He went back over
the history of the preceding half-century. Fresh from the defence of
Rabirius, he showed how dangerous citizens, the Gracchi, Saturninus,
Glaucia, had been satisfactorily killed when they were meditating
mischief. He did not see that a constitution was already doomed when the
ruling powers were driven to assassinate their opponents, because a trial
with the forms of law would have ended in their acquittal. He told
Catiline that under the powers which the Senate had conferred on him he
might order his instant execution. He detailed Catiline's past enormities,
which he had forgotten when he sought his friendship, and he ended in
bidding him leave the city, go and join Manlius and his army.
Never had Cicero been greater, and never did oratory end in a more absurd
conclusion. He dared not arrest Catiline. He confessed that he dared not.
There was not a doubt that Catiline was meditating a revolution--but a
revolution was precisely what half the world was wishing for. Rightly
read, those sounding paragraphs, those moral denunciations, those appeals
to history and patriotic sentiment, were the funeral knell of the Roman
Commonwealth.
Let Catiline go into open war, Cicero said, and then there would no longer
be a doubt. Then all the world would admit his treason. Catiline went; and
what was to follow next? Antonius, the second consul, was notoriously not
to be relied on.
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