The Enemy in Sallust's Bellum Catilinae

Aislinn A. Melchior (University of Puget Sound)

Recent scholarship has focused on the failure of signification in the Bellum Catilinae (e.g. Batstone, Erikson, Sklenar).  In this paper I argue that this mismatch of signifier and signified is demonstrated most dramatically by the way that Sallust uses the word hostis.  Early in the work, the term is only used to specify a foreign enemy.  This is the metus hostilis that creates virtue in the early Republic and leads men to strive for glory, showing the appropriate application of the word.  The first misapplication of the term to a Roman citizen occurs in the marked context of the senate, immediately after the first Catilinarian oration.  Cicero delivers the speech that is "splendid and useful to the state," and when Catiline responds with abuse, the senate shouts out that Catiline is an enemy and a patricide.  Catiline calls them instead his political foes (inimici). 

Thereafter the term "enemy" is divided in use between foreign enemies - when it always connotes virtuous Roman activity - and the conspirators, clearly suggesting that the two categories are equivalent.  Sallust, however, problematizes this identification of conspirator and hostes in the final battle at Pistoria.  Not only does he show Catiline and his men fighting with unexpected courage, but he also tells the battle in a way that is unprecedented.  Rather than choosing a viewpoint and showing the battle from the perspective of one side, the narrative leaps between the factions (Latte).  Nor does Sallust retain fixed identifiers to clarify the flow of the battle.  Instead he untethers the term hostis and focalizes the account first through one set of eyes, then through the eyes of the opposing side.  In the space of a few lines, Sallust switches the referent of the term hostes from the Catilinarians to the Romans and back again four times.

The confusion of enemy identity is graphically demonstrated at the end of the work.  There, after the battle, spectators view the dead.  As the bodies are rolled over, those who had thought to find enemies (hostilia) discover when they see the faces that the bodies are in fact those of friends, kinsman, or guest friends.  Even those who find enemies find not hostes but inimici.  I will argue that the misidentification of the enemy is key to understanding Sallust's meaning: heated rhetoric, by imagistically placing the hostis within the city walls, led inevitably to the violence of civil war.  By misnaming Romans as enemies, military virtue was likewise misapplied.