Lucius Sergius Catilina ( 108 BC – January 62 BC), known in English as Catiline (), was a Roman politician and soldier. He is best known for instigating the Catilinarian conspiracy, a failed attempt to violently seize control of the Roman state in 63 BC. Born to an ancient patrician family, he joined Sulla during Sulla's civil war and profited from Sulla's purges of his political enemies, becoming a wealthy man. In the early 60s BC, he served as praetor and then as governor of Africa. Upon his return to the city, he attempted to stand for the consulship but was rebuffed; he then was beset with legal challenges over alleged corruption in Africa and his actions during the proscriptions. Acquitted on all charges with the support of influential friends from across Roman politics, he stood for the consulship twice in 64 and 63 BC. Twice defeated in the consular comitia, he concocted a violent plot to take the consulship by force, bringing together poor rural plebs, Sullan veterans, and other senators whose political careers had stalled. The coup attempt, involving armed uprisings in Etruria, was revealed to the consul Cicero in October 63 BC but it took until November before evidence of Catiline's participation emerged. Discovered, he left the city to join his rebellion. In early January 62 BC, at the head of a rebel army near Pistoria (modern day Pistoia), he fought a battle with republican forces; Catiline was killed and his army annihilated. Catiline's name became a byword for doomed and treasonous rebellion in the years after his death. Sallust, in his monograph on the conspiracy, Bellum Catilinae, painted Catiline as a symbol of the republic's moral decline. Early life Family background Catiline was a member of an ancient patrician family, the gens Sergia, who claimed descend from Sergestus, a Trojan companion of Aeneas. While Sallust says he was one of the nobiles, which implies a consular heritage, the specifics are unclear: no member of the gens Sergia had held the consulship since the second consulship of Gnaeus Sergius Fidenas Coxo in 429 BC; a few other Sergii had served in the consular tribunate, but the last was in 380 BC. The exact year of Catiline's birth is unknown. From the offices he held it can be deduced that he was born no later than 108 BC, or 106 BC if patricians enjoyed a right to hold