Catilina's Riddle (71 page)

The night is warm, and made even warmer by the heat radiating from the flames which shoot up from a burning house nearby.

Let me explain.

A little while ago I was minding my own business, reading in the garden by the last of the daylight. I noticed that the darkening sky had an oddly reddish tinge, but this I attributed to a florid sunset. I was about to call for a lamp when a slave came to say that I had a caller, and our neighbor Marcus Caelius burst into the garden asking if I could see the fire from the terrace upstairs. Together we rushed to my bedroom, where Bethesda already stood transfixed on the terrace, watching Cicero's house go up in flames.

A few days ago Cicero fled into exile, hounded out of the city by the populist tribune Clodius. The reaction against Cicero has been building for some time. There are still those who praise his virtue and his service to Rome, but even many of his staunchest supporters have grown sick of hearing him go on and on about how sharp and fearless he was in putting down Catilina, in such overblown terms that it's become something of a joke. And then of course his overweening vanity and rudeness have become legendary. Crassus despises him, Pompey barely tolerates him, and you know the sentiments of your beloved commander, Caesar. And of course there are a great many people of all classes who sympathized with Catilina without ever joining him, who are rankled by Cicero's constant boasting and his vilification (beyond the grave!) of a man they respected.

As tribune, Clodius has been a genius at organizing the people (the Master of the Mob, they call him) and at cowing (even terrorizing) the Optimates. They say his feud with Cicero began as a personal matter (incited by Cicero's wife Ter-

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entia, who accused Clodius's sister of trying to break up her marriage by going after Cicero—imagine!), but soon enough Clodius found he could whip up a firestorm of popular support by making public attacks on Cicero. To elicit sympathy, Cicero let his hair grow and went about the city dressed in mourning, but Clodius and his mob followed him everywhere, jeering at him and pelting him with mud, and the hordes of sympathizers Cicero expected to rush to his defense never materialized.

What had become of the masses who had hailed him as Father of the Fatherland only a few years before? The mob is fickle, Meto. Cicero grew so fearful for his life that he fled from the city, whereupon Clodius got the people's Assembly to pass an edict condemning Cicero to exile "for having put Roman citizens to death unheard and uncondemned" and forbidding anyone within five hundred miles of Rome to give him shelter.

(Never mind the law the Senate passed promising everyone immunity after the conspirators were executed.) Further, it was decreed that anyone agitating to bring Cicero back from exile should be regarded as a public enemy, "unless those whom Cicero unlawfully put to death should first be brought back to life." Clodius has a dry sense of humor.

So now, with Cicero headed for Greece, Clodius is on a rampage, and Cicero's lovely house on the Palatine is going up in flames. I write to you not by lamplight, but by the bright, flickering flames that illuminate my bedroom and would make it impossible to sleep, even if I were so inclined.

Now, can you tell me a story of fighting the Helvetii as hair-raising as that?

Where all this chaos will lead I do not know, but I doubt that we have seen the last of Cicero; foxes have a way of slinking back to their lairs once the hunters have moved on.

I wish you every blessing of Fortune in your service under Caesar, and each day I pray for your safe return.

Finally, this letter, which bears today's date, the Ides of Sextilis: To my beloved son Meto, serving under the command of Gaius Julius Caesar in Gaul, from his loving father in Rome, may Fortune be with you.

I have just returned from a trip up north to Arretium.

How wonderful to come home to Rome, to the welcome of Bethesda and your little sister Diana, who in a few days will

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celebrate her twelfth birthday. They send their love, as do Eco and Menenia and the twins, who have become quite uncon-trollable. (I should have become a grandfather in my thirties or forties like most men; now I fear I'm too old for it!) But I must tell you what I discovered on my trip to the countryside. I had not been north on the Cassian Way in years; I have avoided that road, not wanting to pass by the farm again, but a bit of business involving a lost necklace and an adulterous wife compelled me to go to Arretium. (If you want to know the details, you shall have to give up soldiering, come home, and take up your father's profession!) On the way up I was so rushed that I merely rode by the farm at a quick pace. Mount Argentum, the ridge, the farmhouse, the grape arbors and orchards and fields—I felt a pang of nostalgia, which lingered long after I had pressed on. On the way home I had more time, and so when I came to Mount Argentum and the farm, I slowed my horse to a walk.

The first thing I noticed was that the stone wall at the northern end of the farm was in the process of being demolished. The earth was hazy with heat and dust, but I could see the farmhouse and the other buildings clearly enough. Squinting beyond them, toward the stream, I could not see the water mill at all, until I was able to pick out its ruined foundation.

The mill was gone.

I was almost tempted to go riding up to the farmhouse.

Instead I simply stopped in the road and stared. A little while later an oxcart driven by a single slave set out from the stable, heading toward the highway. As he drew closer, I saw that he was not one of the slaves we had owned, so I asked him if he belonged on the farm.

"Yes," he said. His manner was cowed, and he would not look in my eyes.

"Then perhaps you can tell me when your mistress started tearing down the wall up north."

"That wasn't the mistress's idea," he mumbled, looking perplexed at such a suggestion. "It was the master's."

"The master?" I said, wondering if Claudia could have married. "What is his name?"

"Manius Claudius. He started tearing down the wall as soon as he inherited the property, which was a year ago. And quite a job it is, breaking up all that stone and carting it off!

Now that he owns all the land as far as the eye can see on both sides of the ridge, he says he has no use for the wall."

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"But what happened to Claudia?"

"Ah, the master's cousin, who left him the land. She died—a year ago."

"How did she die?"

"It happened quite suddenly. They say it was quite awful.

She went into convulsions, and her tongue turned black. They say it must have been something she ate."

I was quiet for some time, absorbing this. "And the water mill—why was it demolished?"

"That was also at the order of my master Manius. He said, 'Such an abomination is an insult to the institution of slavery!' "

"I see."

"Pardon me," the slave said, looking at the ground, "but you must be the old master, the one who was here before Claudia."

"That's right."

"The old hands speak of your time as a Golden Age."

"Do they? Golden Ages have a way of being overrated.

And they never seem to last. Tell me, is Aratus still the foreman?"

"Yes, and a better one I've never worked for. A steady hand in good times and bad."

"So he is, and I hope your master appreciates him. And tell me, is Congrio still the cook?"

"He was, until shortly after the master inherited the farm. Then the master made Congrio a free man and let him go off to the city with a bag of silver on his belt. Can you imagine that?"

"Yes," I said, "I think I can."

From this story, you may draw your own conclusions.

Recounting this tale, putting it into words as if you were here, makes me miss you very much, my son. I worry for your safety.

I long for your companionship. Though we have had our differences, there are things we two understand that no one else knows of, and so you are precious to me. Without you, there would be no one else to remember and bear witness to certain incidents that still confound and haunt me.

Seeing the farm again has unleashed many memories, which circle my head like harpies. To whom but you could I ever speak of my feelings about Catilina? What a waste, I sometimes think, to have spent my precious time with him suspecting and resisting him! But another part of me says:

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What if you had supported him, given yourself to him heart and soul—toward what end? And an even more skeptical part still doubts everything about Catilina and suspects he was nothing more than a very charming and very desperate charlatan, no different from the rest.

To my knowledge there is no god of regret, or of doubt; why should there be when a Roman is not supposed to feel such things? And so there is no altar upon which I can lay these feelings, see them purified by flame and turned to ash.

Instead I live with doubt and regret, sustained by the love of those close to me, bemused by such ironies as Cicero's exile and Claudia's fate, and I continue to ponder, as I know you must, Catilina's riddle.

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A U T H O R ' S N O T E

ew figures in history have attracted more controversy than Lucius Sergius Catilina. A generation after his death he was already being portrayed as a damned soul by Virgil in the
Aeneid.
Over the centuries he has alternately been held up as F a hero or villain, often in extreme terms. Two works published hundreds of years and thousands of miles apart illustrate the dichotomy by their titles alone: compare
Patriae Parricida: The
History of the Horrid Conspiracy of Catiline Against
the Commonwealth
of Rome,
published by an anonymous pamphleteer in London in 1683, and Ernesto Palacio's
Catilina: Una Revolucion contra la Plutocracia en
Roma,
published in Buenos Aires in 1977. Which is it to be: Catilina the depraved insurrectionist, or Catilina the heroic revolutionary? The destroyer of decency, or the champion of the underclass?

Ben Jonson adhered faithfully to the classical sources hostile to Catilina to produce
Catiline his Conspiracy,
a tragedy first performed in 1611 by the players of King James and revived in the Restoration; its antirevolutionary themes would please a monarch. Voltaire made Cicero an exemplar for the Age of Reason and Catilina an agent of chaos in his play Rome
Sauvee, ou Catilina,
which grossly distorts the historical record; Caesar is sent into the field to fight the conspirators! (From Gaston Bossier's
La Conjuration de Catilina
of 1905 we learn that Robespierre was called
le Catilina modeme.)
In 1850 Ibsen delivered a radical revisionist
Catilina
which portrays the conspirator as a sort of Hamlet struggling with his conscience to take a stand against tyranny.

The problem with Catilina lies in the primary sources, which are severely biased against him. Cicero's four famous orations against Catilina

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are models of invective, and Sallust, who was a partisan of Caesar, had his own agenda when he wrote his book-length history of the
Bellum
Catilinae.
The venom in these accounts must be taken with a grain of salt. One finds evidence from his own writings that before and after the conspiracy Cicero found much to admire in Catilina, and Sallust, while repeating every vile rumor about Catilina and his followers like a dutiful tabloid reporter, nevertheless provides compelling evidence to justify their actions.

Many modern historians seem content to accept the negative por-trait of Catilina at face value, even knowing that it was painted by his enemies. Others follow revisionist lines that seek to look behind Cicero's rhetoric and Sallust's melodrama. In general, the clearest revelation to emerge from most historical reconstructions is of the particular historian's personal politics and point of view; Catilina becomes merely a prop.

Even more distressing are those historians who insist on having the "last word" on a subject for which there can be no last word, short of the invention of time travel or communication with the dead.

Fortunately, the first-person novelist, liberated from any pretense of omniscience, can adhere scrupulously to historical evidence even while allowing for the development of a subjective interpretation. The essential details in Catilina's Riddle, including the speeches and the various political maneuverings, are authentic. Nevertheless, the reader is ultimately free to question Gordianus's perceptions and his conclusions, as does Gordianus himself. It has not been my aim to rehabilitate Catilina, as Jo-sephine Tey sought to rehabilitate Richard III in The
Daughter of Time.

Catilina remains today what he must have been in his own time:
aenigma,
which is to say, a riddle.

Books beget books, and I should acknowledge the one that first made me think that a novel about Catilina was dramatically feasible, The
Conspiracy of Catiline
by Lester Hutchinson (Barnes and Noble, 1967), which remains my favorite book-length reconstruction. Among shorter works, "In Defense of Catiline" by Walter Allen, Jr.
(Classical Journal
34, 1938) provided unique insights. I should also acknowledge Arthur D. Kahn's The
Education of Julius Caesar
(Schocken Books, 1986); the very title of his chapter "The Conspiracy of Cicero and Catilina" challenged me to turn every interpretation I encountered inside out.

Among primary sources, after Cicero and Sallust come the Roman histories of Appian and Dio, and of course the Lives of Plutarch, a treasure trove of juicy details, including the use of Tironian shorthand to record the Senate's debate, Cato's altercation with Caesar over Servilia's love letter, and the notorious riddle itself. What a pity that Plutarch left us no full-scale biography of Catilina!

Readers of previous novels in the "Roma Sub Rosa" series, curious

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about Gordianus's benefactor, Lucius Claudius, may wish to know that he has previously appeared in short stories belonging to the series, most of them published in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.