Cicero (c. 106-43 BCE), the famous silver-tongued statesman of the Roman Republic, won his political race to become a powerful consul of Rome in 64 BCE and subsequently served his term in the high office during the year 63 BCE. A former governor named Lucius Sergius Catilina, usually shortened to Catiline, had competed and lost against Cicero in the election of 64 BCE. While Cicero was serving out his term as consul, Catiline ran for office in the 63 BCE consular election race, but an electoral defeat crushed his ambitions once again. Following this second election loss, Catiline decided to abandon the usual political process and plotted, along with a tribune named Manlius and other conspirators, to seize power through the use of assassination and armed rebellion.
Consul Cicero and the Roman government discovered the conspiracy around October of 63 BCE, and by November, indictments were issued against conspirators as the military was dispatched against Catiline’s rebel army (which had been secretly gathered by Tribune Manlius). Come December, several conspirators had been arrested in Rome and five were controversially executed without an adequate trial—a detail that hounded Cicero’s reputation and legacy. Nevertheless, as the year was coming to a close, it was about time for Cicero to relinquish his position as a consul of the Roman Republic.
Cicero, who lived for speeches, wanted to formally address the Roman masses in regard to his efforts to overcome Catiline’s conspiracy. Yet, to the statesman’s frustration, this wish for a formal speech was blocked by the tribunes, Bestia and Nepos. In response, Cicero found a loophole by splicing portions of his intended speech into a customary assembly oath he was required to give at the end of his term. In his work, The Republic, Cicero recalled, “As I was retiring from the consulship, I swore in a public assembly that the state had been saved by my actions” (Cicero, The Republic, chapter 8). Indeed, the early discovery of the conspiracy and the arrest of the conspirators who were still in Rome did save the Republic from a worse rebellion, but it is curious to note that Catiline and his forces in the field had not yet been defeated at that time. Catiline’s rebels were not militarily destroyed until 62 BCE. Unfortunately for Cicero, the Catiline conspiracy was a harbinger of things to come and the Republic was only granted the briefest of reprieves from existential crises. Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great soon put the Roman government in a stranglehold with the First Triumvirate in 60 BCE. Then they dragged the Romans into the Civil War of 49 BCE, which transitioned control away from the Roman Senate and put power irreversibly into the hands of authoritarian emperors. Cicero, himself, fell along with the Republic, as he was assassinated in 43 BCE on the orders of Mark Antony and Octavian (later known as Augustus, r. 32/27 BCE-14 CE).
Written by C. Keith Hansley
Picture Attribution: (Bronze Roman statue of a camillus (acolyte), dated ca. 14–54 CE, [Public Domain] via Creative Commons and the MET).
Sources:
- The Republic and the Laws, by Cicero and translated by Niall Rudd. Oxford University Press: 1998.
- Catiline’s Conspiracy, The Jugurthine War, Histories, by Sallust and translated by William W. Batstone. Oxford University Press: 2010.
- The Civil Wars, by Appian and translated by John Carter. Penguin Books: 1996.
