Cicero - Anthony Everitt [51]
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AGAINST CATILINA
Campaign and Conspiracy: 63 BC
Cicero aimed to scale the summit of Roman political life at the first possible opportunity or, as the phrase went, “in his year.” A two-year interval was required by law between a Praetorship and a Consulship and when he left office as Praetor in December 66, Cicero laid down his powers completely, forgoing the customary provincial governorship, and at once began planning his campaign for the Consulship in 63. The election would be held in the summer of the preceding year.
Quintus wrote a “Short Guide to Electioneering” (Commentariolum petitionis) for his brother, in which he set out a comprehensive campaign strategy. (Some scholars regard the document as a rhetorical exercise of the imperial age, but, with its good sense and knowledge of the period, it is to all appearances authentic.) There is a good deal in it which today’s politicians would find instructive, as when Quintus observed that candidates should not hesitate to be generous with pledges and assurances. “People naturally prefer you to lie to them rather than refuse them your help,” he writes. There is advice about the specific obstacles Cicero was facing, chief of which was his status as a New Man. “You must cultivate [the aristocrats] diligently. You must call upon them, persuade them that politically we have always been in sympathy with the optimates and have never in the least been supporters of the populares.”
Of Cicero’s six rivals, four were hopeless electoral prospects, respectable but dull—and in one case probably dull-witted. The other two raised very different considerations. Caius Antonius was the son of the great orator, Marcus Antonius; he was corrupt, often insolvent and with little native ability or pluck. He had been disgraced in 70 and expelled from the Senate but managed all the same to be reelected to the Praetorship. Although unimpressive, he was acceptable to the political establishment and for that reason had to be taken seriously.
Lucius Sergius Catilina was an altogether more formidable opponent. He was one of a line of able and rebellious young aristocrats during the declining years of the Roman Republic who refused to settle down after early indiscretions and enter respectable politics as defenders of the status quo. They usually joined the populares. Sometimes they did so out of youthful idealism and intellectual conviction, but others were simply rebelling against family discipline. They often badly needed money.
In recent years the failure of agriculture and the sudden block in trade with, and tax revenues from, the eastern provinces following the resurgence of Mithridates had created a cash-flow crisis for the state of Rome and for many citizens. So far as we can make it out, the main plank of Catilina’s political program was a general cancellation of debts. This thoroughly frightened the propertied classes. How much popular support the policy attracted is harder to say. In the absence of a proper banking system, the web of credit spread through every level of society. While debt cancellation would to some extent benefit the poor more than the rich, in many respects it would simply shift the problem of financial liquidity around the system rather than get rid of it, replacing one set of bankrupts with another.
Whatever Catilina’s precise policies, he stood for, or was part of, the wider popularis movement, which step by step was dismantling Sulla’s reforms and was set on weakening the Senate’s hold on the levers of government. The radicals seem not to have had a clear set of proposals and seized opportunities as they came along.
The Senate had no answer to Rome’s problems and indeed sought none. Its aim was simply to maintain the constitution and resist the continual attacks on its