Conspiracy of Catiline [ca. 43-40 B.C.]
by Sallust [prob. 87-35 B.C.]

Reading notes--Adam Kissel

• Good short summary and outline of the events, pp. 15-23
     Catiline in 64 "was not yet perceived as a dangerous revolutionary by these important figures in government [e.g., Julius Caesar]. A far different picture emerges from Sallust's account which makes Catiline the ringleader of a sinister plot at the time of his candidacy in 64. Sallust fails to allow for a gradual shift in Catiline's strategy and aims as his hopes of reaching the consulship faded, because Sallust prefers to present Catiline as a thoroughgoing villain, the product of a corrupt age"; "It is not until after the defeat of Catiline at the elections in 63 that our other sources begin to confirm [the] preparations for revolution," 17

• Sallust is very far from being a defender of Caesar or apologist of any sort. He attacks." 2
• On his early years: they "were passed in the thirty years of precarious peace under the system of the oligarchy which Sulla restores. As Rome for his education, he was perhaps in time to witness the more or less peaceful revolution of 70, who the consuls Pompeius and Crassus overthrew some of the ordinances of Sulla. He saw the turbulence of the middle sixties: tribunes' bills and the prosecution of tribunes, fierce competition at the elections, and violence threatened. Then came the conspiracy of Catilina, the return of Pompeius Magnus from the eastern lands, the dynasts' pact in 60, the consulship of Caesar." 15
• On politics: Optimates and Populares not really a "two-party system," roughly the nobility vs. the plebs, 17-18.
• "Sallust antedated the revolutionary designs of Catilina. Why should he have made this assumption? One reason is artistic and simplificatory--to demonstrate the coherent evolution of Catilina as a product of the whole post-Sullan environment." 77
• "The historian is cleared. There was no deception. How difficult it is to combine in one narration contemporaneous events in different theaters without a lavish use of dates and sign posts is not always apparent to the erudite arbiters of praise and blame who eschew the writing of narrative history." 81
• Cicero's "management of the crisis of 63 deserved full and frank praise. Cicero overdid the self-laudation--'non sine cause sed sine fine.' [Seneca] Men of the time grew tired and annoyed. Cicero's version was abundantly proclaimed to the world, and, through the glory of his oratory and his subsequent fate, it occurred little danger of being depreciated by posterity. The danger, Sallust saw, was all the other way. Sallust is a highly anti-suggestable author. He redresses the balance by producing a Bellum Catilinae of which Cicero is not the inevitable and central figure. And, it can be said, Sallust earns some justification, such has been the prevalence of blind Cicero worship, the easy and congenial habit of writing the Roman history of that age very much as a biography of Cicero." 110
• "Caesar and Cato were divergent in conduct, principles, and allegiance. Their qualities could be regarded as complementary no less than antithetic. In alliance the two had what was needed to save the republic. That may be what the historian is gently suggesting. Fate or chance determined otherwise. Caesar pursued personal ambition, ruthlessly, but Cato went with the Optimates (he knew they were no good); and, in the end, he accepted Pompeius, the old enemy of the oligarchy." 120
• "Yet it is not through Cato or Cicero that Sallust makes the most insidious stab at the Triumvirs. He exploits Caesar against the heirs of Caesar. The oration deprecates anger, rancour, and bloodshed, the plea is for good sense, and calm restraint." 121-22
• "Praising Caesar, Sallust is ostensibly loyal to the party of Caesar. But when he matches Cato with Caesar, he strikes a deadly blow against the Triumvirs. Let it be granted that he idealizes. There are worse things, such as subservience to power." 123
• "Sallust's portrayal of Caesar is ambiguous, insidious even. There is no equivocation in his view of Sulla, but a self-avowing obsession. Catilina is linked to Sulla by various devices or assumptions. More than that, the author transfers to his picture of Catilina (it has been supposed) the image and features of Sulla already dominant in his mind. Whenever be thought of that notion, Sallust can be convicted of a flagrant exaggeration. The example of Sulla, he suggests, inspired Catilina with a lust to seize power at Rome." (123-24)
• Cato presents the historian with a marvellous opportunity, which he seized with alacrity. The ancestor, a man of vigour and integrity, scourged the nobiles of his day for vice, inertia, incompetence. Sallust exploits him for style--but also as a precedent and a weapon, with a double edge. His descendant was a leader of the Optimates, lending strength sorely needed, and a greater prestige after his death. It is Cato in his oration who presents the case against the oligarchy, torpid, corrupt, and unpatriotic.
     "The assault is contrived by the historian with diabolical skill. He uses Cato to suggest and evoke his ancestor. he might have known or guessed that Cato the Censor was not in truth an enemy of the Roman aristocracy but a recent arrival who wished to purge it of distempers and rebuild its predominance. No Roman could conceive a better from of government than the supremacy of oligarchy.
  .   "Sallust is intent to demonstrate that the heirs of a great tradition had betrayed their trust. Hence the repetition of "nobilis" and "nobilitas." But it is with melancholy rather than derision that he pronounces the verdict on Lentulus Sura, strangled by the public executioner ..." 125-26; "Sallust is against the nobilitas. But he is not wholeheartedly on the side of its enemies. The excursus which is central in the economy of the monograph conveys the author's reflections on what happened after the assault on Sulla's oder in 70--and discloses a kind of subversive equity (36.4 to 39.4). After that year, young men of spirit and ambition were able to exploit the exorbitant power of the tribunate, they harried the Senate and stirred up the plebs. Sallust pronounces a crushing verdict. They were equally culpable, those politicians who claimed to assert the rights of the People and those who stood by the authority of the Senate. A specious pretext, only "honesta nomina" (38.3). What the politicians wanted was personal power." 126
• "To conclude. What is the value of the monograph? If Sallust had lived to write nothing else, it was an epoch-making achievement in the literature of the Latins, creating a new style and manner. Examined as history, it exhibits manifold defects, and harsh things can be said." 136
• on Sallust's use of Plato and other Greeks, 244; esp. Thucydides, 245 f.
• Thucydides and Sallust "take the same view of human nature, and they are at one in their conception of how history should be written: concentrated, selective and eschewing the trivial. Politics is the theme, with a dramatic presentation and a psychological analysis. Thucydides produced a masterpiece when he diagnosed the discord at Corcyra, showing its effects on behaviour, and also on language. A single chapter so captivated Sallust that he put it under contribution a dozen times.
     "Thucydides discarded the supernatural, and Sallust sees no moving force beyond human reason or passion, only chance. It is 'fortuna.' Not 'fatum,' which occurs only once ... And Caesar in the oration makes suitable allusion to 'fortuna ... .' Sallust's belief coincides with that of Caesar." 246
     "Disbelief and positivism does not, however, bring Sallust anywhere near Thucydides. He lacks the cool scientific appraisal." 248

• "as a work of literature the Catiline is one of the greatest books produced by the ancient world [but] his political and social judgments should often be regarded as part of the literary ornamentation with which he enhanced his theme," 72
• "the conspiracy revealed what, but for Sallust, might almost have escaped record, widespread discontent throughout Italy, reaching even the upper classes, provoked by the high level of debt and social and economic dislocation deriving from hasty and ruthless arrangements for the settlement of Sulla's veterans. … It is for this reason, it would seem, that Sallust has taken such pains to place the conspirators in their social setting and to compose a portrait of Sempronia as a complement to that of Catiline, both being types of the corrupt and dissolute nobility," 92; Sallust "despite his awareness of social and economic problems, tended to see the political crisis of his day as essentially a moral crisis; the portrayal of ancient virtue might therefore also be intended as an encouragement to any contemporaries who yearned for reform, for history could be regarded as an incitement to virtue," 93; "On the other hand, Sallust's moral vision was bounded by these old aristocratic ideals [Syme concurs, 41] (saving his insistence on a place in the sun for novi homines of merit); … in so far as he did genuinely seek reforms, and was not simply <<difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti>>, he envisaged it as the 'restoration' of a state of society which was itself an ideal," 108
• On Thucydides as stylistic and intellectual source, 107

• "Werner Schur … sees in Sallust a philosophical historian deeply influence by, though in some respects independent of, Posidonius," 46 [but other writers are opposed to this view of Pos.-AK]. Schur's Sallust "is not, as Schwartz had argued, a writer who to the end remained a bitter political partisan, … but one who shed his party bias to become in the end a dispassionate, if pessimistic, critic strongly tinged with the Stoic doctrine as it was understood in the late Republican age," 47 [but other writers disagree on the last point--see Laistner, 52]
• recurring theme in Sallust: "the evil effects of power, ambition, and avarice on Rome and the Roman character. This to him is more important than historical accuracy or even probability." 52
• on his introductions: "The recent school of German critics tends to regard them as a proof of a philosophic mind with a strong predilection for Stoicism. The fallacy … lies in the assumption that the thought expressed by Sallust is marked by originality," 52; "The antitheses in Sallust (Cat. 2 …) between luxuria, avaritia, superbia, ambitio, desidia, and continentia, acquitas, probitas, industria, had become hackneyed long before his time," 171, n. 21.
• "Sallust is consistently on the side of the populares, though he can be critical of their leaders." 54
• His "ethopoiia is both brilliant and memorable; its weakness lies in the absence of light and shade. His personalities … are devoid of psychological subtlety. … Even Catiline's early life is passed over in silence beyond a general statement about its dissoluteness. But we know now that [Catiline] had served honorably under Pompey's father …" 56
• His "descriptive powers were of a high order, but it is only here and there that he relates a military episode with individual traits." 58
• "Accuracy is subordinated to dramatic effect, truth is sacrificed for the sake of upholding a preconceived theory. Sallust predominant interest is … in the juxtaposition of leading personalities and in the contrast between the leaders of the optimate party and their opponents," 59. His account is "opposed to [that of] the optimate tradition," 64.
• Note Sallust's use of Thucydides and Plato and other Greeks, 170, nn. 5-7

Sulla dictator, 82-79
Catiline a partisan of Sulla, ca. 70s

   Tribunician power restored when Crassus and Cn. Pompey are consuls, 70

Catiline, fl. 60s down to 63; dies 62
Caesar pontifex maximus over against Optimates, 63

Murder of Clodius (allied with Pompey, Hypsaeus) by Milo (allied with Cicero), 52; Milo prosecuted.
Sallust's predilections went with Clodius; in 50 he's thrown out of the senate--revenge for Milo.
Murder of Caesar, Sallust's protector, in 44.
Murder of Cicero, December 43.
Writing of the Catiline follows (or just precedes).