Cicero - Anthony Everitt [59]
The Senate was not convinced of Catilina’s seriousness and took no action. Many optimates still thought of Cicero as a parvenu and felt that he was getting above himself by creating an atmosphere of crisis on the basis of very few facts. This left the Consul in a distinctly awkward position. He had revealed his hand to no avail. Catilina was now alerted to his investigations and, given his personality, might well be provoked into a violent response. Cicero appointed a bodyguard and when the postponed elections eventually took place was careful to let people see that he had started wearing a breastplate under his toga.
Cicero insured himself against the risk of violence by assembling a large number of armed followers. This and all the publicity preempted Catilina’s plans and there were no assassinations. The voting proceeded without any trouble. Quintus, following in his brother’s footsteps in the Honors Race, was elected Praetor, as was Caesar, who won by a strong margin.
Catilina failed for a second time to secure the Consulship. So far as he was concerned, this was the final insult. During the two years that he had been running for Consul, Catilina’s second “conspiracy” had probably been more a secret alliance around a radical program (land redistribution and debt cancellation) than a revolutionary plot, but now, enraged by Sulpicius’s antibribery law and his electoral defeat, he abandoned legality. Against his better instincts, he had stuck by the rules, and look where it had gotten him. His aim was personal—to claim what he saw as his right and to take revenge on everyone who had prevented him from obtaining it. This included Cicero and most of the Senate. He set his mind on a coup d’état.
His closest partners were Praetor Lentulus in Rome and Caius Manlius, one of Sulla’s old centurions, who was gathering a military force in northern Etruria at Faesulae. Catilina was reported to have insisted on a “monstrous” oath of loyalty, which even his friend the Consul Antonius swore. According to Dio (and Plutarch): “He sacrificed a boy and, after administering the oath over his entrails, ate them in company with others.” This sounds far-fetched and was probably another example of black propaganda, but there was a half-submerged tradition of occasional human sacrifice. The last recorded case had taken place after the battle of Cannae, when Hannibal had scored one of his most decisive victories. Two Gauls and two Greeks had been buried alive. The great Greek historian Polybius, writing in the previous century, noted that in times of extreme danger the Romans would go to any lengths to propitiate the gods and thought no ritual inappropriate or beneath their dignity.
Seeing what Catilina had in mind, Crassus, who was not a revolutionary at heart, and Caesar, doubtless as disturbed by Catilina’s poor judgment as by his intentions, definitively abandoned him. For all his difficulties with a skeptical Senate, Cicero was clearly receiving good intelligence, and he looked forward to assembling enough evidence to be able to take action against Catilina.
There was a lull for a time as summer gave way to autumn. Then, at about midnight on October 20, Cicero received an unannounced visit from Crassus and two leading Senators. They had an alarming tale to tell. After dinner earlier the same evening Crassus’s doorkeeper had taken delivery of some letters for various senior Romans. Crassus read the one addressed to him, which was unsigned. It claimed that Catilina was organizing a massacre and warned him to slip away from the city as soon as possible. Crassus said that he had left the other letters unopened and come at once to Cicero—“quite overcome by the news,” as Plutarch puts it, “and wishing to do something to clear himself from the suspicion that he lay under because of his friendship with Catilina.”
Having thought the matter over, Cicero convened