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After the illegal condemnation of the adherents of Catilina, after the unparalleled acts of violence against the tribune of the people Metellus, Pompeius might wage war at once as defender of the two palladia of Roman public freedom the right of appeal and the inviolability of the tribunate of the people against the aristocracy, and as champion of the party of order against the Catilinarian band.
The aristocracy isolated was not formidable; but it had just been rendered evident in the Catilinarian affair that it could certainly still exert some influence, where it was more or less openly supported by the men of material interests and by the adherents of Pompeius.
After the illegal condemnation of the adherents of Catilina, after the unparalleled acts of violence against the tribune of the people Metellus, Pompeius might wage war at once as defender of the two palladia of Roman public freedom the right of appeal and the inviolability of the tribunate of the people against the aristocracy, and as champion of the party of order against the Catilinarian band.
While the course of the events themselves thus testifies that the threads of the Catilinarian plot reached far higher than Lentulus and Catilina, it deserves also to be noticed, that at a much later period, when Caesar had got to the head of the state, he was in the closest alliance with the only Catilinarian still surviving, Publius Sittius the leader of the Mauretanian free bands, and that he modified the law of debt quite in the sense that the proclamations of Manlius demanded.
In the original draft his vacillating mind had leaned more and more decisively towards the Catilinarian conception of his hero, and the book-version of 1783 was accordingly supplied with a motto from Sallust's 'Catiline. The sentence runs: Nam id facinus imprimis ego memorabile existimo, sceleris atque periculi novitate.
Individuals of the most broken reputation, notorious personages like Quintus Hortensius, Gaius Curio, Marcus Antonius, the latter the stepson of the Catilinarian Lentulus who was executed by the orders of Cicero were the most prominent actors in it; the highest posts of trust were bestowed on men who had long ceased even to reckon up their debts; people saw men who held office under Caesar not merely keeping dancing-girls which was done by others also but appearing publicly in company with them.
Even apart from the fact that such neutral burgesses were chiefly to be sought outside of Rome, and thus were not directly affected by the rioting in the capital, those minds which could be at all influenced by such motives had been already by their former experiences, and especially by the Catilinarian conspiracy, thoroughly converted to the principle of authority; but those that were really alarmed were affected far more emphatically by a dread of the gigantic crisis inseparable from an overthrow of the constitution, than by dread of the mere continuance of the at bottom withal very superficial anarchy in the capital.
While the course of the events themselves thus testifies that the threads of the Catilinarian plot reached far higher than Lentulus and Catilina, it deserves also to be noticed, that at a much later period, when Caesar had got to the head of the state, he was in the closest alliance with the only Catilinarian still surviving, Publius Sittius the leader of the Mauretanian free bands, and that he modified the law of debt quite in the sense that the proclamations of Manlius demanded.
He was brought to the front in politics, as Sallust avers, by his merit, in spite of his birth and social position, when the mortal peril of the Catilinarian conspiracy was gathering round the state, and necessity called for the man, and not the game-preserver. His conduct in that hour of supreme peril is ridiculously overpraised by himself.
We have, therefore, nothing exactly contemporaneous to help us to form a judgment on the great event which coloured so much of his after life, the suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy and the execution of the conspirators, in the last month of his consulship.
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