Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett
considerable courage.
His quaestorship over, he was an assiduous senator, always the first to arrive in the morning at the Senate House and the last to leave, attending every session to ensure no corrupt measure could be debated without his being there to oppose it. But in 65 BC he resolved to take a reading holiday. He set off for his country estate, accompanied by a group of his favourite philosophers and several asses loaded down with books. The projected idyll – quiet reading and high-minded discussion in a bucolic setting – was aborted. On the road Cato met Metellus Nepos, brother-in-law and loyal supporter of Pompey. Learning that Nepos was on his way to Rome to stand for election as a tribune of the people, Cato decided that it was his duty to return forthwith and oppose him.
It was an edgy time in Rome. Two years previously, during Cato’s quaestorship, a group of influential men had plotted a coup d’état. The plot was aborted, but those suspected of instigating it were all still at liberty, all highly visible on the political scene. The ancient historians differ as to who they were. Sallust identifies the ringleader as Catiline, a charismatic, dangerous man whom Cicero credited with a phenomenal gift for corrupting others and a corresponding one for ‘stimulating his associates into vigorous activity’. Catiline was a glamorous figure: nineteen hundred years later Charles Baudelaire was to identify him, along with Alcibiades and Julius Caesar, as being one of the first and most brilliant of the dandies. Scandals clung to his name. He was said to have seduced a vestal virgin, even to have murdered his own stepson to please a mistress. His sulphurous reputation had not prevented him achieving the rank of praetor, but his first attempt to win the consulship was thwarted when he was accused of extortion. Sallust maintains that, prevented from attaining power by legitimate means, Catiline plotted to assassinate the successful candidates and make himself consul by force. Suetonius, on the other hand, asserts that the chief conspirators were Crassus and Caesar.
Crassus was a man some seventeen years older than Cato who had grown fabulously rich by profiting from others’ misfortunes. He had laid the foundations of his wealth at the time of Sulla’s proscriptions, buying up the confiscated property of murdered men at rock-bottom prices. He had multiplied it by acquiring burnt-out houses for next to nothing (in Rome, a cramped and largely wooden city, fires were frequent and widespread) and rebuilding them with his workforce of hundreds of specially trained slaves until he was said to own most of Rome. A genial host, a generous dispenser of loans and a shrewd patron of the potentially useful, he ensured that his money bought him immense influence. No one, he is reported to have said, could call himself rich until he was able to support an army on his income. He was one who could.
Julius Caesar was one of Crassus’ many debtors. Five years older than Cato and politically and temperamentally his opposite, he was already noted for his military successes, his sexual promiscuity and his fabulous munificence – all of which endeared him to the populace. As aedile in 65 BC, the year of the alleged conspiracy, he staged at his own expense a series of wild-beast hunts and games of unprecedented magnificence, filling the Forum with temporary colonnades and covering the Capitoline Hill with sideshows. In Alcibiades’ lifetime, Plato had warned ‘any politician who seeks to please the people excessively … is doing so only in order to establish himself as a tyrant’. Whether or not he was actually plotting sedition, Caesar was already one of the handful of men who threatened to destabilize the Roman state – as Alcibiades had once undermined the stability of Athens – simply by being too glittering, too popular, too great.
But though Catiline, Crassus and Caesar were all present in Rome when Cato returned in 63 BC to stand for election, it was Pompey whom the guardians of republican principles were watching most apprehensively. It was because Metellus Nepos was Pompey’s man that Cato had felt it so imperative to oppose him. Pompey had treated Cato graciously in Ephesus, but Cato was not the man to be won over by a display of good manners, however flattering. Cato was a legalist. His political philosophy was based on the premise that only by a strict and absolute adherence to the letter of the law could the Republic be preserved. Pompey’s entire career had been conducted in the law’s defiance.
When only twenty-three he had raised an army of his own and appointed himself its commander. When he returned triumphant from Spain in 71 BC he had insisted on being allowed to stand for consul – the highest office in the state – despite the fact that he was ten years too young and had held no previous elected office, and he had backed up his demand by bringing his legions menacingly close to the city. Sulla had drastically reduced the powers of the tribunes and enhanced those of the Senate. As consul in 70 BC, Pompey had reversed the balance. In subsequent years he had seen to it that a fair number of the tribunes were his supporters and he worked through them, as Caesar was to do later, to bypass the increasingly unhappy Senate and appeal directly to the electorate for consent to the expansion of his privileges and power.
In 66 BC a tribune had proposed and seen through a law granting Pompey extraordinary and unprecedented powers to rid the eastern Mediterranean of pirates. In the following year another tribune had proposed that he should be granted command of the campaign against Mithridates of Pontus (Sulla’s old adversary who had risen against Rome again). Military commands brought glory, which in turn brought popularity. They brought tribute money and ransoms and loot that could be used to buy power. Military commanders also had armies (which the Senate did not). Pompey had been spectacularly successful, both against the pirates and against Mithridates. There were plenty who remembered that he had begun his career as one of Sulla’s commanders, that it was Sulla who had named him ‘Pompey the Great’. And Sulla, who had returned from defeating Mithridates to make war on Rome itself, had set a terrible precedent. In 63 BC the senators awaited the return of their victorious general with mounting fear.
Cato and Metellus Nepos were both among those elected to hold office as tribunes in the following year. At once Cato resumed his role as self-appointed guardian of public morality, while simultaneously demonstrating how unable, and indeed unwilling, he was to act the wily politician. He accused one of his own political allies, the consul Murena, of bribery. He was almost certainly correct in doing so. The bribing of voters was so commonplace that Cato’s own refusal to practise it made him highly unpopular. But those who had assumed that Cato was their ally were exasperated. Cicero, the celebrated advocate and the other great luminary of the constitutionalist party, defended Murena (and got him off), remarking acidly in court that Cato had acted ‘as if he were living in Plato’s Republic, rather than among the dregs of Romulus’ descendants’ – a remark designed less to lament the imperfection of modern life than to reproach the incorruptible Cato for his political ineptitude.
Later that year, though, Cato got the chance to demonstrate that what he lacked in adroitness he made up for in passion and persuasiveness. For years he had been developing his powers of oratory, rigorously preparing himself for his calling, and he had, besides, two gifts worth more than any acquired rhetorical skill. One was an exceptionally powerful voice. It was loud and penetrating enough for him to be able to address enormous crowds, and he had trained and exercised it until he had the stamina and the lung power to speak all day at full volume. The other was ferocity. He is reported to have believed that political oratory was a discipline as ‘warlike’ as the defence of a city, and he put his theory into practice. His speeches were performances of thunderous belligerence, full of devastating energy, of aggression and of righteous rage. He was soon to have occasion to employ his talent.
Catiline had once more stood for election as consul and lost. Whether or not he had conspired against the state two years earlier, this time he certainly did. According to Sallust he bound his followers to him with a solemn ritual during which they were all required to drink from a cup full of human blood, and he prepared to lead an armed revolt.
Cicero was consul. He heard – from his wife, who had heard it from a female friend, who had heard it from her lover, who was one of Catiline’s fellow conspirators – that Catiline’s coup was imminent. Unable to act on such hearsay evidence, Cicero provided himself with a bodyguard of hired thugs and ostentatiously wore a breastplate in public, as though to announce that he knew he and his fellow officeholders were under threat and that he was ready to defend himself. Catiline, too, had his personal guard,