Consulship (B.C. 63).
For the consulship of B.C. 63 there were six candidates, but of these only Cicero, Catiline, and C. Antonius were prominent. The contest was not merely one of personal ambition. The first and second conspiracies of Catiline, as well as his notorious character, could have left no doubt that his aims were treasonable. Antonius had combined with him for mutual support in securing election by illegal means, and was himself a weak and unprincipled man. On the other hand, Cicero was a novus homo, 1 a champion of the equites (though without being an enemy of the senatorial order), and had had an unusually clean record in his office as well as in the Forum. Thus the cause of Cicero's ambition was, at the same time, the cause of good government against both the worthless and debauched members of the senatorial order on the one hand, and the dregs of the people on the other. It was also the cause of the great middle class against the patricians and the official nobility, who were so entrenched in power that for many years no novus homo had been elected consul. The success of Cicero unquestionably prolonged the existence of the already doomed republic. Antonius, the less dangerous of his two rivals, was elected as his colleague.Cicero had now reached the goal for which he had striven from his earliest youth. His administration is famous for the overthrow of the Catilinarian conspiracy, which has cast into obscurity all his other consular acts. These, however, were of such a character, in relation to the needs of the times, as to be unimportant. By birth an eques, but by virtue of his offices a member of the senatorial order, Cicero had always been eager to reconcile and unite these, the two upper classes in Roman society and politics. 2 He failed to see that the real needs of the commonwealth, as well as its real strength, centred in the interests of the common people. His association with Pompey, and his own rise in official rank, made him incline more and more to the side of the Senate, and he seems to have thought it his mission to restore that body, now thoroughly effete, to its former purity and political importance. The minor acts of his administration 3 were dictated by such sentiments as these, and are significant only as illustrating his character and opinions.
The history of Catiline's conspiracy is given in the Introduction to the four Orations against Catiline, 4 and need not be repeated here. The conspirators were completely thwarted, and five of them were, in accordance with a resolution of the Senate, put to death by the consul without a trial. This victory was the climax of Cicero's career, and he always regarded it as one of the greatest of human achievements. In fact, however, it marked the beginning of his downfall.
