It is hard to know. Cicero was convinced and claimed informants all over Italy, but when he gave his first speech against Catiline he had no written evidence linking him to armed groups. Some historians argue Catiline didn't consider violence until Cicero attacked him in the Senate in early November.

Catherine Edwards says many groups were desperate: aristocrats who borrowed to fund election campaigns, veterans who failed at farming, descendants of those proscribed by Sulla, and poor urban migrants in Rome. Massive inequality was conspicuous, and Sallust recognizes the justified resentments behind it. Even the Allobroges envoys, indebted to Roman moneylenders, were initially drawn in.

Letters obtained from the Allobroges implicated five men, including the praetor Lentulus. Without a trial, the Senate debated their fate; Cato the Younger urged death while Julius Caesar proposed imprisonment. As consul, Cicero carried out the decision, marched them to the Mamertine prison on the Capitoline Hill, and witnessed them being strangled.

Fulvia, an aristocratic woman in a relationship with Quintus Curius, a senator expelled in 70, grew suspicious when he became generous. Curius revealed plans for a revolution, and Fulvia passed information to Cicero, including a plan for two men to kill him during a morning greeting. Cicero barred them from his house.

Catiline came from an old patrician family, was prosecuted for extortion after governing Africa and other crimes but always acquitted, and had enormous debts. In 64 he came third behind Cicero and Gaius Antonius despite spending heavily, amid doubts about his reliability, violence and radical plans like abolishing debt. He lost again in 63.

After leaving Rome to join Manlius in Etruria, Catiline faced an army sent under Gaius Antonius, led by his deputy. Catiline's forces were massively outnumbered, yet no one deserted; they fought until nearly all were dead, with Catiline at the forefront, which Sallust presents as an almost redemptive moment.

Cicero was hailed father of the fatherland, but a tribune blocked his end-of-office speech for executing citizens without trial. He spent years defending his actions. In 58 BCE Clodius passed legislation forcing him into exile for 16 months, a devastating experience, using the executions as the excuse.

Cicero deliberately circulated his speeches from his 63 BCE consulship as models for young orators, and a huge corpus of his letters survives, including about 450 to Atticus, letters to friends possibly edited by his freedman Tyro, and letters to his brother Quintus. These reveal his in-the-moment reflections and anxieties.

Yes. Catherine Edwards says he definitely viewed it as his finest achievement. In the Philippics, attacking Mark Antony after Caesar's assassination, he presented Antony as a new Catiline, and he attacked Clodius similarly, constantly reinforcing his image as the saviour of Rome in 63.