? Perchance I go to pay my vows
to Jupiter upon the capitol! perchance," he added with a deep sneer, "to
salute our most eloquent and noble consul!"

A crimson flush shot instantly across the face and temples of Arvina,
perceiving that he was tampered with, and sounded only; yet he replied
calmly and with dignity, "Thither indeed, go I; but I knew not that thou
wert in so much a friend of Cicero, as to go visit him."

"Men sometimes visit those who be not their friends," answered the other.
"I never said he was a friend to me, or I to him. By the gods, no! I had
lied else."

"But what was that," asked the youth, moved, by an inexplicable curiosity
and excitement, to learn something more of the singular being with whom
chance had brought him into contact, "which thou didst say but now
concerning slaves?"

"That all these whom we see before us, and around us, and beneath us, are
but a herd of slaves; gulled and vainglorious slaves!"

"The Roman people?" exclaimed Paullus, every tone of his voice, every
feature of his fine countenance, expressing his unmitigated horror and
astonishment. "The great, unconquered Roman people; the lords of earth and
sea, from frosty Caucasus to the twin rocks of Hercules; the tramplers on
the necks of kings; the arbiters of the whole world! The Roman people,
slaves?"

"Most abject and most wretched!"

"To whom then?" cried the young man, much excited, "to whom am I, art
thou, a slave? For we are also of the Roman people?"

"The Roman people, and thou, as one of them, and I, Paullus Caecilius, are
slaves one and all; abject and base and spirit-fallen slaves, lacking the
courage even to spurn against our fetters, to the proud tyrannous rich
aristocracy."

"By the Gods! we are of it."

"But not the less, for that, slaves to it!" answered Cataline! "See! from
the lowest to the highest, each petty pelting officer lords it above the
next below him; and if the tribunes for a while, at rare and singular
moments, uplift a warning cry against the corrupt insolence of the
patrician houses, gold buys them back into vile treasonable silence!
Patricians be we, and not slaves, sayest thou? Come tell me then, did the
patrician blood of the grand Gracchi preserve them from a shameful doom,
because they dared to speak, as free-born men, aloud and freely? Did his
patrician blood save Fulvius Flaccus? Were Publius Antonius, and Cornelius
Sylla, the less ejected from their offices, that they were of t