r was then joined with Catiline, we must be
guided by our ideas of probability rather than by evidence.[193] As I
have said before, conspiracies had been very rife. To Caesar it was no
doubt becoming manifest that the Republic, with its oligarchs, must
fall. Subsequently it did fall, and he was--I will not say the
conspirator, nor will I judge the question by saying that he was the
traitor; but the man of power who, having the legions of the Republic in
his hands, used them against the Republic. I can well understand that he
should have joined such a conspiracy as this first of Catiline, and then
have backed out of it when he found he could not trust those who were
joined with him.

This conspiracy failed. One man omitted to give a signal at one time,
and another at another. The Senate was to have been slaughtered; the two
Consuls, Cotta and Torquatus, murdered, and the two ex-Consuls, Sulla
and Autronius, replaced. Though all the details seem to have been known
to the Consuls, Catiline was allowed to go free, nor were any steps
taken for the punishment of the conspirators.

The second conspiracy was attempted in the Consulship of Cicero, B.C.
63, two years after the first. Catiline had struggled for the
Consulship, and had failed. Again there would be no province, no
plunder, no power. This interference, as it must have seemed to him,
with his peculiar privileges, had all come from Cicero. Cicero was the
busybody who was attempting to stop the order of things which had, to
his thinking, been specially ordained by all the gods for the sustenance
of one so well born, and at the same time so poor, as himself. There was
a vulgar meddling about it--all coming from the violent virtue of a
Consul whose father had been a nobody at Arpinum--which was well
calculated to drive Catiline into madness. So he went to work and got
together in Rome a body of men as discontented and almost as nobly born
as himself, and in the country north of Rome an army of rebels, and
began his operations with very little secrecy. In all the story the most
remarkable feature is the openness with which many of the details of the
conspiracy were carried on. The existence of the rebel army was known;
it was known that Catiline was the leader; the causes of his
disaffection were known; his comrades in guilt were known When any
special act was intended, such as might be the murder of the Consul or
the firing of the city, secret plots were concocted in abu