THE WAR WITH CATILINE
BY SALLUST
Gaius Sallustius Crispus (86-ca. 35 BC) was a Roman politician who rose to become proconsular governor of the province of New Africa and then retired to devote himself to writing history. Presented here is the only passage relevant to Greek love in all his surviving writings. It appears in his first book, the Bellum Catilinae (The War with Catiline), about the failed conspiracy of the noble Lucius Sergius Catilina to overthrow the state in 63 BC.
The translation is by J. C. Rolfe in the Loeb Classical Library volume 116, London: William Heinemann, 1921.
51 ix
In a speech of Gaius Julius Caesar, praetor-elect and future dictator, to the Senate on 5 December 63 BC, arguing in favour of imprisoning rather than executing the Catilinian conspirators who had already been arrested:
| "The greater number of those who have expressed their opinions before me have deplored the lot of the commonwealth in finished and noble phrases; they have dwelt upon the horrors of war, the wretched fate of the conquered, the rape of maidens and boys[1], children torn from their parents’ arms, matrons subjected to the will of the victors, temples and homes pillaged, bloodshed and fire; in short arms and corpses everywhere, gore and grief. […]” | “Plerique eorum qui ante me sententias dixerunt conposite atque magnifice casum rei publicae miserati sunt. Quae belli saevitia esset, quae victis adciderent, enumeravere; rapi virgines pueros, divelli liberos a parentum conplexu, matres familiarum pati quae victoribus conlubuissent, fana atque domos spoliari, caedem, incendia fieri, postremo armis, cadaveribus, cruore atque luctu omnia conpleri. […]” |
[1] See Livy, Books from the Foundation of the City XXVI 13 v for another speech (made in 211 BC) which assumed a rampaging Roman army would rape both females and boys. See also Livy, ibid., XXIX 15 xv-xvi and Tacitus, Histories III 33 for descriptions of this actually happening in 204 BC and AD 69 respectively.
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