The Historians' History of the World 05

The prætor refused to quit his tribunal till compelled by a military force, whereupon he dismissed his lictors, divested himself of the ensigns of office, and retired with dignity to his pontifical dwelling. The populace now assembled to avenge the insult cast upon their favourite. A riot ensued, which compelled the consuls to retrace their steps, not without obsequious expressions of respect and deference towards him. Cicero had become already sobered from the intoxication of his recent triumph. The cold distance Pompey observed towards his party mortified and alarmed him. Crassus loudly accused him of having calumniated him, and the enmity of Crassus was not to be despised. Finally a tribune had just seemed to menace him with impeachment, notwithstanding the decree of the senate which had forbidden any action to be brought against those who had aided in the punishment of the conspirators. These resentments the discreet consular now studied to allay. He sought to appease Crassus; he proclaimed aloud the zeal which Cæsar had displayed in being the first, as he attested, to disclose to him Catiline’s machinations; and he who had lately exclaimed, “Let arms give place to the gown,” now prostrated himself before Pompey, whom he exalted above Scipio, begging only for himself the humble place of a Lælius. He even sought allies for himself among the accomplices of Catiline. P. Sulla, one of the conspirators, was defended by Cicero, and acquitted in the face of manifest proofs. The orator struggled to maintain that union between the two privileged orders of the commonwealth, the senators and knights, the cherished aim of his policy, which seemed at last to be accomplished on the steps of the temple of Concord. But when the nobles spurned the knights haughtily from them; when Cato, reckless of the misery of the provincials, repulsed the prayer of the publicans of Asia, who sought relief from their contract with the treasury, on account of the deep impoverishment of the revenues they had undertaken to farm, insisting that they should be held to the strict letter of their bargain; when the chasm between the two orders seemed once more to open before his eyes, having now to choose between the class to which he belonged by birth and natural sympathies and that to which his genius had exalted him, Cicero weakly threw himself upon the former, and proclaimed himself the creature of the aristocracy which despised him. The concessions he had made came too late to save either himself or them. The friends of Catiline still devoted him to their direst revenge; the demagogues lashed the people into fury against him; Cæsar smiled at his mistakes, while Crassus scarcely disguised the rancour of his hate under the veil of frigid courtesy.

Ruins of the Palace of the Cæsars, Rome

The nobles committed indeed no greater error than when they inflamed the enmity of Crassus by divulging their suspicions of him, and at the same time shrank from disarming it by force. Assuredly they should have made him their friend, and this they might have done perhaps at a trifling sacrifice of their vanity. Crassus was liked by none, but few could afford to despise him; while his ambition might have been kept within bounds by the concession of legitimate honours and dignities, and the show of listening to his counsels. At the moment when Pompey was passing over to the people, Crassus might have been retained on the side of the oligarchy from which he had never wholly estranged himself. His immense riches, the sources of which lay close at hand, gave him clients in the senate as well as among the knights: his slaves, his freedmen, his debtors and his tenants constituted an army in the heart of the city, to sway the debates of the Forum and overawe its seditions. But when the nobles refused to support him in his suit for the consulship, they drove him to league himself with his popular competitor Pompey: when they denounced him as a confederate of Catiline, they threw him into the arms of Cæsar. By lending money to the Marian spendthrift, Crassus thought that he made him his own; but in fact he bound himself to the fortunes of his rival, from whose entire success he could alone hope to be repaid.