ce still densely crowded by men to the prison
in which criminals condemned to death were wont to be kept.
It was a subterranean vault, twelve feet deep, at the foot
of the Capitol, which formerly had served as a well-house.
The consul himself conducted Lentulus, and praetors the others,
all attended by strong guards; but the attempt at rescue,
which had been expected, did not take place. No one knew whether
the prisoners were being conveyed to a secure place of custody
or to the scene of execution. At the door of the prison they
were handed over to the -tresviri- who conducted the executions,
and were strangled in the subterranean vault by torchlight. The consul
had waited before the door till the executions were accomplished,
and then with his loud well-known voice proclaimed over the Forum
to the multitude waiting in silence, "They are dead." Till far
on in the night the crowds moved through the streets and exultingly
saluted the consul, to whom they believed that they owed
the security of their houses and their property. The senate ordered
public festivals of gratitude, and the first men of the nobility,
Marcus Cato and Quintus Catulus, saluted the author of the sentence
of death with the name--now heard for the first time--of a "father
of his fatherland."

But it was a dreadful deed, and all the more dreadful that it
appeared to a whole people great and praiseworthy. Never perhaps
has a commonwealth more lamentably declared itself bankrupt,
than did Rome through this resolution--adopted in cold blood
by the majority of the government and approved by public opinion--
to put to death in all haste a few political prisoners, who were
no doubt culpable according to the laws, but had not forfeited life;
because, forsooth, the security of the prisons was not to be
trusted, and there was no sufficient police. It was the humorous
trait seldom wanting to a historical tragedy, that this act
of the most brutal tyranny had to be carried out by the most unstable
and timid of all Roman statesmen, and that the "first democratic
consul" was selected to destroy the palladium of the ancient
freedom of the Roman commonwealth, the right of -provocatio-.

Suppression of the Etruscan Insurrection

After the conspiracy had been thus stifled in the capital
even before it came to an outbreak, there remained the task of putting
an end to the insurrection in Etruria. The army amounting to about
2000 men, which Catilina found on hi