Speech 1

1 CHAPTER 1

Catiline, how much longer must our patience suffer your abuse? How long must we be mocked by that madness of yours? What limit is there to the swagger of your unrestrained recklessness? Has nothing touched you: the Palatine guarded through the night, the city’s watches, the terror of the people, all loyal men gathering together, the strength of this place where the Senate meets, the faces, the expressions of these men? Are you unaware that your designs stand exposed? Can you not see the knowledge of everyone here tightening its grip upon your conspiracy? Your acts last night and the night before, your whereabouts, the men you called together, the plan you chose—which of us, do you imagine, remains ignorant of these?

2 What times! What morals! The Senate understands it all; the consul sees it. Yet this man lives. Lives? He even comes into the Senate, takes part in the public council, and marks out each one of us with his eyes for slaughter. And we, brave men that we are, think we have done enough for the republic if we avoid his madness and his weapons. Long ago, Catiline, the consul should have ordered you led to your death, bringing upon you the destruction you have long been plotting against us all.

3 Publius Scipio, a man of the highest distinction and chief priest, killed Tiberius Gracchus as a private citizen, though Gracchus was only moderately unsettling the constitution. Shall we consuls endure Catiline, who longs to lay waste the whole world with slaughter and fire? I pass over those examples too remote in time, such as Gaius Servilius Ahala killing Spurius Maelius with his own hand for seeking revolution. Once, once there was such courage in this republic that brave men restrained a dangerous citizen with sharper punishments than the bitterest enemy. We have a decree of the Senate against you, Catiline, forceful and grave. The republic does not lack counsel or the authority of this order. We—we consuls, I say it openly—are failing it.

4 CHAPTER 2

The Senate once decreed that the consul Lucius Opimius should see that the republic suffered no harm. Not a single night intervened. Gaius Gracchus, with his illustrious father, grandfather, and ancestors, was killed on certain suspicions of sedition; Marcus Fulvius, a former consul, was killed with his children. By a similar decree, the republic was entrusted to the consuls Gaius Marius and Lucius Valerius. Did death and the republic’s punishment then keep the tribune Lucius Saturninus and the praetor Gaius Servilius waiting even a day? Yet we have now allowed the edge of these men’s authority to grow blunt for twenty days. We possess a decree of that same kind, but shut away among the records, hidden like a sword in its sheath. Under that decree, Catiline, you should have been killed at once. You live—and live not to abandon your recklessness, but to strengthen it. Senators, I wish to be merciful. I wish not to seem lax amid such dangers to the republic. But now I condemn myself for idleness and worthlessness.

5 A camp has been established in Italy, in the passes of Etruria, against the Roman people. The enemy’s numbers grow each day. Yet you see that camp’s commander and the enemy’s leader within our walls—indeed, in the Senate itself—daily devising some destruction of the republic from within. If I were now to order your arrest and execution, Catiline, I suppose I would have to fear not that all good men would call my action too late, but that someone would call it too cruel! Yet for a definite reason I have still not brought myself to do what should have been done long ago. You will be killed only when no one can be found so wicked, so corrupt, so like yourself that he will not admit it was justly done.

6 While there remains a man who dares speak in your defense, I will leave you alive. Alive, however, as you are today: surrounded by the numerous, steadfast guards I have placed about you, with no freedom to stir against the state. Unseen by you, many eyes will spy on you and many ears will keep watch, as they have done so far.

Chapter 3

What further thing can you await, Catiline? Night itself cannot hide your wicked gatherings beneath its darkness; a private dwelling cannot imprison the voices of your conspiracy behind its walls. All is coming to light, all breaking free. Alter your purpose now; take my word for it, abandon murder and burning. On every side you are caught. We see your plans more brightly than the light of day. You may go through them with me now.

7 Recall what I told the Senate on October 21: that on October 27, a day I named precisely, Gaius Manlius, the servant and accomplice of your reckless designs, would rise in arms. Did my prediction fail, Catiline, in that enormous, dreadful, scarcely believable event—or in the day itself, a still more astonishing matter? In that same Senate I announced your appointment of October 28 for slaughtering the leading citizens. Many of the state’s foremost men then fled Rome, more to thwart your plans than to save themselves. Can you deny that my protection and watchfulness hemmed you in on that date, leaving you powerless to act against the republic? This, even while you declared that the killing of us who stayed would satisfy you, though the rest had gone!

8 And Praeneste? You believed you would capture it in an assault at night on November 1 itself. Did you find the colony made secure at my bidding, by the guards I stationed, the sentries and the watches? Nothing you do, nothing you devise, nothing you think escapes not merely my hearing but my sight and clear understanding.

Chapter 4

Come, revisit that earlier night with me. You will discover how much sharper my vigilance is for saving the republic than yours for destroying it. The night before last, I say, you went to Marcus Laeca’s house in the scythe makers’ district—I will not speak in riddles. Several partners in your madness and criminality met you there. Will you dare a denial? Why this silence? Deny it and I shall establish it: some of the men who joined you are here before my eyes in the Senate.

9 Immortal gods! Where in the world are we? What republic do we possess? In what city do we live? Here, here among our own number, senators, in this most sacred and weighty council of the world, are men who contemplate the death of us all, the destruction of this city—indeed, of the whole world. As consul I see them and ask their opinions on public affairs; men who should have been cut down by the sword I have not yet wounded even with my voice! You were at Laeca’s that night, then, Catiline. You divided up Italy, decided where each man was to go, chose whom to leave in Rome and whom to take with you, assigned districts of the city for burning, and declared that you yourself were now about to leave. You said one small delay still held you back: I was alive. Two Roman knights were found to relieve you of that concern, promising to kill me in my own bed that very night, shortly before dawn.

10 Your gathering had scarcely broken up when everything reached me. I fortified my home with stronger protection and made it secure; the visitors you sent with their morning greeting found themselves shut out. They were precisely the men whose coming at that hour I had predicted to many men of the highest standing.

Chapter 5

Go forward, then, Catiline, upon your chosen path. Out of the city at last! The gates are open to you: leave. Your camp under Manlius has waited for its commander far too long. Bring every follower of yours, or at least the greatest number you can. Empty Rome of their pollution. Let the city wall stand between us, and you will lift a heavy fear from me. Your life among us can continue no longer. I will neither bear it, nor endure it, nor allow it.

11 Great thanks are owed to the immortal gods, and to this very Jupiter the Upholder, the city’s most ancient guardian, because we have already escaped so often from a pestilence so foul, so dreadful, so hostile to the republic. The state’s very survival must not repeatedly be endangered by a single man. As long as you plotted against me while I was consul-elect, Catiline, I defended myself not with public guards but with private vigilance. When, at the last consular elections, you wished to kill me, the consul, on the Campus, together with your rivals, I crushed your criminal attempt with my friends’ protection and forces, without arousing any public disturbance. In short, whenever you struck at me, I resisted you through my own resources, although I saw that my destruction was bound up with a great calamity for the republic.

12 Now the object of your open assault is the entire state. The gods’ temples, the houses of Rome, every citizen’s life, Italy in its entirety—you call them all to ruin and desolation. There is a first course, proper to the authority we hold and to the discipline our ancestors left us, which I do not yet dare adopt. Instead I shall choose a course less stern in punishment, more serviceable to the safety of all. Your execution would leave the other conspirators embedded in the state. Your departure, which I have urged upon you so long, would draw out of Rome that great cesspool of your adherents, so deadly to the republic.

Chapter 6

What now, Catiline?

13 Will my order make you hesitate over an act you were already undertaking freely? An enemy is being commanded out of Rome by its consul. Is it exile, you ask? I give no command for that; consult me, however, and it is my advice. What joy remains for you here, Catiline? Outside your confederacy of ruined men, there is not a person in this city without fear or hatred of you. Name a stigma of shame in private life that has not branded your own existence; a private dishonor that has not fixed itself to your name. When were your eyes free of lust, your hands of crime, any part of your body of disgrace? Was there ever a young man you caught in corruption’s snares for whom you did not hold out the sword toward audacity, or the torch toward desire?

14 And recently, when you had cleared the way for a new marriage through your former wife’s death, did you not heap upon that crime another incredible crime? I pass over it and readily allow it to go unspoken, so that this community need not seem to have produced so monstrous a deed or left it unpunished. I pass over the collapse of your fortunes, which you will feel hanging over you in full at the next Ides. I turn to matters that concern not the private shame of your vices, not your domestic difficulties and disgrace, but the whole republic and the life and safety of us all.

15 Can this daylight, Catiline, or the air beneath this sky give you pleasure, when you know that no one here is ignorant of your standing armed in the assembly place on December 31, in the consulship of Lepidus and Tullus; of your preparing a band to kill the consuls and the leading citizens; of your crime and madness being thwarted not by any change of heart or fear of your own, but by the Fortune of the Roman people? I leave those matters aside now—for your later deeds are neither few nor hidden. How often you have tried to kill me as consul-elect, and again as consul! How many thrusts, aimed so that escape seemed impossible, have I evaded with a slight movement, with a turn of the body, as they say! You do nothing, achieve nothing, and yet you never cease to try and desire it.

16 How often that dagger has been wrested from your hands! How often it has slipped and fallen by some chance! I do not know by what rites you have consecrated and dedicated it, that you think it must be planted in a consul’s body.

Chapter 7

But what sort of life is yours now? I will speak to you as though moved not by the hatred I owe you, but by the pity you do not deserve. A little while ago you entered the Senate. Out of this great gathering, out of all your friends and associates, who greeted you? If this has happened to no one in human memory, do you wait for the insult of spoken words when you have been crushed by the weightiest judgment of silence? When your arrival emptied those benches, when every former consul—men you have so often marked for death—left that stretch of seats bare and vacant as soon as you sat down, with what spirit do you think you should endure it?

17 Were my household slaves, by Hercules, as afraid of me as your fellow citizens are of you, I should consider my home no place to remain. Must you not think the same of Rome? Were my citizens to regard me, even unjustly, with such deep suspicion and offense, I would choose to vanish from their sight rather than meet their united hostile gaze. You know from your own crimes that the hatred of everyone is rightful and long overdue. Yet you hesitate to withdraw from the presence of those whose hearts and understanding you wound? Suppose your father and mother hated and feared you, and no argument could reconcile them. Surely you would go somewhere beyond their view. Your country now stands in their place, the parent shared by all of us. She hates you, fears you, has long believed your sole intention to be her murder. Will her authority command no reverence, her judgment no obedience, her might no fear?

18 She addresses you, Catiline, and in a sense speaks without a voice: “For years no crime has arisen except through you, no outrage without you. You alone have been free to murder many citizens without punishment, to harass and plunder our allies. You have had the strength not merely to disregard laws and courts, but to overturn and break them. Those earlier deeds, unbearable though they were, I bore as best I could. But now that all of me should live in fear because of you alone; that every sound should make me fear Catiline; that no plot against me should seem beyond your criminal nature—this cannot be borne. Therefore leave, and take this fear away from me: if it is well founded, so that I am not crushed; if false, so that at last I may cease to fear.”

19 CHAPTER 8

If these were your country’s words, as I have imagined them, ought her plea not prevail even without force to carry it through? Consider also your volunteering for custody. To dispel suspicion, you said, you wished to reside with Manius Lepidus. He would not accept you. You then had the audacity to come even to me, asking that my house should serve to guard you. I answered that sharing a house with you could in no way be safe for me: sharing a city already put me in grave danger. Off you went to Quintus Metellus, the praetor. He rejected you too, and you moved to your friend Marcus Metellus, that admirable man! Evidently you expected him to be a most attentive keeper, a most penetrating detector of suspicious acts, and a most valiant agent of punishment. But how remote from chains and prison should we keep one who has already pronounced himself fit for detention?

20 So, Catiline, if you cannot meet your end with composure, what makes you reluctant to seek some other country? Save this life of yours from the many penalties it justly owes, and give it over to the solitude of flight.

“Refer the matter to the Senate,” you tell me. That is what you request; should the order decree its wish for your exile, you say you will comply. I shall make no such reference: that would run against my practice. Nevertheless you shall learn their opinion of you. Out of Rome, Catiline! Release the state from terror. Depart into exile, if exile is the word you are waiting to hear. Well? Are you listening, observing the silence of these men? They let you go. They utter nothing. Their unspoken will lies plain before you: why wait for the authority of their speech?

21 Had I said the same to this excellent young Publius Sestius, or to the courageous Marcus Marcellus, the Senate would already, and with perfect justice, have laid violent hands on me, the consul, in this very temple. But concerning you, Catiline, their stillness is approval; their permission is a decree; their silence is a cry. Nor is it only these men, whose authority is evidently dear to you, whose lives are worthless to you. It is also those Roman knights, most honorable and excellent men, and the other courageous citizens surrounding the Senate. You could see their numbers, understand their zeal, and hear their voices a little while ago. I have long scarcely restrained their hands and weapons from you; I will easily persuade those same men to escort you to the gates as you leave the city you have long sought to devastate.

22 CHAPTER 9

But why do I speak like this? As though anything could subdue you; as though you could ever amend your ways, contemplate escape, or form a thought of exile! If only the gods would put that purpose in your mind! I see, of course, the tempest of hostility hanging over me if fright at my words should resolve you upon exile. Perhaps not today, when your crimes are fresh in memory, but in the years to come. I accept the price, so long as the disaster falls upon you privately and is cut away from the public danger. Yet we cannot ask that conscience over your vices should move you, legal penalties make you afraid, or the state’s circumstances bring you to yield. Nothing in your character, Catiline, allows shame to turn you from dishonor, fear from peril, or judgment from frenzy.

23 Leave, therefore, as I have said again and again. If you wish to heap unpopularity on me, whom you proclaim your enemy, take the direct road to exile. Were you to do it, men’s talk would be almost more than I could bear; the burden of hostility almost more than I could sustain, if a consul’s command had sent you into exile. Prefer to further my renown and glory instead? Then depart with your savage troop of criminals. Go to Manlius. Stir up the ruined citizens, divide yourself from the loyal, wage war on your homeland, give yourself to the delight of godless banditry. Let it appear that I invited you to your own people, not that I banished you among strangers.

24 Yet why should I invite you, when I know you have already sent men ahead to wait for you under arms at Forum Aurelium; when I know you have fixed and agreed a day with Manlius; when I know you have even sent ahead that silver eagle, for which a criminal shrine was established in your house, and which I trust will bring death and destruction to you and all your followers? Could you endure any longer without the eagle you used to worship as you set out for slaughter, from whose altars you so often carried that impious right hand to the murder of citizens?

25 CHAPTER 10

At length you will reach the place toward which that raging, uncontrolled appetite has long swept you. Far from grief, this affair gives you an unbelievable delight. For this madness nature brought you forth, choice schooled you, and fortune kept you alive. Peace was never your desire; even war you never wanted unless it was wicked. Now you have secured a company of criminals, made up of men utterly ruined, forsaken not simply by all their fortunes but by their last hope.

26 There, what happiness will be yours! In what joy you will exult, in what pleasure run wild, when the multitude around you contains no good man for your ears to hear or your eyes to see! It was to cultivate that life that you practiced your celebrated exertions: lying upon the ground, not merely in pursuit of illicit sex but in preparation for a crime; foregoing sleep, not merely to ambush sleeping husbands but to prey upon the property of the peaceful. There is your theater for displaying that famous capacity to suffer hunger, cold, and destitution of every kind. Soon enough you will feel those privations wear you out.

27 This much I achieved when I kept you from the consulship: you could assail the republic as an exile rather than torment it as consul, and the criminal enterprise you undertook would be called banditry rather than war.

Chapter 11

Now, senators, to avert and turn aside an almost just complaint from my country against me, hear carefully, I beg you, what I will say, and lodge it deep in your hearts and minds. If my country, far dearer to me than my own life, if all Italy, if the whole republic were to address me: “Marcus Tullius, what are you doing? Will you permit this man to leave—one you have discovered to be an enemy, whom you see about to lead a war, whom you know the enemy camp awaits as commander, the author of crime, the chief of the conspiracy, the summoner of slaves and desperate citizens—so that you seem not to have let him out of the city, but let him loose upon it? Will you not order him taken into chains, dragged to his death, sacrificed to the supreme punishment? What, then, holds you back? The practice of our ancestors?

28 “But in this republic even private citizens have very often punished dangerous citizens with death. Or the laws passed concerning the punishment of Roman citizens? But those who have deserted the republic have never retained citizens’ rights in this city. Or do you fear the hatred of posterity? A splendid repayment you make to the Roman people, who raised you, a man who owed his reputation to himself, without the recommendation of ancestors, so early through every rank of office to the highest authority, if fear of hatred or some danger makes you neglect your fellow citizens’ safety!

29 “But if hatred is to be feared, hatred earned by sternness and courage is not to be feared more than hatred earned by idleness and worthlessness. When Italy is devastated by war, cities are ravaged, homes burn, do you not think you too will blaze in the fire of hatred?”

Chapter 12

To these most sacred words of the republic, and to the thoughts of those who share them, I will make a brief reply. Senators, had I judged Catiline’s execution the best course, I would not have granted that gladiator the use of a single hour of life. If our greatest men and most illustrious citizens did not stain themselves with the blood of Saturninus, the Gracchi, Flaccus, and many earlier men, but rather gained honor, I certainly had no need to fear that killing this murderer of citizens would send any hatred against me down to posterity. Even if that hatred threatened me most of all, my mind has always been such that I considered hatred earned by courage to be glory, not hatred.

30 There are, however, senators within this very order who either fail to perceive what threatens or pretend not to perceive what they see. Lenient judgments from them fed Catiline’s expectations. Their refusal to believe made his newborn conspiracy strong. Such men’s authority would have persuaded many others, the uninformed no less than the wicked, to call action against him the deed of a cruel tyrant. Now I know that, once he arrives at Manlius’s camp as he purposes, only a fool could fail to see the conspiracy, and only a scoundrel fail to acknowledge it. I know also that killing him alone could push back the state’s pestilence for a while, never put it down forever. Let him depart of himself, lead out his adherents, and assemble there the remaining wrecks of men from every direction: then we shall quench and destroy not merely this fully matured plague upon the republic, but the root and seed from which all our evils spring.

31 CHAPTER 13

For a long time now, senators, we have lived amid these dangers and conspiratorial plots. Yet somehow the ripeness of all these crimes, of this long-standing madness and recklessness, has burst forth in the season of my consulship. If this one man alone is removed from so great a band of robbers, we may seem relieved of care and fear for a little while; but the danger will remain, enclosed deep in the veins and entrails of the republic. Often, when people gravely ill are tossed by heat and fever, a drink of cold water seems at first to relieve them; then they suffer far more violently and severely. So this disease in the republic, relieved by his punishment, will worsen more fiercely while the others live.

32 Let the corrupt depart, then, and draw apart from the good. Let them meet in one place. Finally, as I have repeatedly urged, put a wall between them and us. No more plots against a consul in his house; no more encircling the city praetor’s judgment seat; no more swords besieging the Senate House; no more incendiary darts and torches readied to burn Rome. Let every man’s political purpose be inscribed upon his brow. Senators, I give you this pledge: the consuls will show such watchfulness, you such authority, the knights such courage, all loyal citizens such concord, that after Catiline’s departure you will see every design laid bare, brought to light, overthrown, and punished.

33 Go, Catiline, with these omens to a war against piety and law. Let supreme safety come to the republic, destruction and disaster to you, annihilation to those joined with you in every crime and assault upon their country. And you, Jupiter—whom Romulus established under the auspices that founded Rome, whom we justly name the Upholder of our city and our power—will bar this man and his confederates from your own temples and every other shrine, from Rome’s dwellings and ramparts, from all its citizens’ possessions and lives. Against men hostile to the loyal, enemies of their homeland, brigands of Italy, linked in a pact of crimes and a fellowship of wickedness, you will exact everlasting punishment, in life and after death.

1 CHAPTER 1

How much longer will you abuse our patience, Catiline? How long will this madness of yours keep making fools of us? How far will your reckless daring go? Has none of this affected you: the night guard on the Palatine, the watches throughout the city, the people’s fear, the gathering of all decent citizens, this heavily guarded place where the Senate meets, the faces and expressions of these men? Do you not realize that your plans are exposed? Do you not see that everyone’s knowledge has already trapped your conspiracy? Which of us do you think does not know what you did last night and the night before, where you were, whom you called together, and what plan you adopted?

2 What times we live in! What standards of behavior! The Senate knows all this. The consul sees it. Yet this man is still alive. Alive? He even comes into the Senate. He takes part in public decisions. His eyes pick out and mark each one of us for murder. And we, brave men that we are, think we are doing enough for our country if we keep out of the way of his madness and his weapons. A consul’s order should have sent you to your death long ago, Catiline. The destruction you have long been planning for all of us should have fallen on you.

3 Publius Scipio, a most distinguished man and the chief priest, killed Tiberius Gracchus as a private citizen. Gracchus was only shaking the foundations of the state to a limited degree. Are we, the consuls, to put up with Catiline, who wants to devastate the world with slaughter and fire? I pass over the much older example of Gaius Servilius Ahala, who killed Spurius Maelius with his own hand for trying to bring about a revolution. Our country once had that courage. It did. Brave men would punish a dangerous citizen more harshly than the bitterest foreign enemy. We have a Senate decree against you, Catiline, forceful and serious. The state does not lack the judgment or authority of this body. We are failing it—we, the consuls, I say so openly.

4 CHAPTER 2

The Senate once decreed that the consul Lucius Opimius should see that the state suffered no harm. Not a single night passed. Gaius Gracchus was killed on suspicion of stirring up unrest, despite his famous father, grandfather, and ancestors. Marcus Fulvius, a former consul, was killed along with his children. A similar Senate decree put the state in the hands of the consuls Gaius Marius and Lucius Valerius. Did Lucius Saturninus, the people’s tribune, and Gaius Servilius, the praetor, then wait even a day for death and the state’s punishment? But we have let the sharp edge of the Senate’s authority grow blunt for twenty days now. We have a decree of this kind, but it is shut away among the records, like a sword put back in its sheath. Under that decree, Catiline, you should have been killed at once. You live, and you live not to give up your reckless purpose but to strengthen it. Senators, I want to be merciful. I want to avoid seeming careless when our country faces such danger. But I already condemn myself for inaction and worthlessness.

5 A camp has been set up in Italy against the Roman people, at the approaches to Etruria. The number of enemies grows every day. Yet you see the commander of that camp, the leader of those enemies, inside our walls—inside the Senate itself. Every day he works to destroy the state from within. If I now ordered your arrest and execution, Catiline, I suppose I would have to fear that someone might call me too cruel, rather than that all decent citizens would say I had acted too late! Still, I have a particular reason for not yet bringing myself to do what should have been done long ago. You will be killed only when no one can be found so wicked, so ruined, so much like you, that he will not admit it was justified.

6 As long as anyone dares to defend you, you will live. And you will live as you do now, surrounded by the many strong guards I have posted, so you cannot make a move against the state. Many people’s eyes and ears will also watch and track you without your knowing it, just as they have done so far.

Chapter 3

What more can you be waiting for, Catiline? The darkness of night cannot hide your criminal meetings. The walls of a private house cannot hold in the words of your conspiracy. Everything comes to light. Everything breaks out into the open. Change your thinking now. Believe me: forget murder and arson. You are caught on every side. All your plans are clearer to us than daylight. You can now go over them with me.

7 Do you remember what I said in the Senate on October 21? I said that Gaius Manlius, the follower and agent of your recklessness, would take up arms on a particular day, October 27. Was I wrong, Catiline? Not just about an event so serious, so terrible, so hard to believe, but, far more surprisingly, about the day? I also said in the Senate that you had fixed October 28 for the murder of the leading supporters of the state. That was when many leading citizens left Rome, less to save themselves than to block your plans. Can you deny that on that very day my guards and my careful watch kept you hemmed in and unable to act against the state? You were saying that, though the others had left, you were still content to murder those of us who had stayed.

8 And what about Praeneste? You were sure you would seize it in a night attack on November 1 itself. Did you notice that I had ordered that colony to be protected by my guards, sentries, and night watches? You do nothing, attempt nothing, think of nothing that I do not hear about and also see and fully understand.

Chapter 4

Go back with me now over the night before last. You will soon see that I watch far more closely to keep the state safe than you do to destroy it. I say that the night before last you went to the scythe-makers’ district—I will be quite specific—to the house of Marcus Laeca. Several partners in the same madness and crime came there too. Do you dare deny it? Why are you silent? If you deny it, I will prove it. I can see men here in the Senate who were there with you.

9 Immortal gods! Where on earth are we? What kind of state do we have? What city are we living in? Here, here among us, senators, in this most sacred and respected council in the world, are men who plan the death of us all. They plan the destruction of this city and, beyond it, the whole world. I, the consul, see these men and ask their opinions on public business. They should be cut down with swords, yet I have not even wounded them with words! So you were at Laeca’s house that night, Catiline. You divided up the regions of Italy. You decided where each man was to go. You chose whom to leave in Rome and whom to take with you. You assigned districts of the city to be burned. You confirmed that you yourself would now leave. You said there was still one small delay: I was alive. Two Roman knights were found to free you from that worry. They promised to kill me in my own bed that very night, shortly before dawn.

10 I learned all this almost before your meeting had broken up. I strengthened and secured my house with more guards. I shut out the men you had sent to greet me in the morning. The men who came were the very ones I had already told many of our most important citizens would come at that time.

Chapter 5

That being so, Catiline, carry on as you began. Get out of the city at last. The gates are open. Go. That camp of Manlius’s has been waiting far too long for you, its commander. Take all your men with you too. If not all, take as many as you can. Clean the city out. You will free me from a great fear, as long as a wall stands between you and me. You cannot stay among us any longer. I will not bear it. I will not put up with it. I will not allow it.

11 We owe great thanks to the immortal gods, and to Jupiter the Upholder himself, this city’s oldest guardian. We have escaped so many times from this foul, terrifying threat to our country. The survival of the state must not keep depending on one man’s life. While you were plotting against me as consul-elect, Catiline, I protected myself through my own vigilance, not with public guards. At the last consular elections, you wanted to kill me, the consul, and your rivals on the Field of Mars. I stopped your criminal attempts with the help and forces of my friends, without causing any public alarm. In short, whenever you attacked me, I resisted you with my own resources. Yet I could see that my destruction would bring a great disaster on the state as well.

12 Now you openly attack the whole state. You are calling down destruction and devastation on the temples of the immortal gods, the city’s homes, the lives of all its citizens, and all of Italy. So I will take a course that is less harsh but more useful for everyone’s safety. I do not yet dare take the first and best course, the one that belongs to the authority I hold and our ancestors’ practice. If I order you killed, the rest of the conspirators will remain in the state. But if you leave, as I have long been urging you to do, the great, dangerous cesspool your followers make in the state will be drained out of the city.

Chapter 6

What is it, Catiline?

13 Are you hesitating to do on my orders what you were already doing on your own? The consul orders an enemy to leave the city. Are you asking me whether I mean exile? I am not ordering it. But if you ask my advice, I recommend it. What can still give you any pleasure in this city, Catiline? Outside your conspiracy of ruined men, everyone here fears you and everyone hates you. What mark of shame in family life has not been branded on your life? What disgrace in private affairs does not cling to your reputation? What lust has ever been absent from your eyes, what crime from your hands, what shameful act from your whole body? When you trapped a young man with the lures of corruption, was there ever one for whom you did not hold up a sword to guide him into violence or a torch to guide him into lust?

14 And what about this? Recently, when you had made room for a new marriage by the death of your previous wife, did you not add another unbelievable crime to that crime? I pass over it and am quite willing to leave it unspoken. Otherwise it would seem that a crime of such monstrous scale could either have happened in this country or have gone unpunished. I pass over the collapse of your finances. You will feel its full weight hanging over you on the next Ides. I turn instead to things that concern not the personal disgrace of your vices, not your private troubles and shame, but the survival of the state and the lives and safety of us all.

15 Can this daylight, Catiline, or the air you breathe under this sky give you any pleasure? You know that every man here knows what you did on the day before January 1, in the consulship of Lepidus and Tullus. You stood in the assembly ground with a weapon. You had put together a band to kill the consuls and the leading citizens. Neither a change of mind nor any fear on your part blocked your criminal madness. It was the good fortune of the Roman people. But I leave that aside. Your later acts have not been hidden or few. How many times have you tried to kill me as consul-elect, and then as consul! How many attacks you aimed at me seemed impossible to dodge! Yet I escaped by a slight movement, a turn of the body, as they say. You do nothing. You get nowhere. Yet you never stop trying and wanting to do it.

16 How many times has that dagger been forced from your hands! How many times has some accident made it slip and fall out! I do not know what rites you have used to consecrate and dedicate it, making you think you must plant it in a consul’s body.

Chapter 7

But what kind of life are you living now? I will speak to you now in a way that seems prompted not by the hatred you deserve, but by pity, which you do not deserve at all. You came into the Senate a short while ago. Out of this great crowd, out of all your friends and close associates, who greeted you? Nothing like this has happened to anyone in living memory. Do you wait for insults spoken aloud when the silence has already delivered the harshest judgment against you? And what about the benches emptied at your approach? All the former consuls, men you had marked out for murder so often, left that part of the benches bare and empty as soon as you sat down. How do you think you should bear that?

17 I swear by Hercules, if my slaves feared me the way all your fellow citizens fear you, I would think I had to leave my house. Do you not think you have to leave the city? If I saw that my fellow citizens deeply suspected and hated me without cause, I would rather be out of their sight than face everyone’s hostile looks. But you know from your own crimes that everyone’s hatred is justified and has long been deserved. How can you hesitate to get away from the sight and company of people whose minds and feelings you hurt? If your parents feared and hated you, and you could not win them over by any means, I think you would go somewhere out of their sight. Now your country, the common parent of us all, hates and fears you. It has long judged that you think of nothing but murdering it, your own parent. Will you show no respect for its authority, accept no judgment from it, feel no fear of its power?

18 This is how your country deals with you, Catiline. In a way, its silence speaks: “For several years now, no crime has happened except through you, no disgraceful act without you. You alone have been free to kill many citizens, to harass and rob our allies, and go unpunished. You have had the power not only to disregard laws and criminal courts, but to overturn and break them down. Those earlier acts should not have been tolerated, but I put up with them as best I could. Now my whole being is gripped by fear because of you alone. At every sound, it is Catiline I fear. No plan against me seems possible that would be out of keeping with your criminal nature. This cannot be tolerated. So go away and free me from this fear. If it is justified, go so that I am not destroyed. If it is groundless, go so that I can finally stop being afraid.”

19 CHAPTER 8

If your country spoke to you as I have described, should it not get what it asks, even if it cannot use force? And what about your offer to place yourself under supervision? To avoid suspicion, you said you wanted to live with Manius Lepidus. When he would not take you in, you even dared to come to me and ask me to keep you under guard in my own house. I too gave you my answer: I could not possibly be safe inside the same house as you, since I was in great danger even living inside the same city walls. Then you went to the praetor Quintus Metellus. He turned you down, so you moved in with your friend Marcus Metellus, that excellent man. Clearly, you thought he would be extremely careful in guarding you, extremely sharp in suspecting you, and extremely brave in punishing you. But how far from prison and chains should a man be who has already judged himself fit to be kept under guard?

20 That being so, Catiline, why hesitate? If you cannot calmly face death, go away to some other country. You have snatched this life of yours from the many punishments you justly owe. Why not hand it over to exile and loneliness?

“Put it to the Senate,” you say. That is your demand. You say you will obey if this body passes a decree declaring that it wants you to go into exile. I will not put it to a vote; that would go against my principles. Still, I will make you understand what these men think of you. Leave the city, Catiline. Free the state from fear. Go into exile, if that is the word you are waiting for. Well? Are you paying attention? Do you notice their silence? They let this happen. They say nothing. Why wait for them to speak with authority when their silence makes their wishes plain?

21 If I had said the same thing to this excellent young man Publius Sestius, or to that very brave man Marcus Marcellus, the Senate would by now have laid violent hands on me, the consul, right here in this temple. And it would have been fully justified. But in your case, Catiline, by keeping still they approve. By letting this happen they pass judgment. By saying nothing they shout. And it is not just these men, whose authority you of course value, though you think their lives are worth nothing. It is also those Roman knights, those honorable and excellent men, and the other courageous citizens standing around the Senate. You could see their numbers, recognize their feelings, and hear their voices a little while ago. For a long time now I have barely kept their hands and weapons off you. Yet I will easily persuade these same men to escort you all the way to the gates as you leave the places you have so long been trying to destroy.

22 CHAPTER 9

But what am I saying? Could anything break you? Could you ever put yourself right? Could you consider fleeing, or think about exile? I wish the immortal gods would put that thought into your head! Yet I can see the storm of resentment that threatens me if my words frighten you into deciding to go into exile. Perhaps it will not come now, while the memory of your crimes is fresh. But it will come in the future. Still, it is worth the price, provided the disaster falls on you alone and is kept apart from danger to our country. But we cannot expect you to be troubled by your vices, to fear the penalties of the law, or to give way before the country’s crisis. You are not the sort of man, Catiline, whom shame could turn back from disgrace, fear from danger, or reason from madness.

23 So leave, as I have said so often. If you want to stir up hatred against me, whom you call your enemy, go straight into exile. If you do that, I will hardly be able to bear people’s talk. If you go into exile on the consul’s orders, I will hardly stand up under the weight of their hatred. But if you would rather add to the praise and glory I receive, leave with your savage band of criminals. Go to Manlius. Rouse the ruined citizens. Separate yourself from the decent ones. Make war on your country. Revel in your godless banditry. Then it will be clear that I did not drive you out to live among strangers, but invited you to join your own people.

24 But why should I invite you? I already know you have sent armed men ahead to wait for you at Forum Aurelium. I know you have agreed and fixed a day with Manlius. I know you have even sent ahead that silver eagle. I am sure it will bring destruction and death to you and all your followers. You set up a criminal shrine to it in your own house. Could you stay away from it any longer? You used to worship it before setting out to murder. Often you have left its altars to use that godless right hand to kill citizens.

25 CHAPTER 10

At last you will go where your wild, uncontrolled desire has long been dragging you. This brings you no pain, but an almost unbelievable pleasure. Nature gave you birth for this madness. Your own will trained you for it. Fortune kept you alive for it. You have never wanted peace, or even any war that was not criminal. You have found a band of wicked men, made up of ruined people who have lost all their resources and even all hope.

26 What delight you will enjoy there! How you will jump for joy! How wildly you will revel in pleasure, when among so many of your followers you neither hear nor see a single decent man! Those famous hardships of yours were practice for this way of life. You lay on the ground not only to wait for a chance at illicit sex, but to carry out a crime. You stayed awake not only to take advantage of sleeping husbands, but to attack the property of peaceful people. Now you have somewhere to show off that famous ability of yours to endure hunger, cold, and the lack of everything. You will soon find that those things have worn you out.

27 I achieved this much when I kept you out of the consulship: you could attack the state as an exile rather than torment it as consul. And the criminal enterprise you had undertaken could be called banditry rather than war.

Chapter 11

Now, senators, I want to head off a complaint my country might make against me, one that would almost be justified, and ask to be spared it. Please listen carefully to what I say and fix it deep in your hearts and minds. Suppose my country, which I love far more than my own life, suppose all Italy, suppose the whole state were to speak to me: “Marcus Tullius, what are you doing? You have found this man to be an enemy. You see that he will lead a war. You know the enemy camp is waiting for him as its commander. Will you let him leave, the man behind these crimes, the leader of the conspiracy, the man who calls out slaves and ruined citizens? It will seem that you have not let him out of the city, but let him loose against it. Will you not order him put in chains, dragged off to death, put to death as the ultimate punishment? What, after all, stops you? Our ancestors’ practice?

28 “But very often in our country even private citizens have put dangerous citizens to death. Or is it the laws passed about punishing Roman citizens? But in this city those who have broken with the state have never kept their rights as citizens. Or do you fear the hatred of future generations? What a fine way to repay the Roman people! You were a man known through your own achievements, with no ancestral standing to recommend you. They took you through every rank of public office and raised you to the highest authority so early in life. And now, because you fear hatred or some danger, you neglect the safety of your fellow citizens!

29 “But if there is any reason to fear hatred, you should not fear the hatred that comes from firmness and courage more than the hatred that comes from inaction and worthlessness. When Italy is devastated by war, when cities are ravaged and houses burn, do you think you will not burn too, in a fire of hatred?”

Chapter 12

I will give a brief answer to these deeply respected words of my country and to the thoughts of those who feel the same way. Senators, if I thought the best thing to do was to put Catiline to death, I would not have given that gladiator a single hour of life. Great men and famous citizens shed the blood of Saturninus, the Gracchi, Flaccus, and many others before them. They did not stain themselves by it; they even gained honor. Surely, then, I had no need to fear that killing this murderer of his fellow citizens would bring hatred on me in the future. Even if that hatred were a very real threat to me, I have always believed that hatred earned by courage is glory, not hatred.

30 Still, there are some in this body who either do not see the dangers ahead or pretend not to see what they do see. Their mild opinions have fed Catiline’s hopes. By refusing to believe in the conspiracy as it took shape, they made it stronger. Their influence would lead many people, not just the wicked but also the uninformed, to say I had acted cruelly and like a king if I had punished him. As things stand, I know that if he reaches Manlius’s camp, where he is heading, no one will be so stupid as not to see that a conspiracy has been formed, or so wicked as not to admit it. But I also know that killing this one man could hold back this plague on our country for a short time, not put it down forever. If he throws himself out, takes his men with him, and gathers the other ruined wrecks of men from everywhere to that same place, it will wipe out and destroy not just this fully grown plague on the state, but also the root and seed of all our troubles.

31 CHAPTER 13

Senators, we have lived with the dangers and plots of this conspiracy for a long time. But somehow all these crimes, all this long-standing madness and recklessness, have reached their full growth and burst out during my consulship. If just this one man is removed from such a large band of robbers, we may seem free of worry and fear for a short time. But the danger will remain, shut deep inside the veins and vital organs of the state. People who are seriously ill and tossed about by burning fever often seem to get relief at first if they drink cold water. Then they suffer far more severely and violently. In the same way, the disease in our country will get temporary relief from this man’s punishment, then become much worse while the others stay alive.

32 So let the wicked withdraw. Let them separate themselves from the decent people and gather in one place. As I have so often said, let a wall stand between them and us. Let them stop plotting against the consul in his own house, crowding around the city praetor’s tribunal, surrounding the Senate house with swords, and getting fire-darts and torches ready to burn the city. Let each man’s attitude toward the state be written on his forehead. Senators, I promise you this: we consuls will show such vigilance, you such authority, the Roman knights such courage, and all decent citizens such unity that, once Catiline has left, you will see everything exposed, brought to light, crushed, and punished.

33 With these omens, Catiline, go to your godless, criminal war. Let it bring complete safety to the state, disaster and destruction to you, and ruin to those who have joined you in every crime and in the murder of their country. And you, Jupiter, whom Romulus established under the same divine signs as this city, whom we rightly call the Upholder of this city and its rule: you will keep this man and his partners away from your own and the other temples, from the city’s houses and walls, and from the lives and property of all its citizens. These enemies of decent people, these foes of their country, these robbers of Italy are joined together in a pact of crime and a godless alliance. You will punish them forever, in life and in death.