Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (29 page)

In the great game of personal advancement Caesar’s profligacy was a high-risk but deliberate gambit. His enemies might condemn him as an effeminate dandy, but they also had to acknowledge him as an increasingly heavyweight political contender. Caesar himself, every so often, would rub their noses in this fact. As aedile, he was responsible not only for the games, but for the upkeep of public places. One morning Rome woke to find all the trophies of Marius, long a non-person, restored. The Sullan establishment was appalled. After Caesar had coolly admitted his responsibility, Catulus went so far as to accuse him of assaulting the Republic with a battering ram. Caesar, playing the innocent, responded with outrage himself. Had Marius not been just as great a hero as Sulla? Was it not time for the rival factions to bury the hatchet? Were they not all citizens of the same republic, after all? The mob, assembling in Caesar’s support, roared out its answer: ‘Yes!’ Catulus was left to splutter impotently. The trophies stayed in place.

Episodes such as this served to demonstrate that the
popularis
tradition, scotched but not destroyed by Sulla, was starting to
revive. It was a striking achievement – but it came at a cost. For the
plebs
, who idolised Caesar, his munificence was the key to his appeal, but his enemies could reasonably hope that it might also prove to be his downfall. Just as Cato was famous for his austerity, so Caesar was notorious for his debts. Everyone knew that a moment of reckoning would have to come. It duly arrived in 63
BC
. Caesar, looking to break into the front rank of the Senate once and for all, and to colour his loose-belted image with a touch of more traditional prestige, chose to stake his entire career upon a single election. The post of Rome’s high priest, the
pontifex maximus
, had just become vacant. This was the most prestigious office in the Republic. The man elected to it held it until he died. Quite apart from the immense moral authority it bestowed, it also came with a mansion on the via Sacra, in the Forum. If Caesar became
pontifex maximus
, then he would be, literally, at the centre of Rome.

His opponent in the election was none other than that grandest of all grandees, Quintus Lutatius Catulus. Under normal circumstances, Catulus would have considered himself a shoo-in. The very fact of Caesar’s candidature was a scandal.
Pontifex maximus
had always been considered a post suitable for a distinguished former consul, and emphatically not for a politician on the make. Caesar, however, was not the man to be put off by a minor detail of tradition like that. Instead, he opted for his invariable strategy when confronted by a problem: he threw money at it. The electors were bribed on a monstrous scale. By now Caesar had stretched his credit to the limit. On the day that the result of the election was due to be announced he kissed Aurelia goodbye, then told her, ‘Mother, today you will either see me as high priest or I will be heading into exile.’
¹⁹

As it proved, he would indeed be moving from the Subura – not into exile, but to his new mansion on the via Sacra. Caesar had pulled
it off. He had been elected high priest. Once again, his extravagance had paid spectacular dividends. He had dared to gamble for massive stakes – against the status quo and the most ancient traditions of the Republic itself – and he had won.

There were plenty who gambled and did not win. Caesar’s strategy of conspicuous extravagance was perilous. The promise of future greatness was staked against ruin. Money might be squandered, but never potential. Lose an election, fail to gain a lucrative posting, and a whole career might come crashing down.

It was no wonder that the provincial aristocracy, even as they fostered the ambitions of their sons, should also have slightly dreaded them. To send an heir to Rome was a calculated risk. Young men were easy prey to money-sharks. If a father were prudent, he would attempt to find patrons in the capital, mentors who might not only instruct his son in the labyrinthine ways of the Republic, but also protect him from the city’s many seductions. Particularly for families who had never held office in Rome, it was essential to secure the best. So it was, for instance, that when a banker by the name of Caelius Rufus succeeded in obtaining for his son the sponsorship of not only Crassus but Cicero too, the young Caelius was immediately marked out as a brilliant prospect. This in turn – ironically – served to secure him massive credit. When the usurers came swarming, Caelius welcomed them with open arms. Handsome, witty and buccaneering, the young man was soon developing a lifestyle far in excess of his allowance. He was too ambitious to neglect his education, but even as he studied under his two guardians he was simultaneously establishing a reputation as one of the three best dancers in Rome. New circles were opening to
him – circles in which Cicero tended not to move. As he became ever more of a fixture on the party scene, Caelius began to fall under the spell of a whole new order of acquaintance.

And in particular of a louche patrician by the name of Lucius Sergius Catilina – Catiline. Caesar was not the only man to have founded a career on wild extravagance, nor was he the only aristocrat to have a chip on his shoulder about the bare walls of his atrium. Catiline’s great-grandfather had been a celebrated war hero, fighting against Hannibal with a prosthetic iron hand, but politically his ancestors had been an embarrassment. Even so, although there had been no consul in the family for almost four hundred years, Catiline’s patrician status provided him with cachet. He could pass muster, for instance, with the rigorously snobbish Catulus. Their friendship had been literally sealed with blood. Back in the dark days of the proscriptions, Catiline had helped Catulus to punish his father’s murderer. The wretched man had been whipped through the streets to where the tomb of Catulus’ father stood, his bones smashed with rods, his face mutilated, and only then put out of his misery by decapitation. To Catulus, this savagery had been a grim act of filial piety, a blood-offering to his father’s restless soul. Catiline had had no such excuse. After the murder he had brandished the severed – and supposedly still breathing – head back through the streets of Rome. Even by the standards of the civil war this was regarded as repellent behaviour. Although nothing was ever proved in a court of law, charges of murder, to say nothing of adultery and sacrilege, were to dog Catiline for the rest of his career. True, his sinister reputation was not always a handicap: among more raffish circles it combined with his stylishness and approachability to make him into a figure of menacing glamour. But while this served to provide him with a considerable constituency, it also placed him in a tactical bind. ‘His main appeal he targeted at the young’:
²⁰
how long could Catiline continue to do this without
alienating allies such as Catulus, let alone the majority of senators who already mistrusted him?

In an attempt to square the circle he turned to Crassus for help – or so at least the political gossip had it. No one could be sure, of course. Crassus’ manoeuvrings were invariably veiled in shadow. But one thing could be certain: Crassus, in the sixties
BC
, was a worried man. Once again he was faced with the prospect of being trumped by Pompey. Not only would his old rival soon be returning at the head of a seasoned army, but he would be stupefyingly wealthy: for the first time in his political career Crassus was threatened with losing his status as the richest man in Rome. No wonder that he was frantic to shore up his support. Catiline, with huge ambitions and even huger debts, must surely have struck him as well worth a punt.

It was not merely that Crassus was looking to have a tame consul elected. Catiline also promised other pickings. He was popular wherever the margins of political life were at their seamiest: among the bands of upper-class delinquents brawling in the Subura; among the salons of scheming, dissipated women; among the indebted, the disappointed and the impatient; in short, wherever respectability tipped over into the disreputable. For the abstemious Crassus, a former consul, such a world was clearly out of bounds, although Cicero commented waspishly that he would dance in the Forum if it would win him a legacy.
²¹
That was as may be – but for as long as Crassus had Catiline as his creature, fishing in the murky waters of the underworld, glad-handing the salons, scheming with radicals in late-night bars, it was the proxy whose dignity was on the line.

It is impossible to distinguish what Caelius’ precise role was in all this. It is conceivable, of course, that he had first met Catiline through the agency of Crassus, whose dark political skills Caelius had been studying at first hand. It is even possible that Cicero was
responsible for the introduction. In 65
BC
a rapacious spell as the governor of Africa had finally caught up with Catiline, when Clodius, back in Rome from the East, and eager to make a mark in the law courts, charged him with extortion. At the same time Cicero, the new man, was nerving himself for an attempt on the consulship. He knew that Catiline was planning to stand as well, and so briefly considered defending him in his forthcoming trial, hoping that the two of them might then run for office the following year on a joint ticket. Catiline, however, turned down the offer with a sneer of patrician contempt. The trial held few fears for him. Sure enough, he was speedily acquitted, possibly with the collusion of Clodius, almost certainly with the assistance of hefty bribes from Crassus. He was now free to run for the consulship of 63
BC
. Catiline and Cicero would be going head to head.

Caelius was by his guardian’s side throughout the election campaign. For a young politician who was himself a new man it must have been an intoxicating experience. The election was the most unpredictable in years. Cicero’s whole career had been a preparation for it, but Catiline, just as desperate, was attempting to make good four centuries of family failure. Snobbery formed the basis of his entire campaign. It was conducted in open alliance with another nobleman, Antonius Hybrida, a man so debauched and thuggish that it was hard to believe that he was the son of Cicero’s great hero, Marcus Antonius. Confronted by two such disreputable candidates, the aristocracy took a deep breath, held their noses, and voted for the least bad option. So too, with a good deal more enthusiasm, did the equestrian classes. Cicero won by a mile. Hybrida beat Catiline to a distant third place.

For any patrician, this would have been a humiliation. For Catiline, it threatened disaster: his debts were submerging him, and Crassus, in particular, would have no interest in sponsoring a loser. Yet Catiline had not abandoned all hope. As Cicero, draped in his
purple-bordered toga, guarded by his lictors, a consul of the Roman people at last, began his year in office, so Catiline licked his wounds and plotted his comeback. His credit would last him until another election, and so he continued to borrow, lavishing everything on bribery. At the same time, rather than concealing the scale of his debts, he started to boast about them openly. This was a staggering risk, but, in the circumstances, one he had to take. The misery of indebtedness percolated far beyond the gilded seediness of his own circle. Italy seethed with the resentments of the oppressed, whether in the festering tenements of Rome or on barren farmland, where Sulla’s veterans, mortgaged to the hilt, scratched at dust and recalled the fat days of civil war. At private meetings Catiline began to promise the poor that he would be their champion. After all, as he pointed out, ‘Who was best qualified to be the leader and standard-bearer of the desperate, if not a man who was bold and desperate himself ?’
²²

Cicero, who had been keeping a careful eye on Catiline, was only too willing to take such incendiary talk at face value. Was it possible, he began to wonder, that, having attained the honour of the consulship, he might now be granted the even more glorious honour of saving the Republic from revolution? The prospect filled him with a mixture of consternation and dizzied delight. He and Catiline, stalking each other, both had a vested interest in raising the stakes, in making the flesh of their respective audiences creep. But when at last the two men confronted each other openly in the Senate House, Catiline allowed his loathing of the tongue-wagging upstart opposite to push him into a fatal act of bravado. ‘I can see two bodies,’ he commented, not quite enigmatically enough, ‘one thin but with a large head, one huge, but headless. Is it really so terrible if I offer myself to the body which is lacking a head?’
²³
His fellow aristocrats, the ‘large head’ of Catiline’s riddle, were ominously unamused. Wrapped in metaphor or not, revolutionary
sentiments did not go down well in the Senate House. Catiline had effectively just lost himself a second successive election. Cicero, patrolling the Campus Martius on polling day, made sure to wear a breastplate beneath his toga, and made even more sure that the voters could glimpse it. As the results were announced and Catiline’s defeat became known, so the usurers flocked to pick at his corpse.

Like Caesar campaigning to be
pontifex maximus
, Catiline had staked everything on a single throw. He had gambled that it was possible to play Janus, showing one face to the senatorial and equestrian elite, the other to the poor, the indebted, the dispossessed. The gamble had failed. But if the establishment had turned its back on Catiline, then the underworld had not. He had stirred up hopes perhaps greater and more desperate than he knew. In the countryside, where peasants were starting to arm themselves with scythes and rusty swords, in Rome, where demonstrations were increasingly boiling over into riots, even in the Senate itself, where losers in the great game of advancement chafed against their debts and disappointments, talk of revolution still burned like sparks in the air. And there, sharing in the wild talk, was Marcus Caelius.