Plutarch thought that Marcus Tullius was called Cicero because of a wart, shaped like a vetch (cicer), on an ancestor’s nose; more probably his forebears had earned the cognomen by raising renowned crops of chick-peas. In his Laws Cicero describes with engaging tenderness the modest villa that had seen his birth near Arpinum, halfway between Rome and Naples, in the foothills of the Apennines. His father was just rich enough to give his son the best education that the age could provide. He engaged the Greek poet Archias to tutor Marcus in literature and Greek and then sent the youth to study law with Q. Mucius Scaevola, the greatest jurist of his time. Cicero listened eagerly to the trials and debates in the Forum, and rapidly learned the arts and tricks of forensic speech. “To succeed in the law,” he said, “a man must renounce all pleasures, avoid all amusements, say farewell to recreation, games, entertainment, almost to intercourse with his friends.”36
Soon he was practicing law himself and making speeches whose brilliance and courage won him the gratitude of the middle classes and the plebs. He prosecuted a favorite of Sulla and denounced the proscriptions in the midst of the Sullan terror (80 B.C..).37 Shortly afterward, perhaps to avoid the dictator’s revenge, he went to Greece, and continued there his studies of oratory and philosophy. After three happy years in Athens he passed over to Rhodes, where he heard the lectures of Apollonius, son of Molon, on rhetoric, and those of Poseidonius on philosophy. From the first he learned the periodic sentence structure and purity of speech that were to distinguish his style; and from the other that mild Stoicism which he would later expound in his essays on religion, government, friendship, and old age.
Returning to Rome at the age of thirty, he married Terentia, whose ample dowry now enabled him to go into politics. In 75 he distinguished himself by his just administration of a quaestorship in Sicily. In 70, having resumed the practice of law, he raised a furor among the aristocracy by accepting a retainer from the cities of Sicily and bringing suit against the senator Caius Verres, on the charge that as propraetor there (73-71) Verres had sold his appointments and decisions, had lowered individual tax assessments in inverse proportion to bribes received, had despoiled Syracuse of nearly all its statuary, had assigned the revenues of a whole city to his mistress, and all in all had carried injustice, extortion, and robbery to such a pitch as to leave the island more desolate than after two Servile Wars. Worse yet, Verres had kept for himself some of the spoils that usually went to the publicans. The business class supported Cicero in the indictment, while Hortensius, aristocratic leader of the Roman bar, led the defense for Verres. Cicero was allowed some hundred days to gather evidence in Sicily; he took only fifty, but he presented so much damaging testimony in his opening address that Hortensius—who had decorated his gardens with part of Verres’ sculptural loot—abandoned his client. Condemned to pay a fine of 40,000,000 sesterces, Verres fled into exile. Cicero published the five additional speeches that he had prepared; they constituted an unsparing attack upon Roman malfeasance in the provinces. His energy and courage won him such support that when he ran for the consulate for 63 B.C. he was elected by acclamation.
Born of modest equestrian rank, Cicero had naturally sided with the middle class and had resented the pride, privileges, and misrule of the aristocracy. But far more deeply he feared those radical leaders whose program, he thought, threatened all property with mob rule. He therefore made it his policy, now that he was in office, to promote a “concord of the orders”—i.e., a co-operation of the aristocracy and the business class—against the returning tide of revolt.
The causes and forces of discontent, however, were too deep and varied to be easily dissolved. Many of the poor were listening to preachers of utopia, and some who listened were ripe for violence. A little above them were plebeians who had forfeited their property through defaulted mortgages. Some of Sulla’s veterans had failed to make their land allotments pay and were ready for any disturbance that might give them loot without toil. Among the upper classes were insolvent debtors and ruined speculators who had lost all hope or wish to meet their obligations. Others had political ambitions and saw their road to advancement cluttered with conservatives who took too long to die. A few revolutionists were sincere idealists, convinced that only a complete overturn could mitigate the corruption and inequity of the Roman state.
One man sought to unite these scattered groups into a coherent political force. We know Lucius Sergius Catiline only through his enemies—through the history of his movement by the millionaire Sallust, and through the violent vituperation of Cicero’s orations Against Catiline. Sallust describes him as a “guilt-stained soul at odds with gods and men, who found no rest either waking or sleeping, so cruelly did conscience ravage his overwrought mind. Hence his pallid complexion, his bloodshot eyes, his gait now fast now slow; in short, his face and every glance showed the madman.”38 Such a description suggests the pictures that a people struggling for life or power paints of its enemies in war; when the battle is over the pictures are gradually revised, but in the case of Catiline we have no revision. In youth he had been charged with deflowering a Vestal Virgin, a half sister of Cicero’s first wife; the court had acquitted the Virgin, but gossip had not acquitted Catiline; on the contrary, it added that he had killed his son to please his jealous mistress.39 In the scale against these stories we can only say that for four years after Catiline’s death the common people of Rome—“the miserable, starveling rabble,” Cicero called them—strewed flowers upon his tomb.40 Sallust quotes what purports to be one of his speeches:
Ever since the state fell under the sway of a few powerful men . . . all influence, rank, and wealth have been in their hands. To us they have left danger, defeat, prosecutions, poverty. . . . What have we left save only the breath of life? … Is it not better to die valiantly than to lose our wretched and dishonored lives after being the sport of other men’s insolence? 41
The program on which he proposed to unite the heterogeneous elements of revolution was simple: novae tabulae—“new records”—i.e., a clean sweep and abolition of all debts. He labored for this purpose with all the energy of a Caesar; indeed, for a time he had the sympathy, if not the secret support, of Caesar. “There was nothing,” said Cicero, “that he could not undergo, no pains that he would spare of co-operation, vigilance, and toil. He could bear cold, hunger, and thirst.”42 We are assured by his enemies that he organized a band of 400 men who planned to kill the consuls and seize the government on the first day of 65. The day came, and nothing unusual transpired. At the end of 64 Catiline stood against Cicero for the consulate and waged a vigorous campaign.I Capital took fright and began to leave Italy. The upper classes united in support of Cicero; for a year the concordia ordinum that he had asked for was a reality, and he was its perfect voice.
Blocked politically, Catiline turned to war. Secretly his followers organized an army of 20,000 men in Etruria, and gathered together in Rome a group of conspirators that included representatives of every class from senators to slaves, and two urban praetors—Cethegus and Lentulus. In the following October Catiline again ran for the consulate. To make sure of his election, conservative historians tell us, he planned to have his rival murdered during the campaign, and to have Cicero assassinated at the same time. Claiming that he had been apprised of these plans, Cicero filled the Field of Mars with armed guards and superintended the voting. Despite the enthusiastic support of the proletariat, Catiline was again defeated. On November 7, says Cicero, several conspirators knocked at his door, but were driven away by his guards. On the morrow, seeing Catiline in the Senate, Cicero flung at him that superb excoriation which once every schoolboy mouthed. As the oration proceeded, the seats around Catiline were emptied one by one, until he sat alone. Silently he bore the torrent of accusations, the sharp, relentless phrases falling like whips upon his head. Cicero played upon every emotion; he spoke of the nation as the common father, and of Catiline as in intent a parricide; he charged him—not with evidence given, but by innuendo and implication—with conspiracy against the state, with theft, adultery, and sexual abnormality; finally he petitioned Jove to protect Rome, and to devote Catiline to eternal punishment. When Cicero had finished, Catiline walked out unhindered, and joined his forces in Etruria. His general, L. Manlius, sent a last appeal to the Senate:
We call gods and men to witness that it is not against our country that we have taken up arms, nor against the safety of our fellow citizens. We, wretched paupers, who through the violence and cruelty of usurers are without a country, condemned to scorn and indigence, are actuated by only one wish: to guarantee our personal security against wrong. We demand neither power nor wealth, those great and external causes of strife among mankind. We only ask for freedom, a treasure that no man will surrender except with life itself. We implore you, senators, have pity on your miserable fellow citizens! 44
The next day, in a second oration, Cicero described the rebel’s following as centering around a coterie of perfumed perverts, and indulged without stint his genius for sarcasm and invective, ending again on a religious note. In the following weeks he presented evidence to the Senate purporting to show that Catiline had tried to stir up revolution in Gaul. On December 3 he had Lentulus, Cethegus, and five other adherents of Catiline arrested. In a third oration he declared their guilt, announced their imprisonment, and told the Senate and the people that the conspiracy was broken and that they might retire to their homes in security and peace. On December 5 he convoked the Senate and asked what should be done with the prisoners. Silanus voted that they should be executed. Caesar advised mere imprisonment, recalling that the execution of a Roman citizen was forbidden by the Sempronian Law. In a fourth oration Cicero gently advised death. Cato gave the opinion the sanction of his philosophy, and death won the day. Some young aristocrats tried to kill Caesar as he left the senate chamber, but he escaped. Cicero, with armed men, went to the jail and had the sentence carried out with a minimum of delay. Marcus Antonius, co-consul with Cicero, and father of a famous son, was sent north with an army to destroy Catiline’s force. The Senate promised pardon and 200,000 sesterces to every man who would leave the rebel ranks; but, says Sallust, “not one deserted from Catiline’s camp.” On the plains of Pistoia battle was joined (61). The 3000 insurgents, far outnumbered, fought to the end around their treasured standards, the eagles of Marius. None surrendered or took flight; every one of them died on the field, among them Catiline.
Being essentially a man of thought rather than of action, Cicero was surprised and impressed by the skill and courage he had shown in suppressing a dangerous revolt. “The direction of so great an enterprise,” he told the Senate, “seems scarcely possible to merely human wisdom.”45 He compared himself with Romulus, but considered it a greater deed to have preserved Rome than to have founded it.46 Senators and magnates smiled at his language, but they knew that he had saved them. Cato and Catulus hailed him as pater patriae, father of his country. When, at the end of 63, he laid down his office, all the propertied classes in the community, he tells us, gave him thanks, named him immortal, and escorted him in honor to his home.47 The proletariat did not join in these demonstrations. It could not forgive him for violating the laws of Rome by putting citizens to death without appeal; it felt that he had made no effort to remove the causes of Catiline’s revolt, or to mitigate the poverty of the masses. It refused to let him address the Assembly on that last day, and listened in anger when he swore that he had preserved the city. The revolution was not over. With Caesar’s consulate it would begin again.
I It was in this campaign that Cicero’s brother Quintus drew up for him a manual of electioneering technique. “Be lavish in your promises,” Quintus advised; “men prefer a false promise to a flat refusal. . . . Contrive to get some new scandal aired against your rivals for crime, corruption, or immorality.”43