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Catiline, The Monster of Rome: An Ancient Case of Political Assassination Hardcover – June 25, 2014

by Francis Galassi (Author)
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Leader of a Conspiracy to Overthrow the Roman Republic, a Reform-Minded Senator Whose Reputation, Life, and Legacy Were Destroyed to Maintain the Status Quo
In 62 BC, Roman Senator Lucius Sergius Catiline lay dead on a battlefield in Tuscany. He was slain along with his soldiers after his conspiracy to overthrow the Roman Republic had been exposed by his adversary Cicero. It was an ignominious end for a man described at the time as a perverted, insane monster who had attempted to return his family to fortune and social standing. Chroniclers were not kind to Catiline, and his name over the centuries was synonymous with treachery. Recently, scholars have been reappraising the life and influence of this ancient Roman. In Catiline, The Monster of Rome: An Ancient Case of Political Assassination, economic historian Francis Galassi provides the first book-length account of Catiline in more than a generation.
            Rome first achieved a status as an empire during Catiline’s lifetime. The republic was, however, constantly at war with foreign powers and occasionally its own allies, and the disparity between the wealthy and the poor threatened to destabilize society. Catiline was from an aristocratic but impoverished family and first served as an officer with Cornelius Sulla during that general’s purges against Gaius Marius, the supposed champion of the oppressed masses. Catiline’s goal was to serve Sulla and then use that as a springboard to public office where he could recover his family’s former wealth and honor. However, the senatorial elite became suspicious if not threatened by the upstart Catiline and blocked his ambitions. Catiline was dogged by trumped-up charges, including raping a Vestal virgin and murdering his brother-in-law; he was acquitted each time, but his political life was ruined. With citizens demanding land and agrarian reform, Catiline genuinely embraced their dissatisfaction, and realizing that the elite would stop his attempt to gain status through elections, he organized a conspiracy to take control of Roman government through arms. Once his actions had been made public, many of his supporters and co-conspirators left him; but honoring the course he had chosen, he and his remaining soldiers fought a Roman army to their deaths. Rather than the “monster” as portrayed by his contemporaries, the author contends that Catiline was compelled to act for the benefit of common Romans to save Rome even if it meant overthrowing the government. As Galassi notes, Catiline’s contemporary, the slave Spartacus, has been a symbol of social reform for centuries, but it was actually Catiline, not Spartacus, who attempted to change Rome.
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  1. Print length
    192 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Westholme Publishing
  4. Publication date
    June 25, 2014
  5. Dimensions
    5.5 x 1.1 x 8.5 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1594161968
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1594161964
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

FRANCIS GALASSI received his PhD in economics and economic history from the University of Toronto. As an economist and consultant he has worked for the European Commission and the International Labour Office and at universities around the world. Currently he is senior economic advisor with the Labour Program in the Ministry of Employment and Human Resources for the Canadian Federal government. He lives with his family in Ottawa.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Westholme Publishing; 1st edition (June 25, 2014)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 192 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1594161968
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1594161964
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.1 x 8.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
11 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Daniel Prior
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best Ancient books I have read for a while
Reviewed in the United States on March 1, 2015
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One of the best Ancient books I have read for a while. A true Post Modern take on Catiline, something I have thought about for a while since there seemed always to be something very fishy about the whole affair.
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GDGleason
5.0 out of 5 stars Poor Catiline, Poor Rome
Reviewed in the United States on October 31, 2015
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Easy to read. I think the author is a great storyteller and researcher. Catiline got screwed and Galassi tells you why.
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Christopher C. Smith
2.0 out of 5 stars In the end, too full of errors to take.
Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2014
I wanted to like this book, as the basic thesis that our view of Catiline has been slanted is one I agree with. This was done
to a large extent by Cicero using the sorry little incident to plump his image in history. My impression is that this rather comic little episode (Cicero executes 5 people without trial, and Catiline flees....) hardly warrants much concern either way. And the fact that the co-consul opted out of fighting Catiline's little army and Cicero was unceremoniously ejected from the city a few years later for his part says that the heroism might have been seen as overblown even in that day.

But the real flaw in the book is the huge number of factual errors. At least once on each page (and these are small pages) I come across a factual error or very questionable assertion by the author, even unrelated to his thesis where you might expect some exaggeration to come into play. He has called Marius, Julius Caesar in his consulship, and Crassus as dictators when two were consuls at the time. "Dictator" is an actual Roman office, you just can't slap it on anyone you happen to dislike.

The final howler was when he claimed Julius Caesar introduced proscriptions in 43 BC. Quite a feat for someone knifed to death by Senators in the somewhat famous incident on the Ides of March, 44 BC, a year earlier. As anyone with even a passing knowledge of the era knows, Julius Caesar was famous for clemency in the Civil Wars. The proscriptions were set up by Octavian, (later Augustus) Caesar, who had taken Julius' name when he was named as the heir to the assassinated Caesar.

It's clear that the author's feel for this period is weak, and so it will be hard to carry a convincing argument forward from such a weak foundation.
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J. Shelby
3.0 out of 5 stars Good Read, Be Wary of Factual Inaccuracies
Reviewed in the United States on December 10, 2014
This is a great book and a terrible book. It is terrible because the text has either been quite sloppily edited or the author has a very poor grasp on Roman History and the Latin language. Unfortunately, these errors constitute evidence (not proof!) that he is making other, more subtle mistakes. That said, if you zoom out from the details, it is an at times breathless rehabilitation of the character of Catiline and his rebellion.

Most striking is the way the author shows how an aristocratic ally of the old order was slowly but surely turned away from any hope of creating reform from within the state, and eventually sought redress by attempting to overthrow it. Even on the bare evidence that we have from antiquity, the author creates seemingly solid and believable portraits of Rome's movers and shakers. For my part and as the proud holder of B.A. in Classics, I'd never thought of Crassus, Caesar, Cicero, (not to say Catiline; Galassi's portrait of Catiline is basically what you'd get from Sallust if you took Sallust's account with a lump of salt, and maybe a little sugar) in quite this way or as quite this human. A good read if you're wary of the details.
4 people found this helpful
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JPS
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but flawed and biased portrait of "a victim"?
Reviewed in the United States on August 21, 2014
This little book (less than 170 pages of text) is about Catiline, a Roman scion of a patrician family who lost out in the fierce competition to make it to the top, failed to get himself elected consul, plotted a coup which also failed rather abysmally, rebelled and was finally killed when fighting against the odds alongside a few thousand of his last partisans, rather than surrendering and facing execution. Except that the "real" story is quite a bit more complicated than that, as the author, Frank Galassi, sets out to demonstrate. Despite some serious reservations, he does come up with some very good points.

The central theme of the book is to show how Catiline was subjected to a very successful political and character assassination campaign from none other than Cicero, who, as usual, used this to stake his own claim to fame. He is still largely known nowadays as the "saviour" of the Republic because he claimed credit for squashing the Catiline conspiracy. As the author shows rather well, he (among others) had done so much to foster this conspiracy in the first place by barring Catiline from standing as a candidate for the consular elections two years in a row and then by somewhat rigging the consular elections to help defeat him.

I did however quickly start to have a bit of a problem with the author's repeated attempts to present Catiline as a "victim" because I found them rather unconvincing. Politics in Rome at the time were ultra-competitive, and the competition had probably even been increasing for the elections for consul as the number of praetors was increased. Hideous personal attacks and character assassination was commonplace so that Cicero's unscrupulous and disingenuous portraying of Catiline as a "monster" was not necessarily exceptional. It is not exceptional either to find more than traces of this kind of vicious "mud slinging" in our historical written sources of the time.

This is where the author's findings started to sound not entirely convincing to me, and where he appeared to be somewhat biased. Typically, a successful "character assassination" campaign tends to be based on at least a grain (or several) of truth, however distorted and exaggerated these become. As the author also makes clear, at least some of Cicero's "mud-slinging" has stuck to Catiline so that he can still appears as a rather shadier character than the average ambitious politician and a worse rabble rouser than others nowadays, even if he is not quite the "monster" that Cicero wants his audience to believe in.

In fact, the author largely ascribes this to Cicero's "talent" and his vicious attacks. There is probably some truth in that, with an interesting parallel (that the author does not make) being the way in which Cicero also blackened the reputation of Mark Antony. However, giving the impression that Catiline was "the hopeless victim" of Cicero's manipulations and/or was "too noble" to respond in kind does not seem entirely convincing. It would anyway have made Catiline veru much out of character with his fellow senators. It may also seem to be "not good enough" as an explanation since Mark Antony, to pursue the comparison, turned out to be perfectly capable to reply to Cicero in kind and with interest and to hit hard where it hurted. How come Catiline seemed unable to respond to attacks in kind?

There may be several responses and the author, at times, seems to be just about ready to present and discuss them but fails to do so because it would somewhat damage his case of "Catiline the victim". One possible reason is that Senators and equestrians remembered Catiline as the head of one of the hit squads who carried out Sulla's proscriptions. That could have put him "beyond the pale" even if he was very much one of theirs, given his family background - a pure "blue-blood" Patrician. His role as hit-squat leader during the proscriptions could have made him durably disliked and feared, at the very least, and possibly even hated, by all senators and equestrians who cared to remember (or were "kindly" reminding off!) the role he had played.

Another reason is that, contrary to Crassus, who had also been very closely associated with Sulla's purges, he did NOT exercise senior military commands. Contrary to what the author asserts, it was not Catiline who commanded the victorious right wing of Sulla's army during the hard fought battle at the Gates of Rome, it was Crassus. Despite the efforts of the author to present Catiline as having substantial military experience, he was only twenty six at the time (82 BC), too young to have exercised a senior command, and only a relatively junior officer. Also, he had a huge handicap: no money or at the very least not enough to run for election on his own and certainly not Crassus' or Pompey's kind of money to raise his own "private" army. He was, at best, only a tribune, precisely the kind of officer who would be given the task of commanding a hit squad to hunt down and execute Sulla's enemies. So was Sulla's henchman and executioner, with lots of blood (quite litterally!) on his hands. Even if one sides with the author and dismisses the gory stories of his torturing, this was hardly the way to make a beginning and gain popularity.

Another and related line of response is that he seems to have been less than successful and brilliant when playing the game of Rome's dirty politics. The mystery here is whether he was unwilling to get his hands dirty in his own interest, as just about all of the others did (with the notable exception of Cato the Younger) or whether he was just not good at it, incapable in other words, rather than simply unwilling. This is also something else that the author does not really get to discuss and it is a pity. Interestingly, he does not seem to have made any significant fortune as a result of either the Sullan proscriptions or of his appointment as governor of Africa, contrary to many other Sullans and just about all Romans who were appointed as governors. With regards to the later, the trick was to get rich by milking your province but not to brazingly so as to avoid any serious risk of prosecution onece your were out of office and returned to Rome. Catiline seems to have been quite unsucessful here, according to the author's interpretation at least: he make a bit of money, but no serious money but still managed to get himself prosecuted by Clodius Pulcher on his return.

Here again, the author makes streneous attempts to demonstrate that the charges against him were baseless, that no witnesses were ever produced, and that the case against him was finally dropped. However, he tends goes on the show that the real purpose of the legal case was simply not to get Catiline condemned. Instead, it was to prevent him from being able to stand for consul in the elections for two years in a row and in case the ploy was entirely successful. Contrary to what the author claims, and to the extent that the objective was to eliminate a rival and prevent him from running, this does not "prove" that the charges has no ground, neither does it prove that there were not witnesses against Catiline and no misdeeds committed by him. All that this demonstrates is that there was no need to go any further against him because the objective had been achieved without the matter being judged.

Another unconvincing attempt to show Catiline as a "victim" is to allegate that, at the time, the province of Africa was poor and largely a desert so that even if he had wanted to do so, he could not have made any serious money during his spell as governor. Contrary to these allegations, Africa was not a poor province. Although it may not have been as prosperous as it had been under Carthage and would become later on, it was certainly much less barren than modern Tunisia happens to be.

Perhaps the main factor explaining his multiple failures is his lack of support or, more precisely, his inability to attract and keep the kind of support he needed to get himself elected as consul and prosper, and this was vital for any high born Roman willing to succeed and climb up to the top of the "cursus honorum." Just like Caesar, he was financed by Crassus but the plutocrat distanced himself from his ex-protégé (and even helped to "bury" him, figuratively speaking, by providing evidence against him to Cicero when consul) as soon as Catiline became a losing proposition and a liability. Also, and because he is somewhat unwilling to discuss, let alone admit, that Catiline seems to have been his own worst enemy by proving incapable of successfully playing the game of Roman politics, the author hints quite unconvincingly as some kind of treason from Julius Caesar. This could have been possible, to the extent that Catiline has once upon a time been Caesar's rival for the sponsorship (and money) of Crassus. However, by the time Caesar allegedly betrayed, such treason had become quite unnecessary because Catiline had already lost Crassus' support. He was never going to be elected consul and was already virtually a spent force.

Another somewhat unconvincing piece is the author's attempted comparison of Catiline and Cato the Younger, which is part and parcel of the author's spirited effort to prevent Catiline as full of "noble ideals". This is speculative. Besides, the comparison itself is somewhat spurious because Cato the Younger, given his considerable family fortune, could afford to be an eccentric, regardless of whether he was sincere or not (although he does seem to have believed in what he preached). Cornelius Sulla and Julius Caesar, also coming from blue-blooded patrician families just like Catiline but, just like him, with no significant money, had to find themselves a powerful protctor to sponsor and fund their élections. That they were able to do so and conserve this support whereas Catiline was not largely made the difference between success and failure. Also, another difference between Catiline and Cato was that the later was accepted by his peers, even if, as the author puts it, his moralising lectures would have made him a pain. Catiline, the thuggish ex-murderer of Senators and rich equestrians, with his promises to upend the social order and his dark threats represented another proposition altogether and a "clear and present danger" for the upper-class on which somebody as unscrupulous as Cicero could easily build his reputation as saviour of the Republic.

Finally, the book also contains some inaccuracies. The most glaring of them - two mentions of Caesar conducting his own proscriptions in 43 BC - may be caused by poor editing. It is clearly confusion between Caius Julius Caesar and his great-nephew Octavian, since Caius Julius was murdered on the Ides of March in 44 BC, as the author mentions further on in the book. Another example is a somewhat "technical" mistake about the fate of Cinna. While he was murdered by his own troops when planning to attack Sulla who was marching home from the East, the murder took place in Italy (at Ancona) as he was about to cross. It did not take place in Greece which he never reached. The issue I had with these few flaws is that they also tended to undermine the author's case and lead me to start systematically questioning each of the author's assertions.

This was a bit of pity because Francis Galassi did pick a very interesting topic to write upon and had some very good points to make: Catiline was clearly NOT a monster. However, he was probably not entirely the "victim" either and, given his track record, his personal circumstances and his behaviours, he seems to have "had it coming." Three stars.
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Top reviews from other countries

SilverSkater
5.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting
Reviewed in France on July 16, 2016
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One percent of the population draining all the riches, while the remaining 99 percent are driven to desperation.
Very interesting book, and the most detailed I ve found yet, about this singular character : Catiline.
History is written for the dominant classes, and they never forgave him, just as they did for the Gracchi.
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ND
4.0 out of 5 stars Good, but full of minor mistakes
Reviewed in Canada on July 9, 2014
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The author is not a classical scholar. Normally, this does not signify much, but not in this case.

The book opens with a myth about Carthage that has been recently disproven. I was, however, willing to overlook the story of Carthaginian soil being salted after it was defeated (something not practiced by Romans: this was made up by a scholar not based on any primary source, whom later scholars repeated without consideration). As things progressed, so did the mistakes. At one point Ti. Gracchus is mixed up with C. Gracchus. It’s stated that Tiberius was killed after his brother when Ti. “proposed” (p.18) a law to grant citizenship to “Italic peoples.” Caius, not Tiberius, was killed afterwards and proposed to grant citizenship to all Italians. A major mistake I was able to spot while skimming through chapters of summarizing primary sources was assumptions made on Roman law. In short, the author tries to convince you that Roman law protected children and it was an “unspeakable crime” to kill one’s child. Not only was it legal for the father of the family to kill his child and often the wife too depending on the type of marriage, but also it was often seen as the greatest sacrifice and virtue of a father for the Republic. There are so many minor mistakes it would take a book twice its size to explain. In addition, the author’s proficiency of Latin, ancient Greek, and German, essential for classical scholarship, are questionable. I have never seen “tabulae” (wax-tablets; used for writing down debts) translated as “tables,” which are later in the chapter called a “governing system.”

A rating of 4 (A) is given due to the interesting arguments and since it is written in an entertaining, albeit oppressive, style and; most importantly, due to my personal bias that Catiline was a victim of the aristocracy. Most of the argument in this book have been covered in detail by past classical scholars.
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alan penn
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 24, 2014
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very very pleased with book and delivery
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