Civil War and Popular Politics in Republican Rome and Renaissance Florence

What can a comparison between Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae and Medici propaganda tell us today?

In 1478 the Florentine banking family of the Pazzi, aided and abetted by intimates of Pope Sixtus IV in Rome, prepared an attempt on the life of the capi of their rivals, Giuliano and Lorenzo de’ Medici. The Medici at that time were the dominant party in Florentine finance and politics and leaders of what in modern terms would be called a multinational giant. If by itself the violent disposal of political enemies was by no means exceptional in early modern Italy, both the eminence of the Medic and the high connections of the conspirators made the stakes exceptionally high. If they were to succeed, the conspirators would bring about a complete reversal not only in local but in international politics.

In the attack in Florence’s cathedral, Giuliano was killed, but his elder brother Lorenzo survived, although wounded. In order to attribute the character of a coup d’état against the Florentine Republic to what was in effect an incident in a clan war and thus be able to eliminate the Pazzi for good, Lorenzo initiated a publicity campaign, part of which was to commission the Medici family humanist, domestic tutor and client Angelo Poliziano to produce a short monograph in Latin describing the events that was to conciliate public opinion in Florence and the surrounding Italian city-states in favor of the Medici. To this end Poliziano used and adapted a number of canonical classical texts, in particular Sallust’s description of the conspiracy of Catiline in 63 BC known as the Bellum Catilinae.

As an instance of Renaissance reception of classical antiquity, Poliziano’s Coniurationis commentarium has been diligently studied so as to establish echoes, intertextual references and stylistic borrowings. In this lecture, I would like to explore the more abstract question, namely what kind of reading of Sallust’s monograph informs Poliziano’s use of Sallust. From what perspective he supposed Sallust to be writing? And what was he supposing his readers to think Sallust had been saying?

These questions are all the more interesting since both the political position of Sallust himself and his evaluation of Catiline are ambiguous. Perhaps as a consequence, in some early Renaissance Florentine circles rather than as the incarnated evil, Catiline had been considered an avatar of the independent Florentine republican spirit. Even now, the questions to what extent Sallust was a Caesarian, and, more importantly, what it meant to be a Caesarian—being a populist, or monarchist, or being a democrat—are subject to an ever more topical debate. Indeed, the discourse on civil war, political renewal and popular politics this comparison lays bare may contain valuable insights for the political situation in the democratic West today.

Co-sponsored by Princeton Classics and the Department of French and Italian