Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?. The famous incipit—‘And what are you reading, Master Buddenbrook? Ah, Cicero! A difficult text, the work of a great Roman orator. Quousque tandem, Catilina. Huh-uh-hmm, yes, I've not entirely forgotten my Latin, either’— already impressed contemporaries, including some ordinarily not so readily impressed. It rings through Sallust's version of Catiline's shadowy address to his followers, when he asks regarding the injustices they suffer : quae quousque tandem patiemini, o fortissumi uiri?. More playfully, (...) and less well-known, Sallust employed the expression again in a speech by Philippus : uos autem, patres conscripti, quo usque cunctando rem publicam intutam patiemini et uerbis arma temptabitis?. Soon afterwards it served Cicero's son, who, as governor of Asia, put down Hybreas fils for having dared to quote from his father's work in his presence : ‘age’, inquit [sc. Marcus Tullius], ‘non putas me didicisse patris mei: “quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra”?’. Just about the same time, Livy recalled it in order to colour Manlius’ exhortation of his followers : quousque tandem ignorabitis uires uestras, quas natura ne beluas quidem ignorare uoluit? … audendum est aliquid uniuersis aut omnia singulis patienda. quousque me circumspectabitis?. Thereafter Quintilian would refer to it twice, when discussing apostrophe and rhetorical questions, just a couple of years before Tacitus has the maladroit Q. Haterius encourage Tiberius to seize the reins—quo usque patieris, Caesar, non adesse caput rei publicae? ; a few decades later still, Apuleius puts it into the mouth of the slave who chastises his master, now in asinine form : ‘quo usque tandem’, inquit, ‘cantherium patiemur istum paulo ante cibariis iumentorum, nunc etiam simulacris deorum infestum?’. He trusted, no doubt, that the famous question would alert his readers more than anything to the many ‘similarities between Catiline and Lucius’, in order to have them appreciate this ‘ludicrous copy of Cicero's arch-enemy’. Some time after, and in a different corner of the Empire altogether, a teacher's bronze statue would carry the inscription:VERBACICRO | NISQVOVSQ | TANDEMABVTE | RECATELINAPA | TIENTIANOS | TRA. (shrink)

Any educated Roman in late antiquity would immediately have recognized the figure of Catiline, for the simple reason that Sallust, together with Vergil, Cicero, and Terence, formed the core of the school curriculum. When his grandson starts school, Ausonius rejoices in a second chance to read the Catiline and the Histories.

That Sallust owed a considerable debt to the writings of Cato the Censor was observed in antiquity, and the observation has often been discussed and expanded on by modern scholars. The ancient references to Sallust's employment of Cato are mainly in the context of his adoption of an archaic style, and specifically Catonian vocabulary. But the choice of Cato as a model had an obvious significance that went beyond the purely stylistic. Sallust's works articulate extreme pessimism at the moral state (...) of late-Republican Rome, and do so partly by contrasting the modern age with a prelapsarian time of near-untrammelled virtue, brought to an end only by the fall of Carthage and the consequent dominance of Roman power, which in turn led to moral corruption. Similarly, Cato famously stood in his own day for moral rectitude—and specifically appealed to past virtue as the standard to which he wished to hold his contemporaries. Sallust, by writing in a Catonian style, aligns himself with that tradition. (shrink)

Summary This paper investigates the ties of the Statilius family to the Caesarian party and to Roman politics more generally during the last decades of the Roman Republic. After establishing the gens Statilia's origin and potential political position in Lucania, it contests earlier suppositions about what started the family's prominence in Rome proper. The paper argues that, instead of the Statilii catapulting into prominence at Rome during the time of the Augustan novus homo Titus Statilius Taurus, their involvement began earlier, (...) as part of the equestrian branch of the conspiratorial followers of Catiline, a datum which might provide enlightenment about the „missing clients“ of Julius Caesar's early career. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between Machiavelli's The Prince and Sallust's War with Catiline. In particular, I will argue that Sallust's War with Catiline, and especially the debate between Cato and Caesar over the treatment of the Catilinarian conspirators, provide both a model and a source for portions of Machiavelli's The Prince often held to be most inconsistent with classical thought. Moreover, I will argue that Machiavelli, in describing his ideal prince and the attributes he should adopt, recreates (...) the rhetorical and deliberative context faced by Cato in his debate with Caesar before the Roman senate concerning the treatment of the Catilinarian conspirators. This context, marked by a confusion of moral language and a misunderstanding of virtue, enables Machiavelli's prince, like Sallust's Cato, to appear to depart from conventional virtue and to criticize would- be Caesars. (shrink)

Shortly after his accidental transformation into an ass, Lucius attempts to return to his human form by grabbing some roses decorating a statue of the patron goddess of the quadrupeds, Epona. But his servulus feels outraged at the sacrilegious act. Jumping to his feet in a temper and acting as a faithful defender of the sacred place, he addresses his former human owner as a new ‘Catiline’ : Quod me pessima scilicet sorte conantem servulus meus, cui semper equi cura (...) mandata fuerat, repente conspiciens indignatus exurgit et: ‘quo usque tandem’ inquit ‘cantherium patiemur istum paulo ante cibariis iumentorum, nunc etiam simulacris deorum infestum? Quin iam ego istum sacrilegum debilem claudumque reddam.’My attempt was frustrated by what seemed to be the worst of luck: my own dear servant, who always had the task of looking after my horse, suddenly saw what was going on, and jumped up in a rage. ‘For how long’, he cried, ‘are we to endure this clapped-out beast? A minute ago his target was the animals' rations, and now he is attacking even the statues of deities! See if I don't maim and lame this sacrilegious brute!’A self-evident instance of parody, the servant's words ironically reformulate one of the most familiar texts of Republican oratory, the famous opening of Cicero's first invective against Catiline, delivered before the assembled senate in the Temple of Jupiter Stator on 8 November 63 b.c.: the substitution of a low and familiar word such as cantherium for Catilinam underpins the comic undertone of the entire passage, imbued with further reminiscences of Cicero. Scholars debate whether the servant's verbal attack against Lucius is a parodic adaptation of Cicero's opening invective or rather a spoof on Catiline's paradoxical reading of Cicero's phrase in Sallust. It is safer to assume a case of double imitation, not unusual in Apuleius' work. (shrink)

Izhodišče prispevka je domneva, da nad precejšnjim delom Salustijevega historiografskega opusa lebdi senca izkušnje dolge državljanske vojne v Rimu v času njegovega življenja. To je razvidno iz zgodovinarjevega prikaza surovega obračuna nobilitete z bratoma Grakh in iz njegove upodobitve Sule in njegove vladavine kot vira moralnega kaosa v desetletju po njegovem zavzetju Rima. Ko razmišlja o vzrokih krize rimske republike v šestdesetih letih pr. Kr. in v času nastanka svojih spisov, se Salustij sicer skuša predstaviti kot nepristranski opazovalec, ki občasno (...) biča napake političnih voditeljev obeh sprtih taborov, aristokracije in ljudstva. Vendar zgodovinar gotovo ne deli Ciceronovega mnenja o slogi med osrednjima skupinama vladajočega sloja kot zadostnem zdravilu za rimske težave. Preveč resno je jemal družbene korenine krize. Pri tem je nedvomno pripisoval odgovornost za krizo vladajočemu sloju. Zato si po Salustijevem mnenju pozornost zaslužijo celo neverodostojni glasniki sprememb, kakršen je bil Katilina. Po eni strani se Salustij ni odmaknil od uničujočega Ciceronovega prikaza voditelja zarote in ga je še dodatno prikazal kot demagoga, ki se, kadar mu to koristi, predstavlja za tipičnega člana nobilitete. Toda po drugi strani slika njegov razmislek o položaju v Rimu kot verodostojen, zlasti ko gre za Katilinov goreč napad na vodilno elito. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new synthetic account of the presence of Cicero as both character and source in Lucan's Bellum Ciuile. Lucan's treatment is derived primarily from Virgil's technique for creating intertextually complex characters, but further builds on Sallust's displacement of Cicero in his narrative of the Catilinarian conspiracy and on the declamatory practice of reducing the orator to a few prominent and recognizable traits. Cicero the character, as he briefly appears at the opening of the seventh book, is not (...) simply an ahistorical caricature: he is constructed through a careful series of allusions designed to indict his use of violence in the suppression of Catiline. Other prominent aspects of Cicero in the tradition are displaced and transferred to other characters more important to Lucan's design, Cato and Pompey. Lucan's depiction of Pompey, especially his death and decapitation, draws on the language and affect of the tradition associated with Cicero, using Cicero's own words and the obituary of Cicero in the lost historical epic of Cornelius Severus. Finally, the language of Cicero's peace-making efforts in his correspondence, suppressed in Lucan's depiction of him as a warmonger, forms an important part of the narrator's own emotional evocations of the impending catastrophe of civil war. The combination of models Lucan uses is more broadly reflective of his technique in composing a historical epic. (shrink)

Pliny's celebration of Cicero's consular achievements contains a striking anomaly, namely the assertion that Cicero proscribed Marcus Antonius(HN7.117). That statement turns Cicero, the victim of Antonius’ murderous vendetta, into the one who wielded the executioner's axe, and it abruptly shifts the focus of the passage from 63 to 43b.c.Two slight corrections to the Latin text can eliminate the intrusion of the proscriptions by substituting a reference to the control Cicero exercised in 63 over Gaius Antonius, his consular colleague and an (...) old ally of Catiline. In hisIn Pisonem(§5), Cicero takes credit for combatting the threat posed by his colleague, and it is highly probable thatHN7.117 mentioned Gaius (not Marcus) Antonius as well, since Pliny's summary of Cicero's consular deeds and honours is nearly identical to the one found inPis. 4–6. The beauty of the emended text is that it restores both historical fact and a logical progression to the overall structure of Pliny's encomium. (shrink)

Of the various contests held by Aeneas to mark the anniversary of his father's death the ship-race is marked out by its length and initial position as especially important. However its precise significance is by no means obvious. That Virgil intends it to have some relevance to events of later Roman history seems fairly clear. First, we are told the names of the families descended from three of the four captains involved — Cluentii, Memmii and Sergii. It seems therefore that (...) we should look to the activities of members of these families to discover Virgil's intention. Two families — Cluentii and Memmii — are a mystery, since none of their members plays an obviously prominent role in the events of Virgil's own time. However, Sergestus and the Sergii point unmistakably towards Catiline. Sergestus' rash folly, which is nearly the ruin of his men and his ship, exactly matches Catifine's own furor, which would have destroyed Rome. Even the name of his ship, Centaurus, reinforces the point. (shrink)

This new edition of Sallust, the first critical text for over thirty years, is based on a fresh study and collation of the manuscripts, as well as careful consideration of the indirect tradition. Besides the well-known Catiline and Jugurtha, the volume contains more than seventy of the longer or more interesting fragments of the Histories and also the spurious Epistulae ad Caesarem and Invectivae. These inclusions will prove extremely valuable to students and scholars alike.The works of Sallust, written in (...) the latter half of the first century BC, are commonly studied not only by classicists and ancient historians, but also by students of Latin prose. This new edition should therefore prove a particularly welcome addition to the series of Oxford Classical Texts. (shrink)

The Agricola of Tacitus differs from other surviving biographies of antiquity. It exhibits some features more characteristic of an oration, yet the preface and composition of the biography as a whole recall Sallust's Iugurtha and Catiline. Then, the central biographical section of the work is interrupted by an excursus on the geography and peoples of Britain, and an historical outline of the Roman occupation of the island. It has been argued that the style of these chapters would be more (...) appropriate to history than to biography, and this same historical style recurs in the pair of commanders' speeches which precede the account of the battle of Mons Graupius. (shrink)

In his article , 97–105) R. Reneham rightly classes Sail. Cat.20.9 as a conscious imitation of Cic.Cat.1.1, but adopts the unsatisfactory explanation of parody. Such parody is, as he notes, without parallel in Sallust and ineptly distracts attention from the vigorous development of Catiline's rhetoric. Elsewhere mimesis is regularly a compliment to the author imitated, often closely functional by reinforcing a point from the parallel of a similar context . Similarly I suggest that here Sallust recalls Cicero's words to (...) illustrate that perversion of vocabulary which is the keynote of Catiline's speech: just as he misuses, for example, the terms virtus fidesque at the beginning of his speech, in stark contrast to Sallust's own definition, so he perverts the famous words of the attack which revealed his true villainy in similar savage indignatio. (shrink)

In the Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli claims that writers who are afraid to condemn Caesar instead criticize Catiline. I argue that Machiavelli follows this advice by inverting it. He openly condemns Caesar and the empire he founded while signaling that he has in mind another inimical example: the Church. He signals his intention by echoing Cicero’s fourth Catilinarian oration, imitating Cicero’s image of the ruin of Rome if Catiline’s conspiracy were to succeed through his own vision of the (...) Italy wrought by wicked Roman emperors who succeeded Caesar. The reader of Machiavelli who recognizes this echo is in a position to see Machiavelli’s own Catilinarian oration against another successor of Caesar. In making my argument, I draw on Rex Stem’s treatment of the functions of exemplementarity as employed by authors of texts and as received by their readers. (shrink)

As Fragment 46 of the first book of Sallust's Histories Maurenbrecher prints: Magnis operibus perfectis obsidium cepit per L. Catilinam legatum. This he takes in effect to mean that Lucretius Ofella after the completion of great siege works received reinforcements brought by L. Catiline legate of Sulla. The interpretation depends largely upon his contention that the phrase obsidium cepit is to be taken as equivalent to subsidium cepit, for which he claims the authority, ultimately, of Verrius Flaccus as represented (...) by Festus p. 193M s.v. obsidium. Though opinions may occasionally have differed as to the precise event documented by the fragment, this central assumption seems to have gone unchallenged by historians. Yet it rests upon remarkably insecure foundations. The reading cepit has scant authority and the interpretation of obsidium as subsidium none at all. It is in fact the result of misunderstanding the passage of Festus in which the text is embedded. In Lindsay's edition the Festus entry which is here quoted in full runs as follows: Obsidium tamquam praesidium, subsidium recte dicitur, cuius etiam auctor C. Laelius pro se apud populum : ‘Ut in nobis terra marique simul obsidium facerent.’ Et Sallustius historiarum I : ‘Magnis operibus perfectis obsidium coepit per L. Catilinam legatum.’ Coepit is the reading of the manuscript F, which has been generally accepted, while cepit appears only in the Aldine edition where it may well be an emendation or even an error, there being no obvious independent source which might have provided it. For Maurenbrecher it was merely the ‘correction’ of Corte who produced the earliest roughly chronological arrangement of the fragments of Sallust's Histories. (shrink)

In discussing the authorship of the first suasoria preserved in Cod. Vat. Lat. 3864 I said that an argument against its Sallustian origin had been found in the words ‘paulo ante hoc bellum’ of 4, 1. By this phrase the author marks an interval of twenty-seven years, and I suggested, as had been done before, that perhaps this is hardly the way ‘in which a man still under forty would refer to so long an interval which had ended only four (...) years before he was writing.’ The elasticity of Latin words indicating number and magnitude is familiar, but by the kindness of Dr. Rice Holmes I have been reminded of a place where some of the more interesting examples have been collected. Dr. Postgate, on p. lxxiv of his edition of Lucan VIII., mentions among other Caesarian passages B.C. 3, 106, 1, where the few days concerned in ‘Caesar paucos dies in Asia moratus’ are something like three weeks; and B.G. 3, 20, 1, where ‘paucis ante annis’ dates an event which probably happened either twenty-one or twenty-two years before the time with which the narrative is concerned. To these Dr. Holmes would add Cic. in Cat. 3, 1, 3, and, by way of contrast, Caesar B.C. 3, 25, 1. In the former the ‘eruption’ of Catiline on the night of November 8–9 is described by Cicero on December 3, twenty-four days later, as having occurred ‘paucis ante diebus’: in the latter a period of scarcely three months is ‘multi menses.’. (shrink)

The first sentence of the Annals reads urbem Romam a principio reges habuere. Commentators observe the echo of Sallust, Catiline 6.1 urbem Romam, sicuti ego accepi, condidere atque habuere initio Troiani, and of Claudius, ILS 212 quondam reges hanc tenuere urbem. In a stimulating recent contribution David Levene also compares the first sentence of Justinus' Epitome of the Histories of Pompeius Trogus: principio rerum gentium nationumque imperium penes reges erat. A fourth potential model may now be taken into consideration: (...) Ἀθηναῖοι τὸ μὲν ἐξ ἀρχῆς ἐχρῶντο βασιλɛίαι. (shrink)

Tacitus' use and adaptation of phrases from earlier Latin writers is well known. By this means he adds to his own context something of the atmosphere belonging to the context from which the phrase is borrowed. So, for example, when at Ann. 4. 1 he describes Seianus in language modelled on Sallust's description of Catiline , the reader is immediately made aware that he is to expect Seianus to display the same resolute villainy that Catiline had shown.

Tacitus' use and adaptation of phrases from earlier Latin writers is well known. By this means he adds to his own context something of the atmosphere belonging to the context from which the phrase is borrowed. So, for example, when at Ann. 4. 1 he describes Seianus in language modelled on Sallust's description of Catiline, the reader is immediately made aware that he is to expect Seianus to display the same resolute villainy that Catiline had shown.

If any words are unmistakably Ciceronian, these are. Every schoolboy knew them. Generations of Latin prose composers have trotted them out with unassailable confidence. It seems almost indelicate to suggest that they are not Ciceronian at all; but it would solve the problem presented by Sallust Cat. 20.9 if this were the case. Sallust's placing of the hallowed words in the mouth of Catiline has always been something of a scandal, to be laughed off , or played down.