Historians characterize the Catilinarian conspiracy as the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire—which director Francis Ford Coppola compares to modern-day America.
The Roman Forum was a hub for ever day ancient Roman life. It was here that Cicero delivered a famous speech denouncing Catiline in 63 B.C.
Francis Ford Coppola has been working on his epic sci-fi fantasy drama Megalopolis since the early 1980s.
Fresh off the success of Apocalypse Now, Coppola became fascinated by the story of Lucius Sergius Catiline, who in 63 B.C. sought to forcibly overthrow the consuls of the Roman Republic, co-led by Marcus Tullius Cicero. This attempted coup d’etat is known as the Catilinarian conspiracy.
Coppola wanted to set the conflict of two ambitious men with very different ideals in modern New York, so that he could draw parallels between the beginning of the end for the Roman Republic and the contemporary United States.
At a Q&A in New York before the premiere of Megalopolis on September 23, Coppola remarked, “Today, America is Rome, and they’re about to go through the same experience, for the same reasons that Rome lost its republic and ended up with an emperor”
Coppola was so adamant about highlighting the similarities between the Roman Empire and U.S. that he named the film’s leading characters after Catiline and Cicero.
In Megalopolis, Giancarlo Esposito plays Mayor Franklyn Cicero, who runs the decaying city “New Rome” and clashes with idealistic architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver). When Catilina is given permission to rebuild the city using Megalon, a material that allows him to control space and time, he recruits Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) to make a sustainable utopia.
Why Cicero and Catiline were at odds
The Roman version of Cicero was “a new man, meaning, he was the first in his family to enter Roman politics,” explains Josiah Osgood, professor of classics at Georgetown University and a specialist in Roman history.
Catiline was a patrician from a distinguished family. He had fought alongside Roman general Sulla, helping him win Rome’s first major Civil War, before then rising through the political ranks.
In 64 B.C., Catiline stood to become one of Rome’s two consuls. The highest elected public positions in the Roman Republic, the consuls served one-year terms and were elected each year by the Centuriate Assembly. Accused of corruption, Catiline was defeated by Cicero.
“Normally, a new man wouldn’t win the consulship,” adds Osgood.
An embarrassed and desperate Catiline ran for consulship again in 63 B.C. “By now he and Cicero were sworn enemies and Cicero did everything he could to stop Catiline,” says Osgood.
Catiline’s campaigns had also left him in debt.
“Roman elections were extremely expensive because they were extremely corrupt,” says Edward Watts, professor of history at the University of California, San Diego. “They required you to borrow a lot of money and outlay a lot of cash to try to buy support from people. The idea being you win the consulship, you can then get a command somewhere or govern a province, then make that money back. But if you lose, you’re screwed.”
What made these defeats even worse for Catiline is that, in that period, “some older families with a deep history had fallen on hard times,” says Richard Saller, an American classicist and former president of Stanford. “Catiline resented new upstarts like Cicero, who he was having a hard time keeping up with financially.”
How was Catiline defeated?
With Cicero backed by wealthier Romans that lent out money to make their own income, Catiline adopted a more populist and radical message, insisting that he would cancel debts and relieve the debt crisis. When Catiline lost another election, he retreated to northern Italy, formed an army of veterans from the first Civil War and farmers in debt, and planned to march on Rome so that he could become consul by force.
But in January 62, B.C., he was defeated by the Roman Republic in the Battle of Pistoria. Roman historian Sallust would write that “Catiline was despicable, a real menace to the Republic, who represented all that was wrong with Rome” because of his pursuit of demagoguery, says Osgood.
With Megalopolis, Coppola focused on Catiline’s ambition to release the lower classes from debt in order to make him a sympathetic figure. In his director’s statement for the film, Coppola explains, “I wondered whether the traditional portrayal of Catiline as ‘evil’ and Cicero as ‘good’ was necessarily true … Since the survivor tells the story, I wondered, what if what Catiline had in mind for his new society was a realignment of those in power and could have even in fact been ‘visionary’ and ‘good’, while Cicero perhaps could have been ‘reactionary’ and ‘bad’.”
Saller acknowledges that accounts of the Catilinarian conspiracy are “Cicero centric” and “from a historian’s point of view there are reasons to think there are biases.”
In 1969, Robin Seager argued that “Cicero really manufactured the conspiracy and drove Catiline to violence, but his view is not broadly accepted,” adds Saller.
Coppola’s message for a modern era
After the Catilinarian conspiracy, Cicero was briefly driven into exile because of how he administered justice to members of the coup, in particular killing associates of Catiline without a trial. The conspiracy exposed how extensive poverty and debt was in Roman society, created a climate of paranoia in the Senate, and is ultimately regarded as the first step to the Civil Wars that ended the Roman Republic and built the Roman Empire.
Both Watts and Osgood can see some similarities between the late Roman Republic and the current political rhetoric of the U.. ] “I think there’s been a significant loss of trust in the integrity of systems,” says Watts.
But Saller remains skeptical about such parallels. “The constitutional situation in the U.S. and Rome are very, very different. One of the things that Rome did not have was anything like our Supreme Court. Whatever problems we may think we have with our current Supreme Court, the Roman Republic had no institutional way of resolving differences between leading senatorial generals in their contest for power.”
Ultimately, Esposito believes that Megalopolis is a cautionary tale: “There’s a line in the movie, ‘Don’t let the now destroy the forever.’ That’s such a powerful thought to have right now. The film is a call for hope, for us to think larger than just ourselves.”
