Lucius Sergius Catilina

1. Lucius Sergius Catilina • Our villain--or at least Cicero’s!

2. Who was Catiline? • The detailed history of Catiline and his conspiracy is a topic for a semester college course, not a week in Latin 3. But with no background at all, you will be lost, and the reading will be intolerably boring.

3. Catiline bio • Lucius Sergius Catilina (usually called Catiline in English) was a Roman senator from an old family who had gone through the cursus honorum. • Catiline’s family had lost both money and prestige by his time (their last consul had served 380 BC). This was a potently embarrassing situation for many ambitious young Romans.

4. Catiline’s Career • Catiline had served a distinguished (if in some ways scandalous) military career, and had also governed the province of Tunisia. He would have entered his first consular election in 66BC, when he came home, but he was prosecuted for financial misconduct overseas. • (Bizarrely, Cicero’s letters indicate that he seriously considered defending Catiline in this trial, and imply that he knew Catiline was guilty but suspected the judge was open to corruption. Cicero didn’t actually participate in the trial, but still, the discovery of this letter in the Renaissance horrified many lovers of Cicero’s public writing. You will read some of Cicero’s personal letters at the end of the course.)

5. The Election • Catiline did manage to run for consul in 64BC (to serve in 63BC). It was a three-candidate election in which the other two were Cicero and Antonius Hybrida. He proposed a populist platform, including a blanket erasure of all debts. • Though Cicero was not himself an ideal candidate for the Optimates, since his family had never had a consul (i.e. he was a novus homo), his platform was moderate, so with the support of the bloc that got to vote first Cicero and Hybrida got the consulships for 63BC, with Catiline in third place. • He ran again the following year but again came third.

6. The Conspiracy • At this point, Catiline was out of legal options for achieving power (and any ideological ends he may have had). • To make a long story very short, Catiline planned a two-part violent coup: a terrorist attack by a cell in Rome, and a conventional armed assault in North Italy.

7. What did he want? • Scholars differ on what motivated Catiline and his upper-class followers. Some possibilities: • A desire to restore family glory. • Desperately needing the debt relief policy themselves. Just like today, not only the poor in Rome could go into debt. Catiline and his friends liked to live well, and they often lived on a great deal of credit they could never repay. • Some respectable historians have believed that Catiline was also a good-faith revolutionary for the interests of the poor, rehabilitating him from our negative ancient sources. He has also been convincingly argued to have been a standard politician manipulating the poor for his own interests, mentally deranged, or even a pawn for Julius Caesar whom Caesar threw under the bus when he got out of hand.

8. Our Ancient Sources • In addition to Cicero’s orations against Catiline (there are a total of three; we are reading the beginning of the first one), there is a short historical text about the conspiracy by the historian Sallust, which gives us valuable context for the speeches and another view of Catiline’s personality. • The work is not particularly long and is available in English translation, of a sort, in the public domain online, but I hesitate to give a link even for reference since the translation is from the late 1800’s, and sounds like it.

9. Further sources • Again, the whole Catilinarian conspiracy is a semester-long college topic. However, if you are interested, some worthwhile secondary sources include: • http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/99879/Catiline • http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/sallust/chronology.html