Cicero’s Rhetorical Branding and Dismemberment of Catiline

Christina E. Franzen (Marshall University)

In his Catilinarian orations, Cicero dehumanizes Catiline, a Roman aristocrat, through metaphors of tattooing, branding and dismemberment. Only slaves, animals and religious suppliants are branded in the ancient world. Cicero literarily brands Catiline with the marks of his crime and dismembers him with his rhetoric. The Roman rebel becomes only flesh, body and feeling. Cicero’s use of the verb inurere is significant: quae nota domesticae turpitudinis non inusta vitae tuae est? praetulisti? (1.13); it means ‘to brand’ something on someone. This disfigurement marks Catiline first as physically different, and second as less than human, either a slave or an animal. Scholarship about slavery and the American Civil War has been especially illuminating with regard to this topic (Hartman 1997; Henderson 2000); current scholarship surrounding tattooing and branding in the ancient world focuses on the acts themselves and not their literary deployment (Jones 1987).

Cicero furthers this characterization of Catiline as flesh, body and appetite by dismembering him textually. In separating Catiline into his constituent body parts; the orator attempts to make Catiline unrecognizable as a human, but only a body that has been hewn into an unrecognizable hunk of meat. This, like the metaphorical branding, emphasizes Catiline’s corporeality, and, therefore, his lack of sentience: quae libido ab oculis, quod facinus a manibus umquam tuis, quod flagitium a toto corpore afuit (1.13). Not only is Cicero metaphorically carving up this Roman citizen physically, but laying claim to him and marking him as either pro- Cicero and Republic or anti-Cicero and Republic. Later, the princeps created windows into the lives of his elite male subjects, constantly monitoring them: as Frederick (2003) argues, “the development of the principate into empire demands the slow refocusing of the power of the state, the res publica, from outside to inside, from public spaces, the comitia and curia, to private spaces, the household or court of the emperor.” Cicero is attempting this very same thing– he wants to gaze into the private spaces of Roman citizens through this very transgressive act.

Cicero is paving the way for the dismal reality of the road to Empire, where no person has ownership of his own body and the emperor can see into every life and every body of the inhabitants of Rome. This branding makes only bodies of people, bodies which are subject only to sensation, mostly to pain. In this way, there is a distinct sexualization of Catiline, and eventually the elite male Roman. He, like women, is stripped of his mind and is all body, to be dealt with as the one in power pleases, penetrated, disfigured and discarded.