ius and Gabinius, were handed over to be guarded
by the senators Caesar and Crassus; it was manifestly intended that these
should either, if they allowed them to escape, be compromised in the view
of public opinion as accessories, or, if they really detained them,
be compromised in the view of their fellow-conspirators as renegades.

The following scene which occurred in the senate shows
significantlyhow matters stood. Immediately after the arrest
of Lentulus and his comrades, a messenger despatched by the conspirators
in the capital to Catilina was seized by the agents of the government,
and, after having been assured of impunity, was induced
to make a comprehensive confession in a full meeting of the senate.
But when he came to the critical portions of his confession
and in particular named Crassus as having commissioned him,
he was interrupted by the senators, and on the suggestion
of Cicero it was resolved to cancel the whole statement without
farther inquiry, but to imprison its author notwithstanding
the amnesty assured to him, until such time as he should have
not merely retracted the statement, but should have also confessed
who had instigated him to give such false testimony! Here it is
abundantly clear, not merely that that man had a very accurate
knowledge of the state of matters who, when summoned to make
an attack upon Crassus, replied that he had no desire to provoke
the bull of the herd, but also that the majority of the senate
with Cicero at their head were agreed in not permitting the revelations
to go beyond a certain limit. The public was not so nice; the young men,
who had taken up arms to ward off the incendiaries, were exasperated
against no one so much as against Caesar, on the 5th of December,
when he left the senate, they pointed their swords at his breast
and even now he narrowly escaped with his life on the same spot
where the fatal blow fell on him seventeen years afterwards;
he did not again for a considerable time enter the senate-house.
Any one who impartially considers the course of the conspiracy
will not be able to resist the suspicion that during all this time
Catilina was backed by more powerful men, who--relying on the want
of a legally complete chain of evidence and on the lukewarmness
and cowardice of the majority of the senate, which was but half-
initiated and greedily caught at any pretext for inaction--knew how
to hinder any serious interference with the conspiracy on the pa