Political and private gambling had reduced thousands of the well born to the condition of mere needy adventurers, while the advantages of birth and station served only to make them more dangerous and their manners more seductive. Among these restless and accomplished bravos none was so conspicuous or so able as L. Sergius Catilina. His descent was one of the most ancient in Rome, and he had served with distinction among the nobles ranged under Sulla’s banner. His valour indeed from the first had been tinged with brutal ferocity, and the stories currently reported of him, believed as they undoubtedly were by his own contemporaries, may give us at least an idea of the crimes which were possible at the period. It has been already mentioned that he was accused of assassinating his brother from private malice, and of getting his name inscribed on the list of proscription for the sake of obtaining his confiscated estate. All Rome had seen him waving on the top of a pike the head of the murdered Gratidianus. It was rumoured that, wanting to marry the fair but profligate Orestilla, who waived his suit through jealousy of his son by a former consort, the father had sacrificed the youth without scruple to his passion.
Though loaded with the infamy of such crimes, Catiline had entered on the career of public honours, had obtained the prætorship for the year 68, had succeeded from thence to the government of Africa, and upon his return in 66 was about to offer himself for the consulship. Publius Clodius, a stripling, not less profligate, but as yet less notorious, crossed his path with a charge of malversation in his province. Presently the rumour ran that Catiline, thus disconcerted, formed a plot with Autronius Pætus, just deprived of the consulship for bribery, with Calpurnius Piso and other dissolute nobles, to murder the successful candidates, and to seize the powers of the state. The names both of Crassus and Cæsar were whispered in connection with this bloody enterprise. The former, it was said, was to be created dictator, the latter his master of the horse. When it was asked upon what military resources the rash intriguers relied, it was answered that Piso, who had acquired the command of one of the Iberian provinces, was charged to organise an armed force in that quarter, with which to balance the legions of the senate under Pompey. The scheme, it was alleged, was opportunely detected, the chief conspirators discovered and marked. Piso shortly afterwards was cut off in his province by banditti, or possibly by assassins; but the proceedings with which the culprits were menaced were stayed by the intervention of a tribune, and the circumstances of the plot were never formally revealed.
Such however was the influence of Catiline, or such the interest which his presumed machinations could excite among the lawless and ambitious even in the heart of the commonwealth, that not only was the government unable to convict him upon this flagrant charge, but he did not shrink from suing for the consulship itself for the following year, and that too while yet unabsolved from the accusation of Clodius. The man and the times must be more particularly described to make the story of Catiline credible to any other age than his own. For passing strange must it appear that, notwithstanding the atrocities by which he was disgraced, Catiline had been able to connect himself with many eminent public men, by whom his suits had been openly supported. Cicero himself, a man of unsullied personal purity, was prepared, for the sake of his alliance in their common competition for the consulship, to defend his cause against Clodius, and only escaped the disgrace of appearing as his advocate by the charges themselves being dropped, as it would seem, by the venal accuser. But it was over the corrupt patrician youth that he exercised the most extraordinary ascendency. Through dissipation he led them into the darkest crimes. He taught them to depend upon him as a trusty associate in every wickedness, and whether in bilking a creditor or negotiating a loan, in planning a seduction or compassing a murder, his boldness and invention were never found to fail them. Catiline was their friend, their champion, and their idol. They vaunted his bodily strength and vigour, his address in bodily exercises, his iron frame which could endure alike the excesses of debauch and the rudest toils of war. He became the model of the youthful aspirants to fashionable distinction, which then demanded not only splendour in dress and furniture, but skill in the use of the sword and eminence in all martial accomplishments. But these exercises could not fail to have a brutalising effect; for they connected such as sought distinction in them with the slaves, criminals, and hired ruffians who fought in the arena. Such men, admired as consummate masters of their art, became the friends and companions of the young nobility, who drank with them one day in the wineshop, and shouted over their agonies in the theatre on the morrow.
The long career of conquest which Rome had enjoyed had tended to throw all her noblest energies into the sole profession of arms, which is naturally inclined above all others to measure excellence by success, and to confound virtue with valour. When the Roman returned from the wars for a short breathing time to his own country, he beheld few objects around him which were calculated to allay the fever of his excited imagination. His pride was fed by trophies and triumphs, by the retinue of captive slaves which attended him, by the spoils of conquered palaces which decorated his home. In the intervals of danger and rapine few cared to yield themselves to the vapid enjoyments of taste and literature, or could refrain from ridiculing the arts which had failed to save Greece from subjugation. The poets, historians, and philosophers of Rome were few in number, and exercised but a transient influence on a small circle of admirers. Nor were the habits of civil life such as to soften the brutal manners of the camp. The Romans knew nothing of the relations of modern society, in which the sexes mutually encourage each other in the virtues appropriate to each, and where ranks and classes mingle unaffectedly together under the shelter of a common civilisation. The Romans lived at first in castes, afterwards in parties; even in the public places there was little fusion or intercourse of ranks, while at home they domineered over their clients as patrons, their slaves as masters, their wives and children as husbands and fathers.
The instruction of boyhood was general in the upper ranks, but it was imparted by slaves, who corrupted the temper of their pupils far more than they improved their understanding; and when, already exhausted by premature indulgence, they were married while young from motives of convenience, they were found incapable of guiding and elevating their still more neglected consorts. The women were never associated in their husbands’ occupations, knew little of their affairs, and were less closely attached to their interests than even their bondmen. They seldom partook of their recreations, which accordingly degenerated for the most part into debauches. Systematically deprived of instruction, the Roman matron was taught indeed to vaunt her ignorance as a virtue. If in the first century B.C., those Sabine housewives were no longer to be found who shut themselves up in their apartments and spun wool among their handmaids, yet to exercise their intellects or cultivate their tastes passed almost for a crime. To know Greek and Latin books, to sing and dance, to make verses, to please with conversation,—these, in the opinion of the historian Sallust, were no better than seductive fascinations, such as formed the charm and fixed the price of the courtesan. Rarely therefore did any woman break through this mental bondage, without losing in character what she gained in intellect and attraction. In either case she was almost equally despised. The men’s indifference to the conduct of their spouses is a frightful feature in the social aspect of the times. Their language, it has been observed, had no word to express the sentiment of jealousy. The laws which gave them such facility of divorce show how little regard they had for the dearest interests of the married state; just as their common practice of adoption proves the weakness among them of the paternal sentiment.
Thus did the morose and haughty Roman stand isolated and alone in the centre of his family and of society around him; nor did he strive to exalt his moral nature by sympathy with the divinity above him. A century indeed had scarcely elapsed since Polybius had lauded the character of the Romans for the earnestness of its religious sentiment. Undoubtedly the moral sanctions of religion had at that time been strongly felt; the gods were actually regarded as the avengers of crime and the patrons of virtue. Even then however the principle of setting up the deity as a model for imitation, which alone is efficacious for elevating and purifying the soul, was unknown or disregarded. The coarse and sensuous pagans of Greece and Rome gloated over the wretched stories of lust and violence ascribed to the objects of their worship, and if they feared their power never dreamed of adoring their goodness or their justice. Their religious practices therefore were not moral actions, but merely adopted as charms to preserve them from the caprice or ill-nature of their divinities. From this debasing superstition even their strongest intellects could not wholly release themselves, while in the seventh century the vulgar at least were as devoutly addicted to it as at any former period. Indeed the general relaxation of positive belief in the minds of the educated class was accompanied, as is not unfrequently the case in the history of nations, by still more grovelling prostration on the part of the ignorant multitude.
THE CONSPIRACY
[63 B.C.]
Such a state of society already trembled on the verge of dissolution, and reflecting men must have shuddered at the frailness of the bands which still held it together, and the manifold energies at work for its destruction. Catiline’s designs, suspended for a moment, were ripening to another crisis; and the citizens pointed with horror to the victim of a guilty conscience, stalking through the streets with abrupt and agitated gait, his eyes bloodshot, his visage ashy pale, revolving in his restless soul the direst schemes of murder and conflagration. Involved in ruinous debt, his last hope of extrication had been the plunder of a province. The spoils of the prætorship had been wrested from him by the rapacity of his judges or his accuser, and access to the consulship was denied him. But his recent escape confirmed him in the assurance that he was too noble a culprit to be convicted; he scarcely deigned to veil his intrigues, while he solicited the aid of men of the highest families in the city. The young Roman prodigals invoked “new tables,” or a clear balance sheet; and it cannot be doubted that their aims were rather personal than political—that they yearned for the extinction of their debts first, and the division of public offices afterwards.