First Oration Against Catiline

Summary

The First Oration Against Catiline is the speech Cicero, as consul, delivered to the Roman senate on 8 November 63 BC in the temple of Jupiter Stator, with Lucius Sergius Catilina himself sitting among the senators. Catiline, twice defeated for the consulship and deep in debt, had been organizing a rising: his ally Gaius Manlius was raising an army in Etruria, and on the night of 6-7 November conspirators met at the house of Marcus Laeca, where two men undertook to murder Cicero at his morning reception. Cicero, warned in advance, kept them out and summoned the senate. The speech opens with a famous burst of questions, rendered by Yonge as When, O Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? Cicero then cries out against the age (the Latin O tempora, o mores) because the senate knows everything and yet this man lives. He reminds the house that it has already passed its emergency decree and cites precedents in which consuls killed dangerous citizens at once. He then shows Catiline that every plan is known: the date Manlius would take up arms, the planned massacre of 28 October, the failed attempt on Praeneste, and the meeting at Laeca's house. Instead of ordering an execution, Cicero commands Catiline to leave Rome and take his followers with him, so that the conspiracy will reveal itself in open war. He describes how the senators emptied the benches around Catiline when he sat down, and personifies the fatherland pleading with Catiline to depart. He answers an imagined objection that he should simply kill him, arguing that executing one man would leave the disease in the republic, and ends with a prayer to Jupiter Stator to defend the city. Catiline left that night for Manlius's camp. Cicero later secured evidence against the conspirators remaining in Rome, and five were executed in December after a senate debate. Catiline died fighting near Pistoria early in 62 BC. Cicero revised and published his consular speeches in 60 BC, and the First Catilinarian became a school text for nearly two thousand years.

Top Lessons

• Vigilance as a duty of office

  Cicero's power in the speech comes from knowledge: he names dates, houses, and plans before Catiline can deny them. The consul presents watchfulness for the republic's safety as the first duty of anyone entrusted with public office.

• Restraint in the use of power

  Cicero holds a decree that would allow him to execute Catiline but chooses to order him out of the city instead. He argues that killing one man would leave the conspiracy hidden, while exile will expose it. The speech shows a magistrate weighing justice, prudence, and public opinion before acting.

• The force of silence and shame

  In sections 16-21 Cicero turns the senate's empty benches and silence into evidence. Catiline is condemned not by a vote but by the visible refusal of his peers to sit near him or defend him, and Cicero names this shame as a judgment Catiline cannot escape.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The speech is political, but Cicero twice reaches for medical metaphor. In section 30 he calls the conspiracy a disease and a full-grown plague of the republic, and in section 31 he compares the city to a fevered patient who drinks cold water, feels relief, and then suffers worse. The simile assumes an audience familiar with fevers and with the debate, live among Greek and Roman physicians, over whether and when to give water to the febrile. The repeated words for Catiline's madness and frenzy are moral and political terms of abuse in Roman oratory, not clinical descriptions, and are best read that way.

• Section 30

  Cicero calls the conspiracy a disease of the republic that execution would check but not eradicate, and hopes Catiline's departure will remove its root and seed.

• Section 31

  The simile of fever patients who drink cold water, seem relieved, and then grow worse, applied to the danger hidden in the veins and bowels of the republic.