The other conspirators, senators who sat listening while
Cicero poured out his eloquent indignation, remained still in the city
with the threads of insurrection in their hands, and were encouraged to
persevere by the evident helplessness of the government. The imperfect
record of history retains for us only the actions of a few individuals
whom special talent or special circumstances distinguished, and such
information is only fragmentary. We lose sight of the unnamed seething
multitudes by whose desires and by whose hatreds the stream of events was
truly guided. The party of revolution was as various as it was wide.
Powerful wealthy men belonged to it, who were politically dissatisfied;
ambitious men of rank, whose money embarrassments weighted them in the
race against their competitors; old officers and soldiers of Sylla, who
had spent the fortunes which they had won by violence, and were now trying
to bring him back from the dead to renew their lease of plunder; ruined
wretches without number, broken down with fines and proscriptions, and
debts and the accumulation of usurious interest. Add to these "the
dangerous classes," the natural enemies of all governments--parricides,
adulterers, thieves, forgers, escaped slaves, brigands, and pirates who
had lost their occupation; and, finally, Catiline's own chosen comrades,
the smooth-faced patrician youths with curled hair and redolent with
perfumes, as yet beardless or with the first down upon their chins,
wearing scarves and veils and sleeved tunics reaching to their ankles,
industrious but only with the dice-box, night-watchers but in the supper-
rooms, in the small hours before dawn, immodest, dissolute boys, whose
education had been in learning to love and to be loved, to sing and to
dance naked at the midnight orgies, and along with it to handle poniards
and mix poisoned bowls.
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