Bellum Catilinae -- The Catiline Conspiracy

Why Do Roman Historians Invent Such Good Speeches for Their Enemies?

Imagine you're watching Mulan, the Disney movie. The movie proceeds as usual: a Hun invasion, some musical numbers, the devastation of the Chinese peasantry, et cetera. Then comes the first meeting between Mulan and Shanyu on the snowy slopes of Tung Shao Pass. Imagine, however, that instead of growling and playing up the barbarian angle, Shanyu gives a speech to Mulan. A long one, like five solid minutes.

He was provoked, he says. The Chinese built their wall straight through his people's ancestral pastureland. The Chinese army fortified the good grass and drove his people into the scrublands to starve, and they called the wall "defensive." He tried to negotiate, but the Chinese garrison killed his ambassador and fed his corpse to the palace geese. Whose conduct, Mulan, is more barbarous?

Mulan replies by firing her rocket at the pass and burying Shanyu (and his army) under a thousand tons of snow. The Huns are defeated, and with them, their inexplicably compelling arguments. Hooray! The end.

This, to a modern audience, would be a deeply weird cinematic choice.

Why would you give your villain borderline unimpeachable motivations, ones the audience might actually agree with? Why would you give him five solid minutes to explain himself, and never have your protagonist refute them?

Yet Roman historians do this so routinely it might be called a style.

I first encountered it in Tacitus, in his biography of his father-in-law, the statesman and general Agricola. Tacitus, a historian and politician of imperial Rome at its height (and a committed imperialist), admires Agricola without reservation. So it is rather odd that Tacitus writes the greatest anti-imperial speech in world literature and puts it into the mouth of Agricola’s primary enemy Calgacus, a Caledonian chieftain.

We, at the furthest limits both of land and liberty, have been defended to this day by the remoteness of our situation and of our fame. The extremity of Britain is now disclosed; and whatever is unknown becomes an object of magnitude. But there is no nation beyond us; nothing but waves and rocks, and the still more hostile Romans, whose arrogance we cannot escape by obsequiousness and submission.

These plunderers of the world, after exhausting the land by their devastations, are rifling the ocean: stimulated by avarice, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor; unsatiated by the East and by the West: the only people who behold wealth and indigence with equal avidity. To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace. (Tacitus, Agricola 30)

Agricola then replies with some competent but forgettable pre-battle oratory, and the Caledonians and Romans fight. Agricola wins a glorious victory.

This is very strange, especially since Calgacus' speech was entirely invented by Tacitus. I should clarify this: inventing speeches per se is common—nearly all reported speeches in ancient history are fictional, and written according to Thucydides’ principle of ta deonta, writing “what the situation calls for.” It is instead strange that the invention is this good, indeed, Calgacus’ speech is better than the ostensible protagonist’s.

This recurs constantly in the Latin sources. Julius Caesar lets his German opposite, Ariovistus, eloquently call him a hypocrite right before Caesar crushes him in battle. The historian Livy speaks for Hannibal, the greatest enemy Rome ever faced. What's going on and why is this so common?

Recently, while translating the Catiline Conspiracy, and reading the suspiciously compelling speeches of Sallust's monstrous villain Catiline, I think I came to understand.

Disclaimer: the translations of Bellum Catilinae are mine, and I am an amateur Latinist at best. There may be some errors.

The Rotting Republican Edifice and the Catiline Conspiracy

The backdrop to the Bellum Catilinae is a Republic in decline. After the Roman Republic defeated Carthage in 146 BC, the Republican virtues rotted away. Rome's politicians, with no one left to fight, spent their energies screwing each other, then screwing each other over, all the while screwing the provinces out of every sesterce they could.

The worthy and the worthless alike all wished glory, honor, and power for themselves; the worthy strove by the right path, but the worthless, proper methods failing them, turned to tricks and lies. Greed births love of money, which no wise man covets; that vice, like an evil poison, unmans the body and manly spirit. Love of money is infinite, insatiable, diminished by neither plenty nor poverty. (Bellum Catilinae 11)

Sallust blames victory over Carthage for starting the decay, but accuses Sulla of accelerating it. Sulla was Caesar before Caesar: he marched on Rome during a civil war, made himself dictator, rewrote the constitution in order to “save” it, then retired from public life. Caesar objected only to the last, saying that “Sulla didn’t know his ABCs, to lay down the dictatorship.”^[1]

Sulla's veterans squandered their plunder and longed for another profitable war. Half the aristocracy was broke and desperate, and the urban poor had nothing, and so nothing to lose.

The Catiline Conspiracy was a byproduct of this long decline, and the last great prelude to the fall of the Roman Republic. In 63 BC, Lucius Sergius Catilina (Catiline), a patrician from an ancient family, lost his chance to be consul for the second time. Drowning in debt from the truly epic bribery required to run for office in late Republican Rome, he reinvented himself as a radical populist and formed a conspiracy to overthrow the Republic.

He collected young, impressionable men, "ensnared their soft and malleable minds by trickery." The trickery included, according to Sallust, lavishing the young men with prostitutes (understandable) and expensive dogs (less understandable). He also gathered to himself the indebted, the dispossessed, and the disgruntled veterans of the civil war who had "lavishly squandered their spoils, and remembering the rape and victory in the civil war," wanted more. (Bellum Catilinae 14, 16) He, unusually, recruited women too, "who at first had supported their enormous extravagance by debauchery, but by the time their age placed a limit on their extravagance, had accumulated enormous debts." (Bellum Catilinae 24)^[2]

His conspiracy was exposed before he succeeded. Catiline's allies in Rome were arrested by the Senate and executed without trial. Cicero, the greatest orator Rome ever produced, presided over the killings, and depending on who you asked, they were either the apex of his career or the blackest stain on it. Catiline himself died hard—the state was forced to raise an army to put down his conspiracy, which had turned into a full-blown revolt, and won only a "bloody and mournful victory."

Caius Sallustius Crispus (Sallust)^[3], wrote the Bellum Catilinae about twenty years later, during the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination, as the Republic gave way to the rule of Octavian-soon-to-be-Augustus.

Catiline’s conspiracy is famous, not so much for its impact on history, but for its participants and its literature.^[4] Julius Caesar and Cato the Younger were senators at the time, Cicero was consul. Both Cicero's Orations Against Catiline and Sallust's Bellum Catilinae were used as textbooks for two millennia thereafter.

Sallust: His Life, His Voice, and His Grudge Against Cicero

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"Sallust, according to the judgment of the learned, will rank as the prince of Roman historiographers."

—Martial

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Sallust was many things: a failed populist politician, a partisan of Julius Caesar during his seizure of power, a brilliant writer, and by near-universal ancient testimony, an absolutely terrible person.

Expelled from the Senate on grounds of immorality, he was reinstated by Caesar and given the governorship of an African province, which he looted in such spectacularly corrupt fashion that Caesar was forced to intervene, again, to save him from prosecution. Without further prospects for advancement, he retired to private life, and decided to write history.^[5]

Sallust was also a contemporary of Cicero. Cicero was famous at the time for breaking the Catiline conspiracy, but Sallust's history leaves Cicero out entirely—no orations whatsoever from Rome's greatest orator, yet plenty from Catiline. Why? It’s simple; Sallust hated Cicero personally, and the Bellum Catilinae is deliberately written as a rejection of Cicero's style. The result is a highly original style called inconcinnitas, "inelegance," by Latinists^[6] that will stick in your head and infect your prose thereafter.

Cicero's style is famous for intricate constructions, balanced clauses, and giving students a headache hunting for the verb in the proverbial haystack. Sallust's is the reverse. Compare for yourself:

Here is Cicero, in De Amicitia, "On Friendship":

For I do not agree with those who have recently begun to argue that soul and body perish at the same time, and that all things are destroyed by death. I give greater weight to the old-time view, whether it be that of our forefathers, who paid such reverential rites to the dead, which they surely would not have done if they had believed those rites were a matter of indifference to the dead; or, whether it be the view of those who lived in this land and by their principles and precepts brought culture to Great Greece, which now, I admit, is wholly destroyed, but was then flourishing; or, whether it be the view of him who was adjudged by the oracle of Apollo to be the wisest of men, who, though he would argue on most subjects now on one side and now on the other, yet always consistently maintained that human souls were of God… (De Amicitia 13)

Now here is Sallust, on a related theme, opening the Bellum Catilinae:

It befits all men who wish to stand above the animals to strive with all their might, lest they pass their life in silence like cattle, whom nature formed groveling, belly-slaves. (Bellum Catilinae 1)

Obedient to virtue are those men who plow, who sail, who build, but many mortals, slaves to stomach and sleep, unlearned and uncultured, pass through life like strangers. To those, against nature, the body is a delight and the mind a burden. Of such men, I count their life and death the same, since nothing is recorded of either. (Bellum Catilinae 2)

Sallust studiously avoids the standard vocabulary of Ciceronian public life: honestas, humanitas, consensus. Instead, he uses deliberately archaized spellings: lubido for libido, maxumum for maximum, to appear closer to the ancient virtues—and to his hero Cato the Elder—than the debased modern Republic. According to the grammarian Suetonius, he actually hired a man to collect archaic words for him (De Grammaticis 10). Is Sallust's austere, deliberately unadorned style because he is a stern Roman Moralist who hearkens to the ancient virtues, or a reaction to the effete, detestably modern Ciceronian stooges that tried him for corruption and kicked him out of the Senate? Well, Sallust also married Cicero's ex-wife, so I leave the judgment up to you.^[7]

Sallust deploys this voice most memorably on his villain.

Unspeakable Outrages with Noble Maidens, and Other Youthful Indiscretions

Sallust describes Catiline thus:

Lucius Catilina, born of a noble family, had great force of mind and body, though that mind was twisted and evil. From his youth he reveled in civil war, murder, rape, and discord, and he spent his youth entirely in pursuit of them. His body endured hunger, cold, and insomnia better than you would believe. In character, he was reckless, sly, fickle, pathologically dishonest, always striving after foreign things, extravagant with his own wealth, yet burning with desire for more. Eloquent enough, but unwise. His monstrous and insatiable temper always yearned for that which was too far out of reach. (Bellum Catilinae 5)

His impure mind, hateful to men and gods, could rest neither in wakefulness nor in sleep, indeed, his conscience ravaged his agitated mind. Thus his pallid color, ugly eyes, sometimes rapid, sometimes slow gait. In his face and countenance the madness was apparent.

While still a youth, Catiline engaged in many unspeakable outrages, with noble maidens, Vestal virgins, and others in a manner contrary to law, both human and divine. Later, he was seized with lust for Aurelia Orestilla, in whom no good man ever praised anything save her figure. And though she hesitated to marry him, fearing his adult son, it was believed that Catiline murdered his son, thereby vacating his house for their criminal wedding. (Bellum Catilinae 15)

This description of Catiline would scare a Cyclops. Is it accurate, though? Probably not. This catalog of crimes is likely less revealing about the character of Catiline than of the Roman subconscious—Catiline was not a saint, but practically every politician, beyond a certain point in Roman history, is accused of something similar.

Catiline's Politics, with Which Sallust Privately Sympathizes

Most secondary sources will say that Catiline, twice passed over for the consulship, simply tried a coup. Sallust does say this; he says that after the madness of the Sullan dictatorship poisoned the atmosphere, Catiline is seized by a procession of lusts: for power, for loose women, for the recovery of his family fortune, that thus degrade his character and kindle the spark of revolution.

But Sallust also allows Catiline himself to tell us his very different motivations, in the following (amazing) speech that was the genesis of this review:

My mind has been restless, as you have each heard. My spirit burns hotter each day, when I consider what the future may hold, if we do not act to avenge our lost liberty. Ever since the Republic was lost to the power of the few, it is to their benefit, always, that kings and tetrarchs are made tributaries, that peoples and nations are weighed down by taxes. Yet outsiders, whether hardworking, worthy, noble or common—we are the despised mob, without influence, without authority, and bound by obligation to those who should fear us, were the Republic healthy. All influence, power, honor, and wealth goes to them or their cronies; to us is left only dangers, rejection, trials, and poverty. How long will you suffer this, O bravest of men? Is it not better to die on your feet, displaying your virtues, than to live a miserable and shameful life, lost to dishonor, while other men's arrogance mocks you?

Assuredly, victory is within our grasp—I so swear by the faith of gods and men. We are in the prime of life and our spirit is strong, while they, rich, slip into dotage. We must only begin this great task, and the rest will follow!

And who among mortals, whose minds are yet virile, could endure the tyranny of money, which they squander building upon oceans and leveling mountains, while we lack our portion, indeed, lack the bare necessities of life? Should they double their houses, and nowhere permit us to kindle our own meager hearths? They splurge on tablets, tokens, and fancy metalwork, they tear down new buildings just to build others, and extract money in every way, so that even with the greatest profligacy they are unable to exhaust their wealth. Yet we are left with destitution within the home, bitter debts without, present misery and a yet more hopeless future: what then remains save the wretched breath of life?

Will you not be awakened? Lo! That which you so, so often longed for, your liberty, not to mention wealth, your due, your glory, is before your eyes! Fortune gives all such prizes to the victor. Let the age, the moment, the dangers, the poverty, and war's glorious spoils exhort you, yes even more than my speech, to action! Use me, then, either as your commander or your soldier! I recuse neither my spirit nor my body from your service! These plans I hope I shall make real as your consul, together with all of you!

Unless, of course, my eyes deceive me, and you are content to be slaves rather than to rule. (Bellum Catilinae 20)

Catiline is a monster, no doubt. But as I read, I found myself agreeing with him. Hell, I'd follow the monster after a speech like that. It’s clearly a speech written by a master orator, one whose culture prized rhetoric above nearly all other skills. But… Catiline didn’t personally say any of this! Sallust invented it from whole cloth, and put it in the mouth of his enemy!

Why do this? I think we can see part of the answer in the quality of this speech: love of the game.

Sallust, remember, is a disgraced Roman politician turned historian, who wants to be seen displaying skill, displaying arete, in his chosen craft. It would be beneath a Roman historian to write a bad speech, especially since, in this case, the speeches comprise fully 25% of the text by word count. Sallust loves the game, and it would be profoundly embarrassing to play it poorly.

But, one may counter, Sallust could have reserved his amazing speeches for Catiline’s opponents, and only competently written Catiline’s. Ditto for Tacitus and Calgacus. Why do the reverse?

For patriotic Roman speechwriters, a stirring call to arms is probably the equivalent of a five-paragraph essay. Perhaps marshaling the arguments of the enemy demonstrates technical mastery better to Sallust’s contemporaries? While probably true, in this case, Sallust’s personal politics provide a more complete explanation—he straight-up agrees with Catiline on the merits.

Go reread Catiline's speech; look at his specific grievances. Consider that this speech, given to a happy, healthy, and free crowd, would inspire precisely nothing. Sallust thinks their grievances are real; he sympathizes with the plight of the poor, and writes a killer speech on their behalf. This is Sallust telling on himself.

Later in the book, Sallust speaks more on this, and does not ascribe the poor folk's motivation to an intrinsically evil nature; rather, he suggests that in poverty, one's moral character is degraded by circumstance.

Always in civilizations, those who have nothing envy the respectable. They extol what is evil, they hate tradition and burn for new beginnings. Hating their own circumstances, they wish to change everything, they nourish sedition and discord without a care, since destitution is easily obtained without injury. (Bellum Catilinae 37)

Sallust was a partisan of Julius Caesar during his revolution, and Caesar was a popularis, literally, a populist. Catiline and Caesar, and by extension Sallust, thus have very similar politics. They share certain ambitions, too; in many ways, Catiline is a failed Caesar.^[8]

So Sallust can't be too harsh on the people's motivations. Instead, the conspiracy must emerge from Catiline's inner, base nature. Sallust thinks, paraphrasing Appian, that Catiline has "a most excellent design, too violently pursued."

Entrapment, and Catiline's Rubicon

Following this speech, Catiline then, uh, passes around human blood to drink. Sallust hedges on whether this actually happened and throws in a dig at Cicero for good measure.

Some, at that time, said that Catiline, after giving his speech, drove his criminal accomplices to take a solemn oath, by passing around human blood mixed with wine, in a sacrificial cup. And for this reason, [Catiline] repeatedly asserted that he did this so that there would always be the greatest faithfulness between them, because each was conscious of the other's crimes.

Some considered this a fiction, and much else besides, coming from those who, jealous of Cicero who afterwards ascended to power, believed that he [Cicero] inflated the atrocious criminality of those whom he punished. To us, in view of its great moment, too little has been discovered of this matter. (Bellum Catilinae 22)

But while Catiline is busy drinking blood, his conspiracy is falling apart.

Word of the plot leaks through a string of informants, and the scared nobles elect Cicero consul to crush it, despite Cicero’s execrable nouveau riche status. Catiline’s perfidious Gallic allies, not so sanguine about Catiline's chances, tell Cicero everything. Cicero then sets up a sting, involving an exciting night ambush scene on a bridge, and arrests some of the conspirators. The atmosphere in Rome turns toxic with suspicion after the arrests, due to the magnitude of the conspiracy—the conspiracy uncovered by Cicero, who is named “father of his country” for services rendered.

Catiline himself, however, escapes to his army in the provinces, and no one can be convinced to betray him, though his army is composed of robbers, bandits, and slaves:

Despite two senatorial decrees, not a single person, out of so many, could be bribed to expose the conspiracy, nor could be convinced to desert Catiline's army camp. (Bellum Catilinae 36)

Scholars are split on whether any of this actually happened. Did Cicero genuinely uncover a sinister plot, and act decisively to quash it, or did he invent a conspiracy for his own political gain, driving Catiline to armed rebellion in self-defense? Like most historical mysteries, the answer is unknowable, but for my part, I read it as somewhere in between: Catiline is just the latest in a long line of armed populist reformers, from Tiberius Gracchus to Julius Caesar. The sentiment is clearly real, the conspiracy likely overblown.

Two Speeches in the Senate: the Clementia of Caesar, the Austerity of Cato

We reach the centerpiece of Bellum Catilinae during the trial of the captured conspirators: a pair of opposing speeches, first Caesar, then Cato, in which the Senate decides their fate. Together the two speeches run roughly 15% of the book.

But before we quote from the first speech, I want to make a point that works best in the original Latin.

First, we recall the opening line of the book:

Omnis homines, qui sese student praestare ceteris animalibus, summa ope niti decet, ne vitam silentio transeant veluti pecora, quae natura prona atque ventri oboedientia finxit. Sed nostra omnis vis in animo et corpore sita est: animi imperio, corporis servitio magis utimur; alterum nobis cum dis, alterum cum beluis commune est.

It befits all men who wish to stand above the animals to strive with all their might, lest they pass their life in silence like cattle, whom nature formed groveling, belly-slaves. No, all our power rests in mind and in body—it is best when the mind rules and the body obeys, the first like unto gods, the second, to beasts. (Bellum Catilinae 1)

Next, from Caesar's speech to the Senate, which parallels the opening very closely in structure:

Omnis homines, patres conscripti, qui de rebus dubiis consultant, ab odio, amicitia, ira atque misericordia vacuos esse decet. Haud facile animus verum providet, ubi illa officiunt, neque quisquam omnium lubidini simul et usui paruit.

It befits all men, Conscript Fathers [Senators], who deliberate on uncertain matters, to be free of hatreds, friendship, anger and compassion. The mind discerns truth with difficulty when obstructed by these things, nor has anyone ever simultaneously served both his passions and his best interests. (Bellum Catilinae 51)

Both sentences begin with Omnis homines—an archaized spelling of omnes, fronted for emphasis—and both use decet, the impersonal verb of propriety, “what is fitting.” They universalize what is appropriate for a Roman man; Jane Austen would write “It is a truth universally acknowledged…”

I took one real liberty with word choice here: “belly-slaves.” Prona atque ventri oboedientia literally translates as “[lying] prone and obedient to the stomach,” but the sense is contemptuous and the rhythm punchy, so I decided to render prona as “groveling” (following the 1921 Loeb edition), and ventri oboedientia with an Anglo-Saxon kenning.

Beyond the clear sentence-level similarity are parallel themes: Caesar’s lubidini, lust for power or riches, contrasts with usui, that which is “of use” or in one’s best interest; this maps directly to the opening’s animi imperio, corporis servitio magis utimur—it is better when the mind rules and the body obeys.

The similarities are intentional. This is a technique called metalepsis, a deliberate blurring of the history and its subjects: Caesar, and later Cato, engage directly with the themes of Sallust from within his book. We should expect, therefore, that these two speeches are special, that they serve some purpose for Sallust beyond accurate recordkeeping.

Caesar speaks first, and his argument is strikingly modern. He argues for clemency on precedent. The law does not permit summary execution; to break it is to set one foot on a slippery slope.

In the Macedonian War, the great and magnificent city of Rhodes, with a flourishing population (due to our help!), behaved treacherously towards us. Yet after the war was won, there was a discussion about the Rhodians' fate, and our ancestors dismissed them unpunished, so that no one might say that they began the war for revenge, or for money… Our ancestors constantly concerned themselves with what conduct was worthy of their dignity, not what could be justly inflicted on their enemies.

This I see for you all, Conscript Fathers, lest the crimes of Publius Lentulus and others carry greater weight with you than your own dignity, and you be swayed more by your anger than your good names. If a just penalty for their crimes can be found, I will approve a departure from precedent, but if the magnitude of their crimes exceeds our capacity, I think only that should be done which laws already provide for.

Whatever befalls them is deserved, but moreover, Conscript Fathers, consider what you inflict on others. All evil deeds arise from good intentions. And indeed, when command falls to cowards or lesser men, a new standard arises, moving from that which is worthy and appropriate to unworthy and immoderate… In living memory, when the victorious Sulla ordered Damasippus, and others who had risen by doing evil to the Republic, to be strangled, who among us did not praise him? It was said that men, both criminal and conspiratorial, who plotted sedition against the republic, were deservedly killed. Yet these crimes were the beginning of a catastrophe, because henceforth whenever anyone coveted a house or villa, or later, even a vase or someone's clothes, Sulla saw to it that he too was numbered among those proscribed. Thus those who had celebrated Damasippus' death, only a little afterwards were themselves dragged off, nor did the slaughter end before Sulla had entirely glutted his own supporters with stolen wealth…

For my own part, I do not fear this from Marcus Tullius [Cicero] or for these times, but in a great commonwealth there are many and varied characters. It could be that at another time, with another consul who also holds an army in his hand, some lie is taken as truth. When the consul, with this precedent before him, draws his sword, who shall restrain him? (Bellum Catilinae 51)

The quality of this speech is no mystery—Sallust loves both Caesar and writing good speeches to stick it to Cicero. But Caesar’s speech is improbably prescient. What will happen, asks Caesar, the next time a dictator seizes hold of the Republic? Caesar at the time would not have known, but that future dictator is Caesar himself, and Sallust's audience does know this. Caesar prophesies his own conduct.

More prosaically, Sallust also allows Caesar to demonstrate the virtues Sallust most wants to enshrine. In addition to being lauded as another of the greatest orators of all time, Caesar was famed for his clementia, his mercy to his enemies. Both are on display in this speech.

After Caesar sits, most of the room is leaning towards clemency, but no mercy is to be found in Cato. He arises to speak next, and calls for the death penalty. His argument is moral—be decisive, act swiftly, save the Republic.

Very often, Conscript Fathers, I have spoken at great length to this body. I have complained of the extravagance and avarice of our citizens, and for that reason made enemies of many men. It is not easy for me to overlook others' lustful deeds, when I have never permitted the same faults in myself. Yet even as you regard my complaints as of little worth, the Republic has stood firm: great prosperity can bear a little negligence.

But now, however, it is not at issue whether we shall live with good or evil customs, nor how magnificent is the empire of the Roman people, but whether these, whatever kind they are, shall belong to us, or to the enemy, and we ourselves with them. And at a time like this, someone mentions gentleness and mercy, to me! I tell you, we lost the true names of things long ago. Now, to lavish another's goods is called generosity, boldness in evil deeds is called fortitude, and because of this, our Republic balances on a knife's edge.

Our noblest citizens have conspired to burn out our country. They have summoned the Gauls, the most hated foes to the Roman name, to war; the enemy general looms over our heads. Yet you delay, and even now you doubt. What will you do when the enemy takes our walls?

Conscript Fathers, if, by Hercules, there was time for error, I would happily suffer you to be corrected in this matter, since you think so little of words. But we are surrounded on all sides. Catiline presses us at the passes with his army; our enemies are within our walls, in the very heart of our city. Neither preparations nor plans can now be hidden; it is all the more necessary to hasten to action. (Bellum Catilinae 52)

The Senate "extols his virtues to the heavens" (Bellum Catilinae 53), and votes with him.

There is a second level of metalepsis in these speeches that I think reveals why Sallust writes history at all. Sallust allows Caesar and Cato, in whom he admires a disjoint set of Roman virtues, to fix their memories in the minds of posterity through his history, lest they be forgotten "like beasts of the field."

The idea of recording history just so that events won't be lost is modern. Sallust doesn't think like this; the facts per se are of no importance—the people are the focus. Sallust tells us this himself in his introduction: men of whom nothing is written are not just unimportant, they are beasts, whose life and death he holds equally worthless.

This sentiment descends directly from the grand Indo-European poetic tradition. Every grand cultural-linguistic complex has some idea of what makes a man immortal, and the Indo-European conception always runs through the kleos aphthiton, the fame imperishable, won through great deeds in front of your peers.^[9]

There is no afterlife in this system. It is by the doing of great deeds, by the poets weaving these great deeds into great epics, and by the poets being paid great sums for that epic (this is genuinely a necessary component), that a man may live forever.

In Caesar, Sallust sees the pinnacle of generosity and mercy, and in Cato, dignity and austerity. These virtues make them worthy, and Sallust makes them immortal. His description of Cato is one of the most famous lines in Latin prose:

esse quam videri bonus malebat

He preferred to be virtuous, rather than to seem it. (Bellum Catilinae 54)

Agonal Culture and a Bloody, Mournful Victory

With the conspirators captured and executed on Cato's recommendation, the Senate raises an army and marches it to Catiline’s stronghold in the provinces. There, Catiline’s army of misfits and the Roman regulars have a short war of maneuver, but Catiline is eventually trapped against a mountain and forced to fight.

Catiline sends away his cavalry, "in order to make his soldiers’ spirits greater by equaling their danger" (Bellum Catilinae 59), and personally deploys his infantry, placing himself and his freed slaves next to the Marian Eagle battle standard.

This is a very interesting detail. Caius Marius was a contemporary of Sulla, and a brilliant general who reformed the Roman army and defeated the greatest existential threat to Rome since Hannibal. Marius was also a radical populist reformer who seized military control of Rome for a few bloody years right before Sulla did, and became a sort of tyrant-martyr hybrid for the populist cause when Sulla defeated his faction. Hoisting the Marian Eagle is the secular equivalent of Crusaders carrying the True Cross into battle—Catiline is displaying both his allegiance and his legitimacy.

Here, Catiline delivers his final speech. His cause is doomed, his army is outmatched, and Sallust makes it fairly clear that Catiline knows this.

I have discovered, soldiers, that words do not add to courage, nor can a commander's speech make braves from cowards, nor strength from fear. However much is inherent in each man's spirit, by nature or customs, so much is laid bare in war.

If you wish to remain here [on the field of battle], you must be daring, for nothing save victory can exchange war for peace. But if you hope to find salvation in flight, when you have turned those arms which shield your body away from the enemy, you are indeed insane. Always in war, the coward is in the greatest danger, therefore trust in boldness, not in walls.

And when I regard you, soldiers, and think upon your deeds, I hold a great hope of victory. Your spirit, your life, your valor lends me strength, and beside those the necessity, which makes brave even the timid… But if Fortune should envy your valor, take care, lest you lose your life unavenged. Nor if you are captured, allow yourselves to be slaughtered like livestock, but die fighting, like men, and leave your enemies a bloody and mournful victory! (Bellum Catilinae 58)

Sallust notes that the enemy commander Petreius, assuming Catiline to be a coward, is surprised to see him fighting fiercely in the front ranks. And at the end, when Catiline sees his own forces routed, he makes a wild charge with his retainers "into the crowd of the enemy and was there pierced through, still fighting" (Bellum Catilinae 60).

At the battle's close, it was obvious how much courage, how much strength of spirit, was in the army of Catiline. Because nearly every man who held a position while alive and fighting, covered that spot with his body when dead. A few, indeed, whom the praetorian cohort had scattered, were a little further apart, but the wounds of even these were on the front. Catiline was found far in advance of his men, surrounded by the corpses of his enemies, still breathing slightly, and retaining in his countenance the ferocious spirit that animated him while alive.

In the end, out of the whole force, no freeborn citizen was taken prisoner, either in battle or the flight: they spared their own lives no more than they did their enemies'. Nor indeed did the Roman army take much joy, nor win a bloodless victory: because each of their bravest had been either killed in the battle or grievously wounded as they left the field. Many, who had ventured out of the camp to visit or plunder, turning over the bodies of the rebels, found a friend instead. Others found guests or kinsmen; there were those as well who found their enemies. Thus was the entire army shaken with happiness and sorrow, mourning and celebration. (Bellum Catilinae 61)

To us, it is a little odd for a historian to display obvious admiration for a man so "twisted and evil in mind." Catiline is decidedly not virtuous in the modern sense, murderous youth-corrupting rapist that he (allegedly) is.

But he does have virtus.

Latin has many of these words, with exact modern reflexes and inexact connotational correspondence. Consider the verb rapere. Rapere, from which our word “rape” is derived, literally means "to seize by force" in Latin. It does not necessarily entail sexual violation—the verb is frequently used for objects. The sexual violation is instead a common connotation in Latin, which usurps the bare meaning in English.

It is the same with hero and virtus. A Latin hero who displays virtus is not necessarily a virtuous hero. Hercules goes mad and murders his wife and child, yet Cato, and indeed all Romans, literally swear by him. Hero and virtus are at least skew to goodness in Latin, if not quite orthogonal.

Applied to Catiline, excellence commands recognition independent of moral status, and a magnificent villain receives a magnificent, worthy death. This is the essence of Greco-Roman agonal culture. Agon in Greek means "contest" or "struggle," and names the Greco-Roman ideal of competition as a virtue per se, absent moral valence.

This mindset explains much, both in Roman history generally and Sallust's histories specifically—if glory is found in competition, what glory is there in defeating an unworthy enemy? Roman commanders disdained to prosecute slave revolts for the same reason—where is the grandeur in killing slaves? This is part of the reason why the famous Spartacus slave revolt was so successful—the political/military class of Rome didn’t consider it worth their time to fight a bunch of slaves. This backfired on them in spectacular fashion.^[10]

Caesar, again, furnishes a compelling example. His famous line “veni, vidi, vici” was actually a dig at his rival, Pompey Magnus. Caesar had just defeated Pompey, and wanted to belittle Pompey’s conquest of the East, where he made his name. Caesar’s quip implies there was no skill involved: When Caesar also ventured to the East, he came, he saw, he conquered.^[11]

Sentiments Alien to a Well-Ordered Mind

Why does Sallust put such exceptional speeches in the mouth of his enemy?

His simplest motivation is familiar—he personally agrees with Catiline on the substance of his politics. This does not make Catiline less personally vile to Sallust, but explains why Sallust gives Catiline's politics the deference he does.

His second personal motivation, the love of the game, is also recognizable. Sallust is trying to out-write his rival Cicero, who succeeded in politics where Sallust failed, and whose oratorical style literally defined classical Latin. You see it everywhere: Cicero’s conspicuous absence, Sallust’s deliberately archaic prose, and of course, his marriage to Cicero’s ex-wife.

As a Latin stylist, Sallust is compressed, expressive, ametric, and brilliant. The prose is superb. Cicero at his best is lyrical:

Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?

How long, Catiline, will you abuse our patience?

Sallust at his best is syncopated, arresting:

Namque pauci libertatem, pars magna iustos dominos volunt.^[12]

Because few prefer liberty, the greater part desire only fair masters.

Sallust translates naturally into English, as if inconcinnitas were the default style of our prose—at least after Hemingway.

As a history in the modern sense, Bellum Catilinae is narrow—competent, not great. As in a Greek play, the decline of Roman virtue is the single, radiant theme that limns every line, and Sallust makes no attempt at objectivity. But beneath this there lies a more fundamental answer about why Sallust writes history at all—and not only Sallust; the same impulse runs through Cato and Caesar's speeches, through Tacitus, through the whole tradition. “To speak the name of the dead is to make them live again.” This proverb is Egyptian, but any Vedic bard or Greek poet would feel it in their bones. We write history to preserve facts; he wrote "to fix our memory in that of others as greatly as possible," to grant a great man immortality.

Virtue, for us, is inseparable from moral character. But this is culturally contingent, and Sallust is immersed in agonal culture in a way we are not. Catiline’s virtues are separable from his manifold flaws: his oratory is first-rate, his personal courage beyond question, and his men die with wounds in front. A magnificent triumph requires a magnificent villain. To read the speeches of the Bellum Catilinae is to partake of a Roman worldview where excellence is admirable even when attached to genuine moral depravity.