Sallust: The War with Catiline. Loeb Classical Library.

 

Born in 86 B.C., Sallust became a member of the Roman Senate in his late twenties, then a tribune of the plebs a few years later. He therefore can be said to have had first-hand dealings with both the ‘few’ and the ‘many’ at an early age. No aristocrat, initially he seems to have inclined in favor of the plebs, a preference that may have contributed to his expulsion from the Senate for alleged corruption—the sort of crime which, had it been acted against universally, might have severely depopulated the Senate of his time. In the civil war that ensued a few years later, he sided with Julius Caesar—that noteworthy example of the rule of the ‘one’ who wins power by appealing to the many—obtaining an appointment as government of Numidia; for his pains, he was again charged with corruption, although this time his patron got him off the hook. He retired in 44 B.C., and in the ten years remaining to him he composed a substantial body of work, of which The War with Catiline and The War of Jugurtha survive extant. His five-volume history of Rome is lost.

Why history? Sallust begins his book on the Catilinian conspiracy with a defense of historiography, a defense intended particularly for Romans, who at that time had written so much less of it than the Greeks. “All human beings”—the one, the few, and the many—who “are keen to surpass other animals had best strive with all their vigor not to pass through life unnoticed, like cattle, which nature has fashioned bent over and subservient to their stomachs.” Unlike animals, “all our vitality” resides in both soul and body, with the godlike soul properly ruling the beast-like body. “Therefore, it seems to me more right to seek renown, that we should employ the resources of intellect than of bodily strength, and since the life we enjoy is itself brief, to make the memory of ourselves as lasting as possible.” The best way to do that is to cultivate “manly virtue,” a “shining and lasting possession,” unlike “riches or beauty,” the renown for which doesn’t last. 

Sallust thus begins his history with a justification of the life of the mind in ‘thumotic’ or aristocratic terms. For Plato’s Socrates, thumos rules the bodily appetites; while they love physical pleasures and fear pain, thumos or spiritedness loves honor and fame, detesting the way bodily appetites drag human beings down to the level of brutes. Logos or reason, in turn, rightly rules thumos, and through it the appetites. Hence the ‘philosopher-king’—king, at least, of his own soul, ruling it in accordance with reason, the distinctively human characteristic. Sallust, however, makes an appeal to the honor-lovers, the aristocrats or patricians: If you want fame, if you seek renown, if you would achieve something like godlike immortality, use your souls to achieve manly virtue. Unlike Socrates, Sallust puts the mind to the service of honor-loving spiritedness. Or, perhaps, that is his argument in justifying his own way of life, his own life of the mind, his historiography, to patricians, to men who scorn mere words and seek glory in great actions.

He knows that the thumotic few have long debated the priority of soul to body or body to soul. “For a long time, there was a big dispute among mortals whether military sucess depends more on bodily strength or strength of soul.” It is true that both are needed to win battles, and the renown such victory brings. “In the beginning,” kings—for “that was the first title of rule on earth”—chose between the two ways of life, “some training their intellect and others their body.” At that time, a third choice. covetousness, wasn’t seriously considered by such men. “But after Cyrus in Asia and in Greece the Lacedaemonians and the Athenians began to subdue cities and nations, to suppose the lust for dominion a pretext for war, to consider the greatest empire the greatest glory, then finally men learned from perilous enterprises that qualities of intellect can accomplish the most.”

Sallust makes several noteworthy observations in that sentence. The first kings confined their rule to poleis, to city-states. There, the question of strength of soul, and especially of the intellect, versus strength of body really was a question; city-states are small, and a man of exceptional physical strength, surrounded by friends or kinsmen nearly his equal in prowess might well rule the merely intelligent, as anyone who has experienced a high school gym class has learned. Ruling a vast empire is another matter; physical force doesn’t travel well, at least under the conditions prevailing in the ancient world, without long-range weapons. (And even such weapons require intelligence to design.) Second, the discovery of the superiority of mind to bodily strength in the pursuit of imperial rule and fame occurred both in Asia and in Europe; it was a ‘cross-cultural’ discovery, not limited to any one civilization but a discovery about human nature—one made, moreover, not by philosophers but by the rulers themselves and their subjects, proven in action, not in thought. The human mind proved itself in practice, not in the theory at which it excels more obviously. Finally, “covetousness” found its first expression not in commerce but in conquest and in ruling. It was not first of all a matter of ‘economics.’

With this discovery, however, a new question or problem came to sight. Manly excellence of soul works well in war, as the great empire builders demonstrated. Surprisingly, it works less well in peace. If it did, “you would not see rule passing from hand to hand and everything in turmoil and confusion.” You would not see empires break up, rebellious provinces, palace revolutions, factions fighting each other in the streets. It is true that “rule is easily retained by the qualities by which it was first won”; a prudent emperor readily maintains his authority. But those very qualities decline with that very sustained imperial rule. As years wear on, “sloth has usurped the place of hard work, and lawlessness and insolence have superseded self-restraint and justice.” With this, “the fortune of princes changes with their character,” as men of real virtue overthrow their complacent superiors. 

This is true not only in politics but in agriculture, navigation, and architecture. Success in those endeavors also “depends invariably upon manly virtue.” There, too, however, “many mortals, being slaves to appetite and sleep,” slaves to the bodily appetites, “have passed through life untaught and untrained,” living ways of life “contrary to Nature’s intent,” wherein “the body [is] a source of pleasure, the soul a burden.” Such men are “on a par” with one another in life and in death,” since “no record is made of either,” no fame distinguishes them or raises them above animals. They have achieved equality, but it is an equality of obscurity, of slavish subservience to their own mediocrity. “In the very truth, that man alone lives and makes the most of life, it seems to me, who devotes himself to some occupation, seeking fame for a glorious deed or a noble career.” Nature provides many paths to the same end, using the human characteristic closest to the gods, the power of the mind, to win the fame that constitutes the closest men get to divine immortality.

Here the practice of history arises. “It is glorious to serve the Republic well by deeds; even to serve her by words is a thing by no means absurd; one may become famous in peace as well as in war.” That is, the peace of empire need not bring sloth in its train, nor factitiousness. For “both those who have acted and those also who have written about the acts of others receive praise.” The poet Homer, the historians Herodotus, Thucydides, and Polybius have won fame for themselves with their words by preserving the fame of doers in those words. Rome has had no such historian, before Sallust. In Rome, “by no means equal renown attends the narrator and the doer of deeds, nevertheless the writing of history is an especially difficult task: first, because the style and diction must be equal to the deeds recorded”—as with poetry, art should imitate nature—and also “because such criticism as you make of others’ faults are thought by most men to be due to malice and envy.” With the artistic challenge, the historian faces a moral challenge, not unlike that faced by the man of action, whose every move is prey to malicious and envious rivals. Further, men notoriously believe only what they want to believe, and what they believe they measure by their own capacities. “While everyone is quite ready to believe you when you tell of things which he thinks he could easily do himself, everything beyond that he regards as fictitious, if not false”—a lesson Thucydides had taught, centuries before. Whether you praise great men of action or blame them, you will endure much the same egalitarian animosity, the same growling of men who remain too near the level of beasts, as those you write about must endure. Sallust thus moves to win the sympathy of the few, the men who look down on those who teach, who work with words, instead of doing. 

He turns to autobiography to increase this sympathy. As a young man, he entered public life, finding “many obstacles, or instead of modesty, incorruptibility, and honesty, shamelessness, bribery, and rapacity held sway,” captivating his ambitious young soul, in “my youthful weakness.” He went along to get along. He exited public life into enforced leisure. But “it was not my intention to waste [that] precious leisure in indolence and sloth,” the bane of peace, “nor yet to turn to farming,” like Cincinnatus, or to hunting—which he deems “slavish employments.” “On the contrary, I decided to return to an undertaking and pursuit from which the harmful craving for advancement had held me back, and to write of the deeds of the Roman people, selecting such portions as seemed to me worthy of record.” With a soul “free from hope, and fear, and partisanship,” he has chosen to write on the conspiracy of Catiline,” a history that deserves “special notice because of the novelty of the crime and of the danger arising from it.” History well written might change the course of events in his country, if citizens understand the way of tyrants, the unnatural way of their nature. 

What was his nature, his character? A patrician, Lucius Catiline “had great vigor both of soul and body, but an evil and depraved intellect.” Sallust makes no attempt to account for the origin of that nature. It may be that some tyrants are born, not made. However it may have been with Catiline, “from youth up, he reveled in civil wars, murder, pillage and political dissension, and amid those he spent his early manhood.” “His soul was reckless, cunning, treacherous, capable of any form of pretense or concealment,” and he put it to use in a life of covetousness, but not the covetousness of a Cyrus or a Pericles. Like Aristotle’s tyrant, he bent his ambition toward gain for himself, not for his country, a country that already ruled the world, with nothing more to covet. A man of “violent passions,” he threw away his own property while seizing the property of others; “he possessed a certain amount of eloquence, but little discretion.” His was the wrongly ordered soul par excellence, one that “ever craved the excessive, the incredible, the impossible.”

He saw the dictatorship of Lucius Sulla in the years 83 to 79 B.C. The Romans appointed dictators in times of emergency. “Seized with a great passion of seizing control of the republic,” Catiline understood that he could “make himself supreme” only if another crisis occurred. He couldn’t wait for one to occur by chance, however. Indebted by his own extravagance, vulnerable to prosecution for his crimes, his “fierce soul” was “spurred on, also, by the corrupt public morals, which were being ruined by two great evils of opposite character, luxury and avarice”—public parallels to his own private vices—he needed to foment such a crisis as soon as he could.

Sallust here pauses to explain how “the public morals” of Rome had “ceased to be the noblest and best,” in accordance with “the institutions of our forefathers in peace and in war,” and thanks to the way those men “governed the republic” within the framework of those institutions, only now to “become the worst and most infamous” of countries, one in which a Catiline might arise. The city of Rome was founded by the Trojans, who arrived in an Italy populated by native, “rustic” folk who had no laws of government, living “free and unrestrained.” Although different in race, language, and way of life, these people “were merged into one with incredible facility,” thanks to its founding lawgivers. But the very prosperity of Rome, as it grew “in population, civilization, and territory,” fostered envy in the surrounding peoples, who “put [the Romans] to the test of war.” Their friends in Italy for the most part looked the other way, forcing the Romans into self-reliance. They “defended their liberty, their country, and their parents by arms,” becoming a powerful military republic. Their victories enabled them to turn to their erstwhile allies and political friends from a position of strength, “establish[ing] friendly relations” with them “rather by conferring than by accepting favors,” in liberty not dependency.

The regime, “founded on law,” was a monarchy in name, an aristocracy in fact. The patricians were elders, called “Fathers,” their bodies “enfeebled by age,” their intellects “fortified with wisdom” at the service not of themselves but of “the welfare of the republic.” That is, even before embarking on empire, they had already answered the question emperors had settled, the question of whether the soul’s intellect or the body should be authoritative in human life. When the monarchic element of the regime so strengthened as to overbear the few, establishing tyranny, in 509 B.C. the patricians wisely “altered their form of rule,” changed the regime, by appointing two consuls with one-year terms, thereby checking and balancing what would later be called ‘executive’ power while ensuring that no one man or combination of two men could become ensconced in power over the Senate. This again shows the importance of the human mind; the bicephalous executive was designed to “prevent men’s minds from growing insolent through unlimited authority.”

This reform affected the spirit of the whole population, not only the spirit of the one and the few. “Every man began to distinguish himself and to put his native talents forward.” The Roman regime now brought out what Sallust has called the best of human nature in all its citizens. The Romans used their minds to strive for fame. Although in perpetual danger from its enemies, the Romans’ “civitas, once liberty was won, waxed incredibly strong and great in a remarkably short time, such was the desire for glory that had arrived on the scene.” Its young men consented to the “vigorous discipline” of army life, learning and practicing the “soldier’s duties” enabling them to endure “the hardships of war.” For such men, “valor mastered all obstacles.” Their “greatest struggle for glory” came not from their battles with foreigners but “with one another,” as each strove to surpass the others in striking down enemies, in performing feats of military prowess. “This they considered riches, this fair fame and high nobility:” “this fame they coveted.” They sought “only such riches as could be gained honorably,” their aim being “unbounded renown” not luxury.

And it is precisely in this that Rome has suffered. The goddess Fortuna “rules everywhere.” One expects Sallust to write that the strong Roman people found themselves overmatched by her, and for the historian to draw from this a lesson of humility. Not at all. Fortuna worked against Rome not in ordaining its downfall but by exercising her capacity to “make all events famous or obscure according to her pleasure rather than in accordance with the truth.” The Athenians performed “great and glorious deeds,” but the fame of those deeds surpasses their true worth “because” Fortuna would have it so. “Athens produced writers of exceptional talent” to laud them, men of “great intellect” who more than matched the deeds with “words of praise.” “The Roman people never had that advantage, since their most prudent men were always engaged with affairs; no one employed his intellect apart from his body; the best citizen preferred action to words and thought that his own brave deeds should be lauded by others rather than that theirs should recounted by him.” (Julius Caesar would become the exception to this rule.) Not only should Romans not denigrate their historians, but they should also understand that the fame they seek can last only in their words.

In the Rome Sallust admires, the one whose history he would write, “good morals were cultivated at home and in the field…thanks not so much to laws as to nature,” the nature cultivated by the regime, animated by its spirit. Romans reserved their quarrels for their enemies, as “citizen vied with citizen only for the prize of merit.” With respect to money, “they were lavish in their offerings to the gods, frugal in the home, loyal to their friends,” exhibiting “boldness in warfare and justice when peace came.” In war, they observed the mean between extremes, exacting punishment on a soldier for attacking contrary to orders or for leaving the field of battle too reluctantly when so ordered. Thumos, yes, but thumos in right measure. When at peace, “they ruled by kindness rather than fear, and when wronged preferred forgiveness to vengeance,” centuries before Christianity would adjure them to do so. ‘Kind’ also means ‘nature.’ 

It was only “when our country had grown great through toil and the practice of justice” that Fortuna “began to grow be savage and to bring confusion into all our affairs.” The regime of military republicanism needs adversaries to continue in the spirit of courage, moderation, and justice. Under the austere conditions of danger, “leisure and wealth” were desirable, but under the conditions of world empire they were “a burden and a curse.” Longterm rest imperils the regime of active warrior-citizens by turning their ambition toward wealth and rule not over foreigners but over one another. Avarice ruins honor, integrity, and “all the other noble qualities,” replacing the virtues of the few with insolence, cruelty, impiety—the thumotic impulses gone wrong. Romans began “to set a price on everything.” They began to conceal their corrupt natures from one another, pretenders to the virtues they once openly displayed, showing “a good front rather than a good heart.” They surreptitiously, each in his own heart, raised not the battle standard of Rome but “the standard of self-interest.” 

Because their ethos had been a warrior ethos, their souls initially “were activated less by avarice than by ambition.” But after the rule of Lucius Sulla had “brought everything to a bad end from a good beginning, all men began to rob and pillage.” This occurred not only through his bad example, bringing out the selfishness which had by now risen dangerously near the surface of Roman souls, but because he corrupted the army. Having led it to Asia, to lands ruled by despots wallowing in luxury, he secured the loyalty of his soldiers to himself, not to Rome, but “allow[ing] it a luxury and license foreign to our ancestral customs”; “those charming and voluptuous lands…easily demoralized the warlike spirit of his soldiers.” The most active and austere segment of the Roman people “learned to indulge in women and drink, to admire statues, paintings,” stealing exquisite vases from private houses and public places, pillaging shrines, and “desecrat[ing] everything, both sacred and profane.” If “prosperity tries the souls of even the wise,” why would it not ruin the souls of soldiers? This is how Sulla made an army of Rome his own private army.

These men returned to Rome with their trophies and, worse, their newfound vices. “As soon as riches came to be held in honor,” mingling with ambition and the desire for glory and for rule, virtue no longer became a source of honor among honor-lovers. “Luxury and greed, united with insolence, took possession of our young manhood,” those the would-be tyrant needs to boost himself into power. Their ancestors had “adorned the shrines of the gods with piety,” not gold leaf; they had adorned their homes with glory, having taken nothing from the vanquished but “the license of doing harm” to Rome. They lived mindfully, doing honor to their human nature. “The men of today, on the contrary, basest of creatures,” no longer fully human, “with supreme wickedness are robbing our allies”—not only their vanquished enemies—of “all that those most courageous men in the hour of victory had left them; they act as though the only way to rule were to wrong.” They have destroyed friendship among themselves and with Rome’s allies, weakening Rome both internally and abroad.

In the new Rome, men level mountains and extend their villas on jetties into the seas, abusing nature and squandering money for the gratification of their own pleasure. “Men played the woman, women offered their chastity for sale.” Driven by such “self-indulgence,” young men ran themselves into debt, turning to crime to pay the bills. 

“In a city so great and so corrupt Catiline found it a very easy matter to surround himself, as by a bodyguard, with troops of criminals and reprobates of every kind.” What Sulla had done in Asia Catiline did in Rome, militarizing vice. A self-ruling republic requires a self-ruling citizenry, but the would-be tyrant wanted neither. This is why “most of all Catiline sought the intimacy of young men,” as “their souls, still pliable as they were and unstable, were without difficulty ensnared by his deceits.” After “carefully studying the passion which burned in each, according to his time of life, he found harlots for some or brought dogs and horses for others,” thus “mak[ing] the dependent and loyal to himself,” borrowing the technique from Sulla. Dependency on ‘the one’ replaced self-governing liberty among the many and the few in the rising generation.

Catiline himself seems to have needed no such seduction. “Even in youth [he] had many shameful debaucheries,” notably with a woman named Aurelia Orestilla, “in whom no good man ever commended anything save her beauty,” as Sallust finely phrases the matter. In order to clear his way into her household, Catiline murdered her stepson. Sallust suggests that Catiline may have hastened his political conspiracy because “his guilt-stained soul, at odds with gods and men, could find rest neither waking nor sleeping so cruelly did conscience ravage his overwrought mind.” That is, the tyrannical mind, impassioned by the prospect of physical pleasure but then tormented by what remains of its true nature, drives itself insane. “His very glance showed the madman.”

To blood his young hounds, he kept them busy with crimes, including murder, preferring “to be vicious and cruel rather than to allow their hands and souls to grow weak with lack of practice.” This is the perversion of martial discipline, impossible without an ethos of military discipline to pervert. This is how the military republic can be re-founded as a tyranny. Catiline now needed only the opportunity, the circumstances in which he could make his move with a chance of success.

He made that decision, however, not in liberty but out of necessity. Both he and the veterans of Sulla’s campaign he counted on for backing were deeply in debt, thanks to their extravagances. There being no foreign lands for them to conquer, they could only plunder Rome itself, becoming “eager for civil war.” The great general Pompey was in Syria and would not be able to return in time to counter the planned coup. Most of the senators suspected nothing, except those who were in on the plot. “All was tranquil and secure; this was a straightforward opportunity for Catiline.” One of the few great men of the time, Marcus Licinius Crassus, may have been in on it, too. Rival of Pompey, “he was willing to see anyone’s power grow in opposition to the power of his rival, fully believing meanwhile that if the conspiracy should be successful, he would easily be the principal man among them.” Catiline would then prove a useful tool, easily discarded if broken in the work.

Catiline first attempted to murder his way to power. In 66 B.C., after having been charged with extortion and prevented from standing for the consulship because he hadn’t met the deadline for announcing his candidacy, he and his co-conspirator Publius Autronius met with “a reckless young noble,” Gnaeus Piso, who proposed that they arrange for the murder of the two newly elected consuls and several of the senators. Then Catiline and Autronius could seize the consulships, sending Piso to grab two Spanish provinces ruled by Rome. “Had Catiline not been over-hasty in giving the signal to his accomplices in front of the senate-house, on that day the most dreadful crime since the founding of the city of Rome would have been perpetrated.” But thanks to one of his own vices, impatience, Catiline ruined the scheme by calling for action before a sufficient number of conspirators had assembled to carry it out effectively. Curiously, Piso’s ‘punishment’ consisted of being sent off to Spain with military powers; the senators wanted to get him away from them and to use him as a counterbalance to Pompey, now in Spain and himself feared by the senators. Piso was murdered there, perhaps by “the barbarians” there or by some “old and devoted retainers of Pompey.” Thus ended the first Catiline conspiracy.

As yet uncharged with any crime against the government—evidently, he had covered his tracks—Catiline addressed his co-conspirators, whom he lauds as “brave and faithful to me.” He tells them that his soul therefore “has had the courage to set on foot a mighty and glorious enterprise.” This recalls Sallust’s teaching, that the soul should rule the body for the sake of honor. Catiline, too, understands this, in his own perverse way. Indeed, “I perceive that you and I hold the same view of what is good and bad; for agreement in likes and dislikes—this, and this only us what constitutes firm friendship.” Just so, but one must consider the like-mindedness he invokes. It consists of fear (consider “under what conditions we shall live if we do not take steps to emancipate ourselves”); a desire for liberty that is really license (emancipation from debts brought on by their own extravagance); resentment (we, the “energetic, [the] able” have been reduced to the status of “the common herd,” ruled “a few powerful men” who control a vast empire); libido dominandi (we are the ones who would be “the objects of fear” for our current rulers, were they subservient to us); impatience (“How long will you endure this, O bravest of men?”); hope (“victory is within our grasp”); contempt (“we are in the prime of life,” but they are in a condition of “utter dotage”); spiritedness in the cause of justice defined in terms of envy (“what mortal with the spirit of a man can endure that our tyrants should abound in riches?”); desperation (we have nothing to lose); ‘wokeness’ (“Awake then!”); pride (“use me as your leader or as a soldier in the ranks,” as “my soul and my body shall be at your service”); and shame (surely, I do not “delude myself and you are content to be slaves rather than to rule”). He takes the vices of his like-minded, like-impassioned followers and ascribes them to their enemies, right down to the claim that the ‘exploitive’ few who rule Rome cannot even rule the riches they have amassed—exactly the fault of Sulla’s ‘Asianized’ soldiers.

Catilinean like-mindedness lacks mindfulness, except insofar that it ‘awakens’ or brings to consciousness a perfect storm of passions, supposedly in service of his confederates but designed to render them subservient to himself. A tyrant would rule for himself, but he cannot rule by himself. He needs allies, the more impassioned the better. Stooping to conquer their minds, he perorates, “Use me either as your leader or as a soldier in the ranks”—small chance of that—either way, “my soul and my body shall be at your service.” Sallust has presented exactly the kind of speech an aspiring tyrant would make. If you hear a man speak like this, he tells his fellow Romans, understand his real nature and his means of persuasion. He hasn’t yet the power to enforce; he must begin with persuasion. He uses his own mind to reinforce the passions of his followers, attaching them to himself even as the Roman generals had already begun to attach their soldiers to themselves, not to Rome. A military republic cannot easily or quickly be redirected into commercial republicanism, but its military republican virtues he had described at the beginning of his book can be perverted toward license and tyranny, redefining liberty as the fulfillment of libido dominandi, introducing the harshest spirit of imperialism inflicted on followers into Roman politics itself.

The men wanted to know how all of this could be done. Catiline answered by telling them what they need to do to achieve “the prizes of victory.” These included (he assured them) the abolition of debts, the proscription of the current authorities, secular and religious, and “plunder.” After “heaping maledictions upon all good citizens,” he demonstrated his intimate knowledge of each man, praising them by name and reminding each of his particular interest in the enterprise, whether it was escape from poverty or prosecution, or the fulfillment of hitherto thwarted ambition. “When he saw that the souls of all were aroused, he dismissed the meeting.” He may or may not have sealed their allegiance by having them drink a concoction compounded of human blood and wine—themselves agents of heatedness— although Sallust admits he has “too little” evidence to confirm that this actually happened. Whether factual or not, the story makes sense in that it bespeaks a new, decidedly uncivil religion in Rome, replacing the old religion of Jupiter and Juno, Mars and Venus. The purpose of these “solemn rites” was to render each conspirator “more faithful” to the others, sharing “the guilty knowledge”—the content of minds—of “so dreadful a deed.” By refusing to insist on the truth of this detail, Sallust himself exemplifies the way a true, rational mind thinks, inviting a sober form of faith in his readers, trust in his own reliability as a historian.

The problem with conspiring with evil men is that one or more of them may lack even the modest degree of virtue required to keep his mouth shut. Quintus Curius, “a man of no mean birth but guilty of many shameful crimes” and expelled from the Senate for them, preened himself in the presence of his mistress, Fulvia, who retained some traces of the old Roman patriotism. Having “had no thought of concealing such a peril to her country,” she gossiped about the conspiracy to “a number of people,” while concealing the name of her lover. The senators became sufficiently alarmed to bestow the consulate upon Marcus Tullius Cicero, whose ancestors had achieved no office distinguished enough to cause him to merit such an honor under ordinary circumstances. “But when danger came, jealousy and pride fell into the background.”

Despite Cicero’s election, “Catiline’s frenzy did not abate.” He stashed arms “at strategic points throughout Italy”; borrowed still more money and sent it to one of his allies, Manlius, who would command troops in the planned civil war. He appealed to slaves in Rome, avid for emancipation, to prepare to set fires in Rome—the imagery of fire, again—at the appointed moment. He enlisted the assistance of Sempronia, a woman “who had often committed many crimes of masculine daring”—but nonetheless refined, “able to play the lyre and dance more skillfully than a virtuous woman need do.” “There was nothing which she held so cheap as modesty and chastity,” “her lust [being] so ardent that she pursued men more often than she was pursued by them,” but she “could write verses, raise a laugh, and use language which was modest, or tender, or wanton,” being possessed of “a high degree of wit and charm.” She, too, enjoyed a sort of life of the mind.

With such friends in his train, Catiline spent the year scheming against Cicero, “who, however, did not lack the craft and address to escape” the traps set for him. Indeed, Cicero induced blabbermouth Curius to reveal Catiline’s plot. He also took the precaution of agreeing to offer his consular colleague, Antonius, a richer province than the one he had received as a reward for winning high office. Cicero also prudently “provided himself with a bodyguard of friends and dependents.” Sallust’s Cicero understands politics, ‘low’ as well as ‘high’; he isn’t Shakespeare’s windbag. When Catiline attempted to gain election to the consulship the following year, he lost.

Having failed in Roman politics, politics in the capital city, Catiline moved to activate his military strategy with the provinces. He sent Gaius Manlius, Septimus of Camerinum, and Gaius Julius, among others, to various parts of the empire to prepare for civil war. He would soon turn to them because a plot to murder Cicero failed, thanks again to Curius’ timely warning. [1] Gaius Manlius was particularly successful in gathering support for rebellion because the Etrurians he rallied had been abused by Sulla during his governorship of the colony. In this case, the many had just complaints. (Not to be uncatholic in his recruitment, he also enlisted local “brigands” in the cause.) When Cicero reported these stirrings to the senators, they voted him emergency powers as dictator. 

The thirty-first, central section of The War with Catiline recounts the reaction of the now-corrupt Romans to their peril. In the earlier centuries of the republic, shared danger had reinforced self-discipline and noble rivalry in service of fame and the public good. Now, “in place of extreme gaiety and frivolity, the fruit of long-continued peace, there was sudden and general gloom.” “The women, too, whom the greatness of our country had hitherto shielded from the terrors of war, were in a pitiful state of anxiety, raised suppliant hands to heaven”—suddenly remembering Roman pietas —bewailed “the fate of their little children, asked continual questions, trembled at everything, and throwing aside haughtiness and self-indulgence, despaired of themselves and their country.” 

In response to Cicero’s condemnation of him in the Senate [2], Catiline denied everything, asserting that he ought to be believed because he, a man of high birth, could not possibly benefit from revolution in Rome, whereas Cicero, whom he lyingly described as a resident alien, was suspect. The senators were hearing none of that and shouted him down. Invoking the imagery of fire Sallust has attributed to Catiline throughout, the accused man, “in a transport of fury,” screamed “Since I am cornered by my enemies and driven to desperation, I will put out the fire which consumes me by general devastation.” His hope of fighting passion-fire quite literally with fire in the streets were frustrated when the slaves he had engaged to set fires throughout the city were prevented from doing so by watchmen deployed by Cicero, who knew about this tactic from his interviews with Curius. 

Catiline fled Rome, instructing those followers remaining in the city “to make ready murder, arson, and other deeds of war” within the city, preparatory for his own return at the head of a rebel army. His ally, Manlius, wrote to a loyal Roman general, who had been sent into the provinces to quell the rebellious forces, invoking the gods and men alike as witnesses to their grievances. We are crushed by debts imposed “by the violence and cruelty of the moneylenders”; there is precedence for the forgiveness of debts by senatorial decree. “We ask neither for power nor for riches, the usual causes of wars and strife among mortals, but only for liberty, which no true man gives up except with his life.” With no little effrontery, he concluded with a plea to the general “to restore the protection of the law.” For his part, the general could only reply that if the rebels had any request to make of the Senate, they must disarm themselves “and set out for Rome as suppliants.”

Catiline deployed the same rhetorical appeal on behalf of the many in a letter to the Senator Quintus Catulus. No longer denying that he had rebelled, he instead argued for the “justice” of his rebellion. “Provoked by wrongs and slights, since I had been robbed of the fruits of my industrious labor”—true enough, as his criminal plots had come to ruin—I “followed my usual custom and took up the general cause of the unfortunate.” A true social justice warrior, he has “adopted measures which are honorable enough considering my situation.”

These measures, Sallust informs us, included arming the provincial populace Manlius had roused to revolt, joining Manlius in his camp, taking care to bring with him “the fasces and other emblems of authority”—actions that earned him and his chief accomplice designation as “enemies of the state” by the Senate, which decreed that the consul Antonius bring an army against him while Cicero remained to keep watch over Rome itself. “At that time,” Sallust remarks, “the rule of the Roman people, it seems to me, was by far the most pitiable. Although the whole world, the rising to the setting of the sun, had been subdued by arms and was obedient to Rome, although at home there was peace and wealth, which mortals deem the foremost blessings, nevertheless, there were citizens who from sheer perversity set out to destroy themselves and the state.” Lamentably, no one stepped forward to desert Catiline’s conspiracy, symptomatic of “a disease of such intensity as the plague which had infected the souls of many of our citizens.” “Eagerness for change,” animated by envy of wealthy men, hatred of everything old and of “their own lot” as spendthrift debtors who had “squandered their patrimony in disgraceful living,” animated the souls of men with as little respect for the republic” as “they had for themselves.”

Worse, the disease infected even hitherto respectable citizens. Previously, during the consulship of Pompey and Crassus, “the greater part of the nobles strove with all their might, ostensibly on behalf of the senate but really for their own aggrandizement. For, to tell the truth in a few words, after that time, whoever disturbed the state under the guise of honorable slogans—some as though defending the rights of the people, others so that the senate’s influence might be dominant—under pretense of the public good, each in reality strove for his own power.” Neither the party of the few nor the party of the many “showed moderation in their strife; both parties used victory ruthlessly.” When the pretended populist, Gnaeus Pompey, was sent to wage war overseas, “the strength of the plebians lessened” for a time, but once this new prospect of revolution came to view, “the old contest aroused their passions once again.” Sallust’s remark about the self-interest of both the few and the many should be kept in mind as he proceeds to recount the actions and words of the Romans.

Catiline’s ally, Lentulus, continued his recruitment of “anyone he thought ripe for revolution by disposition or fortune.” Among these he counted the Allobroges, a Gallic people, debt-burdened and, being Gallic, “by nature prone to war.” He detailed a man named Publius Umbrenus to approach their envoys in Rome. The envoys were receptive but cautious. They engaged in what our contemporaries would call a process of rational choice utility maximization: recognizing the superior power of the Republic, they saw a chance to gain rewards from Rome “in place of [the] unsure hope” of success with the conspirators. Through the Roman noble who served as their patron in the city, they informed Cicero of the plot.

Cicero then conspired against the conspirators. Pretend to join them, he advised; that way, their guilt will be brought “out into the open” and there will be evidence sufficient to convict them in the eyes of the senators. This they did, and the plotters moved their plans ahead. Once Catiline arrived near Rome with his army of provincials, they would publicly charge Cicero with fomenting civil war. Their people in Rome would then set fire to “twelve strategic points in the city” in the hope that the “ensuing confusion” make it easier to attack Cicero and other key senators. Additionally, the restive sons of aristocratic families “were to kill their fathers.” All of this would make Rome vulnerable to attack by Catiline’s waiting forces.

Duped by Cicero’s counterplot, the conspirators were arraigned before the Senate. Cicero was ambivalent about the matter, “rejoic[ing] in the knowledge that the disclosure of the plot had snatched the republic from peril” but worried because main conspirators were “citizens of such high standing.” “He believed that their punishment would produce trouble for him personally, that failure to punish them would be ruinous to the republic.” He chose the patriotic course and the in the event, the senators judged them guilty. As for the plebeians, they proved fickle, changing from their “desire for revolution” to denouncing Catiline and praising Cicero. Sallust takes the disclosure of the plan for arson as decisive to them, since fires would burn their own property.

Part of Cicero’s apprehension proved valid. A witness came forward, claiming that the exceptionally wealthy and powerful Crassus was part of the conspiracy. This was too much for some of the senators to believe, and the ones who did believe the man kept silent because they were in debt to Crassus. As for Crassus himself, he blamed Cicero, claiming that he had induced the witness to perjure himself. The enmity of Crassus would indeed produce trouble for Cicero, later on.  

Subordinates of the convicted conspirator Lentulus attempted to “rouse workmen and slaves in the neighborhoods of Rome to rescue him from custody, while others sought out leaders of mobs who had made it a practice to cause public disturbances for a price.” When Cicero learned of this, he convened the Senate in order to hasten the determination of the punishment of all the main conspirators. Consul-elect Decimus Junius Silanus arose to argue for a harsh punishment. Caesar opposed this, delivering a carefully worded speech, reasonable on its face if perhaps self-serving under the surface. 

He began with an appeal to the rule of the rational part of the soul over the passions. “All men who deliberate upon difficult questions,” he told his colleagues (in what then was the world’s greatest deliberative body) “had best be devoid of hatred, friendship, anger, and pity,” since affects hamper the soul’s attempt to “discern the truth.” What kind of reasoning, then? “No one has ever served at the same time his passions and his best interests.” Sallust has already told his readers that Romans by that time inclined toward conceiving of their best interests as their self-interest. Caesar gives two examples of such “bad decisions [made] under the influence of wrath or pity”: in the Macedonian war, Rome was deserted by the Rhodians, its putative allies, yet “our ancestors let them go unpunished so that no one might say that war had been undertaken more because of the wealth of the Rhodians than their misconduct”; in the Punic wars, despite “many abominable deeds” done to Romans by the Carthaginians “never did likewise when they had the opportunity,” but maintained their “dignity” against strict justice. Both of these claims undergird an appeal to the Romans’ honor, their reputation, not their virtue. Further, Caesar overlooks the punishment that was imposed upon the Rhodians, who were deprived of their territories on a strategic mercantile territory in Asia Minor. The “best interests” of Rome, then, evidently require ranking dignity over the virtues.

In this case, Caesar continued, we should again prefer our “good name” to righteous indignation. “What is the aim of that eloquence” which denounces the conspirators by invoking “the horrors of war”? We senators hold “great power” (magno imperio); men such as us hold a “lofty station” visible to “all mortals,” unlike the many. With the eyes of all upon us, we enjoy “the least freedom of action” of any class of men because we are judged more harshly. “That which is called wrath” among ordinary men is termed haughtiness and cruelty in persons having power.” While admitting that rage at the Catiline treason is just, inflicting a just punishment will provoke just such a claim; people will remember the punishment more vividly than they remember the crime because “most mortals remember the recent past.” Therefore, just punishment of the conspirators is “contrary to the best interests of our republic,” which (Caesar seemed to know) the senators incline to mingle with their own “best interests.” And it is not even just, as death will relieve the malefactors of the “grief and wretchedness” of life in confinement.

Not one for oversubtlety, Caesar invoked “the immortal gods” in opposing Silanus’ proposal. Setting the “bad precedent” of capital punishment for treason will invite our successors to turn the tables on us. Covetous men will accuse and convict innocents because they want to acquire their houses. To be sure, “I fear nothing of this kind in Marcus Tullius or in these circumstances, but in a great polity there are many and various geniuses”; some consul in the future, given the near-dictatorial power Cicero wields, may have “no limit” to his actions and no one to “restrain him.” He concluded his speech by proposing the exile of the conspirators from the city, the confiscation of their assets, and their imprisonment in several towns throughout Italy. 

This speech persuaded the senators, until Marcus Porcius Cato (‘Cato the Younger’) spoke. “My judgment is very different,” he began, bluntly. Our first concern should be to guard the city against the remaining conspirators, not to consult with one another regarding the punishments appropriate for those we now have in custody. Without the city, which remains in danger, there will be no capacity to judge or to punish. With sharp irony, he “call[ed] upon you, who have always valued your houses, villas, statues, and painting more highly than the nation”: If you want to remain free “from disturbance for indulging your pleasures, wake up at last, and lay hold of “the reins of government.” Caesar’s invocations of the wrongs of Rome’s allies or are wealth” stray from the point, which is, “our liberty and our lives are in doubt.” I, Cato, “have often deplored the luxury and avarice of our citizens,” thereby making enemies. But that was when we were prosperous and could afford such complacency. “Now, however, at issue is not the question whether our ethics are good or bad, nor how great or magnificent the empire of the Roman people is, but whether all this, of whatever sort it appears to be, is going to be ours or belong to the enemy along with rule over our very lives.” Knowing the less than noble character of the patricians of his time, Cato concentrated their minds on the low but solid ground of survival, while at the same time shaming them in their decadence.

He then made a critical point about language. “In these circumstances, does someone mention to me clemency and compassion? To be sure, we have long since lost the true names for things.” The right use of words requires moral as well as intellectual rigor. “It is precisely because squandering the goods of others is called generosity, and recklessness in wrongdoing is called courage, that the republic has been placed in a crisis.” If it is “the fashion of the time” to be “liberal at the expense of our allies” and “merciful to robbers of the treasury,” at least do not be “prodigal of our blood, and in sparing a few scoundrels bring ruin upon all good men.”

In Caesar’s appeal to self-interest in the guise of prudence, Cato recognized an unstated atheism. When Caesar said that a life in prison is worse than death, he tacitly denied “the tales which are told concerning the inhabitants of Underworld.” As for his proposal to disperse the prisoners to prisons throughout Italy, this would only risk their rescue by their fellow plotters or by hired mobs; indeed, such audacity has “greater strength where the resources to resist it are weaker.” Caesar’s advice is therefore “utterly worthless, if Caesar fears danger from the conspirators”; moreover, “if amid such universal dread he alone is not afraid, there is all the more reason for me to fear for your sake and my own,” implying that the alternative to Caesar’s overconfidence is a secret alliance with the conspirators. Not only Caesar’s atheism but the scope of his ambition may lurk beneath the surface of his rhetoric. Better to deter the conspirators who remain at large by vigorous action, for “if they detect even a little weakness on your part, they will all fiercely make their presence immediately felt.” The real source of our ancestors’ greatness was not in arms or even their dignity but in their nobility, seen in their industriousness at home, their just rule abroad, and “in counsel a soul liberated from the enslavement of misdeed and of passion.” With us, including Caesar, our intellects and our language fail us because our character has failed, as we live in “extravagance and greed, public poverty and private opulence, lauding wealth and pursuing idleness,” and for that reason making no distinction “between good men and bad,” a moral relativism that frees “ambition [to] appropriate all the prizes of merit.” No philosophy is needed to understand this, and so Cato exclaims “No wonder!” No need for Socratic dialectic, here. “Each of you takes counsel separately for his own personal interests”—instead of truly deliberating in common for the public good—and “when you are slaves to pleasure in your homes and to money or influence here, this gives impetus to an attack upon the defenseless republic.” Hypocrisy of words, words bent away from the shape of truth, results from hypocrisy of character.

Nor will piety do, if misunderstood. True, “the immortal gods,” invoked by Caesar, “have often saved this republic in moments of extreme danger.” But the gods don’t respond to “vows” or to “womanish entreaties.” The gods help those who help themselves “by means of watchfulness, vigorous action, and good counsel.” But “when you surrender yourself to sloth and cowardice, it is vain to call upon the gods; they are offended and hostile.” Thus “in the days of our forefathers” a general commanded that his son be executed after the young man, in a display of “immoderate valor,” “fought against the enemy contrary to orders.” In light of that, “do you hesitate what punishment to inflict upon the most ruthless traitors?” No: punish them “after the manner of our forefathers.” And so the senators did. 

At this point Sallust intervenes to deliver judgments in his own voice. “Now, for my own part, while reading and hearing of the many illustrious deeds of the Roman people at home and in war, on land and sea, a desire happened to stir in me to give thought to what factor in particular had made possible such great exploits,” whereby “a handful of men had done battle with vast enemy legions,” waging war against “powerful kings” with “small resources,” enduring “the cruelty of Fortune.” The Greeks had been more eloquent; the Gauls had won more “martial glory.” What was it, then, that made Rome great? “It became clear to me after much deliberation that many things were in motion and that all had been accomplished by the distinguished courage of a few of the citizens, and that as a result of this, poverty had triumphed over riches, and small numbers over a multitude. But after the civitas was corrupted by luxury and sloth, the republic still sustained the vices of generals and magistrates by its very magnitude, and just as the vigor of parents is exhausted by childbearing, so many storms had exhausted Roman virtue, and there was no one great in virtue remaining in Rome.” 

This defense of the virtue of the few, of aristocracy, inclines toward Cato’s side of the argument. However, Sallust immediately adds that “within my own memory there were two men of towering virtue, though of opposite character, Marcus Cato and Gaius Caesar.” They were “almost equal” in ancestry, age, and eloquence, equal in “greatness of soul and in renown,” but “each of a different sort. “Caesar was considered great because of his benefactions and lavish generosity, Cato for the uprightness of his life.” Consequently, liberal Caesar provided “refuge for the unfortunate,” severe Cato “destruction for the wicked.” In peace, Caesar worked hard, remained vigilant and often “devoted himself to the affairs of his friends at the neglect of his own,” but he really desired “a major command, an army, a new war in which his merit might be able to shine forth.” Cato instead “cultivated moderation, decorum, and above all sternness,” vying not “in riches with the rich, nor in factitiousness with the factious but with the strong in virtue, with the moderate in moderation, with the innocent in integrity. He preferred to be, rather merely to seem, virtuous,” and “hence the less he sought renown, the more it overtook him.” It is well known that in his youth Sallust allied himself with Caesar. Having retired from political life, he now offers the verdict of his mature judgment.

Cicero ordered preparations for the execution of the conspirators. Lentulus thereby “found an end of his life befitting his character and his deeds,” as did the others. As for Catiline, still backed by his ally, Manlius, and two legions of poorly armed troops outside Rome, he first attempted to retreat over the mountains into Transalpine Gaul. The Romans cut off that route with three legions already on guard in the Picene district; meanwhile, troops under Antonius’ command pursued him from Rome. Trapped, with no choices but surrender or defiance, he chose defiance, exhorting his men in a speech blaming Lentulus’ failure to foment sufficient disorder in Rome for their plight and invoking their “brave and ready soul.” “We must hew a path with iron “to win “riches, honor, glory, and on top of that, liberty and your native land.” Our enemies only “fight on behalf of the power of a few men.” Coming as it does after Sallust’s praise of aristocratic virtue, this description of a ‘populist’ or ‘democratic’ argument shows that Sallust’s history takes up Aristotle’s theme of the claims to rule by the few and the many, in this case a ‘few’ that has largely declined from true aristocracy, the ‘rule of the best,’ to oligarchy, the rule of the merely rich. Catiline hopes that he can inspire the many to rise up to the virtues of the few who ruled Rome in generations past. So far, however, he has failed to triumph precisely because the many have declined in virtue as badly as the few. He would fortify their remaining aspirations to virtue and their desire for material and political goods with the claim of necessity: “In battle the greatest danger always threatens those who show the greatest fear; boldness serves as a rampart.” And so, “your soul, youth, and valor encourage me, not to mention necessity, which makes even the timid brave.” 

In the battle, Catiline’s men faced off against the seasoned professional troops led by Marcus Petreius, Antonius’ deputy commander who was pressed into battlefield leadership by his boss, who was suffering gout. Both sides fought courageously. “When Catiline saw that his troops had been routed and that he had been left with a few comrades, mindful of his birth and his former standing, he plunged into the thickest of the enemy and while fighting there was run through.” None of his men had retreated, as “all had fallen with wounds in front.” No freeborn citizen was taken prisoner. The Roman army “had gained no joyful or bloodless victory,” as “all the most resolute had either fallen in the battle or come away with severe wounds.” Therefore, the surviving victors were “affected with exaltation and mourning, lamentation and gladness.”

The regime of the few rich thus preserved itself, not because its troops were any more courageous than the regime’s enemies but because they were better armed and more experienced in battle. A commander with better resources, appealing to the many, might have prevailed. Eventually, Caesar did. Cato won the debate, Caesar the empire.

 

Note

1. Not that Cataline gave up his hopes of murdering Cicero, the one man in Rome who as “a serious obstacle to his plans,” as a man of genuine virtue.
2. Cicero: “First Oration against Catiline.” In this brilliant speech, Cicero not only presents the evidence against Catiline and his confederates but recommends a course of action superior to the ones proposed by Caesar, some years later. Cicero urges the Senate not to jail the conspirators, as Caesar would advocate, but to expel Catiline from Rome, along with the other conspirators, let them concentrate their forces outside the city, then deploy the superior Roman legions to crush them.