[Footnote 1:  ’Stator’.]

Catiline’s courage did not fail him.  He had been sitting alone—­for, all the other senators had shrunk away from the bench of which he had taken possession.  He rose, and in reply to Cicero, in a forced tone of humility protested his innocence.  He tried also another point.  Was he,—­a man of ancient and noble family;—­to be hastily condemned by his fellow-nobles on the word of this ‘foreigner’, as he contemptuously called Cicero—­this parvenu from Arpinum?  But the appeal failed; his voice was drowned in the cries of ‘traitor’ which arose on all sides, and with threats and curses, vowing that since he was driven to desperation he would involve all Rome in his ruin, he rushed out of the Senate-house.  At dead of night he left the city, and joined the insurgent camp at Faesulae.

When the thunders of Cicero’s eloquence had driven Catiline from the Senate-house, and forced him to join his fellow-traitors, and so put himself in the position of levying open war against the state, it remained to deal with those influential conspirators who had been detected and seized within the city walls.  In three subsequent speeches in the Senate he justified the course he had taken in allowing Catiline to escape, exposed further particulars of the conspiracy, and urged the adoption of strong measures to crush it out within the city.  Even now, not all Cicero’s eloquence, nor all the efforts of our imagination to realise, as men realised it then, the imminence of the public danger, can reconcile the summary process adopted by the consul with our English notions of calm and deliberate justice.  Of the guilt of the men there was no doubt; most of them even admitted it.  But there was no formal trial; and a few hours after a vote of death had been passed upon them in a hesitating Senate, Lentulus and Cethegus, two members of that august body, with three of their companions in guilt, were brought from their separate places of confinement, with some degree of secrecy (as appears from different writers), carried down into the gloomy prison-vaults of the Tullianum,[1] and there quietly strangled, by the sole authority of the consul.  Unquestionably they deserved death, if ever political criminals deserved it:  the lives and liberties of good citizens were in danger; it was necessary to strike deep and strike swiftly at a conspiracy which extended no man knew how widely, and in which men like Julius Caesar and Crassus were strongly suspected of being engaged.  The consuls had been armed with extra-constitutional powers, conveyed by special resolution of the Senate in the comprehensive formula that they “were to look to it that the state suffered no damage”.  Still, without going so far as to call this unexampled proceeding, as the German critic Mommsen does, “an act of the most brutal tyranny”, it is easy to understand how Mr. Forsyth, bringing a calm and dispassionate legal judgment to bear upon the case, finds it impossible to reconcile it with our ideas