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Edward Spencer Beesly. Catiline, Clodius, and Tiberius
Catiline, Clodius, and Tiberius
Table of Contents
I. CATILINE
II. CLODIUS
TIBERIUS
(A LECTURE DELIVERED AT BRADFORD, MARCH 27, 1867.)
PART I
PART II. *
IV. NECKER AND CALONNE: AN OLD STORY
THE END
Отрывок из книги
Edward Spencer Beesly
Published by Good Press, 2022
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We are entitled to point to the fact that he was acquitted. The verdicts of Roman juries are not above suspicion. But Catiline himself was very poor, and the long purses were on the side of Cicero. An acquittal may not prove a man innocent; but still less does a prosecution prove him guilty. Sallust, our only other contemporary authority, while raking up everything disadvantageous to Catiline, says nothing of his share in the murders of the proscription, nor did Cicero himself ever again allude to it in his most unsparing invectives. It had served his turn for the moment, which was all he thought of.
The other stories which Cicero and Sallust set afloat, and Plutarch and Dion copied, cannot easily be disproved, for the simple reason that they are not supported by a tittle of evidence. Catiline has the misfortune to lose his wife and only son. Of course, he poisoned them. He has a large circle of friends who are never weary of his society. What more easy than to call them a gang of debauchees? If you had a political quarrel with a man at Rome, you accused him, as a matter of course, of all vices and crimes, natural and unnatural. These were the "mendaciuncula," the fibs, with which, as Cicero tells us in one of his treatises on rhetoric, a good orator will season his speech.* It was so much "common form." You were not liable to be called out, or horsewhipped, or indicted for a malicious libel.
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