Issues in Catiline: Rebel of the Roman Republic (Part 3 of 4)

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

In our own time, Catiline has been featured in Richard Harris’ Cicero Trilogy as a bigger villain than even Cicero made him out to be. Perhaps the most realistic and intriguing modern picture of Catiline in novels appears in Steven Saylor’s Roma sub Rosa series, with one book – Catilina’s Riddle – devoted to him. Saylor depicts Catiline as a Bill Clinton made of sterner stuff.

    In the last fifty years, the Catilinarian conspiracy has attracted a great deal of attention from historians, prompting a number of ingenuous reinterpretations of Catiline’s story:

• Robin Seager has rejected the traditional unitary conspiracy theory embodied in my book in favor of collections of different conspiracies headed by different individuals, including Manlius, whose camp Catiline joins only at the last moment before going into exile in Massalia. 
• 
  K. H. Waters has suggested that Catiline was in many ways a bogeyman created by Cicero as a way of uniting the senatorial and equestrian orders in order to maintain oligarchical supremacy. 
• Barbara Levick has suggested Catiline was an ally and presumably a puppet of Pompey, although she candidly admits there is no evidence for such a connection. 

Any of these versions of Catiline’s story may be correct, but the weight of the evidence is against each one of them.
    The significance of the Catilinarian conspiracy is not that it failed but that it came somewhat close to succeeding. This fact demonstrates that the Roman Republic in its last century of existence rested on a very shaky foundation because of its failures to deal with the large number of problems confronting it. There is a general consensus among historians that these problems arose from the city-state’s expansion beyond Italy. Among the key issues were

1. proper governance and taxation of the provinces so that the provincials were not subjected to extortion by Roman governors or bankruptcy by the publicani (Roman tax collectors);
2. corruption in both the law courts and in the political process due in large part to the riches available to those who were elected to office, which was a prerequisite to becoming a provincial governor;
3. lack of a system to compensate the Roman armies, which were no longer composed of citizens but rather of professional soldiers;
4. the demands of the non-Roman Italians, the friends and allies of the Senate and Roman People (amici et socii Senatus Populusque Romanus) for admission to full Roman citizenship;
5. the decline of small farmers in some parts of Italy due to their inability to compete with the slaves in latifundia (slave plantations owned by the members of the senatorial and equites classes – i.e., the rich elite); and
6. the rise of the urban proletariat in Rome itself.

    These problems were not capable of easy resolution but neither were they insolvable. Indeed, this failure to resolve problems provided a groundswell of support for the conspiracy and gave it an apparent chance of success, and eventually led to the downfall of the Republic. It would come as no surprise to a discerning reader that the Republic fell within 15 years of the conspiracy.

Inscribed bronze bust of
Cato the Younger from Volubilis

While the issue of why the Republic fell is beyond the scope of my book, it nevertheless deals with it tangentially. It features character sketches of the Romans who dominated the last generation of the Roman Republic: Cicero, Crassus, Caesar, Catulus, Pompey and Cato. Nothing in these character sketches or in the actions of the individuals in question suggests that they had any interest in – or willingness to address – any of the significant issues confronting the Republic. Most of these men, particularly Cicero, had the intellectual ability to recognize the problems but none were really willing to deal with them. Cicero in particular was a doctrinaire conservative who served as a toady of the oligarchy and the mouthpiece of reaction. The possible exception to this generalization is Cato, who in 63 carried a measure to alleviate the sufferings of the urban proletariat. But his action may have been more in the Roman tradition of throwing the dog a bone when he becomes too annoying than in trying to address the real problem of the urban proletariat.

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.