Читать книгу Catiline, Clodius, and Tiberius - Edward Spencer Beesly - Страница 3

Table of Contents

B.C.	Consuls	Events
68	L. Caecilius Metellus Q. Marcius Rex	Catiline Propraetor.
67	C. Calpurnius Piso M'. Acilius Glabrio	Catiline Praetor in Africa.
66	M'. Aemilius Lepidus L. Volcatius Tullus	So-called, "First Conspiracy" of Catiline to kill Cotta and Torquatus when they should enter on office.
65	L. Aurelius Cotta L. Manlius Torquatus	Catiline prevented from standing for Consulship by prosecution for malversation in Africa.
64	L. Julius Caesar Marcius Figulus	Catiline stands for Consulship, but is defeated by Cicero.
63	M. Tullius Cicero C..Antonius	Catiline again stands for Consulship, but is defeated by Silanus and Murena, the election having been put off till Oct. 28. Catiline leaves Rome Nov. 8-9. Arrest and execution of his friends, Dec. 4-5.
62	D. Junius Silanus L. Licinius Murena	Catiline defeated and slain at Pistoria early in the year.

IF in the political life of our own time we are too much in the habit of judging men with reference to party, in our views of history we are equally prone to judge parties with reference to men. There is a natural and perhaps laudable prejudice in favour of a political party which numbers among its ranks the men who have the reputation of decency, probity, and respectability. But is it so clear that such men are likely to be on the right side in political struggles? Their virtues, if genuine, are no doubt, from a public point of view, valuable; but it is unquestionable that they are virtues frequently found in conjunction with narrow minds and timid spirits. If this class of men had a preponderating influence, human progress must cease. Moreover, ill-natured as it may seem, we cannot avoid observing that these virtues are simulated more easily, more naturally, and more unconsciously than any others. The citizen who has wealth and a dignified position soon learns to pique himself on his exemption from vices to which he has no temptation, and poses, not without ostentation, as the "integer vita scelerisque purus." The merit he thus affects has also the advantage of being simple and obvious. As it May be coupled with the humblest capacity and the feeblest character, so it is by ordinary men most easily understood and most highly valued. The average mortal feels incapable of judging the aims and conduct of a Cesar or a Cromwell. But if you tell him that Catulus was veracity itself,* or that, Falkland ingeminated Peace, Peace, he feels that here are solid facts on which at all events he can make up his mind. The inference of course follows, that the party which received the support of such men must have been battling for the right. Capital punishment of citizens without appeal to the people, was as illegal at Rome as general warrants in England. But Cicero was a more respectable man than Clodius, and George Grenville than Wilkes. The systems attacked by Catiline and O'Connell may have been full of folly and injustice. But the men themselves have a bad name. They had an interest in disorder. They stimulated their followers to violence and insurrection. Whereas we know that Cicero and Cato, the Duke and Sir Robert Peel, were highly respectable men (whose interests were bound up with order), and our sympathies must therefore go with them. Thus it is that not a few of the enfants perdus of political progress are more hardly judged by posterity, when the abuse they attacked is universally condemned, than by their contemporaries, while it is still an open question.

* "Hoc verum est; dixit enim Q. Catulus."

Of all the characters in history Catiline has been painted blackest. He is to the historians what Judas Iscariot is to the divines. The name itself has a wicked sound to us The very syllables of it seem to connote a monstrous depravity. We cannot hear it but there rings in our ears a confused hurtle of incendia, coedes, latrocinium, audacia, furor, scelus, parricida, sicarius, and other choice missiles from the Ciceronian armoury. We think of him not as a man, but as a demon breathing murder, rapine, and conflagration, with bloodshot eyes and pallid face, luring on weak and depraved young men to the damnation prepared for himself; a horrid portent rising from below, without visible cause or warning, like some earthquake or volcano, to scorch the fair face of civilisation and convert order into chaos.

In endeavouring to relate the story of Catiline calmly and consistently with common sense, I protest, by anticipation, against the supposition that I am amusing myself with maintaining a paradox. My sole desire is to do something towards the elucidation of a much misunderstood period of Roman history. I care nothing about the memory of Catiline, except so far as he was the representative, for a time, of the revolution which it is sought to blacken through him, just as the French revolution is blackened by calumniating Danton and Robespierre.

Let us first endeavour to get some true conception of what the Roman revolution was, and what its course had been before Catiline became a prominent actor in it. It did not, like the French revolution, owe its birth to the growth of ideas and the progress of speculation. It was purely a revolt against intolerable practical evils. No government has been such a scourge to the governed, as was that of the Roman oligarchy during the last century of its existence. Some few of the emperors, maddened by the possession of absolute power, outraged and oppressed families or individuals who had become obnoxious to them, and indulged in freaks of cruel tyranny, which history has taken care to record. Asiatic despots have not seldom shown a sublime indifference to human suffering. Party leaders have been pitiless to opponents, and mobs have sometimes waded in blood. But the aggregate of suffering caused by such agencies appears trifling when compared with the systematic, the methodical torture inflicted by the Roman oligarchy on the Roman world. The government was entirely in the hands of the senate. The senate was composed of ex-officials. Office was again practically unattainable except by "nobiles," men, that is, whose ancestors had filled offices. From Marius to Cicero, a period of forty years, there was no instance of a "novus homo" obtaining the consulship. Nor did the oligarchy choose the most capable men even from its own ranks. Oligarchies are always jealous of distinguished merit, and a Scipio or an Aemilius Paullus was only called to the helm when repeated disasters had shaken the state and discredited the governing class. Vast wealth was to be found among the nobility, but also vast indebtedness; for politics was an expensive pursuit, and no man could hope to succeed who was not as lavish in flinging away his money as he was unscrupulous in getting it. A young man spent all he had and all he could borrow in forcing his way to office. If he was known to be audacious and unscrupulous he found unlimited credit among the money-lenders, for office would be a certain mine of wealth. When his consulship or praetorship had expired he was assigned a province, and then he made his harvest. In the two or three years of his government he had to amass treasure enough to repay his creditors and to place himself in opulence for the remainder of his life. Ha had no salary; but his power was practically unlimited. He could therefore plunder the wretched provincials at his discretion. His operations were generally carried on in the most open and shameless manner. The rod, the axe, and the cross were freely employed in the quest, for there was a cold pitiless barbarity about a Roman noble unknown in modern times, except perhaps among the slave-owners in America. While the head brigand swept off the richest prizes, his "cohors" or attachés flew at smaller game, and between them they managed, in the course of two years, to pick the prey tolerably bare. But this was not the worst. If Verres had been governor of Sicily for life, the position of the Sicilians would have been comparatively enviable. Pure selfishness would have taught him to give some protection to life, some security to property, if he did not wish to dry-up the sources of his wealth. Such an arrangement, however, was incompatible with the oligarchical system. Turn about is fair play. Verres and his suite may gorge for two years or even three; but at the end of that time he must give place to some hungry successor just arrived from Rome, he too with debts to discharge, friends to gratify, and a fortune to make. Can we be surprised that under this blasting system, whole districts went out of cultivation, whole towns became uninhabited?

Alongside the governing class at Rome was a moneyed class whose chief field of operation was also in the provinces. As tax-farmers and moneylenders they were a scourge hardly less terrible than the officials. When an insurrection broke out in a provincial town the first thought of the populace invariably was to massacre the "cives Romanos qui negotiandi causa ibi constiterant." As in our own country, there was no love lost between the business men and the governing class. The noble sneered at the trader and the trader snarled at the noble, and sometimes brooded sulkily over his own exclusion from a political career. But upon the whole there was a tacit understanding between the two classes to divide the spoil. The middle class acquiesced in the monopoly of office by the nobles, on condition that the tax-farmer and money-lender were backed up in the provinces by official authority.

If the provinces were on the high road to ruin, Italy herself, the home of the conquering race, was in little better plight. It was a wise and time-honoured principle, established at a time when the gradual incorporation of Italy with Rome had not been arrested, that the provinces should furnish taxes, not soldiers, and Italy soldiers but not taxes. From fiscal extortion and its concomitant evils the Italians were exempt. But the Italians who enjoyed the enviable privileges of Roman citizenship were before the commencement of the revolution much less than half the inhabitants of the peninsula. The rest, men of the same or kindred stock who had done their share, and more than their share, in building up the empire, shedding their blood on every battlefield from the Tagus to the Halys, were held in political bondage, and exposed in their native towns to the brutality and caprice of Roman officials. Moreover, throughout the peninsula—on Roman territory still more than on Italian—the free peasantry and yeomanry were being superseded by gangs of slaves, who cultivated the vast estates of wealthy proprietors. The free population congregated in the cities, particularly in the metropolis, where they formed a mass of pauperism every day more appalling to the thoughtful politician.

The dull people who have for the most part had the writing of history to themselves do not seem to have perceived that at the commencement of the revolution (B.C. 133) the greatness of Rome was rapidly declining. Industry dying out before slavery, commerce languishing, land going out of cultivation, population diminishing, frontiers receding, north and east menaced by barbarians, armies that could not fight led by generals that could not command—we have all the symptoms that characterised the final break up in the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era. The new military system inaugurated by the revolution, and the improved administration which is the glory of the empire, arrested this downward course, and gave the world five hundred years more of Roman civilisation. But to Scipio Aemilianus, the last hero of the old régime, the end must have seemed not far distant.

Under such a complicated load of evils was the Roman commonwealth staggering, evils that clearly portended a fatal issue, evils not springing from natural and unavoidable causes, but distinctly traceable to the infamous system of government maintained by the nobility for the most selfish and sordid ends. This was the system round which the respectable friends of order (optimates) rallied, the Catos, the Ciceros, and the Catuli. This was the system which the irreverent advocates of reform (populares), the Gracchi, the Catilines the Caesars, strove to beat down. The reformers were not all pure-minded patriots, not all men of stainless lives. But if we would deal them even-handed justice, let us never forget what that thing was that they were labouring to destroy and their opponents to keep alive.

The Roman revolution was inaugurated by the Gracchi. Never had a good cause more noble champions. Not even the shameless mendacity of Roman party warfare dared to breathe a slander against their private character.* The elder, all enthusiasm, sentiment, and generosity, was born to be loved. The nobles beat his brains out in the street. The younger was cast in a sterner mould, and had the murder of an adored brother to avenge.

* If Cicero had been their contemporary, with his theories on "Mendaciuncula," derived from his Greek models, the Gracchi we may be sure would have been handed down to us as stained with every vice that humanity most shudders at.

The first really great man that Rome in six centuries had produced, imperial in his aims, fearless in his choice of means, he gathered up the whole force of the revolution in his single arm and smote the oligarchy with a mortal blow—

"Moriens animam abstulit hosti.

Tum super exanimum sese projecit amicum

Confossus, placidaque ibi demum morte quievit."

The next crisis of the revolution was the attempt of Saturninus to make Marius chief of the State. The charges of vice and profligacy heaped upon Saturninus are, to say the least, unsupported by any trustworthy evidence. Cicero, who must have been well acquainted with many both of his supporters and opponents, although frequently speaking with detestation of his policy, nowhere says a word against his private character. There seems to be no reason to question that he was a sincere reformer endeavouring to carry out the policy of Caius Gracchus, which was in effect to incorporate the Italians with Rome, and to substitute a single ruler responsible directly to the people for the sham Republic. No doubt he resorted to violence. But how could he do otherwise when the nobility were ever ready to meet constitutional action by the bludgeon and the dagger? His scheme, could it have succeeded, would certainly have been a blessing to Rome. It failed through the miserable political cowardice of Marius. The moneyed men, who had hitherto favoured the revolution, now turned against it, and the fall of Saturninus was followed by a real terreur blanche.

Drusus, who headed the revolutionary party in the struggle of 91, is allowed to have been a man of the loftiest character. An aristocrat by birth and temper, he called on the governing class to prove itself worthy of rule by rising superior to selfish greed, and exercising its functions as a duty not as a privilege. In particular he called on them to face the Italian question which had never slept since it had been stirred by Caius Gracchus. He was assassinated. He had fully expected it.

The next conspicuous leader of the revolution was the orator Sulpicius. His character too has been painted very black, without a shadow of evidence. It seems clear that he was an enthusiastic man, whose patience was exhausted by the cant of the conservatives, eternally prating about order and the laws, while they knocked on the head every man who attempted reform by constitutional means. They had appealed to the sword, and so would he. But a new force was now beginning to make itself felt. For the first time in the history of Rome an army intervened in a political question. Sulla marched his troops on the city. The revolution was for the moment crushed, and its leaders, as usual, massacred. But no sooner had the champion of the senate departed for the East, than the irrepressible conflict broke out again. The senate was powerless. The constitution was virtually at an end. Cinna, and after him Carbo, were chiefs of the state, governing despotically by the will of the majority. Unfortunately, they were not fitted, either mentally or morally, for so serious a responsibility. The only solid result of their government—and that due more to the force of events than to the men—was the final incorporation of the Italians with Rome.

Again the political question hung on the shock of contending armies. Sulla returned with his veterans, and after two campaigns found himself absolute master of the Roman state. Too fond of ease and self-indulgence to care for empire, an aristocrat to the finger tips, Sulla re-established the oligarchical constitution in its stiffest form, having previously assured its duration for at least a few years, by the simple expedient of putting to death every one whom he thought at all likely to recalcitrate. But, like Herod and Macbeth, with all his precaution, he missed the important victim.

The first serious blows to the Sullan constitution came from an old partizan of its founder. The history of the last twenty years had not been lost upon Pompeius. Cinna, Carbo, and Sulla had successively ruled Rome with absolute power. Pompeius looked on himself as their natural successor; and if he never openly asserted his position, it was because his inordinate vanity constantly led him to believe that it would come to him gradually without any effort of his own. The key to his vacillating career will probably be found in the hypothesis, that being a man of no originality and no earnest political convictions, his only idea was to repeat the career of Sulla. When that chart failed him he lost his reckoning and steered wildly. He wished to be the dignified omnipotent patron of the aristocracy, administering provinces by his lieutenants, occasionally undertaking some extraordinary function, but ordinarily sitting apart in sublime solitude with the Domitii and the Metelli kotooing, and the rabble cheering itself hoarse. Unfortunately, however, he never succeeded in convincing the nobles of the beauty and fitness of this arrangement. He could not persuade them that he was a man of Sulla's calibre. They thwarted his schemes. They sneered at his vanity. They despised his mushroom nobility. They believed that the constitution could stand without his protection, and studied to reduce him within the limits of oligarchic equality. Hence his coalitions with Cesar, in which he imagined that he was using his great rival as a tool to humble the nobles. He played with revolution. Caesar meant it. The time therefore came when Pompeius was content to enrol himself with the nobles not as their master, but as their servant, though probably not without the secret resolution to make a clean sweep of "optimates" and "populares" alike had he conquered at Pharsalia.

If the appointment of Pompeius to carry on the war against Mithridates (B.C. 66) had been very unpalatable to the nobles, they had at least the opportunity, during his four years' absence, of playing their game without being thwarted by his opposition, or humiliated by his patronage. It was clear that a storm was impending. The merciless proscriptions of Sulla had cut off every man of influence and energy among the revolutionary party. But sixteen years had passed away, and with them the traces of that terrible depletion. New leaders had sprung up. Old grievances were flourishing rank as ever; and the pauperised masses, borrowing courage from despair, were once more confronted by the men of privilege, canting, unscrupulous, and ferocious as their fathers before them.

The history of the so-called conspiracy of Catiline, as hitherto written is absolutely unintelligible, except on conventional rules of probability, which may satisfy us in melodrama, but are out of place as applied to real life. Some things in the past of course we cannot hope to clear up. We shall never know who the Hermokopids were, or who murdered Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey, or how Darnley came by his death; and we may acquiesce, without shame in our ignorance, because, important as the effects in these cases accidentally were, the facts themselves are no more of a public nature than the Road murder. The investigation of them belongs, not to the historian, but to some detective, with a literary turn, retired from business. But we may not so dismiss the Catilinarian mystery. It is not creditable to the historian to be at fault when the evidence and probabilities to be balanced are strictly political. The thoughts and actions of individuals may baffle our scrutiny. But nations and societies, and even parties, act in obedience to simple motives and broad general principles. The footsteps of the solitary traveller may be easily lost. But he who would follow the track of an army has only to use his eyes.

If the story of Catiline is unintelligible, it is because the historians one and all have run away with the idea that Caesar was at that time the leader of the popular party. Mr. Merivale, for instance, prefaces his history of the conspiracy by a picture of the popular party, in which he makes Caesar the central figure. He "stood forth far more prominently among his own associates, and gave more distinct expression to their aims than was the case with any one of the chiefs of the opposite faction. To that grand array of aristocratic gravity, of military renown, of learning and eloquence, of austere and indomitable virtue, were opposed the genius and resources of one man," &c. The Emperor Napoleon has not put forward this view more strongly than the English historian. Every law that is proposed emanate from Caesar. Every prosecution is instigated by Caesar. The idol of the populace is Caesar. The very provincials rest their hopes on Caesar. The sole thought of the oligarchy sleeping and waking is to parry the blows of Caesar.

Well, but if this hypothesis be true,—if the masses follow Caesar, and the wealthy classes Cicero and Cato,—where are we to look for the party of Catiline, the party which thought itself strong enough to revolutionise the state, and, according to Cicero, was within an ace of doing so? This is a question which sensible men are not ashamed to answer by maundering about "dissolute youth," "insolvent debtors," and "disbanded soldiers." Any explanation must be preferable to such transparent nonsense.

The fact is that the acknowledged leader of the popular party, after the departure of Pompeius, was not Caius Julius Caesar, but Lucius Sergius Catilina. When Caesar's grand career had closed, and men's eyes were still dazzled by the glorious effulgence, they naturally ransacked their own memories or the traditions of their elders, if perchance they might glean some fragments of information respecting the early life of the hero. They did not gather much for Caesar's early years had not greatly impressed his contemporaries. What they did gather we may be sure they made the most of. Every anecdote was treasured up, and every anecdote is characteristic. Now the most characteristic anecdotes of great men are generally the least authentic. Perhaps they are not, for that reason, the less valuable, since they represent the impression a man has produced on the contemporary or succeeding generation. But we must be careful how we arrange them alongside of facts, or spin out inferences from them. Suetonius, Plutarch, and Dion Cassius, writing long afterwards, were naturally disposed to attribute an importance to little facts in Caesar's early career, which in the eyes of contemporaries they certainly did not possess.

That previous to the affair of Catiline, Caesar was by no means a leading man in his party may be very clearly proved. Every one knows that by far the largest part of our information respecting the period is derived from the works of Cicero, particularly from his letters and speeches. Previous to the fourth oration against Catiline, which was delivered in reply to a speech of Caesar, we have sixteen orations, forming in bulk about half of those extant. We have also eleven letters. Now it is a curious fact, and one which, as far as I am aware, has not hitherto been noticed, that in those orations and letters the name of Caesar does not occur once. Nay, more, I believe it will be found that nowhere in his subsequent writings, though continually alluding to Caesar, does he give the slightest intimation that before the affair of Catiline he was a man of consequence. Our other contemporary authority, Sallust, though a great admirer of Caesar, is equally silent about his early career. Neither Cicero's fourth oration against Catiline, nor the speech of Cato on the same occasion, as reported by Sallust, treat Caesar as the spokesman of the great popular party, which they could hardly have failed to do had he occupied that position. My own impression is, that the mettle Caesar showed in that memorable debate first marked out as the champion of the revolution a. man who hitherto had been popular indeed, but had not been regarded as a serious politician.

The man on whom the eyes of the revolutionary party were fixed after the departure of Pompeius was, I repeat, Catiline. Sallust tells us so in so many words, "Cuncta plebes Catilinae incepta probabat."* Let us once understand this clearly, and Catiline's position becomes perfectly simple. He was the successor in direct order of the Gracchi, of Saturninus, of Drusus, of Sulpicius, and of Cinna, and was recognised as such both by friends and enemies. The popular cause, it must be owned, might have been in better hands; but it cannot be expected that the men who ride the revolutionary storm will always be men of the purest character. The more dangerous the task is made, the greater is the probability that none will undertake it but fiery, nay, desperate men, whom the passionate sense of wrong has made careless of consequences, both to themselves and others. It is fit and proper that when a Gracchus or a Drusus is murdered, the murderers should have to deal with a Catiline.

* De Conj. Cat. xxxvii. 1.

Who and what, then, was this man whose deeds and purposes brought upon him not merely failure and death, but a martyrdom of nineteen centuries, from which even his iron soul must have shrunk, could he have foreseen it?

L. Sergius Catilina was sprung from one of the most ancient patrician families of Rome. His ancestors had been consuls and decemvirs when the Metelli and Domitii were clapping their chopped hands and throwing up their sweaty nightcaps on the Aventine or Mons Sacer. But the sun of the Sergii had long set. No Sergius had been consul since the burning of Rome by the Gauls. Catiline himself had, like Pompeius and Crassus, borne arms on the side of Sulla. It is, therefore, quite possible that, like them, he may have been implicated in the butcheries of the proscription.* But when we remember the devotion with which he was followed in after years by the Marian party, we shall hesitate to believe that he was guilty of an act so exceptionally odious and horrible as the torture and murder, with his own hand, of M. Marius Gratidianus, a highly popular man; and a near relation of C. Marius. This tale is repeated as a matter of course by every historian; but let us see on what foundation it rests.

* The cruelties of Pompeius are well known. Crassus, without authority, inserted a man's name on the list of the proscribed, that he might get his property.

Quintus Cicero, in a letter to his brother Marcus, at the time when the latter was standing for the consulship, tells him that Catiline had murdered Gratidianus and also his own brother-in-law, Caecilius. M. Cicero, in an oration delivered at the same time against Catiline, who was his competitor, and of which some disjointed fragments remain, appears to have advanced the charge publicly. This is the only contemporary evidence. What historians in later ages wrote, we may be sure they wrote on the authority of Cicero. Of the facts they would know no more than we do. Now every one who is acquainted with the ancient orators, both Greek and Roman, is aware that they never shrunk from the most impudent falsifications of fact when it served their turn. At the present day, when contemporary history is recorded in a vast printed literature, easily accessible to every one at a moment's notice, a speaker is afraid to make assertions which would be proved to be false in all the newspapers next morning. But a Greek or Roman orator was under no such fear, and his most daring fabrications were commonly introduced by "μεμνησθε γαρ δ ηπου ω ανδρες 'Αθηναιοι," or "Ecquis est vestrum Quirites qui non meminerit." Cicero's oration, "In Toga Candida," was an electioneering speech, in which his object was to paint Catiline as black as he could. The stories about Gratidianus and Caecilius he probably got from his brother's letter, above alluded to, for he was himself absent from Rome during the proscriptions. But, it may be said, Catiline was prosecuted for the murder of Gratidianus. True; but when? Not till this very year. The murder of Gratidianus had taken place eighteen years before. It was one among hundreds of others, resembling it, no doubt, pretty closely in all its circumstances. It was now raked up by Cicero to discredit Catiline with his Marian supporters. Of the thousands who listened to the unscrupulous orator, how many would be able to say how Gratidianus came by his death? When once the charge was set afloat during a hotly disputed election, of course it would be repeated as an indisputable truth by the partisans of Cicero, and Catiline was put on his trial for it.

We are entitled to point to the fact that he was acquitted. The verdicts of Roman juries are not above suspicion. But Catiline himself was very poor, and the long purses were on the side of Cicero. An acquittal may not prove a man innocent; but still less does a prosecution prove him guilty. Sallust, our only other contemporary authority, while raking up everything disadvantageous to Catiline, says nothing of his share in the murders of the proscription, nor did Cicero himself ever again allude to it in his most unsparing invectives. It had served his turn for the moment, which was all he thought of.

The other stories which Cicero and Sallust set afloat, and Plutarch and Dion copied, cannot easily be disproved, for the simple reason that they are not supported by a tittle of evidence. Catiline has the misfortune to lose his wife and only son. Of course, he poisoned them. He has a large circle of friends who are never weary of his society. What more easy than to call them a gang of debauchees? If you had a political quarrel with a man at Rome, you accused him, as a matter of course, of all vices and crimes, natural and unnatural. These were the "mendaciuncula," the fibs, with which, as Cicero tells us in one of his treatises on rhetoric, a good orator will season his speech.* It was so much "common form." You were not liable to be called out, or horsewhipped, or indicted for a malicious libel.

* De Oratore, II. 59.

Even with these wholesome checks we know what queer stories will get about in England at an election, and what strong language Fizkin will use to Slumkey on the Eatanswill hustings. In England, these libels are soon forgotten; but in Rome they were precisely what remained and have been preserved, because they are imbedded in the speeches of a great orator. Our dull littérateurs have adopted them as serious facts, rather than confess how little we really know of ancient history beyond its broad features. Sallust admits, in two places; that he had no evidence for these scandalous stories, and that in the opinion of many they were trumped up by Cicero's friends after the execution of Catiline's partisans, in order to relieve the consul from the odium of that illegal act.* Nay, Cicero himself, seven years afterwards, confesses that Catiline enjoyed the intimacy of many of the best men in Rome, who esteemed him for the eminent virtues (maximae virtutes) he appeared to possess.

* De Conj. Cat., xiv. 7; xxii. 3.

"There was a time," he says, "when he nearly imposed on me, even on me. I used to think him a worthy citizen, a man who delighted in the society of the good, a firm and faithful friend. His criminal enterprises came upon me completely by surprise. I have often since reproached myself with my mistake."* What! a man who had commenced his career by horrible cruelties committed in the face of Rome, who had notoriously murdered his nearest relatives, whose whole life had been passed in the public practice of the foulest and most unnatural debauchery, who had been a sort of professor of depravity among the most depraved wretches of the day—this monster could enjoy the friendship and respect of the best men in Rome! For my part I know what to think.

* Pro M. Coelio, 6.

So much for Catiline's antecedents. There seems to be no reason to doubt that he had been of Sulla's party. Beyond this we do not know a single fact about him, good or bad. All we know is that he was considered a respectable man in the most respectable circles in Rome, and that, as he is admitted on all hands to have possessed some very fine and rare qualities, he must have been a man of mark and promise.

Catiline's public life covers the period from B.C. 68, when he was praetor, to B.C. 62, when he fell on the field of Pistoria. We have no information as to his praetorship. In 67 he went in due course to Africa as propraetor. When he returned in 66, Pompeius, hitherto looked on as the popular leader, was away in Asia, conducting the war against Mithridates, and the popular party was for the moment without a head. The nobles were determined to take advantage of his absence to inaugurate a reaction.*

* "Postquam Cn. Pompeius ad bellum maritimum atque Mithridaticum missus est, plebis opes imminutae, paucorum potentia crevit."—Sallust, de Conj. Cat., xxxix. 1.

The election of consuls for the ensuing year had fallen on Autronius and Sulla. The first was perhaps "ignobilis;" at all events, no Autronius had yet been consul. The latter, though a nephew of the great Dictator, had used his influence with his uncle to save many of the proscribed, and was now on the the popular side.* The oligarchy quashed the election on the ground of bribery, although for Sulla at least every century had given its vote, and declared the defeated candidates, Cotta and Torquatus, consuls for 65—a proceeding as outrageous as that of the House of Commons in 1769, when it declared Colonel Luttrell member for Middlesex. To this year belongs what is called the first conspiracy of Catiline. Evidently on his return he had stepped into the place of popular leader, vacant by the absence of Pompeius. He had supported the candidature of Autronius and Sulla, and he is accused of having now conspired with them to kill Torquatus and Cotta. The plot, it is said, failed through Catiline's not giving the signal at the right moment. There is no proof that this charge was seriously and publicly made at the time. Later in the year it was arranged that Catiline should stand on the popular interest for 64, and to prevent this the notorious Clodius was employed by the oligarchy to impeach him for malversation in Africa. Upon this trial Clodius brought up the story of the assassination plot. But the Consul Torquatus himself pooh-poohed it, and showed that he acquitted Catiline, at all events, of any share in it, by coming forward in his defence. Doubtless it would never have been heard of again but for the fierce passions subsequently excited. It is worthy of remark that Suetonius, upon the authority of Bibulus and the elder Curio, attributes this plot to Crassus and Caesar, the latter of whom he says made the mistake about the signal. Catiline he does not even mention.

* Cicero, pro P. Sulla, 26.

Catiline was acquitted of malversation; but the object of the oligarchy was gained. The impeachment had been so timed as to make it impossible for him to announce himself as a candidate before the period for giving notice had expired. We may imagine how his fierce temper was rising as he saw the game the oligarchy were determined to play. However, he at once commenced his canvass for 63. Among his competitors were Cicero and Antonius. Cicero was anxious to make common cause with Catiline, and to be nominated with him on the popular ticket. With this view he was anxious to act as Catiline's advocate on his African trial.* But it was determined that Antonius should run with Catiline; and Cicero thereupon threw himself upon the nobles, and was put forward as their candidate.

* We know all this from a letter of Cicero to Atticus (i. 2), in which he speaks as if he was already engaged in the case ("Indices habemus," etc.). Middleton has the effrontery to say that Catiline "had been soliciting Cicero to undertake his defence."

From this moment dates the furious hostility of Cicero to Catiline. Up to this time he had courted the revolutionary party. But he now sold himself to the nobles, and began to earn his wages by denouncing revolutionary measures, and the leader of the party, Catiline. Among the earliest efforts of his venal tongue in this direction were the orations, In Toga Candida, De Lege Agraria, and Pro C. Rabirio. It is in the first of them that the horrible charges against the early life of Catiline were made, for the first time, as far as we know. While accusing Catiline of abetting the cruelties of Sulla, Cicero was not ashamed to oppose the bill for restoring the children of Sulla's victims to their civil rights.

In the meantime the efforts of the oligarchy brought in Cicero at the head of the poll for the ensuing year, Antonius heading Catiline by a few votes. On January 1st, 63, Cicero and Antonius entered on office. Again Catiline renewed his candidature, and again the oligarchy concentrated all its efforts to defeat the popular champion. To this object Cicero, inflamed by personal hatred and the proverbial bitterness of a renegade, devoted the whole period of his consulship. Judging from all former precedents, an appeal to force was imminent. The nobles were evidently resolved, by fair means or foul, to keep Catiline out of office. On the other hand, Catiline was not a man to submit tamely either to fraud or violence. Probably those did him no injustice who thought him capable of striking the first blow. Most certainly he did not mean to be knocked on the head like the Gracchi and Saturninus, whose cases Cicero was always quoting as wholesome precedents. If the nobles had their armed retainers and the vantage ground of authority and office, he had the populace of Rome on his side, and the peasantry throughout Italy, groaning under an infamous government, and ripe for revolution. Expecting from day to day that a coup d'état would force him into open resistance, he passed the word round to be ready for action. If he could obtain the consulship, of course there would be no civil war; and that he would obtain it appeared more and more likely as the day of election approached. Would the nobles let things take their course?

The moment for the coup d'état seemed to be come. On October 20th, Cicero got up in the senate and announced the existence of a plot. This was made an excuse for postponing the election, and the next day Cicero called Catiline to account before the senate. The popular leader disdainfully scouted the idea of a plot. They were welcome to know his plans. The people had found its strength, and while he was alive, should not want a leader. Having said this, he abruptly left the house, amidst the groans of the assembled nobles, to the great disappointment of Cicero, who had hoped that he would be murdered on the spot—as he certainly would have been if Cicero had had the nerve of Nasica or Opimius.*

* "Omnino vivum illinc exire non oportuerat."—Cicero, pro Murena, 25.

One thing, however, Cicero could do. He could talk; and talk he did. He employed the interval before the election in filling Rome with horrible stories of a plot. He made men's hair stand on end with his ravings. The conspirators had met in the dead of night. They had sworn a fearful oath. They had tasted each other's blood. They had killed a child and eaten its entrails. They had resolved to plunder and burn the city. Rome was mapped out into districts for conflagration.

Grossly improbable as such charges were, they were sure to damage Catiline; and by means of these manoeuvres and a lavish expenditure of money, which disgusted even so violent an aristocrat as Cato, the nobility again managed to carry their candidates, Silanus and Murena.

That Catiline may at this time have laid plans against the life of Cicero is probable enough. He was not a man whom we could expect to rise superior to the manners of his class. The nobility had never shrunk from assassination where it served their purpose; and Cicero, though he disliked it as applied to himself, could applaud it loudly where a Gracchus or a Caesar was the victim. Assassination is a form of crime which has always been especially characteristic of oligarchic manners.

The triumph of the reactionary party was the signal for insurrectionary movements in several parts of Italy. We may be sure that Catiline was in correspondence with the insurgent leaders, just as in B C. 91 Drusus had been in correspondence with Pompaedius Silo. But it is evident that he was very reluctant to cast in his lot openly with the insurrection. Drusus, if he had not been assassinated, might have been, driven ultimately to take refuge at Corfinium. The personal prowess of Catiline, and the devotion of his friends, probably saved him from assassination, though Cicero distinctly states that he would have had it done if he had thought that his single death would have broken up the revolutionary party.* On the other hand, such was still his popularity in Rome, that to get up a riot and lynch him and his friends, as had been done in the cases of the Gracchi and Saturninus, was too dangerous an experiment. Cicero therefore used every effort to drive him into the disaffected districts, and when the insurrection broke out in Etruria, on October 27th, Catiline's position at Rome became full of danger. Every one knew this relations with Manlius, the leader of the insurgents; and many who had sympathised with the wrongs and sufferings of an oppressed class, would range themselves on the side of authority when it came to civil war. The moneyed men particularly took fright at the spectre of communism.

* In L. Catilinam, iv. 12.

Cicero now saw his opportunity, and summoned the senate for November 8th. On that day the Equites—that is to say, the moneyed men and nobles not in the senate—appeared in arms to overawe the populace, and Cicero, emboldened at the sight, delivered his celebrated "Quousque tandem" oration, in which he denounced Catiline as a public enemy The popular leader endeavoured to reply, asserting his attachment to his country, and appealing to his whole life, from his youth up, for the proof of it. But the nobles drowned his voice with their clamour; and his patience at length forsaking him, he flung out of the senate house, exclaiming that he was being driven to ruin by his enemies, but that if he must fall he would not fall alone. Returning to his house, he recommended his wife and daughter to Catulus, the head of the aristocratic party, in a simple and dignified letter, which, as the Emperor Napoleon says, offers a striking contrast to the passion of Cicero. His conscience, he says, does not accuse him; he has endeavoured to act within the constitution; but he has been crushed by a conspiracy of unworthy men. Even while he writes he learns that the assassins are on his track; he has now no choice but to put himself at the head of the insurrection. The same night he left Rome for Etruria.

The nobles had thus gained their point. Catiline was a rebel, and an outlaw. "Les absents ont toujours tort" was true in a peculiar sense in Roman politics. Such was the veneration for Rome, the seat of empire—"Capitoli immobile saxum"—that in the civil wars the party who yielded possession of it were regarded, and regarded themselves, as rebels and enemies of the state. The flight of Catiline was followed by a proclamation offering large rewards to any one who should give information as to the plot. It is remarked as strange by the historians, that no such information was obtained. The fact is that there was no plot. . There was a large political party, numbered by tens of thousands, and its leaders were in correspondence with the insurgents in Etruria. An exact parallel is to be found in our own revolution. Pym and Hampden openly headed a powerful party. But of course they had their private consultations, and no one doubts that they were in correspondence with the Scotch insurgents. That there was an organisation in Rome for the purpose of burning, slaying, and plundering is a supposition too ridiculous to be seriously discussed.

The leadership of the Catilinarian party in the city now devolved on P. Lentulus, an elderly man, who had been consul eight years before. He was in no respect equal to the task, but age and official rank always conferred precedence amongst Romans.* The first step of this man, his negotiation with the Allobroges, ruined his cause. The sword of Caesar had not yet relieved Rome from the constant dread of the Gaulish avalanche impending over Italy. Once suspected of inviting the barbarian, the revolutionary leaders were fatally discredited. Even the mob, according to Sallust, turned against them. The famous debate of December 5th shows that the government felt itself much stronger. Even Caesar, while courageously protesting against an illegal sentence, did not dare to extenuate the guilt of the criminals. If the nobles hung back at first, it was because they hoped that their hireling, Cicero, would take the responsibility and odium upon himself. This, however, he was determined not to do, and their courage was at length screwed to the sticking-place by the cynical frankness of Cato, who told them that if they wished to preserve their palaces, villas, and other luxuries, they must take their share of the work.

* This is one among many reasons why Caesar could not have been an influential leader before the affair of Catiline.

The execution of Lentulus and his companions was a barefaced and deliberate violation of the most solemn article of the Roman constitution, which provided that no citizen should be put to death without an appeal to the people. It was much as if Charles I. had succeeded in arresting the five members, and had gone on to execute them by a vote of the House of Lords or the Privy Council.

The name of Caesar had not been mentioned by the Allobroges. But some of the wire-pullers of the aristocratic party, particularly Catulus ("Hoc verum est dixit enim Q. Catulus!"), who thought that advantage should be taken of the excitement to clear away all undesirable persons, urged Cicero, and even offered him money, to make the Allobroges, or some other informer, accuse him.* Cicero, however, thinking, no doubt, that he had done a good-day's work for his patrons, declined to run himself into more danger.

* "Q. Catulus et C. Piso neque pretio neque gratia Ciceronem impellere quivere, uti per Allobroges aut per alum indicem C. Caesar falso nominaretur."—Sallust, De Cat. Conj. 49.

The little army of Catiline died round their leader like the Spartan Three Hundred round Leonidas at Thermopylae. Even Sallust cannot withhold his admiration, and rises into a genuine enthusiasm as he describes the closing scene. "All wounded in front; not a man taken alive; Catiline himself gasping out his life ringed round with corpses of his foemen." The world has generally a generous word for the memory of a brave man dying for his cause, be that cause what it will. But for Catiline none. The execrations of nineteen centuries lie piled on the grave of the successor of the Gracchi and the forerunner of Caesar. It is not good to make a literary man your enemy.

Catiline and Cicero were not merely political opponents. The natures of the two men were thoroughly antipathetic. Cicero thought that society existed for the glory of clever writers and eloquent speakers. The strength of character and prudence which make the practical statesman were in his eyes very vulgar qualities. He shrank with dislike and fear from a resolute man. He reverenced constitutional forms as framed in the interest of talkers. His idea of good government was a state of things where talkers should always have full swing, and be listened to with respect, while rough practical men should humbly do their bidding. If he had lived in our time he would have written in the Saturday, and had his views about the representation of minorities.

Catiline, on the contrary, was the man of action, who would rather see a thing done than hear it talked about. Not deficient in intellect—far from it; but with an intellect of the practical sort, quick, decisive, intuitive. He looked on Cicero as a coward and babbler. It made his gorge rise to see the complacent orator mount into the rostra and go through his feats. And then to think that this windbag, this prating knave, "that never set a squadron in the field nor the division of a battle knows, more than a. spinster," has talked himself into the first magistracy of a military commonwealth, while I, Lucius Catilina, a soldier every inch of me, with every masculine quality, with a dauntless heart and a ready hand, with a special gift for ruling my fellows, must stand aside, year after year, because my family has gone down in the world, and I have no stake in the country!

An unequal struggle. The man of letters has had the ear of the world ever since, and has told his story without contradiction. More than that, the literary men have stood by one another, as they always do—like game-preservers or Whitechapel thieves; and each in turn has pointed his stale moral with the fate of the unlucky wight who dared to beard the patriarch of their tribe. Ουδ αρα οι τις ανουτητι γε παρεστη. But the true character of the Roman revolution and of Roman parties has of late years been much better understood. As the greatness and goodness of Caesar were more ungrudgingly recognised, the character and aims of his precursors could not fail to meet with fairer treatment. The first writer who has thought it necessary to bring his account of Catiline into some accordance with common sense and probability is, as might have been expected, not a literary man, but a practical statesman. But the Emperor Napoleon's determination to make Caesar a hero from his cradle has to some extent led him astray in his estimate of Catiline. I will not affirm that I have completely succeeded in painting the man and the situation as they were, for the attempt to restore a likeness from a comparison of caricatures must always be attended with more or less uncertainty. But if I have done any injustice, it has not been to the Roman oligarchy, but to Catiline.