XIII.  These were the things worthy of commemoration in the consulship of Crassus.  But his censorship[44] passed over altogether without results, and without any active measures; for he neither revised the senate, nor inspected the equites, nor made a census of the citizens, though he had for his colleague Lutatius Catulus, the mildest of the Romans.  But it is said that Crassus designed a shameful and violent measure, to make Egypt tributary to the Romans, and that Catulus opposed him vigorously, on which a difference arising between them, they voluntarily laid down their office.  In the affair of Catiline,[45] which was a serious matter, and one that came near overthrowing Rome, some suspicion, it is true, attached to Crassus, and a man came forward to name him as implicated in the conspiracy, but nobody believed him.  However, Cicero, in one of his orations, evidently imputed to Crassus and Caesar participation in the plot; but this oration was not published till after the death of both of them.  But in the oration on his consulship, Cicero says that Crassus came to him by night and brought a letter[46] which contained information on the affair of Catiline, as if his object was to establish the truth of the conspiracy.  Now Crassus always hated Cicero for this, but his son stood in the way of his doing Cicero any open injury.  For Publius,[47] who was fond of oratory and of improving himself, was much attached to Cicero, and went so far as to change his dress when Cicero did at the time of his trial, and he induced the other young men to do the same.  At last he prevailed upon his father, and reconciled him to Cicero.

XIV.  When Caesar returned from his province,[48] he made preparations to be a candidate for the consulship; but, observing that Crassus and Pompeius were again at enmity, he did not choose by applying to one of them for his help to have the other for his enemy, and he did not think that he could succeed if neither of them assisted him.  Accordingly, he set about reconciling them, by continually urging upon them, and showing that by their attempts to ruin one another they would increase the power of the Ciceros, and Catuli, and Catos, who would lose all their influence if they would unite their friends and adherents, and so direct the administration with combined strength, and one purpose.  By persuasion and effecting a reconciliation, he brought them together, and he formed out of the union of all three an irresistible power by which he put down the Roman senate and the people, though he did not make Pompeius and Crassus more powerful, one through the other, but by means of the two he made himself most powerful; for immediately on being supported by Pompeius and Crassus, he was elected consul by a great majority.  While Caesar was ably discharging the business of the consulship, Crassus and Pompeius, by procuring for him the command of armies, and by delivering Gaul into his hands, fixed him in a kind of acropolis, thinking that they should