Cicero - Anthony Everitt [61]
Catilina said he would think over what he had heard and left the meeting freely. He understood that all was up for him in Rome: only the military option remained. He slipped out of the city that night, accompanied by 300 armed men, and made his way north to Manlius’s troops. Before he left he wrote an explanatory letter to the elder statesman Catulus. If it is genuine, and it reads so, it almost touchingly reveals a man, self-centered yet sincere, who had nothing left to hope for.
I do not intend … to make any formal defense of my new policy. I will however explain my point of view; what I am going to say implies no consciousness of guilt, and on my word of honor you can accept it as the truth. I was provoked by wrongs and insults and robbed of the fruits of my painstaking industry, and I found myself unable to maintain a position of dignity. So I openly undertook the championship of the oppressed, as I had often done before.… I saw unworthy men promoted to honorable positions [and] felt myself treated as an outcast on account of unjust suspicions. That is why I have adopted a course of action, amply justified in my present circumstances, which offers a hope of saving what is left of my honor. I intended to write at greater length, but news has come that they are preparing to use force against me. So for the present I commend Orestilla [his wife] to you and entrust her to your protection. Shield her from wrong, I beg in the name of your own children. Farewell.
Claiming the office of which he believed he had been robbed, Catilina assumed a Consul’s rods and axes. He also took with him a silver eagle, a military standard that had belonged to Marius and which he kept in a shrine at his house. He took his time to reach Faesulae, arriving in mid-November. AS soon as the Senate heard the news of his departure/defection, he and Manlius were declared public enemies.
In Rome the management of the conspiracy devolved to the middle-aged Lentulus. It is strange that he and his colleagues did not abandon their plans. Perhaps they were still under the influence of Catilina’s outsize personality. Perhaps they feared to break their oaths. Perhaps they felt they were on a vehicle careering out of control and that it was marginally safer to stay on board than jump off. Whatever their reasons, they held to their course.
Although Lentulus had a contemptuous attitude toward the proprieties of public life, he was a superstitious man and was apparently encouraged by some forged prophecies predicting that he would achieve absolute power (from which it may be inferred that he was not averse to supplanting Catilina). He decided on a wholesale massacre of the Senate and timed it for one of the nights of the Saturnalia in mid-December. This festival of misrule (a distant original of Christmas) would provide cover for the preparations. It was the custom for clients to bring their patrons presents, and houses were kept open all night for the purpose. About 400 men, carrying concealed swords, were detailed to kill Senators individually in their homes. Lentulus devised a solution to the problem of the returning Pompey; his children would be taken as hostages against his good behavior. The plan had a frivolous kind of ingenuity, but, as ever, Fulvia was able to pass on the details to Cicero.
The Consul was now interrupted by a legal matter. AS he had promised he would, Sulpicius prosecuted Murena for handing out bribes during his election campaign. Cicero defended him and, although exhausted, produced one of his most entertaining speeches. He poked fun at nit-picking lawyers and scoffed at Marcus Porcius Cato, a leading conservative who was a member of the prosecution team, for his extravagant commitment to the