Disclaimer: Originally written as a submission to the 2026 ACX book review contest. I decided to post it on my personal Substack, but it was too long for one post, so I split it up and edited it a bit. The translations of Bellum Catilinae are mine, and I am an amateur Latinist at best. There may be some errors.
Why Do Roman Historians Make Their Villains So Persuasive?
Imagine you’re watching Mulan, the Disney movie. The movie proceeds as usual: a Hun invasion, some musical numbers, the devastation of the Chinese peasantry, et cetera. Then comes the first meeting between Mulan and Shanyu on the snowy slopes of Tung Shao Pass. Imagine, however, that instead of growling and playing up the barbarian angle, Shanyu gives a speech to Mulan. A long one, like five solid minutes.
He was provoked, he says. The Chinese built their wall straight through his people’s ancestral pastureland. The Chinese army fortified the good grass and drove his people into the scrublands to starve. He tried to negotiate, but the Chinese garrison killed his ambassador and fed his corpse to the palace geese. Whose conduct, Mulan, is more barbarous?
Mulan replies by firing her rocket at the pass and burying Shanyu (and his army) under a thousand tons of snow. The Huns are defeated, and with them, their inexplicably compelling arguments. Hooray! Cue musical number. The end.
This, to a modern audience, would be a deeply weird cinematic choice.
Why would you give your villain borderline unimpeachable motivations, ones the audience might actually agree with? Why would you give him five solid minutes to explain himself, and never have your protagonist refute him?
Roman historians do this so routinely it might be called a style.
I first encountered it in Tacitus’ biography of his father-in-law, the statesman and general Agricola. Tacitus, a historian and politician of imperial Rome (and a committed imperialist), admires Agricola without reservation. So it is rather odd that Tacitus writes the greatest anti-imperial speech in world literature and puts it into the mouth of Agricola’s primary enemy, the Caledonian chieftain Calgacus.
We, at the furthest limits both of land and liberty, have been defended to this day by the remoteness of our situation and of our fame. … But there is no nation beyond us; nothing but waves and rocks, and the still more hostile Romans, whose arrogance we cannot escape by obsequiousness and submission.
These plunderers of the world, after exhausting the land by their devastations, are rifling the ocean: stimulated by avarice, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor; unsatiated by the East and by the West: the only people who behold wealth and indigence with equal avidity. To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.
(Tacitus, Agricola 30)
This last line is famous enough that you may have heard it before, often paraphrased as “The Romans make a wasteland, and call it peace.”
Agricola then replies with some competent but forgettable pre-battle oratory, and the Caledonians and Romans fight. Agricola wins a glorious victory.
This is very strange, doubly so since Calgacus’ speech was entirely invented by Tacitus. I should clarify: inventing speeches per se is common—nearly all reported speeches in ancient history are fictional.1 It is instead strange that the invention is this good. Calgacus’ speech is better than the supposed protagonist’s.
This recurs constantly in the Latin sources. Julius Caesar lets his German opposite, Ariovistus, eloquently call him a hypocrite right before Caesar crushes him in battle. The historian Livy speaks for Hannibal, the greatest enemy Rome ever faced. What’s going on and why is this so common?
This question occurred to me as I was translating the first oration of Catiline, the villain in the Roman historian Sallust’s masterpiece, the Bellum Catilinae.2 I had the odd experience of thinking that if he gave that speech to me, I’d probably follow him too. But as I considered, I realized this wasn’t just a Sallustian quirk, it was a broader pattern in Roman historiography—the suspiciously persuasive antagonist whose arguments are a little too good, a little too pointed directly at the Roman establishment.3 Thus the genesis of this essay, a case study of the phenomenon in Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae, now in two parts.
I split the essay into two related questions. Part I will try to answer why Sallust writes such good speeches for his enemies. In the process, we’ll cover Sallust himself: his life, his style, the first half of his magnum opus, and I’ll examine his personal motivations for making his Catiline into such a persuasive monster. Part I will thus touch on why the speeches are good, but not so much as to why Sallust put them in there. Part II, then, will cover the second half of the book, show a bit of my translation process, and attempt to explain why Sallust writes history at all.
The Rotting Republican Edifice
Catiline’s conspiracy is famous, not so much for its impact on history, which was minor, but for its participants and its literature. Julius Caesar and Cato the Younger were senators at the time, and Cicero, the greatest orator Rome ever produced, was consul. The literature of the conspiracy, Cicero’s Orations Against Catiline and Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae were used as Latin textbooks for two millennia thereafter.
The backdrop to the Bellum Catilinae is a Republic in decline. After the Roman Republic defeated Carthage in 146 BC, the ancient, martial, Republican virtues rotted from disuse. With no one left to fight, Rome’s politicians spent their energies screwing each other, then screwing each other over, all the while screwing the provinces out of every sesterce they could.
The worthy and the worthless alike all wished glory, honor, and power for themselves; the worthy strove by the right path, but the worthless, proper methods failing them, turned to tricks and lies. Greed births love of money, which no wise man covets; that vice, like an evil poison, unmans the body and manly spirit. Love of money is infinite, insatiable, diminished by neither plenty nor poverty. (Bellum Catilinae 11)
Sallust blames Rome’s triumph over Carthage for beginning the decay, but accuses Lucius Cornelius Sulla of accelerating it. Sulla was Caesar before Caesar: he marched on Rome (twice), thereby starting a civil war, made himself dictator, rewrote the constitution in order to “save” the Republic, then retired from public life. He did not save the Republic, and his spiritual successor, Julius Caesar objected only to his last act, saying that “Sulla didn’t know his ABCs, to lay down the dictatorship.”4
Sulla’s veteran soldiers, though, “lavishly squandered their spoils, and remembering the rape and victory in the civil war,” wanted more. (Bellum Catilinae 14, 16). Half the aristocracy was broke and desperate too, the urban poor of course had nothing, and so had nothing to lose. The Catiline Conspiracy was a byproduct of this long decline and general disaffection, and the last great prelude to the fall of the Roman Republic.
In 63 BC, Lucius Sergius Catilina (Catiline), a patrician from an ancient family, lost his chance to be consul for the second time. Drowning in debt from the truly epic bribery required to run for office in late Republican Rome, he reinvented himself as a radical populist and tried to overthrow the Republic.
For his conspiracy, he first collected the young, impressionable men, “ensnaring their soft and malleable minds by trickery.” The “trickery” included, according to Sallust, lavishing the young men with prostitutes (understandable) and expensive dogs (less understandable). He gathered to himself all the indebted, the dispossessed, and the disgruntled veterans of the civil war. He, unusually, also recruited women, “who at first had supported their enormous extravagance by debauchery, but by the time their age placed a limit on their extravagance, had accumulated enormous debts.” (Bellum Catilinae 24)5
His conspiracy was exposed before he succeeded in seizing power. Catiline’s allies in Rome were arrested by the Senate and executed without trial. Cicero presided over the killings, and depending on who you asked, they were either the apex of his career or the blackest stain on it. Catiline himself died hard—the state was forced to raise an army to put down his coup attempt, which by then had turned into a full-blown revolt, and won only a Pyrrhic victory against his army.
Caius Sallustius Crispus (Sallust)6, wrote the Bellum Catilinae about twenty years later, during the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination, as the Republic gave way to the autocracy of Octavian-cum-Augustus.
As a history in the modern sense, Bellum Catilinae is narrow—competent, but not great. Like a Greek play, the decline of Roman virtue is the single, radiant theme that limns every line of his history, and Sallust makes no attempt at objectivity. But as a book it is fantastic, and my personal favorite of all the Latin prose I’ve ever read. At least half of this is due specifically to Sallust’s writing style.
Sallust’s Life, Voice, and Grudge Against Cicero
“Sallust, according to the judgment of the learned, will rank as the prince of Roman historiographers.”
—Martial
Sallust was many things: a failed populist politician, a partisan of Julius Caesar during his seizure of power, a brilliant writer, and by near-universal ancient testimony, a terrible person.
Expelled from the Senate on grounds of immorality, he was reinstated by his patron Caesar and made governor of an African province, which he looted in such spectacularly corrupt fashion that Caesar was forced to intervene, again, to save his incurably avaricious ass from prosecution. Without further prospects for advancement, he retired to private life, and decided to write history.7
Sallust was also a contemporary of Cicero. Cicero was famous at the time for breaking the Catiline conspiracy, but Sallust’s history leaves Cicero out almost entirely—no orations printed whatsoever from Rome’s greatest orator in the definitive history of his greatest triumph… yet multiple from Catiline. Why? It’s simple; Sallust hated Cicero, and the Bellum Catilinae is deliberately written as a rejection of Cicero’s style. The result is a highly entertaining history, written in a highly original style called inconcinnitas8, “inelegance,” that will stick in your head and infect your prose thereafter.
Cicero’s style (essentially “default Latin” for the last 2000 years) is famous for intricate constructions and giving students a headache hunting for the verb in the page-long sentence. Sallust’s is the reverse.
Here is Cicero, in De Amicitia, “On Friendship”:
For I do not agree with those who have recently begun to argue that soul and body perish at the same time, and that all things are destroyed by death. I give greater weight to the old-time view, whether it be that of our forefathers, who paid such reverential rites to the dead, which they surely would not have done if they had believed those rites were a matter of indifference to the dead; or, whether it be the view of those who lived in this land and by their principles and precepts brought culture to Great Greece, which now, I admit, is wholly destroyed, but was then flourishing; or, whether it be the view of him who was adjudged by the oracle of Apollo to be the wisest of men, who, though he would argue on most subjects now on one side and now on the other, yet always consistently maintained that human souls were of God… (De Amicitia 13)
Now here is Sallust, on a related theme, opening the Bellum Catilinae:
It befits all men who wish to stand above the animals to strive with all their might, lest they pass their life in silence like cattle, whom nature formed groveling, belly-slaves. …
Obedient to virtue are those men who plow, who sail, who build, but many mortals, slaves to stomach and sleep, unlearned and uncultured, pass through life like strangers. To those, against nature, the body is a delight and the mind a burden. Of such men, I count their life and death the same, since nothing is recorded of either. (Bellum Catilinae 1, 2)
Sallust avoids the (effeminate and weak) vocabulary of Ciceronian public life and the debased modern Republic: honestas, humanitas, et cetera. He uses deliberately archaized spellings: lubido for libido, maxumum for maximum and so on, to appear closer to the (manly and tough) ancient virtues—and to his (manly and tough) hero Cato the Elder. According to the grammarian Suetonius, he hired a man specifically to collect archaic words for him.9 Is Sallust’s austere, deliberately unadorned style reflective of his stern Roman Moralist character, who hearkens to the ancient virtues, or is it a reaction to the effete, detestably modern Ciceronian stooges that tried him for corruption and kicked him out of the Senate? Well, if we believe Jerome, Sallust also married Cicero’s ex-wife, so I leave the judgment up to you.10
As a Latin stylist, Sallust is compressed, expressive, ametric, and brilliant. The prose is superb, and can coin a one-liner like no author I’ve ever read. Sallust translates naturally into English, as if inconcinnitas were the default style of our prose, at least post Hemingway.
Cicero at his best is lyrical:
Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?11
How long, Catiline, will you abuse our patience?
Sallust at his best is syncopated, arresting:
Namque pauci libertatem, pars magna iustos dominos volunt.12
Because few prefer liberty, the greater part desire only fair masters.
Sallust deploys this voice most memorably on his villain.
Catiline’s Youth: Unspeakable Outrages with Noble Maidens, and Other Youthful Indiscretions
Sallust describes Catiline thus:
Lucius Catilina, born of a noble family, had great force of mind and body, though that mind was twisted and evil. From his youth he reveled in civil war, murder, rape, and discord, and he spent his youth entirely in pursuit of them. His body endured hunger, cold, and insomnia better than you would believe. In character, he was reckless, sly, fickle, pathologically dishonest, always striving after foreign things, extravagant with his own wealth, yet burning with desire for more. Eloquent enough, but unwise. His monstrous and insatiable temper always yearned for that which was too far out of reach. (Bellum Catilinae 5)
His impure mind, hateful to men and gods, could rest neither in wakefulness nor in sleep, indeed, his conscience ravaged his agitated mind. Thus his pallid color, ugly eyes, sometimes rapid, sometimes slow gait. In his face and countenance the madness was apparent.
While still a youth, Catiline engaged in many unspeakable outrages, with noble maidens, Vestal virgins, and others in a manner contrary to law, both human and divine. Later, he was seized with lust for Aurelia Orestilla, in whom no good man ever praised anything save her figure. And though she hesitated to marry him, fearing his adult son, it was believed that Catiline murdered his son, thereby vacating his house for their criminal wedding. (Bellum Catilinae 15)
To be fair, the catalog of crimes is likely less revealing about the character of Catiline than of the Roman subconscious—Catiline was not a saint, but practically every politician, beyond a certain point in Roman history, is accused of something similar. Nevertheless, this description would scare a Cyclops, and is decidedly not sympathetic to Catiline, the man.
Catiline’s Politics, with Which Sallust Sympathizes
Now what of his conspiracy and its motives? Most secondary sources will say that Catiline, twice passed over for the consulship, simply tried a coup. Sallust says this too; he says that after the madness of the Sullan dictatorship poisoned the atmosphere, Catiline is seized by a procession of lusts: for power, for loose women, for the recovery of his family fortune, that thus degrade his character and kindle the megalomania.
But Sallust also allows Catiline himself to tell us “in his own words” his entirely different motivations, in the following speech that was the genesis of this book review:
My mind has been restless, as you have each heard. My spirit burns hotter each day, when I consider what the future may hold, if we do not act to avenge our lost liberty.
Ever since the Republic was lost to the power of the few, it is for their benefit, always, that kings and tetrarchs are made tributaries, that peoples and nations are weighed down by taxes. Outsiders—whether hardworking, worthy, noble or common—we are the despised mob, without influence, without authority, and bound by obligation to those who should fear us, were the Republic healthy. All influence, power, honor, and wealth goes to them or their cronies; to us is left only dangers, rejection, trials, and poverty.
How long will you suffer this, O bravest of men? Is it not better to die on your feet, displaying your virtues, than to live a miserable and shameful life, lost to dishonor, while other men’s arrogance mocks you?
Assuredly, victory is within our grasp—I so swear by the faith of gods and men. We are in the prime of life and our spirit is strong, while they, rich, slip into dotage. We must only begin this great task, and the rest will follow!
And who among mortals, whose minds are yet virile, could endure the tyranny of money, which they squander building upon oceans and leveling mountains, while we lack our portion, indeed, lack the bare necessities of life? Should they double their houses, and nowhere permit us to kindle our own meager hearths? They splurge on tablets, tokens, and fancy metalwork, they tear down new buildings just to build others, and extract money in every way, so that even with the greatest profligacy they are unable to exhaust their wealth. Yet we are left with destitution within the home, bitter debts without, present misery and a yet more hopeless future: what then remains save the wretched breath of life?
Will you not be awakened? Lo! That which you so, so often longed for, your liberty, not to mention wealth, your due, your glory, is before your eyes! Fortune gives all such prizes to the victor. Let the age, the moment, the dangers, the poverty, and war’s glorious spoils exhort you, yes even more than my speech, to action! Use me, then, either as your commander or your soldier! I recuse neither my spirit nor my body from your service! These plans I hope I shall make real as your consul, together with all of you!
Unless, of course, my eyes deceive me, and you are content to be slaves rather than to rule. (Bellum Catilinae 20)
As I read his speech, I found myself agreeing with the monster. I’d join the monster’s conspiracy after a speech like that. It’s clearly written by a master orator, one from a culture that prized rhetoric above nearly all other skills. But that master orator is Sallust, because Catiline didn’t say any of this!
So why make Catiline so persuasive?
First, I think Sallust just loves the game.
Sallust is a disgraced Roman politician-turned-historian, who wants to be seen displaying skill, displaying arete, in his chosen craft. It would be beneath a Roman historian to write a bad speech, especially since the speeches comprise fully 25% of the text by word count. Sallust loves the game, and it would be profoundly embarrassing to play it poorly.
But, one may counter, Sallust could have reserved his amazing speeches for Catiline’s opponents, and only competently written Catiline’s. Ditto for Tacitus and his speech for Calgacus. Why do the reverse?
It could be that, for patriotic Roman speechwriters, a stirring call to arms is the equivalent of a five-paragraph essay. Perhaps marshaling the arguments of the enemy demonstrates technical mastery better to Sallust’s contemporaries.
But Sallust might also straight-up agree with Catiline on the merits.
Sallust was a partisan of Julius Caesar during his revolution, and Caesar was a popularis, literally, a populist. Thus, Catiline, Caesar, and by extension Sallust, have very similar politics. They share certain ambitions, too; in many ways, Catiline is a failed Caesar, and his conspiracy an aborted crossing of the Rubicon.13
Sallust’s popularis sympathies leak into his history as philosophical asides. Here’s what he has to say on the motivations of the poor, the plebeian class, for joining the Catiline conspiracy.
The entire population of plebs, desiring the cancellation of debts, approved of Catiline’s endeavor. And this indeed, following their own customs, he seemed to do. Because, as always in states, those who have nothing envy the respectable, extol evil, hate tradition, and burn for new beginnings. Hating their own circumstances, they wish to change everything, they nourish sedition and discord without a care, since destitution is easily obtained without injury. (Bellum Catilinae 37)
It’s remarkably modern. Sallust does not say that the poor are intrinsically evil or base in nature. Instead his analysis is materialist. The poor are motivated by their poverty to desire change, any change, reasoning that it must be better than this. Destitution is indeed easily obtained without injury—for wealth and honor, one must bleed.
And if we re-read Catiline’s speech and look at the specific grievances, it seems obvious that this speech, given to a happy, healthy, and free crowd, would inspire precisely nothing. He speaks in the tradition of populists everywhere. The few, the elites, despise you and have all the money. They trample your rights and waste the wealth that should be yours in frivolity. And why should we let them?
Sallust thinks the grievances of Rome’s poor are real; he sympathizes with their plight, and writes a killer speech on their behalf. It’s a strange position to be in, condemning the man Catiline but endorsing his motives. To paraphrase Appian, perhaps Sallust thinks that Catiline had “a most excellent design, too violently pursued.”
Now normally, I’d end the essay here. This is a) probably true, and b) a reasonably satisfying explanation for why Sallust writes such convincing speeches for his filicidal, pathologically dishonest, ugly-eyed villain.
But I think there’s a lot more going on under the surface. Sympathy for the devil is very modern, and it doesn’t quite jive with the later speeches in Sallust. Sallust devotes fully 25% of the text to speeches, split equally between:
His patron, Caesar, whose motives and character he fully endorses,
Cato the Younger, his patron’s sworn enemy, a reflex of the ancient Republican virtues, whose character Sallust deeply admired,
and Catiline, the villain, whose character he deplores but whose motives are sympathetic.
Sallust’s own motivations for writing this history are complex, and I think to best understand, we should examine the cultural context in which Sallust is embedded, so very different from our own. We’ll pick this thread up in Part II, where I posit, among other things, that Sallust is a bard in the grand Indo-European tradition, reaching, like the rest of us, for immortality.14
Forgotten, Like the Beasts of the Field: The Catiline Conspiracy, Part II
Disclaimer: Originally written as a submission to the 2026 ACX book review contest. I decided to post it on my personal Substack, but it was too long for one post, so I split it up and edited it a bit. The translations of Bellum Catilinae are mine, and I am an amateur Latinist at best. There may be some errors.
They are generally written according to Thucydides’ principle of ta deonta, “what is appropriate” to the moment. A bit like the historical reenactments that play in the background of narrative documentaries.
Literally, Bellum Catilinae is “Catiline’s War” but it’s more commonly referred to as The Catiline Conspiracy.
As I was writing this, I caught myself using the not X, but Y pattern (plus an em dash!), and realized that Claude has infected my prose.
Sullam nescisse litteras, qui dictaturam deposuerit. (Suetonius, Divus Iulius 77)
Here we get Sallust’s famous pen portrait of Sempronia—one of very few women to receive any inner life at all in Roman historiography.
But within this group was a certain Sempronia, who had often performed manly and audacious deeds. This woman, fortunate both in birth and beauty, and besides that in her husband and children, was learned in both Latin and Greek literature. Yet, she danced and sang more elegantly than was proper for a good woman, and possessed much else besides which excites the passions. Indeed, she held nothing so cheaply as decency and shame, and it is difficult to decide whether she was more reckless with her money or reputation. Her desire for sex was so ardent that she more often sought out men than they her.
Nevertheless, she had a keen mind; she could fashion a verse, make a joke, discourse equally to the modest, the tender, or the wanton. Indeed, she possessed much in the way of wit and charm. (Bellum Catilinae 25)
It’s an odd segment for Sallust to include. He describes Sempronia in more detail than any conspirator save Catiline himself, made doubly strange by her sex. He clearly sees her as an avatar of a Rome in decline, a point-for-point contrast to the ideal Roman woman, and initially I wondered whether Sempronia was Catiline in miniature. She has some of his flaws, feminized: ambition and talent turned toward un-Roman ends, but I think her closest parallel is actually Caesar.
Caesar was a little older than the principals of the last Republican generation. A bit punk rock, he trimmed his toga with lace and wore it “loosely belted.” A bit outside normal gender conventions, too, what with those rumors of losing his virginity to the king of Bithynia. A poem, chanted by Caesar’s legionnaires during his triumph, went:
Gallias Caesar subegit, Nicomedes Caesarem:
Ecce Caesar nunc triumphat qui subegit Gallias,
Nicomedes non triumphat qui subegit Caesarem.
Caesar mounted all of Gaul, Nicomedes Caesar
Caesar walks in triumph now with all of Gaul subdued
Nicomedes has no triumph, though he had Caesar screwed. (Suetonius, Divus Iulius 49).
I doubt Sallust intended the parallel; the comparison is not flattering to a Roman.
The praenomen “Gaius” is spelled “Caius” by Sallust, as a throwback to older forms of Latin where c was used for both /g/ and /k/. In deference to his preferences I have spelled it “Caius” everywhere.
I really have to resist just quoting the whole book at you, Sallust’s description of his early life and decision to write history is, well, judge for yourself.
Even I, since I was a young boy, like most, desired to involve myself in public affairs, but there I found many setbacks. Because in place of shame, in place of abstinence and virtue, temerity, profligacy, and avarice flourished. And even though my mind, unused to these evil arts, rejected these things, yet, next to so much vice, my tender age was enthralled by corrupting ambition, and I, though I held back from the remaining evil customs, nevertheless desired those same honors, that same ill repute (I do not understand the construction here), that so vexed the others.
Therefore, when my mind was reprieved from many miseries and dangers, I decided that the remainder of my days should be passed far from the republic. It was not my plan to while away my good leisure in idleness and sloth, nor in the cultivation of fields or hunting (the duties of slaves), but to spend my time actively. From that initial desire, I determined on returning to the same, though deterred for a time by ill ambition, to write and complete a history of the Roman people and that which seems worthy to remember, in several volumes, and this more so now that my spirit is liberated from hope, fear, and the factions of public affairs. Therefore I shall set forth the Catiline Conspiracy, as truthfully as I may, in a few words, because that crime I think especially memorable by the novelty of its perils and wickedness. (Bellum Catilinae, 3,4)
This is not a unique life story for a Roman Moralist. They have a certain flavor—Seneca, probably the most famous moralist, possibly caused the Boudica uprising with predatory lending practices. Boudica’s revolt was the bloodiest in the history of Roman Britain in which eighty thousand people died. His contemporaries pointed out the tension, so he wrote On the Happy Life, a famous work of Stoic philosophy, defending his wealth.
Nietzsche described his style as: “Compact, severe, with as much substance as possible, cold sarcasm toward ‘beautiful words’ and ‘beautiful sentiments.’” (Twilight of the Idols).
Suetonius, De Grammaticis 10
Hieronymus, Adversus Jovinianum 1.48. “Illa [Terentia] … nupsit Sallustio.“
Cicero, Catilinarian Orations 1.1
Sallust, Epistula Mithridatis 18
Indeed, at the time, Caesar was suspected of having a hand in the Catiline conspiracy, an allegation Sallust strenuously denies.
And here I will be the first to admit that this thesis is both more original and a lot more speculative than the fairly uncontroversial readings in Part I.
I really enjoyed this read and had at times thought on the issue of how Roman histories seem to hype up the villains. Lots of great context here and understandable to me who doesn't have that context. Eager to see #2.
Yeah this is nice and all but, bigger question, how are the villains in Mulan HUNS?! Make it make sense, history man