24 Facts About Catiline

Catiline's name became a byword for doomed and treasonous rebellion in the years after his death.

Catiline's father was poor by the standards of the aristocracy.

Catiline married a woman named Gratidia, one of Gaius Marius's nieces.

Some modern historians doubt Catiline was involved in Gratidianus' death except perhaps in an auxiliary role, placing blame instead on Catulus and attributing the story of Catiline's involvement to Ciceronean political slander.

Regardless, Catiline did engage in profiteering from the Sullan proscriptions, likely purchasing estates for fractions of their true value, and by the end of Sulla's dictatorship, he had become a rich man.

Catiline then served as propraetorian governor of Africa for two years.

Cicero later claimed in his Catilinarians that Catiline murdered his first wife and Orestilla's son to make way for the match; he claimed in In toga candida that Orestilla was Catiline's own illegitimate daughter.

Catiline attempted to stand for the consulship, but his candidacy was rejected by the presiding magistrate.

In some tellings, Catiline himself was to assume the consulship.

Catiline, bankrolled by Caesar and Crassus, distributed large bribes; after a bill against electoral bribery was defeated, Cicero gave In toga candida, a speech full of invective attacking Catiline and Antonius.

Antonius and Catiline were allies during the election and attempted to beat Cicero.

Catiline was still nursing hopes of an eventual consulship that would be both his birth-right and necessary for his career.

Just before the elections, Cicero alleges Catiline engaged in demagoguery and attempted to build up his bona fides with the poor and dispossessed men of Rome and Italy, including himself among their number, advocating the wholescale abolition of all existing debts.

At the electoral comitia, Cicero presided, surrounded by a bodyguard and wearing an ostentatious cuirass to signal his belief that Catiline posed a threat to his person and public safety.

Sallust reports that Catiline promised his supporters that he would kill the rich but this supposed promise is likely ahistorical.

Cicero, in his invectives, naturally focused on the ruined Sullan veterans, who were unpopular; but at the end, Catiline likely kept only the support of the dispossessed Etruscans who had "nowhere else to go".

Catiline, who was already planning to leave the city, offered to go into exile if the senate would so decree.

Catiline thereafter left the city, claiming that he was going into voluntary exile at Massilia "to spare his country a civil war".

Catiline left the city on the road to Massilia, but in Etruria, he went to a weapons cache before diverting for Faesulae where he met up with Manlius' forces.

Catiline decamped from Faesulae and moved near the mountains but remained close enough to the town to be in striking distance.

In Roman literature, Catiline's figure became often used as a byword for "villainy".

Virgil, in the Aeneid, depicts Catiline as being tortured in the underworld by the Furies.

Into the imperial period, Catiline's name was used as a derogatory nickname of unpopular ruling emperors.

In Tuscany, a mediaeval tradition had Catiline survive the battle and live out his life as a local hero; another version gives him a son, Uberto, who eventually spawns the Uberti dynasty in Florence.