Against Catiline 1
[1] How long will you go on, Catiline, abusing our patience? For how long will even that fury of yours keep slipping from our fingers? Where will your unharnessed recklessness finally stop? The night-guard on the Palatine, the watch in the city, the fear of the people, the uproar among all good men, this most secure location for the senate to meet, the faces and the looks on the faces of these people, do they not move you even in the slightest? Your plans are obvious, you realise? Your conspiracy, by the intelligence of all these men, is already kept constricted, can’t you see? What you’re up to tonight, tomorrow night, where you will go, who you will call together, what plans you will plot - which of us do you think doesn’t know it all already? [2] Oh, how times have changed! Oh, how people have too! The senate’s seen this. The consul knows, yet he is still alive. Alive? Hah! He even came into the senate, started taking part in public counsel, and with his eyes he is picking out and dooming to death each and every one of us. However, we will prove to be men brave enough for the state, if we can avoid that fury and those weapons of yours. Your execution, Catiline, ordered by the consul, has already been a long time coming, your disease should have been culled with you alone, before you started plotting against us [all for a long time already].
[3] Is it really the case that the noblest man, P. Scipio, pontifex maximus, killed Ti. Gracchus as a private citizen, though he was only gently rocking the state; but Catiline - laying waste to the world in slaughter and fire, or so he wishes - is being tolerated by us consuls? Listen, I’ve not even mentioned tales from too long ago, when C. Servilius Ahala cut down Sp. Maelius, who was eager for revolution. Long ago, long ago, in this very state there was once such virtue that brave men would restrain a dangerous citizen with stricter tortures than their most bitter enemy. We have had a meeting of the senate against you, Catiline, and it was direct and serious: we are not lacking a counsel of the state, nor the authority of this rank of men: it is us, us, I say, us consuls who are lacking.
[4] II. At one time, the senate decided, while L. Opimius looked on as consul, that nothing harmful should lay hands on the state. Not one night passed, before even the suspicion of uprising lead to the slaughter of C. Gracchus, a man of the most renowned father, grandfather, ancestors - slaughtered along with the ex-consul M. Fulvius and his children. After a similar decree from the senate, while C. Marius and L. Valerius were consuls, the state was released; wasn’t it only one day later, that L. Saturninus the tribune of the plebs and C. Servilius the praetor were quite literally stopped dead in their tracks as punishment by the state? But, for twenty days now, have we really been allowing the keen brilliance of these men to grow blunt? Look - the senate has made a decision, now just as before, but it has been hidden and tucked away on tablets, as if a sword in a sheath: this decree of the senate should have caused your immediate killing, Catiline. But you live, and you do not live to put your recklessness down, but to build it up. I would love it, senators, if I had proven gentle, I would love it if I had not buckled under such dangers to the state, but now I must find myself guilty of inaction and inability.
[5] Camps have been stationed in Italy against the people of Rome, in Etruria. Day by day, our enemy grows in number; but the general of this camp and the leader of the enemy is here within our walls, and even now in the senate, before your eyes: you see this parasite working every day bringing some disaster against the state. If I have already captured you, Catiline, if I am going to order your execution, I know that I should worry not that all good men would say I acted too late, but that one man might say I acted too cruel. In truth, despite this case being certain, I myself have not yet been drawn to carry out this deed which should have been done long ago. You will be killed at last, when no longer anyone so perverse, so corrupt, so similar to you can be found, who might say that it was done illegally. [6] For as long as there is somebody at all who would dare defend you, you will live, and you will live just as you are living now: trapped by my many strong guards, to stop you being able to make any movement against the state. The eyes and ears of many men, just as they have been doing up to now, without you noticing, will watch you and guard against you.
III. And Catiline? What more could you possibly be waiting for, since night cannot cloak your horrific meetings in darkness nor can any private house contain the whispers of your conspiracy, since everything is on display, since everything has broken out? Stop thinking like that, trust me, forget about the slaughter and fires. You are held on all sides; the light has made all your plans clearer to us; you can see that I know them.
[7] Do you not remember that on 20th October, I said in the senate the exact date on which C. Manlius, your accomplice in recklessness and your attendant, would be ready for war - the 26th October? Did I miss it, Catiline - not only the plans, so great, so horrible, and so far beyond belief - but even, which is more impressive by far, the date itself? Moreover, I said in the senate that you were plotting to slaughter the optimates before the 27th October, and then many high-ranking men of our society turned fleeing from Rome - not so much to save themselves, but to put a stop to your plans. Are you really able to deny that on that very day, my defenses and my diligence surrounded you, stopped you from moving against the state, when you kept saying that yes, perhaps the others had fled, but you would be content in slaughtering those of us who had stayed put?
[8] Shall I go on? When you let on that on the 1st November you were going to occupy Praeneste, attacking it by night, did you not notice that the colony was protected on my command by my defenses, guards, and watchmen? There is nothing you can do, nothing you can plot, nothing you can devise, which I will not only hear about, but even spot and see openly. IV. Think once more, finally, about last night, at my house; you will know that I am much more keenly focused on the safety of the state than you are on its destruction. I say that last night, you visited the makers of scythes in the house - I will not beat around the bush - of M. Laeca; masses of men with the same senselessness and criminality as you, your allies, came to join you. Do you dare to deny it? What’s holding your tongue? I will prove it, if you deny it. You see, right here in the senate I can spy some of the men who were with you.
[9] Oh, gods immortal! Who are our families? What city is this? What state do we live in? Here, here in our number, senators, in the most sacred and most serious counsel on earth, there are men who are plotting the deaths of all of us, the doom of this city, and even the world! I can see these men, as consul, I can ask them what they think of the state, and yet - those men who ought to have been cut down by a sword of iron - I cannot even wound them with my words!
And so, you were at Laeca’s that night, Catiline, you parcelled out slices of Italy, you decided the day on which everyone was happy to begin, you chose who you would leave at Rome, who you would lead out with you, you assigned parts of the city to the flames, you confirmed that you were already planning to leave yourself, you said that something was holding you back, just a little - I was still alive. Two Roman knights were found who might free you of that care of yours, and that very night, shortly before dawn, they promised that they would murder me in my bed. [10] All this I found out while your meeting was still being dismissed; I strengthened and fortified my house with better guards, I shut out those men whom you had sent to wish me good morning when they turned up: I had already told many great men that they would visit me just when they did.
V. Given all this, Catiline, continue what you have begun, get out of the city now; the gates are open; get going. For far too long has your camp under Manlius been missing you. Oh, and take with you all of your men, or at the very least most of them; clean up this city. You will release me from great fear, as long as there is a wall between me and you. You cannot move among us any longer; I will not bear it, I will not tolerate it, I will not allow it. [11] The immortal gods, as well as Jupiter the Resister [Stator] himself, the most ancient guard of this city, are owed great thanks, because so many times we have already escaped this plague so disgusting, so terrifying, so sickening to the state.
It’s not often that the very safety of the state is put into danger by just one man. For as long as you have been trying to ambush me, Catiline, as designated consul, I have not been protecting myself with a public guard, but with my private caution. When you were planning to murder me in the Campus Martius, as consul, during the previous elections, planning to murder your competitors too, I squashed your sadistic plans with a guard made of friends and an army stirred by no public commotion; finally, however many times you went after me, I myself stood against you, though I could see that my downfall was closely linked to great disaster for the state.
[12] Now, however, you are openly going after the entire state, the temples of the immortal gods, the houses of the city, the life of every citizen, all of Italy [at last] you are calling to destruction and devastation. And so, since I do not yet dare to do what is obvious and what was normal for the ancestors of this power and this culture, I will do what is gentler in its severity, and more effective for public safety. You see, if I order you to be killed, your gang of conspirators will occupy the rest of the state; but if, as I have been urging you to do for some time, you leave, the huge vile cesspool in the state of your accomplices will drain out of the city. [13] What’s that, Catiline? Are you scared to do what you were going to do anyway, just because I’m asking you to? This consul is ordering the enemy to leave the city. You will question if I mean exile: that is not my order, but, if you asked, it would be my recommendation.
VI. I mean really, Catiline, what is left in this city that you might enjoy? Where there is nobody outside of that conspiracy of corrupt men of yours who isn’t scared of you, who doesn’t hate you.
What mark of domestic disgrace is not branded onto your life? What scandal of private affairs has not stuck to your reputation? What lust has ever escaped your eyes, what crime has escaped your hands, what shame has slipped past your whole body? What young lad, ensnared by your corrupt little bribes, have you not handed a sword for recklessness or a fire for lust? [14] What indeed! Recently, when your last wife had died and you had cleared out your house for your next wedding, you compounded crime with unbelievable crime, didn’t you? I am quite happy to leave it there, to keep my silence: I wouldn’t want this society to see the cruelty of so great a crime, let alone see that it went unpunished. I will leave the ruin of your fortune, which you will notice hanging over your own head next Ides; I will move on to the matters that do not concern your private and disgraceful moral failures, nor the difficulties or the disgrace in your home life, but the very state itself, and the life and safety of every one of us. [15] Could this light, Catiline, or a breath of this air be pleasant to you, when you know that there is not one of us who doesn’t know that on the last day of December, when Lepidus and Tullus were consuls, you were standing in the assembly with a weapon, you were gathering a gang to murder the consuls and high-ranking men of this society, and your crime and rage was not stopped by any conscience, nor any fear of yours, but by the mere luck of the Roman people?
And I am even leaving them out - although they were hardly secret, hardly done much later - those attempts you made against my life so many times, so many times when I was consul! So many plots you threw together in such a way that they seemed impossible to escape, but I turned slowly away, and, as they say, I escaped by the skin of my very teeth! You start [nothing, you accomplish] nothing, [you strive towards nothing], yet your plans and your intentions never cease. [16] So many times that dagger of yours has been wrestled from your hands, so many times [indeed] it has fallen by chance and slipped away! [But you cannot do without it for much longer], and really, I have no clue what sacred things you have initiated it into and dedicated it to, since you think it needs to be sticking into the corpse of a consul.
VII. Now, then, what’s life to you? I’m not speaking to you like I am so that I seem to be acting out of hatred, though I ought to be, but out of pity, none of which you ought to get. You came a little while ago into the senate. Who of such a huge crowd and so many of your friends and relations said hello? Given that this has happened to nobody else in human history, you should expect some harsh insult, since you were crushed by such a serious judgement of silence! I mean, since as soon as you arrived the benches were emptied, since everyone of consular rank, whom you had been continually condemning to slaughter, as soon as you had sat down deserted that part of the bench and left it exposed and bare, how on earth do you think you should take it?
[17] My slaves, I mean- if they were terrified of me just as all citizens are terrified of you, I’d abandon my house like a shot; don’t you have the same feeling about the city? And, if I was suspected of a crime against my citizens and saw that things were so dire, that I was so hated, I would rather do without the sight of citizens than be glared at by the hostile eyes of every man; you - though your awareness of your crimes should make you acknowledge that everyone’s hatred is just and has been a long time coming - do you hesitate to avoid the sight and the presence of those whose thoughts and emotions you are wounding? If your parents feared you and hated you, and you couldn’t calm them by any reason, I for one reckon you would move back where they could not see you. Now, your homeland, which is the shared parent of all of us, hates you and fears you and for a long time has condemned you for doing nothing other than plotting its parricide; will you not respect its authority, nor follow its judgement, nor fear its very power?
[18] It does this, Catiline, and though it is silent, somehow it is saying the following: “For many years now, there has been no crime done except through you, no scandal without you; for you alone the murders of many citizens, for you the abuse and plunder of allies have been free and unpunished; you have not only been powerful in avoiding laws and investigations, but you have even been powerful in overturning them and tearing them apart. Though they should never have been borne, I have been bearing these last things as best I can; now, however, I am engulfed by terror because of you alone, I fear anything that may be said, Catiline, it seems that nothing could be plotted against me which wouldn’t be in line with your criminality, this cannot be tolerated. For this reason, get out and take my terror with you; if it’s justified, let me not be crushed, if it’s irrational, then at last let me finally stop being scared.”
[19] VIII. If our homeland were to say these things to you just as I have said them, wouldn’t it have to start begging, even if it couldn’t use force? What about the fact that you yourself have put yourself under guard, that you said to M’. Lepidus that you wanted to find somewhere to stay so you could avoid suspicion? When he didn’t welcome you, you even dared to come to me, and you asked me to keep watch over you in my home. When you got the same response from me - that I could never be safe within the same walls as you, since I was even in great danger from being kept within the same city walls - you went to the praetor Q. Metellus. Rejected by him, you moved along to your pal, that wonderful man, M. Metellus; of course, you thought he would be so very loyal in guarding you, so very wise in his scepticism, and so very brave in his defence. Oh, but how far away should a man be from prison and chains, if even he judges himself deserving of guard!
[20] Since things are as they are, Catiline, if you cannot die with a clear conscience, are you hesitating to get gone in some foreign land and dedicate that life of yours to many tortures just and deserved, cast out into escape and loneliness? “Bring it to the senate,” you say; you demand it, even, and if they do decide that you should go into exile, you say that you would put up with it. I will not bring up what is so far from my own morals, though I will still make sure you understand what these people think about you. Leave from the city, Catiline, free the state from fear, go into exile, if those are the words you’re waiting for. What is it, Catiline? Are you deliberating at all? Are you noticing at all the silence of these people? They’re fine with it, so they’re keeping quite. Why are you waiting for the assurance of speech, when you can see what these people want from their silence?
[21] But, if I had said the same thing to this wonderful young man, P. Sestius, or this most brave man, M. Marcellus, the senate would have already come for me, a consul, in this very temple, and rightly so, with fists of violence. But when it comes to you, Catiline, when they are silent, they approve, when they are passive, they decide, when they are silent, they shout - and not only these men whose authority you obviously consider important, but whose life worthless, but even those Roman knights, the most honourable and wonderful men, and the other most brave citizens, who are surrounding the senate, whose number you could see, whose eagerness you could spot, and whose voices you could clearly hear just a moment ago. I have barely been holding their hands and their weapons away from you, but I could easily bring them here, so that as you leave everything which you had already been intent on destroying, they could pursue you, hot on your heels, right up to the gates.
[22] IX. But why am I even speaking? So that something might break you, so that you might someday change your ways, so that you might deliberate some escape, so that you might consider some exile? Oh, would that the immortal gods might grant you such a conscience! And yet, I can see that if you might be scared by my voice and make your mind up to go into exile, what a storm of hatred would come for us, smaller at first because your crimes would be in recent memory, but it would rear over times to come. But it’s only that important as long as this disaster remains a private one, and stays far away from bringing danger to the state. But for you to move on from your vices, to start fearing legal punishment, to concede to the times and to the state, it just cannot be demanded. You’re hardly the kind of person, Catiline, for whom shame would ever drive you away from scandal, or fear from danger, or logic from fury.
[23] For this reason, as I’ve said many times now, get yourself going, and, if you’re intending to set light to your burning hatred against me, your enemy, as you’ve made known, then head straight into exile; I will barely be able to deal with people’s mutterings, if you do so, I’ll barely be able to carry the weight of this hatred, if you go into exile at this consul’s order. But if you’d prefer to obey my glory and reputation, then get out of here with your cruel band of criminals, take yourself to Manlius, rouse up your corrupt citizens, distance yourself from good men, declare war on our homeland, excite yourself in your impious villany, so that it looks less like I’ve cast you out to foreigners, and more like you’ve been invited to visit your own people.
[24] But then again, why would I invite you, since I already know you have sent men out to wait for you at the Forum Aelium, armed, since I already know that you and Manlius have decided and settled upon on a date, and since that silver standard - which I am sure will bring death and doom upon you and all your allies, which has been set up in your house as a shrine [to your crimes] - as I know, is already on its way? Can you really do without it any longer, given that you used to worship it as you set off for slaughter, or that you’ve often moved your criminal hand away from its altars to the deaths of citizens?
[25] X. You will go, some day, in the end, where that ravenous and unrestricted lust of yours has already been snatching you away to; not that this would hurt you at all, it would bring you quite an incredible delight. This senselessness is what nature has produced you, what your greed has trained you, what your fortune has preserved you for. At no point have you ever desired not just spare time, but even war unless it was something abjectly evil. From corrupt men, and from those abandoned by not just any luck but even any hope, you have collected your firey gang of evildoers. [26] Here, you will be so delighted in your happiness, you will be so glad from your joy, you will be so frenzied in your glee, since you won’t be able to hear or even see a single good man among you! This man’s zeal for life has been considered by those men, those projects of yours, who are said to lie on the ground not just to sit and gawk at debauchery, but even to take part in the crime, they do not only spend their waking hours carefully waiting for husbands to fall asleep, but they even have their eye on the possessions of those who are lazy. You have a place where you will be able to demonstrate that most infamous tolerance of yours for hunger, for cold, for poverty in all things, and you will feel yourself surrounded by all this very soon. [27] I only had the power, when I drove you away from the consulship, to make sure you were able to go after the state as an exile, rather than plague it as consul, and to make sure that whatever you decided to do in your wickedness would be dubbed crime, rather than war.
XI. Now, senators, so that I might be able to debate and discuss a particular complaint practically fair for our homeland, take in everything I say carefully, please, and hold it deep in your souls and your minds. And indeed, if our homeland - far dearer to me than my own life - if all of Italy, if the entire state spoke to me:
“M. Tullius, what are you doing? You have found out that he’s an enemy, you can see he is going to lead a war, you know they are waiting for him as general in the enemy camp, he is the creator of wickedness, the chief of conspiracy, the summoner of slaves and corrupt citizens - are you going to let him escape, so it looks less like you’ve sent him out of the city, and more like you’ve sent him against the city? Aren’t you going to order him to be lead off in chains, or dragged to his death, aren’t you going to order him to be put to death as his final execution? [28] What on earth is still holding you back? Our ancestors’ precedent? But so many times even private individuals in this state have punished perilous citizens with death. Or the laws, which have been consulted about the execution of Roman citizens? But never in this city have the laws for citizens held those who have deserted the state. Or are you afraid of being hated by people to come? Really, it’s utterly obvious that you are doing a favour for the Roman people, who have raised you, a person infamous in and of yourself, so early to the highest power through every stage of honour, by no recommendation of our ancestors, if you are ignoring the safety of your citizens because of a hatred or a fear of some kind of danger. [29] But, if you are afraid of hatred at all, it’s less of a violent hatred of harshness and bravery, and more a hatred of a very urgent and pressing fear of laziness and inability. Or, when Italy is laid waste by war, the cities overturned, the houses burning, at that point will you not realise you will blaze up in a fire of hatred?”
XII. In response to these most pure statements raised by the state, and to the minds of those people who feel exactly the same thing, I will say a few short things. I for one, if I judged this to be the best thing to do, senators, would punish Catiline with death, I would not have handed him over to that gladiator to live one hour more. And indeed, if the greatest and most famous citizens had not only not contaminated themselves with the blood of the Saturnii, and the Gracchii, and the Flacci, and a huge number of men beyond, but had even bestowed honour upon themselves in this blood, I certainly shouldn’t have been afraid that the killing of this parricide citizen might taint me with a little hatred in time to come. But even if it had been looming right over me, I would still have been of the same mind as always - that I consider hatred born of virtue glory, not hatred.
[30] However, there are some people in this rank who either cannot see what is coming, or who cover up the things they do see; who have nurtured Catiline’s hope with their gentle opinions, and given strength to the growing conspiracy by not believing it; following their authority, many people - and not only wicked people, but even just naive people - if I had drawn their attention to this man would say that it was cruel and taking advantage of power. Now I understand that if this man makes it where he is heading - to the camp lead by Manlius - nobody would be so stupid that they wouldn’t realise a conspiracy had been plotted, nobody would be so wicked that they wouldn’t confess it. However, by killing just this one man, I understand that this plague on the state would be squashed only a little bit, and could not be contained forever. But if he were to cast himself out and lead his men out, and in the same place gather together the others coming from everywhere, his castaways, then not only such a pressing plague on the state, but even the family tree and the seed of all evil will be extinguished and destroyed.
[31] And indeed, senators, we have been tangled up in these dangers and plots from the conspiracy for a long time, but by some plan or another all their crimes, their previous fury, their recklessness are ready now, and are breaking out when we are consul. But if that man, and that man alone, is pulled out of such great criminality, we will feel that perhaps for a short amount of time we are relieved of our worry and fear, but danger will settle down again and it will be trapped deep in the veins and guts of the state. Just as people sick with serious illness, troubled by hot flushes and fever, if they drink some cold water they first seem to be relieved, but later are troubled much more seriously and violently, so too will this illness in the state first be relieved by punishing that man, but later it will violently cause grave sickness to whoever is left alive.
[32] For this reason, let the wicked isolate themselves, let them separate themselves from the good, let them gather in one single place, behind walls, and then - as I have already said many times - let them be separated from us; let them stop plotting ambushes at home against the consul, surrounding the tribunal of the praetor urbanus, besieging the senate-house with their swords, gathering firey darts and torches to burn down the city; and then, let it be written on the foreheads of each and every one of them what they think of the state. This I promise you, senators, that we consuls will be so very careful, that you will be so very respected, that the Roman knights will be so very virtuous, that all good men will be so very much in agreement, that when Catiline sets off, you will see that everything has been opened up, illuminated, suppressed, and avenged.
[33] Because of all these very things, Catiline, take the critical health of the state, take your plague and disease, and take the doom of anyone who has joined you in all your wickedness and parricide, get out to your war - a sacrilege and a god-crime. You, Jupiter, who have made your decision with the same auspices this city was founded on by Romulus, you whom we truly call Resister [Stator] of this city and power- from this man and his allies you will protect your [altars] and your other temples, the houses and walls of the city, the life and fortune of [all] citizens, and you will get the men who are foes of the good, the enemy of our homeland, the criminals of Italy joined to one another by their treaty of wickedness and their fellowship of god-crimes, and in eternal torture you will sacrifice them, both alive and dead.