The Portable Roman Reader (Portable Library) (26 page)

Since this is the situation, Catiline, go whither you had intended, depart at last from the city; the gates are open; get on your way! That camp you share with Manlius has awaited you, its commander, for all too long a time. Take with you all these friends of yours, if not all, then as many as you can; purge the city. I shall be free from my great fear only if there is a wall between us. You cannot now remain with us longer; I will not bear it, I will not tolerate it, I will not permit it.

Great thanks are due to the immortal gods and especially to Jupiter Stator here, the most ancient custodian of this city, because we have already so often escaped this curse of the state, so foul, so horrible, so deadly. The safety of the state ought not to be imperilled too often by one man. While I was consul-elect, Catiline, and you lay in wait for me, I defended myself, not by a public guard, but by my own caution. When, at the last consular elections, you wished to kill me and your competitors in the Campus Martius, I foiled your wicked attempt by the resources and protection of my friends without arousing any public disturbance; in a word, as often as you threatened me I thwarted you by my own efforts, although I saw that my death would bring a great calamity upon the state. Now you are attacking openly the whole state, you call for the destruction and devastation of the temples of the immortal gods, the dwellings of the city, the lives of all the citizens, and all Italy. Therefore, since I do not as yet dare to do that which is most important and which most befits this government and our traditions, I will do this which is more lenient in point of severity and more useful as regards the common safety. For if I shall have ordered you to be killed, there will remain in the state the rest of your conspirators; but if you leave the city, as I have long been urging, the city will be drained of the abundant and pestilent bilge-water of the state—your accomplices. What is wrong, Catiline? You do not hesitate, do you, to do at my command what you were already about to do of your own accord? The consul bids a public enemy leave the city. You ask me “Is it to be exile?” I do not order that, but if you ask my opinion, I advise it.

For what, Catiline, can please you now in this city where there is no one, except your fellow-conspirators—ruined men—who does not fear you, no one who does not hate you? What stigma of disgrace is not branded on your private life? What dishonour in personal relations does not cling to your ill fame? What lust has not stained your eyes, what crime has not stained your hands, what corruption has not stained your whole body? To what youth whom you had ensnared by the allurements of your seduction have you not furnished a weapon for his crimes or a torch to kindle his lust? What then? When lately you had made room in your home for a new marriage by murdering your former wife, did you not add to this crime another incredible crime? I do not describe this and I am glad to let it be passed in silence, lest it be thought that the enormity of so great a crime has either existed in this state or has escaped punishment. I pass over in silence the complete ruin of your fortune which you will feel threatening you upon the thirteenth of this month; I come to those things which have to do, not with your private scandals and shame, not with the sordid tangle of your personal affairs, but with the highest interests of the state and with the life and safety of us all. Can this light, Catiline, or the breath of this air be pleasing to you when you are aware that all these men know that you, on the last day of December in the consulship of Lepidus and Tullus, took your place in the assembly armed, that you had prepared a band to kill the consuls and the chief citizens of the state, and that no pity nor fear on your part checked your crime and your madness, but the good fortune of the Roman people? But those crimes I do not mention, for they are not unknown and many have been committed since that time:—how often did you attempt to kill me when I was consul-elect and how often after I was consul! How many of your thrusts, so aimed that they seemed unavoidable, I escaped by a slight movement and a dodge, as they call it! You gain nothing, you accomplish nothing, and still you do not cease trying and hoping. How often already has that dagger been struck from your hands, how often has it fallen by some chance and slipped! Still you cannot bear to be deprived of it for a single day. I do not know what sacrifices you made to hallow and consecrate it because you thought that you must plunge it into the body of a consul!

But now what is this life of yours? For I shall speak to you, so that men may feel I am swayed, not by hatred, as I ought to be, but by pity, none of which is due you. You came a little while ago into the senate. Who among all your many friends and relatives saluted you? If such treatment has been accorded to no one within the memory of man, do you await the condemnation of the spoken word when you have been crushed by this most significant verdict of silence? What of the fact that at your coming all those near-by seats were deserted, that all the ex-consuls whom you have often marked out for murder left all that area of seats vacant and unoccupied as soon as you took your place—with what feelings do you think you ought to bear this? By Hercules, if my slaves feared me as your fellow-citizens fear you I should think I must leave my house; do you not think you ought to leave the city? If I thought that I was so grievously suspected even unjustly, and that I was so offensive to my fellow-citizens, I should prefer not to be seen by my fellow-citizens rather than to encounter the hostile eyes of all; you know because you are conscious of your crimes that the hatred of all toward you is just and long due. Do you hesitate to avoid the eyes and the presence of those whose minds and sensibilities you are torturing? If your parents hated and feared you and you could not be reconciled to them in any way, you would, I think, withdraw somewhere from their gaze. Now your native country, the mother of us all, hates you and fears you and decides that you have had no single thought for a long time save for her destruction. Will you neither revere her authority, nor obey her judge ments, nor fear her power? She, Catiline, thus confers with you and, as it were, though silent, speaks: “No crime for some years now has come into existence except through you, no outrage without you; you alone have killed many citizens, harried and despoiled the allies, unpunished and free; you have been able not only to neglect the laws and the courts but even to thwart and destroy them. I endured as I could those earlier deeds, although they ought not to have been borne, but now that I should be wholly in fear on account of you alone, that, at the slightest sound, Catiline should be feared, that no plan, it seems, can be undertaken against me uninspired by your villainy, that is not to be borne. Therefore depart and free me from this terror; if it is well founded, that I may not be overwhelmed; if it is false, that now at last I may cease to fear.”

If our country speaks to you thus, as I have said, ought she not to obtain her request, even though she cannot use force? What of the fact that you gave your self into voluntary custody, that you said that you wished to live at the home of Manius Lepidus, to avoid suspicion? When he would not receive you, you dared to come even to me and ask me to protect you in my home. From me also you got the answer that I could in no way be safe within the same house-walls with you, since I was in great peril because we were encompassed by the same city walls, you came to the home of Quintus Metellus, the prætor. When he repulsed you, you moved on to the boon companion of yours, that noble gentleman, Marcus Metellus; because of course you thought that he would be most careful to guard you, most shrewd to suspect others, and most brave to defend you. But how far do you think a man should be away from prison and chains who already judges himself worthy of custody?

Since these things are so, Catiline, do you hesitate, if you cannot die with a mind at ease, to go to some other land and devote that life of yours, rescued from many just and long-deserved penalties, to exile and solitude? Refer the matter, you say, to the senate; for you demand this and if this body votes that you should go into exile you say that you will obey. I will not refer it; that does not accord with my practice, and still I will so act that you may know what these men think of you. Leave the city, Catiline, free the state from fear; into exile, if you are waiting for this word, go. What is it, Catiline? What are you waiting for? Do you notice at all the silence of these men? They approve it; they are silent. Why do you await the spoken word when you see their wish silently expressed? But if I had said this same thing to that excellent youth, Publius Sestius, if I had said it to that bravest of men, Marcus Marcellus, upon me, the consul, the senate with most just cause would have laid violent hands in this very temple. In your case, however, Catiline, when they say nothing they express their approval; their acquiescence is a decree. By their silence they cry aloud. And this is true not only of these men whose authority is, forsooth, dear to you, whose lives are most cheap, but also those most honourable and noble Roman knights, and the other brave citizens who are standing around the senate. You could see the crowd of them, their zeal you could perceive, and their voices you could hear a little while ago. For a long time with difficulty I have kept their hands and their weapons from you; I will easily persuade them to accompany you as far as the city gates when you leave all that you so long have desired to destroy.

And yet why do I talk? As if anything could move you, as if you could ever pull yourself together, as if you had contemplated flight, as if you had any thought of exile! Would that the immortal gods might incline you to that purpose! And yet I see, if, terrified by my threats, you were to be persuaded to go into exile, what a tempest of ill feeling would await me, if not now while the memory of your crimes is still fresh, certainly in after times. But it is worth all that, provided your ruin remains a private affair and is divorced from the dangers to the state. But that you should be dissuaded from your vices, that you should fear the punishment of the laws, that you should yield to the needs of the state, that is a thing not to be asked. For you are not the man, Catiline, ever to be recalled from disgrace by shame, or from danger by fear, or from madness by reason. Wherefore, as I have now often said, go, and if you wish to stir up hatred against me, your enemy, as you call me, go straight into exile; with difficulty shall I bear the criticisms of mankind if you do this; with difficulty shall I sustain the load of that hatred if you shall go into exile at the consul’s orders. But if you prefer to minister to my praise and glory, take with you that rascally gang of criminals, take yourself to Manlius, arouse the debauched, separate yourself from the upright, bring war upon your country, exult in impious robbery; then it will appear that you have gone not expelled by me to join aliens but invited to join your friends. And yet why should I urge you, for I know that you have already sent men ahead to await you under arms at Forum Aurelium. I know that you have arranged and appointed a day with Manlius and that you have also sent forward that silver eagle, which I trust will be a cause of ruin and a curse for all your band. For this eagle a shrine of iniquities has been set up in your own home. Is it possible that you could longer be separated from this to which you were wont to pay homage as you set forth to murder, from whose altars you often have lifted that impious right hand of yours for the slaughter of the citizens?

You will go, then, at last where that unbridled and furious greed of yours has long been hurrying you; indeed this does not bring sorrow to you but a certain incredible delight. For this madness nature bore you, your own wish has trained you, fortune has preserved you. You never desired peace, nor war even unless it were a wicked war. You have a band of criminals swept up from those whom all fortune and even all hope have deserted and abandoned. In their company what joy will be yours, what delights, what exultation, how you will revel in debauchery, when among so many of your friends you will neither hear nor see a single upright man! For pursuing a life like that those “labours” of yours, of which men speak, have been good practice: to lie on the bare ground not only to lay siege to the object of your lust, but also to perpetrate crime; to lose sleep not only plotting against the repose of husbands, but plotting also to steal the goods of peaceable citizens. You have an opportunity to show that famous ability you have to endure hunger, cold, a lack of everything; soon you will know that these practices have ruined you. This much I accomplished when I kept you from the consulship: that you might be able to attack the state as an exile rather than to vex it as a consul, and that this undertaking which has been foully conceived by you may be called brigandage rather than war.

And now, that I may prevent our country by entreaty and prayer, Conscript Fathers, from making a complaint that would be almost justified, listen carefully, I pray you, to what I shall say and store it deep in your hearts and minds. For if our country, which is much dearer to me than my life, if all Italy, if all the state should speak to me thus: “Marcus Tullius, what are you doing? This man is a public enemy as you have discovered; he will be the leader of the war, as you see; men are waiting for him to take command in the enemies’ camp, as you know: author of a crime, head of a conspiracy, recruiter of slaves and criminals—and you will let him go, in such a way that he will seem to be not cast out of the city by you but let loose against the city! Will you not command him to be cast into chains, to be haled to death, to be punished with the greatest severity? What, pray, hinders you? The custom of our ancestors? But often even private citizens in this state have punished with death dangerous men. Is it the laws which have been enacted regarding the punishment of Roman citizens? But never in this city have those who revolted against the state enjoyed the rights of citizens. Or do you fear the odium of posterity? A fine return you are making to the Roman people who have raised you, a man distinguished only by your own deeds, and by no achievements of your ancestors, so early to the highest office through every grade of honour, if because of the fear of unpopularity or any danger whatever you neglect the safety of your fellow-citizens! But if there is any fear of unpopularity, the unpopularity that comes from sternness and severity is no more greatly to be dreaded than that which comes from laxness and cowardice. Or when Italy shall be devastated by war, when the cities shall be harried, when houses shall be burned, do you not think that then you will be consumed by the fire of unpopularity?”