Comments:
Dear Friends
As some of you may know, some 55 years ago, in January, 1958, as a mid-term transfer student, I walked into the main entrance to Mt. Lebanon High School to report to the office for class assignment. As I turned left, I passed a picture of an orator addressing the Roman senate with an enthralled audience except for one man sitting a side by himself in a state of deep depression. I felt a surge of empathy for the isolated man who seemed as lonely at I was at that moment. Although I did not know it at the time, I saw a copy of the famous Palazzo Madama painting of Cicero delivering his First Oration against Catiline. In my third year Latin and studied Cicero’s First Oration against Catiline and Sallust’s War against Catiline which described Catiline’s efforts to overthrow the Roman Republic after his second unsuccessful run for consul. These efforts which were thwarted by Cicero who revealed the details of the conspiracy in the above speech and drove Catiline from Rome. Catiline died fighting superior government forces in the battle of Pistoria, January, 62.
Sallust described Catiline as man who
born of a noble clan, was of great strength of mind and body, but possessed of an evil and depraved character. From his youth, he loved civil discord, murder, pillage and political dissension; and among these he spent his early manhood. His body could endure hunger, cold, and lack of sleep to a degree which was unbelievable; his mind was reckless, cunning, changeable, capable of any form of pretense or concealment. Covetous of the possessions of others, he was wasteful of his own. Violent in his passions, he possessed a great deal of eloquence but little wisdom. His disordered mind always desired the monstrous, the gigantic and the incredible. After the dictatorship of L. Sulla, he was seized by a great desire to take over the Republic, little reckoning the means by which he would achieve this goal as long as he attained power himself.
I was a rebellious teenager then. Naturally, he became my hero. He would have been a fascinating dinner guest although one might have been advised to keep an eye on the silverware.
Throughout my life I have always been sceptical of established “truths” and extreme portraits of “villains.” So at the end of my junior year I wrote a long essay trying to establish a more nuanced picture of Catiline as other than Lucifer in Paradise Lost. This was the first of several efforts to poke holes in the classical account of Catiline. I stopped writing about Catiline not long after I graduated from law school. I could have gone on after college to become an academic. However, the efforts of my father, who spent every weekend of my senior year in high school serving as an extra debate coach and judge so that I could participate in debate or extemporaneous speaking led to my wise decision to go to law school, to the benefit of academe and the detriment of the legal profession. Having spent some thirty-three years of my career in the U.S. Steel Law Department negotiating with the United Steelworkers of America, it is safe to say that some of my union friends would have preferred that I had taken the other road. I have a number of grey hairs on my head from my battles with them, but they have more.
Following my retirement from U.S. Steel I have returned to my hero and after several years of intense scholarship, I have written my first and only book- Catiline: Rebel of the Roman Republic. I attach a blurb describing the book which is being published by Pen & Sword of the United Kingdom. I will never rival the output of some of my Yale classmates since it had taken my almost 60 years to write this book and I doubt that I have another second 60 years to do a sequel. Jim
