Chapter XXI: The Conspiracy of Catiline (2)

Among them was Quintus Cicero, the consul’s own brother; Silanus himself thought fit to explain away the sentiments he had just delivered in accordance with the last speaker. Cicero then rose to stem the current, and demonstrated with all his eloquence the impossibility of stopping at the point recommended by Cæsar after having gone so far, and both offended and alarmed so many dangerous enemies. But this appeal to the fears of the assembly rather increased than allayed their anxiety to escape from the immediate responsibility. Cicero’s real influence with them was never great. A master in the Forum, he was only a minister in the senate. There he was too generally regarded as a mere bustling politician, who used the means put into his hands by others for his own glory or advancement. The senators would have little heeded his counsel, had it not been reinforced by an energetic speech from Cato, who pronounced for the execution of the criminals in a tone of deep conviction and unflinching courage. Once more the audience was swayed round to the side of severity, and Cato’s influence was openly avowed by the language of the fatal decree itself, which was expressed in his own words. The knights, who waited impatiently for the result, were furious at the obstruction Cæsar had thrown in the way of justice, and when he appeared on the steps of the temple could hardly be restrained from assassinating him. Some of the younger senators carried him off in their arms, and among them C. Scribonius Curio was conspicuous for his spirit and courage.

The knights, it was said, had looked to Cicero for the signal to consummate their vengeance; but the consul had turned away. He was giving orders for the immediate execution of the senate’s decree, in order to prevent the interference of the tribunes, or a rescue by main force. He went in person to the house where Lentulus was detained on the Palatine, and brought him to the Tullianum, the prison under the Capitol, whither the prætors at the same time conducted the other criminals. The executioners were at hand. Lentulus was strangled first, and Cethegus, Gabinius, Statilius, and Ceparius suffered the same fate successively. When the consul, who had attended to the last, traversed the Forum on his route homeward, he exclaimed to the crowds through which he made his way, “They have lived,” and the people shuddered in silence.

Cicero had performed, as he well knew, an action, the fame of which must resound through all ages, and for the moment the head of the aspiring Arpinate swam with the conviction that his name was now linked indissolubly with the greatest crisis in the history of Rome. The execution took place on the 5th of December [Feb. 7th, 62] and he had yet another month of office before him, and Catiline was in arms in Etruria. While he turned from the contemplation of his own glory to finish his work, the nobles could dwell with grim satisfaction on an exploit, which proved, as they conceived, to them that they could defend themselves henceforth without the aid of a military chief. The patron they suspected and feared had withdrawn from their presence to collect his forces and assail their prerogative from a distance. He had left them exposed to the attacks of the Marians, whose courage had revived in his absence. But, trusting in themselves alone, they had checked opposition, crushed sedition, and strangled revolution. Should the survivors appeal, on his return to Pompey, they at once threw down the gauntlet and defied the commander of their own legions. We shall see how rash their hot-brained courage was, and how soon they cooled in the presence of the avenger whom they had evoked. But those among them who already apprehended his calling them to account, were prepared at least to make a sacrifice of Cicero, assured that he would accept the victim and pardon the offence.

The successes of the generals of the senate had doubtless inspired Cicero with confidence to accomplish the act, which he regarded as the eternal glory of his consulate, and the salvation of his country. The presence of the troops of the republic had repressed the movements of insurrection in every quarter. In Etruria alone was the resistance serious and obstinate. Cicero had purchased the co-operation of his colleague Antonius, whose vacillation had given confidence to the conspirators, by ceding to him the province of Macedonia. He had placed him at the head of the troops destined to act against Catiline in person; but he had furnished him with firmer and more faithful lieutenants in Sextius and Petreius. While this army covered Rome, another under Metellus occupied the Cisalpine, and cut off the rebel’s communications with his Gallic allies. Catiline had assembled twenty thousand men, but only one-quarter of this number were regularly equipped. Menaced both in front and rear he turned alternately from the one opponent to the other, and was trying to shake the loyalty of Antonius, when the news of the death of his associates threw him into despair. He was now assured that the senate would never retreat from its position, and even the gaining of Antonius could only postpone by a few days the ruin which must eventually overwhelm him. His men too deserted from him by whole cohorts, and he soon found himself at the head of no more than four thousand followers. He attempted to penetrate the Apennines, and evading the forces of Metellus, gain the Alps and excite an insurrection in Gaul. But the defiles were closed against him, and again he threw himself on Antonius. The consul himself affected sickness and entrusted his legions to Petreius. The armies met not far from Pistoria.[b]

Catiline, when he saw that he was surrounded by mountains and by hostile forces, that his schemes in the city had been unsuccessful, and that there was no hope either of escape or of succour, thinking it best, in such circumstances, to try the fortune of a battle, resolved upon engaging as speedily as possible with Antonius. Having, therefore, assembled his troops, he addressed them in the following manner:

“I am well aware, soldiers, that words cannot inspire courage; and that a spiritless army cannot be rendered active, or a timid army valiant, by the speech of its commander. Whatever courage is in the heart of a man, whether from nature or from habit, so much will be shown by him in the field; and on him whom neither glory nor danger can move, exhortation is bestowed in vain; for the terror in his breast stops his ears.

“I have called you together, however, to give you a few instructions, and to explain to you at the same time my reasons for the course which I have adopted. You all know, soldiers, how severe a penalty the inactivity and cowardice of Lentulus has brought upon himself and us; and how, while waiting for reinforcements from the city, I was unable to march into Gaul. In what situation our affairs now are, you all understand as well as myself. Two armies of the enemy, one on the side of Rome, and the other on that of Gaul, oppose our progress; while the want of corn and of other necessaries prevents us from remaining, however strongly we may desire to remain, in our present position. Whithersoever we would go, we must open a passage with our swords. I conjure you, therefore, to maintain a brave and resolute spirit; and to remember, when you advance to battle, that on your own right hands depend riches, honour, and glory, with the enjoyment of your liberty and of your country. If we conquer, all will be safe; we shall have provisions in abundance; and the colonies and corporate towns will open their gates to us. But if we lose the victory through want of courage, those same places will turn against us; for neither place nor friend will protect him whom his arms have not protected. Besides, soldiers, the same exigency does not press upon our adversaries, as presses upon us; we fight for our country, for our liberty, for our life; they contend for what but little concerns them, the power of a small party.

“We might, with the utmost ignominy, have passed the rest of our days in exile. Some of you, after losing your property, might have waited at Rome for assistance from others. But because such a life to men of spirit was disgusting and unendurable, you resolved upon your present course. If you wish to quit it you must exert all your resolution, for none but conquerors have exchanged war for peace. To hope for safety in flight, when you have turned away from the enemy the arms by which the body is defended, is indeed madness. In battle, those who are most afraid are always in most danger; but courage is equivalent to a rampart.

“When I contemplate you, soldiers, and when I consider your past exploits, a strong hope of victory animates me. Your spirit, your age, your valour, give me confidence--to say nothing of necessity, which makes even cowards brave. To prevent the numbers of the enemy from surrounding us, our confined situation is sufficient. But should Fortune be unjust to your valour, take care not to lose your lives unavenged; take care not to be taken and butchered like cattle, rather than, fighting like men, to leave to your enemies a bloody and mournful victory.”[102]

When he had thus spoken, he ordered, after a short delay, the signal for battle to be sounded, and led down his troops, in regular order, to the level ground. Having then sent away the horses of all the cavalry, in order to increase the men’s courage by making their danger equal, he himself on foot, drew up his troops suitably to their numbers and the nature of the ground. As a plain stretched between the mountains on the left, with a rugged rock on the right, he placed eight cohorts in front, and stationed the rest of his force, in close order, in the rear. From among these he removed all the ablest centurions, the veterans, and the stoutest of the common soldiers that were regularly armed, into the foremost ranks.

On the other side, Caius Antonius, who, being lame, was unable to be present in the engagement, gave the command of the army to Marcus Petreius, his lieutenant-general. Petreius ranged the cohorts of veterans, which he had raised to meet the present insurrection, in front, and behind them the rest of his force in lines. Then, riding round among his troops, and addressing his men by name, he encouraged them, and bade them remember that they were to fight against unarmed marauders, in defence of their country, their children, their temples, and their homes. Being a military man, and having served with great reputation, for more than thirty years, as tribune, prefect, lieutenant, or prætor, he knew most of the soldiers and their honourable actions, and, by calling these to their remembrance, roused the spirits of the men.

When he had made a complete survey, he gave the signal with the trumpet, and ordered the cohorts to advance slowly. The army of the enemy followed his example; and when they approached so near that the action could be commenced by the light-armed troops, both sides, with a loud shout, rushed together in a furious charge. They threw aside their missiles, and fought only with their swords. The veterans, calling to mind their deeds of old, engaged fiercely in the closest combat. The enemy made an obstinate resistance; and both sides contended with the utmost fury. Catiline, during this time, was exerting himself with his light troops in the front, sustaining such as were pressed, substituting fresh men for the wounded, attending to every exigency, charging in person, wounding many an enemy, and performing at once the duties of a valiant soldier and a skilful general.

When Petreius, contrary to his expectation, found Catiline attacking him with such impetuosity, he led his prætorian cohort against the centre of the enemy, amongst whom, being thus thrown into confusion, and offering but partial resistance, he made great slaughter, and ordered, at the same time, an assault on both flanks. Manlius and the Fæsulan, sword in hand, were among the first that fell; and Catiline, when he saw his army routed, and himself left with but few supporters, remembering his birth and former dignity, rushed into the thickest of the enemy, where he was slain, fighting to the last.

When the battle was over, it was plainly seen what boldness, and what energy of spirit, had prevailed throughout the army of Catiline; for, almost everywhere, every soldier, after yielding up his breath, covered with his corpse the spot which he had occupied when alive. A few, indeed, whom the prætorian cohort had dispersed, had fallen somewhat differently, but all with wounds in front. Catiline himself was found, far in advance of his men, among the dead bodies of the enemy; he was not quite breathless, and still expressed in his countenance the fierceness of spirit which he had shown during his life. Of his whole army, neither in the battle, nor in flight, was any free-born citizen made prisoner, for they had spared their own lives no more than those of the enemy.

Nor did the army of the Roman people obtain a joyful or bloodless victory; for all their bravest men were either killed in the battle, or left the field severely wounded.

Of many who went from the camp to view the ground, or plunder the slain, some, in turning over the bodies of the enemy, discovered a friend, others an acquaintance, others a relative; some, too, recognised their enemies. Thus, gladness and sorrow, grief and joy, were variously felt throughout the whole army.[d]

While the generals of the republic were still hunting the common enemy in the Apennines, and even before the execution of Lentulus, the leaders of the senate had been quarrelling among themselves, as if they had no one to fear either within or without the city. The election of consuls for the ensuing year had fallen upon D. Junius Silanus and L. Licinius Murena. We have seen that Catiline had presumed to offer himself; but a worthier candidate, the great jurist Sulpicius, was also disappointed, and resenting the notorious bribery employed by his rivals, had rushed to prosecute Murena. Bribery there had been probably on all sides, and Rome could ill afford at such a moment to waste her energies in a private squabble. Cicero, intent upon his schemes for the frustration of the conspiracy, could not endure that the public attention should be withdrawn to the miserable intrigues of the rival candidates, and stepped forward to defend Murena. But Cato, insensible to every argument from expediency, and unable to see two sides of any question, supported the suit of the accuser with headlong pertinacity. A part of Cicero’s speech was directed to undermine the influence of so virtuous an advocate. “Would you know, judges, what sort of person a sage of the Porch is? He concedes nothing to favour, he never pardons. Compassion, he says, is frivolousness and folly; the wise only are beautiful, though crooked and deformed; he only is rich though a beggar, a lord though a slave; but we, he declares, who are no sages, are no better than runaways, outlaws, enemies, and madmen. All faults, he affirms, are equal; every error is a heinous sin; to wring a fowl’s neck without just reason is as bad as to strangle one’s father. The wise man never doubts, never repents, is never deceived, can never change his mind.” And in this strain he continued to the infinite amusement of his audience, who were well pleased to hear the philosopher bantered. Cato joined good-humouredly in the laugh. “How witty a consul we possess,” was the only remark he made. Nor did he afterwards retain any feeling of displeasure against the orator who both defeated his prosecution and turned him into ridicule.[103]

THE RISE OF JULIUS CÆSAR

[Sidenote: [62 B.C.]]

In the midst of their contentions amongst themselves for the highest magistracy, the nobles had allowed Cæsar to obtain the prætorship, the second rank in the scale of office. Pompey had despatched one of his creatures, Metellus Nepos, from Asia to secure one place in his interest on the bench of tribunes. Cato had refused to be nominated to another; and he was journeying into Lucania to avoid the turmoil of the elections, in which he declined to take a part, when he met the Pompeian candidate on the road, and learned the object of his return. He now felt it incumbent upon him, as a true patriot, to watch and check the intrigues of the dangerous proconsul. Hastily retracing his steps, he presented himself to the people for election, and obtained a seat in the tribunate in conjunction with Metellus and others. Jealousies, suspicions, and preparations for violence were rife on all sides. The people were alarmed for the safety of their favourite Cæsar, and after the execution of Lentulus, when he was once detained longer than usual in the senate, surrounded the curia with hostile cries, insisting on his being produced to satisfy them of his safety. The Marian chief indeed was himself far from daunted. He laughed to scorn the new-born courage of the nobles. On the 1st of January the chief men and dignitaries of the state were wont to ascend the Capitol, and there offer their greetings to the new consuls. Cæsar, however, instead of assisting in this act of official courtesy, took advantage of the absence of his colleagues and rivals to address the people in the Forum, and to propose that Catulus should be deprived by their vote of the honours due to him as restorer of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. Since its destruction by fire in the time of Sulla, it had taken twenty years to rebuild that august edifice, the glory of the city and the empire; and the work had now been brought to completion by Catulus, to whom, as prince of the senate, the most dignified of all the citizens, that honourable duty had been assigned. Catulus might now expect that his name, as the restorer of the structure, should be engraved upon its front; and no noble Roman would fail to prize such a commemoration of his services as dearly as a consulship or a triumph. Cæsar now charged him with peculation, and insisted on the production of his accounts; meanwhile, he urged the people to resolve that the final consummation of the work should be transferred to Pompey. But the nobles, on hearing what was passing, rushed from the presence of the consuls with all their friends and adherents into the Forum, and succeeded in averting the blow. The name of Lutatius Catulus was duly inscribed upon the proudest monument of the national pride, and bore witness to the glory of the most blameless hero of the later commonwealth, till the temple was again destroyed in the wars of Vitellius and Vespasian.

Nor was this the only defiance hurled against the senate on that memorable day. Nepos, the tribune, had put himself in communication with Cæsar, and combined with him to insult the dominant faction, even in the moment of its victory. The execution of the conspirators had already been denounced as a murder, ere the echoes had died away of the shouts amidst which it had been perpetrated. Cicero, on resigning the fasces, presented himself to harangue the people, and detail the events of his consulship. It was a proud day for him, and he was prepared to enjoy it. But Nepos abruptly interposed: “The man,” he said, “who condemned our fellow-citizens unheard, shall not be listened to himself”; and he required him to confine himself to the customary oath, that he had done nothing contrary to the laws. “I swear,” exclaimed Cicero, “that I have saved the state.” The nobles shouted applause: Cato hailed him as “the father of his country”; and the general acclamations of the people overwhelmed every opposing whisper. The nobles were elated by the unaccustomed sounds of popular applause; but Nepos threatened the recall of Pompey, ostensibly to oppose Catiline, who was still in arms, but really to bear down the free act of the senate. Cato vowed that while he lived no such rogation should pass. A scuffle ensued in which Cato proceeded to actual violence; his colleague declared his sanctity violated, and fled to his patron’s camp. The senate declared his office vacant (for the tribune was forbidden by law to quit the city); and at the same time suspended Cæsar from his functions.

The prætor refused to quit his tribunal till compelled by a military force, whereupon he dismissed his lictors, divested himself of the ensigns of office, and retired with dignity to his pontifical dwelling. The populace now assembled to avenge the insult cast upon their favourite. A riot ensued, which compelled the consuls to retrace their steps, not without obsequious expressions of respect and deference towards him. Cicero had become already sobered from the intoxication of his recent triumph. The cold distance Pompey observed towards his party mortified and alarmed him. Crassus loudly accused him of having calumniated him, and the enmity of Crassus was not to be despised. Finally a tribune had just seemed to menace him with impeachment, notwithstanding the decree of the senate which had forbidden any action to be brought against those who had aided in the punishment of the conspirators. These resentments the discreet consular now studied to allay. He sought to appease Crassus; he proclaimed aloud the zeal which Cæsar had displayed in being the first, as he attested, to disclose to him Catiline’s machinations; and he who had lately exclaimed, “Let arms give place to the gown,” now prostrated himself before Pompey, whom he exalted above Scipio, begging only for himself the humble place of a Lælius. He even sought allies for himself among the accomplices of Catiline. P. Sulla, one of the conspirators, was defended by Cicero, and acquitted in the face of manifest proofs. The orator struggled to maintain that union between the two privileged orders of the commonwealth, the senators and knights, the cherished aim of his policy, which seemed at last to be accomplished on the steps of the temple of Concord. But when the nobles spurned the knights haughtily from them; when Cato, reckless of the misery of the provincials, repulsed the prayer of the publicans of Asia, who sought relief from their contract with the treasury, on account of the deep impoverishment of the revenues they had undertaken to farm, insisting that they should be held to the strict letter of their bargain; when the chasm between the two orders seemed once more to open before his eyes, having now to choose between the class to which he belonged by birth and natural sympathies and that to which his genius had exalted him, Cicero weakly threw himself upon the former, and proclaimed himself the creature of the aristocracy which despised him. The concessions he had made came too late to save either himself or them. The friends of Catiline still devoted him to their direst revenge; the demagogues lashed the people into fury against him; Cæsar smiled at his mistakes, while Crassus scarcely disguised the rancour of his hate under the veil of frigid courtesy.

The nobles committed indeed no greater error than when they inflamed the enmity of Crassus by divulging their suspicions of him, and at the same time shrank from disarming it by force. Assuredly they should have made him their friend, and this they might have done perhaps at a trifling sacrifice of their vanity. Crassus was liked by none, but few could afford to despise him; while his ambition might have been kept within bounds by the concession of legitimate honours and dignities, and the show of listening to his counsels. At the moment when Pompey was passing over to the people, Crassus might have been retained on the side of the oligarchy from which he had never wholly estranged himself. His immense riches, the sources of which lay close at hand, gave him clients in the senate as well as among the knights: his slaves, his freedmen, his debtors and his tenants constituted an army in the heart of the city, to sway the debates of the Forum and overawe its seditions. But when the nobles refused to support him in his suit for the consulship, they drove him to league himself with his popular competitor Pompey: when they denounced him as a confederate of Catiline, they threw him into the arms of Cæsar. By lending money to the Marian spendthrift, Crassus thought that he made him his own; but in fact he bound himself to the fortunes of his rival, from whose entire success he could alone hope to be repaid.

Cæsar’s suspension from his prætorship had only served to attach his party more closely to him; an incident soon occurred by which it was hoped to sow discord between them. P. Clodius, the corrupt accuser of Catiline, a turbulent intriguer like so many members of his house, had ingratiated himself with the people by his popular manners. This beardless youth, already alike notorious for his debts and his gallantries, had introduced himself into Cæsar’s house in female attire during the celebration of the rites of the Bona Dea, which should have been studiously guarded from male intrusion. A servant-maid discovered him and uttered a cry of alarm; the mysteries were hastily veiled and the intruder expelled; but the assembled matrons rushing hastily home revealed each to her husband the scandal and the sin. The nobles affected grave alarm; the pontiffs were summoned and consulted, and the people duly informed of the insult offered to the deity. As chief of the sacred college, Cæsar could not refrain from lending himself to the general clamour; but his position was delicate. On the one hand the presumed delinquent was an instrument of his own policy, while on the other his own honour and that of his wife Pompeia were compromised by the offence.[104] He disappointed everybody. He divorced his wife, not because she was guilty, but because “the wife of Cæsar,” as he said, “should be above suspicion.” But he refused to countenance the measures which the consuls took, by direction of the senate, for the conviction of the reputed culprit; and it may be suspected that the money with which Clodius bribed his judges was a loan negotiated with Crassus by Cæsar himself. Cicero for his part had been lukewarm in an affair, the barefaced hypocrisy of which he was perhaps too honourable to countenance; but, urged by his wife Terentia, a violent woman who meddled much in his affairs, and was jealous at the moment of a sister of the culprit, he clearly disproved his allegation of absence from the city, and thus embroiled himself, to no purpose, with an able and unscrupulous enemy. The senate believed their cause gained; the proofs indeed were decisive, and they had assigned at their own request a military guard to the judges to protect them from the anticipated violence of a Clodian mob; but to their consternation, on opening the urns, the votes for an acquittal were found to be thirty-one opposed to twenty-five. “You only demanded a guard, then,” exclaimed Catulus with bitter irony, “to secure the money you were to receive.” Cicero attributed to Crassus the scandal of this perversion of justice; the nobles sneered at the corruption of the knights, and the gulf which separated the two orders yawned more widely than ever.

THE RETURN OF POMPEY

[Sidenote: [62-61 B.C.]]

The profanation of the mysteries had occurred in December of the year 62, but the Clodian process, retarded by various intrigues, did not take place for some months. Meanwhile, before the end of January, Pompey had returned from the East, and reached the gates of the city. He appeared there as an imperator, to solicit a triumph, at the head of a small detachment of his legionaries; but no sooner had he touched land at Brundusium than he had dismissed the mass of his victorious army, with the promise of estates which he made no doubt of obtaining for them from the senate. All parties were in anxious expectation of the use he would make of his power in quelling the feuds of the city, and some perhaps apprehended that he would extinguish the legitimate powers themselves from the perversion of which they sprang. All were amazed at the generosity or arrogance with which he divested himself of the support of his soldiers, and trusted to the glory of his name for maintaining his ascendency in the commonwealth. The senators indeed regarded it as a weakness, and presumed that their adversary cowered under the imposing attitude they had assumed. The laws forbade him to enter the city while he yet retained the military command, but both the senate and the people held meetings in the Field of Mars to hear him recount his exploits, and to collect from his own mouth the policy he proposed to adopt. Of his own actions he spoke magniloquently; but when he touched on domestic affairs his language was studiously moderate and conciliatory. He declared his deep respect for the great council of the nation; but withheld a word of approval of their recent or their pending measures. In order to draw him out Crassus was induced to utter an encomium on Cicero’s conduct in his consulship; and upon that hint, Cicero himself rose to improve the occasion, and enlarged with his usual copious rhetoric on the dangers from which he had saved the state. He spoke, as he alone could speak, of the dignity of the senate, the loyalty of the knights, the favour of the Italians, the paralysis of every element of disaffection, the cheapness of provisions, the security of the commonwealth. The senate responded to the speaker’s satisfaction; it was the crowning day of Cicero’s vanity, yet one triumph was wanting to it--Pompey would not be drawn into any indication of his views.

Pompey seems to have held himself aloof from the proceedings relative to Clodius. Cæsar was also anxious to extricate himself from them, and the expiration of his prætorship had opened to him an honourable retreat in the province of the Further Spain. But there were two impediments in his way; the one lay in the deep embarrassment of his debts; the other was a decree of the senate, passed on purpose to retain him at home, by which the magistrates were forbidden to go to their provinces before the decision of the Clodian process. Cæsar’s private means had been long exhausted. The friends who had continued to supply his necessities had seemed to pour their treasures into a bottomless gulf; so vast was his expenditure in shows, canvasses, and bribes; so long and barren the career of public service through which this ceaseless profusion had to be maintained. At this period when the bold gamester was about to throw his last die, he could avow, that he wanted 250,000,000 sesterces (above £2,000,000 or $10,000,000) to be “worth nothing.” Before he could enter on the administration of his province he had pressing creditors to satisfy, and expensive preparations to make. Every other resource had been drained, but Cæsar could apply to Crassus for a loan. The wealthiest of the Romans hated the Great Captain who had just returned to the city, and he saw in Cæsar the readiest instrument for lowering his estimation. He held in pawn the treasures of Iberia. The sum required was 830 talents (£200,000) and this was placed at once in Cæsar’s hands. With the other impediment the proprietor ventured to deal in a more summary manner. He had reason to apprehend that a scheme was in contemplation to retain him at home by a political impeachment; but he knew that once at the head of his legions his foes would not dare recall him, and he trusted to reap such a harvest both of treasure and reputation as would screen him from the effects of their malice on his return.

The evasion of Cæsar and the escape of Clodius mortified the senate, which wreaked its sullen humour on Pompey by delaying the official ratification of his acts, and the satisfaction of his veterans. It had conceded the honour of a triumph to Lucullus in spite of the impediments opposed thereto by his successor in the eastern command, and still more recently, by conferring a similar distinction on Metellus, together with the surname of Creticus, it had expressed its approbation of the conduct of the very general against whom Pompey had made war for disobedience to his orders. Now that the conqueror of Mithridates had himself returned to claim the last reward of military prowess, it seems to have harassed him with mortifying delays, for it was not till the end of September, nine months after his return to Rome, that his triumph was actually celebrated. Meanwhile he had been compelled to intrigue for the election of a creature of his own to the consulship; and while he thus bought the interest of Afranius, a weak and frivolous friend, he was mortified by the appointment of Metellus Celer, a decided enemy, as his colleague. His vanity was perhaps in some measure indemnified by the glories of his triumph, which lasted two days, amidst a display of spoils and trophies such as Rome had never before witnessed. The proconsul boasted that he had conquered twenty-one kings, and that Asia, which he had found the farthest province of the empire, he had left its centre. Banners borne in the procession announced that he had taken 800 vessels, 1000 fortresses and 900 towns; thirty-nine cities he had either founded or restored; he had poured 20,000 talents (about £5,000,000 sterling) into the treasury, and nearly doubled the national revenues. Above all he plumed himself, says Plutarch, on having celebrated his third triumph over a third continent. For though others before him had triumphed three times, Pompey by having gained his first over Libya, his second over Europe, and this the last over Asia, seemed in a manner to have brought the whole world within the sphere of his conquests.

But on descending from his chariot the hero found himself alone in the city in which he had once been attended by such crowds of flatterers and admirers. Lucullus, stimulated beyond his wont by the presence of his rival, attacked his conduct in every particular; the senate was cold or hostile; even Cicero discovered that his idol was formed of ordinary clay. When the new consuls entered on their office Afranius was no match for his far abler colleague, and the ratification of the proconsul’s acts was still petulantly withheld. Pompey had disposed of crowns, he had made and unmade kingdoms, he had founded municipal commonwealths, in short he had regulated everything at his sovereign pleasure, from the Ægean to the Red Sea. It concerned his honour to show to his friends and foes throughout the East, that he was not less powerful in the city than he had pretended to be in the camp. He demanded a public ratification, full, prompt, and unquestioning. But Lucullus, supported by Cato, demanded that each separate act should be separately discussed. Such a method of proceeding could not fail to result in numerous checks and mortifications to him; even the delay would suffice to show that he had fallen from his vaunted supremacy. Pompey chose rather to forego altogether the formal ratification of arrangements which he knew were not likely to be in fact disturbed. At the same time he instructed a tribune named Flavius to demand lands for his veterans. Cato and Metellus again opposed him; then violence ensued, and the tribune complaining that his sanctity was profaned, dragged the consul to prison. The senate insisted upon sharing the insult offered to its chief, and Pompey, ashamed of the insolence of his own creature, gave way once more, and withdrew his demands for a more favourable opportunity. But he was deeply chagrined at the treatment he had experienced, which dishonoured him in the eyes of his soldiers and of all Asia. Then, too late, he began perhaps to regret the disbanding of his legions. Repulsed by the nobles he betook himself once more to the people, and sought by popular arts to revive the prestige of his arms. But the first place in their regards was no longer vacant. Cæsar was securely lodged in their hearts, and with him the newcomer must be content to share a divided empire.[b]

FOOTNOTES

[102] [Of course, this is not Catiline’s speech; Sallust[d] composed it in order to represent what under the circumstances Catiline might appropriately have said to his troops. Most speeches found in the ancient historians are of a similar character; few of them have been drawn from documents.]

[103] [Compare the words of Velleius Paterculus,[e] “To praise Cato for his honesty would be rather derogatory to him than otherwise; but to accuse him of ostentatiously displaying it would be just.”]

[104] [According to Appian,[f] when Clodius had invaded the rites of the Bona Dea “he had laid a blemish upon the chastity of Cæsar’s wife.”]