latrones - Get a Free Blog

POLITICIANS AND PRETENDERS AS LATRONES
2 Latro as a new expression in the political invective
of the late Republic
Latro entered the language of political abuse during the crisis which marked
the fall of the Republic. It was Cicero, in fact, who first introduced the use
of the term ‘bandit’ against political opponents into the polemical discourse
of the assemblies, the Senate and the courts. 4 He gave his prototype of the
life-and-death political opponent as latro the features of his deadly personal
enemy, Catiline, by depicting the conspirator and his accomplices as a robber
band and calling his actions and plans latrocinia. 5
It goes without saying that Catiline and his crew were afforded none
of the traits of ‘noble’ bandits, only those of despicable, common criminals,
‘meditating nothing but murder, arson and pillage’. 6 According to Cicero it
was permissible to combat Catiline’s ‘patent robbery’ with ‘an open war’.
Roman citizens had no cause to fear this, thanks to ‘the want and poverty of
that bandit’. 7 Finally, Catiline is described as being proud of the fact that he
preferred to die as a bandit than to live as an exile. 8 Penury, need, the greed
for plunder and violence, together with audacious courage and pride, were
all elements in the Roman picture of the ‘common’, despicable bandit. We
hear of the greed of the indigent (egentes), for example, in almost every one of
Tacitus’ accounts of uprisings and rebellions. 9 It would, however, be wrong
to assume that such stock themes say nothing about historical realities. In
the portrait of Catiline that he offered to the public, Cicero was very well
placed to convince people of his enemies’ poverty and lust for booty thanks
to the problem of general indebtedness – at the time a dangerous social time
bomb. Catiline had made this sensitive political issue his own, and had
promised relief. 10 In this way he won a great following among debtors who,
in the polemics of their opponents, could be cried down as have-nots, longing
to take the property of others. This gives us one concrete link between
the basic meaning of latro and the one transferred to the political arena.
I. Opelt has already indicated another: ‘The particular feature of the politician
who is called a latro which can be linked to the original meaning of the
expression is that he has assembled an army, i.e., – to stay in character – a
“robber-band”’. 11
The individual contribution that Cicero made to widening the repertoire
of political polemic in defaming Catiline as a latro may be seen in the fact
that Sallust, in his account of the conspiracy, refrains absolutely from
describing Catiline personally as a bandit. This should not be seen as, say,
indicating that Sallust judged Catiline more favourably than Cicero. Rather,
such a variance in categorisation by two contemporary writers seems to
express authorial individuality. In this respect, it may be not so important
that in Sallust’s ‘Catilina’ we are dealing with an historical work and in
Cicero’s Catilinariae with political speeches, since the latter exist in the form
in which they were revised for publication. Permeating the Catilinarian
73