in his candidature for
the Consulship of the next year, B.C. 65. P. Sulla and Autronius were
elected--that Sulla to whose subsequent defence I have just referred in
this note--but were ejected on the score of bribery, and two others,
Torquatus and Cotta, were elected in their place. In this way three men
standing on high before their countrymen--one having been debarred from
standing for the Consulship, and the other two having been robbed of
their prize even when it was within their grasp--not unnaturally became
traitors at heart. Almost as naturally they came together and conspired.
Why should they have been selected as victims, having only done that
which every aristocrat did as a matter of course in following out his
recognized profession in living upon the subject nations? Their conduct
had probably been the same as that of others, or if more glaring, only
so much so as is always the case with vices as they become more common.
However, the three men fell, and became the centre of a plot which is
known as the first Catiline conspiracy.

The reader must bear in mind that I am now telling the story of
Catiline, and going back to a period of two years before Cicero's
Consulship, which was B.C. 63. How during that year Cicero successfully
defended Murena when Cato endeavored to rob him of his coming
Consulship, has been already told. It may be that Murena's hands were no
cleaner than those of Sulla and Autronius, and that they lacked only the
consular authority and forensic eloquence of the advocate who defended
Murena. At this time, when the two appointed Consuls were rejected,
Cicero had hardly as yet taken any part in public politics. He had been
Quaestor, AEdile, and Praetor, filling those administrative offices to the
best of his ability. He had, he says, hardly heard of the first
conspiracy.[189] That what he says is true, is, I think, proved by the
absence of all allusion to it in his early letters, or in the speeches
or fragments of speeches that are extant. But that there was such a
conspiracy we cannot doubt, nor that the three men named, Catiline,
Sulla, and Autronius, were leaders in it. What would interest us, if
only we could have the truth, is whether Caesar and Crassus were joined
in it.

It is necessary again to consider the condition of the Republic. To us a
conspiracy to subvert the government under which the conspirer lives
seems either a very terrible remedy for great evils, or an attempt to do
e