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Against Catiline

Marcus Tullius Cicero · the Senate, at the Temple of Jupiter Stator, Rome · November, 63 BC
text: C. D. Yonge's translation (1856), via the Perseus Digital Library · published before 1931, in the public domain · the first movement, through the counsel of exile
colour carries the act's function; a dashed underline marks a predicted misfire; hover or focus any span for its filing

When, O Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end of that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now? Do not the nightly guards placed on the Palatine Hill—do not the watches posted throughout the city—does not the alarm of the people, and the union of all good men—does not the precaution taken of assembling the senate in this most defensible place—do not the looks and countenances of this venerable body here present, have any effect upon you? Do you not feel that your plans are detected? Do you not see that your conspiracy is already arrested and rendered powerless by the knowledge which every one here possesses of it? What is there that you did last night, what the night before— where is it that you were—who was there that you summoned to meet you—what design was there which was adopted by you, with which you think that any one of us is unacquainted? Shame on the age and on its principles! The senate is aware of these things; the consul sees them; and yet this man lives. Lives! aye, he comes even into the senate. He takes a part in the public deliberations; he is watching and marking down and checking off for slaughter every individual among us. And we, gallant men that we are, think that we are doing our duty to the republic if we keep out of the way of his frenzied attacks. You ought, O Catiline, long ago to have been led to execution by command of the consul. That destruction which you have been long plotting against us ought to have already fallen on your own head. What? Did not that most illustrious man, Publius Scipio, 1 the Pontifex Maximus, in his capacity of a private citizen, put to death Tiberius Gracchus, though but slightly undermining the constitution? And shall we, who are the consuls, tolerate Catiline, openly desirous to destroy the whole world with fire and slaughter? For I pass over older instances, such as how Caius Servilius Ahala with his own hand slew Spurius Maelius when plotting a revolution in the state. There was—there was once such virtue in this republic, that brave men would repress mischievous citizens with severer chastisement than the most bitter enemy. For we have a resolution 2 of the senate, a formidable and authoritative decree against you, O Catiline; the wisdom of the republic is not at fault, nor the dignity of this senatorial body. We, we alone,—I say it openly, —we, the consuls, are waiting in our duty.

The senate once passed a decree that Lucius Opimius, the consul, should take care that the republic suffered no injury. Not one night elapsed. There was put to death, on some mere suspicion of disaffection, Caius Gracchus, a man whose family had borne the most unblemished reputation for many generations. There was slain Marcus Fulvius, a man of consular rank, and all his children. By a like decree of the senate the safety of the republic was entrusted to Caius Marius and Lucius Valerius, the consuls. Did not the vengeance of the republic, did not execution overtake Lucius Saturninus, a tribune of the people, and Caius Servilius, the praetor, without the delay of one single day? But we, for these twenty days have been allowing the edge of the senate's authority to grow blunt, as it were. For we are in possession of a similar decree of the senate, but we keep it locked up in its parchment—buried, I may say, in the sheath; and according to this decree you ought, O Catiline, to be put to death this instant. You live,—and you live, not to lay aside, but to persist in your audacity. I wish, O conscript fathers, to be merciful; I wish not to appear negligent amid such danger to the state; but I do now accuse myself of remissness and culpable inactivity. A camp is pitched in Italy , at the entrance of Etruria, in hostility to the republic; the number of the enemy increases every day; and yet the general of that camp, the leader of those enemies, we see within the walls—yes, and even in the senate, —planning every day some internal injury to the republic. 1 If, O Catiline, I should now order you to be arrested, to be put to death, I should, I suppose, have to fear lest all good men should say that I had acted tardily, rather than that any one should affirm that I acted cruelly. But yet this, which ought to have been done long since, I have good reason for not doing as yet; I will put you to death, then, when there shall be not one person possible to be found so wicked, so abandoned, so like yourself, as not to allow that it has been rightly done. As long as one person exists who can dare to defend you, yet shall live; but you shall live as you do now, surrounded by my many and trusty guards, so that you shall not be able to stir one finger against the republic: many eyes and ears shall still observe and watch you, as they have hitherto done, though you shall not perceive them.

For what is there, O Catiline, that you can still expect, if night is not able to veil your nefarious meetings in darkness, and if private houses cannot conceal the voice of your conspiracy within their walls;—if everything is seen and displayed? Change your mind: trust me: forget the slaughter and conflagration you are meditating. You are hemmed in on all sides; all your plans are clearer than the day to us; let me remind you of them. Do you recollect that on the 21st of October I said in the senate, that on a certain day, which was to be the 27th of October, C. Manlius, the satellite and servant of your audacity, would be in arms? Was I mistaken, Catiline, not only in so important, so atrocious, so incredible a fact, but, what is much more remarkable, in the very day? I said also in the senate that you had fixed the massacre of the nobles for the 28th of October, when many chief men of the senate had left Rome , not so much for the sake of saving themselves as of checking your designs. Can you deny that on that very day you were so hemmed in by my guards and my vigilance, that you were unable to stir one finger against the republic; when you said that you would be content with the flight of the rest, and the slaughter of us who remained? What? when you made sure that you would be able to seize Praeneste on the first of November by a nocturnal attack, did you not find that that colony was fortified by my order, by my garrison, by my watchfulness and care? You do nothing, you plan nothing, you think of nothing which I not only do not hear, but which I do not see and know every particular of.

Listen while I speak of the night before. You shall now see that I watch far more actively for the safety than you do for the destruction of the republic. I say that you came the night before (I will say nothing obscurely) into the Scythe-dealers' street, to the house of Marcus Lecca; that many of your accomplices in the same insanity and wickedness came here too. Do you dare to deny it? Why are silent? I will prove it if you do deny it; for I see here in the senate some men who were there with you. O ye immortal gods, where on earth are we? in what city are we living? what constitution is ours? There are here,—here in our body, O conscript fathers, in this the most holy and dignified assembly of the whole world, men who meditate my death, and the death of all of us, and the destruction of this city, and of the whole world. I, the consul see them; I ask them their opinion about the republic, and I do not yet attack, even by words, those who ought to be put to death by the sword. You were, then, O Catiline, at Lecca's that night; you divided Italy into sections; you settled where every one was to go; you fixed whom you were to leave at Rome , whom you were to take with you; you portioned out the divisions of the city for conflagration; you undertook that you yourself would at once leave the city, and said that there was then only this to delay you, that I was still alive. Two Roman knights were found to deliver you from this anxiety, and to promise that very night, before daybreak, to slay me in my bed. All this I knew almost before your meeting had broken up. I strengthened and fortified my house with a stronger guard; I refused admittance, when they came, to those whom you sent in the morning to salute me, and of whom I had foretold to many eminent men that they would come to me at that time.

As, then, this is the case, O Catiline, continue as you have begun. Leave the city at last the gates are open; depart. That Manlian camp of yours has been waiting too long for you as its general. And lead forth with you all your friends, or at least as many as you can; purge the city of your presence; you will deliver me from a great fear, when there is a wall between me and you. Among us you can dwell no longer—I will not bear it, I will not permit it, I will not tolerate it.. Great thanks are due to the immortal gods, and to this very Jupiter Stator, in whose temple we are, the most ancient protector of thus city, that we have already so often escaped so foul, so horrible, and so deadly an enemy to the republic. But the safety of the commonwealth must not be too often allowed to be risked on one man. As long as you, O Catiline, plotted against me while I was the consul elect, I defended myself not with a public guard, but by my own private diligence. When, in the next consular comitia , you wished to slay me when I was actually consul, and your competitors also, in the Campus Martius , I checked your nefarious attempt by the assistance and resources of my own friends, without exciting any disturbance publicly. In short, as often as you attacked me, I by myself opposed you, and that, too, though I saw that my ruin was connected with great disaster to the republic. But now you are openly attacking the entire republic. You are summoning to destruction and devastation the temples of the immortal gods, the houses of the city, the lives of all the citizens; in short, all Italy . Wherefore, since I do not yet venture to do that which is the best thing, and which belongs to my office and to the discipline of our ancestors, I will do that which is more merciful if we regard its rigour, and more expedient for the state. For if I order you to be put to death, the rest of the conspirators will still remain in the republic; if as I have long been exhorting you, you depart, your companions, those worthless dregs of the republic, will be drawn off from the city too. What is the matter, Catiline? Do you hesitate to do that which I order you which you were already doing of your own accord? The consul orders an enemy to depart from the city. Do you ask me, Are you to go into banishment? I do not order it; but, if you consult me, I advise it.

The divergences

"When, O Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience?" — the catalogue files a Rhetorical question at orientation belonging and motive manipulative, on the reasoning that the form asks, the force asserts, and the gap between them works by not being noticed. Here the gap is advertised: the premises are laid out as the questions go — the guards are posted, the senate is aware, the plans are known — and every one of them is checkable by the men listening. So the page files the barrage at motive mixed, and the divergence is about what survives the disclosure. The form of an exchange remains, and the other party is denied a turn in it. Three chapters on, the same grammar produces "Do you dare to deny it?" and then, when nothing comes back, "Why are silent?" They part on orientation: whether an answer is wanted, or the empty slot is the instrument. Latin settles that with a particle on the verb; English cannot, and the only man who could settle it here has not spoken. Set it beside the archive's sentencing colloquy of 1873, where a court asks the question its procedure requires and the prisoner answers it at length — the same form, opened for the same reason, and taken up.

"and according to this decree you ought, O Catiline, to be put to death this instant." — the chamber files an Assertion about what a standing decree warrants, keyed to reality and offered as law. The man addressed in the second person files a Threat: a commitment to future harm, conditional on his staying, from the officer who would carry it out. They part on function, assertive against commissive. What loads the clause is the seven-sentence recital in front of it, a chain of Reports — Opimius's decree, the decree entrusting the republic to Marius and Valerius, the resolution against Catiline himself — each one relaying a power the speaker declines to exercise. A Report is how a consul holds a sword up without drawing it, and by the time this clause arrives the room has been shown four times that the drawing would be legal.

"Shame on the age and on its principles!" — read as an outcry, it files as an Articulation: indignation rendered into words, expressive, reflexive, changing nothing outside the speaker. Read for what it does to the next four sentences, it files as a Frame-break: after it, the senate and the consul are the parties under examination, and the man being prosecuted is referred to in the third person as evidence of their failure. They part on target, reflexive against meta. The filing is also the page's clearest translation seam. In Latin these are two verbless vocatives whose whole force is in the case-endings; Yonge's English builds a sentence with a subject and a predicate, and a sentence can break a frame in a way an exclamation cannot. Anyone who wants the Latin's act has to file the Latin.

"when you said that you would be content with the flight of the rest, and the slaughter of us who remained" — one filing takes the clause as a Report, entering the accused's own words as evidence in a chamber that can weigh them. Another takes the whole sentence as a Rhetorical question in which the quotation is a premise the addressee is invited to deny and structurally prevented from denying. They part on target: an act performed on another man's utterance, or an act performed on the room's belief about it. This is the only place in the text where Catiline speaks, and he speaks in his prosecutor's grammar, inside his prosecutor's sentence. The archive's Hotel Commodore session of 1948 is the same accusation with the other setting: there the accuser and the accused are both in the room and both talk, and the page turns on which of two speaking men is lying. Here there is one voice, and the contradiction the record would need is never made. The archive's declaration of conscience of 1950 is the far end of the same scale. Margaret Chase Smith accuses a colleague of her own body, and the rule that page turns on — a senator may be described and may not be named — holds his name, his words and any answer he might make out of the record together, which leaves her charges to arrive as facts about her own feelings. Three chambers, three quantities of the accused admitted to the transcript: two voices at the Hotel Commodore, one voice quoting the other here, and one voice alone on the Senate floor.

"We, we alone,—I say it openly, —we, the consuls, are waiting in our duty." — the speaker files an Avowal, reflexive, disclosing his own failure to a body he has spent the chapter accusing. A hearer files a manoeuvre: the failure is taken off the senate and onto the consul, which is where it has to sit if the consul is going to be the one who ends it, and "I say it openly" is the sentence that pre-empts anyone else saying it. They part on motive, cooperative against manipulative, and the axis cannot be settled from inside the text — the disclosure is real and the advantage is real. What the page can show is the sequence: the self-accusation arrives directly after the exculpation of the senate, and directly before the recital of everything the office is entitled to do.

"I will put you to death, then, when there shall be not one person possible to be found so wicked, so abandoned, so like yourself, as not to allow that it has been rightly done." — read narrow, it is a Threat to the man addressed, and its condition is one he cannot influence. Read wide, its addressee is the chamber: supply the unanimity, and the killing follows. They part on scope. The sentence is grammatically second person and functionally a request to three hundred men, and the twenty days admitted to a few lines earlier are the measure of how far that request has got.

"The consul orders an enemy to depart from the city." then, one sentence later, "I do not order it; but, if you consult me, I advise it." — the page files the last line as an Order given by being withheld, and marks a misinvocation, because no consul could sentence a citizen to banishment. The alternative filing is a Retraction: the first clause withdraws, on the record, the order issued two sentences above, and what is left is advice a free man is at liberty to refuse. They part on function, directive against declaration, and the stake is who owns the exile. If it is an order, a magistrate has removed a citizen without trial and answers for it. If it is counsel, Catiline banished himself. He left the city, which decides nothing, because both filings predict it. The archive's statement to the court of 1918 is this page inverted: there the state holds the power and the man under judgment does all of the talking, and the force of what he says comes from being said where it can change nothing. Here the man under judgment says nothing, and the officer holding the power spends the whole movement explaining why he will not use it.