Defending Sulla… to condemn the Catilinarians once again? Some moral and political concepts from Cicero’s Pro Sulla

For Catiline and his fellow conspirators, the most important Latin sources are Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae and Cicero’s Catilinarians. Yet also other works deserve proper attention, in particular some of Cicero’s orations, especially the Pro Sulla (62 BC). This paper intends further to explore some values and examples relating to the ideological interpretation of the Pro Sulla and, consequently, to the environment in which Cicero and his political adversaries lived. More specifically, the focus will be on some antithetical pairs (namely, ‘madness-rationality’, along with ‘immorality-integrity’, ‘severity-mercy’ and ‘regnum-libertas’) that are not only relevant in rhetorical terms, but also reflect the political tensions and the different ideologies in Cicero’s days.