Enemy Criminal Law. A Study of its Origins in Catiline's Conspiracy

Abstract

Cicero reveals himself as homo faber, but in malam partem, when he stages a sort of summary trial, enlisting the Senate in the nocturnal corvée of the dramatic 5th of December 63 BC, in order to impose upon the Catilinarians the supreme penalty of death by strangulation. Thus is punished a conduct that is merely incipient. Caesar dissents, objecting to a disproportionate condemnation that would prove collective and undifferentiated, as in the case of the Athenian generals at Arginusae (406 BC). The pronouncement ex abrupto constitutes an act of deprivation, in that it strips the Conspirators of the fundamental provocatio ad populum. The Author traces, in the brutality of the thanatological event consummated in the Mamertine Prison, the roots of the so-called criminal law of the enemy, invoking the authoritative judgment of Franco Cordero, who speaks of “Catilinarians unlawfully put to death”.