Fractured by formido: Plotting the Destabilizing Specter of Fear in Catiline’s War
By Gideon Gruel

In Catiline’s War, Sallust constructs the eponymous Catiline and his infamous conspiracy to overthrow the Republic as products of Rome’s advancing moral decay and indicts the largely confused counteraction of the Roman populace — the Senate together with the commons — thereto as likewise symptomatic of that decay. This was not a decay of wealth, empire, or political institutions, though these too eventually suffered, but a decay of the mind. For Sallust, this mental decay, its exact evolution muddled and difficult to perspicuously plot, is rooted in a gradual corruption of the way Romans…