ostentatiously a corslet of bright steel, to show that he knew his danger; and Catiline’s partisans found the place of meeting already occupied by a strong force of the younger citizens of the middle class, who had armed themselves for the consul’s protection.  The election passed off quietly, and Catiline was again rejected.  A second time he tried assassination, and it failed—­so watchful and well informed was the intended victim.  And now Cicero, perhaps, was roused to a consciousness that one or other must fall; for in the unusually determined measures which he took in the suppression of the conspiracy, the mixture of personal alarm with patriotic indignation is very perceptible.  By a fortunate chance, the whole plan of the conspirators was betrayed.  Rebel camps had been formed not only in Italy, but in Spain and Mauritania:  Rome was to be set on fire, the slaves to be armed, criminals let loose, the friends of order to be put out of the way.  The consul called a meeting of the senate in the temple of Jupiter Stator, a strong position on the Palatine Hill, and denounced the plot in all its details, naming even the very day fixed for the outbreak.  The arch-conspirator had the audacity to be present, and Cicero addressed him personally in the eloquent invective which has come to us as his “First Oration against Catiline”.  His object was to drive his enemy from the city to the camp of his partisans, and thus to bring matters at once to a crisis for which he now felt himself prepared.  This daily state of public insecurity and personal danger had lasted too long, he said: 

“Therefore, let these conspirators at once take their side; let them separate themselves from honest citizens, and gather themselves together somewhere else; let them put a wall between us, as I have often said.  Let us have them no longer thus plotting the assassination of a consul in his own house, overawing our courts of justice with armed bands, besieging the senate-house with drawn swords, collecting their incendiary stores to burn our city.  Let us at last be able to read plainly in every Roman’s face whether he be loyal to his country or no.  I may promise you this, gentlemen of the Senate—­there shall be no lack of diligence on the part of your consuls; there will be, I trust, no lack of dignity and firmness on your own, of spirit amongst the Roman knights, of unanimity amongst all honest men, but that when Catiline has once gone from us, everything will be not only discovered and brought into the light of day, but also crushed,—­ay, and punished.  Under such auspices, I bid you, Catiline. go forth to wage your impious and unhallowed war.—­go, to the salvation of the state, to your own overthrow and destruction, to the ruin of all who have joined you in your great wickedness and treason.  And thou, great Jupiter, whose worship Romulus founded here coeval with our city;—­whom we call truly the ’Stay’[1] of our capital and our empire; thou wilt protect thine own altars and the temples of thy kindred gods, the walls and roof-trees of our homes, the lives and fortunes of our citizens, from yon man and his accomplices.  These enemies of all good men, invaders of their country, plunderers of Italy, linked together in a mutual bond of crime and an alliance of villany, thou wilt surely, visit with an everlasting punishment, living and dead’”.