How to Stop a Conspiracy: An Ancient Guide to Saving a Republic

by Sallust

One especially powerful exploration of conspiracy—including the problem of distinguishing between claims of conspiracy and the real thing—is a short book written in the late 40s BC, Sallust’s The War against Catiline. The first foray of Sallust into history-writing, The War against Catiline recounts a plot by the corrupt aristocrat Lucius Sergius Catilina (known in English as “Catiline”) to topple the Republic in the year 63 BC. As alluring as he was dangerous, Catiline attracted a wide array of supporters: men and women from prominent families who had run up debts; impressionable youths eager for sex, money, or other favors; and the impoverished inhabitants of Rome fed up with a political class that seemed only to look out for its own interests.

For despite the Senate’s two decrees, no one out of such a large number of men had been induced by the rewards to reveal the conspiracy, and not a single person had defected from Catiline’s camp. Such was the intensity of the disease that, like a plague, had attacked the souls of many citizens. Nor was it only accomplices in the conspiracy whose minds were disturbed. The entirety of the common people were in favor of Catiline’s undertakings because of their eagerness for revolution.