“He had about him very many of, I can hardly say the visible tokens, but the adumbrations of the highest qualities.  There was in his character that which tempted him to indulge the worst passions, but also that which spurred him to energy and hard work.  Licentious appetites burnt fiercely within him, but there was also a strong love of active military service.  I believe that there never lived on earth such a monster of inconsistency,—­such a compound of opposite tastes and passions brought into conflict with each other.  Who at one time was a greater favourite with our most illustrious men?  Who was a closer intimate with our very basest?  Who could be more greedy of money than he was?  Who could lavish it more profusely?  There were these marvellous qualities in the man,—­he made friends so universally, he retained them by his obliging ways, he was ready to share what he had with them all, to help them at their need with his money, his influence, his personal exertions—­not stopping short of the most audacious crime, if there was need of it.  He could change his very nature, and rule himself by circumstances, and turn and bend in any direction.  He lived soberly with the serious, he was a boon companion with the gay; grave with the elders, merry with the young; reckless among the desperate, profligate with the depraved.  With a nature so complex and many-sided, he not only collected round him wicked and desperate characters from all quarters of the world, but he also attracted many brave and good men by his simulation of virtue.  It would have been impossible for him to have organised that atrocious attack upon the Commonwealth, unless that fierce outgrowth of depraved passions had rested on some under-stratum of agreeable qualities and powers of endurance”.

Born in the same year with Cicero, his unsuccessful rival for the consulship, and hating him with the implacable hatred with which a bad, ambitious, and able man hates an opponent who is his superior in ability and popularity as well as character, Catiline seems to have felt, as his revolutionary plot ripened, that between the new consul and himself the fates of Rome must choose.  He had gathered round him a band of profligate young nobles, deep in debt like himself, and of needy and unscrupulous adventurers of all classes.  He had partisans who were collecting and drilling troops for him in several parts of Italy.  The programme was assassination, abolition of debts, confiscation of property:  so little of novelty is there in revolutionary principles.  The first plan had been to murder the consuls of the year before, and seize the government.  It had failed through his own impatience.  He now hired assassins against Cicero, choosing the opportunity of the election of the incoming consuls, which always took place some time before their entrance on office.  But the plot was discovered, and the election was put off.  When it did take place, Cicero appeared in the meeting, wearing somewhat