Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (30 page)

Why? Were the young man’s debts already so prodigious that he was prepared to risk all his hopes of legal advancement by taking part in revolution? Or was it the excitement, the whisperings of conspiracy, that tempted him? Or idealism? A fervour for Catiline’s cause certainly appears to have radicalised many brilliant young men. Generational tensions were more than capable of setting father against son. One senator preferred to kill his heir rather than see him consorting with Catiline, despite the fact that, like Caelius, the young man had been ‘outstandingly talented, well read, and good looking’.
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Even Cicero was forced to admit that Catiline was ‘still capable of maintaining the loyalties of many fine men by putting on a show of moral fervour’.
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So Caelius may have continued
to support him for either the basest or the noblest of reasons, or a mixture of the two. But there is a further possibility: it is conceivable that Caelius may not have been supporting Catiline at all. Headstrong as he was, he was also more than capable of a calculating cynicism. Perhaps he was providing his guardian with a pair of well-placed eyes.

Cicero certainly still needed well-placed spies. Following Catiline’s failure in the election, the consul’s forebodings of revolution had become increasingly alarmist. People were starting to demand proof. And then, just as nervousness was turning to mockery, a packet of letters was suddenly delivered to Cicero’s house. They set out Catiline’s plans for a wholesale massacre. The man who handed over these incriminating documents was none other than Crassus. He claimed that they had been handed in to his doorkeeper by an ‘unknown man’.
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When Cicero read the letters out to the Senate the following morning, panic gripped the city. A state of emergency was declared, and the Republic entrusted to Cicero’s hands. Crassus, having publicly shopped his protégé, slunk back into the shadows. In reading accounts of this improbable story it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Catiline was not the only conspirator in that autumn of 63. Who might the ‘unknown man’ have been? We know of only one person who was simultaneously an intimate of Cicero, Crassus and Catiline. That person was Caelius.

Wild speculation, of course. Any or all of the above explanations are possible. But it is not sufficient to blame a lack of sources alone for the mystery. It also reflects something fundamental about the Republic itself. The longing of the Romans for glory, which burned brightly within them and lit their city and indeed their entire empire with its flame, also cast flickering and treacherous shadows. Every ambitious politician required the skills of a conspirator. When Cicero met Catiline for the last time, face to face in the Senate House, he dissected his enemy’s manoeuvrings with
forensic brilliance, exposing them to the full scorching glare of his outrage, picking over the details of the conspiracy to such effect that Catiline fled Rome that very night. Ever after Cicero was to regard this as his finest hour, ‘a pinnacle of immortal glory’,
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as he modestly expressed it. The image of himself as the dauntless protector of the Republic, a patriot pure and simple, would provide him with the touchstone for the rest of his career. It was a perspective that Catiline, unsurprisingly, failed to share. Before leaving Rome he had written to Catulus, still protesting his innocence, bitterly complaining that he had been manoeuvred into exile. Heading north, ostensibly towards retirement in Marseille, he had in fact turned aside to take command of a ragbag army of peasants and war veterans. Meanwhile, back in Rome, more spine-tingling details of his plots, fed to the Senate at judicious intervals, had started to emerge: Gauls in the north of Italy were to rise in savage revolt; slaves were to be freed; the city itself was to be put to the torch. The whole of Rome was engulfed by hysteria. Cicero was the hero of the hour. Yet a few dissenting voices could still be heard. The crisis had been manufactured, they whispered. Catiline had been right. It was Cicero who had pushed him into his revolt, Cicero and his vainglory, Cicero the upstart, greedy for fame.

Of course, as is invariably the way with conspiracy theories, hard proof was lacking. No one was on hand to subject Cicero to the kind of grilling that he himself had given Catiline. The truth remained obscured behind a haze of disinformation. It was certainly evident that Cicero had employed dirty tricks to smoke out his enemy, but how much further than that he might have gone was impossible to say. Yet, in a sense he would have been less a Roman had he not schemed to push his enemy over the edge. Every consul dreamed of stamping his term of office with glory. That was how the game of self-advancement was played. Cicero
may not have behaved according to the standards of his own propaganda, but then again – apart from Cato – who ever did?

And it was Catiline, after all, who had first upped the stakes. The civil war had shown how quickly violence could escalate. In a society as competitive as Rome’s even to talk of forcing short cuts through the constitution was perilous, like tossing a flame on to a tinder box. This explains why Cicero was so anxious to erect firebreaks around Catiline. He feared that if the conspirators were not isolated, then the conflagration might quickly spread out of control. Sure enough, no sooner had Catulus accepted that Catiline had indeed been plotting to destroy the Republic than he was attempting to finger Crassus and, just for good measure, Caesar too. Cicero may have had his own suspicions on that account, but Catulus’ move was precisely the kind he was desperate to avoid. He had no wish to see a man like Crassus backed into a corner.

On 5 December, with panic-stricken rumours growing wilder by the hour, he convened a crisis meeting of the Senate. All the conspiracy’s ringleaders in Rome had been identified and arrested, he announced. Neither Crassus’ nor Caesar’s name appeared on the list. Even so, the great debate that followed was at least as much about the hatreds and ambitions of the various speakers as it was about the conspiracy itself. At stake was the issue of what to do with Catiline’s henchmen. Many were of good family, and it was forbidden by the severest laws of the Republic to execute any citizen without a proper trial. But did the state of emergency entitle Cicero to waive this sacred injunction? Caesar, still nervous that the hysteria might sweep him away, proposed the novel idea that the conspirators should be imprisoned for life; Cato, opposing him, demanded their execution. Here, in the clash between these two men so matched in talent, so opposite in character, was the opening salvo of a struggle that would eventually convulse the Republic. For now, it was Cato who emerged triumphant. A majority in the
Senate agreed with him that the safety of Rome was more important than the rights of individual citizens. And besides, who ever heard of imprisonment as a punishment? The conspirators were sentenced to death.

Among their number was a former consul. Watched by a confused and frightened crowd, he was led through the Forum, Cicero by his side, bristling with grim self-importance, four other senators following in quick succession. With the shadows of twilight deepening over the city, the five prisoners were lowered into the blackness of an underground cell. Here they were garrotted. Cicero, emerging from the gloom, tersely announced their deaths to the crowd. Many in the Forum were friends of the executed men, and they now slunk away, but throughout the rest of the city the news was greeted with an explosion of applause. A blaze of torches illumined the road that led from the Forum up to Cicero’s house. As the consul climbed it he was escorted by a phalanx of the greatest names in Rome. All acclaimed him as the saviour of his country. Surely, not even in his wildest dreams could the provincial from Arpinum ever have imagined such a day.

What had impressed his colleagues was not merely that he appeared to have saved the Republic, but that he had done so with comparatively little bloodshed. Cicero himself remained desperate to preserve a fire-wall around the conspiracy. He refused, for instance, to investigate his fellow consul, Antonius Hybrida, despite the fact that Hybrida had been one of Catiline’s closest friends. Cicero bribed his colleague with the governorship of Macedon, a rich province that would more than enable him to pay off his debts, and command of the war against Catiline. Since Hybrida was not merely suspected of double-dealing with the rebels, but was also a coward and an alcoholic to boot, this provoked much unease. Allies of Pompey began to press for the great man’s recall. This in turn provoked an eruption of outrage from Cato, who announced that
he would rather die than see Pompey given an Italian command. But if anyone had genuinely stood in Pompey’s way, it was Cicero. The prospect of a Rome pushed into armed factions, their rivalry escalating into ever greater violence, degenerating in the end into open civil war, this had been his ultimate nightmare. Nothing would have provided Pompey with a more perfect excuse to intervene with his legions. It was in this sense that Cicero had indeed saved the Republic, less from Catiline, perhaps, than from itself.

In the summer of 62
BC
, just a few bare months before Pompey was due back in Italy, Catiline’s makeshift army was finally cornered and destroyed. Hybrida, succumbing to a diplomatic illness, spent the entire battle in his tent, then scuttled off to Macedon, to extract his blood-money but otherwise lie low. He was not alone in beating a tactical retreat from Rome. Humbler players in the conspiracy were also slipping away. Among them was Caelius. He travelled to Africa, where his father had extensive business holdings, staffed with protective subordinates. But Caelius had far from abandoned his political career. For a year he served in Africa as an aide-de-camp to the province’s newly appointed proconsul, and did so very successfully. Whatever Caelius’ precise role in the conspiracy had been, his future still lay all before him. He had seen enough of public life to know that nothing in it was for ever. Alliances might buckle, twist and be reversed. The heroes of one year might be the villains of the next. In the blink of an eye the political landscape might be utterly transformed.

And so it would soon dramatically prove.

Early every December women from the noblest families in the Republic would gather to celebrate the mysterious rites of the Good
Goddess. The festival was strictly off limits to men. Even their statues had to be veiled for the occasion. Such secrecy fuelled any number of prurient male fantasies. Every citizen knew that women were depraved and promiscuous by nature. Surely a festival from which men were banned had to be a scene of lubricious abandon? Not that any male had ever dared take a peek to confirm this thrilling suspicion. It was one of the idiosyncrasies of Roman religion that even those who sniggered at it also tended to regard it with awe. Men, just as much as women, honoured the Good Goddess. She was one of the divine protectors of Rome. Clearly, should her rites be profaned, the sacrilege might threaten the security of all.

In the winter of 62
BC
the matrons had particular reason to pray for the Good Goddess’s favour. Catiline was dead, but fears and rumours still gusted through the Forum. After a leisurely saunter on the tourist trail around Greece, Pompey had finally arrived on the Adriatic coast. It was said that he would be crossing to Italy before the end of the month. What would it be like for other ambitious noblemen, having to live like pygmies in the shadow of Pompey the Great? It was a question of particular concern to the two women who presided over the rites of the Good Goddess: Aurelia, Caesar’s mother, and Pompeia, his wife. The
pontifex maximus
himself, although he had provided his mansion for the occasion, was naturally not present. Along with every other male in his household, free and slave alike, Caesar had withdrawn for the night.

The mansion began to fill with incense, music and great ladies. Now, for a few brief hours, it was the city’s women who held the safety of Rome in their hands. There was no longer any call for them to skulk in the shadows, afraid of prying eyes. Yet one of Aurelia’s maids, looking for some music, observed a flute-girl who was doing exactly that. She approached her; the flute-girl shrank away. When the maid demanded to know who she was, the flute-girl shook her head, then mumbled Pompeia’s name. The maid
shrieked. Dressed in a long-sleeved tunic and breastband the stranger might have been, but the voice had been unmistakably male. Uproar ensued. Aurelia, frantically covering up the sacred statues of the goddess, suspended the rites. The other women went in search of the impious intruder. They finally found him, hidden in the room of one of Pompeia’s maids. Off came the veil of the bogus flute-girl to reveal … Clodius.

Such at least was the story that immediately swept like wildfire around Rome. Gossip convulsed the city. Friends and enemies of Clodius alike huddled to swap the salacious details. If sporting a goatee or touching the head with a finger could be considered marks of effeminacy, then Clodius, by dressing up in women’s clothes and gatecrashing a sacred ritual, had clearly taken offensiveness to a whole new level. Overnight he became the toast of every loose-belted dandy and the bogey of every conservative in Rome. Caught in the middle, deeply embarrassed by the affair, was Caesar. Naturally, he had to affect outrage. Not only had Clodius violated the pontifical house, but it was also rumoured that he had been planning to violate Pompeia herself. Cuckolded Roman husbands had been known to set their slaves on adulterers, to beat them, rape them, even castrate them; at the very least Caesar would have been justified in dragging Clodius through the courts. But the
pontifex
had an image problem: despite his elevated religious status, he remained a topic of fevered gossip himself, the rake who had been labelled ‘a man for every woman, and a woman for every man’.
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For Caesar to adopt the tone of the moral majority might open him to even greater ridicule, quite apart from making an enemy of Clodius and alienating the fast set who were his natural supporters. After all, he was planning to run for the consulship within a couple of years. Clodius was far too well connected, and capricious, to risk offending. In the end Caesar resolved his dilemma by divorcing Pompeia, but refusing to say why:
‘Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion’
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was his single, Delphic comment. Then, before anyone could press him further, he slipped away to Spain, where he was due to serve as governor. It was a measure of his eagerness to be away from Rome that he arrived in his new province before the Senate had even had time to confirm his appointment.