What it is
The Bellum Catilinae — known in English as the Conspiracy of Catiline or The War with Catiline — is the shorter of Sallust's two surviving historical monographs. It runs to about sixty modern pages and concerns the conspiracy of Lucius Sergius Catilina against the Roman state in 63 BCE, suppressed during Cicero's consulship of that year. It is one of the earliest surviving Roman histories conceived as a literary genre rather than as annual chronicle — a deliberate, shaped narrative with a thesis, drawing on Thucydides for its method and on the long Roman moralising tradition for its argument.
Historical context
Sallust wrote in retirement. After service with Caesar in Africa and a governorship that ended in accusations of extortion, he withdrew from public life — in some accounts under threat of prosecution — and turned to the historical work for which he is now read. The Catilina dates to the years immediately after Caesar's assassination, when the political class that had lived through 63 BCE was either dead or in retreat and the Republic's fall could be read as a process rather than as an event. The work is partisan but not crudely so: Sallust was a Caesarian, and his Caesar in this work is given a magnificent speech (Cat. 51), but the corresponding speech he gives Cato (Cat. 52) is at least as powerful, and the moral frame of the work is consonant with Cato's side.
What it argues
The proem (Cat. 1–13) is the heart of the work. Roman virtue, Sallust argues, was sustained while Rome had external enemies whose power kept Roman ambition disciplined — the metus hostilis, the "fear of the enemy." When Carthage was destroyed in 146 BCE, that discipline disappeared. Ambitio and avaritia — ambition and greed — entered the citizen body and corroded it from within. Sulla's army, returning from the East with eastern wealth and eastern luxury, accelerated the process. By the generation of Catilina, the Republic was already a shell. The conspiracy is not a freak event; it is the symptom of a deeper sickness.
The narrative proper (Cat. 14–61) is brisk and dramatic. The famous twin speeches of Caesar and Cato in the senatorial debate over the conspirators' execution (Cat. 51–52) are the work's literary high-point: Caesar arguing on Stoic grounds against capital punishment in the absence of due process; Cato arguing that the preservation of the Republic in extremity requires the courage to act firmly. The two speeches together are Sallust's portrait of two strands of the late-Republican political character. The narrative closes at the battle of Pistoia (Cat. 60–61), where Catilina dies fighting — Sallust giving him, in death, a kind of brutal Roman dignity.
Why it has been read
The Catilina defined how the late Republic read itself. The frame — that virtue requires external pressure, that wealth corrupts, that the loss of civic virtue is what destroyed the Republic — became the dominant ancient interpretation of Rome's fall. Augustine engaged with Sallust at length in De Civitate Dei, recasting the metus hostilis argument in Christian terms. The Renaissance read him as the moral historian of Rome; the American founders — Adams especially — cite the proem repeatedly. His style, abrupt and Thucydidean, was the model for a particular kind of moralised, compressed history through the early modern period.
Citing the Catiline
Standard citation is by chapter and section (e.g. Sall. Cat. 5.1 for the portrait of Catilina himself; Cat. 10–13 for the proem on decline; Cat. 51–52 for the speeches of Caesar and Cato). The standard Latin text is Reynolds' Oxford Classical Texts edition; see our Sources page.