'Thunderbolts, cast into the crowd!' I murmured.
'What did you say, Papa?' said Eco.
'An idea I got from Catilina. Vestal Virgins and sexual debauchery; arson, anarchy, slave revolts; conspiring with foreigners; the will of Jupiter — Cicero seems to have made a science of the words and phrases that will manipulate the masses.'
'Don't forget his watchfulness,' said Meto. He stood up and put down his cup. His hands were trembling. 'At least I can say something no one else in this room can say: I've never served as the consul's eyes or ears.' With that he abruptly turned and left us.
Eco stared after him. 'Papa, what on earth has happened to my little brother?'
'He's become a man, I suppose.'
'No, I mean — '
'I know what you mean. Ever since his birthday celebration here in Rome, he's become more and more as you see him now.'
'But these wild ideas, and the depth of his anger against Cicero — where does it come from?'
I shrugged. 'Catilina has slept under my roof several times. I think Meto may have had some private conversations with him while I was elsewhere. You know Catilina's notorious effect on the young.'
'But such ideas are dangerous. If Meto wants to brood on the farm, that's one thing, but here in the city I hope he knows enough to keep his mourn shut, at least in public. I think you should have a talk with him.'
'Why? Everything he says makes perfect sense to me.' 'Yes, but aren't you worried?'
'I suppose. But when he left the room just now, it wasn't worry that I was feeling. I was feeling rather proud of him, actually — and a little ashamed of myself'
There are moments in the theatre when the characters and events upon the stage seem to become more real than reality itself. I speak not of bawdy Roman comedies, though sometimes even those attain the phenomenon I'm thinking of; I speak more of those sublime tragedies of the Greeks. One knows that mere actors reside behind the masks, and one knows that the words they speak come from a script, and yet when Oedipus is blinded one feels an anguish more vivid than physical pain and a terror that seems to well up from the deepest recess of the soul. Gods hover in the air: one knows they are merely men suspended from a crane, and yet one experiences an awe that transcends all reason.
The days that followed Cicero's speech in the Forum were coloured with that same sense of vivid, compelling unreality. There was something grand and theatrical, but at the same time grubby and absurd, about the inevitable progression towards the destruction of the men who had fallen into Cicero's power. Ultimately it was not Cicero who decreed their annihilation, but the Senate. Whether that august body acted legally or not is a controversy which I doubt will be resolved in my lifetime.
Roman law does not give to either the consuls or to the Senate the right to put a citizen to death; that right is reserved for the courts and for the people's Assembly. Because the courts are slow and cumbersome and the Assembly is dangerously volatile, neither institution is of much use in an emergency. It might be argued that the Extreme Decree, by which the Senate had empowered the consuls to take any steps necessary to preserve the state, superseded other restrictions and allowed for a penalty of death against Rome's enemies within. Even so, was it right, legal, or honourable to put to death men in captivity, who had laid down their arms and given themselves into custody, and thus posed no immediate threat to anyone? These were some of the arguments that occupied the Senate over the next two days.
Self-professed hater of politics that I was, I should have left the city at once, but I did not I could not Like every other citizen I endured the passing hours in nervous, spellbound suspense, feeling the dread of something awful hanging over the city and its people. Everyone felt it, no matter what his political stripe, or his opinion of Cicero, or his belief in the righteousness or wickedness of the men in custody. The dread was like an ache that had settled into every joint of the body politic, a fever that addled the collective mind. We wished to be rid of our illness. We also feared that our physicians in the Senate would resort to some drastic cure that would not only break the fever but also kill the patient.
On the day after Cicero's speech the city became a vast whirlpool of rumours, with the Temple of Concord, where the Senate continued to meet, at its ravenous centre. The news that one of Catilina's supporters had implicated Crassus sent a panic through the commodity traders in the Forum; men wrung their hands, wondering what would happen if Crassus should be arrested and his fortune immobilized or confiscated, while others said that Crassus would never allow such a thing and would instead join Catilina in civil war. In fact, a certain Lucius Tarquinius had come before the Senate to state that Crassus had sent him to Catilina to carry news of the arrests and to advise Catilina to march on Rome at once. The senators' reaction, after some consternation, was to shout the man down. Even if the story was true, no one particularly cared to draw Crassus into the affair so long as he remained publicly loyal to the Senate. After a brief debate, those present recorded a vote of confidence in their richest member. It was also decided that Lucius Tarquinius would not be allowed to give any further testimony until such time as he was willing to reveal who had bribed him to give false and slanderous testimony against a man of such indisputable patriotism as Marcus Crassus. Some believed that Tarquinius had set out to implicate Crassus in order to moderate the punishment of those already in custody, since with Crassus among them the Senate would shrink from taking drastic measures. Others thought that it was Cicero who put Tarquinius up to it, in order to silence Crassus and keep him from influencing the debate. Lucius Tarquinius nevertheless stood by his original story and, disqualified from further testimony, was effectively gagged. The matter of Crassus's loyalties was not raised again, but he also removed himself from actively debating the fate of the arrested men.
Caesar was also the subject of scrutiny and suspicion. Had Volturcius and the Allobroges implicated him as well? And had those charges been suppressed by the Senate and censored by Cicero in his speech, because they did not want a confrontation with Caesar? Or were these assertions merely rumours circulated by Caesar's enemies? Whatever the truth of the matter, the rumours against Caesar were widespread. So strong did feelings run among the armed men assigned to protect the Temple of Concord — all equestrians and partisans of Cicero — that when Caesar was leaving the building that afternoon they shouted threats and brandished their swords at him. According to those who were there, Caesar's dignity never faltered, and once he was clear of the cordon he quipped, 'What a foul mood these dogs are in; has their master not ted them lately?'
That day the senators voted on the treasonable conduct of the prisoners, and after a brief debate pronounced them all guilty. Whether or not this constituted a legal trial was a question that would loom large for years to come. The senators also voted to give substantial rewards to the Allobroges and to Volturcius.
In the shops and taverns and open squares, details began to circulate about the uprising that had allegedly been scheduled to coincide with the Saturnalia. The entire Senate was to be killed along with as many citizens as possible in an indiscriminate slaughter; only the children of Pompey were to be taken alive, as hostages to keep the great general at bay. A hundred men had been recruited to set fires all over the city and to demolish the aqueducts, so that the fires would burn unchecked; anyone bearing water to extinguish the blazes was to be slain on the spot. Which of these details was authentic and which fantastic? It was impossible to tell, for as soon as one heard a rumour, another arose to contradict it. A silver merchant near the Forum told me he had seen with his own eyes the enormous cache of newly sharpened swords and incendiary material that had been discovered in the house of Cethegus, and that Cethegus's household consisted of a fierce coterie of highly trained gladiators; a few steps away and a few moments later, a wine merchant who claimed to have visited Cethegus only two days before his arrest said that the only weapons at the house were a collection of harmless ceremonial heirlooms, that he kept only a handful of bodyguards (like every senator), and that his house contained no more kindling and brimstone than any other.
Fresh rumours asserted that Lentulus and Cethegus and the rest were planning to escape. The captives had been put under house arrest in the custody of various senators. But Lentulus's freedmen were said to be scouring the streets, trying to incite workmen and slaves to rise up and free their patron, and Cethegus's purported army of gladiators was attempting to join forces with the city's hired gangs to storm the house where he was being kept. Accordingly, the consul ordered more troops from the garrison to surround the nine houses where the accused were incarcerated. The presence of so many armed men in the streets set even more rumours into motion.
At sundown Cicero was banished from his house on the Palatine for reasons that had nothing to do with the crisis. It was the night of the annual rite of the Good Goddess, Fauna, a state ceremony traditionally presided over by the wife of the consul and attended by the Vestal Virgins. Because men are excluded from the rite, Cicero spent the night in the home of his brother Quintus. Among the Vestals in attendance was Cicero's sister-in-law Fabia, who had been tried and acquitted ten years before for consorting with Catilina; according to Bethesda, the chief topic of gossip among the women of Rome centred on what Fabia must be feeling on such a night, I myself was more curious about Cicero's wife, Terentia. Whether or not she had any more belief in Fauna than did her husband in Jupiter, she was just as canny at perceiving omens; when the name dedicated to the goddess was thought to have gone out and then suddenly sprang up again, Terentia sent a message at once to her husband, advising him that the Good Goddess had sent a sign for him to show no mercy to the enemies of Rome.
The Nones of December dawned bright and cold. A coterie of armed men gathered before the Temple of Concord. One by one the senators arrived, leaving their entourages behind in the milling throng while they mounted the stairs beneath the stern countenance of Jupiter and disappeared within the temple to decide the fate of the conspirators. Crassus was conspicuously absent, as were a great many senators of the populist party, but Caesar attended, making his way through the Forum with a large body of followers.
While the Senate met, the nervous crowd in the Forum awaited the outcome. Men speculated wildly about the debate being staged within, and mad rumours circulated — that Lentulus had escaped, that Cethegus had already been strangled in the night, that Crassus had committed suicide, that Catilina and a huge army were crossing the Milvian Bridge, that parts of the city were in revolt and had been set on fire, that Caesar had been attacked and killed inside the Temple of Concord. This last bit of gossip set off a small riot among Caesar's partisans, who began to storm the temple and were brought under control only when Caesar himself appeared on the steps to show himself alive and whole.
I found myself wishing that Rufus could have smuggled us inside, as he had done on Meto's birthday, so that we could hear the speeches for ourselves. Instead I learned of the details afterwards, largely from Rufus but also from reading the speeches themselves; for Cicero, with his mania for surveillance, who in his first speech against Catilina had proclaimed, 'Let every man's political views be written on his brow for all to see,' actually stationed an army of secretaries among the senators to record the entire debate, something that had never been done before. These secretaries had been trained by Tiro himself in the method called Tironian 'shorthand', by which whole words and phrases are recorded with a single stroke. Using this new invention, they were able to take down every word, and thus the sentiments of every senator were put on record in Cicero's files.
The consul-elect Silanus began the debate with a fiery condemnation of those who would have plunged Rome into the ruins of civil war; he conjured up images of children torn limb from limb before their horrified parents, of wives raped in front of their castrated husbands, of boys and girls brutally ravished, temples plundered, homes burned to the ground. No course would satisfy the gods, he argued, except that the prisoners should suffer 'the supreme penalty'.
Subsequent speakers agreed and seemed bent on outdoing one another with expressions of outrage, until the proposal was countered by Caesar, who pointed out that Roman law permits a convicted citizen to go into exile rather than face execution. He did not argue that the convicted men deserved to live, but rather that the law should be scrupulously adhered to, for the sake of tradition. 'Consider the precedent you establish, for all bad precedents originate from measures good in themselves. You would inflict an extraordinary penalty on guilty men who doubtless deserve it. But what happens when power passes into the hands of men less worthy than yourselves, and they wish to inflict death upon men who do not deserve it? They will point to your precedent and no one will be able to stop them.' Thus did Caesar, whom many thought to be connected with the conspirators, manage to argue for clemency without actually arguing on their behalf. Instead of executing them, he proposed instead that their property should be confiscated and that they should be banished to distant towns and kept under guard until Catilina had been defeated in battle or the crisis had otherwise passed.
Cicero spoke against this proposal, saying that the only safe period of imprisonment for such men would be imprisonment for life, for which there was no precedent at all, and that the laws that protect the lives of citizens no longer applied to the men in question, 'for a man who is a public enemy cannot be regarded any longer as a citizen.'
Nevertheless, so persuasive was Caesar that Silanus himself equivocated, saying he had never meant to advocate death for the prisoners, for in the case of Roman senators such as Lentulus and Cethegus 'the supreme penalty' meant imprisonment. This was met with guffaws and cries of disdain from all sides.
More speeches followed, and it appeared that those present were deeply split between execution and banishment. Tiberius Nero drew cries of assent when he argued that no action as drastic as execution should be taken in the heat of the moment, and that to follow Caesar's course was best; nothing should be done without strictly legal trials, he said, and no clear judgments could be rendered until after Catilina had been either driven into exile for good or defeated in the field.
At this point Marcus Cato rose to speak. Though the transcripts do not record it, one can imagine a collective groan from the assembly. Marcus Cato was the self-styled conscience of the Senate, ceaselessly admonishing his fellows to uphold those stern moral principles he inherited from his famous great-grandfather.
'Many a time have I spoken before this body,' he began, 'and many a time have I reproached my fellow citizens for their spinelessness, their self-indulgence, their indolence and greed. By doing so I have made many enemies, but, as I have never excused myself for my own failings, I find no reason to excuse the failings of others. You know my sentiments. You have heard them many times before, and I see your eyes rolling up even now at the prospect of hearing them again. Men do not like being told that they have lost the virtues of their ancestors, especially when it is true. Our forefathers built this empire by hard work, just rule abroad, and integrity within this chamber. Today you pile up riches for yourselves while the state is bankrupt. Posts of honour that should be awarded for merit are sold to ambitious schemers. In your private lives you are slaves to pleasure, and here in the Senate you are mere tools for money and influence. The result? When an assault is made upon the Republic, there is no one here to defend it. Everyone stands around, trembling and confused, waiting for someone else to act!
'Over the years you have taken little notice of my admonishments.
You have shrugged me off and held fast to your reckless course. Fortunately, thanks to the sound foundation laid by our ancestors, the state has withstood your waywardness and has even prospered. Now, however, the issue at stake is not a question of morality, or whether our empire should be even grander and richer than it is. The issue is whether our empire is going to remain our empire or whether we shall lose it to our enemies! In such a crisis, what fool dares to speak to me of clemency and compassion?’
‘For a long time now we have ceased to call things by their proper names. Giving away other people's property is called generosity; seditious ideas are called innovations; criminal daring is applauded as courage. No wonder we've come to such a pass! Very well, let us be liberal at the expense of those who pay taxes, and merciful to those who plunder the treasury. But must we make a gift of our lifeblood to those who would murder us? Must we spare a handful of criminals, only to let them destroy good, honest men?
'We are advised to bide our time, to let our passions cool, to wait for a clearer perspective — while staring into the jaws of an abyss! We are urged to adhere to the letter of the law, to await a formal trial, to allow convicted men the option of exile — while the kindling is being stacked up around our houses! Other crimes can be punished after they have been committed, but not this crime. Nip it in the bud, or else it's too late. Let these traitors take over, and you can forget about invoking the law. When a city is captured, its defeated inhabitants lose everything. Everything!
'If you cannot be stirred to patriotism, then perhaps you can react to self-interest. Let me address myself to those of you who have always been more concerned for your expensive villas, artwork, and silver than for the good of your country. In Jupiter's name, men, if you want to keep those precious possessions that mean so much to you, wake up while there is still time and lend a hand to defend the Republic. We're not talking here about misappropriated taxes, or wrongs done to subject peoples. Here and now it is our lives and liberty that are at stake!
'We may react to this crisis with either strength or weakness. To show weakness would be the most dangerous course, for any mercy you show to Lentulus and the other prisoners is a clear signal to Catilina and his army. The harsher your judgment, the more their courage will be shaken. Show weakness, and like a pack of dogs they will swarm over you and tear you apart. Once that happens, forget about calling upon the gods for help. The gods help those who help themselves!
'Banishment? Imprisonment? What absurd half-measures! These men must be treated exactly as if they had been caught in the act of the offences they contemplated. If you came upon a man setting fire to your house, would you stand back and debate your reaction — or would you strike him down? As for the senator who argues for a lesser punishment — well, perhaps he has less reason to be afraid than the rest of us!'
This was a clear implication that Caesar was somehow connected to the conspirators, and those who sat around Caesar reacted with loud booing and catcalls, until Caesar himself stood up and engaged Cato in a heated debate on the merits of his proposal. Nothing new was said, and no memorable insults were exchanged until, while Cato was speaking, Caesar was handed a letter by one of his secretaries. He began to pore over it, drawing it close to his chest as if it contained a great secret Cato, apparently thinking it was a note from someone involved in the conspiracy, stopped what he was saying and demanded that Caesar read the letter aloud. Caesar demurred, but Cato vehemently insisted until Caesar handed the slip of parchment to his secretary and sent it across the aisle, saying, 'Read it yourself, out loud if you must.'
Cato snapped the letter away from the secretary's hand, held it up, and hurriedly scanned it. While the whole Senate watched, he blushed a purple to match the stripe on his toga. Caesar is said to have barely registered a smile while Cato, sputtering with rage, crumpled the parchment in his fist and hurled it back at Caesar, shouting, 'Take it back, you filthy drunkard!'
In the midst of a debate over life and death and the future of the Republic, Caesar had received a lascivious love letter from Cato's own half-sister, the wayward Servilia, a perennial source of embarrassment to the great moralist. Was this scene contrived by Caesar to discombobulate his opponent in the midst of the deliberations? Or did Servilia, pining away in her house on the Palatine and blithely unconcerned about the crisis that had paralyzed the whole city, simply happen to crave Caesar's attentions with an unusual intensity that afternoon? Even the most outlandish writer of comedies would never have dared to compose a scene of such pungent absurdity.
In the end, it was Cato, discombobulated though he may have been, who carried the day. The Senate voted to exact the supreme penalty on five of the nine prisoners. These included the two senators, Lentulus and Cethegus; two men of equestrian rank, Lucius Statuius and Publius Gabinius Capito; and a common citizen, Marcus Caeparius.
The senators feared that nightfall might bring an attempt to free the prisoners, and no time was wasted in carrying out the sentence. While praetors went to fetch the others, Cicero himself, flanked by numerous senators and an armed bodyguard, went to fetch Lentulus from the house on the Palatine where he was being kept. The senators formed a moving cordon as Cicero escorted the former consul through the middle of the Forum I was among the crowd, holding my breath, listening to the pounding of my heartbeat, alert for the first signs of a riot, my ears pricked for cries of insurrection. But the crowd was hushed and made only a dull, wordless roar like the surging of the sea. I have never seen a crowd in the Forum so subdued. I looked at the men around me, and on their faces I saw that awe which overcomes men when they witness some terrible spectacle. The solemn ritual of death held them spellbound. I thought again of the theatre, with its strange power to remove men from reality and yet bring them face to face with something vaster than themselves. The Senate of Rome was enacting its will, and there was no power on earth that could stop it.
Eco and Meto were with me. I was content to hang back, but Meto wanted to work his way closer to the procession. Beyond the shields and upraised swords of the bodyguard, through a brief opening in the sea of purple-striped togas, I caught a glimpse of Cicero. One arm was at his side; the other was raised to his chest to clutch the hem of his toga. His chin was held high. His eyes looked straight ahead.
Beside him walked another, older man in senatorial garb, whose posture and expression were exactly the same. Lentulus showed no trace of that irascible sarcasm that had earned him his nickname, nor did he bow his head in shame or tremble with fear. Had I not known which was the consul and which the prisoner, by their bearing alone I could not have told them apart Then Lentulus chanced to turn his face in my direction. I caught a glimpse of his eyes and knew that I saw a man approaching his end.
Close by the Temple of Concord, built into the hard stone of the Capitoline Hill, is the ancient state-prison of Rome. The prison was built in the days when kings ruled the city, as a place to put their enemies. Once Rome became a republic, the prison became a place to keep Rome's conquered foes. Its most famous inhabitant in my lifetime had been King Jugurtha of Numidia; after being dragged through the streets of Rome in chains, he and his two sons were taken to the prison and cast into a lightless, airless pit twelve feet underground, reached only through a hole in its stone roof. There they lingered for six days without food or water before being strangled by their jailers.
Lentulus did not have so long to wait. Inside the prison, where the four other prisoners had already been brought, he was stripped of his toga, then escorted to the same pit where the King of Numidia had met his end. As befitted his rank, Lentulus was the first to be lowered through the hole. As soon as his feet touched the ground, executioners strangled him with a noose. One by one the four other condemned men were lowered into the pit to join him in death.