Teaser Tuesday today and I decided to quote a fragmet from "Lustrum" by R.Harris (p.3, the very beginning of the first chapter), reviewed by me not so long ago...;)
"Two days before the inauguration of Marcus Tullius Cicero as consul of Rome the body of a child was pulled from the River Tiber, close to the boat sheds of the republican war fleet. Such a discovery, though tragic, would not normally have warranted the attention of a consul-elect. But there was something so grotesque about this particular corpse, and so threatening to civic peace, that the magistrate responsible for keeping order in the city, Gaius Octavius, sent word to Cicero asking him to come at once."
That was the most sensational part of the book! Cicero never accused Catilina of blood sacrifice. If there was even the slightest rumor that Catilina did that, he would have been all over it. It wasn't until 40 years later when Sallust was writing, he mentioned a rumor about drinking blood to seal an oath. 150 years later Plutarch wrote in Cicero's bio that they had murdered a man. 250 years later Dio Cassius wrote that they had murdered a child. And nobody respectable would defend Catilina since he had been declared an enemy of the state by Cicero while Consul. Poor Catilina.
ReplyDeleteCatilina might have been a victim of his own notoriety. Perhaps he wasn't officially accused because Cicero didn't manage to find enough proof or maybe because he was innocent - we won't know for sure.
ReplyDeleteOh yeah. I have read Cicero's speeches against Catilina. If he had anything this sensational to accuse him of, he would have said it. He repeated other rumors in the Senate not always by naming names but he clearly thought Crassus was behind Catilina. Sallust witnessed an altercation between them in the Senate years after the fact. Cicero did not mind repeating gossip.
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