literature, Catiline's figure became often used as a byword for "villainy". Politicians quickly distanced themselves from his failed revolt; others tried to discredit rivals by linking them to Catiline's conspiracy after the fact. Cicero, who claimed for himself the credit of saving the state from Catiline's revolt, later praised Catiline's personal qualities in a defence speech for someone accused of being a co-conspirator: Cicero paints Catiline as a good motivator, effective general, sociable, and strong as reasons for why so many men were willing to associate with him (for Cicero's client, however, only as a non-conspiring friend). The history of Sallust, written around the time of the Second Triumvirate, painted Catiline as a thoroughgoing disrepute who had from an early time wanted to destroy his own country and symbolised the moral decline that Sallust identified as the cause of the republic's collapse: Livy used the Catilinarian conspiracy as a template to fill in shaky portions of early Roman history. For example, the conspiracy of one Marcus Manlius, who rose up against the elite with the support of poor plebs, both gives a speech patterned on Cicero's First Catilinarian and takes actions patterned on the real Catiline's. Virgil, in the Aeneid (written during the reign of Augustus), depicts Catiline as being tortured in the underworld by the Furies. Into the imperial period, Catiline's name was used as a derogatory nickname of unpopular ruling emperors. However, his reputation as an advocate for the dispossessed rural plebs seemed to carry to some degree in rural parts of northern Italy at least until the mediaeval period. In Tuscany, a mediaeval tradition had Catiline survive the battle and live out his life as a local hero; another version gives him a son, Uberto, who eventually spawns the Uberti dynasty in Florence. While history has often viewed Catiline through the lenses of his enemies – especially in the vein of Cicero's four Catilinarians – some modern historians have reassessed Catiline. The first major attempt was Edward Spencer Beesly in 1878, who argued against the then-prevailing view that Catiline was "a demon breathing murder, rapine, and conflagration, with bloodshot eyes and pallid face, luring on weak and depraved young men to the damnation prepared for himself". Beesly's defences have been followed more recently by others, such as and . Waters' admittedly "largely hypothetical" narrative depicts the Catilinarian conspiracy largely as a Ciceronean fiction framing Catiline and the