The Catiline Conspiracy

Introduction to History Hit

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Cicero's Consulship

0:56The grand old orator of Rome. And in the year 63 BC, he achieved his lifelong ambition, the consulship, Rome's highest elected office. But before the year was over, his career, and perhaps his life, hung by a thread. Rome was gripped by what became known as the Catiline Conspiracy, so-called after its most prominent ringleader, Lucius Sergius Catalina.

1:27According to Cicero, it was an existential threat to the Republic. Violence in the streets, unrest across Italy, and an insurrection plot to overthrow the Roman state. But was it really? Or did Cicero exaggerate the danger to cement his own legacy?

Catherine Edwards Interview

1:45Today, I'm joined by renowned classicist, Professor Catherine Edwards, to sift through the facts and the fiction. Was this Cicero's finest hour? Did he save Rome and its famed republican institutions from the uncertain collapse? Or has Catiline been the subject of one of history's most brutal, posthumous hit jobs? This is the story of one of Rome's most famous political conspiracies.

2:15Catherine, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show. Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. I'm very excited to have you here. I can't believe we haven't had you on the show before.

Cicero's Background

2:37Better late than never. You've got a new book all about Cicero. This particular event from Cicero's life, the Catilinarian conspiracy or the Catiline conspiracy, it feels like it has it all. It's got backstabbing, brilliant speeches, schemings, unrest, and this larger than life figure of Cicero right at its heart. It's a fascinating episode of Roman history. It is indeed a completely fascinating episode. And it's in some ways the high point of Cicero's own life. But it also lays the seeds for terrible things that happened to him later. It's a moment

3:15of crisis, it seems, for the Roman Republic. And it's not just the larger than life figure of Cicero, whom we meet in this year, dominating events. There's also, of course, the man after whom the conspiracy is named its leader, Catiline. And then we also have as significant contributors to the debate, Julius Caesar and Cato. So, you know, a lot of major Republican figures here.

Cato the Younger

3:42So it's a big cuss. And this is Cato the Younger, not Cato the Elder. It is indeed Cato the Younger, who is descended from Cato the Elder and very proud of that fact. Right. But absolutely, Cato the Younger. He's not shouting, Carthage must be destroyed. Anyways. And why is this episode in 63 BC, why is this such a big event in Cicero's story? This is a big event in Cicero's story for a variety of reasons. Partly because Cicero himself never shut up about it. He was the most kind of eloquent,

4:16wordy man of his time. And he left an enormous legacy of his own speeches, as well as other writings, his letters, treatises. So he chose to preserve the speeches that he gave as consul for the year 63 BCE. He was kind of Rome's chief executive officer, or one of the two. And a couple of years after his consulship, he deliberately kind of wrote up these speeches and put them into circulation

4:46as models for young orators in years to come. So he was kind of setting himself up as a kind of a model speech maker. And that was a tremendously successful move because he's actually had that role kind of for hundreds of years, thousands of years indeed, since his lifetime. And the speeches of Cicero have been studied, particularly the Catalinarian orations, by aspiring orators of many stripes. I didn't realise that Cicero put his speeches into public circulation as well. It gives you more

5:20of an insight into the man and how he wanted to be remembered. Absolutely. Now, it wasn't unheard of for Roman politicians to put their speeches into circulation. The elder Cato indeed had done the same thing. Also a man of somewhat similar background to Cicero in some ways. But it was a very deliberate move on Cicero's part. He was really curating his legacy from very early on. He made comparisons between himself and the Athenian orator Demosthenes.

5:51Yes. He made these comparisons repeatedly. And then, fortunately for Cicero, the kind of comparison was then picked up on by Plutarch when he did his parallel lives of Greeks and Romans. A hundred plus years later, he paired Cicero and Demosthenes. So that aspiration on Cicero's part was kind of pursued and embedded in the tradition by Plutarch. And you mentioned how, I'm going to read from here so I don't butcher the quote either, of those who lived in Roman antiquity, Cicero is the one about whom most is known. And is that

6:28largely because of his own work surviving? You mentioned Plutarch as well, but is it largely because he wrote so much and it has survived down to us? Yes. I mean, there's sort of two factors there. There's the profusion of his writings, many speeches, but also really unusually. And interestingly, Cicero's letters, he was a great letter writer. I mean, letter writing was an enormously important part of the lives of the Romans political elite. At a time when they're governing a huge empire, kind of staying in touch

7:00with one another is really important. Cicero is a kind of master letter writer. He's absolutely brilliant at writing letters. And after he died, a collection was made of his letters, in fact, multiple collections. There was a collection of his letters to his friend Atticus, who was a close friend for really throughout his adult life. Although the letters to Atticus didn't really get going until the sixties. So earlier on,

Cicero's Letters

7:27we don't have letters between Cicero and Atticus. So it's like 450 odd of those letters. Then there's another collection, which is Cicero's letters to friends that are sometimes called ad familiaris. That also includes letters to family members. And indeed, very interestingly, to his secretary, his sometime slave, and then freedman, Tyro. And many people think that it was Tyro himself who edited these letters after Cicero's death. So there's those two big

8:01collections. And the collection of letters to friends also includes some letters addressed to Cicero by other people, people like Julius Caesar, Cato. We've got their letters to Cicero. And then there's a smaller collection of letters that Cicero wrote to his brother Quintus, who is an important figure in his life. And then some fragments. In antiquity, there were other collections of letters by Cicero in circulation. So we know that he wrote letters to Octavian, who later became Augustus.

8:33Very little of those has survived. Probably everybody involved wanted to suppress those, that one can imagine. And actually, there are also some letters to Brutus, one of the men who was responsible for the death of Julius Caesar, who's a good friend of Cicero. Letters to Marcus Brutus. Some of those are of dubious authenticity, but others are more securely attributed to Cicero. So this huge corpus of Ciceroanian letters that really lets us see

9:05a man embedded in all these different social networks. And particularly in the letters to Atticus, we get Cicero's kind of in the moment reflections on everything that's going on in Rome. And that includes a huge range of things. I mean, Atticus looks after Cicero's finances, so we get Cicero's money worries. We get family anxieties because Atticus's sister is married to Cicero's brother. So they have all this kind of family stuff they talk about as well. But I suppose the most striking

9:37thing is the constant speculation, gossip, reflection on what's going on in the political arena, trying to work out what other people's motives are. Cicero shares his anxieties about all sorts of things in the letters to Atticus. And I think that's one of the things that really has always drawn people to Cicero is that we get, yes, we get these sort of rather bombastic speeches, which are powerful in their own way. And Cicero's been pretty consistently admired as a successful

10:08orator. But we also get this other side of Cicero in the letters, which is so fascinating. In some ways, people kind of have criticized Cicero's character. When Cicero's fortunes were kind of, I suppose, much of Cicero's writing was kind of not really known in the kind of later Middle Ages. But with Petrarch and the sort of beginnings of the Italian Renaissance, you get this kind of rediscovery of Cicero. And Petrarch found a manuscript of Cicero's letters in the library

10:43of the cathedral chapter in Verona. And he was so thrilled because he was a big fan of Cicero. He thought, oh God, I'm going to read Cicero's letters. It's amazing. He read these letters and he thought, oh my God, I can't believe it. Here's this guy. I really admired him. I've been reading his moral philosophy and now I'm reading his letters and he keeps changing his mind about everything. He's human. He's very human. And on the one hand, he then goes down massively in Petrarch's estimation and Petrarch actually writes these letters to Cicero going, why on earth did you support Julius Caesar

11:13and taking him to task? Or why did you support Mark Antony? Or sorry, why did you get into conflict with Mark Antony? But at the same time, there is this sort of almost this recognition of Cicero's humanity, his kind of human failings, which I think have made him, I mean, he provokes a lot of criticism for his character, if you like. But there's a strong sense that we kind of have access to his character. And in regards then to the Catiline conspiracy event, which we're going to focus on. So we have

Catiline's Plans

11:42those big bombastic speeches, which we'll no doubt explore with the story. But I'm guessing another source, do you get him mentioning Catiline in the letters that he has as well? So you get a bit of an interesting different side that we can also explore that, you know, Cicero and the letters versus Cicero and the bombastic speeches. Well, one of the things that's quite interesting about the year 63, and a bit frustrating in some ways, is that we don't have any letters between Cicero and Atticus for that year when Cicero was consul, and very likely Atticus was in Rome, so they didn't need to write to one another. At other times, Atticus was often away for long periods,

12:17and that's when we get these kind of very detailed, regular exchanges of correspondence, not that we ever hear from Atticus, I might say. But to rephrase, we don't have letters from 63 BCE, when Cicero actually is consul. However, we do have quite a lot of kind of later reflections on the events of that year in Cicero's letters to Atticus, and particularly his worries about how other people are judging his actions. Right. So it sounds like we do have a bit of a bias problem,

12:47regardless though, in that if our main source for this event, Cicero is our main source for this story. Cicero is our main source for this story, but we do also have another quite detailed and pretty much contemporary account, which is Salus' account of the war against Catiline. Salus was a generation younger than Cicero, but he was very familiar with many of the key players in the events of 63. He was a close associate of Julius Caesar for a while. So he too was a kind of, you know,

13:19a senior Roman politician, although he'd stepped back from politics by the time he wrote this account of the Catilinarian conspiracy in the 40s BCE. And he gives us a rather different take on the events of 63 from the version that we get in Cicero. So that's quite interesting. And you mentioned, of course, so 63 BC is the year that we're going to be focusing on. And this is the year when Cicero becomes consul and the position of consul, basically the pious

13:50position that an elite Roman could get to in the late Roman Republic at that time. Can you briefly explain, I know it's a massive story, but Cicero's road to that point, has he been active in the political sphere a long time to get to this big moment in his story? It's hard to gauge exactly when Cicero set his sights on the consulship, but he was very clearly an ambitious young man and wanted to make a name for himself in the law courts at an early age. He

14:23was clearly a talented orator. He had some challenges to overcome because, you know, when he was in his late teens, early 20s, Rome was riven by the civil war between Marius and Sulla and then Sulla's dictatorship, which meant that there wasn't a lot going on in the forum and law courts. But after the sort of restoration of order, Sulla's dictatorship, and then the restoration of sort of traditional government forms largely in the wake of that, yes, Cicero does manage to pursue a pretty standard

15:00political career in some ways. I mean, one of the things that's really important to appreciate about Cicero is that he doesn't come from a grand senatorial family. He has no senatorial ancestors, and that marks him out as different from the vast majority of the Senate and from virtually everybody who gets elected to be consul. So that rode from a family with no senatorial ancestors. I mean, they were clearly very wealthy, the Ciceros, and quite well connected. His father knew influential

15:32people in Rome. Cicero was sort of apprenticed. Cicero and his brother, indeed, were apprenticed to some of Rome's leading orators in their youth. So we have, you know, Cicero, who's clearly very talented and a persuasive speaker, who kind of, and also a keen student, not just of oratory, but also philosophy. And he stands for election to the office of Cicero, the sort of most junior office

16:03that entitles you to a seat in the Senate. And once he's been elected Cicero, that's a role that only lasts for one year. He's Cicero serving in Sicily, where he gains valuable experience, but he also, you know, has got this seat in the Senate. And then that kind of, it really makes him part of that hugely influential body that kind of uses its authority, if you like, in theory, at least. He's got his first step on the ladder. He's got his first step on the ladder. Exactly so. And later on, he's elected Preta. You know,

16:37he makes a real name for himself with his speeches in the law courts. So the speech that he gives prosecuting Gaius Veres in 70 BCE is an absolutely crucial moment for kind of making his name as an orator. But it's really interesting that, you know, there had been other men of, I suppose, non-senatorial background making it to the top of the tree previously. And one of those came from the same small town as Cicero, Arpinum, Gaius Marius. But Marius had, you know, a generation

17:13earlier, Marius had made his fortune as a hugely successful general in the military sphere. Cicero was, I mean, he did have military experience in his youth. He'd served under Pompeius Strabo, fighting in the kind of civil war, first of all, the war against the allies and then civil war period. But that was not really the sphere in which he excelled. And instead, he really asserted the importance of the role of the orator in society and the orator as someone who provides

17:49leadership and provides ethical leadership and guidance for the state. So that was how he kind of, you know, presented his contribution and what qualified him to hold highest office in Rome. He's a brilliant speaker. He's worked his way up the ladder. You know, as you say, Cuiesta, Preeta, all of these positions. And as you say, I also think he's not from a senatorial background. He's rich, but he's a new man, a novus homo, as they say. So getting the consulship then in 63 BC, I mean, that's a big deal for him to have earned it. And the power of his words,

18:23rather than the power of money by other figures, like the actual Crassus. But we've painted the scene for Cicero at that time. But let's introduce this figure of Catiline. So who is

Catiline's Character

18:34this big rival Catiline? Okay, so Catiline is pretty much contemporary with Cicero, maybe a couple of, probably a couple of years older. We don't know for sure. He comes from quite a different background. He comes from a really old patrician family. And the patricians in Rome were people who claimed that their ancestors had been in the Senate in the time of Romulus, Rome's mythical founder. And they went back a long way. And they have, you know, there are various special religious roles, particularly that patricians

19:04are entitled to hold that other people aren't. So he's fantastic. He's very grand. He's also very ambitious. And he holds various offices. However, he also gets himself into hot water in various ways. So he has, you know, after he'd been Preeta, he went off to be a Roman provincial governor in Africa, and the Roman province of Africa. But he was, there were various embassies that came from the

19:36provincial subjects there complaining about his behaviour as governor. And he was prosecuted for extortion on his return to Rome. And that was by no means the only court case that brought against him. There was also a scandal about, you know, had he or had he not seduced one of the Vestal Virgins, which was hugely scandalous. Now, he was prosecuted for a variety of different crimes and always acquitted. So now, prosecution, Roman politicians prosecuted one another constantly,

20:09as it's a very litigious society. So, you know, in some ways, it's not hugely unusual. But Catiline does perhaps stand out as someone who got attracted a lot of scandal. And he seems to have been quite a spendthrift. Now, so by the time we get to 63, Catiline appears to have enormous debts. He is by no means the only Roman politician to be in this situation. Julius Caesar had huge debts by this date as well. So, and we can perhaps come back later to the issue of debt. But Catiline was

20:47someone who had, well, he'd wanted to stand for the consulship previously, but because he was about to be in the process of being prosecuted, he'd not really been able to be a candidate. So he stood for the consulship in the summer of 64 against Cicero. So he was one of the seven candidates for the consulship. Cicero, a guy called Gaius Antonius, and Catiline were the three favorites, if you like. So Catiline seems to have spent a lot more money trying to get himself elected.

21:23But there were various doubts about Catiline's reliability and his interest in using violence to gain his ends, and the possibility that he might actually want to pass some rather radical measures, such as the abolition of debt. And in the end, it seems that Cicero was able to get the support of senior senators for his own candidature. So Cicero was elected, came top of the ballot.

21:54Gaius Antonius came second by a fairly significant distance. And then Catiline was third, and third gets you nowhere in Roman politics. So he spent a load of money, which he didn't have, which he borrowed. And he was really in a difficult situation. So Catiline, he's a failed Roman politician. He's one of the conspicuous failures, but he's by no means the only one. There were quite a lot of people around who had spent a lot of money trying to get elected and been unsuccessful. And because they were

22:26unsuccessful, that meant they would not go on to hold a provincial governor position following their year of office, which was often regarded as an excellent means to make a fortune back again, with which you can then repay all the people you borrowed money from to get elected.

Election and Aftermath

22:43Gosh, pulling no punches as well by labelling him a failed politician. And do you think, even in 64 BC, I guess we don't know much about Cicero's previous relationship with Catiline, but during that election campaign, can you imagine that Cicero was actively pushing others who weren't voting for him to vote for Gaius Antonius to make sure that Catiline did not get the consulship? Well, I mean, actually Cicero attacks Gaius Antonius as well. And he really plays on everyone's

23:17anxieties after the slave rebellion led by Spartacus, which kind of rumbled on for quite some time between 73 and 71. There's a lot of anxiety. So the sense that Catiline and perhaps Gaius Antonius too might resort to violence or something that Cicero seems to have kind of played on in his speech. But it was really Catiline he went for. He seems to have brought up all sorts of stories about incest

23:50with his sister, murder of family members, the appalling way he'd behaved during the Sullen prescriptions when Catiline was on the side of Sulla and actually carried out various executions, supposedly. Now, how much we should believe of any of this is not entirely clear. We also have the problem that this speech that Cicero made as a candidate for the consulship survives only in fragments or reports that other people, references in other writers. So, you know, we're not entirely

24:23sure what he said. And what he did say may not be entirely, you know, a lot of that may be kind of embroidered, fabricated. I think we do need to bear in mind when we think about Roman oratory, it is also about kind of entertaining your audience and evoking these extraordinarily vivid vignettes of, you know, conveying the terrible character of your opponent. The kind of strict truth is quite often a casualty, one suspects, in these situations. So, you know, the extremely

24:55toxic family situation of Catiline may be a significant exaggeration on Cicero's part. Well, we'll now delve into what happens the next year and Catiline coming back right after this.

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Conspiracy Unfolds

26:22What's this big moment in 63 BC that sets it all off again?

26:33It's interesting to speculate exactly when Cicero starts to kind of get a sense of something funny going on. But clearly, it's important that Catiline is having another go at standing for the consulship. So he puts himself forward as a candidate in the summer of 63, hoping to secure election for the consulship of 62. So he tries again. He tries again. He tries again. However, there are all sorts of stories about how Catiline is going

27:06to resort to violence even in the course of the elections. And the elections themselves are postponed. There are stories going around about what Catiline's been saying to his supporters. He has a rally in his house where he says, you know, the wealthy governing class of Rome are kind of, you know, choking everyone else to death. Well, you know, we're all laden with debt and there they are living in their grand houses and, you know, it's got to stop. So there are these stories going around about Catiline planning, you know, if he doesn't get elected consul, what's he going to do? There are

27:41all these stories going around. Now, partly these stories must play a role in Catiline failing to get elected because his name is being tarnished with all sorts of stories. But the consequence of his not being elected is that he is in a completely desperate situation. He's taken on even more debt. And what is he going to do now? And now, according to Cicero and Sallust as well, you know, this is the point at which, so he's already kind of tried to use violence to affect the outcome of the elections.

28:16That hasn't worked. Instead, we have the elections of Solanus and Morena, who are now consuls elect for the year 62. And at this point, we get Catiline clearly, well, according to Cicero, turning to violence, you know, to get his way. So he's staging a coup to make himself consul in the place of these men who've been elected. So, but exactly what's going on is really, really hard to work out because

28:49we have Cicero's very tendentious account of it in the first speech against Catiline, which he delivers in possibly, probably the 8th of November. And he kind of gives us a summary of what's happened in previous months. And then we also have Sallust's account of what's going on. But again, you know, the sources that Sallust's drawing on are not necessarily very clear. Now, some historians would say, actually, maybe Catiline didn't even think of turning to violence until he's attacked

29:19in the Senate by Cicero in early November. So much later on, several months after his failure in the elections in the summer? Well, the elections themselves had been, because of the potential violence, the stories around violence associated with the elections, the elections normally happen in July. They may have been postponed to September. Even that is not entirely clear. But the elections finally happen. Catiline is defeated. And then, you know, he seems to have these supporters. And Cicero claims he's got a network of informants all over Italy who are feeding back to him, you know,

29:52accounts of what's going on. And the most worrying and obvious thing is sort of gathering of armed men in Faizulai in Etruria. And these men are under the command of a man called Manlius, who had been a centurion in the army of Salah. He's clearly an experienced military man and is himself, you know, a bit desperate. So we have this sort of quite complicated situation of a whole number of

30:23different groups of people who are feeling really disaffected and ready for revolt because they're so desperate, one way or another. Now, some of these groups are people whose lands were taken from them by Salah in order to give land allotments to his veteran soldiers. Some of them are veteran soldiers who've kind of failed to make a success of their farming. We have another group who are descendants of individuals who were proscribed by Salah. That's to say, you know, they were made

30:56outlaws, they could be killed with impunity, and they and their descendants lost the right to participate in politics in Rome. So the proscribed are feeling this huge sense of resentment and really wanting some kind of revolution to turn things around and offer them a way back into Roman politics. And that had been a kind of a real issue for some time. And the resentment of the sons of the prescribed was something that Cicero and others were aware of to a degree.

31:26And so had those people been the ones who had been championing Catiline in the previous election? Or are these people who are disillusioned off their own back and they're kind of they're gathering together regardless? It's hard to say exactly who Catiline supporters were in the elections that took place in 64 and indeed in 63. Obviously, he had some supporters, but not enough to get him over the line. The proscribed are not able to vote because that, you know, they're still suffering from this ban.

31:58But they're, you know, itching to get back into it, to reclaim their rights, reclaim their property and all the rest of it. So there are all sorts of people who are feeling disaffected. And the urban populace of Rome is a really important group as well. I mean, we have, you know, Rome has this growing population, lots of people, Salas talks about all the people who come in to Rome looking for work, because their farm has failed in the countryside or they've lost their farm. They come to Rome

32:28looking for work and there's not very much work in Rome or it's very seasonal, it's very hard to make a living. So there's a lot of people who are feeling very precarious in one way or another. And many of these people have debts. So Catiline's proposal to cancel debts is an enormously appealing one for many different groups for different reasons. So it's appealing to those aristocratic politicians who've really got themselves into debt, trying to get elected to high office. But it's

33:01also really appealing to people much kind of lower down the social scale, if you like, who have maybe got into debt, you know, just to get enough to eat. So it's kind of, you know, a whole lot of different people who are looking for big changes. And there are rumors that Catiline too may bring about prescriptions where you confiscate the lands of your outlawed enemies and redistribute them to your supporters. So, you know, that could be further opportunities for people who are feeling very

33:32marginalized and resentful. I mean, one of the things we have to remember about Rome in this period is the massive, massive inequality that is becoming ever more conspicuous. And that's one of the things that's so interesting about Sallust's account of the Catilinarian conspiracy is that there's actually quite a lot of similarity between the kinds of observations that Catiline makes about, you know, the terrible situation that they're in, in Rome with these rich people with their huge houses and their fish ponds and everything else. So Catiline gives a speech in Sallust kind of drawing attention to,

34:08you know, the houses of the rich on the one hand, and then the wretched living conditions of the poor on the other. But also, Sallust himself, in his introduction to his account of the conspiracy, makes the same point. So there's a recognition in Sallust, and this is why I think Sallust's account is such an interesting kind of compliment to Cicero's speeches. In Sallust's account, there's a recognition of the serious problems of inequality and the justified resentments of many different groups. I mean, Sallust is also critical, and he does talk about, you know,

34:41all the dregs of the countryside are finding their way to Rome and that kind of thing. But at the same time, you know, he is very critical of the kind of Roman, I suppose, the successful members of the Roman elite and how they have just enriched themselves and are concerned about nothing beyond kind of, you know, their own fortunes. So although Catiline loses the election, as you mentioned, his policies are popular with lots of people. And as he mentioned, you have that massing together of a group of armed men north

35:17of Rome in Tuscany, in Etruria, Faisuli. As this is happening over the summer and in the autumn of 63 BC, do you think Catiline is seeing this? And do you think he's involved with this build up? Is he thinking, this is actually a good show of force to show the people that my policies are actually popular? Or, I mean, I mean, what do you think? Is he actually planning an insurrection with these men? What do you think? Yeah, that's a, it's a really interesting question. It's kind of, at what point do Catiline and Manlius really kind of start planning together?

35:48Because we think they are working together, well, yes. Well, Cicero clearly thinks they're working together. And he sort of, you know, intercepted some messages in October that suggest, they're kind of anonymous messages saying, you know, there's an anonymous message to Crassus saying, you know, get out of Rome because, you know, Catiline's planning to bring about a revolution. So, you know, how reliable is this? Who knows? Um, but certainly that fuels Cicero's suspicion that, um, Catiline and Manlius are kind of

36:23collaborating. And there are stories about armed gatherings elsewhere in Italy as well. So it all feels quite uncomfortable, but I think one of the, the challenges or one of the frustrations for Cicero is trying to find some actual proof that Catiline is really linked to these armed gatherings elsewhere in Italy. Um, and it's not until quite late on that he actually, you know, achieves that, um, when, when he manages to get the, the, these Gauls, the Allobrogos, who's, um, they're on an embassy to Rome. And of course the Gauls as well are really suffering from

36:58debt. They've borrowed loads of money in order to pay their taxes to Rome. And the reason these Gauls Gauls have come, come to visit to the Senate is that they want remission of, of their debts. And when we're talking about the Gauls here, we're not talking across the Alps in modern-day France. These are Gauls who are in northern Italy, who have come under the control of the Romans, or are we talking a bit further afield and they're being forced to pay money almost as tribute to Rome? Yes. So these are, the, the Allobrogos are the other side of the Alps. Oh, they are the other side. Okay. My apologies. Yes. Yes. Yes. Because at one point, Cicero says, you know, the conspiracy has spread over the Alps.

37:32Right. So the, um, the Allobrogos then have, have sent their embassy to Rome. They want support from the Senate because they are feeling really up against it. They've got an oppressive governor and these Roman money lenders are oppressing them as well. So they want, you know, the idea of cancelling debts is very appealing for them. And initially they are quite drawn to support Catiline and they think, well, that could work out quite well for us to have debts cancelled. Um, but they also have cold feet and, um, they, in the end, um, someone who is kind of connected to

38:12one of the Gallic ambassadors, persuades them to help with a plot to secure written evidence of the complicity of Catiline. Then we get the letters. So these Allobrogos, the Gauls are persuaded to get some letters, um, that they can then take home to, um, to their compatriots and say, look, we've got a guarantee from Catiline. And then there's also a letter from the conspirators in Rome to Catiline,

38:43who's by then in Etruria. And by this point, then, then Cicero actually has this written evidence. But when he makes his first speech to the Senate, at that point, he doesn't have written evidence of Catiline's involvement with, um, these, with these other armed groups. So, you know, that's, I think, where scholars can take quite different views about, um, whether, how far Catiline really was working with Manlius, um, and, and other groups elsewhere in Italy.

39:14Because Catiline leaving Rome, I mean, that feels like an important moment. And can we get to how

Fulvia's Informant Role

39:17that, that happens? Because is there a couple of events before this where Cicero is getting more rumblings, more thoughts that actually Catiline could be involved with these, these armed men, or at least what we hear in the surviving sources? Because what's this mention of a woman called Fulvia being an informant? Yes. Okay. So Fulvia is a key, plays a key role really in, um, the discovery of the conspiracy. She is, um, uh, an aristocratic Roman woman. She's having a relationship with a man called Quintus

39:49Curious who had once been a Senator, but like quite a few others had been expelled from the Senate in the year 70, um, for a variety, I mean, senators were, were expelled for a variety of reasons, but it was, um, might be to do with not having sufficient wealth to support their position in the Senate, or it might be to do with their poor moral behavior, but it was, you know, a bit catastrophic actually for a Roman politician to be expelled from the Senate. So Quintus Curious is a slightly desperate man. Um, he's lost status, um, and he's part of the conspiracy. He's really drawn to

40:24Catiline's conspiracy. So, uh, Fulvia is having this relationship with him and her suspicions are aroused because, um, uh, according to Salas and other sources, previously, Curious had been very mean and kind of never bought her presence, but then he started getting much more generous. And so she gets suspicious. It's curious, what is going on? And Curious reveals to her, you know, everything's going to change. It's all going to be so much better because we're going to have this revolution and, you know, these awful upstarts like Cicero are going to be got rid of, and we're

40:56going to have, you know, Catiline is going to be consul and it will all be great. Um, and so Fulvia is a bit, um, doubtful about this and she communicates this information via intermediaries to Cicero. And gradually Fulvia picks up more and more about what the conspirators are planning. And one of the things that she seems to be the source for is a plan to assassinate Cicero. So the news leaks out that there's a gathering in the house of a man called Laica in the Sive Makers street in Rome of

41:32Catiline and his supporters. And a plan is made for two men to go to Cicero's house pretending to be about to offer him, you know, uh, uh, greetings of a morning and sort of standard Roman practice. Um, but they're going to kill him. Uh, and, but Cicero gets wind of this and he prevents these two men from entering his house the next morning, um, and foils their plot. But this is, you know, one of the things that he describes in very vivid detail in his speech, in his first speech against

42:06Catiline in the Senate about how he's been dodging multiple attempts on his life by Catiline. Now, quite possibly Catiline did plan to kill Cicero. I mean, in a way, you know, if he wanted to secure the consulship for himself, then that would be, you know, a plausible thing to do. And we should remember that political murder was by no means uncommon, um, in the, in the decades, in the previous decades, we've, you know, we've had the prescriptions of Sulla, you know, we've had all sorts of terrible

42:37things happening in the city of Rome. But to kill a consul, Catherine, that's quite a big step. Well, it is a big step to kill a consul and who knows exactly what would have happened had the consul been killed, but he wasn't. Um, he foils the attempt if there was an attempt. Um, but Cicero also started to make these really broad claims about how Catiline wanted to kill everybody in Rome or, you know, so, so that he paints the picture of Catiline as planning a sort of complete bloodbath, um, as a way to convince the rest of the Senate that proper action against Catiline

43:10and his supporters needs to be taken. And at that time, Catiline is still in Rome, is he hasn't left the city? Yes. Now that's interesting. That's interesting. Yes. Well, and that, and I think the fact that Catiline is still in Rome is one of the, um, reasons that, that some scholars will say, well, you know, was Catiline really, you know, planning violence at this point. So, uh, there's this meeting of the Senate, um, in the temple of Jupiter's startle, probably on the 8th of November, where, um, Catiline is there in attendance and Cicero gives, you know, this sort of searing speech,

43:44which is then known later as, or the version that survives is known as the first speech against Catiline. And he really lays into him, you know, how long will you abuse our patience, Catiline? And he goes on and on at him about how everyone knows that he is planning terrible things, um, and planning violence against the city, planning to set fire to the city. All these claims are made about what Catiline's planning. And yet you still, you know, have the effrontery to carry on sitting here, see how, you know, you've been isolated. Everyone's moved

44:15away from you. And so he paints this really vivid picture of Catiline sitting isolated on a bench in the Senate and everyone else is, is kind of, you know, shrinking away from this terrible man. He's, you know, one of their own and yet is allegedly planning a coup, um, against, uh, the Roman state. Um, so what Cicero says is, you know, I have the authority to have you executed, which is, you know, rather a dubious claim. Um, and he says, if I were you, Catiline, I would just go into exile. Um, so in some ways, you know, Catiline's retreat from Rome,

44:49which he, you know, he seems to leave the night after that speech is given. And he goes off to Etruria and joins up with, with Manus at that point. They finally met. Okay. Now, now they finally met. Now, okay. So now he's out in the open. I mean, in some ways, Cicero said, you know, you know, we'll see you leave the city and then we'll really know that you're in this conspiracy. And so in some ways, Catiline does kind of show he's right, except that, you know, we could also tell a bit of a different story about Catiline. If we, if we think about Catiline as someone who

45:19feels actually completely scandalized that this jumped up new man from Arpinum has been elected consul when he feels it's, you know, he is a patrician and it's almost his entitlement to be elected consul. Catiline is, you know, one thing we should, shouldn't forget about Catiline. He was actually a very successful military man. So he was, you know, admired for his incredible talents as a military leader. He was sort of tireless at the head of an army. He, you know,

45:52and he, we get these quotations or speeches attributed to Catiline in Salas' account, particularly, where, you know, he, he communicates to some of the other, you know, old established aristocrats in the Senate and says things like, you know, my dignity has been affronted. You know, I am, you know, this is, I'm claiming what is my right. You know, so, so that sort of sense that he deserved to be consul and Cicero didn't, and that he's, he's kind of wants to write that wrong.

46:27But then he's also presenting himself as the champion of the oppressed, and which is a somewhat kind of, you know, curious combination. Right. Well, we'll get to the grand climax

Conspiracy Climax

46:40of this conspiracy now that he's left Rome, right after this. Are you looking for the perfect podcasts to hunker down with during the longer, colder, darker nights? Well, look no further than the award-winning after dark myths, misdeeds, and the paranormal with me, Maddy Pelling. And me, Anthony Delaney. We are historians and love all things gloomy and macabre. From Tudor executioners and ancient Egyptian death

47:10rituals to which trials and folklore feel transported back in time on After Dark, out every Monday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts. And guess what? We're also now on YouTube, After Dark, a podcast from History Hit. So, we've kind of covered the story of those earlier months in 63. You know, these groups of armed men outside of Rome, Manlius for instance, in Tuscany, and these groups who support what Catiline

47:47was backing. The big question of how involved he was in wanting an insurrection, but now with that damning speech by Cicero, and Cicero very much thinks he is keen on insurrection, Catiline has left Rome, and he has for the first time. He's now met up with Manlius and these forces north of Rome. And for Cicero, is this the proof that he was looking for? What happens next? Well, it seems that there are still some doubters in the Senate about what Catiline's intentions really

48:17are. And Catiline did have some supporters in the Senate, although Cicero would like us to believe he didn't. But he's kind of in touch with some of the more conservative figures, like Catilus. He writes to Catilus to kind of talk about his... Catiline writes to Catilus, justifying his actions. That's where we get this thing about his dignity being... And he's a conservative senator. Yes, he's conservative senators. And there are all kinds of stories, actually, about senators who are quite in favour of Catiline, potentially, and certainly at an earlier stage,

48:52that perhaps even Crassus, the richest man in Rome, had been backing Catiline, partly to get back at Pompey, one of those complicated bits of Roman politicking behind the scenes. And who knows whether Crassus was ever really a backer of Catiline. But we now have this situation where,

49:16in a way, Cicero himself is apparently absolutely convinced that Catiline is a massive threat to Rome. And even in his first speech against Catiline, he aligns him with other individuals who've been seen as wanting to overturn the Roman state. Although historians might dispute Cicero's version of events, but he says he's like Gaius Gracchus, who'd been a revolutionary, supposedly revolutionary

49:47tribune back in 121 BCE and ended up being killed by conservatives. And that was a very kind of controversial situation at the time. So Cicero claims that Catiline poses this terrible threat, but there are still plenty of people who are not totally convinced. And this is really why Cicero needs to get that written evidence that really is going to be damning. So when he's hatched this plot with the Gaelic envoys, and they have got these letters, he's then able to use the letters to

50:31implicate not just Catiline, but also various other individuals, some of whom are actually in the Senate. And the most senior of those is Lentula Sura, who is actually a praetor for the year 63. So quite high up, not consul, but still quite high up. Yes. Well, Lentula Sura is a really interesting character. He had been expelled from the Senate in 70. He'd managed to kind of claw his way back. So this is his second time as praetor. He'd got to be, you know, got to be praetor before and then been, you know, sort of got up the ladder and then

51:03like a snake of being kind of expelled from the Senate. You have to kind of go back and start again. So he'd managed to get back to being praetor, but clearly wasn't, you know, wasn't happy with the situation in Rome. And so he's the most senior of those who are allegedly involved in the conspiracy, who stayed in Rome. So Catiline's left and gone to join Manlius, but there are these other guys who are in the city. And so while Catiline is off, you know, with his armed force in Tuscany,

51:37Cicero now has the issue of these letters that implicate these guys. And the letters are kind of opened in the Senate in front of these individuals. And Cicero describes how guilty they look. You can see they're guilty just by looking at their faces. And then he also says that they confessed. Now, what they confessed to is not entirely clear, but you know, we have these other guys,

52:10you know, including Roman senators who are, where there's written proof that they are involved in Catiline's conspiracy. So, you know, this is a very kind of scary situation and a complicated situation. complicated situation. But Cicero gets his way in that they are, does he get his way that they are, they're evidently found guilty of being conspirators? Well, found guilty is an interesting way to put it, because they don't have a trial. And that is part

52:41of what makes this whole episode so problematic. We've got Roman citizens who are accused of involvement in a conspiracy. But these men in Rome have not been, you know, they've not been caught red handed in anything like, you know, they're not kind of at the head of an armed force, you know, in Tuscany. That's, that's Catiline. They are in the city, and allegedly one of them is found with a whole load of weapons in his house. But I mean, you know, they, but they don't have a proper trial.

53:12They are treated as if they are manifestly guilty by Cicero. And then we have this sort of big debate in the Senate about what to do with these manifestly guilty men. So Roman citizens is manifestly guilty, accused of treason. And so Cicero, he goes, he goes big on this. He wants the worst penalty possible. Cicero wants the worst penalty possible, but he's by no means the only one. And I think one of the things that we need to appreciate about this, this debate in the Senate is that there are plenty of people

53:47expressing different opinions. The majority of people are in favour of killing these guys. Oh, okay. So we have Cato the Younger, for instance, who gives a very strong speech in favour of putting them to death. Now, there are voices that speak in favour of, you know, not rushing into things. And most prominent among those, at least according to Salas' account of the conspiracy, is Julius Caesar. And Julius Caesar says, this is going to set a really dangerous precedent and we

54:20should really think very hard before we do something as drastic as this. Let's put them in prison for a while instead. I mean, I think part of the problem is normally when aristocratic Romans are found guilty. They are allowed to retreat into exile rather than facing capital punishment. So, but in this case, to allow these men to leave Rome would be almost, you know, to give them an obvious opportunity to just go and join forces with Catiline in Tuscany. So that's not really an option here.

54:52Imprisonment is not a standard punishment in ancient Rome. So, but it's not entirely clear why it's not possible to, you know, keep them in prison at least until Catiline's been defeated in the field. That, you know, and that seems to be the kind of thing that Julius Caesar's talking about. But the strongest voices in the Senate are in favour of executing these men. And Cicero does speak in favour of this, but he's not the only one.

55:25What really puts Cicero on the spot is that he's the consul. So the Senate can make a decision, but in a way that doesn't make it law. So Cicero takes it upon himself to execute what he, to carry out what is the decision of the Senate, but he kind of carries the can for that. So he, as consul, oversees, there are five men in total who are in this category. So they are in custody temporarily, and then he oversees their being marched up to the Mamatine prison

56:03on the Capitoline Hill. And then they go down into this horrible, dank prison, which Sallus describes very vividly, and then they're strangled to death. So these powerful Romans, who have been in the Senate, are infamously strangled to death. And Cicero is the one who effectively gave the orders for that to happen. He gave the orders for that to happen. And not only that, but he himself accompanied these men on their walk to the prison, and he put his hand on Lentulus's shoulder. Lentulus is the

56:34most senior of the group, the one who's Praetor for 63. Cicero puts his hand on his shoulder. And he's basically got him under arrest, marches him up to Mamatine prison, and witnesses the execution of the conspirators. Wow, Cicero, there you go. So that is what happens to the conspirators. They're executed, and Cicero is the man very much behind it. We must wrap up also, though, the story of

57:05Catiline, because he is not there. He is out of Rome with Manlius and these armed men in Tuscany.

57:12They've got to figure out what to do with these guys as well. Yes, they have. And one of the complicating factors, I think, with Cicero's speeches against Catiline is that most of his anger is directed against Catiline himself. But as you say, Catiline is not among the group who get executed in Rome. He's off in Tuscany with his troops. And Cicero's colleague as consul, Gaius Antonius, is put at the head of an armed force, and he goes off to Tuscany. And actually, Gaius Antonius himself is indisposed, so it's his deputy who leads

57:47the forces. And Catiline's forces are massively outnumbered. Nevertheless, it is really striking. No one deserts Catiline's cause. They fight on. They fight until they're basically all dead on the battlefield. And at the forefront is Catiline himself. So in Sallis-Sacar, which concludes with the death of Catiline, we have this really almost tragic situation of Catiline, in many ways, a very talented, albeit kind of aristocrat gone wrong character, who has this incredible capacity for

58:22leadership that he's put to perverted ends. But we see an almost redemptive moment for him at the end, because we can see how he's inspired loyalty in his followers. And they have followed him to their deaths on the battlefield. They believed in his cause of insurrection, whether it was largely just because you'll clear our debts, you might give us a new life, or for whatever other reason. It's probably his military background as well. He was able to kind of continue with the loyalty of those figures,

58:54even when it was very much against them. The whole state was against them, that idea. No, absolutely. Absolutely. So he's obviously quite charismatic. And it's quite interesting, many years later, when Cicero is defending a young friend of his, Caelius, it turns out that Caelius himself had been, for a while, a follower of Catiline. And in that speech in defense of Caelius, in the mid-50s, Cicero actually says, well, of course, Catiline was terribly charming and charismatic,

59:26because he's trying to make excuses for the fact that Caelius had actually followed Catiline for a while. So we didn't get quite such a sort of, you know, Catiline as an evil incarnate in that particular context. Oh, yes, the veil is a nice glimpse behind the curtain. Absolutely. Interesting. So that is the story of the Catiline conspiracy. It doesn't end well for Catiline, and of course, Cicero is the figure who, you know, is the man at the top during it and oversees the execution of these five conspirators, which is such a big moment. How does this affect Cicero's career

1:00:06after that point? Is he hailed as a hero, the man who stopped this potential insurrection? Or is it less favourable for him? It's a pretty complicated story what happens afterwards, because some people hail Cicero as a hero. He is, you know, after the execution, he's kind of escorted by cheering crowds. He's hailed as father of the fatherland, you know. He's rescued Rome and he presents himself as being Rome's saviour. He saved Rome from the threat of arson, whether Catiline ever really meant

1:00:38to burn down Rome is a moot point. You know, he saved the Roman state. But already, you know, even before the end of December, he's being challenged. One of the tribunes prevents Cicero from making his speech that a consul normally makes on laying down office on the grounds that Cicero has executed Roman citizens without trial. And that is a breach of the liberties of the Roman people. And it is, of course, the tribune's job particularly to protect the liberties of the

1:01:12Roman people. And clearly, there are plenty of people criticising Cicero at the time.

1:01:19And in subsequent years, Cicero spends an inordinate amount of time defending what he did in 63. So boasting about how he saved the state, but in such a way that, you know, makes it clear he is constantly under criticism. He has to defend himself. And, you know, later commentators say things like, well, you know, Cicero praised his consulship, not wrongly, but too much kind of thing that, you know, he just went on and on about it. And that made him a bit of a figure of fun in

1:01:53some ways. But he was absolutely right to be anxious about his reputation because a few years later, in 58 BCE, the tribune published Clodius, whom Cicero had been at odds with for a variety of reasons. But Clodius engineered, he really sort of made the most of all these criticisms of Cicero kind of going against Roman citizen rights, and enacted a piece of legislation,

1:02:27making, obliging Cicero to go into exile. So, and Cicero was furious, also absolutely devastated. He was in exile for 16 months, absolutely horrifying experience for him because he had no idea if he'll ever get back to Rome. He had no idea what would happen next. It was terrible for his family. You know, it was, it was an absolute disaster. And that was, you know, in a sense, the cause for that, if you like, or at least the excuse for that, that Clodius used was, was the execution of the Catalinarian conspirators.

1:03:00Right. So that's the reason that gives the motivation for Cicero's exile. Catherine, there's been a fascinating chat, insight into the Catalinarian conspiracy, and how complex it is, especially when you explore the character of Catalina, and how involved, how much he actually wanted an insurrection, how much of this is Cicero kind of just being convinced in Catalina's involvement from the beginning, when Catalina really gets involved in it. My last question is, from Cicero's own viewpoint, do you think at the end of his life,

1:03:31would he have viewed the Catalina, his defeating the Catalinarian conspiracy in his eyes? Do you think he would have viewed it as his finest hour, his greatest achievement?

1:03:44Well, we can say for sure that he viewed it as his finest. He did. He definitely viewed it as his finest achievement. We can see that from the speeches that he makes in the last year of his life, where he's attacking Mark Antony. And he presents himself as entitled to attack Mark Antony, whom he accuses of having ambitions to take over Caesar's position. Because this was after the assassination of Julius Caesar, Mark Antony was Caesar's deputy.

1:04:16And Cicero comes up with a series of blistering speeches against Mark Antony, known as the Philippics. And in those, he is really almost reprising his role in attacking Catiline. And he presents Mark Antony as, you know, here is a new Catiline, who is posing a very similar, devastating threat to the Roman state. And in fact, he attacked Clodius in similar terms as well. So he kept sort of in aligning all his personal enemies with the attacks on the Roman state.

1:04:46You know, he was kind of constantly reinforcing this idea of himself as the savior of Rome in 63. Whether other people were quite so convinced, who can say, you know, that he never returned to the position that he'd had as consul. Yes, people wanted to get him on their side to have his powerful oratory back them up. But, you know, if he got on the wrong side of Caesar in the mid fifties, that was not going to go well. Well, that's another story entirely. I mean,

1:05:17Catherine, this has been absolutely brilliant. What a story. And it features in your new book, all about the life of Cicero, it is called? Indeed it is. Orator, the life of Cicero and the end of the Roman Republic. And that is out soon. That is out in July. Out on the 23rd of July. Brilliant. Catherine, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

1:05:43Thank you.

1:06:13Thank you.

1:06:43Thank you.

1:07:13Thank you.