The History of Rome, Book V - Theodor Mommsen
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Cato
There was among the younger men a single exception; it was
Marcus Porcius Cato (born in 659), a man of the best intentions
and of rare devotedness, and yet one of the most Quixotic
and one of the most cheerless phenomena in this age so abounding
in political caricatures. Honourable and steadfast, earnest in purpose
and in action, full of attachment to his country and to its hereditary
constitution, but dull in intellect and sensuously as well as
morally destitute of passion, he might certainly have made
a tolerable state-accountant. But unfortunately he fell early
under the power of formalism, and swayed partly by the phrases
of the Stoa, which in their abstract baldness and spiritless
isolation were current among the genteel world of that day, partly
by the example of his great-grandfather whom he deemed it his especial
task to reproduce, he began to walk about in the sinful capital
as a model burgess and mirror of virtue, to scold at the times
like the old Cato, to travel on foot instead of riding, to take
no interest, to decline badges of distinction as a soldier,
and to introduce the restoration of the good old days by going after
the precedent of king Romulus without a shirt. A strange caricature
of his ancestor--the gray-haired farmer whom hatred and anger made
an orator, who wielded in masterly style the plough as well as
the sword, who with his narrow, but original and sound common sense
ordinarily hit the nail on the head--was this young unimpassioned
pedant from whose lips dropped scholastic wisdom and who was
everywhere seen sitting book in hand, this philosopher
who understood neither the art of war nor any other art whatever,
this cloud-walker in the realm of abstract morals. Yet he attained
to moral and thereby even to political importance. In an utterly
wretched and cowardly age his courage and his negative virtues told
powerfully on the multitude; he even formed a school, and there were
individuals--it is true they were but few--who in their turn
copied and caricatured afresh the living pattern of a philosopher.
On the same cause depended also his political influence.
As he was the only conservative of note who possessed if not talent
and insight, at any rate integrity and courage, and was always ready
to throw himself into the breach whether it was necessary to do so
or not, he soon became the recognized champion of the Optimate party,
although neither his age nor his rank nor his intellect entitled
him to be so. Where the perseverance of a single resolute man
could decide, he no doubt sometimes achieved a success,
and in questions of detail, more particularly of a financial character,
he often judiciously interfered, as indeed he was absent
from no meeting of the senate; his quaestorship in fact formed
an epoch, and as long as he lived he checked the details of the public
budget, regarding which he maintained of course a constant warfare
with the farmers of the taxes. For the rest, he lacked simply
every ingredient of a statesman. He was incapable of even
comprehending a political aim and of surveying political relations;
his whole tactics consisted in setting his face against every one
who deviated or seemed to him to deviate from the traditionary
moral and political catechism of the aristocracy, and thus
of course he worked as often into the hands of his opponents
as into those of his own party. The Don Quixote of the aristocracy,
he proved by his character and his actions that at this time,
while there was certainly still an aristocracy in existence,
the aristocratic policy was nothing more than a chimera.
Democratic Attacks
To continue the conflict with this aristocracy brought little
honour. Of course the attacks of the democracy on the vanquished
foe did not on that account cease. The pack of the Populares threw
themselves on the broken ranks of the nobility like the sutlers
on a conquered camp, and the surface at least of politics
was by this agitation ruffled into high waves of foam. The multitude
entered into the matter the more readily, as Gaius Caesar especially
kept them in good humour by the extravagant magnificence of his games
(689)--in which all the equipments, even the cages of the wild
beasts, appeared of massive silver--and generally by a liberality
which was all the more princely that it was based solely
on the contraction of debt. The attacks on the nobility
were of the most varied kind. The abuses of aristocratic rule afforded
copious materials; magistrates and advocates who were liberal or assumed
a liberal hue, like Gaius Cornelius, Aulus Gabinius, Marcus Cicero,
continued systematically to unveil the most offensive and scandalous
aspects of the Optimate doings and to propose laws against them.
The senate was directed to give access to foreign envoys on set days,
with the view of preventing the usual postponement of audiences.
Loans raised by foreign ambassadors in Rome were declared non-actionable,
as this was the only means of seriously checking the corruptions
which formed the order of the day in the senate (687). The right
of the senate to give dispensation in particular cases from the laws
was restricted (687); as was also the abuse whereby every Roman of rank,
who had private business to attend to in the provinces, got himself
invested by the senate with the character of a Roman envoy thither
(691). They heightened the penalties against the purchase
of votes and electioneering intrigues (687, 691); which latter
were especially increased in a scandalous fashion by the attempts
of the individuals ejected from the senate(1) to get back
to it through re-election.
What had hitherto been simply understood as matter of course
was now expressly laid down as a law, that the praetors were bound
to administer justice in conformity with the rules set forth by them,
after the Roman fashion, at their entering on office (687).
Transpadanes
Freedmen
But, above all, efforts were made to complete the democratic
restoration and to realize the leading ideas of the Gracchan period
in a form suitable to the times. The election of the priests
by the comitia, which Gnaeus Domitius had introduced(2) and Sulla
had again done away,(3) was established by a law of the tribune
of the people Titus Labienus in 691. The democrats were fond
of pointing out how much was still wanting towards the restoration
of the Sempronian corn-laws in their full extent, and at the same
time passed over in silence the fact that under the altered
circumstances--with the straitened condition of the public finances
and the great increase in the number of fully-privileged Roman
citizens--that restoration was absolutely impracticable.
In the country between the Po and the Alps they zealously fostered
the agitation for political equality with the Italians.
As early as 686 Gaius Caesar travelled from place to place there
for this purpose; in 689 Marcus Crassus as censor made arrangements
to enrol the inhabitants directly in the burgess-roll--which was only
frustrated by the resistance of his colleague; in the following
censorships this attempt seems regularly to have been repeated.
As formerly Gracchus and Flaccus had been the patrons of the Latins,
so the present leaders of the democracy gave themselves forth
as protectors of the Transpadanes, and Gaius Piso (consul in 687)
had bitterly to regret that he had ventured to outrage
one of these clients of Caesar and Crassus. On the other hand
the same leaders appeared by no means disposed to advocate
the political equalization of the freedmen; the tribune of the people
Gaius Manilius, who in a thinly attended assembly had procured
the renewal (31 Dec. 687) of the Sulpician law as to the suffrage
of freedmen,(4) was immediately disavowed by the leading men
of the democracy, and with their consent the law was cancelled
by the senate on the very day after its passing. In the same spirit
all the strangers, who possessed neither Roman nor Latin burgess-
rights, were ejected from the capital by decree of the people
in 689. It is obvious that the intrinsic inconsistency
of the Gracchan policy--in abetting at once the effort of the excluded
to obtain admission into the circle of the privileged, and the effort
of the privileged to maintain their distinctive rights--had passed
over to their successors; while Caesar and his friends on the one hand
held forth to the Transpadanes the prospect of the franchise,
they on the other hand gave their assent to the continuance
of the disabilities of the freedmen, and to the barbarous setting aside
of the rivalry which the industry and trading skill of the Hellenes
and Orientals maintained with the Italians in Italy itself.
Process against Rabirius
The mode in which the democracy dealt with the ancient criminal
jurisdiction of the comitia was characteristic. It had not been
properly abolished by Sulla, but practically the jury-commissions
on high treason and murder had superseded it,(5) and no rational
man could think of seriously re-establishing the old procedure
which long before Sulla had been thoroughly unpractical.
But as the idea of the sovereignty of the people appeared to require
a recognition at least in principle of the penal jurisdiction
of the burgesses, the tribune of the people Titus Labienus in 691
brought the old man, who thirty-eight years before had slain or was
alleged to have slain the tribune of the people Lucius Saturninus,(6)
before the same high court of criminal jurisdiction, by virtue of which,
if the annals reported truly, king Tullus had procured the acquittal
of the Horatius who had killed his sister. The accused was one
Gaius Rabirius, who, if he had not killed Saturninus,
had at least paraded with his cut-off head at the tables
of men of rank, and who moreover was notorious among the Apulian
landholders for his kidnapping and his bloody deeds. The object,
if not of the accuser himself, at any rate of the more sagacious men
who backed him, was not at all to make this pitiful wretch
die the death of the cross; they were not unwilling to acquiesce,
when first the form of the impeachment was materially modified
by the senate, and then the assembly of the people called to pronounce
sentence on the guilty was dissolved under some sort of pretext
by the opposite party--so that the whole procedure was set aside.
At all events by this process the two palladia of Roman freedom,
the right of the citizens to appeal and the inviolability of the tribunes
of the people, were once more established as practical rights,
and the legal basis on which the democracy rested was adjusted afresh.
Personal Attacks
The democratic reaction manifested still greater vehemence
in all personal questions, wherever it could and dared.
Prudence indeed enjoined it not to urge the restoration of the estates
confiscated by Sulla to their former owners, that it might not quarrel
with its own allies and at the same time fall into a conflict
with material interests, for which a policy with a set purpose
is rarelya match; the recall of the emigrants was too closely connected
with this question of property not to appear quite as unadvisable.
On the other hand great exertions were made to restore to the children
of the proscribed the political rights withdrawn from them (691),
and the heads of the senatorial party were incessantly subjected
to personal attacks. Thus Gaius Memmius set on foot a process aimed
at Marcus Lucullus in 688. Thus they allowed his more famous
brother to wait for three years before the gates of the capital
for his well-deserved triumph (688-691). Quintus Rex and the conqueror
of Crete Quintus Metellus were similarly insulted.
It produced a still greater sensation, when the young leader
of the democracy Gaius Caesar in 691 not merely presumed to compete
with the two most distinguished men of the nobility, Quintus Catulus
and Publius Servilius the victor of Isaura, in the candidature
for the supreme pontificate, but even carried the day
among the burgesses. The heirs of Sulla, especially his son Faustus,
found themselves constantly threatened with an action for the refunding
of the public moneys which, it was alleged, had been embezzled
by the regent. They talked even of resuming the democratic
impeachments suspended in 664 on the basis of the Varian law.(7)
The individuals who had taken part in the Sullan executions were,
as may readily be conceived, judicially prosecuted with the utmost
zeal. When the quaestor Marcus Cato, in his pedantic integrity,
himself made a beginning by demanding back from them the rewards
which they had received for murder as property illegally alienated
from the state (689), it can excite no surprise that in the following
year (690) Gaius Caesar, as president of the commission
regarding murder, summarily treated the clause in the Sullan
ordinance, which declared that a proscribed person might be
killed with impunity, as null and void, and caused the most
noted of Sulla's executioners, Lucius Catilina, Lucius Bellienus,
Lucius Luscius to be brought before his jurymen and, partially,
to be condemned.
Rehabilitation of Saturninus and Marius
Lastly, they did not hesitate now to name once more in public
the long-proscribed names of the heroes and martyrs of the democracy,
and to celebrate their memory. We have already mentioned how
Saturninus was rehabilitated by the process directed against
his murderer. But a different sound withal had the name of Gaius
Marius, at the mention of which all hearts once had throbbed;
and it happened that the man, to whom Italy owed her deliverance
from the northern barbarians, was at the same time the uncle
of the present leader of the democracy. Loudly had the multitude
rejoiced, when in 686 Gaius Caesar ventured in spite of
the prohibitions publicly to show the honoured features of the hero
in the Forum at the interment of the widow of Marius. But when,
three years afterwards (689), the emblems of victory, which Marius
had caused to be erected in the Capitol and Sulla had ordered to be
thrown down, one morning unexpectedly glittered afresh in gold
and marble at the old spot, the veterans from the African and Cimbrian
wars crowded, with tears in their eyes, around the statue of their
beloved general; and in presence of the rejoicing masses the senate
did not venture to seize the trophies which the same bold hand had
renewed in defiance of the laws.
Worthlessness of the Democratic Successes
But all these doings and disputes, however much noise they made,
were, politically considered, of but very subordinate importance.
The oligarchy was vanquished; the democracy had attained the helm.
That underlings of various grades should hasten to inflict
an additional kick on the prostrate foe; that the democrats also
should have their basis in law and their worship of principles;
that their doctrinaires should not rest till the whole privileges
of the community were in all particulars restored, and should
in that respect occasionally make themselves ridiculous,
as legitimists are wont to do--all this was just as much
to be expected as it was matter of indifference. Taken as a whole,
the agitation was aimless; and we discern in it the perplexity
of its authors to find an object for their activity, for it
turned almost wholly on things already essentially settled
or on subordinate matters.
Impending Collision between the Democrats and Pompeius
It could not be otherwise. In the struggle with the aristocracy
the democrats had remained victors; but they had not conquered
alone, and the fiery trial still awaited them--the reckoning
not with their former foe, but with their too powerful ally,
to whom in the struggle with the aristocracy they were substantially
indebted for victory, and to whose hands they had now entrusted
an unexampled military and political power, because they dared
not refuse it to him. The general of the east and of the seas
was still employed in appointing and deposing kings. How long time
he would take for that work, or when he would declare the business
of the war to be ended, no one could tell but himself;
since like everything else the time of his return to Italy,
or in other words the day of decision, was left in his own hands.
The parties in Rome meanwhile sat and waited. The Optimates indeed
looked forward to the arrival of the dreaded general with comparative
calmness; by the rupture between Pompeius and the democracy, which they
saw to be approaching, they could not lose, but could only gain.
The democrats on the contrary waited with painful anxiety,
and sought, during the interval still allowed to them
by the absence of Pompeius, to lay a countermine against
the impending explosion.
Schemes for Appointing a Democratic Military Dictatorship
In this policy they again coincided with Crassus,
to whom no course was left for encountering his envied and hated rival
but that of allying himself afresh, and more closely than before,
with the democracy. Already in the first coalition a special
approximation had taken place between Caesar and Crassus
as the two weaker parties; a common interest and a common danger
tightened yet more the bond which joined the richest
and the most insolvent of Romans in closest alliance.
While in public the democrats described the absent general
as the head and pride of their party and seemed to direct
all their arrows against the aristocracy, preparations
were secretly made against Pompeius; and these attempts
of the democracy to escape from the impending military dictatorship
have historically a far higher significance than the noisy agitation,
for the most part employed only as a mask, against the nobility.
It is true that they were carried on amidst a darkness, upon which
our tradition allows only some stray gleams of light to fall;
for not the present alone, but the succeeding age also
had its reasons for throwing a veil over the matter. But in general
both the course and the object of these efforts are completely clear.
The military power could only be effectually checkmated by another
military power. The design of the democrats was to possess
themselves of the reins of government after the example of Marius
and Cinna, then to entrust one of their leaders either with the conquest
of Egypt or with the governorship of Spain or some similar
ordinary or extraordinary office, and thus to find in him
and his military force a counterpoise to Pompeius and his army.
For this they required a revolution, which was directed immediately
against the nominal government, but in reality against Pompeius
as the designated monarch;(8) and, to effect this revolution,
there was from the passing of the Gabinio-Manilian laws down to
the return of Pompeius (688-692) perpetual conspiracy in Rome.
The capital was in anxious suspense; the depressed temper
of the capitalists, the suspensions of payment, the frequent bankruptcies
were heralds of the fermenting revolution, which seemed as though it must
at the same time produce a totally new position of parties.
The project of the democracy, which pointed beyond the senate
at Pompeius, suggested an approximation between that general
and the senate. But the democracy in attempting to oppose
to the dictatorship of Pompeius that of a man more agreeable to it,
recognized, strictly speaking, on its part also the military government,
and in reality drove out Satan by Beelzebub; the question of principles
became in its hands a question of persons.
League of the Democrats and the Anarchists
The first step towards the revolution projected by the leaders
of the democracy was thus to be the overthrow of the existing
government by means of an insurrection primarily instigated
in Rome by democratic conspirators. The moral condition of the lowest
as of the highest ranks of society in the capital presented
the materials for this purpose in lamentable abundance. We need not
here repeat what was the character of the free and the servile
proletariate of the capital. The significant saying was already
heard, that only the poor man was qualified to represent the poor;
the idea was thus suggested, that the mass of the poor might
constitute itself an independent power as well as the oligarchy
of the rich, and instead of allowing itself to be tyrannized over,
might perhaps in its own turn play the tyrant. But even in the circles
of the young men of rank similar ideas found an echo.
The fashionable life of the capital shattered not merely the fortunes
of men, but also their vigour of body and mind. That elegant world
of fragrant ringlets, of fashionable mustachios and ruffles--merry
as were its doings in the dance and with the harp, and early
and late at the wine-cup--yet concealed in its bosom an alarming abyss
of moral and economic ruin, of well or ill concealed despair,
and frantic or knavish resolves. These circles sighed without
disguise for a return of the time of Cinna with its proscriptions
and confiscations and its annihilation of account-books for debt;
there were people enough, including not a few of no mean descent
and unusual abilities, who only waited the signal to fall
like a gang of robbers on civil society and to recruit by pillage
the fortune which they had squandered. Where a band gathers,
leaders are not wanting; and in this case the men were soon found
who were fitted to be captains of banditti.
Catalina
The late praetor Lucius Catilina, and the quaestor Gnaeus Piso,
were distinguished among their fellows not merely by their genteel
birth and their superior rank. They had broken down the bridge
completely behind them, and impressed their accomplices by their
dissoluteness quite as much as by their talents. Catilina especially
was one of the most wicked men in that wicked age. His villanies
belong to the records of crime, not to history; but his very outward
appearance--the pale countenance, the wild glance, the gait by turns
sluggish and hurried--betrayed his dismal past. He possessed in a high
degree the qualities which are required in the leader of such a band--
the faculty of enjoying all pleasures and of bearing all privations,
courage, military talent, knowledge of men, the energy of a felon,
and that horrible mastery of vice, which knows how to bring the weak
to fall and how to train the fallen to crime.
To form out of such elements a conspiracy for the overthrow
of the existing order of things could not be difficult to men
who possessed money and political influence. Catilina, Piso,
and their fellows entered readily into any plan which gave the prospect
of proscriptions and cancelling of debtor-books; the former had
moreover special hostility to the aristocracy, because it had opposed
the candidature of that infamous and dangerous man for the consulship.
As he had formerly in the character of an executioner
of Sulla hunted the proscribed at the head of a band of Celts
and had killed among others his own aged father-in-law
with his own hand, he now readily consented to promise similar services
to the opposite party. A secret league was formed. The number
of individuals received into it is said to have exceeded 400; it
included associates in all the districts and urban communities
of Italy; besides which, as a matter of course, numerous recruits
would flock unbidden from the ranks of the dissolute youth
to an insurrection, which inscribed on its banner the seasonable
programme of wiping out debts.
Failure of the First Plans of Conspiracy
In December 688--so we are told--the leaders of the league thought
that they had found the fitting occasion for striking a blow.
The two consuls chosen for 689, Publius Cornelius Sulla and Publius
Autronius Paetus, had recently been judicially convicted
of electoral bribery, and therefore had according to legal rule
forfeited their expectancy of the highest office. Both thereupon
joined the league. The conspirators resolved to procure
the consulship for them by force, and thereby to put themselves
in possession of the supreme power in the state. On the day
when the new consuls should enter on their office--the 1st Jan. 689--
the senate-house was to be assailed by armed men, the new consuls
and the victims otherwise designated were to be put to death, and Sulla
and Paetus were to be proclaimed as consuls after the cancelling
of the judicial sentence which excluded them. Crassus was then
to be invested with the dictatorship and Caesar with the mastership
of the horse, doubtless with a view to raise an imposing military
force, while Pompeius was employed afar off at the Caucasus.
Captains and common soldiers were hired and instructed; Catilina
waited on the appointed day in the neighbourhood of the senate-
house for the concerted signal, which was to be given him by Caesar
on a hint from Crassus. But he waited in vain; Crassus was absent
from the decisive sitting of the senate, and for this time
the projected insurrection failed. A similar still more comprehensive
plan of murder was then concerted for the 5th Feb.; but this too
was frustrated, because Catilina gave the signal too early,
before the bandits who were bespoken had all arrived. Thereupon
the secret was divulged. The government did not venture openly
to proceed against the conspiracy, but it assigned a guard
to the consuls who were primarily threatened, and it opposed to the band
of the conspirators a band paid by the government. To remove Piso,
the proposal was made that he should be sent as quaestor
with praetorian powers to Hither Spain; to which Crassus consented,
in the hope of securing through him the resources of that important
province for the insurrection. Proposals going farther
were prevented by the tribunes.