Catiline

Latin name Lucius Sergius Catilina. ?108--62 bc, Roman politician: organized an unsuccessful conspiracy against Cicero (63--62)

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Catiline

(Lucius Sergius Catilina). Born circa 108 B.C.; died 62 B.C., near Pistoria (present-day Pistoia), northern Etruria. Roman politician.

In the civil wars of 88–82 B.C., Catiline was a follower of Sulla, and later he participated in the proscriptions. He became praetorin 68 and served as propraetor in the province of Africa in 67–66.Upon his return, he was accused of extortions but was acquittedby the court. The trial prevented Catiline from participating inelections for the consulship. Apparently during that time Cati-line plotted his first conspiracy, a plan for a coup d’etat that wasnot carried out (66). In 64, Catiline was defeated in the consularelections (Cicero was elected), but in 63 he stood for electionagain, trying to attract all the dissatisfied by promising debtcancellation. After his second defeat Catiline organized a con-spiracy for the forceful seizure of power, but he could not carryout his intentions because the consul Cicero learned of the plot.Having received extraordinary powers from the Senate, Cicerodemanded (on Nov. 7, 63) that Catiline leave Rome immedi-ately. Catiline went to Etruria, where his followers gathered anarmy. In December 63, Catiline’s followers in Rome were ar-rested, after being exposed, and were later executed. Catiline fellin a battle with the consular army. The vivid portrayal of Cati-line given by his ambitious enemy Cicero (orations against Cati-line) and the historian Sallust gave rise in modern times to aromantic view of Catiline and an exaggerated notion of the im-portance of his conspiracy.

V. M. SMIRIN

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Cicero called out Catiline and his prominent co-conspirators for precisely what they were: traitors, subversives, infectious corrupters, a "plague"--worse even than murderers.

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(7) Scholarship on both Sejanus and Catiline tends to follow this line of argument by abstracting the play from its acting and repertory contexts, focusing instead on its connection to contemporary aristocratic politics (Philip Ayres, 'Introduction', Ben Jonson, Sejanus His Fall, [Manchester, 1998], 16-22), its links to classical histories written in other genres in the early seventeenth century (Worden, 'Jonson Among the Historians'), or its place in Jonson's development as a writer (Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist [Cambridge, 1984], 92-120).

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The book's sixth chapter continues on with the theme of luxury and its relation to the body politic, a motif emphasized in the preceding segment, with its analysis of early modern Roman tragedies, specifically Jonson's Catiline and Shakespeare's Coriolanus.

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The organisers and perpetrators of the attacks against the rulers are depicted in dark shades as immoral and vicious figures, whose traits are mainly drawn from the model of the Sallust's Catiline, the classical and traditional prototype of conspirators.

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The book begins at 63 BCE with the conflict between Catiline and Cicero and ends in 212 CE, when Caracalla made every free inhabitant of the Roman Empire a full Roman citizen, thereby eroding the difference between conqueror and conquered and completing a process of expanding the rights and privileges of Roman citizenship begun a thousand years earlier.

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Cicero's position was not merely theoretical: He was consul in the year 63, when he marshaled the Senate to authorize war against Catiline and his supporters, a battle that Cicero regarded as waged for the very salvation of the Republic.

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Sallust describes Sullan veterans who joined Catiline in the 60s BC as spendthrift upstarts who had squandered their ill-gotten properties and hoped for new civil wars and confiscations, to escape their debts (Thein, 2010: 84; Sall.

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