Julia Mebane, Indiana University
In the Bellum Catilinae, Sallust claims that omnino cuncta plebes favored Catiline’s revolutionary designs (BC 37.1). In the list of conspirators that dominates the second Catilinarian, however, these supporters are nowhere to be found (Dyck 2008: 148). Scholars have posited historical and rhetorical explanations for their absence. Some deny that Catiline’s program of debt relief would have appealed to those whose economic positions limited the accrual of debt in the first place (Harrison 2008). Others stress the popular context of the speech’s delivery; whatever urban support Catiline enjoyed, it would not have been mentioned in the contio (Berry 2020: 130).
My paper approaches this problem from a new direction. The plebes urbana might be literally absent in the speech, but their conventional role in political discourse is played by Catiline. Cicero makes this rhetorical strategy clear when he identifies Catiline as the bilgewater of Rome (sentina urbis, Cat. 2.7). Comparisons of crowds to the sewage that accumulated in a ship’s hold were commonplace in the Late Republic (Jewell 2019; Kühnert 1989). In a characteristic letter to Atticus, Cicero explained his support for an agrarian bill with the remark, sentinam urbis exhauriri…posse arbitrabar (“I was thinking the bilgewater of the city could be drained off,” Att. 1.19.4). The metaphor located the unpropertied at the bottom of the ship of state, conveying their distance from political power and expendability in the eyes of the elite. Applying it to a senator from a distinguished gens would have immediately captured the attention of Cicero’s contional audience.
Cicero invokes the sentina urbis to justify the exclusion of Catiline from the Republic by any means necessary. A metaphor typically used to reinforce elite privilege is reworked to police the boundaries of civic belonging more broadly: O fortunatam rem publicam, si quidem hanc sentinam urbis eiecerit! Uno mehercule Catilina exhausto levata mihi et recreata res publica videtur (“How fortunate is the Republic, if it has really expelled this bilgewater of the city! By Hercules, it seems to me to have been lightened and revived through the drainage of Catiline alone,” Cat. 2.7). Catiline’s assimilation to bilgewater persists throughout the speech. As water seeps into the hull of a ship, he creeps through the city walls. As sewage sickens sailors, he causes the body politic to vomit. As a ship that takes on excessive bilge risks sinking, a conspiracy with so many followers threatens civic shipwreck. In a satisfying reversal of power relations, the people are invited to take ownership of the rhetoric that was so often used at their expense (Morstein-Marx 2004: 219).
This reading sheds new light on the role of the plebes urbana in the Catilinarians. Through metaphors like sentina, Cicero rhetorically reassigned membership in this social class to his political adversaries. He was thereby able to exploit elite prejudices towards the poor even when speaking in the contio. The search for Catiline’s urban supporters, it seems, is one that must begin in the senate.