History very
often has been, and no doubt often again will be, rewritten, with good
effect and in the service of truth, on the finding of new facts. Records
have been brought to light which have hitherto been buried, and
testimonies are compared with testimonies which have not before been seen
together. But to imagine that a man may have been good who has lain under
the ban of all the historians, all the poets, and all the tellers of
anecdotes, and then to declare such goodness simply in accordance with
the dictates of a generous heart or a contradictory spirit, is to disturb
rather than to assist history. Of Catiline we at least know that he
headed a sedition in Rome in the year of Cicero's Consulship; that he
left the city suddenly; that he was killed in the neighborhood of Pistoia
fighting against the Generals of the Republic, and that he left certain
accomplices in Rome who were put to death by an edict of the Senate. So
much I think is certain to the most truculent doubter. From his
contemporaries, Sallust and Cicero, we have a very strongly expressed
opinion of his character. They have left to us denunciations of the man
which have made him odious to all after-ages, so that modern poets have
made him a stock character, and have dramatized him as a fiend. Voltaire
has described him as calling upon his fellow-conspirators to murder
Cicero and Cato, and to burn the city. Ben Jonson makes Catiline kill a
slave and mix his blood, to be drained by his friends. "There cannot be a
fitter drink to make this sanction in." The friends of Catiline will say
that this shows no evidence against the man. None, certainly; but it is a
continued expression of the feeling that has prevailed since Catiline's
time. In his own age Cicero and Sallust, who were opposed in all their
political views, combined to speak ill of him. In the next, Virgil makes
him as suffering his punishment in hell.[179] In the next, Velleius
Paterculus speaks of him as the conspirator whom Cicero had
banished.[180] Juvenal makes various allusions to him, but all in the
same spirit. Juvenal cared nothing for history, but used the names of
well-known persons as illustrations of the idea which he was
presenting.[181] Valerius Maximus, who wrote commendable little essays
about all the virtues and all the vices, which he illustrated with the
names of all the vicious and all the virtuous people he knew, is very
severe on Catiline.[182] Florus, who wrote two centuries