Catilina's Riddle (61 page)

Everything!

"If you cannot be stirred to patriotism, then perhaps you can react to self-interest. Let me address myself to those of you who have always been more concerned for your expensive villas, artwork, and silver than for the good of your country. In Jupiter's name, men, if you want to keep those precious possessions that mean so much to you, wake up while there is still time and lend a hand to defend the Republic. We're not talking here about misappropriated taxes, or wrongs done to subject peoples. Here and now it is
our
lives and liberty that are at stake!

"We may react to this crisis with either strength or weakness. To show weakness would be the most dangerous course, for any mercy you show to Lentulus and the other prisoners is a clear signal to Catilina and his army. The harsher your judgment, the more their courage will be shaken. Show weakness, and like a pack of dogs they will swarm over you and tear you apart. Once that happens, forget about calling upon the gods for help. The gods help those who help themselves!

"Banishment? Imprisonment? What absurd half-measures! These

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men must be treated exactly as if they had been caught in the act of the offenses they contemplated. If you came upon a man setting fire to your house, would you stand back and debate your reaction—or would you strike him down? As for the senator who argues for a lesser punishment—

well, perhaps
he
has less reason to be afraid than the rest of us!"

This was a clear implication that Caesar was somehow connected to the conspirators, and those who sat around Caesar reacted with loud booing and catcalls, until Caesar himself stood up and engaged Cato in a heated debate on the merits of his proposal. Nothing new was said, and no memorable insults were exchanged until, while Cato was speaking, Caesar was handed a letter by one of his secretaries. He began to pore over it, drawing it close to his chest as if it contained a great secret.

Cato, apparently thinking it was a note from someone involved in the conspiracy, stopped what he was saying and demanded that Caesar read the letter aloud. Caesar demurred, but Cato vehemently insisted until Caesar handed the slip of parchment to his secretary and sent it across the aisle, saying, "Read it yourself, out loud if you must."

Cato snapped the letter away from the secretary's hand, held it up, and hurriedly scanned it. While the whole Senate watched, he blushed a purple to march the stripe on his toga. Caesar is said to have barely registered a smile while Cato, sputtering with rage, crumpled the parchment in his fist and hurled it back at Caesar, shouting, "Take it back, you filthy drunkard!"

In the midst of a debate over life and death and the future of the Republic, Caesar had received a lascivious love letter from Cato's own half-sister, the wayward Servilia, a perennial source of embarrassment to the great moralist. Was this scene contrived by Caesar to discombobulate his opponent in the midst of the deliberations? Or did Servilia, pining away in her house on the Palatine and blithely unconcerned about the crisis that had paralyzed the whole city, simply happen to crave Caesar's attentions with an unusual intensity that afternoon? Even the most outlandish writer of comedies would never have dared to compose a scene of such pungent absurdity.

In the end, it was Cato, discombobulated though he may have been, who carried the day. The Senate voted to exact the supreme penalty on five of the nine prisoners. These included the two senators, Lentulus and Cethegus; two men of equestrian rank, Lucius Statilius and Publius Ga-binius Capito; and a common citizen, Marcus Caeparius.

The senators feared that nightfall might bring an attempt to free the prisoners, and no time was wasted in carrying out the sentence.

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While praetors went to fetch the others, Cicero himself, flanked by numerous senators and an armed bodyguard, went to fetch Lentulus from the house on the Palatine where he was being kept. The senators formed a moving cordon as Cicero escorted the former consul through the middle of the Forum. I was among the crowd, holding my breath, listening to the pounding of my heartbeat, alert for the first signs of a riot, my ears pricked for cries of insurrection. But the crowd was hushed and made only a dull, wordless roar like the surging of the sea. I have never seen a crowd in the Forum so subdued. I looked at the men around me, and on their faces
I
saw that awe which overcomes men when they witness some terrible spectacle. The solemn ritual of death held them spellbound.

I thought again of the theater, with its strange power to remove men from reality and yet bring them face to face with something vaster than themselves. The Senate of Rome was enacting its will, and there was no power on earth that could stop it.

Eco and Meto were with me. I was content to hang back, but Meto wanted to work his way closer to the procession. Beyond the shields and upraised swords of the bodyguard, through a brief opening in the sea of purple-striped togas, I caught a glimpse of Cicero. One arm was at his side; the other was raised to his chest to clutch the hem of his toga. His chin was held high. His eyes looked straight ahead.

Beside him walked another, older man in senatorial garb, whose posture and expression were exactly the same. Lentulus showed no trace of that irascible sarcasm that had earned him his nickname, nor did he bow his head in shame or tremble with fear. Had I not known which was the consul and which the prisoner, by their bearing alone I could not have told them apart. Then Lentulus chanced to turn his face in my direction. I caught a glimpse of his eyes and knew that I saw a man approaching his end.

Close by the Temple of Concord, built into the hard stone of the Capitoline Hill, is the ancient state-prison of Rome. The prison was built in the days when kings ruled the city, as a place to put their enemies.

Once Rome became a republic, the prison became a place to keep Rome's conquered foes. Its most famous inhabitant in my lifetime had been King Jugurtha of Numidia; after being dragged through the streets of Rome in chains, he and his two sons were taken to the prison and cast into a lightless, airless pit twelve feet underground, reached only through a hole in its stone roof. There they lingered for six days without food or water before being strangled by their jailers.

Lentulus did not have so long to wait. Inside the prison, where the four other prisoners had already been brought, he was stripped of his toga, then escorted to the same pit where the King of Numidia had met his end. As befitted his rank, Lentulus was the first to be lowered through

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the hole. As soon as his feet touched the ground, executioners strangled him with a noose. One by one the four other condemned men were lowered into the pit to join him in death.

When it was over, Cicero emerged from the prison and announced to the hushed crowd, "They have lived their lives"—the traditional way to speak of death without saying the ill-omened word itself, so as not to tempt the Fates or raise the lemures of the unquiet dead.

Once the executions were over, a great tension lifted from the city, as when the final words of a tragedy are spoken and the actors leave the stage. Night was falling. The crowd began to disperse. Cicero, surrounded by his bodyguard, made his way across the Forum. Sudden cries of acclamation filled the air. Men rushed toward Cicero, calling him the savior of the city. As he left the Forum and walked through the luxurious neighborhood of the Palatine toward his house, rich matrons rushed to their windows to see him and sent slaves to put lamps and torches in their doorways, so that his path was brightly lit. He no longer wore a grim face, but smiled, and waved to the crowd as generals do in their triumphal parades.

Thus ended the Nones of December, Cicero's greatest day. To watch the crowd hail him as he ascended the Palatine, one might have believed his triumph was endless and absolute. But when we returned to Eco's house on the Esquiline, we saw no celebrations in the Subura. In its dirty, unlit streets, a sullen silence reigned.

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C H A P T E R T H I R T Y - S E V E N

he year dwindled and the winter grew harsher. Cold winds blew from the north. Sleet pelted the shutters at night. Frost covered the earth, and days seemed to grow dark before they had even begun.

T The shortage of hay on the farm grew acute. "We should begin to favor the younger, healthier animals," Aratus told me, "and to consider slaying some of the others to eat, or else try to sell them at market, even at a loss, rather than see them wither and grow weak. Underfed animals will fall prey to a hard winter. They'll die of illness if not starvation. Better to get some use from them than to watch them slowly die."

From time to time we saw troops marching up the Cassian Way toward the north, dressed in battle gear and wrapped in their marching blankets. The Senate's forces were gathering strength for a confrontation.

One day, when a troop of legionnaires was passing by, I came upon Meto and Diana up on the ridge. He was pointing to the ranks of soldiers passing below and telling her the names and uses of their various weapons and pieces of armor. When he realized that I was behind him, he fell silent and walked away. Diana ran after him, then turned back. She cocked her head and frowned at me. "Papa," she said, "why do you look so sad?"

Eco sent messages from the city to keep me informed of develop-ments. He continued to hear news of uprisings as far away as Mauritania and Spain, but following the executions in Rome a great many of Catilina's supporters abandoned him at once. Still, there were those who persevered in their loyalty, and even within families there had been great upheavals. Most terrifying was the story of a senator's son, Aulus Fulvius, who had left Rome to join Catilina. His father sent a party of men after

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him. Aulus was apprehended, brought back to Rome, and put to death by his father.

The Saturnalia came and went without bloodshed. The midwinter holiday was celebrated in Rome as a day of deliverance. Cato declared to the throng in the Forum that Cicero should be saluted as the Father of the Fatherland. The crowd took up the cry without hesitation, and the Senate later passed such a resolution into law. When he began his year as consul, could Cicero have foreseen in his wildest dreams that he would attain such glory?

The first sour note was struck at the beginning of the new year, when Cicero was obliged to lay down his office. Tradition demanded that he should take an oath proclaiming that he had been faithful in his service to Rome, and then be allowed to deliver a valedictory address from the Rostra in the Forum. What a speech Cicero must have been planning! Having once spent several days in his house while Cicero composed his defense of Sextus Roscius, I could imagine him in his opulent library, pacing back and forth, trying out this phrase and that, sending Tiro after various books so as to get every quotation right, polishing and repolishing what was to be the supreme oration of Rome's greatest orator, his declaration to posterity of all his magnificent accomplishments as consul.

But it was not to be. Two of the new tribunes, who had already taken office, used their power to block Cicero from delivering his farewell speech, citing a technicality of the law and saying that a man who had put Roman citizens to death without due process of law could not be allowed to deliver a valedictory address. They occupied the Rostra and would not allow him to mount the platform. Finally they relented, but only to let him pronounce the oath of leaving office. While the tribunes watched, ready physically to remove him, he began the oath—and then quickly improvised: "I swear . . . that I did truly save my country and keep her great!"

Cicero may have had the last word that day, but his bitterness at being deprived of his valedictory must have been great. Some say Caesar and the populists were behind the incident. Others say it was Pompey's faction, who were already tired of hearing Cicero proclaim that his execution of the traitors was as great an achievement as Pompey's conquest of the East, and thought that Senator Chickpea needed to be put in his place.

I was not surprised when Meto came to my library one frosty morning, and said, with his eyes averted that he wished to leave the farm for a while and go to stay with his brother in the city.

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I considered this request for a long moment. "I suppose, if Eco is amenable . . . "

"He is," said Meto quickly. "I know, because I already asked him, when we were in Rome last month."

"I see."

"I'm not really needed here. You have all the help you need."

"Yes, I suppose we can manage without you. Diana will miss you, of course."

"Perhaps I won't be gone for long." He sighed and threw up his hands. "Oh, Papa, can't you see I simply need to get away?"

"Yes, that much is clear. You're right, it would probably be a good thing for you to be in the city. You're a man now. You need to find your own way. And I know that we can trust Eco to look after you. Which of the slaves will you take with you?"

He averted his eyes again. "I was thinking that I would go by myself."

"Oh, no, not with the countryside in such turmoil. You can't travel alone. Besides, I can't send you to Eco without sending along a slave to compensate for the extra burden on his household. How about Orestes?

He's strong and young."

Meto merely shrugged.

He left almost at once, having already packed his things the night before. Bethesda waited until after he was gone to start crying. She thought that Meto and I must have had a great row, and pestered me for the details. When I denied this and tried to comfort her, she shoved me from the room and closed the door in my face.

"Perhaps I should flee to Rome myself," I muttered under my breath.

It was turning out to be a very hard winter.

The next day I took a long walk around the periphery of the farm, thinking that exertion and fresh air might help relieve my depression. I struck out toward the Cassian Way and walked along it toward the north until I came to the low stone wall that separated my land from that of Manius Claudius. What a peculiar fellow he had turned out to be, I thought, remembering the scene he had made at Meto's party. Stealing bits of food to take home with him, and then daring to insult me in my son's home! He was probably in Rome now. Claudia had said that he preferred the city, especially in the colder months.