Free The Book of Ancient Bastards by Brian Thornton

he wrote, “there are many Mariuses.”
    It takes a bastard to know a bastard.

    Bastard’s Circus
    During his entire life, Sulla never forgot where he came from. Even when he had reached the pinnacle of power as dictator representing the interests of the conservative
optimates
political party, Sulla liked to party, to drink, to carouse, and he didn’t like to keep company with stuffy senators and their wives. Instead, he did his drinking with the lowlifes he’d met during his upbringing in the Subura. In fact, when Sulla retired to his country villa, he took his favorite “girlfriend” with him: a female impersonator named Metrobius!

29
CATILINE AND HIS CONSPIRACY
    A Confederacy of Dunces?
    (108–62 B.C.)
    Lucius Catiline . . . had great mental and physical energy, but his abilities were perverted and destructive. From his boyhood he had reveled in civil war, murder, robbery, and public discord. . . . His boundless ambition was constantly directed towards wildly fantastic and unattainable ends. After the dictatorship of Sulla he was possessed by a tremendous urge to seize control of the government and he did not in the least mind what methods he used, provided he obtained supreme power.
—Sallust, Catiline
    Lucius Sergius Catiline was descended from one of Rome’s most distinguished old families. Like his fellow bastard Julius Caesar, Catiline entered adulthood broke. And like many other young Roman aristocrats who refused to curtail their lifestyles to fit a budget during the first century B.C., Catiline soon found himself swimming in debt. Catiline threw his support behind fellow bastard Sulla, and as a result made a fortune dabbling in property sold at auction during that dictator’s proscriptions. In one notorious case, Catiline killed his brother-in-law, hacked off his head, and carried it to the Forum, where he got Sulla to add the poor unfortunate’s name to the proscription lists after the fact, then received the man’s property in the bargain!
    In the end, Catiline attempted a coup to topple the existing Roman state and install him as dictator.
    Like such contemporaries as Cicero and Pompey, Catiline seems to have been impatient with the Roman system of advancement through long government service. Where the others cut a corner here and there (Cicero skimping on military service, Pompey on civil positions), Catiline seemed ready to toss the entire playbook.
    He began conspiring to bypass the senate and seize power as his benefactor Sulla had done. In furtherance of this plan, he attracted to him (in the words of the historian Sallust), “Every gambler, libertine or glutton, who had frittered away his inheritance in play, debauchery or entertainment” to whom the notion of having his debts canceled seemed appealing. His co-conspirator Manlius began raising troops in the hinterlands, calling the poor, the debt-ridden, anyone interested in bettering their lot for a march on Rome like the one Sulla had staged twenty years before.

    Quotable Bastard
    When Catiline ran a fourth time for consul in 62 B.C., he did not simply attempt to win influence in the senate. Like Napoleon and Hitler after him, he took his case straight to the common people. He was quite open about this cynical attempt to use the common people to help him bypass the political process and catapult him to power: “I see two bodies in the state,” he said in a speech shortly before the election of 63 B.C., “One thin and wasted but with a head. The other is headless but large and powerful. What is so dreadful about my becoming head of the body that needs one?”

    It was the consul Cicero who finally called Catiline out, exposing him in the senate as the opportunistic rebel he had become. Apprised of Catiline’s attempt at a coup (and intent to murder hundreds of people, including Cicero himself) by an anonymous letter, Cicero stood on the floor of the senate, pointed his finger straight at Catiline and asked, “How long, tell me, will