When it was time to nominate candidates for the consular election of 63 BCE, the Conservatives
in Rome were in a tough spot.
Many of the older Conservatives still had the stink of Sulla's Reign of Terror on them,
which is this whole can of worms that we're not going to get into today, and the generation
that had come of age after Sulla was still too young to be eligible for higher office.
In desperation, the Conservatives turned to this young senator from an unknown family
named Marcus Tullius Cicero.
Cicero was from a small town in central Italy, and rose to prominence as a lawyer, and later,
as a skilled administrator.
Cicero was a citizen, but not Roman in the sense of being from the city of Rome, and
everybody could tell.
His detractors would call him foreigner and immigrant for most of his life.
Supporting Cicero was a bit of a gamble for the Conservatives.
He had a reputation for being a constitutionalist and for being against corruption and bribery,
but he was still an outsider.
Would he respect the Senate's prerogatives?
What they didn't know at the time, and what we now know, is that Cicero favoured stability,
and order, and peace above all else.
They had all lived through this painful civil war, and Cicero believed that the Roman constitution
was the best defense against another one.
So the Conservatives backed Cicero.
It's not like they had much of a choice.
The two other major candidates for Consul that year were Catilina, aka Catiline, who
was one of the leaders of the Reform faction, and Antonius, the uncle of Marcus Antonius,
aka Marc Antony, Caesar's future right hand man.
Antonius was loosely aligned with the Reformers, but in my opinion just seemed like an ambitious
idiot.
More on him later.
Cicero didn't have a lot of money to spend on this campaign, so he did something as old
as politics itself - he attacked the character of his two opponents.
He was particularly brutal when it came to Catilina.
He accused him of deliberately stealing from non-Romans during Sulla's dictatorship, which
is just another way of saying "hey, non-Roman citizens, I'm one of you, vote for me!"
He constantly reminded voters that both of his opponents were complicit in the dictatorship
while Cicero kept his hands clean.
And even more, he accused both of them of being close friends with a young Julius Caesar,
who was running for Praetor that year and was already a very polarizing figure.
Cicero also fought hard for the support of the wealthy business class.
Some of the more radical Reformers were making them nervous, and they were open to supporting
someone like Cicero, promising stability.
Cicero won in a landslide.
Antonius came in second, and would serve as Cicero's Co-Consul.
He was less strongly associated Sulla than Catilina was, which I think explains his win.
Catilina was understandably upset by his 3rd place finish.
He was arguably Rome's most prominent Reformer.
It was humiliating.
He still had his seat in the Senate, but he immediately he began preparing to run for
Consul again next year.
When Cicero took office in January of 63 B.C.E., he did something so incredibly smart that
I can't believe it didn't become common practice.
He was assigned one of the best province to govern after his term - Macedonia.
He went to Antonius, and was like "hey, want to trade?"
They negotiated a deal.
If Antonius stayed out of Cicero's way all year, he could have Cicero's province.
This is the last time you'll hear about Antonius in this video, but he was around, just doing
whatever Cicero told him to do.
The first major problem to confront Cicero is something we're all familiar with now:
LAND REFORM!
This was 4 years before Caesar's year as Consul, and Land Reform was still the perennial objective
of the Reformers.
Cicero had no interest in bringing this issue up, but it was proposed by one of the new
Tribunes of the Plebs.
Cicero had to figure out how to deal with it.
The actual bill was kinda similar to the Land Reform bills that Caesar would later pass,
only smaller in scope.
A commission - 10 members this time - were to buy up land and redistribute it via lottery
to the urban poor.
In order to pay for this, the commission was authorized to sell publicly owned land in
Italy and abroad.
At the time, Cicero thought that Caesar was secretly behind this bill, but he had no proof.
Based the similarities between this bill and the one that Caesar would later pass, we can
look back with some hindsight and say that yeah he was probably right.
Cicero did everything he could to turn public opinion against the bill.
He went around stirring up old fears, calling the 10 commissioners the "10 kings."
He did his job, because the Senate voted down the bill and there was very little public
backlash.
The downside to all of this was that Reformers now saw Cicero as an arch Conservative, which
honestly he really wasn't.
He was institutionalist, and his problem with land reform was just that it was destabilizing.
Cicero may have been Consul, but he was still a lawyer at heart.
He spent a lot of time in the courts during his year, serving as the defense attorney
in two major cases.
The first was a really stupid case where some of the Reformers accused a Conservative Senator
of a murder 37 years ago.
It was a big, stupid, politically motivated thing.
The guy was innocent, and everybody knew it.
Cicero saw it as his duty as Consul to defend the Senator.
The case ended just as stupidly as it began, when Cicero and his allies deliberately caused
a mistrial by using some arcane legal nonsense.
The guy got off, but, I mean, if you ask me, nobody walked away from it looking particularly
great.
Cicero's second legal case would come later, but first he had to oversee the elections
for next year's Consuls.
Cicero learned from his intelligence network - or more accurately I would say his wife's
intelligence network - that Catilina, the guy who came in third last year, and was a
candidate again this year, was plotting a series of assassinations on election day.
When election day came, Cicero openly wore body armour - something you weren't really
supposed to do - and showed up with a gang of bodyguards.
For whatever reason - maybe the assassins were intimidated by this show of force - violence
was averted.
Cicero oversaw the election of his two successors, and in a cruel twist of fate, Catilina came
in third again.
Apparently he pretty much bankrupted himself paying out bribes.
He didn't have the means to run for Consul a third time.
Cicero's second legal case came up after the elections, and was a lot more consequential.
One of the losers of the consular election was accusing one of the winners of bribery,
and wanted the results thrown out.
This had the potential to be really destabilizing.
Bribing people during elections was very illegal, and very common.
Everybody did it.
Cicero had even campaigned against bribery, while his Conservative backers continued to
bribe everyone behind the scenes.
It was inescapable.
Cicero's logic was: if we start throwing out election results because of bribery, every
future election would be followed by a court case.
He chose to lead the defense.
Cato, the arch-Conservative, represented the prosecution.
It got ugly.
Cato went on and on about how corruption and bribery had seeped into Roman public life,
which all happened to be true.
Cicero responded by not addressing the facts of the case - because again, the defendant
was definitely guilty - and just mocked Cato to his face.
He called his philosophy silly.
He called him unrealistic.
He made an obnoxious appeal to nationalism, saying something along the lines of "this
isn't Greece, here in Rome things get messy but THINGS GET DONE."
Cicero won the case, but ugh, gross.
After this, in a kind of symbolic gesture to prove that he wasn't pro-bribery, Cicero
introduced and passed a law that increased the punishment for blatant bribery to up to
10 years of exile.
Again, this was symbolic, and more of a message to future candidates saying "okay guys, just
pull back on the bribery a bit, it's getting out of control."
In October, after all of the turmoil with the elections had finally been put to rest,
Crassus, a Senator from the Reform faction, came to see Cicero.
He showed Cicero a letter he had received, telling him about a secret plan to overthrow
the government, masterminded by Catilina.
Around the same time, Cicero started to hear reports of a small army mustering north of
Rome.
These two things had to be linked.
Cicero presented his evidence to the Senate, and placed Catilina under house arrest.
As a precaution, the Senate passed a law called the "Senatus Consultum Ultimum", aka the Final
Decree, or the the Final Act, which empowered the Consuls to do "whatever was necessary"
to defend the Republic.
Think of it as a form of Martial Law.
Cicero's wife's spies learned that one night, Catilina slipped his guards and attended a
meeting where, again, a plot was hatched to assassinate Cicero.
After learning of this, Cicero put his home on lockdown, and his gang of bodyguards wouldn't
let anybody through without the right password.
This seems pretty basic to us, but Roman homes were normally open to the public, and the
act of giving a password like this was a well known military tradition.
Cicero basically transformed his home into a military encampment.
The symbolism wasn't lost on anybody.
At the next meeting of the Senate, Cicero put forward a bill to banish Catilina.
He was empowered to do whatever he deemed necessary under the Final Act, but he wanted
to stay on the same side as the Senate.
Unfortunately, nobody wanted to put themselves on the record against Catilina.
Cicero, realizing that he had misread the room, quickly switched tactics, and was like
"okay, how about we banish this random other Senator instead!"
The Senate was like "but he did nothing wrong!," and Cicero was like "A-HA, so you admit Catilina
did SOMETHING wrong!"
Not Cicero's finest moment.
In the end he was right though, because Catilina fled the city that night, joined up with the
army in the north, and declared himself the head of a new government-in-waiting.
The situation was now on the precipice of civil war.
Some time later, one of Catilina's allies in the city went to a diplomat from a Gallic
tribe visiting Rome, and was like "hey, we're going to overthrow the government, let's team
up."
The diplomat went directly to Cicero, and reported to him what had happened.
Cicero was like "no, no, go along with it."
Now he had a spy on the inside of the conspiracy.
The Gallic diplomat set up a big meeting with a bunch of the conspirators to coordinate
their plans, and when everyone showed up, Cicero was there with his bodyguards, and
had all of the traitors arrested.
Cicero went before the Senate, and said that he wanted these guys put to death.
His argument was that the city was a powderkeg, and they had no way of knowing how deep the
conspiracy went.
If they executed these leaders, it might be enough to put an end to the whole rebellion,
and avert a war.
Remember, the Senate had already empowered Cicero to do whatever was necessary to keep
the Republic safe, so he was not required to get the Senate's permission for any of
this.
But Cicero believed in the Senate, did not want to go against their wishes.
Both of the incoming Consuls agreed with Cicero: put the prisoners to death.
All of the ex-Consuls agreed as well.
So did all of the Praetors.
When it came time for the incoming Praetors to weigh in, Julius Caesar rose to speak.
Caesar argued that executing these men without a trial was an authoritarian thing to do,
and it set a dangerous precident for the future.
He suggested that instead they should be sentenced to life imprisonment.
This argument made Cicero suspicious.
Remember, Caesar was friends with Catilina.
How much was he involved in all of this?
But Caesar's appeal against authoritarianism was received well by the Senate, and a majority
of them began to come around to the idea of imprisonment.
After they heard speeches from all of the ex-Praetors, Aediles, ex-Aediles, and Quaestors,
they finally got all the way down to the ex-Quaestors, which is when Cato rose to speak.
Cato was only 32 years old at this time, but he was already cultivating one hell of a reputation.
He chastized the Senate for putting the entire Republic at risk for the sake of their weak
stomachs.
Cato, for once in his life, urged them to be pragmatic.
He argued that eliminating the threat and preserving the Republic was the highest priority,
and if the Senate woke up tomorrow to find the city in flames, they would have nobody
to blame but themselves.
The mood in the Senate shifted yet again.
Cato had convinced them.
A vote was called, and the Senate voted in favour of executing the prisoners.
Caesar went into a frenzy.
He started screaming, and launched himself at the opposition.
His supporters tried to hold him back, and suddenly everybody was on their feet as a
bit of a fight broke out on the floor of the Senate.
Cicero called for his bodyguards.
They entered, swords drawn, and surrounded the Senators.
There was a tense standoff.
After a beat, Caesar turned and stormed out of the Senate house.
He would not return again while Cicero was Consul.
Let me pause for a moment: understand how shocking this was.
Swords were forbidden inside the city of Rome, but at some point Cicero had secretly armed
his men.
Even more shocking was the fact that there was almost bloodshed on the floor of the Senate.
And it was almost Caesar's blood.
Let's just sit with that for a minute.
Cicero left the Senate, followed by a horde of Senators, and went to retrieve all of the
prisoners from the homes where they were locked up.
He lead them down to the Roman jail.
Sidenote: I just learned this, the jail was actually an old converted cistern, like for
holding water, so you could only enter it through the roof.
Pretty cool.
Anyway, Cicero and the Senators lead the prisoners onto the roof of the jail.
One by one they tied nooses around their necks, and had them them jump in.
After the last conspirator was dead, Cicero turned to the crowd and announced what he
had just done.
When the rebel army to the North heard what had happened to their leaders, most of the
men fled.
The Senate sent an army of their own to deal with them, and it was just a one sided slaughter.
Catilina and the rest of the leaders of the conspiracy died on the battlefield.
The Senate declared that for his actions, Cicero was to be honoured with the title "Father
of the Republic."
At this point Cicero's term was nearly over, but for his remaining days as Consul, a crowd
would follow him wherever he went, cheering and applauding.
Cicero would consistently call this the proudest moment of his life.