CHAP. XXXVII. SETTLEMENT OF THE EAST.

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restless population never yet fully subdued by his enemy. He might hope to lead a vast horde of barbarians to the eastern gorges of the Alps, and pour down into Italy at the point where an invader was least anticipated. The plan, if ever ripe for execution, was defeated by petty jealousies and treacheries. The old king had established himself in the Cimmerian Chersonesus, a secure and commanding position; but he found himself enveloped in revolts and intrigues among his own family and subjects. After the manner of so many Oriental sovereigns, he had consulted his personal safety by putting to death several of his many u.o. 691. children; but he fell at last a victim to Pharnaces, his B.O. 63. favorite among them, who had once risen against him, and whom he had spared. At the last extremity he is said to have taken poison; and the story adds that he had so fortified his system by habitual use of antidotes that the draught had no effect upon him, and he was finally obliged to throw himself upon the sword of a slave. Pharnaces was allowed to retain the kingdom of the Bosporus. Comana and Paphlagonia were formed into dependent sovereignties. Galatia and Cappadocia were settled, with extended territory, upon two faithful allies of Rome, Deiotarus and Ariobarzanes. Thirty-nine cities were founded by Pompeius, or repeopled. Seleucia, Antioch, and Phanagoria, in the Chersonese, were declared free communities, under the patronage of the republic. From the Lycus to the Jordan the frontier of the empire was organized under Roman proconsuls or native vassals; but Pontus, Cilicia, Syria, and Phoenicia were definitively inscribed upon the list of provinces. Beyond the Euphrates, Armenia still retained the name of independence; but she had lost all power of self-support, and henceforth only fluctuated in her reliance upon the Romans alternately with the Parthians.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

Position of the oligarchical party.-Character of M. Porcius Cato.-Progress of Cæsar in popular favor.-Cicero supports Pompeius and Crassus, and advocates the bill of Manilius.-Manoeuvres of Cæsar.-Process of Rabirius. Intrigues of Catilina.-His early career.-Crassus and Cæsar suspected of plotting with him.-His influence over the young nobility.-View of Roman society.-Coarseness of the men and frivolity of the women.Decline of religion and spread of superstition.-The Catilinarian conspiracy.-The Optimates prepare to encounter it, and employ Cicero to expose and overthrow it.—Catilina is rejected for the consulship.-His plans revealed to Cicero, consul in 64, and laid before the Senate and people.— Cicero authorized to provide for the safety of the state.-Catilina allowed to quit the city.-His associates seized.

DURING the absence of Pompeius in Asia the extreme section of the oligarchical party, well pleased at the removal of a champion whom they distrusted to so distant an exile, placed themselves under the guidance of their natural chiefs-men of ancient lineage and ancestral honors-such as Catulus, Lucullus, Servilius, Lentulus, and Marcellus. But none of these were men of commanding ability, nor even of adequate energy. Catulus they could not fail to respect, but they regretted his want of firmness. Lucullus seems to have disregarded their solicitations. Many of the principal nobility were sunk in luxury and indolence, and the eloquence of Hortensius, their best speaker, was speedily eclipsed by that of the upstart Cicero. But there was one man still in their ranks, a plebeian by extraction, untried in civil and military affairs, in whose unflinching zeal and dauntless courage they could securely confide. Judgment, indeed, and tact he sorely needed; but these were qualifications which the nobles held in little regard, and neither he nor they were sensible of the deficiency.

This man was M. Porcius Cato, heir to the venerable name of the censor Cato, his great-grandfather-a name long revered by the Romans for the probity and simplicity of its bearer. The younger Cato believed, like his ancestor, in the mission of a superior caste to govern the Roman commonwealth, in the right of a superior race to hold the world in bondage; nor less in the absolute au thority of husband over wife, of parent over child, of master over servant. Yet these fearful dogmas were held by a man whose natural temper was quite averse from the violence by which alone

CHAP. XXXVIII. M. PORCIUS CATO.-CÆSAR.

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they can be maintained, and who strove, on principle rather than from instinct, to repress the natural promptings of humanity by abstract speculation and severe self-discipline. Born in the year B.C. 95, he had witnessed the close of the Social War, and resented as a mere boy the compromise in which it resulted. Nevertheless his feelings had revolted from the atrocities with which Sulla had avenged it; and alone of his party he sighed over their victories, and lamented the bloody execution they did upon their enemies. From early years he trained himself after the austere pattern of the ancient times. Inured to frugality and of simple tastes, he rose above the temptations of his class to rapine and extortion. Enrolling himself in the priesthood of the god Apollo, he seemed to feel a divine call to the practice of bodily self-denial, which constituted the religious life in the view of many of the ancients. He imbibed the doctrines of the Stoic philosophy, the stiffness of which was congenial to his temper, and sought honestly to follow the strictest rules of integrity. Doubtless the exigencies of public affairs drove him, like others much less worthy, to some sordid compromises with his own principles, while in private life the strength he affected became a source of manifold weakness. It made him proud of his own virtues, confident in his judgments, inaccessible to generous impulses, caustic in his remarks on others, a blind observer of forms, and a slave to prejudices. A party composed of such men as Cato would have been ill-matched with the crafty intriguers opposed to them; but when the selfish, indolent, and unprincipled chose themselves a champion of a character so alien from their own, the hollowness of the alliance and the hopelessness of the cause became sufficiently manifest.

On the other hand, the chiefs of factions most opposed to the Optimates were beginning to consolidate their forces. Pompeius, Crassus, and Cæsar were all working to the same end—the abasement of the old governing party; though they had as yet arrived at no distinct understanding among themselves, and the most important man of the three was himself absent from the city in pursuit of the pirates or of Mithridates. They had secured, moreover, the vigorous assistance of the orator Cicero, who at this time lent himself to the cause which seemed likely to gain the ascendant, and to favor his own views of personal advancement. Cæsar had made himself a marked man, and raised high the hopes of the popular party when, in the year B.C. 68, he had defied the law of Sulla, and exhibited the bust of Marius among the images of his own family. He had made a funeral oration over his aunt Julia, the wife of the same proscribed hero of the people, and had pleaded the cause of Cornelius Cinna, and obtained an amnesty for him and other exiles of the Marian party. After his return from the

quæstorship in Spain he had gained another step in public honors, and as ædile had delighted the populace with the lavish munificence of his shows. This charge he had been enabled to defray .c. 689. by securing the aid of a wealthy colleague, Bibulus, for B.C. 65. his own resources were early exhausted, and his debts amounted to 1300 talents. At the same time Cicero was support ing the bill of Manilius, and hoping thereby to attach Pompeius to his interests. He also undertook the defence of the tribune C. Cornelius, who, at the instigation no doubt of Cæsar or Crassus, had made some startling attacks upon the prerogatives of the Optimates, and been repaid by a charge of treason for disregarding the veto of a colleague.

The Optimates were baffled in their process against this petty adversary; but they could retaliate upon Cæsar. On getting the ædileship this ardent enemy had demanded a public mission to reduce Egypt to the form of a province, in virtue of the will of king Ptolemy Alexander. This country, through which all the commerce of the East already passed, was reputed the wealthiest in the world. No Roman officer could touch its soil but much gold would assuredly stick to his hand. Crassus and Cæsar disputed the plunder which should accrue to the fortunate man who should become its proconsul; but the Senate mustered all its forces to baffle both claimants, and was enabled, perhaps by their division, to succeed. It employed a tribune named Papius to declare that all foreigners, and especially Cæsar's clients, the Transpadane Gauls, should be removed from the city, and thus cleared the Forum of a violent section of his adherents. The question about Egypt was postponed, and Cæsar was invited to preside at the tribunal which inquired into cases of murder. He set to work to brand the dictatorship of Sulla with a legal stigma. He first cited before him two obscure creatures who had shed blood in the proscription, and condemned them. He next induced a tribune to accuse an aged senator, Rabirius, of the slaughter of the notorious traitor Saturninus. In this case Cicero himself defended the culprit, but failed to move the judges. Rabirius appealed to the people, and again Cicero pleaded for him, while the senators made every effort to arouse the compassion of the populace. It was known, indeed, to every one that Rabirius had not slain Saturninus, and further that the real slayer had been publicly justified and rewarded; besides that the deed, whosesoever it was, had occurred thirty-six years before, and might well be condoned by the children of the generation who witnessed it. But the people were immensely excited, and would have defied all justice and mercy for the sake of the triumph they anticipated, had not the prætor, Metellus Celer, suddenly struck the flag which floated on the

CHAP. XXXVIII. CONSPIRACY OF CATILINA.

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Janiculum while the tribes were assembled for public business. In ancient times the striking of the flag was the signal that the Etrurians were advancing to attack the city. Straightway all public business was suspended, the comitia was dissolved, the citizens rushed to man the walls. The formality still remained in use among a people singularly retentive of traditional usages; and now the multitude which had just shouted clamorously for innocent blood laughed at the trick by which its fury was arrested, and acquiesced in the suspension of proceedings. Cæsar had gained his point in the alarm and mortification of 1.0.63. the Senate, and allowed the matter to drop, which he never perhaps seriously intended to push to extremity.

U.C. 691.

But Cæsar gained more than this. The leaders of the people now used their influence to get so hopeful a champion elected head of the college of pontiffs, a prerogative which the people had so lately recovered. As chief pontiff he became the mover of a great political engine, and his person was rendered inviolable. Neither the notorious laxity of his moral conduct, nor his avowed disregard for the religious traditions of the state, hindered Cæsar's advancement to the highest office of the national worship. His duties indeed were simply ceremonial, however firmly the Romans believed that the welfare of the state depended on their due execution. Cæsar's triumph was the more complete as it was a victory over Catulus, who had competed with him for the dignity, and offered him a bribe to withdraw. But the Optimates were intent on his destruction, and were threatening him with a charge of treasonable conspiracy. The pontificate was necessary to secure his personal safety. When the hour of election arrived he said to his mother as he left his house, "This day your son will be either chief pontiff or an exile."

The crime which it was sought to fasten upon Cæsar was complicity with a seditious conspiracy of the deepest atrocity. For some years past the city had been kept in feverish anxiety by rumors of a plot, not against any particular interest or party, but against the very constitution of the body politic. The nobles had sounded the alarm, and had insinuated that Cæsar, Crassus, and other august citizens, objects of their special dislike and fear, were engaged in contriving the overthrow of the state. This alleged conspiracy is so startling in its character and conduct, so picturesque in the detail of its circumstances, that it has drawn more than a common share of attention from the students of history; and the inducements which the Roman Optimates might have had to invent it, or, if it really existed in embryo, to drive it into open explosion, are so obvious, that suspicion has been often thrown upon the charges currently made against its reputed authors.