stimulate them to effort and hard work. The fires of passion burned within him; yet he was a keen student of military affairs. For my part I do not think the worldhas ever seen a creature made up of such contrary, divergent, and mutually incompatible interests and appetites.
Who was more agreeable, at one particular time, to men of high rank, and who more intimate with scoundrels? Who at one time a more patriotic citizen, and who a more loathsome enemy of this country? Who more corrupt in his pleasures, and who more able to endure hard work? Who more avaricious in rapacity, and who more lavish in generosity? That man, gentlemen, had many features that were paradoxical. He had a wide circle of friends, and he looked after them well. What he had, he shared with everyone. He helped all his friends in times of need with money, influence, physical exertion, even, if necessary, with recklessness and crime. He could adapt and control the way he was to suit the occasion, and twist and turn his nature this way and that. He could be stern with the serious, relaxed with the free-and-easy, grave with the old, affable with the young, daring with criminals, and dissolute with the depraved. And so this complex, ever-changing character, even when he had collected all the wicked traitors from far and wide, still held many loyal, brave men in his grasp by a sort of pretended semblance of virtue. Indeed, that dastardly attempt to destroy this empire could never have come into being had not that monstrous concentration of so many vices been rooted in certain qualities of skill and endurance.
But that view, though it had some influence on Sallust’s portrayal in the
Catiline
, never took hold. It was instead the uniformly negative portrait that we find in the
Catilinarians
that captured the imagination of posterity. By the time of Virgil, a generation after Cicero, the
Catilinarians
had already become literary classics. Cicero’s invective had become unanswerable: Catiline was the archetypal traitor. In the
Aeneid
, Virgil twice presents Catiline as a figure in Tartarus, paying the penalty for his crimes. In the first of these passages the reference is oblique, and refers to Catiline’s alleged marriage to his own daughter, one of the wilder claims included by Cicero in
In toga candida
in 64: ‘This one forced his daughter’s bed and a marriage forbidden’ (6.623; for the identification of Catiline, see D. H. Berry,
CQ
, NS 42 (1992), 416–20). In the second passage, Virgil has been describing the scenes from Roman history that Vulcan has depicted on the shield he has made for Aeneas, and continues (8.666–9):
Away from these he had added
The abode of Tartarus, the tall portals of Dis,
The punishment of crime, and you, Catiline, clinging
To an overhanging cliff, and trembling before the faces of the Furies.
In the modern era, the invective of the
Catilinarians
continued to castits spell. As late as 1894, one of the scholarly commentators on these speeches, A. S. Wilkins, could write, ‘Swept away in the eddy of the universal immorality, in early youth Catilina flung himself into all possible pleasures and excesses which, without undermining his gigantic strength, blunted his moral feelings, and, through his inclination to ambition, led him into a chain of awful crimes, through which his name stands out in history as one of the monsters of mankind’ (p.ix). In the twentieth century, some scholars tried to break free from Cicero’s presentation by arguing that Catiline was set up by Cicero, and that he had nothing to do with Manlius’ rising and/or the conspiracy in the city. But not even they seriously attempted to defend Catiline’s character. In the end, it has proved impossible to escape from the power of Cicero’s denunciation.
In reality, Catiline’s conspiracy was not so very different from the many other outbreaks of civil disorder which occurred in the unstable world of the late
Who was more agreeable, at one particular time, to men of high rank, and who more intimate with scoundrels? Who at one time a more patriotic citizen, and who a more loathsome enemy of this country? Who more corrupt in his pleasures, and who more able to endure hard work? Who more avaricious in rapacity, and who more lavish in generosity? That man, gentlemen, had many features that were paradoxical. He had a wide circle of friends, and he looked after them well. What he had, he shared with everyone. He helped all his friends in times of need with money, influence, physical exertion, even, if necessary, with recklessness and crime. He could adapt and control the way he was to suit the occasion, and twist and turn his nature this way and that. He could be stern with the serious, relaxed with the free-and-easy, grave with the old, affable with the young, daring with criminals, and dissolute with the depraved. And so this complex, ever-changing character, even when he had collected all the wicked traitors from far and wide, still held many loyal, brave men in his grasp by a sort of pretended semblance of virtue. Indeed, that dastardly attempt to destroy this empire could never have come into being had not that monstrous concentration of so many vices been rooted in certain qualities of skill and endurance.
But that view, though it had some influence on Sallust’s portrayal in the
Catiline
, never took hold. It was instead the uniformly negative portrait that we find in the
Catilinarians
that captured the imagination of posterity. By the time of Virgil, a generation after Cicero, the
Catilinarians
had already become literary classics. Cicero’s invective had become unanswerable: Catiline was the archetypal traitor. In the
Aeneid
, Virgil twice presents Catiline as a figure in Tartarus, paying the penalty for his crimes. In the first of these passages the reference is oblique, and refers to Catiline’s alleged marriage to his own daughter, one of the wilder claims included by Cicero in
In toga candida
in 64: ‘This one forced his daughter’s bed and a marriage forbidden’ (6.623; for the identification of Catiline, see D. H. Berry,
CQ
, NS 42 (1992), 416–20). In the second passage, Virgil has been describing the scenes from Roman history that Vulcan has depicted on the shield he has made for Aeneas, and continues (8.666–9):
Away from these he had added
The abode of Tartarus, the tall portals of Dis,
The punishment of crime, and you, Catiline, clinging
To an overhanging cliff, and trembling before the faces of the Furies.
In the modern era, the invective of the
Catilinarians
continued to castits spell. As late as 1894, one of the scholarly commentators on these speeches, A. S. Wilkins, could write, ‘Swept away in the eddy of the universal immorality, in early youth Catilina flung himself into all possible pleasures and excesses which, without undermining his gigantic strength, blunted his moral feelings, and, through his inclination to ambition, led him into a chain of awful crimes, through which his name stands out in history as one of the monsters of mankind’ (p.ix). In the twentieth century, some scholars tried to break free from Cicero’s presentation by arguing that Catiline was set up by Cicero, and that he had nothing to do with Manlius’ rising and/or the conspiracy in the city. But not even they seriously attempted to defend Catiline’s character. In the end, it has proved impossible to escape from the power of Cicero’s denunciation.
In reality, Catiline’s conspiracy was not so very different from the many other outbreaks of civil disorder which occurred in the unstable world of the late
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