with
Cicero as its chief--"and the other strong, but without any head,"
meaning the people; "but that as for himself, so well had the people
deserved of him, that as long as he lived a head should be
forth-coming."[196] Then, at that sitting, the Senate decreed, in the
usual formula, "That the Consuls were to take care that the Republic did
not suffer."[197] On the 22d of October, the new Consuls, Silanus and
Murena, were elected. On the 23d, Catiline was regularly accused of
conspiracy by Paulus Lepidus, a young nobleman, in conformity with a law
which had been enacted fifty-five years earlier, "de vi publica," as to
violence applied to the State. Two days afterward it was officially
reported that Manlius--or Mallius, as he seems to have been generally
called--Catiline's lieutenant, had openly taken up arms in Etruria. The
27th had been fixed by the conspirators for the murder of Cicero and the
other Senators. That all this was to be, and was so arranged by
Catiline, had been declared in the Senate by Cicero himself on that day
when Catiline told them of the two bodies and the two heads. Cicero,
with his intelligence, ingenuity, and industry, had learned every
detail. There was one Curius among the conspirators, a fair specimen of
the young Roman nobleman of the day, who told it all to his mistress
Fulvia, and she carried the information to the Consul. It is all
narrated with fair dramatic accuracy in Ben Jonson's dull play, though
he has attributed to Caesar a share in the plot, for doing which he had
no authority. Cicero, on that sitting in the Senate, had been specially
anxious to make Catiline understand that he knew privately every
circumstance of the plot. Throughout the whole conspiracy his object was
not to take Catiline, but to drive him out of Rome. If the people could
be stirred up to kill him in their wrath, that might be well; in that
way there might be an end of all the trouble. But if that did not come
to pass, then it would be best to make the city unbearable to the
conspirators. If they could be driven out, they must either take
themselves to foreign parts and be dispersed, or must else fight and
assuredly be conquered. Cicero himself was never blood-thirsty, but the
necessity was strong upon him of ridding the Republic from these
blood-thirsty men.

The scheme for destroying Cicero and the Senators on the 27th of October
had proved abortive. On the 6th of the next month a meeting was held in
the hous