038 - The Catiline Conspiracy

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, episode 38, The Catiline Conspiracy. There were dozens of contributing factors to the breakdown of the old republican order in the first century BC, some economic, some administrative, some martial, but what was really at issue was a sickness that had taken hold at the very root of the political system. Until now, the quasi-religious sovereignty of the electoral process and the officials it produced was unquestioned. If you ran for consul and lost, that was it, you had lost. Maybe your political career was dead, and maybe you would run again someday, but you abided by the decision. When the senate handed down decrees, or the tribunes passed laws, maybe you didn't like it, and maybe you did everything in your power to get them repealed, but there was a way things were done. Maybe it entered into your head to do something about those so-and-sos down in the forum, and maybe after too much to drink, the conversation turned to topics like assassination and military coups, the latter no doubt a favorite topic amongst landless veterans for the whole of Roman history. But in the morning, everyone sobered up, the inertia of the system was simply too great to overcome.

While there is ample evidence of political assassination directed at threats to the old order, the Gracchi being the most famous example, there is a scant record of extra-legal killing directed at the old order, but by the first century B.C., whatever spell that held ambitious men in check when they didn't get their way had been broken. The corruption that had taken hold at all rungs of society, the kickbacks enjoyed by provincial governors, the bribery that secured lucrative posts and favorable court rulings, the cash-for-vote schemes that more and more determined the outcome of elections, had finally reached the heart of the system. An entire generation of men had grown up in the shadow of Marius and Sulla. No amount of democratic whitewashing could hide the truth. Power sprang from the sword. And for those bold enough and strong enough to seize what they could not legitimately earn, it was understood that power had a way of retroactively legitimizing even the most illegitimate of actions. The only rule was power, by any means necessary. Because once in power, the rules could be changed, and those who disagreed could be eliminated.

Oz, the great and terrible, had been seen through, and the man behind the curtain exposed. Cicero, the most persuasive speaker of his day and perhaps in all of Roman history, spent his entire career imploring his countrymen to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. But words are no match for action. And those of us with the swords, as Pompey so aptly described his brethren, were busy plotting how to kill the man behind the curtain, become the man behind the curtain, and become Rome itself, Rome, the great and terrible.

Lucius Sergius Catalina, known to history as Catiline, attempted in 63 B.C. to kill the man behind the curtain. His half-baked scheme never got off the ground, but his story touches on nearly every major player in the subsequent years of civil war in Rome. And while his plot was foiled, the sheer volume of willing accomplices shocked polite company, and reminded those with similar ambition that one of these days the Republic was going to snap in two, and the important thing was not to save it, but to make sure that you came out on top when the bow finally broke.

Catiline was born in 108 B.C. to an ancient patrician family. While he came from a line of consuls and thus would never be considered a new man, the last of those consuls had served in the 380s B.C., so Catiline carried with him all the arrogance of a well-pedigreed aristocrat, while simultaneously bearing the insecurity of knowing his family had been trading on a name that no one in recent memory had done much to earn. This would turn out to be a dangerous combination. Catiline was intent on returning his family to glory. He was bright, energetic, and charismatic, a natural leader, brave in the field, and savvy in the forum. There was no good reason why he should not be able to lead his family out of the political wilderness, and indeed his career began promisingly enough, if only he had been a good man.

He entered public life by way of the social wars, serving with distinction under the command of Pompey Strabo, and alongside young Pompey Magnus and the man who would become his arch-rival, Marcus Tullius Cicero. During the years of conflict between Marius and Sulla, Catiline did his best to keep his head down. He was neither important enough to be courted, nor important enough to be disposed of. Semi-obscurity can be your best friend in times of civil strife. But once Sulla returned from the East, Catiline was one of those officially neutral aristocrats who knew which way the winds were blowing, and he publicly backed the incoming dictator. He served in a variety of administrative posts overseas after Sulla's retirement, and the young man seemed well-positioned for an honorable career. But as is often the case, the true character of a man will eventually come out, and how he deals with adversity is often the best time to gauge what that true character is.

In 73 BC, Catiline was accused of adultery, and not just run-of-the-mill adultery, but adultery committed with a vestal virgin, a very serious offense. But at the trial, one of the leading men of the day and leader of the aristocratic party testified on behalf of Catiline. Character witnessing was a far more potent legal force in Rome than it is today, and with the word of Quintus Catullus backing him, Catiline was acquitted. Now why one of the most important men in Rome would put his own name on the line for a minor noble was a curiosity. The Roman chattering classes assumed bribery played a role. So in his first real test, Catiline seems to have chosen to circumvent the rules and subvert Rome's judicial system rather than directly face whatever consequences he was in store for. It was a pattern that would repeat itself throughout his career.

But with the bullet successfully dodged, Catiline went on to serve as Praetor in 68 BC, and then Pro-Praetor in Africa the next two years. In 66 BC, he entered his name as a candidate for the consulship, but the censors denied his eligibility. A minor legal technicality barred his entrance into the race, namely that the citizens of Africa were accusing him of abuse of power, of using public resources for private gain, and taking kickbacks. Furiously denying the charges, Catiline was enraged that his name was being dragged through the mud, but there was nothing he could do. He would have to wait until the matter was cleared up to run for consul again. In 65 BC, he stood trial for abuse of power and was once again acquitted when a number of leading men vouched for his character. Shiny, precious character.

The skeleton of Catiline's career to this point is a matter of public record. But a few of the more unsavory details are filled in by Cicero and his famous denunciation, and later by the historian Solis, who painted the entire Catilinean affair as a morality tale, with Catiline starring as the despicable enemy of the public good. So it is sometimes hard to tell how many of his actions were real, and how many were embellished or made up out of whole cloth. For example, there is a story of an initial conspiracy that has Catiline planning the murder of half the Senate, and even men at the time believed this episode resided only in Cicero's politically motivated imagination. Certainly Catiline was not connected to any such plot by the time he was allowed to run for consulship the following year, in 64 BC.

As much as Cicero seems to have genuinely hated Catiline, he really ought to have cut them some slack. If it hadn't been for Catiline, it is likely that Cicero never would have won election and earned the consulship that he had been striving for his whole life. With Catiline running on a platform of debt cancellation, and promising the sun, moon, and stars to any poor sod who would listen, the nobility had no choice but to throw their support behind the provincial novice homo who had an unhealthy obsession with philosophy, Marcus Tullius Cicero. Sure he was a pleb who was not even a true Roman, but he was the most conservative of the available candidates, and at least argued for the continued dominance of the Senate in political affairs.

Cicero had been born in Arpium, 60 miles south of Rome. True the region had long been a part of Rome, and its population had been granted full citizenship not long after the end of the Second Punic War, but Cicero was never allowed to forget that he was a mere provincial, and not just a provincial, but a pleb-provincial. He could trace to no ancestors, and would have to rely on his own drive to battle his way up the Roman political ladder. Luckily, he was one of the most gifted men of his generation. From the start, he was recognized as a brilliant student, and his family made sure that he received the finest education they could afford. Like most of the nobility, he was fluent in both Greek and Latin, and devoured Hellenistic philosophy. More than any other man, Cicero was responsible for the full integration of Greek thought into Roman life, translating mountains of Greek literature into Latin, and promoting its study endlessly.

As I said at the very beginning of this series, the Romans were never particularly disposed to invention and creativity, but they were masters of co-option and assimilation. In Rome, no good idea went unadopted, and in Greece, Cicero saw good ideas everywhere. But as much as he contributed to the cultural enrichment of Rome, Cicero saw himself primarily as a politician, and pointed to his political career above his philosophical or legal pursuits as the achievement he was most proud of.

After serving in the legions with resigned ill humor during the Social War, Cicero started his legal career in the 80s BC, quickly garnering a reputation as a great orator. But after defending a man in a murder trial, and pointing the finger at a sullen ally while Sulla still sat on the throne, Cicero took a pragmatic extended tour of Greece until the affair blew over. While in Greece, he was put into contact with the masters of Greek philosophy and rhetoric, and Cicero perfected a unique oratorical style that would make him the acknowledged master of his day. In 75 BC, he was elected quaestor for Sicily, and endeared himself to the locals for his relatively honest dealings. They ultimately asked him to take on a politically dangerous case, prosecuting the Roman governor of Sicily on charges of corruption. Cicero finally agreed, and spun the trial into his big break, successfully prosecuting the governor whose corruption far exceeded the acceptable standards of the day. From that point on, he was on the fast track, achieving every step of the cursus honorum in his year, finally winning the consulship in 64 BC, for a term to be served the following year.

Catiline, though defeated by Cicero in that election, was undeterred, and ran again the next year. But amidst a trial for his role in the sullen purges spearheaded by Cato the Younger, and a lack of support from his wealthy benefactors, Crassus among them, who had supported him as an antidote to senatorial domination, Catiline's last campaign never got off the ground. His career was effectively over, and had he been born in another age, he may have sulked and raged, but would have gone on with his life, and found other outlets for his passions. But in this age, he was able to see his final defeat as merely an advisory decision. And more importantly, he was able to find other men who were ready to help him expose the man behind the curtain.

Catiline began to conspire actively with other disaffected citizens. Their aim was simple, overthrow the government. Now Catiline was motivated by personal delusions of grandeur, and driven to such extreme measures out of an inflamed sense of bitterness. The men he gathered around his plot, however, were almost uniformly brought on board out of a base material self-interest. From the upper classes, he found indebted nobles and corrupt ex-senators who had been purged from their roles by the censors, men who wanted power but couldn't have it, and men who owed money but didn't want to repay it. Catiline promised them access back to control, and a cancellation of all debts once he was in charge. From the lower classes, he stoked the bitterness of landless veterans and indebted commoners. Up and down the line, the message was the same. Once we overthrow the government, everyone will get everything they ever desired. Land. Money. Power. The whole kit and caboodle. This was not an ideological revolution. This was naked self-interest, writ large.

In Etruria, an ex-centurion named Gaius Manlius began gathering an army. It is unclear how connected Manlius and Catiline were at this point, but it speaks volumes that when Catiline was exiled after his plot was exposed, he headed straight for the force Manlius had assembled. In Rome, the plan was to kick off the coup by assassinating Cicero. From there, strategically located conspirators would begin setting fires across the city and generally plunge Rome into chaos. At least, that's what Cicero reported to the Senate the day after he was notified of the assassination plot. Cicero's informants had apparently gotten word to the consul of the threat, and Cicero posted extra guards, foiling the would-be assassins.

There is a great deal of ambiguity about whether any of this is true, but Cicero outlined the whole affair so eloquently and blamed Catiline so thoroughly that the Senate came to believe the charges. Famously, as the Senate listened to Cicero, they moved one by one away from Catiline, who was eventually left sitting by himself, physically and politically isolated. I'm not exaggerating when I say that Cicero's Catilinarian orations are still held up today as some of the finest rhetoric ever uttered by man. Now, how much Cicero was exaggerating is another story completely.

There is speculation that while Catiline was indeed up to something, the assassination attempt may have been invented by Cicero to secure the near-dictatorial powers he needed to deal with the alleged crisis. It is further speculated that he wanted those powers not to deal with the specific machinations of Catiline and his conspirators, but rather to lay the groundwork for a defense of the Republic against Pompey, who was presently on his way home from the East at the head of a large veteran army and with more money at his disposal than the Roman treasury had ever held. Cicero wanted to make sure that any internal strife in Rome was quashed before Pompey returned. Both Marius and Sulla had been able to exploit political divisions in the city in their quest for power. Cicero wanted to deny Pompey a similar opportunity.

Catiline, now a pariah, agreed to go into exile, but lied about his destination and instead headed for Etruria to join Manlius's growing army. But for now, the coup was still on, even without Catiline overseeing the operation in Rome. But the remaining conspirators were not particularly adept at their jobs. They attempted to entice a group of Gallic emissaries to join their cause, but the visiting Gauls simply took the opportunity to earn the goodwill of the Senate by exposing the plot. They talked five of the leading conspirators into affixing their name to a letter promising the Gauls they were fully committed to rebellion. The careless plotters forgot the first and second rule of Fight Club, and when the Gauls presented the document to the Senate, the five men were arrested and the conspiracy inside Rome was short-circuited.

Cicero and Cato led the charge in the Senate to have the men executed at once. Julius Caesar opposed the death sentence, arguing that exile was preferable. It would not set a good precedent to have men of senatorial rank executed without trial. But with Cicero and Cato arguing that punishment must be swift and harsh, the Senate relented and ordered the five strangled. For the rest of his career, Cicero's enemies would bring up this bloodthirsty and illegal railroading of Roman citizens against him. Cicero's exile during the chaos of the subsequent years would be based largely on his actions towards the five conspirators on that day. Certainly, his actions subtly undercut every argument he would ever make about the need to respect the rule of law and the Constitution of Rome.

With the inside men gone, the whole plot quickly imploded. Mass desertions from the insurgent army forced Manlius and Catiline to lead those left around the countryside, studiously avoiding the legions they encountered. Eventually though, they were cornered and forced to fight. The rebels, little more than a mob, were destroyed. Saulus makes a point of reporting that Catiline was killed while fighting on the front lines and unlike many of his men, died of frontal wounds, not wounds in the back, the dishonorable sign that a man had turned to run.

The final verdict on Catiline was that he was a courageous, ambitious, and corrupt man who concocted a plot far more ambitious than his abilities warranted. He was forced to ally himself with the dregs of both Roman nobility and the lower classes and he was easily bested by better men. He was outmaneuvered by Cicero at nearly every step, never standing a chance against Rome's greatest politician.

The conspiracy of Catiline was an instant legend in Roman history, both for the central role played by Cicero and because it provided a blueprint for how not to organize a coup. Julius Caesar, of course, was right there the whole time, no doubt taking notes, mental or otherwise. I like to imagine that somewhere in those notes, in big bold letters, is the line, Make sure Cicero is out of the way. Next week, Julius Caesar, young senator on the rise, will make his first attempt to make sure that Cicero is out of the way. Not by attacking him, but by asking him to join an informal alliance of mutual support that was being formed between Crassus, Pompey, and Caesar. Cicero refused the invitation, correctly identifying the first triumvirate, as it came to be known, as a mortal enemy of the Republic he so loved. Initially, the threat came primarily from Pompey and Crassus, with Caesar seen as little more than a pawn in their game. But the first triumvirate would spell the end of the Republic, not for the power it gave Pompey and Crassus, but for the money and support that it gave Caesar, in whom, you may recall, Sulla saw many Amarius.

There will probably be no episode next week, as I am scheduled to fly to visit the history of Roman laws for what they call Christmas, but what we all know is the Feast of the Unconquered Sun. However, as I sit here, Portland has been crippled by severe weather, so who knows if I'll ever actually make it out of town. So if there's no episode, you've been warned, and if there is, happy Saturnalia.