I. LUSTRUM

In 69 B.C. the Roman citizen body was ritually purified. The citizens assembled at dawn in the Campus Martius, each in the property-class and century to which he had been assigned. A bull, a ram and a boar were led solemnly three times round the assembled host and brought for sacrifice to the altar of Mars, where the censors stood in their purple togas, wreathed and anointed to pray for the gods’ favour on a people cleansed.

Sixteen years had passed since the last lustrum, more than three times the regular interval, and much had happened in the mean time to make the restoration of divine approval particularly urgent. There had been civil war, slave rebellion and natural disasters. Worst of all – for rule and empire were justified only by the moral superiority of the rulers – there was corruption in the political elite which cried out for a stern censorial purge.

That duly took place. The censors had made full use of their arbitrary powers and amid popular applause expelled sixty-four senators, including the patrician consul of 71 B.C., P. Lentulus Sura. It was a good moment for the eloquent and ambitious M. Cicero to publish his devastating exposure of another guilty man, C. Verres (ch. 7 above, pp. 214–15, 225–7).

It was also the essential moment for the dedication of the rebuilt temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, even though not completely finished (ch. 6, pp. 189, 203). Sulla had meant to dedicate it himself; instead of that name of ill omen, for the next 138 years the great architrave would immortalize Q. Lutatius Catulus, cos. 78. And in the new temple the librifatales were back in their stone chest, ready to give Rome oracular advice in any crisis. Sibylline prophecies had been sought out from every source by the XV viri sacris faciundis.

The first name on the cleaned-up list of senators was that of Mam. Aemilius Lepidus, cos. 77; the princeps senatus had to be a patrician. But the true leader of the Senate was Catulus. His ancestral glory shone more brightly since the suppression of Marius’ memory – his father’s Cimbric trophies, now unrivalled, matched his ancestor’s from the victory at the Aegates islands in the First Punic War – and his personal qualities of steadfast and ruthless determination gave him an authority none of his contemporaries could match.