SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

‘Those who have punished others without a hearing,’ they insisted, ‘ought not to have the right to be heard themselves.’

So firmly embedded was it that, in pointed or playful irony, Sallust could put it into Catiline’s mouth. ‘Quae quo usque tandem patiemini, o fortissimi viri?’ (‘How long will you go on putting up with this, my braves?’) is how Sallust’s revolutionary stirs up his followers, reminding them of the injustices they were suffering at the hands of the elite.

Might there not be another side to the story? The detailed evidence we have from Cicero’s pen, or point of view, means that his perspective will always be dominant. But it does not necessarily mean that it is true in any simple sense, or that it is the only way of seeing things. People have wondered for centuries quite how loaded an account Cicero offers us, and have detected alternative views and interpretations just beneath the surface of his version of events. Sallust himself hints as much. For, although his account is heavily based on Cicero’s writing, by transferring the famous ‘Quo usque tandem’ from the mouth of Cicero to that of Catiline, he may well have been reminding his readers that the facts and their interpretations were, at the very least, fluid.