#catilina

[faustandfurious]

The Catilina post reminded me that which historical figures you end up sympathizing with, very often depends on who you hear about first. Because my first proper introduction to Roman history in my early teens (apart from the Asterix comics) was Ibsen’s play Catilina, and so I approached any subsequent book about Ancient Rome with the firm conviction that Lucius Sergius Catilina was right and everyone else was wrong.

#feanor speaks #i have stanned some truly embarrassing people through the years #catilina

[rosssrandomblog]

not my history loving ass being obsessed with this mf

and I don’t even know how I came to this point...

#catilina #catiline #ancient rome #THE republic #catiline's cospiracy #i don't know how i even came here #mom pick me up im scared #look at this mf #he's just a poor little meow meow #history tumblr #history

[anaundying]

Reading Catilinae Coniuratio to get inspired and motivated for the new year.

#Sempronia my love #catilina #sallustius

[psy-yche]

i feel like there's a universe in which catilina is into like v specific mid 2010s vocaloid. but only the weirdly dark narrative ones about nazis or like human experiments

#tagamemnon #expanding on my alcibiades theory #catilina would be into karakuri burst and anything yamashizuku #don't tell me how i know i just KNOW #catilina

[thoodleoo]

it's me boy, the medieval scribe speaking to you inside your brain. listen to me boy. draw in the margins of your notes instead of paying attention

#medieval goings on #every once in a while i feel like i get possessed by brother eadwig #queueusque tandem abutere catilina patientia nostra

[architetturacannibale]

read “catilina” while studying and my thoughts immediately went to tumblr before anything else i hate myself and you all

#catilina #tagamemnon #uni #reading about firenze and fiesole ecc

[revistadehistoria-es]

Síguenos en Substack https://revistadehistoria.substack.com/ Lee cada día nuevos Artículos Históricos GRATIS: https://revistadehistoria.es/registro-gratuito/ La Conjuración de Catilina

#Catilina

[dwarfanonymice]

#ogni tanto un gruppo su facebook regala gioie #il superuovo (sì lo so non iniziate per favore) #ancient rome #ancient roman republic #cicero #catilina #antica roma #cicerone #repubblica romana

[ennuyeuxbabe]

this is how your email finds me

#tagamemnon #archaeology #archaeology memes #queueusque tandem abutere catilina patientia nostra #classics memes #classical studies #cave art #cave paintings

[girlcatilina]

Dionysus as grapes, detail from fresco of Dionysus on Vesuvius, Pompeii, before 79 A.D. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples

#how does it feel to be the coolest person ever #me two bottles of white wine deep #tagamemnon #queueusque tandem abutere catilina patientia nostra #ancient rome #ancient art #archaeology #frescoes #fresco painting

[catominor]

#forgot about catilina until the last moment and had to replace lucullus with him. sad. polls need more options #edit: extremely sad i forgot brutus on this. tremendous oversight

[wingedcupidx]

he's a ten but he doesn't listen to his wife and goes to work after recieving an ominous prophecy that he might die that day

#tagamemnon #queueusque tandem abutere catilina patientia nostra #julius caesar #ides of march #ancient rome

[brother-emperors]

Crassus, Caelius, Cicero, Catiline, Conspiracy

boy howdy these four sure are something. not featured in this soup of C names, Caesar! what on earth happened here.

Plutarch, Crassus

Sallust on Crassus, Ronald Syme

Patron and Client, Father and Son in Cicero's "Pro Caelio"

Crassus' New Friends and Pompey's Return, Eve J. Parrish

Catullus and His World, T.P. Wiseman

Cicero's Catilinarians, D.H. Berry

#flash back to several years ago when I said I could never retain info on Catiline. Turns out the missing link was Crassus lmao #about halfway through drawing this i realized hbo rome era james purefoy would make a really good catiline #which is. not a good thought. bc when i start figuring out casts is when i start thinking thoughts like 'oh what if i did a comic' #conspiracy spotted. absolutely no survivors found here. good grief. we got whatever is going on with caelius. also some kind of divorce #but actually. hey cicero. HEY CICERO. I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS. FOR YOU ACTUALLY--- #i remember kaine told me about the executions but i did not fully appreciate. exactly what any of it meant in context. i have context now! #i should've been drawing the man with fucked up wall shadows the entire time. my god. #drawing tag #roman republic tag #catiline #Lucius Sergius Catilina #have i never. tagged him by his full name here. i should draw him more #cicero #marcus tullius cicero #marcus licinius crassus #marcus caelius rufus

[stcantarella]

#guys this is going to be our year! #marcus tullius cicero #Lucius Sergius Catilina #Lucius Licinius Lucullus #and augustus will be born!!!!! #150

[just-late-roman-republic-things]

The "Caesar maybe sleeps with King Nicomedes" and "Caesar gets captured by pirates" stories feel almost like they're responding to each other:

Both take place near the start of his career, perhaps even in the same year.

Both are dramatic and likely embellished (though connected to real events), to the point of feeling like fiction.

Both stories have probably been molded, through rumors and retellings, with the purpose of telling us what sort of person Caesar is. Convenient for propaganda purposes, either positive or negative.

Both have parallels to the stories about Caesar's interactions with Sulla, as if reinforcing those themes.

If you want to portray Caesar as fearless, responsible, a natural leader, and one who keeps his promises, you'll find that both in the pirate story and in his refusal to divorce Cornelia at Sulla's insistence.

But if you want to portray Caesar as a loose cannon, unmanly, with monarchist leanings and easily corrupted by the allure of power - you'll find that in the Nicomedes story, and also in how Sulla criticized Caesar for dressing too flashy, while Caesar supposedly called Sulla a fool for stepping down from the dictatorship.

And all of these stories can make it easy to overlook that, up until his conquest of Gaul, Caesar just wasn't very important in Roman politics. His aedileship, though splashy, probably wasn't unusual by aedile standards; and his consulship was controversial, but he was still third fiddle to Pompey and Crassus, and the first triumvirate's legal initiatives and electoral candidates lost as often as they won.

There were politically relevant stories from Caesar's early career, like prosecuting Dolabella for extortion and his participation in the siege of Mytilene. But we don't hear about those as often, because pirates and sex scandals are more fun.

I'm sure the man himself had a big personality, but it's difficult to tell fact from legend. Much of it is doubtless Caesar's own spin: he would've liked you to think he was never scared of those pirates. And much of it is slander from his enemies (Caesar did not get involved in seven different conspiracies to overthrow the republic before he even became consul, Suetonius).

These two particular tales, Nicomedes and the pirates, stand out to me. They feel like different threads of propaganda where you can practically feel the storytellers' opposing motives, to lionize Caesar or humiliate him. In the version of the pirate story where Caesar slit the pirates' throats before crucifying them (as a "mercy," sparing them torture), I have to wonder if that's a later addition from after 49 BCE, when Caesar was making much of his mercy toward defeated enemies.

But I think we can get some sense of his personality, in between these distorted threads. He was charming, flashy, very extroverted, and had a high opinion of himself. And he was always prepared to act on his own, contradict authority, and use unorthodox (even illegal) methods to get what he wanted. As for what he wanted, I think Sallust put it best: "a great command, an army, a new war where his virtus [excellence, strength] could shine."

But whether all that was normal aristocratic ambition, and Caesar would've just been another (very successful) politician if not for the split with Pompey in 50 BCE; or if, like Cato thought, you think he was only ever out for himself, republic be damned - I think the historians are still arguing that one, and perhaps they always will.

#btw you can find the pirate and nicomedes stories in suetonius and plutarch's biographies of caesar toward the start #sallust's sketch of caesar is in bellum catilinae near the end #you may have gathered that i have pretty complicated thoughts on caesar myself #but setting morality aside? he's always entertaining #julius caesar #historiography #jlrrt essays

[thoodleoo]

love this egyptian figurine of a woman baking bread in the brooklyn museum. she looks exactly like me while i'm waiting for my food to be done in the microwave. truly an eternal experience

#tagamemnon #queueusque tandem abutere catilina patientia nostra