SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Professor Mary Beard

The Rome of Cicero’s day, with its million or so inhabitants, was still built largely of brick or local stone, a warren o...

A visitor from Athens or Alexandria in Egypt, which did have many buildings in the style of Maccari’s painting, would have found the place unimpressive, not to say squalid. It was such a breeding ground of disease that a later Roman doctor wrote that you didn’t need to read t...

The rented market in slums provided grim accommodation for the poor but lucrative profits for unscrupulous landlords. Cicero himself had large amounts of money invested in low-grade property and once joked, more out of superiority than embarrassment, that eve...

A few of the richest Romans had begun to raise the eyebrows of onlookers with their plush private houses, fitted out with elaborate paintings, elegant Greek statues, fancy furniture (one-legged tables were a particula...

Cicero had summoned the senators to meet, as they often did, in a temple: on this occasion a modest, old building dedicated to the god Jupiter, near the Forum, at the heart of the city, constructed on the standard rectangular plan, not the semicircular structure of Maccari’s fantasy – probably small and ill lit, with lamps and torches only partly compensating for a lack of windows.

The scene that followed has not been re-created by admiring painters. Catiline left town to join his supporters who had scratched together an army outside Rome.

On 5 December, Cicero summoned the senate again, to discuss what should be done with the men now in custody.

Custodial sentences were not the penalties of choice in the ancient world, prisons being little more than places where criminals were held before execution. Fines, exile and death made up the usual repertoire of Roman punishment.

Relying on the emergency powers decree, and on the vociferous support of many senators, Cicero had the men summarily executed, with not even a show trial.

Within a few weeks, Roman legions defeated Catiline’s army of discontents in North Italy. Catiline himself fell fighting bravely at the front of his men.

Catiline’s defeat was nonetheless a notable victory for Cicero; and his supporters dubbed him pater patriae, or ‘father of the fatherland’, one of the most splendid and satisfying titles you could have in a highly patriarchal society, such as Rome.

A few years later, in 58 BCE, the Roman people voted, in general terms, to expel anyone who had put a citizen to death without trial. Cicero left Rome, just before another bill was passed specifically singling him out, by name, for exile.

So far in this story the Populus(Que) Romanus (the PQR in SPQR) has not played a particularly prominent role. The ‘people’ was a much larger and amorphous body than the senate, made up, in political terms, of all male Roman citizens; the women had no formal political rights.

In 63 BCE that was around a million men spread across the capital and throughout Italy, as well as a few beyond. In practice, it usually comprised the few thousand or the few hundred who, on any particular occasion, chose to ...

Exactly how influential the people were has always – even in the ancient world – been one of the big controversies in Roman history; but two things are certain. At this period, they alone could elect the political officials of the Roman state; no matter how blue-blooded you were, you could only hold office as, say, consul if the Roman people elected you. And they alone, unlike the senate, could make law. In 58 BCE Cicero’s enemies argued that, whatever authority he had claimed under the senate’s prevention of terrorism decree, his execut...

The reasons why we can tell this story in such detail are very simple: the Romans themselves wrote a great deal about it, and a lot of what they wrote has survived.

The single most extraordinary fact about the Roman world is that so much of what the Romans wrote has survived, over two millennia. We have their poetry, letters, essays, speeches and histories, to which I have already referred, but also novels, geographies, satires and reams and reams of technical writing on everything from water engineering to medicine and disease.

So how is it, exactly, that we know of the conflict between Catiline and Cicero? The story has come down to us by various routes, and it is partly the variety that makes it so rich.

It was written only twenty years after the ‘war’, in the 40s BCE, by Gaius Sallustius Crispus, or ‘Sallust’, as he is now usually known. A ‘new man’ like Cicero and a friend and ally of Julius Caesar, he had a very mixed political reputation: his period as a Roman governor in North Africa was infamous, even by Roman standards, for corruption and extortion. But despite his not entirely savoury career, or maybe because of it, Sallust’s essay is one of the sharpest pieces of political analysis to survive from the ancient world.

Sallust did not simply tell the unfolding story of the attempted uprising, its causes and its upshot. He used the figure of Catiline as an emblem of the wider failings of first-century BCE Rome. In Sallust’s view, the moral fibre of Roman culture had been destroyed by the city’s success and by the wealth, greed and lust for power that had followed its conquest of the Mediterranean and the crushing of all its serious rivals.

The crucial moment came eighty-three years before the war against Catiline, when in 146 BCE Roman armies finally destroyed Carthage, Hannibal’s home base on the north coast of Africa. After that, Sallust thoug...

Behind Sallust’s essay lie other vivid documents, which ultimately go back to the hand of Cicero himself and give his version of what happened.

Titus Pomponius Atticus

How such private letters ended up in the public domain is something of a mystery. Most likely, a member of Cicero’s household made copies of them available after his death and they quickly circulated among curious readers, fans and enemies.

Equally intriguing a survival, and perhaps even more surprising, is part of a long poem that Cicero wrote to celebrate the achievements of his consulship; it is no longer complete, but it was famous, or infamous, enough that more than seventy lines of it are quoted by other ancient writers and by Cicero himself in later works.

By the first century BCE, reputation and fame in Rome depended not just on word of mouth but also on publicity, sometimes elaborately, even awkwardly, orchestrated.

historian friends, Lucius Lucceius,

But the most direct access that we have to the events of 63 BCE comes from the scripts of some of the speeches that Cicero gave at the time of the uprising.

Cicero himself probably circulated copies of all these soon after they had been delivered, laboriously transcribed by a small army of slaves. And, unlike his efforts at poetry, they quickly became admired and much-quoted classics of Latin literature, and prime examples of great oratory to be learned and imitated by Roman schoolboys and would-be public speakers for the rest of antiquity.

Many later learners have struggled too. This group of four speeches, Against Catiline (In Catilinam) or the Catilinarians, as they are now often known, went on to enter the educational and cultural traditions of the West.

It did not take long for the opening words of Cicero’s speech given on 8 November (the First Catilinarian) to become one of the best known and instantly recognisable quotes of the Roman world: ‘Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?’ (‘How long, Catiline, will you go on abusing our patience?’);

That is only one of the wry ironies and pointed, paradoxical ‘mis-quotations’ in the history of this distinctive phrase.

But when he wanted to capture the civil conflicts of hundreds of years earlier, in particular the ‘conspiracy’ of one Marcus Manlius, who in the fourth century BCE was supposed to have incited the Roman poor to rebellion against the oppressive rule of the elite, he went back to a version of the classic words. ‘Quo usque tandem ignorabitis vires vestras?’ (‘How long will you go on being ignorant of your strength?’)

As his carefully chosen words hint, Livy’s Marcus Manlius, a nobleman turning to doomed revolution, supported by an impoverished rabble, was largely a projection of Catiline back into early Roman history.

Might there not be another side to the story? The detailed evidence we have from Cicero’s pen, or point of view, means that his perspective will always be dominant.

One obvious question is whether the speech we know as the First Catilinarian really is what Cicero said to the assembled senators in the Temple of Jupiter on 8 November.

A lot hangs too on exactly when it was circulated and why. We know from one of his letters to Atticus that Cicero was arranging for the First Catilinarian to be copied in June 60 BCE, when he must have been well aware that the controversy over his execution of the ‘conspirators’ was not likely to go away.

These questions prompt us to look harder for different versions of the story. Never mind Cicero’s perspective, is it possible to get any idea of how Catiline and his supporters would have seen it?

Cicero casts Catiline as a desperado with terrible gambling debts, thanks entirely to his moral failings. But the situation cannot have been so simple.

How can we tell? It is harder to reconstruct economics than politics across 2,000 years, but we do get some unexpected glimpses.

According to these calculations, the number of coins being minted in the late 60s BCE fell so sharply that there were fewer overall in circulation than there had been a few years before.

All this was in addition to the other long-standing factors that might have given the humble or the have-nots in Rome an incentive to protest or to join in with those promising radical change.

Cicero, inevitably, had an interest in making the most of the danger that Catiline posed. Whatever his political success, he held a precarious position at the top of Roman society, among aristocratic families who claimed, like Catiline, a direct line back to the founders of the city, or even to the gods.

The most determined modern sceptics have deemed the whole plot not much more than a figment of Cicero’s imagination – in which case the man who claimed to be a ‘weapons enthusiast’ was exactly that, the incriminating letters were forgeries, the deputation of Gauls were a complete dupe of the consul and the rumoured assassination attempts were paranoid inventions.

It is much more likely that, whatever his original motives, Catiline – far-sighted radical or unprincipled terrorist – was partly driven to extreme measures by a consul spoiling for a fight and bent on his own glory. Cicero may even have convinced himself, whatever the evidence, that Catiline was a serious threat to the safety of Rome.

The clash between Cicero and Catiline has offered a template for political conflict ever since. It can hardly be a coincidence that Maccari’s painting of the events of 8 November was commissioned, along with other scenes of Roman history, for the room in the Palazzo Madama that had just become the home of the modern Italian senate; presumably a lesson was intended for the modern senators.

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When the conspiracy has been replayed in fiction and on stage, it has been adjusted according to the political alignment of the author and the political climate of the times.

Jonson was being unfair to Cicero’s powers of persuasive oratory – at least if the continuing use of his words, quoted and strategically adapted, is anything to go by.