The Life of Cicero, Volume One

by Anthony Trollope

It is necessary again to consider the condition of the Republic. To us a conspiracy to subvert the government under which the conspirer lives seems either a very terrible remedy for great evils, or an attempt to do evil which all good men should oppose. We have the happy conspiracy in which Washington became the military leader, and the French Revolution, which, bloody as it was, succeeded in rescuing Frenchmen from the condition of serfdom. At home we have our own conspiracy against the Stuart royalty, which had also noble results. The Gracchi had attempted to effect something of the same kind at Rome; but the moral condition of the people had become so low that no real love of liberty remained. Conspiracy! oh yes. As long as there was anything to get, of course he who had not got it would conspire against him who had. There had been conspiracies for and against Marius, for and against Cinna, for and against Sulla. There was a grasping for plunder, a thirst for power which meant luxury, a greed for blood which grew from the hatred which such rivalry produced. These were the motive causes for conspiracies; not whether Romans should be free but whether a Sulla or a Cotta should be allowed to run riot in a province.

Cæsar at this time had not done much in the Roman world except fall greatly into debt. Knowing, as we do know now, his immense intellectual capacity, we cannot doubt but at the age he had now reached, thirty-five, b.c. 65, he had considered deeply his prospects in life. There is no reason for supposing that he had conceived the idea of being a great soldier. That came to him by pure accident, some years afterward. To be Quæstor, Prætor, and Consul, and catch what was going, seems to have been the cause to him of having encountered extraordinary debt. That he would have been a Verres, or a Fonteius, or a Catiline, we certainly are not entitled to think. Over whatever people he might have come to reign, and in whatever way he might have procured his kingdom, he would have reigned with a far-seeing eye, fixed upon future results. At this period he was looking out for a way to advance himself. There were three men, all just six years his senior, who had risen or were rising into great repute; they were Pompey, Cicero, and Catiline. There were two who were noted for having clean hands in the midst of all the dirt around; and they were undoubtedly the first Romans of the day. Catiline was determined that he too would be among the first Romans of the day; but his hands had never been clean. Which was the better way for such a one as Cæsar to go?

To have had Pompey under his feet, or Cicero, must have then seemed to Cæsar to be impracticable, though the time came when he did, in different ways, have his feet on both. With Catiline the chance of success might be better. Crassus he had already compassed. Crassus was like M. Poirier in the play—a man who, having become rich, then allowed himself the luxury of an ambition. If Cæsar joined the plot we can well understand that Crassus should have gone with him. We have all but sufficient authority for saying that it was so, but authority insufficient for declaring it. That Sallust, in his short account of the first conspiracy, should not have implicated Cæsar was a matter of course,[190] as he wrote altogether in Cæsar's interest. That Cicero should not have mentioned it is also quite intelligible. He did not wish to pull down upon his ears the whole house of the aristocracy. Throughout his career it was his object to maintain the tenor of the law with what smallest breach of it might be possible; but he was wise enough to know that when the laws were being broken on every side he could not catch in his nets all those who broke them. He had to pass over much; to make the best of the state of things as he found them. It is not to be supposed that a conspirator against the Republic would be horrible to him, as would be to us a traitor against the Crown: there were too many of them for horror. If Cæsar and Crassus could be got to keep themselves quiet, he would be willing enough not to have to add them to his list of enemies. Livy is presumed to have told us that this conspiracy intended to restore the ejected Consuls, and to kill the Consuls who had been established in their place. But the book in which this was written is lost, and we have only the Epitome, or heading of the book, of which we know that it was not written by Livy.[191] Suetonius, who got his story not improbably from Livy, tells us that Cæsar was suspected of having joined this conspiracy with Crassus;[192] and he goes on to say that Cicero, writing subsequently to one Axius, declared that "Cæsar had attempted in his Consulship to accomplish the dominion which he had intended to grasp in his Ædileship" the year in question. There is, however, no such letter extant. Asconius, who, as I have said before, wrote in the time of Tiberius, declares that Cicero in his lost oration, "In toga candida," accused Crassus of having been the author of the conspiracy. Such is the information we have; and if we elect to believe that Cæsar was then joined with Catiline, we must be guided by our ideas of probability rather than by evidence.[193] As I have said before, conspiracies had been very rife. To Cæsar it was no doubt becoming manifest that the Republic, with its oligarchs, must fall. Subsequently it did fall, and he was—I will not say the conspirator, nor will I judge the question by saying that he was the traitor; but the man of power who, having the legions of the Republic in his hands, used them against the Republic. I can well understand that he should have joined such a conspiracy as this first of Catiline, and then have backed out of it when he found he could not trust those who were joined with him.

This conspiracy failed. One man omitted to give a signal at one time, and another at another. The Senate was to have been slaughtered; the two Consuls, Cotta and Torquatus, murdered, and the two ex-Consuls, Sulla and Autronius, replaced. Though all the details seem to have been known to the Consuls, Catiline was allowed to go free, nor were any steps taken for the punishment of the conspirators.

The second conspiracy was attempted in the Consulship of Cicero, b.c. 63, two years after the first. Catiline had struggled for the Consulship, and had failed. Again there would be no province, no plunder, no power. This interference, as it must have seemed to him, with his peculiar privileges, had all come from Cicero. Cicero was the busybody who was attempting to stop the order of things which had, to his thinking, been specially ordained by all the gods for the sustenance of one so well born, and at the same time so poor, as himself. There was a vulgar meddling about it—all coming from the violent virtue of a Consul whose father had been a nobody at Arpinum—which was well calculated to drive Catiline into madness. So he went to work and got together in Rome a body of men as discontented and almost as nobly born as himself, and in the country north of Rome an army of rebels, and began his operations with very little secrecy. In all the story the most remarkable feature is the openness with which many of the details of the conspiracy were carried on. The existence of the rebel army was known; it was known that Catiline was the leader; the causes of his disaffection were known; his comrades in guilt were known When any special act was intended, such as might be the murder of the Consul or the firing of the city, secret plots were concocted in abundance. But the grand fact of a wide-spread conspiracy could go naked in Rome, and not even a Cicero dare to meddle with it.

b.c. 63, ætat 44

As to this second conspiracy, the conspiracy with which Sallust and Cicero have made us so well acquainted, there is no sufficient ground for asserting that Cæsar was concerned in it.[194] That he was greatly concerned in the treatment of the conspirators there is no doubt. He had probably learned to appreciate the rage, the madness, the impotence of Catiline at their proper worth. He too, I think, must have looked upon Cicero as a meddling, over-virtuous busybody; as did even Pompey when he returned from the East. What practical use could there be in such a man at such a time—in one who really believed in honesty, who thought of liberty and the Republic, and imagined that he could set the world right by talking? Such must have been the feeling of Cæsar, who had both experience and foresight to tell him that Rome wanted and must have a master. He probably had patriotism enough to feel that he, if he could acquire the mastership, would do something beyond robbery—would not satisfy himself with cutting the throats of all his enemies, and feeding his supporters with the property of his opponents. But Cicero was impracticable—unless, indeed, he could be so flattered as to be made useful. It was thus, I think, that Cæsar regarded Cicero, and thus that he induced Pompey to regard him. But now, in the year of his Consulship, Cicero had really talked himself into power, and for this year his virtue must be allowed to have its full way.

He did so much in this year, was so really efficacious in restraining for a time the greed and violence of the aristocracy, that it is not surprising that he was taught to believe in himself. There were, too, enough of others anxious for the Republic to bolster him up in his own belief. There was that Cornelius in whose defence Cicero made the two great speeches which have been unfortunately lost, and there was Cato, and up to this time there was Pompey, as Cicero thought. Cicero, till he found himself candidate for the Consulship, had contented himself with undertaking separate cases, in which, no doubt, politics were concerned, but which were not exclusively political. He had advocated the employment of Pompey in the East, and had defended Cornelius. He was well acquainted with the history of the Republic; but he had probably never asked himself the question whether it was in mortal peril, and if so, whether it might possibly be saved. In his Consulship he did do so; and, seeing less of the Republic than we can see now, told himself that it was possible.

The stories told to us of Catiline's conspiracy by Sallust and by Cicero are so little conflicting that we can trust them both. Trusting them both, we are justified in believing that we know the truth. We are here concerned only with the part which Cicero took. Nothing, I think, which Cicero says is contradicted by Sallust, though of much that Cicero certainly did Sallust is silent. Sallust damns him, but only by faint praise. We may, therefore, take the account of the plot as given by Cicero himself as verified: indeed, I am not aware that any of Cicero's facts have been questioned.

Sallust declares that Catiline's attempt was popular in Rome generally.[195] This, I think, must be taken as showing simply that revolution and conspiracy were in themselves popular: that, as a condition of things around him such as existed in Rome, a plotter of state plots should be able to collect a body of followers, was a thing of course; that there were many citizens who would not work, and who expected to live in luxury on public or private plunder, is certain. When the conspiracy was first announced in the Senate, Catiline had an army collected; but we have no proof that the hearts of the inhabitants of Rome generally were with the conspirators. On the other hand, we have proof, in the unparalleled devotion shown by the citizens to Cicero after the conspiracy was quelled, that their hearts were with him. The populace, fond of change, liked a disturbance; but there is nothing to show that Catiline was ever beloved as had been the Gracchi, and other tribunes of the people who came after them.