there had been no popular vote as to the execution of Lentulus and
the other conspirators, who had been taken red-handed in Rome in the
affair of Catiline. Their death had been decreed by the Senate, and the
decree of the Senate had been carried out by Cicero; but no decree of
the Senate had the power of a law. In spite of that decree the old law
was in force; and no appeal to the people had been allowed to Lentulus.
But there had grown up in the constitution a practice which had been
supposed to override the Valerian and Porcian laws. In certain
emergencies the Senate would call upon the Consuls to see that the
Republic should suffer no injury, and it had been held that at such
moments the Consuls were invested with an authority above all law.
Cicero had been thus strengthened when, as Consul, he had struggled with
Catiline; but it was an open question, as Cicero himself very well knew.
In the year of his Consulship--the very year in which Lentulus and the
others had been strangled--he had defended Rabirius, who was then
accused of having killed a citizen thirty years before. Rabirius was
charged with having slaughtered the Tribune Saturninus by consular
authority, the Consuls of the day having been ordered to defend the
Republic, as Cicero had been ordered. Rabirius probably had not killed
Saturninus, nor did any one now care whether he had done so or not. The
trial had been brought about notoriously by the agency of Caesar, who
caused himself to be selected by the Praetor as one of the two judges for
the occasion;[274] and Caesar's object as notoriously was to lessen the
authority of the Senate, and to support the democratic interest. Both
Cicero and Hortensius defended Rabirius, but he was condemned by Caesar,
and, as we are told, himself only escaped by using that appeal to the
people in support of which he had himself been brought to trial. In
this, as in so many of the forensic actions of the day, there had been
an admixture of violence and law. We must, I think, acknowledge that
there was the same leaven of illegality in the proceedings against
Lentulus. It had no doubt been the intention of the constitution that a
Consul, in the heat of an emergency, should use his personal authority
for the protection of the Commonwealth, but it cannot be alleged that
there was such an emergency, when the full Senate had had time to debate
on the fate of the Catiline criminals. Both from Caesar's words as
reported by Sallust, an