lowrie evidence and narrative in merimee

Evidence and Narrative in Mérimée’s

Catilinarian Conspiracy

Michèle Lowrie

Osip Brik, perhaps the keenest of the Russian Formalists, . . .

used to say that political conspirators are tried and con-

demned only for unsuccessful attempts at a forcible

upheaval, because in the case of a successful coup it is the

conspirators who assume the role of judges and prosecutors.

—Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature

Osip Brik’s observation, while an overstatement, concerns the location of

power. His analysis is formal: it has to do with the vicissitudes of point of view.

Who judges the conspirators to be such, and at what point? Do conspirators ever

think of themselves by that name, or is it their perception that they are engaged

in legitimate resistance to unjust rule? These questions have to do with story-

telling: without narrative there can be no “conspiracy,” only acts, whose mean-

ing lies open to interpretation. Who controls the narrative has deeply political

consequences that can lead, under some conditions, to life or death. A further

aspect of Brik’s observation is that conspirators’ actions are curtailed before

they can emerge in full felicity. For them not to prevail, there is need for a pre-

emptive strike.

The Catilinarian conspiracy is a signal instance of prejudgment about

thwarted action. In 63 BCE several leaders of this conspiracy were put to

New German Critique 103, Vol. 35, No. 1, Spring 2008

DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2007-016 © 2008 by New German Critique, Inc.

9

10 Mérimée’s Catilinarian Conspiracy

death without being tried according to Roman law.1 The judgment had already

been made and acted on—the conspirators were strangled—before a trial in

front of the Roman people could take place. Conspiracy sparks both episte-

mological and political crisis. The task is to articulate the relation between

the two. I propose that in the case of the Catilinarian conspiracy and its recep-

tion, the crisis revolves around interiority and emergence. Citizens act in

such a way as to undermine the state from within, but the threat these actions

pose elicits countermeasures to prevent their full emergence. These actions

can be judged conspiratorial only if they are prevented from full achieve-

ment, because their success would result in a different judgment. But how can

we evaluate objectively a story that only ever partially emerges? The secrecy

shrouding conspirators’ actions increases our desire to know, and this is one

reason that the Catilinarian conspiracy has a long narrative afterlife. The trau-

matic moment of curtailment results in renarration, which can only ever be

incomplete. I am going to work from outside in, peeling the conceptual onion

from renarration, to narration, to the evidence, to the emergence of events,

and fi nally to the emergency that is conspiracy. In this particular case, each of

these is only ever partial.2

Prosper Mérimée, the author of Carmen, had a taste for dramatic stories

of intrigue, passion, and violent revenge.3 When he turned his attention to writ-

ing history, the Catilinarian conspiracy offered an opportunity to exercise his

literary and historical acumen.4 It is probably one of the best-documented

1. For an introductory overview of the history of the Catilinarian conspiracy see the historical

essays in Susan O. Shapiro, O Tempora! O Mores! Cicero’s Catilinarian Orations (Norman: Uni-

versity of Oklahoma Press, 2005), which also offers a substantial bibliography on the topic. For an

analysis according to Giorgio Agamben’s theory of sovereignty see Michèle Lowrie, “Sovereignty

before the Law: Agamben and the Roman Republic,” Law and Humanities 1 (2007): 31–55.

2. Kenneth H. Waters claims that the importance of the Catilinarian conspiracy has been

grossly exaggerated and notes that this is largely due to its having been recorded (“Cicero, Sallust,

and Catiline,” Historia 19 [1970]: 195n3). His main argument is that Cicero largely fabricated the

affair. He gives a hypothetical reconstruction of the events as he supposed they happened.

3. See Eileen Boyd Sivert, “Fear and Confrontation in Prosper Mérimée’s Narrative Fiction,”

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 6 (1978): 213–30.

4. Prosper Mérimée, La conjuration de Catilina (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2000). Jean Léger

collects references to classical texts in Mérimée’s letters and shows that he studied the ancients

throughout his life (“Mérimée professeur de latin,” Revue universitaire 65 [1956]: 12–19). Corry

Cropper sees a close overlap between Mérimée’s political and literary concerns in “Prosper Méri-

mée and the Subversive ‘Historical’ Short Story,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 33 (2004):

57–74, and analyzes several short stories “as an outlet for making subversive social and political

commentaries” (57). The contemporary context of La conjuration de Catilina is beyond the scope

of this article but would be well worth pursuing. Mérimée draws an intriguing contrast between

ancient and recent French history: “Nous sommes trop habitués à juger les anciens avec les préjugés

Michèle Lowrie 11

political upheavals in ancient history. As he lists in his account of his sources—

or, as he calls them, “witnesses” (témoins) (fi rst at 38)5—Cicero, who was con-

sul that year, left four speeches, all of which Mérimée regards as genuine, how-

ever much they were written or rewritten after the fact. We also have Sallust’s

monograph, the Bellum Catilinae, written about twenty years after the events it

narrates, as well as a slew of less exhaustive accounts in Cassius Dio and the

like.6 But by its nature as a conspiracy, something in this already well-told nar-

rative needs supplementation. Mérimée’s fi rst sentence identifi es his task as one

of renarration: “J’entreprends, après Salluste, de raconter la conjuration de Cat-

ilina” (I undertake, after Sallust, to narrate the Catilinarian conspiracy) (37).

The problem is that the witnesses do not tell “the truth, the whole truth, and

nothing but the truth,” as they swear to do under American law. Their truth,

besides being contradictory and incomplete, does not tell the whole truth in the

sense of providing reasons, without which the story is incomprehensible. Why

would a privileged, though impoverished, member of the aristocracy, namely,

Catiline, attempt to burn down the city of Rome just because he lost an elec-

tion? Mérimée identifi es his task as one of illumination and explanation: “Je

cherche à jeter quelque lumière sur un des événements les plus extraordinaires

des annales romaines; je voudrais expliquer ce que Salluste a peint avec tant

d’art” (I seek to throw some light on one of the most extraordinary events in the

Roman annals; I would like to explain what Sallust painted with such great art)

(37). Despite the wealth of sources, the conspiracy remains in the dark.

Mérimée’s stated aims are no different from what any modern historian

would say about reconstructing any series of events in ancient history. The dif-

ference is that because the object of his inquiry is a conspiracy, a greater

ou les sophismes de leur histoire. La nôtre a une morale plus sévère; elle exige que les lois soient

appliquées meme à ceux qui les veulent détruire” (We are too accustomed to judging the ancients

with the prejudices or sophistries of their history. Ours has a more severe moral; it requires that the

law be applied even to those who want to destroy it) (271).

5. References to primary sources are given in parentheses in the text: Mérimée as cited in n. 4;

Cicero’s Catilinarian orations as in M. Tulli Ciceronis Orationes, ed. Albert C. Clark, vol. 1

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1905); Sallust as in C. Sallusti Crispi, ed. L. D. Reynolds (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1991). All translations are my own.

6. For the sources available to Sallust see Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae, ed. John T. Ramsey, 2nd

ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 8–9. On Mérimée’s complex intertextual practices see

Pierre Zoberman, “Mérimée et la pratique intertextuelle, ou les mésaventures d’un récit,” French

Forum 6 (1981): 36–49. Zoberman analyzes how Mérimée manipulates allusion to fi ction in his

fi ction (40) under the sign of the literary: “Le propre du text, voire sa condition de littérarité, c’est sa

capacité à inscrire, à réécrire d’autres texts” (The property of a text, that is, its condition of literarity,

is its capacity to inscribe, to rewrite other texts) (42). Mérimée’s historiographical practice sets the

literary on its head.


degree of secrecy than usual obscures the events. Mérimée’s job as renarrator

reduplicates that of the ancient “detectives”—largely Cicero—who brought the

events to light. Mérimée’s description of his task displays his awareness of

the epistemological regress. To effect “l’étude des caractères et des intérêts

propres aux personnages de ce grand drame” (the study of the characters and

interests proper to the actors of this great drama), Mérimée must interrogate

witnesses who have already come to conclusions about the agents, rather

than the agents themselves (37). The witnesses too have characters, passions,

and interests: “Avant d’interroger les témoins, il convient d’étudier leur car-

actère, leurs passions, leurs intérêts” (Before interrogating the witnesses, it is

fi tting to study their character, their passions, their interests) (38). From the

witnesses’ uniformity of judgment, he concludes that original documents

were rare and that the insuffi ciency of information was due to the interests

of contemporaries. Thus he ends up analyzing not the event but the account

given of it by contemporaries or near contemporaries who had already judged

it a narrative of a certain kind, namely, a conspiracy. He views his task as a

historian not to measure the given accounts against countervailing evidence.

There is none. We cannot attempt to produce a counternarrative that would

undo the prejudgment of our sources. His task is rather to give a further nar-

rative, such as to make sense of the ones we have, and the story he tells is

of the fl uctuations in senatorial power in the decades after Sulla’s reforms,

which stripped so many powers from the representatives of the people (the

tribunes) and handed them over to the Senate.7 As an epistemological prob-

lem, telling the story of a conspiracy does not differ in kind from other his-

toriographical problems.8 The difference is that the locus of the original events

in secrecy creates an overlap in the challenges faced by contemporaries and

later historians alike. Secrecy, furthermore, attracts renarration. What is

unusual about the Catilinarian conspiracy in comparison, say, with the con-

spiracy theories on the assassination of President Kennedy is that the narra-

tives are not corrective but expansive. They are, however, similarly traumatic

in that people feel the need to tell the story over and over again, long after

the fact.

7. Shapiro’s historical essays in O Tempora! O Mores! confi rm Mérimée’s overall story of the

vicissitudes of senatorial power.

8. Victoria E. Pagán makes conspiracy paradigmatic for historiography: it “is an ideal circum-

stance in which to observe how a historian confronts the limits of knowledge” (Conspiracy Narra-

tives in Roman History [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004], 4). For knowledge gaps, secrecy,

and their consequences on narrative see also Pagán’s comments on 3, 7, 22, and, for Sallust in par-

ticular, 32.

Michèle Lowrie 13

Let us take a step back in the epistemological regress, since Mérimée

faces many of the same problems of weighing evidence that Cicero faced. The

members of a conspiracy cannot be charged with anything until their actions

see the light of day. They are not conspirators until they have actually suc-

ceeded in producing an event, even if the event fails of its intention.9 Even plan-

ning constitutes an event, but it does not carry the same penalties, and it tends to

remain hidden. By threatening Catiline such that he actually left Rome, Cicero

claims that he “illum ex occultis insidiis in apertum latrocinium coniecimus”

(threw him from hidden treachery into open brigandage) (Cat. 2.1), and the

third Catilinarian oration reads as a cloak-and-dagger story Cicero narrates

to the Roman people on how proof emerged to back up his claims. Up to this

point, Sallust tells us that Cicero was relying on spies. Although they informed

him that some of the Catilinarians would show up at his house to try to murder

him, and he was thus able to thwart their nefarious plans, the social status of the

spies made them unreliable for proof;10 furthermore, the failed attempted mur-

der meant that no actionable event had occurred. In the third Catilinarian, a

recurrent word encapsulates the overlap between action and revelation: “mani-

fest.” Manifestus in Latin originally meant “caught in the act,” in French “pris à

la main,” and later developed the meaning “clearly visible, conspicuous.”11

The event in which the Catilinarians are caught is a textual event.12 Let

me give my own textually dependent renarration. A Gallic tribe, the Allo-

broges, sends an embassy to Rome to ask for debt relief. They end up meeting

with some of the Catilinarians, who explain the plot against the state, which

includes provisions for debt relief. The Allobroges are tempted but uneasy.

They report the plot to the authorities, which means Cicero, and agree to serve

as double agents. They get the Catilinarians to write letters to their leaders

back in Gaul, inciting them to revolt, and collude in the seizure of these letters

by the praetors sent by Cicero to do just that. They and Titus Volturcius, a

9. Some conspiracies simply vanish, leaving just a trace. Pagán treats the so-called fi rst Cat-

ilinarian conspiracy under this guise (ibid., 30, 40).

10. Pagán examines Fulvia as an instance of the unreliability accorded the women who betrayed

conspiracies (ibid., 45; for general comments see 16–17). Mérimée comments on Cicero’s unwill-

ingness to rely on those of unreliable character (146) or low social status (192) for proof before the

Senate.

11. Alfred Ernout and Antoine Meillet, eds., Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine:

Histoire des mots (Paris: Klincksieck, 1939); P. G. W. Glare, ed., Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1982).

12. For an able analysis see Shane Butler, The Hand of Cicero (London: Routledge, 2002),

85–102. Butler provides evidence for the use of documents as testimony and their role in Roman

“semiotic culture” (100).


Roman envoy sent with messages to Catiline, who has now joined his army

outside the city, are arrested at the Mulvian Bridge, north of Rome. Volturcius,

the Allobroges, and the letters are all escorted back to Rome, where Cicero

insists on calling an emergency meeting of the Senate to witness the opening

of the letters. The leaders of the conspiracy who had remained in Rome are

also arrested and brought to the Senate. Cicero makes a dramatic gesture and

lays his hand on Lentulus, the conspirator with the highest rank, praetor, as he

brings him into the Senate (Cat. 46.5). Lentulus is literally “pris à la main”

(taken by the hand, caught red-handed). The letters are opened one by one as

their authors are introduced individually, with the whole Senate there to wit-

ness their reactions. Each recognizes his own seal, his own handwriting, and,

after initial resistance, confesses. Cicero’s description of the evidence for the

conspiracy is twofold: the physical evidence of the letters and, even more

important, the interpretable signs on the conspirators’ faces.

Ac mihi quidem, Quirites, cum illa certissima visa sunt argumenta atque

indicia sceleris, tabellae, signa, manus, denique unius cuiusque confessio,

tum multo certiora illa, color, oculi, voltus, taciturnitas. Sic enim obstupu-

erant, sic terram intuebantur, sic furtim non numquam inter sese aspicie-

bant ut non iam ab aliis indicari sed indicare se ipsi viderentur.

[And indeed, citizens, both those things seemed to me very sure evidence

and signs of crime, namely, the tablets, the seals, the handwriting, and fi nally

the confession of each and every one of them, but also those much surer

things, their color, their eyes, their expressions, their silence. For they were

astounded and looked at the ground; they sometimes exchanged glances

among themselves in such a way that they no longer seemed to be informed

on by others but to inform on their very selves.] (Cat. 3.13)

They had guilt written, as it were, all over their faces. Their characters are as

much evidence as what they say. The Senate at any rate is convinced, and the

speech given to the people—itself written down after the fact—convincingly

reports on the scene of the revelation of evidence as itself convincing. Here

the texts come closest to offering Mérimée the capacity to judge the charac-

ter of the conspirators, but we might perhaps be forgiven for fi nding this

evidence rather opaque and the mediating textual layers obfuscating.

A comparison of the letters’ evidence will both confi rm the standard

interpretation and call into question the accurate transmission of evidence. We

are lucky in having two extraordinary witnesses to the textual event that was

the writing of the letters. Both Cicero and Sallust give us verbatim the content

of Lentulus’s letter to Catiline. This was the letter apprehended in the hands of

Michèle Lowrie 15

Volturcius. The accounts match in content, but do not offer the same words.

Cicero’s version can be translated thus:

Quis sim scies ex eo quem ad te misi. Cura ut vir sis et cogita quem in locum

sis progressus. Vide ecquid tibi iam sit necesse et cura ut omnium tibi auxilia

adiungas, etiam infi morum.

[You will know who I am from the one I sent to you. Be sure to be a man

and think over to what place you have progressed. See if there is anything

else now necessary to you and make sure to join the help of all to yourself,

even the lowest.] (Cat. 3.12)

Sallust’s thus:

Qui sim ex eo quem ad te misi cognosces. Fac cogites in quanta calamitate

sis, et memineris te virum esse. Consideres quid tuae rationes postulent; aux-

ilium petas ab omnibus, etiam ab infi mis.

[Who I am from the one I sent you, you will learn. Make sure to think over in

what a calamity you are, and remember you are a man. Consider what your

accounts demand: seek aid from all, even from the lowest.] (Cat. 44.5)13

Are the discrepancies merely a function of the differences between Cicero’s

and Sallust’s styles? If so, would that imply that both versions differ from the

original? Or is Cicero providing the original wording and Sallust reworking it

to fi t his style,14 or vice versa? These questions are emblematic of the non-

transparency of our sources. Even the content, on which Cicero and Sallust

are in agreement, is not transparent. Lentulus’s identity and Catiline’s alike are

occluded by not being named. Volturcius is necessary as a witness to testify

both that the letter came from Lentulus and that it was addressed to Catiline.

As Mérimée points out, all Lentulus needed to do was deny that Catiline was

the addressee (200). His seal convicted him as its author, but it was his silence

that passed for a confession that Volturcius’s story was right despite the possi-

bility of refutation (201). Volturcius had furthermore only recently joined the

conspiracy and could easily have been made to seem unreliable.15

13. Mérimée confl ates the two sources and provides his own translation (200).

14. This is the view of Ronald Syme, who provides some history of the discussion (Sallust

[Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964], 72n56).

15. Robin Seager argues that Lentulus’s letter does not prove that he and Catiline had plotted

together before this point and asks why Catiline would need Volturcius to identify the sender. He

should have been able to recognize the seal if they had already conspired (“Iusta Catilinae,” Histo-

ria 22 [1973]: 244–45).


What Volturcius provides is the connective tissue—the narrative—that

makes the evidence interpretable, and to that extent his job differs in situation

but not in kind from Mérimée’s. The crucial difference is that he was an eye-

witness who would speak only when granted immunity from prosecution. For

Mérimée, the only consequence to be feared was a failure to be elected to the

Académie des Inscriptions et des Belles Lettres, and in that he succeeded

through his research.16 He gets the material for his narrative at several

removes: Volturcius, then Cicero, then Sallust and other ancient historians,

and the intervening scholarship on this material.17 With each layer, the narra-

tive becomes more coherent, but perhaps farther from the truth.18 How can a

historian, who weighs all the evidence at a distance, have any confi dence in

the explanation of motives and causes? Even the ancients dismissed accusa-

tions on the basis of their improbability. Sallust reports that the Senate offi -

cially judged false L. Tarquinius’s testimony against Crassus and that Tar-

quin ius was locked up despite the promise of immunity (Cat. 48.3–9). It was

simply too dangerous to entertain such an accusation against such a powerful

man, and Sallust records speculation on the motive for the accusation, including

one showing Cicero in a bad light. Reliable motives and causes were already

lacking to the ancients.

What they provide instead appear to us as defamations of character. The

descriptions of Catiline in Cicero and Sallust become paradigmatic in later

history writing for villains. Their point of view is resolutely exterior. Sallust’s

is particularly famous for conveying paradox:19

L. Catilina, nobili genere natus, fuit magna vi et animi et corporis, sed

ingenio malo pravoque. Huic ab adulescentia bella intestina, caedes, rapinae,

discordia civilis grata fuere, ibique iuventutem suam exercuit. Corpus patiens

inediae, algoris, vigiliae, supra quam cuiquam credibile est. Animus audax,

subdolus, varius, cuius rei lubet simulator ac dissimulator; alieni adpetens,

sui profusus, ardens in cupiditatibus; satis eloquentiae, sapientiae parum.

Vastus animus inmoderata, incredibilia, nimis alta semper cupiebat.

16. Claude Briand-Ponsart, introduction to Mérimée, 14.

17. There are, of course, even oral chains in the transmission of information, as in that from

Umbrenus to the Allobroges to Quintus Fabius Sanga to Cicero (Sallust, Cat. 40–41; Mérimée, 191).

18. Mérimée is conscious of the dilemma. He comments that the Greek historians offer explana-

tions one could demand in vain from the Roman historians who were closer to the events (38–39).

19. Cicero’s is at Cat. 1.26. These descriptions, with their admixture of virtues and vices, became

conventional of villains; see Livy on Hannibal (21.4) and Tacitus on Seianus (Annales 4.1.3). For the

preponderance of Sallustian language in the latter see the comments in Tacitus, Annals, Book 4, ed.

R. H. Martin and A. J. Woodman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Thomas Wiede-

mann follows up the two conventional aspects of Catiline, the archvillain and the paradox, in later Latin

literature in “The Figure of Catiline in the Historia Augusta,” Classical Quarterly 29 (1979): 479–84.

Michèle Lowrie 17

[Lucius Catiline, born from a noble race, was of great force of both mind and

body, but of an evil and base character. From adolescence, internal warfare,

slaughter, rapine, civil discord were pleasing to him, and there he exercised

his youth. His body was tolerant of fasting, cold, and wakefulness beyond

what is credible to anyone. His spirit was daring, crafty, fl exible, a pretender

and dissimulator of whatever matter you please, greedy for others’ goods,

profl igate of his own, burning in its passions. He had enough eloquence,

little wisdom. His vast spirit always desired things immoderate, incredible,

excessively high.] (Cat. 5)

By contrast, Mérimée’s novelistic fl air lends a sense of interiority. He imagines

the conspirators remaining at Rome once Catiline leaves the city: “Parmi les

conjurés demeurés à Rome régnait la plus grand irrésolution” (Among the con-

spirators who remained at Rome reigned the greatest irresolution) (185). What

exactly is he narrating? This is an interpretation of a few pages of Sallust, who

recounts what the conspirators did after Catiline’s departure (Cat. 39.6–43),

but it corresponds to no such explicit interpretation of Sallust’s at that point.

Mérimée also engages in supposition about the reactions of the people and the

conspirators to a declaration of the Senate (144). Sallust himself supplements

his narrative with reports of Catiline’s desires, fears, and beliefs.20 Each narra-

tive, however, fi nds different places to supplement its predecessor, leading into

greater uncertainty the clearer the narrative becomes. In Victoria E. Pagán’s

words, “Displacement is of course the ancient historian’s prerogative.”21 But it

is surprising to fi nd it operating in the same guise by a modern. Mérimée’s

imagination of what passed through Catiline’s mind as he left Rome is stun-

ning in the access it purports to give: “A peine hors de Rome il s’arrête incer-

tain. Ira-t-il dans le camp de Mallius exciter l’ardeur des soldats?” (Hardly

out of Rome, he stops, uncertain. Will he go to Mallius’s camp to excite the

soldiers’ ardor?) (172).22 To be fair, the depiction of interiority was not devel-

oped before Augustine, and so the ancient sources for the conspiracy do not

attempt to penetrate the conspirators’ internal thoughts to this extent. The elu-

cidation Mérimée offers could, however, be understood through the ancient

20. Pagán analyzes the techniques Sallust uses for building suspense (Conspiracy Narratives,

36–37). She makes general comments on the implicit presentation of information in conspiracy

narratives by “suggestion, innuendo, insinuation, or implication” (20). Mérimée also uses these

techniques: he both reports ancient rumors and puts forward interpretation in the form of rhetorical

questions to which there is no answer (e.g., 92), though he also shows suspicion of some ancient

rumors, notably those for which an ancient source also expressed doubts (123), and also recognizes

the limits of knowledge (e.g., 125).

21. Pagán, Conspiracy Narratives, 46.

22. Mérimée attributes rage and an incapacity for refl ection to Catiline as he exits the Senate

after Cicero’s fi rst Catilinarian oration (171).


rhetorical term evidentia, from which our modern “evidence” derives, although

its meaning is antithetical.

Evidentia, repraesentatio, and the Greek enargeia all mean vividness.23

It is the fi gure you use when you put something before your audience’s eyes,

and one place Quintilian assigns it is to the narration of the case.

Evidentia in narratione, quantum ego intellego, est quidem magna virtus,

cum quid veri non dicendum, sed quodammodo etiam ostendendum est, sed

subici perspicuitati potest, quam quidam etiam contrariam interim puta ver-

unt, quia in quibusdam causis obscuranda veritas esset. Quod est ridiculum;

nam qui obscurare vult, narrat falsa pro veris, et in iis quae narret debet

laborare ut videantur quam evidentissima.

[Vividness (evidentia) in the narration, as far as I understand, is indeed a

great virtue, when something true is not to be said, but in a certain manner

even pointed out. But it can be joined to transparency, which some have

thought meanwhile as detrimental, because in certain cases the truth should

be obscured. Which is ridiculous. For he who wants to obscure narrates false

things instead of true, and in those things he narrates, he ought to work so

that they seem as evident as possible.] (4.2.64–65)

The problem is that evidentia works equally well whether the narrative is true

or false.

One of ancient historiography’s central techniques for lending vivid-

ness to the narrative is the speech. Sallust is quite careful in quoted material,

whether of letters or speeches, to distinguish between material for which he

has precise sources and where he is giving the gist: he says “quarum exem-

plum infra scriptum est” (an example of which is written below) for the former

and the words “huiusque modi” (of this sort) for the latter (Cat. 34.3, 44.4; Cat.

20.1, 32.3, 50.5, 52.1).24 Mérimée is similarly careful and gives sources for

speeches in footnotes. He even reproduces one of Sallust’s tags in introducing

a letter with “En voici la teneur” (Here is the gist), though Sallust (Cat. 34.3) is

at that point more sure than Mérimée (173). Mérimée largely provides transla-

tions for speeches or letters attested in the ancient sources, and he comments

on how authentic he deems a speech.25 Although a detailed account of his

23. Pagán analyzes direct and indirect speech, focalization, and description (Conspiracy Nar-

ratives, 20–21); these techniques could all fall under the rubric of vividness.

24. See Ramsey, Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae, at 20.1, 34.3.

25. See the positive assessment of the textual conservation of Caesar’s speech in Sallust (Cat.

51) and the negative of Cato’s (Cat. 52) in Mérimée, 222, 244.

Michèle Lowrie 19

methods cannot be given here, he betters the transmitted material in several

ways. He often turns material into direct speech where it is only in indirect

speech or alluded to from the sources.26 In one instance, he cites verbatim,

without reference to any source at all, the acclamation of mothers pointing

Cicero out to their children and calling him the savior of the republic (254).27

In his narrative of the speeches given in the Senate on how to punish the cap-

tured conspirators, Mérimée interweaves Cicero’s fourth Catilinarian oration

between the speeches by Caesar and Cato that are transmitted by Sallust. This

is certainly a legitimate historical reconstruction, but Mérimée furthermore

interrupts the speeches with his own abridgment (239), commentary (207, 234,

239, 246), and interpretation. These include reports on audience reactions:

once Caesar has completed his speech, “une agitation extraordinaire suivit le

discours” (an extraordinary agitation followed the speech); as soon as Cato

begins to speak, the senators “éprouvaient une espèce de terreur” (felt a kind of

terror) (230, 243). Even more embroidered is the attribution of shame to the

Senate’s most venerable members on hearing Caesar’s dignifi ed style: “Plus

d’un vieux consulaire rougit en entendant le jeune préteur désigné parler le

langage de Fabius” (More than one old consular blushed on hearing the young

praetor designate speak the language of Fabius) (229).

The epistemological crisis that is conspiracy differs in extent, but not

kind, from other historiographical conundrums, and because the secrecy con-

spiracy entails sets in motion an extreme version of this crisis, it can be paradig-

matic for historiography in general. Secrecy blurs the known and the unknown.

Conspiracy is partially known, which is why it calls for a fi lling in of the blanks,

although structurally the desire for completion can never be fully met because

evidentia, the technique available for narrative completion, has such a tenuous

relation to the truth. The supplemental method for making what is known

understandable creates a zone of indistinction.28 The question remains whether

the political crisis it engenders has a similar or at any rate related structure.

While we might be capable of reconciling ourselves to not knowing

about things of historical interest, in the moment, the uncovering of conspiracy

26. E.g., more quotation in the exchange between Umbrenus and the Allobroges than attested at

Sallust, Cat. 40.3–4, in Mérimée, 189, and in the interrogation of the conspirators in the Senate

than attested at Cicero, Cat. 3.10, in Mérimée, 199; a statement by Lucius Caesar is reconstructed

from Cicero, Cat. 4.13, in Mérimée, 203.

27. The event can be reconstructed from Plutarch’s Life of Cicero 22.3–5, including the detail

of the torches in front of the houses, but not the speech of the women.

28. Pagán comments on conspiracy’s “interstitial nature”: it “resides in the space between con-

cealment and revelation, between silence and speech” (Conspiracy Narratives, 11).


requires action. The threat requires a response, and here again, I would argue

that it differs in extent, but not in kind, from other internal threats to the state

and consequently becomes paradigmatic for them. What is perhaps differ-

ent from other situations is the indistinct status of the conspiratorial event. I

mentioned above that Cicero says that by expelling Catiline from the city, he

openly exposed his treachery (Cat. 2.1). In the third oration, he expresses

more clearly the results of his own preventive action. If he had not expelled

Catiline from the city, “non ille nobis Saturnalia constituisset, neque tanto ante

exiti ac fati diem rei publicae denuntiavisset neque commisisset ut signum, ut

litterae suae testes manifesti sceleris deprehenderentur” (he would not have set

the Saturnalia as the date for us, nor so much ahead of time would he have

given notice of the day of death and fate to the republic, nor would he have

brought it about that a sign, that his letter, a witness of manifest crime, be appre-

hended) (Cat. 3.17). Although Cicero is arguing that his actions resulted in

the production of evidence proving the conspiracy, we can only wonder if his

actions did not produce the events themselves. Prior to his expulsion of Cati-

line, these events were emergent, but had not actually emerged.

How does one legally prevent illegal action before it has occurred? Is

there any legal basis for the preemptive strike? The Roman method for deal-

ing with perceived internal threats was to declare some form of state of emer-

gency. In this particular case, the Senate took recourse to what was later called

the senatus consultum ultimum (SCU), “the ultimate decree of the Senate.”29

Giorgio Agamben has argued that the state of exception, or state of emergency,

is a zone of indistinction.30 In the SCU, we fi nd the temporary suspension

of the rule of law within the larger aim of preserving the rule of law.31 Cicero

gives the phrasing for the SCU in a past, exemplary instance: “Decrevit quon-

29. Caesar adds the “ultimate” (ultimum) to this kind of “senatus consultum” at BC 1.5.3, so

that the regular phrase used by scholars became “senatus consultum ultimum”; a more accurate

description would be “senatus consultum de re publica defendenda” (decree of the Senate for the

defense of the Republic), according to A. W. Lintott, The Constitution of the Roman Republic

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 89–90.

30. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen

(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 15–29.

31. Agamben treats the SCU in State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2005), 42–47. This interpretation is controversial; for an overview see A. W. Lin-

tott, “States of Emergency,” chap. 11 of Violence in Republican Rome (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1968), 149–74; Thomas N. Mitchell, “Cicero and the Senatus Consultum Ultimum,” Historia

20 (1971): 47–61; and Lintott, Constitution, 89–93. I discuss the SCU in greater detail in Lowrie,

“Sovereignty before the Law.”

Michèle Lowrie 21

dam senatus uti L. Opimius consul videret ne quid res publica detrimenti

caperet” (The Senate once decreed that L. Opimius the consul should see to it

that the republic receive no harm) (Cat. 1.4). He has been granted a similar

charge. In the exemplary instances he cites, the consuls acted immediately and

killed the various leaders who were fomenting the revolt. Cicero, however, has

let the matter drag on. Why? The prior political disturbances he cites, though

internal, were carried out in the public sphere. The Catilinarian conspiracy is

called precisely that because it was secret, and its secrecy has meant that not

everyone is convinced of its existence. Cicero, who has informants working for

him, knows, but they are not reliable, and he has no proof. The conspiracy has

not emerged. They have not pulled off any events, though Cicero is anguished

because of the potential for the destruction of the city. In the meantime, how-

ever, he must wait in a kind of limbo.

We have now reached the heart of this conspiracy, a moment of suspen-

sion. The conspirators are in limbo before the conspiracy emerges; the consul

is in limbo waiting for the conspiracy to emerge; the state is in limbo because

of the state of emergency. The conspiracy cannot be judged to be such before

any events, and yet the events, should they be successful, would mean that the

conspirators would occupy the position of judges and so never have been con-

spirators at all. Finally, an event happens, or rather fails to happen: a Roman

knight, C. Cornelius, and a senator, L. Vargunteius, show up at Cicero’s house,

as if to give him the morning salutation, but with the intention of murder.

Because Cicero was forewarned, he does not let them in, and the planned event

fails to occur (Sallust, Cat. 28).32 It is this threat that leads Cicero to confront

Catiline in the Senate and request that he leave the city. One wonders what

would have happened had Cicero not confronted Catiline.33 How long could

the limbo have dragged on? As it is, Catiline’s departure precipitated action,

32. Seager points out that the visitors’ intention to murder Cicero could have been entirely

fabricated by him and that the preliminary plots he alleged were also nonevents (“Iusta Catilinae,”

243–44).

33. Seager argues that Cicero’s confrontation of Catiline precipitated him into action and that

Catiline had not actually decided whether to go into exile in Marseilles or join Manlius’s army

until after he left Rome (ibid., 248). Ramsey remarks: “If Catiline and his followers had been pur-

suing revolutionary designs against the government since mid-64, it is remarkable that these plans

were not farther along when the conspiracy came out into the open in the latter half of 63 and that

the Senate delayed so long in adopting countermeasures against the revolutionaries” (Sallust’s Bel-

lum Catilinae, 17). He fi nds the reason for the plans’ delay in a switch of Catiline’s supporters from

powerful aristocrats to the urban poor. For the conspirators’ ineffi ciency see also Waters, “Cicero,

Sallust, and Catiline,” 202–4.


produced written traces that could not easily be confuted, and resulted in the

conspiracy’s becoming a conspiracy.

At this point, we might expect things to become clear, but the political

response to conspiracy in this instance takes the epistemological challenge

into a new zone of suspension, that of the rule of law, and the murky legality

of the Senate’s judgment on the conspirators remains a conundrum among

Roman political and legal historians.34 Capital cases were supposed to be tried

by the people. The SCU was a method for giving the consuls powers that were

otherwise not in their brief, as Sallust specifi es, “sine populi iussu” (without

the order of the people) (Cat. 29), and it was grounded in the Senate’s advice-

giving capacity. The SCU in itself could be viewed as infringing on popular

sovereignty,35 but this decree was operative in the stage of the conspiracy

where Cicero was trying to acquire proof. Once they were caught, the Senate

tried the conspirators without reference to the SCU.36 This is the interpretive

sticking point. Theoretically, the Senate trial should also be viewed as infring-

ing on popular sovereignty, but none of the ancient sources present it as such,

including those opposed to capital punishment, a view whose representative in

the sources is Julius Caesar.

There were, of course, pragmatic reasons for immediate judgment. One

was the need for quick action. Catiline and Manlius were still at the head of an

army at Faesulae.37 Another is that the Catilinarians had been planning to do

many things that would have been pleasing to the people, such as canceling

debts. There was a legitimate fear that they would be acquitted, and then

there also would have been no conspiracy according to Brik’s epigram. The

plan to set fi re to different parts of the city and seize power in the confusion,

however, caused alarm even among the most disenfranchised members of

society (Sallust, Cat. 48.1–2), so the risk of acquittal was perhaps not so high.

In any event, Sallust and Appian both record a proposal made by Tiberius Nero

(the grandfather of the future emperor Tiberius) that the guards be increased

on the prisoners and the matter be postponed (Sallust, Cat. 50.4).38 Had this

34. I rely on the accounts given in n. 31 above.

35. Lintott, Violence, 173.

36. Shapiro summarizes the issues (O Tempora! O Mores! 192–93).

37. For a chronology of events see Ramsey, Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae, 18–21. Cato’s speech in

Sallust reminds the Senate of the pressing dangers (Cat. 52.3, 24–25, 35).

38. Appian records that Tiberius argued for postponement until Catiline could be beaten in

battle and they could obtain certain knowledge, but he makes no comment about the future venue

of the trial (BCiv 2.5). See Ramsey, Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae, 193.

Michèle Lowrie 23

plan been followed, a more regular trial would perhaps have taken place. As it

is, the Senate overwhelmingly followed Cato’s advice and punished the con-

spirators who had been caught, as a preemptive strike against the rest: “Nam

cetera malefi cia tum persequare ubi facta sunt; hoc nisi provideris ne adcidat,

ubi evenit, frustra iudicia implores: capta urbe nihil fi t relicui victis” (For you

may pursue other misdeeds when they have been done; if you don’t make sure

that this does not happen, when it does happen, you may beg for justice in

vain: when a city has been captured, there is nothing left for the vanquished)

(Cat. 52.4). They therefore put the conspirators who were in custody at Rome

to death immediately, and the remaining conspirators, including Catiline,

were subsequently defeated in battle.

The Catilinarian conspiracy shows confusion between legal and political

categories on several levels. I have picked up Agamben’s argument that the

state of exception is a zone of indistinction between politics and the law.39 He

argues that the structure of sovereignty becomes apparent in the state of excep-

tion because it is the decision to suspend the law that reveals that the sovereign

is simultaneously inside and outside the law: he who can suspend it must reside

outside, though the law remains at issue in not for the moment applying.40 In

this historical instance, the locus of sovereignty does not become apparent,

and the zone of indistinction Agamben outlines is much less neatly structured

than he describes. There is genuine confusion over sovereignty. Historians are

in accord that under normal circumstances sovereignty in the Roman Republic

was located in the people.41 They were the legislative body, and they further-

more had judicial rights. The state of exception, however, causes the Senate to

make a decree that gives the magistrates special powers ordinarily belong-

ing to the people. There is a dispute among historians about whether sover-

eignty is revealed in the SCU to belong to the Senate because the senators are

the ones who decide, or whether the constitutional danger lies rather in the

39. One reason it is hard to pin down the legality of the political actions taken against the Catili-

narians is that Sallust focuses much more on political practice than on the law (see Briand-Ponsart,

introduction to Mérimée, 26–27).

40. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 15, 22.

41. Lintott, Violence, 173; Lintott, Constitution, 40. Fergus Millar holds a view of the Roman

Republic as “a radical example of popular sovereignty untrammeled by constitutional safeguards,”

which is generally regarded as extremist (The Roman Republic in Political Thought [Hanover, NH:

University Press of New England, 2002], 8; also Millar, The Crowd in Rome in the Late Repub-

lic [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998]). See Joy Connolly, The State of Speech:

Rhetoric and Political Thought in Ancient Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

2007), 30.


magistrates’ exceptional powers.42 I do not think we need to pin this question

down. The point is that the location of sovereignty in the state of exception

becomes genuinely ambiguous and contested. This in turn results in proce-

dural violations.43 Mérimée asks the right questions: Why did Caesar not

demand that the case be brought before the people? Why was there no dis-

cussion of the right to appeal? Why did the tribunes, whose job it was to pro-

tect the rights of the people, not interpose their veto? Mérimée is frustrated by

the failure of the rule of law and offers an interpretation that clearly does not

satisfy even himself: Cicero used intimidation and violence to put a stop to

any appeal (268–70).

Furthermore, the status of the conspirators is legally unclear. Cicero

argues consistently throughout the Catilinarian orations that the conspirators

have given up their rights as citizens, including the right to a trial before the

people, by becoming public enemies (hostis), and after Catiline departed

from Rome, the Senate did declare Catiline and his general Manlius enemies

of the state (Sallust, Cat. 36.2).44 Although Cicero wants to distinguish clearly

between citizen and enemy, the problem with the conspirators is that they are

both, and it is consequently unclear how to apply the law to them. Caesar’s

wish to preserve their lives is recorded in both Cicero and Sallust, and here

again, there is a state of limbo. Caesar proposed stripping them of all citizen

rights, including the right to own property and the right to appeal. All that

would be left them is “uitam solam” (life alone) (Cicero, Cat. 4.8).45 This is

the precursor to Agamben’s “bare life,” and it preserves the ambiguity about

the conspirators’ status: from being both enemies and citizens, they will become

neither. Caesar’s proposal was not adopted, but the decision to put the con-

spirators to death did not resolve their status. Afterward Cicero was in fact

exiled for putting citizens to death without trial. Although this was the result

42. The dispute is best seen in the debate between Mitchell, “Cicero,” and Lintott, Constitution,

92–93. Mitchell argues that the SCU grants temporary sovereignty not to the consuls but to the

Senate (esp. 58–61), while Lintott thinks that the problem lies in the excessive powers given to the

magistrates. Lintott sees the struggle in the scholarship as a refl ection of the political struggle

between the orders at Rome (66).

43. Briand-Ponsart quotes from a letter in which Mérimée consults a jurist about the “violation

fl agrante de la procedure ordinaire” (fl agrant violation of standing procedure) in the treatment of

the Catilinarians (Mérimée, 25).

44. E.g., Cat. 4.10: “Qui autem rei publicae sit hostis eum civem esse nollo modo posse” (How-

ever, he who is an enemy of the republic can in no way be a citizen); therefore the “lex Sempronia”

(Sempronian law), which protected citizens from being put to death without trial before the people,

does not apply.

45. Caesar’s speech is recorded in Sallust, Cat. 51, with a summary of their punishments at 43.

Michèle Lowrie 25

46. This point is discussed in greater detail in Lowrie, “Sovereignty before the law,” 43.

47. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans.

G. Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 5; Agamben, Homo Sacer, 15 and passim. Mitchell’s

argument in “Cicero” is Schmittian in that the Roman Senate was the body to decide on the state of

exception, and he focuses on who decides.

48. Agamben opens his discussion of sovereignty with an analysis of Schmitt in this regard

(Homo Sacer, 15).

of political machinations by his enemies and he was brought back to Rome,

the possibility of manipulating the interpretation of the conspirators’ status

shows that there was real contestation.46

Let us take stock. So far I have argued that the secrecy of a conspiracy

creates an epistemological zone of indistinction. Rather than a sharp differen-

tiation between the known and the unknown, where the former provides clar-

ity and the latter obscurity, what is known becomes interpretable through what

is supplied. Similarly, a zone of indistinction clouds both the structure of sov-

ereignty in the state of exception and the legal status of the conspirators. The

question that remains is the relation between these different zones of indistinc-

tion. Do they have the same structure? Is one causative of the other? It would

be facile to say that the epistemological conundrum gives rise to the political.

Each is implicated in much larger questions. Conspiracy provides one locus

among others for the need for historical reconstruction. There lies a core of the

unknown at the center of it, and conspiracy is judged to be such at the hazy

borderline between the known and the unknown. It is like fi nding a black hole

at the center of an onion. Similarly, the state of emergency is one problematic

among others in the complex debate about the structure of sovereignty. Agam-

ben relies too much on Carl Schmitt’s idiosyncratic defi nition of the sovereign

as he who decides on the state of exception to be a full account.47 Liberal

political theory and the Roman constitution would locate sovereignty in the

people. Even within this theory, the SCU is a single instance of a state of

exception. Furthermore, there is no idea of an inaccessible core to sovereignty

the way there is in secrecy. Rather, in Schmitt’s and Agamben’s models, it has

a paradoxical relation to the law in lying both inside and outside it.48 Even if we

adopt a messier model, the structures do not quite correspond. Still, I think

conspiracy is a limit case both for historiography and sovereignty—the former

because of the participants’ investment in secrecy, so that we confront a limit

to the knowable, and the latter because of the confusion surrounding both the

sovereign and the citizen body. In short, conspiracy lies at the intersection of

multiple zones of indistinction.

lowrie evidence and narrative in merimee

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