The Rhetoric of “Catiline” in Cicero and Sallust: Plural Authenticities in Roman Crisis

Eton College, Windsor, Berkshire, UK

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Abstract

Catiline became a portable paradigm for Roman arguments about law, virtue, and emergency power. This essay reads Cicero’s in Catilinam I alongside Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae to show how genre - live oratory versus retrospective historiography - governs what can be seen, said, and silenced. In Cicero, a politics of vision structures authority: the consul claims to “see” the conspiracy and performs guardianship in the moment of crisis. In Sallust, two internal threads organize the history: the narrator’s moral frame, which situates the revolt within a longer arc of Republican decay; and the staged debate in the Senate, where “Caesar” and “Cato” appear as Sallust’s constructed exempla - lenity and legality versus austere virtue. Read together, these texts yield not one Catiline, but plural authenticities performed under pressure: Cicero enacts custodial vigilance; Sallust’s narrator models moral historiography; his Caesar rehearses clementia as precedent; his Cato insists on severitas. Across both, three recurring features structure crisis-talk: bad precedents, manufactured emergencies, and exemplary violence.