[All translations from Loeb Classical Library editions unless specified.]

For a blog whose name is borrowed from Cicero, it is only fitting that its first entry be dedicated to the memory of Marcus Tullius Cicero, and to the phrase in particular that was trotted out in exasperation and incredulity at those who commit wanton sedition. The instance I want to focus on is the Catiline conspiracy, one of the rare occasions where Cicero was prosecuting and not part of the defence. ¹ Lucius Sergius Catilina, whose sympathies lay with the populares, was actively seditious; Mary Beard describes him as “a disgruntled, bankrupt aristocrat and the architect of a plot … to assassinate Rome’s elected officials and burn the place down.” ² Cicero, as consul, ordered the arrest of Catiline, and then his summary execution — without a trial — on those fateful days in 64 B.C. In In Catilinam (hereinafter IC), he forcefully argues against sedition — sedition prompted by Catiline’s disregard for property rights, as shown by his proposal to forgive debts of both the rich and the poor if he did succeed in his rebellion.

It is the latter that I turn my attention to. ‘O tempora, O mores’ is strategically placed at the start of the first oration after a slew of rhetorical questions in which his plan to burn the city down and assassinate key officials — including Cicero — is laid bare. The opening, equally powerful, is known perhaps best from its inclusion as the leading quotation for Cicero’s entry in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations: “How long, Catiline, will you abuse our patience?” Cicero’s declamation, powerful as it was, rendered Catiline into a comic figure, whose inability to plan and execute even a remotely successful rebellion was a blow to his already bankrupt honour, which he intended to restore through state largesse — by forgiving all loans, public and private. Cicero’s denunciation of Catiline, however, acquires its significance not from the sheer force of nature that his speech was, but rather from Cicero’s later handling of the conspiracy. Whatever the evidence against Catiline, he was still a Roman citizen. “Civis Romanus sum,” Cicero argued seven years earlier in his prosecution of Verres when Verres prescribed the death of a Roman citizen without a trial (In Verres, V.57); now, it was time for Catiline to be put in the same position as Sthenius — the matter that had prompted the prosecution against Verres for extortion in general in the very first place.

Was Cicero justified in putting Catiline to death without a trial? If the Aristotelian citizen was to rule and be ruled in turn, the Roman citizen was to prosecute and to be prosecuted in return. Litigation and the law formed an important part of Roman society, and one of the most important rights that a Roman citizen enjoyed during Cicero’s time was the right to not suffer punishment without being tried in a court by a jury of his peers. It was this that Cicero sought to subvert, but in the face of a national emergency, one that threatened the existence of the Roman Republic and its foundations. Cicero’s move was in a way dictatorial, but he did not aspire to the post, and there is little leeway to argue that Cicero’s motivation in this matter was anything but a genuine concern for the survival of the Roman Republic. Perhaps his calculus was affected, in no small part, by his experience in the prosecution of Verres, who employed every trick — political, legal, and extralegal — to subvert the process of justice. Catiline was Verres on an unimaginably larger scale, and immediacy was the need of the hour. But the question that this poses for us is: whether fundamental rights can be ignored, even if it is in the case of a seditious citizen, during an existential emergency.

Neal Wood provides a tidy summary of Cicero’s thoughts on tyranny: “all governments or aspirants to government that actually violate or threaten he interests of the propertied classes, thereby endangering the common interest and the security of the state, are by definition tyrannical,” and consequently that those who rescue the state from the hands of tyrants — real or aspirational, that is immaterial — “act in a way at once moral and expedient and perform the most signal service to mankind.” ³ This conclusion is drawn in part, from De Officiis (hereinafter DO), where Cicero poses the question: “… supposing a righteous man were in a position to rob the cruel and inhuman tyrant Phalaris of clothing, might he not do it to keep himself from freezing to death?” (DO III.29). Cicero “maintain[s] that disregard of the common interests [communis utilitatis] is repugnant to nature; for it is unjust” (DO III.30–31), and consequently not averse to the prescriptions of “nature’s law” (lex naturae, DO III.31). Cicero then declares that “we have no ties of fellowship with a tyrant … and it is not opposed to nature to rob, if one can, a man who it is morally right to kill” (DO III.32).

But is Catiline a tyrant? Throughout De Officiis, Cicero does not offer a cogent definition of a tyrant, although Julius Caesar is mentioned as such frequently (see DO I.112; II.23; II.25). It is assumed that the word stands for itself and that its meaning is known to all — even the Latin text in all three instances referred to above is some conjugation or declection of the original tyrannus. In On the Commonwealth (hereinafter C), Cicero looks to Tarquinius Superbus for a definition of tyranny, but then ventures to, through Scipio, remark that “so where there is a tyrant, … that is no commonwealth at all.” ⁴ If Cicero did hold Rome to be a commonweal, a res publica, then how could tyranny thrive there? This seems to be an abiding contradiction. We, however, do know where tyrants come from: following Aristotle, Scipio declares that tyranny is the corrupted form of kingship (C II.47), and following Plato, “excessive license … is the stock from which tyrants grow” (C I.68). Assuming that we do, in fact, can know with some certainty what a tyrant is, who gets to decide who is a tyrant — and how? Could anyone be the judge of whether a ruler is acting toward the actualisation of the summum bonum, or is it the members of the Senate, or only the Consuls?

There is, to some degree, a marked ambiguity in the usage of tyrannus and its offshoots in Cicero’s work, one that enables Wood to speculate and fill the gap in by suggesting that anyone who does not follow the primary goal of a state: the protection of private property. It is this that I must take issue with, because this is an uncharitable (and misleading) representation of Cicero’s conception of the state. Wood remarks that “for Cicero, the state exists primarily to safeguard private property and the accumulation of property, not to shape human souls according to some ethical idea of the virtuous.” ⁵ This is, for Wood, one of Cicero’s salient innovations that makes his worthy of study as a philosopher in his own right. ⁶ However, such a concept does not hold under examination. Cicero, using Scipio as his mouthpiece, remarks that the res publica’s first cause is “a kind of natural herding together of men” for man is not a solitary being, but rather, as is implied by the incomplete fragment, a social being and consequently a political being (C I.39a). The state cannot contribute to the summum bonum if it is a brazen oligarchy (C I.51). The perfect state, for Cicero, is a virtuous one: “But when virtue rules over the commonwealth, what could be more glorious?” (C I.52). If the most “glorious” state is the one where virtue is easily accessible, does it not constitute an impetus to make it conducive to virtue? It is not important to look so far into the text: in the opening pages, Cicero points out, in easy reach, that “nature has given men such a need for virtue” (C I.1) that it is only natural for man to seek it — in association — for man is not a solitary being. Wood’s reading of Cicero as advocating for the existence of a state based off the preservation of private property is an incomplete characterisation of the purpose of association and its goals.

The state is defined as “the association of citizens under law” (C I.49): this is the most concise definition that Cicero offers to us. However, it is unclear whether the ‘law’ here is merely the formally promulgated law within the bounds of the state — or whether it is lex naturae, the law of nature that applies to all those who seek membership in the human community: “Who could rightly call ‘human’ someone who desires no bond of shared law, no link of human nature with his fellow citizens or indeed with the whole human race?” (C II.48). The reasoning, implicit in this, I conjecture as follows: since the state is, in fact, “the association of citizens under law” (C I.49), those who dare venture outside law, by conspiring to commit theft on a grand scale by excusing debts they have no jurisdiction over, or by conspiring to deter the existence of the association itself by marking for assassination its executive — the consuls, in this case — the individual seeks to subvert the existence of the state, and consequently, it is outside its ambit. The protections offered to individuals who are members of this association cannot be offered to those outside of it, especially those who seek to use the authority of the state for ends that are contrary to the commands of nature, and to the demands of justice: “for if merely for one’s own benefit one were to take something away from a man … it would be an act of meanness and contrary to nature’s law” (DO III.30). The only exception to this is protection against privation (DO III.30–31), which Catiline does not seek — he seeks to subvert the maxim that “each one must bear his own burden of distress rather than rob a neighbour of his rights” (DO III.30). This is what Catiline seeks to do: his profligacy has resulted in bankruptcy, and he has taken recourse to rebellion and to the subversion of that which rightfully belongs to their individual owners — creditors — not because of the particular demands of justice, but to become the most popular of the populares.

In seeking to subvert the state to use it to ends contrary to its conception, Catiline has engaged in seditious affairs; by acting upon it, as evidenced by the letters to his potential Gaulish allies, he has displayed malicious intent and a readiness to act that puts him outside of the protections accorded by the state, not to all those resident within it, but to Roman citizens. He has broken with his civic sensibilities and is no longer a member of the civitas. In such a clear-cut case of wanting to usurp power in ways contrary to those prescribed by the civic association and then acting upon desires to violently overthrow the state, he resigns his commission from the association — and should not expect any grant of rights from the state, except those offered as a sign of its own benevolence and grace. Cicero is consistent on this front, and although he leaves explicitly the meaning of the word ‘tyrant’ unclear at first, working under the assumption that a gross injustice is an act of a tyrant, Catiline’s intents and actions both qualify him for membership in the country club which Lucius Tarquinius Superbus spends most, if not all, of his time at. If due process is the right of a citizen, but the individual concerned is no longer a citizen, having voluntarily exited the association, then Cicero was most certainly justified in using an extreme and evident case of rebellion to suspend Catiline and his co-conspirators’ trial and directly seek to execute them, if only to save Rome from tyranny. (It is an entirely different matter that Julius Caesar did turn out to be a tyrant, in Cicero’s own words, and although Cicero certainly supported the assassination and was looked up to for leadership in its immediate aftermath, he was most certainly not a ringleader).

It is not that redistribution was an anathema to Cicero, but the means never justified the ends of him. Cicero’s justice is based on virtue and honour, one where how things were done was just as important as what was done. Perhaps his masterful utterance of ‘O Tempora, O Mores!’ was a snide remark to his senatorial colleagues of the populares faction, who most certainly knew of the sedition beforehand, and were prepared to tolerate and accommodate it, until it no longer suited them. Expediency was the rule of the game for the populares; we see it again, with Julius Caesar, who is most certainly devoid of scruples in his brazen power grab. Even in this situation, armed with the ultimate power, the executive authority of the Roman state, Cicero put Catiline to the test of what could arguably be construed as a trial by his peers, for Catiline was a Senator.

Why does this matter today? If we are to take Cicero’s argument and philosophy, it us our duty to kill aspiring tyrants: we do not here seek to kill, but “to render signal service to the state and to human society” (DO III.30). The intent here is not to kill for individual gain but for the summum bonum, not from personal avarice or any expectation of material gain, but for the good of all: this has the seeds of the gulf between intent and action, the double effect theory, that we later see in Aquinas, who justified killing in self-defence, but no intentionally so, using a similar line of thought. This does not also imply that it is not the duty of the state to raise taxes and protect the realm, or discharge such duties prescribed under law — the how is as important as the what. If the state were to exceed the circumscribed limits of power, it would be failing in its duty, for it would no longer contribute to the good, but rather exercise a vile despotism, usurping power where it had no right to exercise it. At the same time, Cicero, acting as Consul, does not make the unilateral decision to execute Catiline — he put the decision to the Senate — the famed Senate of the Senatus Popolus Que Romanus, the Senate and the People of Rome — which ultimately decided in favour of executing, without trial, Catiline and his major co-conspirators. That Catiline escaped and lost his life on the battlefield, fighting against Rome and in open rebellion against it, is not immaterial: the conspiracy was no figment of Cicero’s imagination, and Catiline, was, in fact, an aspiring tyrant.

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Addendum: On further thought, let me lay out an argument for why Cicero used his authority as consul wisely, and in accordance with the norms of justice. From Cicero’s deposition at the trial of Clodius, we can infer that the jury comprised of thirty peers — and no ‘judge’. A jury, competent enough to have judged both the crime itself and the gravity of Catiline’s crimes, was only to be found in the Senate. The Senate, far more expansive than a conventional jury, was a body of Catiline’s peers, for Catiline himself was a senator; consequently, taking Cicero’s precepts on proportional equality into account, there was no fairer trial that Catiline could have received. The entire Senate voted on Catiline’s execution, and the motion seemed to have passed: and Catiline was in attendance, poised to make a response if he wanted to, especially under Senatorial rules at the time. Cicero hosted a trial in form, but not in name. That even the inscrutable Cato the Younger voted and spoke strongly in favour of this motion is an assurance that Clodius was merely seeking revenge, and sullied Cicero’s good name even though Cicero made the effort to gather and present clinching evidence and have the entire Senate vote on the proposal to execute Catiline.