Some Passionate Performances in Late Republican Rome
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Balot: A Companion to the Roman Army 9781405151436_2_c20 Final Proof page 308 18.11.2008 10:06pm Compositor Name: PDjeapradaban CHAPTER 20 Some Passionate Performances in Late Republican Rome Robert A. Kaster No one who has witnessed the opening years of the twenty first century needs to be told that emotion is inseparable from political thought and political action. So many today – individuals, parties, sects, whole nations – ‘‘are full of passionate intensity,’’ and so thoroughly do their passions govern their deeds that we could fancy Yeats’s drafting ‘‘The Second Coming,’’ in January 1919, as an act of prophecy, not a retrospective meditation on the Easter Rising and the First World War. But of course no decade in no century has ever wanted for the like, including the decades and centuries of Rome’s Republic; nor is the enactment of political passion ever, quite, just a symptom of ‘‘mere anarchy . loosed upon the world.’’ Political passions serve multiple purposes – expressive, effective, and normative – in making ideology mani- fest and urgent. In this chapter we will survey a few of these purposes in the time of Cicero, the better to see how such passions illuminate the values that sustained the republican community and inspired people to gestures mimicking stable unanimity amidst the tumult of competing factions.1 We can organize the survey around a story that Cicero never tired of telling about himself, though it meant revisiting, again and again, a time of disfiguring disgrace. The story appears as the main structural element in no fewer than four extant speeches, delivered before quite diverse audiences, and significant elements of it reappear in several other orations and in the correspondence.2 The story goes like this: Late in 63 BCE Cicero, as consul, uncovered the plot of Catiline and his confederates to overthrow Rome’s civil regime. Acting with the senate’s authoritative support, he oversaw the execution of five chief conspirators at Rome, including a praetor of the Roman people; not long after, Catiline was defeated in a pitched battle in Tuscany. The Republic was rescued, and – though some malicious types grumbled that citizens had been executed without trial and the people’s judgment, contrary to Roman law and tradition – there was general agreement that Cicero was the Republic’s ‘‘unique savior.’’3 Balot: A Companion to the Roman Army 9781405151436_2_c20 Final Proof page 309 18.11.2008 10:06pm Compositor Name: PDjeapradaban Passionate Performances in Late Republican Rome 309 But as the next few years passed there came to prominence an enemy of Cicero, and of all right-thinking patriots, the patrician Publius Clodius Pulcher, a dissolute and violent brigand, a plague on the community. After engineering a transfer from his patrician family to a plebian family in 59, so that he could become a tribune of the plebs, he gained that office for the following year and opened his term with a barrage of legislation that overturned several of the Republic’s key institutions. Clodius then turned his attention to Cicero, promulgating a law, ‘‘on the life [caput] of a citizen,’’ intended to punish with exile – retroactively as well as prospectively – anyone who put a Roman citizen to death without trial. This move was greeted by a great public outcry, massive and passionate demonstrations, and demands from both the senate and the people that the consuls take action to protect Cicero and thwart Clodius. But Clodius had already purchased the consuls’ connivance with a promise of rich provincial assignments, and Cicero was left defenseless. After first contemplating armed resistance or even suicide, he resolved that self-sacrifice would be the most patriotic course: he would withdraw and thereby spare his fellow citizens the bloodshed that resistance would bring. So Cicero went out from Rome on the day Clodius’ law was passed [March 18(?), 58], leaving behind his wife, children, and all he held dear. Very quickly Clodius promulgated a second law, declaring that Cicero had been exiled: once this law was passed, his property would be confiscated, his civic status and family rights would be lost, and he could be executed on sight if found within 400 miles of Italy. So Cicero fled to the Greek mainland, staying first at Thessalonica in Macedonia and then at Dyrrachium on the Adriatic Coast, and for almost 18 months tracked from afar the efforts of patriots to gain his recall. These efforts began barely a month after he left Italy and gradually gained momentum through the balance of 58: Pompey the Great, whose impulse to help had been ‘‘slowed’’ during Cicero’s crisis,4 began to work on his behalf, and the elections for the magistrates of 57 both brought in a cadre of tribunes loyal to the good cause and gave the consulship to a man who would be Cicero’s champion, Publius Cornelius Lentulus. When in December the new tribunes entered office they immediately promulgated legislation for Cicero’s recall; the senate soon expressed strong support for such legislation at its meeting on the first day of the new year; and an assembly was convened to vote on the tribune’s law on 23 January. But before that vote could be held the assembly was violently disrupted by Clodius’ thugs: ‘‘the Tiber was filled then with the bodies of citizens, the sewers stuffed, the blood had to be cleared from the forum with sponges.’’ (Sest. 77) With this mayhem the public life of Rome was brought to a standstill, through February and beyond, partly under the oppressive influence of Clodius’ lawless gangs, partly as an expression of outraged protest and sympathy on the part of Cicero’s allies in the senate. But by late spring, the consul Lentulus was able to mobilize the forces of good order and set in motion the events leading to Cicero’s recall. In late May or early June the senate met in the temple of Honos and Virtus built by Marius, Cicero’s fellow native of Arpinum, whose generalship had saved Rome from German hordes just as Cicero’s statesmanship had saved Rome from Catiline. There the senate passed a decree directing all provincial governors to ensure Cicero’s safety and directing the consuls to send letters to the towns of Italy calling on ‘‘all who wished the commonwealth’s safety’’ to gather in Cicero’s support: the language intentionally echoed the formula used to declare a state of emergency and effectively identified the commonwealth’s well-being with Cicero’s own. During the ludi Apollinares in July those crowds did gather, in vast numbers, to show their favor, while the senate, following Pompey’s lead, met to pass further supportive decrees. The law restoring Cicero’s civic status was Balot: A Companion to the Roman Army 9781405151436_2_c20 Final Proof page 310 18.11.2008 10:06pm Compositor Name: PDjeapradaban 310 Robert A. Kaster promulgated, and on August 4, as the centuriate assembly was convened for the vote, Cicero set sail from Dyrrachium and touched Italian soil again at Brundisium the next day. A stately, triumphant procession the length of the Appian Way brought him to Rome on September 4, and to a joyous reception signaling that Cicero and the commonwealth had been restored at one and the same time. Such, at any rate, was the story that Cicero told; and as a story, it derives much of its shape and point from omissions, distortions, and – it must be said – downright falsehoods. To mention only a few of these falsifying touches here: though Cicero repeatedly says that Clodius’ legislation overturned the use of auspices and destroyed the censorship, it is plain that these assertions are false, and tolerably clear that Clodius’ measures aimed only at normalizing procedures (in the case of the auspices) and strengthening due process (in the case of the censorship); though Cicero repeat- edly says the suppression of the Catilinarians was attacked as illegal only by inimici et invidi – personal enemies and those who were envious or spiteful – one did not have to belong to either category to think that such summary executions rode roughshod over several basic principles of republicanism; though Cicero repeatedly blames the consuls of 58 for their corrupt connivance at Clodius’ attack, he also claims to have had the support of almost all the other tribunes, any one of whom could have vetoed the bills Clodius aimed at Cicero – if the bills had been even nearly as unpopular as Cicero represents them as being; though Cicero repeatedly speaks of his departure from Rome as a willing act of patriotic self-sacrifice, his correspondence from exile shows that it was a move he came bitterly to regret; and though Cicero repeatedly stresses the support he received from Pompey in the run-up to his restoration, he cloaks in silence or euphemism the fact that Pompey had flagrantly betrayed him in the weeks and months before his exile, when the great man refused an appeal from Cicero’s son-in-law, equivocated with a delegation of Cicero’s senatorial supporters, and literally turned his back on Cicero himself, not even bidding him to rise when he had thrown himself at Pompey’s feet in supplication.5 But for our purposes here the various ways in which Cicero was economical with the truth in fashioning his story are less important than the story itself, which turns the drama of Cicero’s exile and return into a late republican morality play.6 The play is obviously organized around a central conflict between personal interests and communal interests, between individual willfulness and the subordination of one’s will to the common good: it reaches its crisis in the triumph of the few over the many that sends Cicero out of Rome, and it finds its resolution in the triumph of the many over the few that brings him home.