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Cicero. Part 2/4: His Finest Hour

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Last time, we looked at Cicero's early life. As 3 January was his birthday, let's spend it looking at what he certainly regarded as his finest hour.

Although it was usual for a praetor to take up a foreign posting, a propraetorship, as governor on finishing his term of office, Cicero declined the opportunity in order to concentrate his efforts on gaining the consulship. He stood in 64, the earliest year in which he was eligible. Of the other candidates, the most dangerous for his chances were Gaius Antonius Hybrida and Lucius Sergius Catilina. Cicero and Antonius were elected.

The second and first centuries BC saw a shift in rural land holding from small estates of a size sufficient to support a landowner capable of military service and his household in an idealised simple lifestyle to enormous estates (latifundia) owned by city-dwellers and worked by chain gangs of slaves. This meant increasing levels of rural poverty, as the small landowners were unable to compete with the large estates, and a drift to the cities, and Rome in particular, with a corresponding increase in urban poverty as well. Many of the latifundia had been built up by rich and influential people quietly taking over state land. Not surprisingly there were frequent calls for the redistribution of state land. This tied in with another problem. Marius had reorganised the army at the end of the second century BC, transforming the soldiers from a militia who would serve their time and then go back to their farms to a professional force dependent on their general being able to arrange a grant of land for them to retire on.

Just before the beginning of Cicero's consulship, one of the new tribunes of the plebs, Publius Servilius Rullus, proposed the establishment of a commission of ten men holding office for five years who would have complete control of state revenues and would be able to enquire into the legality of land holdings and distribute past and future conquests (the land of the conquered became state land) through, if necessary, compulsory purchase and re-sale. Cicero's first speeches as consul were against this proposal.

Another remedy often proposed for social ills was taken up by Catilina, who was standing again for election as consul: the cancellation of debts. Catilina had a certain amount of support from those who had been dispossessed or proscribed under Sulla, and from some of Sulla's veterans who had not adjusted well to civilian life. Although they came to Rome to vote for Catilina in the elections, he was again defeated after Cicero reported some of Catilina's more rabble-rousing speeches to the Senate and then started ostentatiously wearing a breastplate to the forum as a security measure against possible assassination attempts by Catilina or his followers.

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