CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Cicero, Antonius, Caesar, Crassus, Pompey, and Clodius sat in Cicero’s cold library, long after midnight. At his brother’s side stood the soldier, Quintus, whom Cicero had hastily summoned. Cicero had wrapped a crimson wool gown over his night clothing, a plain gown and strapped only with leather. His feet were covered by fur-lined boots. He looked at his visitors for a long time, in total silence, after Antonius had finished speaking, and after Caesar and Crassus had made their own ominous comments.

Antonius, the patrician, loved Cicero for all he was a “new man” of no distinguished family, except for the Helvii on his mother’s side—Cicero of the breed held in contempt by the aristocrats, the breed of merchants, manufacturers, professional men, shopkeepers, stockbrokers and traders, and rich farmers. Antonius greatly admired Cicero, the famous lawyer and orator and now Consul of Rome, but he had rarely invited Cicero to his house. Did not one owe something to one’s name? But now, as the distracted Antonius studied Cicero he had to admit to himself, with some vague wonder, that Cicero had a patrician’s nobility and aloofness. The thick and waving brown hair was heavily interwoven with gray; the slender face was locked and grim; the thin long hands lay clasped almost lightly on his knee. The changeful eyes studied one man after another, slowly, and then came to rest on Antonius. But still he did not speak. He was thinking, and his thoughts were bitter. His eyes began to glow with a cold yellow. At last he spoke, and only to Antonius:

“I am Consul of Rome, Antonius, and you are my colleague. We are considered the mightiest men of our country. We are wrong! Crassus and Caesar are the mightiest, the most powerful. Beside them we are infants in the presence of ruthless Titans! You have spoken in fear and horror of Catilina. Your fear and horror are justified. But, who made Catilina such a terrible threat against Rome? These men who sit beside you now.”

Now he looked at Caesar and said, “The tiger who roamed your garden is now within your house, Julius.” Again he turned to Antonius, who was bewildered and shocked at his words. “Antonius, these men, our friends as they claim, were always in a conspiracy against our country in the pursuit of their private power. Look upon their faces! They are dark with scorn and anger against me. But they know I speak the truth. They did not come with you tonight because they fear for their country, or for me. They came because they now fear for themselves; the madman they encouraged for their own purposes is about to destroy them as well as the government, the city, and ourselves. They thought him on their chain; he has broken free; he ranges and roams the streets and his scarlet shadow falls on every wall.

“Iniquitous and immoral men!” Cicero’s eyes blazed upon the others. “To this you have brought Rome, that Catilina with his malefactors, gladiators, perverts and mobs, freedmen, criminals, thieves, murderers, mercenaries and malcontents is now stronger than you! Rome never faced so desperate an hour before. I have called Catilina a traitor. But you are traitors also, to all that established our nation. You are traitors to principle and honor, to good will and valor, to courage and virtue. If Catilina now stands before the bar of Rome as her enemy, you stand with him also.”

Antonius regarded him with fresh horror and affright. “Poor Antonius,” said Cicero. “It may be that your fortitude has saved Rome—for a little while. No nation ever withdrew fully from this abyss, no, not in all the history of the world.”

He looked at Pompey, who had saved his life before, and saw the broad and quiet face, and for an instant his own softened. Then it darkened again. “Have you nothing to say, you, mighty Crassus, dictator of Rome, you, powerful Caesar, you, plotting Clodius?”

“We listen to you because we are patient and tolerant, Marcus,” said Julius, who was now smiling faintly. “You were always intemperate about ‘conspiracies.’ I say again that we know nothing about ‘conspiracies’ except the one revealed to us by Antonius and one we only dimly suspected existed but which we did not credit as a true menace. But we discounted the power of Catilina, whom we have not seen for a long time, and whom we despise as you despise him. Let us be done with foolish recriminations and accusations. We must work together to halt Catilina.”

“Liar,” said Cicero. “You were always a liar, Julius.”

“Your personal opinions, noble Cicero, concerning Caesar are irrelevant,” said Crassus. “I, dictator of Rome, came to you tonight—and I am young no longer—because you are Consul of Rome, and all Rome is in danger. I will not ennoble your accusations by disputing with you. Catilina is about to march on Rome with his monstrous mobs; he will burn the city out of his perversity and hatred for all that lives. Let us consider together. We dare not seize him publicly. He will call upon his creatures to fall upon Rome in total destruction. What, then, shall we do?”

Cicero went to his table and began to write quickly with his quill pen. He then sanded the ink, melted wax at the tall candle on the table, then applied his seal on the paper. He called his silent but formidable brother with his eyes and gave the paper to Quintus. “Search Catilina out within the next hours, Quintus,” he said. “I have summoned him to appear before me and the Senate immediately, to answer charges of treason against Rome.”

Julius smiled, and so did Crassus and Clodius. Pompey studied the floor. Antonius said, “You do not fear him, Marcus?”

“No,” said Cicero. “I never feared him. I never feared any of these. I suspected them greatly these past few years, but I had no proof but only surmise and my own intuition. Caesar, Pontifex Maximus and Magnus! Crassus, dictator of Rome, and the richest and most powerful man in the country! And others, too many others. Yes, I knew for what they lusted. They will not be turned aside, even now. They wish only to have destroyed their fellow conspirator, who has slipped from their control.” He bowed to them ironically from his chair, and his eyes sparkled with disgust. “Masters of Rome, we who are about to die detest your treason!”

Cicero had acted shrewdly. He knew that Catilina, who hated and derided him, would laugh at the summons and would appear, as ordered, before the Senate, safe in his fancied power which none would dare provoke into open violence. He would appear, arrogantly, to denounce the “new man,” Cicero, and hold him up to public scorn before the patricians of the Senate, many who were fellow conspirators with him. He, himself, would speak in his musical and languid voice, elegant and puissant, and forever would Cicero be banished by the great laughter which would fall upon him.

Catilina, receiving the summons just before dawn, laughed with delight. His hour had come. Before the sun set Cicero would be in exile, shamed from the city. Catilina had only one regret: He would have no opportunity now to fire Rome and burn it to the ground as he lusted.

So, arraying himself in a scarlet toga trimmed with gold, and wearing a beautiful coat of the whitest and softest of fur, Catilina lay in his litter and ordered his splendid slaves to carry him to the Senate Chamber. He wore a gemmed necklace in the Egyptian manner, and his armlets and wristlets glittered with jewels and his legs were swathed in scarlet and his feet were shod with fur boots, and at his side was buckled the terrible short sword of Rome, for he was a soldier. As always, he resembled a radiant god in his natural splendor of appearance, and in his dignity and pride. He was composed. Only his intensely blue eyes showed the derangement and evil of his soul, for they appeared on fire.

The frosty golden sun had just touched the highest roofs of the turbulent city when Catilina set forth; below all was purple dusk under the arches and the pillars, and the stony streets were dark with melting snow and puddles of water. Catilina had expected a quiet hearing before the Senate, whom he would soon convulse with laughter. Therefore, he had requested none of his intimates to be present. General Manlius was not present, nor any of the sinister leaders who were Catilina’s devoted servants. “By the very paucity of my apparent following Cicero’s denunciations—whatever they may be—will become ridiculous,” Catilina had told them all.

The haste of the summons assured Catilina that only a quorum of Senators would be present, and in that quorum would be many of his secret friends. The people in mass would not be present. It would be very circumspect, except for the aristocratic laughter of those who would listen to Cicero incredulously, and would resent his accusations against a fellow patrician. He, Catilina, would be disdainfully and carelessly surprised that he should be summoned at all—and on what grounds? Catilina knew that through many, many years Cicero had had him watched, waiting for him to stumble, to betray himself. But he had been very careful, or at least his followers had been clever enough not only to recognize Cicero’s spies and so disarm them with an innocent appearance, but to report their movement to their master. There was no way possible that Cicero could know the full ramifications of the plot against Rome. Not for an instant did Catilina suspect Antonius Hybrida, a fellow patrician whom he had approached on the common ground of their heritage, and whom he, Catilina, had convinced should seize power with him the next week on a certain night.

As for Crassus and Caesar and Pompey and Clodius, and their friends, Catilina now had only the most vehement loathing for them, and a tremendous scorn, as pusillanimous men too timid to move in their own behalf, though their middle years were upon them and Crassus was old. To suspect them of betraying him was incredible, and Catilina gave it no thought not even for a moment. He knew they feared him; he believed that they disliked Cicero and hated him, and he had heard them laugh at him often enough. He was well aware that they had secretly supported Cicero, though long before they had promised Catilina their own support. Vacillating, prudent cowards! It would not be long before they would die, at Catilina’s decree, just as Cicero would die. But before then, Cicero must be banished by the laughter of the Senate and by their order, as his continued presence in Rome as Consul would be an embarrassment to the whole nation.

Absorbed in his happy and vengeful and insane thoughts, Catilina heard nothing in the warm snugness of his litter but the excited beating of his heart. Whatever sounds of footsteps or hurrying there were, were sounds and hurrying familiar to his ears, and so he was not disturbed. Then the litter came to an abrupt halt, and did not move again. He waited, and took thought with himself. Should he, after the hearing was concluded, institute a libel suit against Cicero, and thus refresh his own purse? It was a matter to be considered, and Catilina’s excitement grew. Chick-pea! The country bumpkin who still smelled of the manure pits and hay and the sty! I have waited long, thought Catilina, clenching his jeweled fists. But I have not lost the appetite!

Then, all at once, he became aware that the litter had not moved for some time. He impatiently held back the thick woolen curtains of the litter and glanced out. He was stunned with amazement. The Sacred Way was lined with soldiers, shoulder to shoulder, shield to shield, sword to sword, a full legion of them. And behind them rolled a multitude of men, wrapped against the winter wind, strenuous profiles pointed toward the Forum and the Senate. The sound of their passage was like the sound of a river in spring tumult, though it was only the rush of their feet. For some inexplicable reason they were not shouting or jesting or calling or talking as usual. They wound about the gleaming white pillars, and rushed through porticoes, and bounded down vast stairways—pouring into the Forum in a tide of color and voiceless commotion. Catilina glimpsed their flashing eyes, excited and eager. They were like silent wolves on the close steps of the prey, and he saw their suddenly bared teeth vivid and sharp in the rising sun.

He recognized the legion now. It was the legion of Quintus Tullius Cicero, Quintus whose life he had saved many years ago, Quintus, brother of Cicero. They wore crimson tunics and crimson leggings and brown leather harness and crimson cloaks, and their shining helmets were crowned with crimson crests. He saw their banners held high, the banners of their legion. He saw their faces and their lictors and their drawn swords. They stood immobile, staring before them, apparently seeing nothing, unaware of the huge multitudes pouring behind them.

Catilina’s hand let the curtain of his litter fall. He lay back on the cushions. For the first time he was full of fear and disquiet and foreboding. How had Quintus assembled his legion in so short a space? And, why were the countless crowds pouring into the Forum? Who had summoned them, even with the thousand tongues of Rome? I am betrayed, thought Catilina. The litter began to move again, slowly, hesitatingly, because of the tides of people flowing across its path at intersections. The crowded hills caught golden fire under the sun, and the purple darkness rose in mist from the streets and turned white in the light. And still the running footsteps became more pressing and more imminent to the man in the closed litter. Catilina tried to think, but his thoughts became disordered and chaotic. Then the litter halted, the curtains were held aside by a slave and Catilina saw that he had reached the steps of the Senate, which were also lined with soldiers. Beyond them the Forum was crowded to the very walls, and more and more people were arriving constantly, to push for space, and to see.

Catilina alighted from his litter and looked about him. He saw the soldiers and the people. He saw the façades of pale temples and fora and buildings and the Senate. He saw, above it all, the bristling hills of Rome and above them, the blue and silvery sky of winter. It took but an instant to see it. It took but an instant to observe that on his appearance not a single hail greeted him, not an upraised hand. He looked into thousands of impassive eyes, and they looked back at him and not a sound escaped one mouth. It was like gazing at statues of soldiers and men, stricken into colorful stone as at the display of a Gorgon’s head. He alone moved in a great and stupendous silence, so that he heard the slap of his own boots on the marble steps of the Senate Chamber. His knees began to tremble as he mounted, but he held his head high and his face expressed nothing but impersonal contempt and hauteur. He entered the Senate Chamber, and saw that it was crowded and not sparsely inhabited, as he had believed it would be. The Senators were all there, in their white and their scarlet, and they watched the entry of Catilina as impassively as the soldiers and the crowds had watched without. The only movement was his own, and the lazy rising of incense before the altars. He alone had life in a forest of seated statues.

Then, in the center of the mosaic floor as he stood there, Catilina saw Cicero in the Consul’s chair, and slightly below him sat Antonius Hybrida with a desperate and averted face. He had not expected Antonius. And he had not expected Caesar and Crassus and Pompey and Clodius. Their faces, too, were averted. None looked at Catilina but Cicero, robed in his pure white wool toga and with white shoes, and the eyes of the two men met as once their swords had met. For just a second, seeing those coldly fierce eyes upon him, Catilina qualied. Then, his pride reasserting itself, he pondered on the presence of Crassus and Caesar and their friends and on the strange way in which Antonius avoided looking upon him.

Cicero sat in silence, revolted, full of hatred, devoid of exultation, and feeling only wrath and disgust and the most powerful indignation he had ever experienced. Here was the most malignant traitor of Rome, and the murderer of Livia, the murderer of his own son, the madman who had dared to dream of being king, the patrician who was lower than the most despicable of gutter dogs, the soldier who had defamed the arms of his country, who had dishonored its banners, the aristocrat whom aristocrats now despised, the destroyer whom he, Cicero, must destroy if Rome were to live. Fire took Cicero’s heart, and a bitter fury shook him. But none could guess it, so still he was, so apparently without passion, so objective. Not even his eyes showed what he felt, as he looked on his old enemy. For this day we have both waited many years, he thought, and this day will show whether Romans are still Romans or if they are slaves forever. He had not slept at all during the past night; he had been too busy summoning and writing and thinking of what he must say. He had been too busy praying for his country. Therefore his eyes were sunken and shadowed, but the strength and power of them, changing from blue to amber from second to second, were enhanced by his very exhaustion.

Then his voice rang out like a trumpet in the awful quiet of the chamber, and Catilina heard its compellingly special note for the first time:

“Lucius Sergius Catilina! You have been summoned before this august body, and before me, Consul of Rome, and before C. Antonius Hybrida, my colleague, and before Licinius Crassus, dictator of Rome, and before Julius Caesar, Pontifex Maximus and Magnus, and Praetor, and before Pompey the Magnus, and before the face of Rome, itself, to answer the charge of treason and conspiracy against your country!

“Your crimes and your plots and your companions are known. If you have an advocate, call him forth.”

Catilina had listened intently. He had not known how powerful an instrument this Cicero had possessed in his voice, and how the sound of it struck the walls of the chamber and echoed back from it in thunder. He felt, rather than saw, the press of the people outside the open Senate doors, and it was like an enormous weight against his back. He felt, in fact, the weight of the city he had for so long plotted to destroy to satisfy his own hatreds and lusts. He felt alone as he had not been alone all the days of his life. But he smiled coldly and repudiatingly into the face of Cicero, as one smiles at an insolent inferior who had dared to speak to his lord and master, and contempt shimmered in his blue eyes. He bowed mockingly.

“I have no advocate, Cicero, for I need none. I have committed no crime and know of no conspiracies. I am no traitor. Produce, therefore, your witnesses before this august body which I reverence.”

His manner was elegant and amused and aristocratically disdainful. He stood there in his white fur coat and his crimson and gold garments and his jewels. He looked quickly at the faces of his friends among the Senate. Their faces were inscrutable. He looked at Quintus, his comrade-in-arms, armored and helmeted, who stood at Cicero’s right hand, Quintus whose life he had saved. The burly soldier gazed at him, unmoved, like an image of himself. Sunlight poured through the doors and lay in a pool at Catilina’s feet, and the jewels on his boots flashed in rainbows. Now from the multitudes outside came the dimmest but most awful of sounds, a primal muttering, a vast murmur as if arising from a congregation of aroused beasts. All within heard it; they lifted their faces in instinctive uneasiness and appeared to sniff the air with alarm.

But Catilina was not alarmed nor uneasy now. He, too, had heard that primordial and wordless sound, and he thought, Animals! Swine! Slaves! He was suddenly excited again, and aroused. He thought of the day which was coming for him, when he should have this rabble at the tip of his sword, and this Senate would prostrate itself before him and kiss his feet. He thought of the day, coming soon! when this Cicero, and yes, this Crassus and Caesar, would lie dead in their own blood before him, and he would touch their faces with his boot and roll them from him in repugnance. For he knew now who were his betrayers.

Disordered and demented though the thoughts of Catilina were, he could yet search, again, the faces of his secret friends in the Senate. When he met their eyes with his own some returned the blue stare gloomily, or shifted their gaze, and some smiled in disquiet. But, he thought, with rising exultation, they are my fellow patricians! Crassus and Caesar and Clodius and Antonius were patricians also; they had betrayed him to this bumbling Cicero, for their own reasons and because they feared him or envied him. But the patricians in the Senate were another matter entirely. They would, at the last, not permit the ruin of one of their own, for in his fall they would feel themselves fallen also.

Cicero watched the eloquent and direful face before him and knew all the ghastly thoughts that raced like lightning through the blazing eyes. He said to himself: He, not I, is the future of Rome. My day is passing before my vision, but his is just dawning, the day of power in the hands of the furies, the centaurs, the oppressors, the Pan-stricken, the bloodthirsty and overweening and frightful, the tyrants and the unutterably corrupt and deathly. Nevertheless, if only for a little I must delay that day, and write on the walls of Rome the warning for future and as yet unknown nations to read, lest they fall into the very same pit.

Cicero looked at Caesar and Crassus and their friends. He had thought of calling them as witnesses against this appalling criminal. But they would protect Catilina for fear of being exposed, themselves. They would answer evasively and would look with communicating eyes at the Senators, and all would be lost. At the end they would not abandon a fellow patrician, detestable though they found him. If he wished their support he must not betray them.

He said to Catilina sternly, “This is not a trial by the Senate, or by me. This is an investigation into your activities against the peace and freedom of Rome, against your manifest treason.”

Catilina, who had been watching Cicero with the perceptiveness of insanity, understood. He smiled his dark and beautiful smile. “The laws of Rome demand that an accused man be confronted by witnesses. The laws of Rome give me the right not to incriminate myself and to refuse to answer, even during this alleged investigation.” He turned and surveyed the Senate again. “As I am not under arrest, and charged only with vague crimes whose existence I repudiate, there is nothing to hinder me from leaving this Chamber. Lords, I will remain out of deference to your presence and not by overt restraint.

“I decry the methods of this Cicero, Consul of Rome, who seeks to intimidate and frighten me with loose charges and without witnesses. But I bow to his office if not to the man.”*

A sense of sick frustration came to Cicero, and he pondered. But he said in his great voice, “You will deny the truth of what all Rome knows, and ask for witnesses whom I will not produce—though I have them—because of the danger in which they, themselves, stand. For many years all Rome has felt you in the dark underworld. All the felons and the fools and the dupes and the disaffected and the ambitious of Rome are your followers, and you have lived with them in the cellars and sewers of our nation and conspired with them how to overthrow all that is Rome. You have conspired my murder with them, for a night in the next week, that you may produce chaos and alarm in the city and so seize power to plunder and fire and subjugate and rule in your total madness. Do you deny this?”

Catilina turned the ferocity of his gaze upon Antonius. Now he too pondered. He saw the misery and suffering upon the face of Cicero’s colleague. He, alone, might testify against Catilina for he had no crimes which might be revealed to the open sight of Rome. So Catilina said, “I deny this. I do not ask for a witness, for the allegation is absurd.” He smiled languidly.

“Deny if you will, Catilina. You and I and many others know it to be the truth.”

Those crowding at the doors of the Senate heard him, and the words ran backward through the multitude like a current in a river.

Then Cicero raised his voice to its full majesting and compelling cogency:

“How long, Catilina, will you carry your abuse of our forbearance? How much longer will your reckless temper baffle our restraint? What bounds will you set to this display of your uncontrolled audacity? Have you not been impressed by the nightly guards upon the Palatine, by the watching of the city by sentinels? Are you not affected by the alarm of the people, by the rallying of all loyal citizens, by the convening of this Senate in this safely guarded spot, by the looks and expressions of all assembled here? Do you not perceive that your designs are exposed? Do you not see that your conspiracy is even now fully known and detected by all who are here assembled? What you did last night and the night before, where you were and whom you summoned, and what plans you laid: do you suppose there is one here who does not know? Alas, what degenerate days are these! The Senate is well aware of the facts, the Consul can perceive them all. But the criminal still lives! Lives? Yes, lives; and even comes down arrogantly to this Senate, takes part in these public deliberations, and marks down with ominous glances every single one of us for massacre! And we”—and now Cicero turned his scornfully flashing eyes upon the Senate—“such is our bravery, think we are doing our duty to our country if we merely keep ourselves out of Catilina’s words and bloody deeds!

“No, Catilina, long before this you should yourself have been led by the Consul’s orders to execution, and on your own head should have been brought down the destruction which you are now devising for us!”

Catilina had listened to this with arched black brows and an amused and negligent smile. He glanced at the Senate with humor. “What a splendid voice our Cicero, our Chickpea possesses! I am almost convinced, myself, that I am guilty of these vague accusations! I still deplore his methods, lords, and his incontinence of speech, but as a patrician I endure them with contempt.”

The Senators peeped at each other furtively. They wanted to smile with Catilina. But what had been revealed to them in the night, and what they knew themselves, had terrified them. Moreover, the mutterings of the multitude, which had been listening with the utmost attention to Cicero, now rose in the winter air outside the Chamber with the sound of a most vehement torrent of anger. Now one could hear isolated but awful shouts: “Death to Catilina, the traitor!”

Cicero, as if Catilina had not spoken at all, then resumed his first oration against him, pointing out to the Senate that precedent existed for interrogation of suspected criminals and traitors without actual and written accusations and witnesses. The Senate listened without a movement, and with concentrated intensity. “This is an inquiry and an exposure, and not a trial of Catilina, lords. We have passed resolutions of the Senate against such as Catilina, but they remain unpublished documents. They are still a sword in the sheath. They are resolutions, Catilina, which rightly understood require your immediate execution. Yet, you live! You live, not to abandon but to add strength to your effrontery.” Cicero hesitated, and his pale and slender face became dark with despair and increasing bitterness.

He said to the Senate, “I desire at a moment so critical to the State not to appear careless, but I am even now convicting myself of conduct which is both remiss and wicked, in not demanding immediately that Catilina be seized and executed at once. Even in Italy now a base of operations against the Roman people has been established among the hill passes of Etruria. The number of our foes is increasing day by day. But the leader who directs these foes we see within the walls of Rome, and yes! even within this Senate, plotting every day some fresh device for bringing eternal ruin upon our country!”

A deep murmur rose from the Senate, and the mingled white and scarlet of their robes stirred in agitation. Catilina smiled, then pursed his lips as if restraining an irrepressible amusement.

Cicero lifted his hand and pointed it implacably at Catilina, and at that gesture all became silent and still.

“If then at last, Catilina, I order your arrest and your execution, both of which are within my power, I shall presumably have more reason to fear that all loyal citizens will declare my action too tardy than that a single person will pronounce it too harsh. But this particular step”—and now Cicero gave Crassus and his friends an embittered glare of wrath—“which ought to have been taken long ago, I have certain reasons for not being induced to take at present. You will perish in the end, Catilina, but not until it is certain there will be no one in Rome so shameless, so desperate, so exactly the counterpart of yourself, as not to admit the justice of your execution. Just so long as there is a single man who dares to defend you”—and Cicero again directed his gaze at Crassus and company—“you will live! But you will live as you live now, held at bay by the stanch defenders whom I have stationed everywhere to prevent any possibility of your assailing the State. Many eyes and many ears, moreover, though you perceive them not, will be vigilant as they have been vigilant heretofore, and will keep watch over all your actions.

“For what are you waiting now, Catilina, if the shades of night can no longer veil your abominable conferences, and if the walls of your private house can no longer contain the phrases of your fellow conspirators? What if everything is being exposed to the light and breaking out of concealment? Abandon your design and sword! You are hemmed in on all sides; clearer than daylight to us are all your plans; and you may proceed to review them.

“All is known. My watchfulness is much more persevering than your efforts to ruin the State. And now I assert before this august body of the Senate of Rome that on the night before last you went to the Scythemakers’ Street—I will make no mystery of it—you went to the house of M. Laeca, and there you met several of your accomplices in your mad and insane and criminal adventure. Do you dare to deny it?”

Catilina, for the first time, was visibly struck. His handsome face paled and tightened. He looked at the Senators whom he knew well, one by one. Which had betrayed him?

Cicero laughed wearily. “What is the meaning of your silence? I will prove my assertions if you deny them. Speak!”

Dogs! thought Catilina with dazed fury. What pressure did this Chick-pea exert on them that they betrayed me, these cowards who plotted with me? He dared not deny. There would be some among these Senators who would rise with pretended bravery and assert that they had merely been spying upon him for the sake of Rome, and would utter their own truthful accusations. So Catilina controlled himself. He fought for control as a serpent fights to coil himself, and it was visible.

“Yes,” said Cicero, in a most terrible voice that reached far out into the Forum, “I see here there are present in the Senate itself certain of those who met you there! Merciful gods! Where are we? In what country, in what city are we dwelling? What is the government under which we live? There are here, here among our fellow Senators, lords”—and Cicero’s voice soared like an eagle to the roof of the chamber and sounded outside—“in this deliberative assembly, the most august, the most important in the world, men who are meditating the destruction of us all! The total ruin of this city and in fact of the civilized world! These persons I see before me now and”—he fixed his eyes on the Senate with wrath and burning detestation—“I ask them their opinions on affairs of State daily, and I do not even wound them by a single harsh expression, men who ought to have been put to death with you, Catilina, by the sword!”

Now, thought Caesar, he has destroyed everything. But an instant later the multitudes cried out with a fearful voice from the farthest reaches, “Death to the traitor Senators! Death! Death to the enemies of Rome!”

At this all the Senators, guilty or innocent, trembled violently, for they knew the power of an aroused citizenry. Catilina heard the voice of the people of Rome, the voice he despised and loathed, and he too trembled. He had enormous courage; he did not fear death. He feared only that the people would seize him and dismember him, and he considered that a sacrilege upon his sacred person. He looked at Cicero, and saw the face of the Consul, and knew that he alone had the power to restrain the people, and he saw Cicero’s struggle with himself, that he refrain or that he let loose.

Cicero dropped his hand to his side. His eyes fell to the floor, and his chest heaved as if he were attempting to control his emotions. Stern tears appeared on his cheeks. The muttering of the multitudes was a constant thunder in the background. Finally he looked again on Catilina and the amber glow of his eyes was like flaring embers.

“Quit Rome at last and soon, Catilina. The city gates are open; depart at once. Take with you all your associates, or take as many as you can. Free the city from the infection of your presence. If I give the word, the city will be convulsed, and there will be no more law or order because of the wrath of the people. That I cannot permit, for the sake of Rome. The innocent will perish with the guilty, for when the people are aroused who can preach restraint to them? There is not a man, Catilina, in Rome, outside your band of desperate conspirators, who does not fear you, not a man who does not hate you. For is there any form of personal immorality which has not stained your family life? Is there any scandal to be incurred by private conduct which has not attached itself to your reputation? Is there any evil passion which has not glared from your eyes, any evil deed which has not soiled your hands, any outrageous vice that has not left its mark upon your whole body? Is there any young man, once fascinated by your seductive wiles, whose violence you have not stimulated and whose lust you have not inflamed?

“Is it possible that anything can influence a man like you? Is it possible that a man like you will ever reform? Would indeed that heaven might inspire you with such a thought! But no, Catilina, you are not a man to be withheld from baseness by shame, from peril by alarm, or from recklessness by reason. Return to your criminals! What thrills of excitement you will feel! In what pleasures you will revel when you know that in the whole numbers of your followers you will not hear or see a single honest man! You have now a field for the display of your vaunted power to endure hunger, cold, and deprivation of all the means of life. But you will soon find yourself succumbing!

“When I defeated your efforts to obtain the Consulship I effected this much: I obliged you to attack Rome from without as an exile rather than persecute her from within as Consul, and I made your criminal schemes more correctly to be described as brigandage than as a civil war—which was your object.”

To the Senate now he addressed his severe admonishments, and every face, in innocent indignation against Catilina, or in frightened shame, turned upon him. But Crassus and Caesar exchanged quick smiles. Antonius had long sunk into a lethargy of misery, once he had understood the full conspiracy against his country. Clodius had listened with reluctant admiration. And Pompey, for some reason, had watched only Caesar.

Cicero concluded in a mournful and compelling voice: “Too long already, lords and Senators, have we been environed by the perils of this treasonable conspiracy. But it had chanced that all these crimes, this ancient recklessness and audacity has matured at last and burst in full force upon the year of my Consulship. If then out of the whole gang this single villain only is removed, perhaps we shall think ourselves for a brief period freed from care and alarm. But the real danger will only have been driven under the surface and will continue to infect the veins and vital organs of the State. As men stricken with a dangerous disease, when hot and tossing with fever, often seem at first to be relieved by a draught of cold water, but afterward are much more gravely and severely afflicted, so this disease which has seized the State may be temporarily relieved by the punishment and exile of Catilina! It will return with greater severity!”

Crassus frowned at Caesar, who shrugged lightly. Antonius murmured, “The gods forbid!” Clodius stared at the white and gold ceiling with an air of detachment. Catilina affected a bored and impatient attitude as if Cicero had outrun his patience with his absurdities. But Cicero looked again at Catilina with all his loathing and detestation, and he cried, “With these ominous words of warning, Catilina, to the true preservation of the State, to the mischief and misfortune of yourself and to the destruction of those attached to you by every sort of crime and treason, get you gone to your unholy and abominable and impotent campaign!”*

He stepped down the stairs that led to his chair and the Senate, in deep silence, rose in respect to watch him go. Midway down the aisle he came face to face with Catilina. He halted and confronted his enemy. The silence became intense as all watched the confrontation. Cicero’s pale face became almost incandescent with the fire of his inner hatred and detestation, and he thought, Murderer! Livia shall be avenged, and Fabia, and all the innocent you have assassinated! Destroyer! And Catilina looked back into those eyes and read them. He pretended to repress a smile, and he bowed deeply and with affected humility. Cicero moved on, with Quintus clanging in his armor by his side. The soldiers saluted. Cicero reached the door and heard the thunderous shout he had heard so many times before:

“Hail Cicero, Savior of Rome! Hail to the Hero!”

He lifted his right arm in salute and smiled a little with ironic and sombre humor. He had not saved Rome. He had only delayed the final catastrophe, and this he knew.

That night Catilina left in darkness for Etruria. He was exultant again. None had impeded his passage. He had left the Senate Chamber and while the multitudes had looked at him with fierce and vengeful hatred they had not moved against him. He had bowed to the Senators and had smiled in their faces with contempt; he had bowed even deeper to Crassus and his company. He had laughed silently into the eyes of Antonius, who had betrayed him. No, he had not yet done with Rome, with any of them.

When he reached Manlius he said, “We have not suffered anything, dear friend! I have a plan, a most bold and audacious plan. The Slave Holiday will soon be upon us. We must make haste to strike then, and for all time. The auspices are with us.”

Crassus and Caesar went to the house of Cicero, and he greeted them with cold bitterness. “Do you think it is ended?” he asked them. “It has only begun. Do not felicitate me! You lie in your teeth. I have removed a present danger only for the moment from you. It will return—thanks to your long past conspiracies with Catilina. I salute you, who attempted to use Catilina for your own purposes, and now wish to use me in defense against him. You have won. History will record it. Leave me.”

*Actual speech made to the Senate by Catilina, as reported by Sallust.

*This first oration against Catilina has been greatly condensed.