THE CONSPIRACY OF CATILINE

PREFACE

Every man who wishes to rise superior to the lower animals should strive his hardest to avoid living all his days in silent obscurity, like the beasts of the field, creatures which go with their faces to the ground and are the slaves of their bellies. We human beings have mental as well as physical powers; the mind, which we share with gods, is the ruling element in us, while the chief function of the body, which we have in common with the beasts, is to obey. Surely, therefore, it is our intellectual rather than our physical powers that we should use in the pursuit of fame. Since only a short span of life has been vouchsafed us, we must make ourselves remembered as long as may be by those who come after us. Wealth and beauty can give only a fleeting and perishable fame, but intellectual excellence is a glorious and everlasting possession...

It is a pity that kings and rulers do not apply their mental powers as effectively to the preservation of peace as to the prosecution of war. If they did, human life would be less chequered and unstable than it is: we should not see everything drifting to and fro in change and confusion. Sovereignty can easily be maintained by the same qualities as enable a man to acquire it. But when idleness replaces industry, when self restraint and justice give place to lust and arrogance, the moral deterioration brings loss of station in its train. A degenerate ruler is always supplanted by a better man than himself...

Success in agriculture, seafaring, or building always depends on human excellence. But many are the men who, slaves of gluttony and sloth, have gone through life ignorant and un­civilized, as if they were mere sojourners in a foreign land, reversing, surely, the order of nature by treating their bodies as means of gratification and their souls as mere encumbrances. It makes no odds, to my mind, whether such men live or die; alive or dead, no one ever hears of them. The truth is that no man really lives or gets any satisfaction out of life, unless he devotes all his energies, to some task and seeks fame by some notable achievement or by the cultivation of some admirable gift...

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My earliest inclinations led me, like many other young men, to throw myself wholeheartedly into politics. There I found many things against me. Self-restraint, integrity, and virtue were disregarded; unscrupulous conduct, bribery, and profit- seeking were rife. And although, being a stranger to the vices that I saw practised on every hand, I looked on them with scorn, I was led astray by ambition and, with a young man’s weakness, could not tear myself away. However much I tried to dissociate myself from the prevailing corruption, my craving for advancement exposed me to the same odium and slander as all my rivals.

After suffering manifold perils and hardships, peace of mind at last returned to me, and I decided that I must bid farewell to politics for good. But I had no intention of wasting my precious leisure in idleness and sloth, or of devoting my time to agricul­ture or hunting - tasks fit only for slaves. I had formerly been interested in history, and some work which I began in that field had been interrupted by my misguided political ambitions. I therefore took this up again, and decided to write accounts of some episodes in Roman history that seemed particularly worthy of record - a task for which I felt myself the better qualified inasmuch as I was unprejudiced by the hopes and fears of the party man.

It is my intention to give a brief account, as accurate as I can make it, of the conspiracy of Catiline, a criminal enterprise which I consider specially memorable as being unprecedented in itself and fraught with unprecedented dangers to Rome. I must preface my narrative by a short description of Catiline’s character.

Lucius Catiline was of noble birth. He had a powerful intellect and great physical strength, but a vicious and depraved...

O ŽENAMA U RIMU

About this time Catiline is said to have gained many adherents of every condition, including a number of women who in their earlier days had lived extrava­gantly on money that they obtained by prostituting themselves, and then, when advancing age reduced their incomes without changing their luxurious tastes, had run headlong into debt. These women, he thought, would do good service by acting as agitators among the city slaves and organizing acts of incendiarism; their husbands, too, could be either induced to join his cause, or murdered.

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Among their number was Sempronia, a woman who had committed many crimes that showed her to have the reckless daring of a man. Fortune had favoured her abundantly, not only with birth and beauty, but with a good husband and children. Well educated in Greek and Latin literature, she had greater skill in lyre-playing and dancing than there is any need for a respectable woman to acquire, besides many other accomplishments such as minister to dissipation. There was nothing that she set a smaller value on than seemliness and chastity, and she was as careless of her reputation as she was of her money. Her passions were so ardent that she more often made advances to men than they did to her. Many times already she had broken a solemn promise, repudiated a debt by perjury, and been an accessary to murder. At once self-indulgcnt and impecunious, she had gone headlong from bad to worse. Yet her abilities were not to be despised. She could write poetry, crack a joke, and converse at will with decorum, tender feeling, or wantonness; she was in fact a woman of ready wit and considerable charm.

 THE JUGURTHINE WAR

Through the huge deserts until he reached the country of the Gaetulians, a savage, uncivilized race who at that time had never heard of Rome. Collecting a vast number of them, he trained them by slow degrees to keep ranks, follow the standards, and obey commands, and to perform the other duties of soldiers. He then approached intimate friends of King Bocchus of Mauretania enlisting their support by lavish presents and still more lavish promises. With their aid he obtained access to the king himself, and persuaded him to take up arms against the Romans. This proved an easier and simpler matter than it might otherwise have been because at the start of the Jugurthine war Bocchus had sent envoys to Rome asking for a treaty of alliance, and his proposal in spite of the advantage it offered for the conduct of the war just commenced had been rejected, thanks to the intrigues of a few men who, blinded by avarice, expected to be paid for everything they did, honourable or dishonourable...

O ŽENAMA U SJEVERNOJ AFRICI

Moreover, Jugurtha had married Bocchus’s daughter - though it is true such a tie does not count for much with Numidians and Moors, each of whom has as many wives as he can afford; ten or more are quite usual, and kings have a proportionately larger number. Thus their affection, instead of being concentrated on a single consort, is distributed among a whole harem of women all of them alike slightly regarded...