Cicero - Anthony Everitt [58]
How serious had Caesar been? It is hard to say. It may be that the trial was a neat and painless way of twisting the Senate’s tail. If that were so, Caesar had presumably prompted Metellus Celer to abort the project before the old man was crucified. On the other hand, it is possible that Caesar really did want a guilty verdict and, one must suppose, an execution. Either way, he had made his point and he did not attempt to reconvene the court.
In 63 Caesar stood for the senior religious post of Chief Pontiff, chairman of the college of pontifices, the most important political function of which was to decide the annual calendar of lucky and unlucky days for the conduct of public business. It was usually the preserve of ex-Consuls and elder statesmen and Caesar contracted enormous debts to bribe the necessary voters. Success brought him little power but great prestige and an official residence in the Forum. If Caesar had lost, his credit would have collapsed and he would have been bankrupt. He told his mother, as she kissed him good-bye on the morning of the poll, that if he did not return as Chief Pontiff, he would not return at all.
Meanwhile Catilina was pursuing his schemes and the well-informed Cicero went on keeping an eye on him. Support for Catilina was more broadly based than at the time of his putative first conspiracy. Many Senators who had spent or gambled away their wealth saw nothing to be lost and much to be gained by joining him. A general cancellation of debts, the central plank of his policies, would solve all their problems. Unsurprisingly, this was a program unlikely to appeal to the propertied classes and indeed to the middling sort of people—shopkeepers and small traders. The revolutionary leader was under growing pressure from his supporters in Rome, and from the discontented Sullan veterans in the countryside to seize power by fair means or foul.
At the instigation of a friend from his youth, Servius Sulpicius Rufus, now a distinguished legal expert and candidate for the Consulship of 62, Cicero superintended the passage of a law increasing the penalty for electoral bribery to ten years’ exile. Sulpicius was in fact aiming at one of his rivals, Lucius Licinius Murena, whom he intended to prosecute under the new legislation. However, Catilina believed that he was the target. Infuriated, he decided to have Cicero and other leading figures assassinated. The plan was to attack them on the day in July when elections for next year’s officeholders were to be held.
Cicero learned about the plot from Fulvia, mistress of Catilina’s fellow plotter, Quintus Curius. Curius, who was in financial difficulties, had become less generous to Fulvia than previously and she had pulled away from the liaison. In an attempt to regain her affection, Curius boasted in mysterious terms about his future prospects. Fulvia wheedled the truth out of him. She immediately contacted Terentia, with whom she happened to be acquainted, and told her all she knew. Thereafter, Cicero used Fulvia as a regular informer and, in due course, Curius was himself persuaded to betray his fellow conspirators. Unfortunately, there was no other evidence to corroborate the allegation of conspiracy, and it was not easy to identify specific plans from a welter of wild talk.
Cicero was sufficiently alarmed to persuade the Senate to postpone the forthcoming elections. He questioned Catilina publicly in the Senate about his intentions. Catilina responded with a sinister metaphor: “I see two bodies, one thin and wasted, but with a head, the other headless, but big and strong. What is so dreadful