The scheme, it was alleged, was opportunely detected, the chief conspirators discovered and marked. Piso shortly afterwards was cut off in his province by banditti, or possibly by assassins; but the proceedings with which the culprits were menaced were stayed by the intervention of a tribune, and the circumstances of the plot were never formally revealed.

Such however was the influence of Catiline, or such the interest which his presumed machinations could excite among the lawless and ambitious even in the heart of the commonwealth, that not only was the government unable to convict him upon this flagrant charge, but he did not shrink from suing for the consulship itself for the following year, and that too while yet unabsolved from the accusation of Clodius. The man and the times must be more particularly described to make the story of Catiline credible to any other age than his own. For passing strange must it appear that, notwithstanding the atrocities by which he was disgraced, Catiline had been able to connect himself with many eminent public men, by whom his suits had been openly supported. Cicero himself, a man of unsullied personal purity, was prepared, for the sake of his alliance in their common competition for the consulship, to defend his cause against Clodius, and only escaped the disgrace of appearing as his advocate by the charges themselves being dropped, as it would seem, by the venal accuser. But it was over the corrupt patrician youth that he exercised the most extraordinary ascendency. Through dissipation he led them into the darkest crimes. He taught them to depend upon him as a trusty associate in every wickedness, and whether in bilking a creditor or negotiating a loan, in planning a seduction or compassing a murder, his boldness and invention were never found to fail them. Catiline was their friend, their champion, and their idol. They vaunted his bodily strength and vigour, his address in bodily exercises, his iron frame which could endure alike the excesses of debauch and the rudest toils of war. He became the model of the youthful aspirants to fashionable distinction, which then demanded not only splendour in dress and furniture, but skill in the use of the sword and eminence in all martial accomplishments. But these exercises could not fail to have a brutalising effect; for they connected such as sought distinction in them with the slaves, criminals, and hired ruffians who fought in the arena. Such men, admired as consummate masters of their art, became the friends and companions of the young nobility, who drank with them one day in the wineshop, and shouted over their agonies in the theatre on the morrow.

The long career of conquest which Rome had enjoyed had tended to throw all her noblest energies into the sole profession of arms, which is naturally inclined above all others to measure excellence by success, and to confound virtue with valour. When the Roman returned from the wars for a short breathing time to his own country, he beheld few objects around him which were calculated to allay the fever of his excited imagination. His pride was fed by trophies and triumphs, by the retinue of captive slaves which attended him, by the spoils of conquered palaces which decorated his home. In the intervals of danger and rapine few cared to yield themselves to the vapid enjoyments of taste and literature, or could refrain from ridiculing the arts which had failed to save Greece from subjugation. The poets, historians, and philosophers of Rome were few in number, and exercised but a transient influence on a small circle of admirers. Nor were the habits of civil life such as to soften the brutal manners of the camp. The Romans knew nothing of the relations of modern society, in which the sexes mutually encourage each other in the virtues appropriate to each, and where ranks and classes mingle unaffectedly together under the shelter of a common civilisation. The Romans lived at first in castes, afterwards in parties; even in the public places there was little fusion or intercourse of ranks, while at home they domineered over their clients as patrons, their slaves as masters, their wives and children as husbands and fathers.

The instruction of boyhood was general in the upper ranks, but it was imparted by slaves, who corrupted the temper of their pupils far more than they improved their understanding; and when, already exhausted by premature indulgence, they were married while young from motives of convenience, they were found incapable of guiding and elevating their still more neglected consorts. The women were never associated in their husbands’ occupations, knew little of their affairs, and were less closely attached to their interests than even their bondmen. They seldom partook of their recreations, which accordingly degenerated for the most part into debauches. Systematically deprived of instruction, the Roman matron was taught indeed to vaunt her ignorance as a virtue. If in the first century B.C., those Sabine housewives were no longer to be found who shut themselves up in their apartments and spun wool among their handmaids, yet to exercise their intellects or cultivate their tastes passed almost for a crime. To know Greek and Latin books, to sing and dance, to make verses, to please with conversation,--these, in the opinion of the historian Sallust, were no better than seductive fascinations, such as formed the charm and fixed the price of the courtesan. Rarely therefore did any woman break through this mental bondage, without losing in character what she gained in intellect and attraction. In either case she was almost equally despised. The men’s indifference to the conduct of their spouses is a frightful feature in the social aspect of the times. Their language, it has been observed, had no word to express the sentiment of jealousy. The laws which gave them such facility of divorce show how little regard they had for the dearest interests of the married state; just as their common practice of adoption proves the weakness among them of the paternal sentiment.

Thus did the morose and haughty Roman stand isolated and alone in the centre of his family and of society around him; nor did he strive to exalt his moral nature by sympathy with the divinity above him. A century indeed had scarcely elapsed since Polybius had lauded the character of the Romans for the earnestness of its religious sentiment. Undoubtedly the moral sanctions of religion had at that time been strongly felt; the gods were actually regarded as the avengers of crime and the patrons of virtue. Even then however the principle of setting up the deity as a model for imitation, which alone is efficacious for elevating and purifying the soul, was unknown or disregarded. The coarse and sensuous pagans of Greece and Rome gloated over the wretched stories of lust and violence ascribed to the objects of their worship, and if they feared their power never dreamed of adoring their goodness or their justice. Their religious practices therefore were not moral actions, but merely adopted as charms to preserve them from the caprice or ill-nature of their divinities. From this debasing superstition even their strongest intellects could not wholly release themselves, while in the seventh century the vulgar at least were as devoutly addicted to it as at any former period. Indeed the general relaxation of positive belief in the minds of the educated class was accompanied, as is not unfrequently the case in the history of nations, by still more grovelling prostration on the part of the ignorant multitude.

THE CONSPIRACY

[Sidenote: [63 B.C.]]

Such a state of society already trembled on the verge of dissolution, and reflecting men must have shuddered at the frailness of the bands which still held it together, and the manifold energies at work for its destruction. Catiline’s designs, suspended for a moment, were ripening to another crisis; and the citizens pointed with horror to the victim of a guilty conscience, stalking through the streets with abrupt and agitated gait, his eyes bloodshot, his visage ashy pale, revolving in his restless soul the direst schemes of murder and conflagration. Involved in ruinous debt, his last hope of extrication had been the plunder of a province. The spoils of the prætorship had been wrested from him by the rapacity of his judges or his accuser, and access to the consulship was denied him. But his recent escape confirmed him in the assurance that he was too noble a culprit to be convicted; he scarcely deigned to veil his intrigues, while he solicited the aid of men of the highest families in the city. The young Roman prodigals invoked “new tables,” or a clear balance sheet; and it cannot be doubted that their aims were rather personal than political--that they yearned for the extinction of their debts first, and the division of public offices afterwards.

Among these conspirators were two nephews of Sulla. Autronius and Cassius had been candidates for the consulship; Bestia was a tribune elect; Lentulus and Cethegus, both members of the Cornelian house, were nobles of high distinction, though lost in character; even the consul Antonius was suspected of privity to their designs, and a secret inclination in their favour. They counted upon the support of the men who had been disgraced or impoverished by Sulla, and hoped to inflame the turbulence and lust of rapine which animated the dregs of the populace. They expected moreover the armed assistance of many of the disbanded veterans, who had already squandered, with the recklessness of fortunate adventurers, the possessions they had so suddenly acquired. They proposed to solicit and excite the hostile feelings towards their conquerors, still prevalent among the Italian races. Finally they resolved to seize the gladiators’ schools at Capua; and some of them would not have scrupled to arm a new insurrection of slaves and criminals. This last measure was the only enormity to which Catiline would not consent. He was urged to it more especially by Lentulus; and when a proposal so base was discovered in the handwriting of one of the Cornelii, it crowned the horror and indignation of the Roman people.

Meanwhile among the senatorial faction there were not wanting statesmen who watched the coming storm with secret satisfaction. Too much of their power, they felt, had been surrendered to their military patron, and they longed for an opportunity to resume it in his absence. They fretted at the contempt into which they had fallen; the consulship and pontificate had become the prey of any daring adventurers, the example of usurpation had now descended to mere cut-throats and robbers: they would check it once and forever by a single retribution: they would give the great Pompey himself to understand that they could save and rule the state without him. The marked progress of Cicero in general esteem formed an important element in their calculations. By placing him in the consul’s chair they hoped to secure him for their instrument, and to employ his zeal, his abilities, and his honest intentions in the great work they contemplated--the restoration of their own ascendency. At the instigation of these crafty advisers the nobles now joined with the people in promoting Cicero’s elevation. He had been prætor in the year 65, but he had refused to quit the glories of the Forum and the tribunals for the sordid emolument of a province. In the following year he was designated for the consulship by the general voice of the citizens, and the insignificance of Antonius, the colleague assigned to him, showed that to him alone all parties looked for the salvation of the state. During the early part of his career the new consul proposed various salutary measures, and devoted himself assiduously to the interests of the oligarchy with which he now first began to feel himself connected.

As the year 63 advanced the presumed schemes of Catiline withdrew attention from every other business, the conspirator only waiting for the issue of the consular comitia, at which he still pretended to seek a legitimate election. When his suit was once more rejected and Silanus and Murena chosen, he no longer meditated delay. One of his accomplices named Curius had betrayed the secret, if such it could still be called, to his mistress Fulvia; she had already communicated it to Cicero, and by his instructions obtained from her paramour every particular of the intended outbreak. The information was laid before the senate, and a decree was immediately passed, enjoining the consuls “to provide for the safety of the state!” But in the suppression of so formidable a conspiracy every step was hazardous. We have seen how illustrious were the names enlisted in it. The time had passed when the consul could venture, after the manner of an Ahala or an Opimius, to draw his sword, call the citizens to follow him, and rush boldly upon the men whom the senate had denounced as its foes. Though the nobles still claimed this power for their chief magistrate in the last resort, it contravened a principle which the people would never consent to surrender, which gave to every citizen accused of a capital crime the right of appealing to the tribes. Cæsar and Crassus, if not themselves connected with the conspirators, were doubtless on the watch to thwart the slightest stretch of prerogative against them. On the other hand the danger was becoming imminent. The conspirators had almost completed their preparations, and collected their magazines of arms. They had fixed the day for the intended outbreak, and assigned to each man his proper post and office. The veterans of Etruria, of Samnium, and Umbria, long since solicited by their emissaries, were flocking to their appointed rendezvous. The fleet in the port of Ostia was supposed to be gained, and insurrections were promised both in Africa and Spain. All the legions of the republic were with Pompey in the East, or dispersed in other provinces; the city itself was not defensible for a day, and even the fortresses on the Capitoline and Janiculum retained only the tradition of their ancient strength. Rome had neither a garrison nor a police; all her citizens were soldiers, and with no foreign enemy to fear she had neglected to provide against the dangerous ambition of her own children. At the moment concerted the various bodies of insurgents were to advance against her, and their accomplices within the city were to fire it in a hundred places.

Fortunately for the state, two proconsuls, Marcius Rex and Metellus Creticus, arrived at this moment from the East with some legionary forces, and awaited at the gates of the city the triumph which they demanded of the Senate. Marcius was immediately directed against Mallius, Catiline’s lieutenant in Etruria; Metellus was ordered to make head against the insurgents in Apulia. Some hasty levies were despatched at the same time to check the advance of the men of Picenum. Measures were promptly taken for removing the gladiators from Capua, and distributing them in small numbers among the neighbouring towns. Rome was placed, according to the modern phrase, in a state of siege. Citizens were enrolled and armed guards posted at the gates, the walls and streets patrolled; Cicero assumed command.

Both parties were equally ready for the encounter when the consul boldly summoned the arch conspirator to discover himself. On the 7th of November he had convened the senators in the temple of Jupiter Stator. Catiline appeared in his place: his fellow senators shrank from contact with him, and left a vacant space on the benches around him. Suddenly the consul rose, and poured forth the torrent of his indignant eloquence:

“How long then, Catiline, how long will you abuse our patience? What, are you quite unmoved by the guard which keeps night-watch on the Palatine, by the patrols of the city, by the consternation of the people, by the rushing of all good citizens together, by this fortress-temple in which the senate is assembled, by the fear and horror of the senators themselves? Think you that all your schemes are not open to us as the day? Alas for our times! alas for our principles! The senate knows the plot; the consul sees it--and the man still lives! Lives! did I say? Aye, and comes into the midst of us, partakes of our public councils, observes and marks us, one by one, for slaughter. And yet we, the consuls, who have received the senators’ last decree for the preservation of the state--we into whose hands has been thrust the sword of Scipio, of Opimius, of Ahala, still suffer it to sleep in its scabbard! Yes, I still wait, I still delay; for I wish you not to perish till you cease to find a citizen so perverse as to excuse or defend you. Then, and not till then, the sword shall descend upon you. Meanwhile live, as you now live, tracked by enemies, surrounded by guards; all our eyes and ears shall be fixed upon you as they long have been, and watch you when you think not of it. Renounce then your designs; they are discovered and frustrated. Shall I tell you what they were? Remember how on the 20th of October I announced that Manlius was to rise on the 27th; was I wrong? That the 28th was fixed for the massacre; was it not averted only by my vigilance? On the 1st of November would you not have seized Præneste, and did you not find it apprised and guarded? I track your deeds, I follow your steps, I know your very thoughts.

“Let me tell you whither you repaired last night. Was it not to the house of Læca? There you met your accomplices, you assigned them each their places--who should remain at Rome, who with yourself should quit it; you marked out the quarters to be fired: you only lingered still a moment because I still lived. Then two Roman knights offered to rid you of that anxiety, and to kill me in my bed before the dawn of the morrow. All this I discovered, almost ere your meeting was dissolved: I doubled my guards, I shut the door against the wretches whom you sent so early to salute me; aye, the same wretches whom I had already designated to many as the men who were coming to murder me. You call upon me to impeach you; you say you will submit to the judgment of the senators; you will go into exile if it be their pleasure. No, I will not impeach you; I will not subject myself to the odium of driving you into banishment; though if you wait only for their judgment, does not their silence sufficiently declare their sentiments? But I invite, I exhort you to go forth from the city! Go where your armed bands await you! join Manlius, raise your ruffians, leave the company of honest citizens, make war against your country! Yet why do I invite you to do that which you have already determined to do; for which the day is fixed, and every disposition made?”

And then turning to the senators the orator explained the meaning of this strange address. He dared not bring the criminal to justice: he had too many friends even in the senate itself; too many timid people would declare his guilt unproved; too many jealous people would object to rigorous measures, and call them tyrannical and regal. But as soon as he should actually repair to Mallius’ camp, there would no longer be room for doubt. The consul pledged his word from that moment to lay the proof of the conspiracy before them, to crush the movement, and to chastise the guilty. And in order to assure them that he could do so, he pointed to the knights, who at his bidding were crowding the area and steps of the temple, and listening in violent agitation at the door, ready at his word to dart upon his victim, and tear him in pieces before the eyes of the senate.

Catiline had kept his seat throughout this terrible infliction, agitated by rage and apprehension, yet trusting to the favour of his numerous connections, and relying on the stolid incredulity of the mass of the audience; for the habitual use of exaggerated invective had blunted the force of truth, and rendered the senators callous for the most part even to the most impassioned oratory. The appearance perhaps of the consul’s myrmidons, and the fear, not of any legal sentence, but of popular violence, at last made him start to his feet. He muttered a few broken sentences, in a tone of deprecation, appealing to his birth, rank, and aristocratic sentiments, in gage of his loyalty, and in contrast to the specious pretensions of the base-born foreigner, his accuser. But the senators, encouraged or awed by the presence of the knights, murmured and groaned around him, calling him an enemy and a parricide. Then at last losing all self-command, Catiline, rushed wildly out of the chamber, exclaiming: “Driven to destruction by my enemies, I will smother the conflagration of my own house in the ruin of the city.”

Catiline fled to his house, shut himself up alone, and for a moment deliberated. At nightfall he quitted the city and threw himself into the quarters of his armed adherents in Etruria. He left behind him instructions for his accomplices in the city, in which he charged them not to quit their posts, but watch their opportunity to assassinate the consul if possible, at all events to make all ready for a domestic outbreak as soon as his preparations should be complete for attacking the city from without. To Catulus, whom he regarded as a personal friend, or on whom he wished perhaps to throw the suspicions of the senators, he addressed a letter of exculpation, while he secured, as he said, his own personal safety in the ranks of a hostile army, recommending to his fidelity and friendship the care of his dearest interests. Cicero had reason to exult in the success of his first harangue, which cleared the way before him. Catiline had openly avowed himself a public enemy; but his associates still refused to disclose themselves; and the consul’s next step was to drive them, by similar threats and sarcasms, to an overt act of rebellion. But for the most part they remained firmly at their posts, as their leader had enjoined them. One youth, the son of a senator, quitted the city to join Catiline. His father, informed of his treason, pursued and arrested him, and caused his slaves to slay him upon the spot. But Lentulus, Cethegus, and Bestia continued still in Rome, sometimes threatening to impeach Cicero for the exile of a citizen without judgment pronounced, and meanwhile planning a general massacre of the magistrates during the approaching confusion of the Saturnalia. Cicero, served by a legion of spies, tracked all their movements; but he dared not strike, while still devoid of written proofs against them. The imprudence of the conspirators at last placed such documents in his hands.

There happened to be at the time in Rome certain envoys of the Allobroges, a Gallic people, who had long vainly sued for justice from the republic, under the cruel exactions to which they had been subjected by the government in the province. The wild mountaineers whose cause they pleaded had risen more than once to extort their claims by arms; their discontent, swelling under repeated disappointment, was ready once more to explode at any favourable opportunity, while the senate, full of more important and more alarming affairs, still treated them with contemptuous neglect. So favourable was the moment that the conspirators addressed the envoys through a citizen well known to them, named Umbrenus, disclosing their contemplated plan for the overthrow of the government, and offering them a dire revenge as the price of their nation’s assistance. They at once embraced the proposal and promised the aid of their countrymen. But presently, awed by their deep impression of the invincibility of the consuls and imperators, they sought the counsel of Fabius Sanga, the patron of their tribe in Rome. By him they were persuaded to reveal the negotiation to Cicero, who caused them to affect the deepest interest in the conspiracy, and to extract from the traitors a written engagement for the price of their alliance. Lentulus, Cethegus, and Statilius affixed both their names and seals to the document required. On receiving it the envoys quitted the city in company with Volturcius, one of the conspirators, deputed to conclude the negotiation with the Allobroges in their own country. The consul, kept duly informed of all their proceedings, caused them to be waylaid at the foot of the Milvian bridge, three miles beyond the gates, and they immediately surrendered their despatches. While this was in progress the consul summoned the chief conspirators into his presence. They came without mistrust; surrounding them with his lictors and archers, he led them directly to the senate. In the face of the assembled Fathers he produced the fatal letters; and the culprits, overwhelmed with confusion, acknowledged their guilt by their silence. Lentulus, who had fondly flattered himself on the strength of a reputed oracle of the Sibyls that, after Cinna and Sulla he should be the third Cornelius to reign in Rome, was compelled to abdicate the prætorship on the spot, and, placed with his associates in the custody of the most dignified senators, to await the decision of their fate.

Meanwhile, the examination being closed, Cicero addressed the people, who crowded in agitation and alarm around the doors of the curia, upon the rumour of the awful disclosures going on within. To the multitude the wary consul submitted no judicial proof of the culprit’s designs. He contented himself with declaring the evidence upon which they had been convicted to be their correspondence with Catiline, a public enemy, and their detected intercourse with the hostile Allobroges. This sufficed to brand them as pledged to succour an invader, to harbour him within the city, to deliver Rome to the fury of Etrurians and Gauls. But to prove their ulterior designs would have involved the discovery of the consul’s secret sources of information, it would have been unbecoming the dignity of the government, and inconsistent with the politic reserve of an aristocratic assembly.

CÆSAR AND THE CONSPIRACY

[Sidenote: [63-62 B.C.]]

The conspiracy thus critically arrested has been represented, in accordance with the evidence before us, as the work of mere private cupidity or ambition. But the ruling party sought to incriminate in it their public adversaries. They had already studied to implicate both Cæsar and Crassus in the presumed machinations of Catiline at an earlier period. They now repeated the effort with increased virulence, and Catulus himself was foremost in urging Cicero to produce testimony against Cæsar. Such testimony might doubtless have been suborned; loose surmises might at least have been construed into grave presumptions. But to such a project the consul steadily refused to lend himself. He was sensible perhaps that Cæsar’s popularity would in fact screen from justice every culprit associated with him, and in giving him the charge of Statilius, one of the criminals, Cicero openly declared himself convinced of his innocence. Indeed the great difficulty was still to be overcome, and the consul would not permit himself recklessly to enhance it. Nine of the conspirators had been denounced, five were convicted and confined; but the nature of their punishment yet remained for decision. The law of the republic, as interpreted at least by the patricians, invested the chief magistrate with power of life and death, on the senate issuing its ultimate decree. On this authority alone bold men had slain presumed criminals, and the senate had loudly applauded them.

But against such a stretch of prerogative the commons had always protested. They had resented such daring deeds, and retaliated them with violence. They had constantly appealed to the principle of Roman law, which forbade any citizen to be put to death except by a vote of the tribes. Nor could the tribes themselves, however sternly disposed, deprive a citizen, as long as he retained his rights as such, of liberty to evade sentence by voluntary exile. To the people, accordingly, Cicero could not venture to appeal, nor would he assume on the other hand the responsibility of acting on the mere decree of his own order. Hitherto, even while defying the spirit of the laws, he had scrupulously adhered to their forms. He had abstained from arresting the conspirators in their own houses, to avoid the violation of a citizen’s domicile. He had not given Lentulus in charge to his lictors; but had led him before the senate with his own hand, because none but a consul might put a prætor under restraint. Finally, he had caused the criminals to be declared _perduelles_, or public enemies, in order to strip them of the prerogatives of citizenship, before proceeding to their punishment. He now threw himself once more on the senate itself. He restored to the assembly the sword which it had thrust into his hands. The fathers met in the temple of Concord, the ground-plan of which may yet be traced under the brow of the Capitoline, and from the memorials still preserved to us, we may picture to ourselves a vivid representation of the debate which followed. While strong patrols traversed the streets, and the knights armed and in great multitudes surrounded the place of assembly, the consul-designate, Silanus, invited first to deliver his opinion, pronounced boldly for death. All the consulars, successively, followed on the same side. It seemed as if the meeting would have been unanimous, for Crassus had absented himself, and Cæsar, it might be thought, conscious of his own complicity or at least of the suspicions to which he was subjected, would desire to efface the stigma in the blood of the convicted traitors. But he, taking counsel only of his own boldness and spirit, of the claims of his party, and indeed of his own natural clemency, declared in a speech of remarkable power, for perpetual imprisonment, and with confiscation. He allowed indeed that the culprits were justly liable to the extreme penalty; but to free and high-minded men, degradation, he contended, was worse than death, which he dared to characterise as mere oblivion. This speech made a great impression upon the assembly. Those who were next asked their opinion voted one after the other with Cæsar.