Steven Saylor - Catilina's riddle

'I've often thought, Meto, that the death of my friend Lucius Claudius was somehow providential. Oh, I'm not so vain as to think that the gods would strike down a good man merely to make my life more bearable, but in many odd ways the Fates sift out the details of our lives to unseen ends and, if we're fortunate, to happy coincidence. Just when I felt that I could no longer stand living in the city another year, the dream of a retreat from the city became real. The election campaign last summer was the last straw. Consular campaigns as a rule are crude, vicious affairs, but an uglier campaign I've never witnessed.

'Candidates all run against each other,' I explained, 'and the two who garner the most votes become joint consuls for the year. If the two consuls are of the same political persuasion, they can reinforce one another and have a very effective year in office. If they're of different stripes, the Senate quickly learns which is the more dominant of the two and which the more easily led. In some years rivals are elected, and the stalemate as they try to outdo one another can be spectacular— literally. The year you came to live with me, Crassus and Pompey shared the consulship, and it was one feast after another, festival upon festival, from their inauguration in Januarius up to their valedictory addresses in December. The citizens grew fat and saw some fine chariot races that year!'

'Can any senator run for the consulship?' asked Meto.

'No. There is a prescribed sequence of offices that must be held first. The praetorships, the quaestorships, and so on, all last a year and have their specific functions. A politician goes up the ladder rung by rung, year by year. An electoral defeat means he sits out a whole year, and men in a hurry quickly grow bitter.'

'But what keeps a man from holding the same office over and over?'

'No man may hold the same office two years in a row — otherwise the same tiny handful of the most powerful men, like Pompey and Crassus, would be consul over and over. Besides, the consulship itself is yet another stepping-stone. The whole point of attaining the consulship is that it entities a man to a year as governor of a foreign province. A Roman governor can become fabulously rich by bleeding the locals white with taxes. The whole ugly enterprise is fuelled by endless corruption and greed.'

'And who votes?'

'Every citizen but me, I suppose, since I gave it up years ago. Nothing will ever be changed in Rome by voting, because not all votes are equal'

'What do you mean?'

I shook my head. Having been born a slave, Meto had no grounding from infancy in the inherited privileges of citizenship; having been raised in my household, his subsequent education in such technicalities had been sorely neglected, due to my own growing apathy. "The votes of a poor man count less than those of a rich one,' I said. 'But how?'

'On election day the citizens gather on the Campus Martius, between the old city walls and the River Tiber. Eligible voters are divided into what are called centuries. But the centuries have nothing to do with the number of voters in them. One century might have a hundred men in it and another might have a thousand. The rich are allotted more centuries than the poor, even though there are fewer rich men than poor ones. Thus, when a rich man votes, his vote counts much more than a poor man's vote.

'Even so, me poor man's vote is often needed, since the candidates all come from the rich or high-born classes and split those centuries among themselves. So common citizens are not neglected; they are wooed, seduced, suborned, and intimidated in all sorts of legal and illegal ways, from promises of favouritism, to outright bribery, to gangs set loose in the streets to beat up a rival's supporters. During the campaign the candidates tell pretty lies about themselves and hurl hideous accusations at their rivals, while their supporters cover the city with slanderous graffiti.'

' "Lucius Roscius Otho kisses the buttocks of the brothel keepers!" ' quoted Meto, laughing.

'Yes, one of the more memorable slogans from last year,' I agreed glumly. 'Yet Otho was elected praetor nonetheless!'

'But what was so unusual about last year's campaign?' asked Meto earnestly. 'I remember hearing you rage about it to visitors in your library, but I never really understood.'

'Only that it was so dirty and disgusting. And the fact that it was Cicero, of all people, who plunged the tone of the campaign to such depths. And the things that Cicero has done since the election…'

I shook my head and started again. 'There were three leading candidates: Cicero, Catilina, and Antonius. Antonius is a nonentity, a wastrel and a scoundrel, with no political programme at all, only a desperate need to get his hands, on a provincial governorship so that he can bleed enough taxes from the unfortunate locals to pay off his debts. There are those who say the same things about Catilina, but no one denies that Catilina has charm to spare and a keen political sense. He comes from ancient patrician stock, but he has no fortune; just the sort of aristocrat who backs radical schemes for redistributing wealth, cancelling debts, democratizing public offices and the priesthoods — and the conservative ruling classes do not like to hear that sort of talk. Even so, within the old ruling class there are plenty of patricians who have fallen on bad times and are desperate for a way out, and there are plenty of rich men who think they might use a demagogue for their own purposes, and so Catilina was not without substantial backing, despite his radical posturing. Crassus himself, the richest man in Rome, was his chief financial backer. Who knows what Crassus was up to?

'Then there was Cicero. None of his ancestors had ever held elective office before — he was the first of his family to hold public office, what they call a New Man. And no New Man had managed to get himself elected consul in living memory. The aristocracy turned up their noses at him, despising his political canniness, his eloquence, his success with the crowd. Cicero is a glorious upstart, a comet that came from nowhere, and immodest as a peacock. In his own way he must have appeared as much a threat to the order of things as Catilina. And he might have been, had his principles not proved to be so flexible.

'Catilina and Antonius formed an alliance. From early on they were both favoured to win. Catilina never ceased to needle the aristocracy with reminders of Cicero's common origins (though Cicero was hardly born poor!), but to his own supporters he began talking up the kind of radical schemes that give property owners grey hair and sleepless nights. The rich were in a quandary — Cicero they could not stomach, but Catilina they truly feared.

'As for Cicero, his campaign was managed by his brother Quintus. After the election, one day when I had business at his house, Cicero pressed me to look at a series of letters that he had exchanged with Quintus, discussing the progress of the campaign; he was so proud of them that he was actually talking aboutmaking them into a pamphlet, a sort of guide to successful electioneering. At the very outset Cicero and his brother decided to stop at nothing to destroy Catilina's character. Slander is the accepted style in any election campaign, but Cicero set new standards. Some of the accusations were whispered from ear to ear; others were made by Cicero outright in his speeches. In the thick of it I dreaded setting foot in the Forum, knowing I would have to hear Cicero haranguing the crowd. Even when I could avoid the Forum, the graffiti and the gossip were everywhere. If only half of what they said about Catilina is true, the man should have been strangled in his mother's womb.'

'What was he accused of?'

'A whole catalogue of crimes. There were the usual accusations of corruption, of course, such as buying votes and bribing election officials; those accusations were probably true, considering the financial backing that Catilina was receiving from Crassus — what good is so much money in an election except for bribes? When Roman voters know a candidate has money, they run to him with their palms up.