Catilinarian conspiracy

• 1. Introduction

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  The Catilinarian conspiracy nearly tore the Roman republic apart in 63 BC, when a failed politician named Lucius Sergius Catilina decided that if the voters would not give him the consulship, he would simply take it by force. Catiline had stood for the consulship three times and lost every time. After his third defeat at the consular elections in the autumn of 63 BC, he stopped waiting and started planning a coup. What followed would produce one of the most famous political speeches in the ancient world, the execution of Roman citizens without trial, and a debate about those executions that would never fully be settled. Who were the men Catiline recruited, and what grievances drove them? How did a consul named Cicero expose the plot? And once it was over, which side of history did each man end up on? Those questions still divide historians today.

• 2. A Coalition of Grievances

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  Publius Cornelius Lentulus Sura had been a consul before he was kicked out of the senate for immorality in 70 BC. He was sitting praetor when Catiline brought him into the conspiracy, which meant he held real power even as he plotted to overthrow the state. Alongside him stood Gaius Cornelius Cethegus, who had backed the rebel Sertorius and had few prospects left for political advancement. Publius Autronius Paetus had actually won a consular election in 66 BC, only to have his victory annulled and his senate seat stripped after a bribery conviction. Two other senators rounded out the inner circle, both expelled for immorality and corruption.

  Beyond the senators, the classicist Erich Gruen describes the wider recruits as "mixed", noting that "single-minded purpose cannot readily be ascribed" to them. Some had lost municipal elections. Some had debts they could not pay. Others came from aristocratic families whose standing had slipped over generations. What gave the conspiracy real military weight was the presence of men displaced by Sulla's civil wars of 83-81 BC. Veterans who had fought for Sulla had expected monetary rewards but fell into debt after poor harvests. Landless farmers stripped of property in the Sullan proscriptions joined them.

  The ancient sources blamed large debts as the single engine driving all of this, but scholars reject that explanation as too narrow. Unmet political ambitions were, in the scholarly consensus, just as indispensable. The defeat of the Rullan land reform bill earlier in 63 BC added another layer of resentment. That bill would have confirmed Sullan settlers on their land and allowed them to sell it back to the state. It would also have distributed new land to dispossessed citizens. When it failed, the economic frustrations already building from a financial crisis stretching back to the First Mithridatic War grew sharper. Catiline was not building a social revolution. He was building a coup that would install himself and his allies at the top of a republic they believed had cheated them.

• 3. Cicero's Exposure

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  A woman named Fulvia brought the consul Cicero the first rumours of a plot in the autumn of 63 BC. The first hard evidence came from Marcus Licinius Crassus, one of the most powerful men in Rome, who handed over letters on the 18th or the 19th of October. Those letters described plans to massacre prominent citizens. Reports of armed men gathering in Etruria corroborated the letters, and the senate responded by passing a tumultus, a formal declaration of emergency, and then the senatus consultum ultimum, instructing the consuls to do whatever it took to end the crisis.

  By the 27th of October, the senate had learned that Gaius Manlius, a former centurion, had taken up arms near Faesulae with an army behind him. Cicero dispatched two proconsuls and two praetors to the region with authority to levy troops and orders to maintain night watches. Catiline remained in Rome while this happened. The anonymous letters sent to Crassus named him, but naming was not proof. Only when messages from Etruria directly connected him to the uprising was he indicted in early November under the lex Plautia de vi, the law against public violence.

  The conspirators met, probably on the 6th of November, and found two volunteers willing to attempt Cicero's assassination. When the attempt failed on the 7th of November, Cicero summoned the senate and delivered his first oration against Catiline. Catiline tried to speak in his own defence, attacking Cicero's ancestry, but the senate shouted him down. He left Rome that same night to join Manlius in Etruria. Before he went, he wrote a letter, likely the one preserved in Sallust, committing his wife to a friend's protection and framing his flight not as guilt but as a response to honours unjustly denied.

• 4. The Debate Over Execution

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  On the 2nd or the 3rd of December, Cicero arrested five men in the city: Lentulus, Cethegus, Statilius, Gabinius, and Caeparius. The Allobroges, a Gallic tribe that Lentulus had tried to recruit to the Catilinarian cause, had turned double agents for Cicero, providing the evidence that made the arrests possible. After the Gallic envoys testified before the senate with promises of immunity, the prisoners confessed their guilt. Lentulus resigned his magistracy.

  The debate on what to do with them took place in the Temple of Concord. Cicero had already been empowered by the senatus consultum ultimum to do whatever was necessary to protect the state, but that decree gave him moral cover, not legal immunity. His deeper goal in asking the senate for advice was almost certainly to shift responsibility for the executions from his own shoulders onto the senate as a body. When later charged with killing citizens without trial, he justified himself by pointing to the senate's guidance.

  Calling senators in order of seniority, Cicero found that the consuls-elect and former consuls all favoured the death penalty. Then Julius Caesar, who was praetor-elect at the time, proposed life imprisonment or custody pending trial. His position won significant support, even though life sentences without a trial were also illegal and, as the sources note, impractical. The tide did not turn until Cato the Younger spoke. Plutarch records that Cato attacked Caesar personally and implied he was in league with the conspirators. Sallust's account has Cato condemn moral decline in the state and criticise the senators for failing to match the strictness of their ancestors. Cato also argued that swift execution would cause defections in Catiline's army and warned, with some exaggeration, that Catiline was nearly upon them. The senate ratified Cicero's proposal. When the sentences were carried out, Cicero pronounced a single Latin word: vixerunt. They have lived. The senators then acclaimed him pater patriae, father of the fatherland.

• 5. The Final Battle

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  Near the town of Pistoria in early January 62 BC, Catiline's remaining men, numbering at least three thousand, met the forces under Gaius Antonius Hybrida. Antonius, Cicero's co-consul, claimed illness at the crucial moment. Marcus Petreius took actual command and defeated the Catilinarian army. Catiline himself was killed in the battle. Antonius was hailed as imperator for the victory, even though he had not led the fight.

  The political reckoning that followed was messier than the military one. Cicero was initially celebrated for saving the state, but Cato also received credit for rousing the senate to act. At the close of the consular year, Cicero attempted to give a valedictory speech and was vetoed by two tribunes of the plebs. One of them, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Nepos, moved to have Cicero charged for executing citizens without trial. The senate stopped that prosecution by threatening to declare anyone who brought the case a public enemy.

  The reprieve was temporary. Publius Clodius Pulcher, serving as tribune in 58 BC, passed a law banishing anyone who had executed a citizen without trial. Cicero fled to Greece. He was recalled to Rome the following year at Pompey's request. The classicist Harriet Flower, writing on the affair, argues that Cicero saved the commonwealth "by circumventing due process and the civil rights of citizens" while also exposing "the consul's complete lack of confidence in the court system on which the New Republic of Sulla was supposed to be based".

• 6. Who Wrote the History

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  Sallust's monograph Bellum Catilinae and Cicero's four Catilinarian orations are the two main ancient accounts, and both are openly hostile to Catiline. Cicero's orations were published around 60 BC, specifically to defend him from political backlash over the executions. Beyond the orations, Cicero also wrote a memoir and a three-book poem about his own consulship, De consulatu suo. His account casts Catiline in terms of personal immorality while largely passing over the economic hardships that drove many conspirators into the plot.

  Sallust was not in Rome in 63 BC. He was likely abroad on military service. He drew on extra-Ciceronean evidence, including oral sources, but Cicero's orations and a now-lost memoir were still core sources for his monograph. Sallust's larger argument, that the Roman republic was collapsing because of moral decline, shaped his portrait of Catiline into a vehicle for that thesis rather than a rounded historical figure. J. T. Ramsey, in a commentary on the monograph, writes that Sallust "fails to allow for a gradual shift in Catiline's strategy and aims as his hopes of reaching the consulship faded, because S. prefers to present Catiline as a through-going villain, the product of the corrupt age, who was bent on the destruction of the state from the very beginning."

  Among the revisionist historians, Kenneth Waters argued in 1970 that Cicero invented much of the conspiracy to have something to show for his consulship, and that the conspirators' alleged plan was, as he put it, prima facie unbelievable. Robin Seager argued in 1973 that Catiline had not fully committed to rebellion when he left Rome in November and only joined Manlius in Etruria on his way to Massilia after concluding that rebellion would better protect his dignitas than exile. Most classicists reject both reconstructions, accepting the broader historicity of the conspiracy while conceding that its threat to the republic was exaggerated in the surviving accounts. Erich Gruen, in Last Generation of the Roman Republic, captures the middle ground: the government was in no real danger of toppling, he writes, but the affair "called to notice a number of authentic social ills which had previously lacked effective expression," and the grain bill that Cato sponsored in 62 BC belongs in that context.