The Catilinarian Conspiracy
Cicero exposed a conspiracy to seize Rome in 63 BC and executed five citizens without trial for it. Lucius Sergius Catilina was a patrician of ruined finances who had stood for the consulship twice and lost, and whose programme in the second campaign was the cancellation of debts — which in a Rome full of indebted veterans, dispossessed farmers and bankrupt aristocrats had a considerable constituency. Cicero was consul and had beaten him. The evidence came from a mistress of one of the conspirators and then, decisively, from envoys of a Gallic tribe who had been approached and who took their letters to the authorities. The first oration in the senate on 8 November, asking how long Catiline would abuse Roman patience, is the most famous speech in Latin and drove him out of the city to an army in Etruria. The five conspirators arrested in Rome were the problem. The senate debated their fate on 5 December: Caesar argued for life imprisonment in the towns, Cato for death, and Cicero executed them that evening in the Tullianum on the senate's authority under the emergency decree. Roman citizens had a right of appeal to the people, and no decree could take it away. He announced the deaths to the crowd with a single word meaning that they had lived. Catiline died fighting in January. Cicero was exiled for the executions five years later. Sallust wrote the standard account twenty years later as a study of political decay, and Cicero never stopped talking about it. His insistence on the episode became a joke in Rome, and the poem he wrote about his own consulship contained a line his enemies quoted for the rest of his life.
- Year: 63 BCE
- Category: Political
