Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett
of criminals and reprobates of every kind’. The situation was doubly dangerous. The prospect of an uprising was alarming in itself. Even worse, to Cato and like-minded senators, was the probability that Pompey would use it as a pretext for bringing his legions back to Italy and marching on Rome – ostensibly to suppress the revolt, in fact to seize power for himself. It was among the most essential provisions of the Roman constitution that no army should ever be brought into Rome, and that a military leader must lay aside his command (and the legal immunity it gave him) before entering the city. When in Rome, all Romans were civilians and subject to the law. Sulla had breached that rule, with terrible consequences for the Republic. There was a real prospect that Pompey, Sulla’s protégé, might follow his lead.
In October there was an uprising in Etruria. In November an armed gang attempted to force their way into Cicero’s house before dawn, apparently to assassinate him, but were driven off by his guards. In an atmosphere of mounting panic rumours circulated that the conspirators intended to burn the city to the ground. The Senate declared a state of emergency, but still there was no concrete evidence against anyone. Catiline defiantly took his seat in the Senate. No one would sit next to him. Shortly afterwards he left to join the rebels in the countryside. At last a letter was intercepted naming the leading conspirators. On 3 December the five of them who were still in Rome were arrested.
What was to be done with them? Two days later the Senate met in a temple on the edge of the Forum. Outside were crowds whose shouts and murmurs could be heard from within the chamber, crowds that included many of Catiline’s supporters. Around the building, and in all the other temples in the Forum, were stationed Cicero’s armed guard. It was a dangerous and solemn occasion. The first speakers all demanded ‘the extreme penalty’, clearly meaning death. Then came the turn of Julius Caesar.
Caesar’s speech on that momentous December day was elegant, tightly argued, and – given that he himself was widely suspected of having instigated the earlier plot and of complicity in the current one – coolly audacious. Summary execution was illegal, he argued. The conspirators deserved punishment, but to kill them without legal sanction would be to set a dangerous precedent. He advocated life imprisonment ‘under the severest terms’ instead. So persuasive was he (and so intimidating) that all the following speakers endorsed his opinion, and of those who had spoken earlier several abjectly claimed that by the ‘extreme penalty’ they had meant not execution, but precisely the kind of sentence Caesar was now recommending. The outcome of the debate seemed certain. At this point, very late in the proceedings because senators spoke in order of seniority and he was one of the youngest and lowest ranking, Cato intervened.
His speech was electrifying. Caesar had been suave: Cato was enraged. With the furious probity of a Saint-Just he denounced the pusillanimous senators. Sarcastic and passionate by turn, he sneered at them – ‘You, who have always valued your houses, villas, statues and paintings more highly than our country’ – and fiercely drove them on: ‘Now in the name of the immortal gods I call upon you … Wake up at last and lay hold of the reins of the state!’ He mocked, he ranted, he painted a luridly dramatic picture of the dangers besetting the commonwealth. Finally, with awful solemnity, he demanded that the conspirators be put to death. The potency of his performance was demonstrated by its effect. When he had finished the senators, one after another, rose and went to stand beside him to signal their agreement.
Caesar, who only minutes before had held the assembly in his hand, was left isolated. For once losing his famous imperturbability, Caesar protested furiously. There was a fracas, during which (according to some sources) Cato accused Caesar of complicity with the conspirators. Cicero’s guard intervened, drawing their swords. Caesar was nearly killed in the ensuing mêlée. Eventually some kind of order was restored. Caesar left. The Senate stood firm behind Cato. The conspirators were led, one by one, across the Forum, through the agitated crowd (which included some of their confederates) to the place of punishment. There, in an underground chamber ‘hideous and fearsome to behold’, they were strangled. A few weeks later Catiline himself was killed in battle.
So began the essential drama of Cato’s life. ‘For a long time,’ wrote Sallust, ‘no one at all appeared in Rome who was great. But within my own memory there have been two men of towering merit, Cato and Caesar.’ Two thousand years on Caesar is by far the more celebrated of the two – thanks in part to his skilful fostering of his own fame, in part to our culture’s infatuation with military conquest. But to those who knew them, the two looked evenly matched – a comparable pair of brilliantly gifted men. They clashed for the first time in the debate over the conspirators’ sentence. From that day until his death seventeen years later Cato was to remain Caesar’s most inveterate political opponent.
Each of them was the prime representative of one of two tendencies in Roman political life (to call them parties would be to suggest a degree of cohesiveness notably absent from the political scene). Cato was to become the most eloquent spokesman of the Optimates, Caesar the most successful of the Populares. Optimates and Populares alike were oligarchs drawn from the same exclusive group of rich and well-descended Romans; but they differed in the ways in which they played the complicated political system of the Republic. The Populares were soldiers and empire-builders, or their clients and admirers, who tended to bypass the Senate by enlisting the support of the tribunes and through them of the electorate at large. Like Alcibiades, they were aristocratic populists, distrusted by their peers but adored by an electorate to whom they offered the violent excitement and huge potential profits of warfare. The Optimates – civilians at heart – were the defenders of the power of the Senate, and sticklers for the rules designed to uphold the senators’ dignity and, most importantly, to ensure that military commanders were prevented from using their armies to seize personal power.
Within a week of the executions of the Catilinarian conspirators the new tribunes, Cato and Metellus Nepos among them, took office, and so did Caesar as praetor. At once Nepos fulfilled Cato’s worst fears by proposing that Pompey, his patron, be recalled to Rome with his legions ‘to restore order’. When Nepos’ proposal was discussed in the Senate Caesar supported it, but Cato raged against it with such vehemence that some observers thought he was out of his mind. As a tribune he had the right to veto the measure and he announced that he would do so, swearing passionately ‘that while he lived Pompey should not enter the city with an armed force’.
It was no empty piece of rhetoric. It was widely believed that the Populares would have Cato prevented by whatever means were necessary, up to and including murder, from blocking their way. He would have to declare his veto formally the following day, when the people would be asked to vote on the measure in the Forum. That night he slept deeply, but he was alone of his household in doing so. According to Plutarch, ‘great dejection and fear reigned, his friends took no food and watched all night with one another in futile discussion on his behalf, while his wife and sisters wailed and wept’.
It was customary for friends and political allies to call for an officeholder at his house in the morning and escort him down to the Forum as a public demonstration of support. But on the day of the vote, so effectively had Nepos and Caesar cowed their opponents, Cato had only one companion of note, another tribune by the name of Thermus. As the two of them, attended only by a handful of servants, made their way towards the place of assembly they met well-wishers who exhorted them to be on their guard but who fearfully declined to accompany them. On arriving they found the Forum packed with people whom Nepos had succeeded in rousing to his cause and surrounded by his and Caesar’s armed slaves. (Caesar owned several gladiatorial training schools and had brought an unprecedented number of gladiators to Rome for the games he staged in 65 BC: the games over, he kept the surviving slaves around him as an armed guard.)
Nepos and Caesar were already seated in a commanding position on the exceptionally high and steep podium of the Temple of Castor. On the temple steps a troop of gladiators was massed. Seeing them, Cato exclaimed, ‘What a bold man, and what a coward,