Steven Saylor - Catilina's riddle

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.