Covetous of others’ possessions, he [Catiline] was prodigal of his own.

Sallust uses this characterization in his monograph on the Catilinarian conspiracy (63 BCE), written after the fall of the Roman Republic’s old political norms and amid Sallust’s own retrospective moral critique of Roman public life. In sketching Lucius Sergius Catilina’s personality early in the work, Sallust presents him as a man of violent ambition whose private vices mirror the wider corruption of the age. The line belongs to a compact portrait of Catiline’s contradictory traits—restless energy, audacity, and moral disorder—meant to explain both his personal appeal to the disaffected and the danger he posed to the state.

The sentence highlights a paradox Sallust treats as emblematic of destructive ambition: Catiline is greedy for what belongs to others yet wasteful with what he has. The pairing of covetousness and prodigality suggests not ordinary thrift-versus-spending inconsistency, but a deeper moral imbalance—an appetite that cannot be satisfied by possession and therefore seeks domination and plunder. In Sallust’s moralizing historiography, such inner disorder becomes politically consequential: a man who cannot govern his desires will not respect law, property, or civic limits. The trait also helps explain Catiline’s reliance on debt, bribery, and promises of redistribution to recruit followers.