Catilina's Riddle by Steven Saylor Read Free Book Online Page A

unusual about last year's campaign?" asked Meto earnestly. "I remember hearing you rage about it to visitors in your library, but I never really understood."
    "Only that it was so dirty and disgusting. And the fact that it was Cicero, of all people, who plunged the tone of the campaign to such depths. And the things that Cicero has done since the election . . . "
    I shook my head and started again. "There were three leading candidates: Cicero, Catilina, and Antonius. Antonius is a nonentity, a wastrel and a scoundrel, with no political program at all, only a desperate need to get his hands on a provincial governorship so that he can bleed enough taxes from the unfortunate locals to pay off his debts. There are those who say the same things about Catilina, but no one denies that Catilina has charm to spare and a keen political sense. He comes from ancient patrician stock, but he has no fortune; just the sort of aristocrat who backs radical schemes for redistributing wealth, canceling debts, democratizing public offices and the priesthoods—and the conservative ruling classes do not like to hear that sort of talk. Even so, within the old ruling class there are plenty of patricians who have fallen on bad times and are desperate for a way out, and there are plenty of rich men who think they might use a demagogue for their own purposes, and so Catilina was not without substantial backing, despite his radical posturing. Crassus himself, the richest man in Rome, was his chief financial backer. Who knows what Crassus was up to?
    "Then there was Cicero. None of his ancestors had ever held elective office before—he was the first of his family to hold public office, what they call a New Man. And no New Man had managed to get himself elected consul in living memory. The aristocracy turned up their noses at him, despising his political canniness, his eloquence, his success with the crowd. Cicero is a glorious upstart, a comet that came from nowhere, and immodest as a peacock. In his own way he must have appeared as much a threat to the order of things as Catilina. And he might have been, had his principles not proved to be so flexible.
    "Catilina and Antonius formed an alliance. From early on they were both favored to win. Catilina never ceased to needle the aristocracy with reminders of Cicero's common origins (though Cicero was hardly
    - 30 -

    born poor!), but to his own supporters he began talking up the kind of radical schemes that give property owners gray hair and sleepless nights.
    The rich were in a quandary—Cicero they could not stomach, but Catilina they truly feared.
    "As for Cicero, his campaign was managed by his brother Quintus.
    After the election, one day when I had business at his house, Cicero pressed me to look at a series of letters that he had exchanged with Quintus, discussing the progress of the campaign; he was so proud of them that he was actually talking about making them into a pamphlet, a sort of guide to successful electioneering. At the very outset Cicero and his brother decided to stop at nothing to destroy Catilina's character.
    Slander is the accepted style in any election campaign, but Cicero set new standards. Some of the accusations were whispered from ear to ear; others were made by Cicero outright in his speeches. In the thick of it I dreaded setting foot in the Forum, knowing I would have to hear Cicero haranguing the crowd. Even when I could avoid the Forum, the graffiti and the gossip were everywhere. If only half of what they said about Catilina is true, the man should have been strangled in his mother's womb."
    "What was he accused of?"
    "A whole catalogue of crimes. There were the usual accusations of corruption, of course, such as buying votes and bribing election officials; those accusations were probably true, considering the financial backing that Catilina was receiving from Crassus—what good is so much money in an election except for bribes? When Roman voters know a candidate has