| Sumario: | Sallust's description of Catiline's profligate retinue at Catiline 14.2-3 contains a well-known textual problem. It is certain that the prodigals at the beginning of the sentence wasted their property by means of three body parts (manu ventre pene). Problematic, however, are the three types of wastrel that immediately precede the body parts, printed in most editions as inpudicus adulter ganeo. Because of the imprecise correspondence between these characters and the body parts, a number of remedies have been proposed, ranging from various emendations that create a more straightforward chiastic structure to complete deletion of inpudicus adulter ganeo as glosses. This paper proposes to shed light on the passage by examining the Greek models that Sallust imitated in constructing it: Theopompus' description of Philip's courtiers in Macedon and a passage of invective by the orator Lycurgus. It is concluded that emendation, rather than radical truncation, is the best remedy.
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