Aurelia Orestilla

Aurelia Orestilla is known only through its connection with the Catilinarian conspiracy ; the most detailed description of her person can still be found in Sallust's Catiline, whereas in his first Catilinarian speech Cicero alludes only to the events between Catiline and Aurelia Orestilla.

Source extracts

Sal. Cat. 15.2 - 15.3: Postremo captus amore Aureliae Orestillae, quoius praeter formam nihil umquam bonus laudavit, quod ea ngere illi dubitabat timens privignum adulta aetate, pro certo creditur necato filio vacuam domum scelestis nuptiis fecisse.

At last he was seized by the love for Aurelia Orestilla, in which no decent person ever praised anything but her beauty; because she hesitated to marry him out of fear of a stepson in adult age, he has - this is considered certain - by the murder of this son cleared the house for the nefarious marriage.

Val. Max. IX 1.9: Nam vaesano amore Aureliae Orestillae correptus, cum unum impedimentum videret quo minus nuptiis inter se iungerentur, filium suum, quem et solum et aetate iam puberem habebat, veneno sustulit protinusque ex rogo eius maritalem facem accendit .. .

He (Catilina) had taken a violent passion for Aurelia Orestilla and only one obstacle, his son, prevented her marriage. It was his only one and the same one had already grown up. Then Catiline put him out of the way with poison and then lit the wedding torch on his pyre ...

Aurelia Orestilla and Lucius Sergius Catilina

Catilina and Aurelia Orestilla were both married before and each had a child from their first marriage: Catilina a son and Aurelia Orestilla a daughter. Aurelia Orestilla came from the senatorial nobility and was the daughter of Cn. Aufidius Orestes , consul of the year 71 BC Chr .; So she was a good match for the class-conscious aristocrat Catiline. According to Sallust, however, Aurelia Orestilla feared Catilina's grown son and therefore refused to consent to a wedding; why she harbored such fears remains unclear: did the son realize that Aurelia only had Catilina's fortune in mind? Or was she so wicked, and Catiline and his son so decent, that such a connection was out of the question? Hardly likely! In any case, it is certain that Catiline married her out of love, otherwise he would not have entrusted her so carefully to his friend Quintus Catulus when the danger of the conspiracy became too great. At any rate, Catiline then seems to have gotten his son out of the way. The question now arises whether the Aurelia Orestilla described by Sallust was really as depraved as he would have us believe. If one assumes that the Aurelia mentioned by Cicero is our Aurelia Orestilla, one can assume that Sallust's assertion that there is nothing commendable about her except her beauty is true; however, this assumption is very uncertain. In Valerius Maximus , Aurelia is portrayed far less negatively than Sallust; Valerius Maximus only knows to report that Catilina's son was the obstacle to the marriage, he does not imply Aurelia here that she was the driving force in the murder of Catilina's son, nor is there any mention of her beauty and character. If we assume that Valerius Maximus used Sallust as a source because of the great agreement at this point, he may have softened one or the other exaggeration. As far as Sallust is concerned, there are two ways of interpreting the present source: Either one sees in Aurelia Orestilla the main person who has made the "voluptuous" Catiline submissive by means of her physical stimuli and who now coolly and calculatingly the conditions for a marriage dictates, whereby she is indirectly responsible for the murder of the son, or Catiline is the active and conscious doer who is even ready to eliminate his own son in order to be able to continue indulging in his sexual debauchery. If one keeps the context of the Catilinarian conspiracy in mind, one will tend to prefer the second possibility. In any case, Sallust criticizes the depraved morals and bad manners of the present day, in general with regard to society and especially with regard to Catiline. Nevertheless, Catiline appears innocent in a certain way in Sallust, just as if, blind with love, he had been seduced to murder by this "hideous" woman.

swell

• C. Sallustius Crispus, De coniuratione Catilinae, annotated by Karl Vretska, 2 vol., Heidelberg 1976
• C. Sallustius Crispus, Bellum Catilinae. A commentary (Mnemosyne. Bibliotheca Classica Batava 45), ed. by P. McGushin, Leiden 1977
• Gaius Sallustius Crispus, Catilina, Iugurtha, Historiarum Fragmenta Selecta, Appendix Sallustiana (Oxford Classical Texts), ed. by LD Reynolds, Oxford 1991
• M. Tullius Cicero, Epistulae ad familiares. Libri XVI (Tusculum), ed. by Helmut Kasten, Munich 1964
• M. Tullius Cicero, In Catilinam orationes quattuor, ed. by Dietrich Klose, Stuttgart 2002
• Plutarch, Cicero, ed. by Friedhelm L. Müller , Aachen 1998
• Valerius Maximus, Facta et dicta memorabilia, ed. by Carl Kempf, Leipzig 1888

literature

• Dacre Balsdon : The woman in Roman antiquity , Munich 1979
• Karl Büchner : Sallust , Heidelberg 1982
• Maria H. Dettenhofer : On the political role of aristocrats between republic and principate . In: Latomus 51 (1992), pp. 775-795.
• Anja Schweers: Images of women and men in ancient Rome , in: Der Altsprachliche Studium 42/2 (1999), pp. 2-14
• Bettina Eva Stumpp: Prostitution in Roman Antiquity , Berlin 2001
• Ronald Syme : Sallust , Darmstadt 1975
• Jürgen von Ungern-Sternberg : The procedure against the Catilinarians or: The avoided process , in: Great processes of Roman antiquity , ed. by Ulrich Manthe and Jürgen von Ungern-Sternberg, Munich 1997, pp. 85-99