Cesar etait un grand homme, mais Ciceron etait un homme vertueux
(Voltaire, Preface to Catiline, ou Rome Sauvee)
The first of the three dramatized phases of Caesar’s life, the events around the Catiline conspiracy (63 BC), offers the thinnest pickings: it is the least well represented in any time period, and much of what there was has not survived. We know of five English plays on the subject before Ben Jonson’s Catiline his Conspiracy (1611): all of them are lost, as is the Latin play performed at St. Omer half a century later (1666) (Harbage and Schoenbaum 1964). Not all of these, perhaps, were relevant to this chapter, as playwrights who tackle the conspiracy often choose not to write about Caesar at all; much later, the young Ibsen saw no need to include him in his Catiline. Those who do so take one of two approaches. He is either an opponent of Catiline, or a seditious villain. (That Catiline might have had some right on his side is an idea that seems not to have occurred to any playwright before Ibsen.) Sallust, the chief narrative source for the story, is careful to exonerate Caesar from any part in the conspiracy (see on this Toher, chapter 16, 225-7); a playwright who follows Sallust will keep him for the last act, as in the Dutch L. Catilina (1669) by Lambert van der Bosch, who faithfully translates the long speech for clemency given to him by Sallust. Elsewhere among the classical sources, however, there are different suggestions - particularly in Plutarch’s Life of Crassus, which asserts that Cicero clearly implicated both Crassus and Caesar (Crass. 13.3; the work to which Plutarch alludes is now lost); and in the work on the conspiracy by the Renaissance historiographer Constantinus Felicius Durantinus, which hints at Caesar’s guilt (Duffy 1947: 25).
Ben Jonson seizes on this hint. Apparently a flop at its first performance, his Catiline comes across, at least on reading, as a work of terrific power, thrillingly cynical in its vision of the ragione di Stato - and the heart of it is the Machiavellian figure of Caesar, a secret supporter of Catiline. With his ally Crassus, he hovers behind the action, limiting himself in public to sarcastic asides on Cicero, the play’s beleaguered hero - ‘‘Up glory!’’ he mutters, to Cicero’s maiden speech in the Senate - while keeping his conspiring private and his options open. Jonson’s Cicero delivers himself, later on, of verbatim translations of his own Latin orations; but for Caesar, Jonson invents a wholly original incident in which, under cover of night, he visits Catiline to encourage him in his evil course:
Caesar Come, there was never any great thing yet Aspired, but by violence or fraud,
And he that sticks for folly of a conscience To reach it -
Catiline - Is a good religious fool.
Caesar A superstitious fool, and will die beast.
Good night. [...]
What you do, do quickly, Sergius.
(III. iii.27-36)
And he leaves, declining Catiline’s offer to light his way out. The wholly non-classical, blasphemous echo of that last line is shocking: Caesar uses Christ’s words to Judas (‘‘That thou doest, do quickly,’’ John 13:27) as he incites his stooge to ‘‘violence or fraud’’ - the stooge he will soon abandon and betray. Having done so, he is disturbed, two acts later, to find that Cicero’s spies have delated him to the Senate. This delation is reported by Sallust, among others; but Jonson, who has put Caesar’s guilt beyond question, makes it into the kernel of another, brilliantly original scene, in which he and Cicero shadow-box with each other:
Flaccus Here is a libel too, accusing Caesar,
From Lucius Vectius, and confirm’d by Curius.
Cicero Away with all, throw it out o’ the court.
Caesar A trick on me too?
Cicero It is some men’s malice.
I said to Curius I did not believe him.
Caesar Was not that Curius your spy that had
Reward decreed upon him, the last Senate,
With Fulvia, upon your private motion?
Cicero Yes.
Caesar But has he not that reward yet?
Cicero No.
Let not this trouble you, Caesar, none believes it.
Caesar It shall not if that he have no reward;
But if he have, sure I shall think myself
Very untimely and unsafely honest
Where such as he is may have pay t’accuse me.
Cicero You shall have no wrong done you, noble Caesar,
But all contentment.
Caesar Consul, I am silent.
(V. iv.249-64)
Cicero knows Caesar is guilty, but does not want to accuse him because he fears ‘‘To stir too many serpents up at once’’ (IV. ii.470); Caesar knows that Cicero knows, and wants only to bluff him out of acknowledging it. The outcome of this little exchange is not certain, but it seems that Caesar has carried his point. He goes on to deliver his famous appeal for clemency, recorded by Sallust; in Jonson’s play, the same words become shamelessly hypocritical. Nor does there seem to be any defensible reason for him to support Catiline, a self-proclaimed villain in the play (much worse than in Sallust’s history), interested only in anarchy and destruction. But he gets away with it. ‘‘Caesar, be safe,’’ are Cicero’s last words to him (V. vi.163). Catiline is defeated, but this more formidable opponent remains at large. The happy ending withers into irony.
Later seventeenth-century drama does little with this part of Caesar’s life. Van den Bosch’s L. Catilina (1669) limits his participation to one act and his speech (more or less) to Sallust; M. F. Besteben, De ’tsamensweringe Catalinae (1647), gives him just one line. More than a hundred years separate Jonson’s play from the next extended treatment: Voltaire’s Catiline, ou Rome Sauvee (1749; first published 1752). As with his play on the assassination (discussed below, pp. 388-9), Voltaire claimed to be writing in response to an English precedent - in this case Jonson, to whom he refers, in his Preface, with the mixture of admiration and contempt that Renaissance English drama usually inspired in him. His comments on Jonson suggest that he either had not really read his play, or remembered it only vaguely: he complains that Cicero delivers his denunciation in prose, not verse, because Jonson thought he had to; one glance at the page would have put paid to this objection. Much more of an influence was the near-contemporary French Catilina (1749) by Prosper Jolyot de Crebillon, whose success Voltaire greatly resented (Lepape 1994: 194-7). Crebillon, however, had chosen not to include Caesar at all; Voltaire, inspired or not by Jonson, makes him central to the story. In this version, he is fascinating and dangerous - a potential threat, just kept under control by Cicero, who here, as in Jonson, is the hero of the story. Again, Caesar is the serious problem, while Catiline is hardly more than a frenetic buffoon. When the letter arrives denouncing Caesar, the latter responds by sweeping out of the Senate to take up arms against Catiline. As he says:
J’ai lu; je suis Romain, notre perte s’annonce.
Le danger croit, j’y vole, et voila ma rdponse.
(IV. vii.9-10)
(I have read it; I am a Roman; our defeat is imminent; the danger is growing; I am on my
Way; and there is my reply.)
Despite the misgivings of Cato, Cicero plays to his ambition and - in defiance of historical fact - gives him the military command against Catiline, reminding him:
Vous etes dangereux, vous etes magnanime -
En me plaignant de vous, je vous dois mon estime. . .
(V. iii.29-30)
(You are dangerous, you are great of heart - while I complain of you, I must respect you.)
Caesar repays Cicero’s confidence, but it is clear that the danger he represents is not over. The play ends with Cicero praying, evidently anxious, that this ‘‘ame gener-euse’’ will not be corrupted. Like Jonson, Voltaire read back something of Caesar’s later life into this early episode: like everyone writing on Caesar, he found a character so richly represented in the writing of the past that his personality overflowed historical fact to create its own dramatic reality.
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