Lustrum

mourning are the price that the enemy will pay for victory.' The trumpets then sounded and the front lines advanced towards one another.
    It was a terrible carnage and Catilina was in the thick of it all day. Not one of his lieutenants surrendered. They fought with the ferocious abandon of men with nothing to lose. Only when Petreius sent in a crack praetorian cohort did the rebel army finally collapse. Every one of Catilina's followers, including Manlius, died where he stood; afterwards their wounds were found to be entirely in the front and none in the back. At nightfall, after the battle, Catilina was discovered deep inside his opponents' lines, surrounded by the corpses of the enemies he had hacked to pieces. He was still just breathing, but died soon afterwards from terrible wounds. On Hybrida's instructions his head was sent back to Rome in a barrel of ice and presented to the senate. But Cicero, who had left the consulship a few days earlier, refused to look at it, and thus ended the conspiracy of Lucius Sergius Catilina.

PART TWO
PATER
PATRIAE
    62–58 BC
    Nam Catonem nostrum non tu amas plus quam ego; sed tamen
ille optimo animo utens et summa fide nocet interdum rei
publicae; dicit enim tamquam in Platonis politeia, non
tamquam in Romuli faece, sententiam
.
    As for our friend Cato, I have as warm a regard for him as you. But the fact remains that with all his patriotism and integrity he is sometimes a political liability. He speaks in the senate as though he were living in Plato's Republic rather than Romulus's shit hole.
    Cicero, letter to Atticus, 3 June 60 BC

XII
    For the first few weeks after he ceased to be consul, everyone clamoured to hear the story of how Cicero had foiled the conspiracy of Catilina. There was not a fashionable dinner table in Rome that was not open to him. He went out often; he hated to be alone. Frequently I would accompany him, standing with other members of his entourage behind his couch as he regaled his fellow diners with extracts from his speeches, or the story of how he had escaped assassination on polling day on the Field of Mars, or the trap he had set on the Mulvian Bridge for Lentulus Sura. Usually he illustrated these tales by moving plates and cups around, in the manner of Pompey describing an old battle. If someone interrupted him or tried to raise another subject, he would wait impatiently for a gap in their conversation, give them a hard look and then resume: '
As
I was saying …' Every morning the grandest of the grand families would flock to his levees and he would point to the very spot where Catilina had stood on the day he offered to be his prisoner, or to the exact pieces of furniture that had been used to barricade the door when the conspirators laid siege to the house. In the senate, whenever he rose to speak, a respectful hush fell over the assembly, and he never missed a chance to remind them that they were only meeting together at all because he had saved the republic. Hebecame, in short – and whoever would have imagined saying this of Cicero? – a bore.
    It would have been so much better for him if he had left Rome for a year or two to govern a province; his mystique would have grown with his absence; he would have become a legend. But he had given away his governorships to Hybrida and Celer and there was nothing for him to do except to stay in the city and resume his legal practice. Familiarity makes even the most fascinating figure dull: one would probably be bored with Jupiter Himself if one passed Him on the street every day. Slowly Cicero's lustre faded. For several weeks he busied himself dictating to me an immense report on his consulship, which he wanted to present to Pompey. It was the size of a book and justified his every action in minute detail. I knew it was a mistake and tried all the tactics I could think of to delay sending it – to no avail. Off it went by special courier to the East, and while he awaited the great man's reply, Cicero set about editing and publishing the speeches he had delivered during the crisis. He inserted many purple passages about himself, especially in the public address he had made from the rostra on the day the plotters were arrested. I was sufficiently worried that one morning, when Atticus was leaving the house, I drew him aside and read out a couple of sections.
    '
This day on which we are saved is, I believe, as bright and joyous as the day on which we were born. And just as we thank the gods for the