Cicero - Anthony Everitt [52]
Born into an old but impoverished family, Catilina was about the same age as Cicero. Their paths had first crossed during the War of the Allies, when they both served as very young men on Cnaeus Pompeius Strabo’s military staff. Later, during the civil war between Sulla and Marius, Catilina had taken part in the horrifying murder of Cicero’s cousin and Marius’s nephew, the Praetor Marcus Marius Gratidianus. He had been accused, with what truth we do not know, of having had sex with a Vestal Virgin, Fabia, the half-sister of Cicero’s wife, Terentia. He was also believed to have killed his own son because he was in love with a certain Aurelia Orestilla, who would not agree to marry a man with a child. Despite a pervading smell of scandal, he rose steadily up the political ladder and was Praetor in 68. He then spent a year as governor of the province of Africa and was back in Rome in mid-66.
It was at this point that he began to flirt with revolutionary illegality. Like other reformers before him, Catilina found it advisable to surround himself with bodyguards. Hostile contemporaries put a sexual gloss on this. “No one has ever had such a talent for seducing young men,” Cicero remarked. Sallust claimed that Catilina recruited “debauchees, adulterers and gamblers, who have squandered their inheritances in gaming dens, pot houses and brothels.”
Like every Roman politician Catilina needed to create a coterie of supporters on the basis of favors provided. What was unusual about him was his focus on the young; this may reflect his social and personal tastes or, alternatively, hostility in respectable circles, where alarmist stories deterred mature and experienced citizens from joining his cause. His following was said to include criminals and informers alongside members of his own class. He was reported to reward his youthful supporters handsomely for their loyalty, procuring mistresses for some and dogs and horses for others. Cicero gave an account of a party attended by a certain Quintus Gallius, a friend of Catilina, which evokes the raffish atmosphere of his circle.
There are shouts and screams, screeching females, there is deafening music. I thought I could make out some people entering and others leaving, some of them staggering from the effects of the wine, some of them still yawning from yesterday’s boozing. Among them was Gallius, perfumed and wreathed with flowers; the floor was filthy, soiled with wine and covered with withered garlands and fish bones.
The picture classical historians give of Catilina is a garish one and there is evidence that it may be exaggerated. Some years later, in 56, Cicero found himself obliged, to his clear embarrassment, to put in a good word for Catilina when he was representing one of his former followers on trial for murder. He offered a less diabolic likeness of a complex and many-sided personality, and one that is both more plausible and more attractive. He said:
Catilina had many excellent qualities, not indeed maturely developed, but at least sketched out roughly in outline.… There was a good deal about him that exercised a corrupting effect on other people; and yet he also undeniably possessed a gift for stimulating his associates into vigorous activity. Catilina was at one and the same time a furnace of inordinate sensual passions and a serious student of military affairs. I do not believe that the world has ever seen such a portent of divergent, contrary, contradictory tastes and appetites.
Whatever the truth about his personality, Catilina now began to get into serious trouble. He was put on notice of trial for extortion in Africa. At about the same time, during the summer