d to civil war.

Attitude of Crassus and Caesar toward the Anarchists

The anarchist plot had thus been suppressed in the capital as in Italy
with bloody violence; people were still reminded of it merely
by the criminal processes which in the Etruscan country towns
and in the capital thinned the ranks of those affiliated to the beaten
party, and by the large accessions to the robber-bands of Italy--
one of which, for instance, formed out of the remains of the armies
of Spartacus and Catilina, was destroyed by a military force in 694
in the territory of Thurii. But it is important to keep in view
that the blow fell by no means merely on the anarchists proper,
who had conspired to set the capital on fire and had fought
at Pistoria, but on the whole democratic party. That this party,
and in particular Crassus and Caesar, had a hand in the game
on the present occasion as well as in the plot of 688,
may be regarded--not in a juristic, but in a historical, point of view--
as an ascertained fact. The circumstance, indeed, that Catulus
and the other heads of the senatorial party accused the leader
of the democrats of complicity in the anarchist plot,
and that the latter as senator spoke and voted against the brutal
judicial murder contemplated by the oligarchy, could only be urged
by partisan sophistry as any valid proof of his participation
in the plans of Catilina. But a series of other facts is of more weight.
According to express and irrefragable testimonies it was especially
Crassus and Caesar that supported the candidature of Catilina
for the consulship. When Caesar in 690 brought the executioners
of Sulla before the commission for murder(20) he allowed the rest
to be condemned, but the most guilty and infamous of all, Catilina,
to be acquitted. In the revelations of the 3rd of December,
it is true, Cicero did not include among the names of the conspirators
of whom he had information those of the two influential men;
but it is notorious that the informers denounced not merely those
against whom subsequently investigation was directed, but "many innocent"
persons besides, whom the consul Cicero thought proper to erase
from the list; and in later years, when he had no reason to disguise
the truth, he expressly named Caesar among the accomplices. An indirect
but very intelligible inculpation is implied also in the circumstance,
that of the four persons arrested on the 3rd of December the two least
dangerous, Statil