Issues in Catiline: Rebel of the Roman Republic (Part 4 of 4)

Pen & Sword Books Ltd, 2023
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By James T. Carney

Catiline: Rebel of the Roman Republic suggests that the Republic fell because the members of the elite were unwilling to deal with the basic problems outlined in Part 3. The only issue that the elite did address was the need to expand Roman citizenship to all Italians, but it required the Social War to bring it about. 

    Solutions to any of these problems required the governing classes (and sometimes the citizenry as a whole) to give up some of their economic and social “goods” for the benefit of the Republic. The basic obstacle to any reform is that it requires sacrifices on the part of one or more groups of powerful citizenry.
    Thus, extension of the franchise meant dilution of voting power and consequently a loss of some political power by all Romans. Extension of the franchise downgraded the status of the poorer Roman citizens just as freedom for African American slaves downgraded the status of poor white people in the South.
    Agrarian reform would result in a loss of income to both the senatorial class and the equites who had occupied the public lands in exchange for the payment of small fees. Any method of providing for compensation of legionnaires upon completion of service would also come at the expense of the two upper classes and deprive generals of a tool they used to leverage leadership of unpaid soldiers into political power. Reform failed because the majority of the elite (and also of the public at large) were unwilling to pay the price to solve these problems. Brunt recognizes that the ruling class’s “inability to solve problems that arose from Rome’s expansion…was a critical factor in the fall of the Republic.”

Sallust’s comment about the impact of the restoration of the tribuneship in 70 has broad application to the body politic as a whole and in some ways constitutes the most concise criticism of the political elite in the last generation of the Roman Republic:

Bust of Marcus Licinius Crassus,
in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek,
Copenhagen

For after the office of tribune had been restored in the consulship of Gn. Pompeius and M. Crassus, many young men whose age and disposition made them aggressive obtained this position and then began to excite the commons by their attacks on the senate and further inflamed the people by bribery and promises so that they could become more influential and powerful. Against these men and their allies, the greater part of the aristocracy strove with all their might, ostensibly on behalf of the senate but actually for the sake of their own power. For, to tell the truth in a few words, all who disturbed the Republic used specious pretenses, some declaring that they defended the right of the people; others claiming that they upheld the authority of the senate, but all, under the guise of the public good, furthered only their own individual aims.

Sallust had his deficiencies as a historian but as an astute analyst of the political state of the Roman Republic, he was unequalled.

A final issue dealt with in a separate chapter of my book is the issue of historical accuracy – that is, to what extent can we really know the “truth” about Catiline and the conspiracy, given the loss of so much classical material over the centuries and the problem of deliberate bias or inherited bias (resulting from the use of biased sources)? (Of course, there is a broader philosophical issue that is not addressed: the fundamental epistemological issue of how do we know anything.)

Diodorus Siculus as depicted
in a 19th-century

    This chapter provides a critical examination of the contemporary or primary sources for the conspiracy – Cicero, Sallust, Q. Cicero and Diodorus Siculus – in terms of both the authors’ knowledge and their biases. It emphasizes that much of the Ciceronian material consists of rewritten speeches such as the Catilinarians or closing arguments in which an astute trial lawyer such as Cicero did everything he could to pull the wool over the eyes of the jury to convince them to let his obviously guilty client escape justice. 

    The chapter also focuses on the secondary sources of information – Asconius, Plutarch, Suetonius, and Dio Cassius – whose importance stems from the fact that they had access to primary sources no longer extant, and they had no direct political bias, although they did suffer from source bias and intellectual bias. 

    A significant part of this chapter deals with the problems confronted by the secondary sources in terms of researching and writing. These problems stemmed from the absence of public records for the Republic, the limited existence of public libraries, and the logistical difficulties of working with papyri rolls without chapter headings and paginations, let alone indexes. The absence of public records was a tremendous handicap to the secondary ancient historians. 

    As a trial lawyer, I am well aware that the best evidence of what happened is not post facto, self-serving statements by interested witnesses but contemporaneous documents that have not been altered. The wonder is not that the secondary ancient sources are not perfect but that these writers were more accurate and insightful than they should have been, given the difficulties they faced.

For Further Reading:

• Brunt, P. A., The Fall of the Roman Republic and Related Essays (Oxford, 1988)
• Epstein, D.F., Personal Enmity in Roman Politics, 218-43 B.C. (London, 1987)
• Gruen, E. S., The Last Generation of the Roman Republic (Berkeley 1974, paperback in 1995)
• MacDonald, C. M., ed. and trans. Cicero X (Catilinarians, Murena, Sulla and Flacco) (Cambridge, 1977, reprinted 1996)
• Syme, Ronald, The Roman Revolution (Oxford, 1939, paperback in 2002)

Copyright © 2023 by James T. Carney James T. Carney is a student of history who likes to visit its monuments and museums and report on them with a critical eye and some humor. Attorney-at-law and long-time resident of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.